Hiroshi seemed embarrassed, but he was also stubborn. “Yeah, me, too. Taking out a haole girl right now isn’t the smartest thing you ever did.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kenzo stuck the comb in his hip pocket and threw his hands in the air. “I’m not going to marry her. I’m not going to molest her, either.” He had the small satisfaction of watching his brother turn red as he went on, “All I’m going to do is take her to a movie, so what are you jumping up and down for?”
“You can say that to me. I don’t have any trouble with it,” Hiroshi persisted. “What if you have to say it in Japanese to a bunch of soldiers? You’re asking for trouble, is what you’re doing.”
“Oh, yeah?” Kenzo said. “I’ll tell ’em my dad’s in tight with the Japanese consul. They’ll leave me alone so fast, it’ll make your head swim.”
The scary thing was, he was probably right. Connections never hurt anybody. That had always been true, and it seemed all the more so now. Kenzo wished his father had nothing to do with Consul Kita and the rest of the Japanese at the consulate. The more often Dad went over there and talked with those people, the more self-important he seemed to get. He just wouldn’t see they were using him as a collaborator. The idea of using his trips over there against the occupiers struck Kenzo as delicious. Turnabout is fair play. Who’d said that? He couldn’t remember. His English teachers would have frowned. At least he remembered the phrase. That was what really mattered, wasn’t it?
Hiroshi said, “The haoles won’t like it, either.”
“Hey, butt out, okay?” Kenzo’s temper started fraying. “Let me worry about it. It’s my business, not yours.”
“You’re as pigheaded as Dad is.”
That probably-no, certainly-held more truth than Kenzo wished it did. He could either fight with Hiroshi or go get Elsie Sundberg. He chose the latter without hesitation, and without a backwards glance. Just getting out of the tent, getting out of the refugee camp, seemed wonderful. Sunday afternoon felt almost as good as it would have before the war.
Try as he would, though, he couldn’t pretend December 7 and its aftermath hadn’t happened. Too much reminded him of the changes Honolulu and all of Hawaii had seen. The ruins left from the fighting, oddly, often seemed the least of those changes. The gangs of scrawny POWs clearing rubble with picks and shovels under the guns of Japanese soldiers were much more alien to what Kenzo was used to than the rubble itself. Seeing all those hungry haoles made him feel guilty for being well fed.
Before Honolulu changed hands, it had had as much traffic as any other American city of about 200,000 people. Now moving cars and buses had disappeared from the streets, though many were parked at the curb, more often than not sitting on one or more flat tires. Gasoline and diesel fuel for civilian use had simply dried up. If the Japanese couldn’t spare fuel for fishing sampans-and they couldn’t-they couldn’t spare it for anything.
Shank’s mare, bicycles, a few horse-drawn carriages exhumed from God only knew where, rickshaws, and pedicabs did their best to take up the slack. Kenzo hated the idea of one man hauling another-by which he proved how American he was. Some of the haulers were haoles, which also would have been unimaginable before December 7. The smug look on a Japanese officer’s face as a big blond man pulled him along Vineyard Boulevard stuck in Kenzo’s memory forever.
The Stars and Stripes was gone. Hawaii’s flag still flew here and there, and looked much like that of the USA at a distance, but Old Glory was as extinct as moving motorcars. The Rising Sun had replaced it. Japan’s flag flew over post offices and other public buildings, and also over or in front of houses and businesses owned by people who wanted to get in good with the new occupiers. Not everyone who flew the Rising Sun was Japanese-not even close. Plenty of people of all bloods judged the Japanese Empire was here to stay.
Also gone, or nearly so, were the pigeons and the once even more numerous zebra doves. Kenzo knew what had happened to them. Lots of people were hungry these days, and zebra doves weren’t hard to catch. The foolish little birds did everything but carry EAT ME! signs. Mynahs, by contrast, persisted. They were less appetizing than pigeons and doves, and also had the brains to fly away when people started sneaking up on them.
Kenzo saw plenty of soldiers and sailors heading down toward the red-light district centered on Hotel Street. The uniforms and the faces had changed. The look of greedy expectation on those faces hadn’t.
When Kenzo got farther east, into the haole part of town, the absence of moving motorcars was the main thing that told him how times had changed. Lawns remained neatly mowed; trees were still neatly trimmed. A majority of the houses wrecked by bombs and shellfire had been pulled down by now, so their lots looked as if they were just vacant.
Elsie had always liked him fine. Before the war, her folks wouldn’t have been so happy if he’d shown up to take her out. They weren’t so stuffy about that kind of thing as some haoles, but they wouldn’t have been dancing in the streets, either. Now… When he knocked on the door now, Elsie’s mother opened the door and smiled and said, “Hello, Ken. Come in. Elsie will be ready in just a minute.” The smile seemed genuine. If it wasn’t, she could have gone on stage with it. She used his first name now, too, he noticed, which she hadn’t the first time he’d come over.
“Thank you, Mrs. Sundberg,” Kenzo answered, and did. So much room inside! He’d had that thought before. The apartment where he’d grown up couldn’t have had a quarter as much space. He refused to think about the tent where he was living now.
“Would you like some lemonade?” Mrs. Sundberg asked.
“Sure, if it’s not too much trouble,” he said. He didn’t suppose it would be. Factories had gone right on making sugar even after anybody with a brain in his head could see they weren’t going to be able to ship it to the mainland. And, while you could cook with lemons and use their juice, eating them as fruit took real determination.
The lemonade was perfect: sweet and tart and cold. Kenzo had taken only a couple of sips before Elsie walked into the front room. “Hi!” he said.
“Hi, Ken.” She smiled.
“You look nice,” Kenzo said. She was wearing a sun dress, but not one that was too revealing. Part of him was sorry. The rest, the sensible part, wasn’t: why borrow trouble with leering soldiers or, worse, with soldiers who wanted to do more than leer? He sniffed. “You smell nice, too.” She’d put on some kind of cologne. He could smell it in spite of the Vitalis he’d used on his own hair.
Elsie wrinkled her nose at him. “As long as I don’t smell like old fish, I’d smell nice to you.”
Since she was right, he grinned back at her. “Shall we go?” he said. Elsie nodded. He drained the glass of lemonade and set it down on a doily to make sure it didn’t leave a ring on the furniture. “Thanks very much,” he told Mrs. Sundberg.
“You’re welcome, Ken,” she answered. “I hope you have a nice time.” If her voice held the thinnest edge of worry, he could pretend he didn’t notice.
Little spatters of rain were coming down when he and Elsie stepped outside. They both ignored it, confident it would let up in a few minutes-and it did. Some adman had no doubt got a bonus for coining the phrase “liquid sunshine.” Advertising for tourists or not, though, it held a lot of truth. The sun hadn’t stopped shining while the rain fell, and it was warm and more refreshing than annoying.
Elsie looked up at the sky as the clouds drifted away. “If I’d just had a permanent, I’d be mad,” she said, and laughed. “I don’t think you can get a permanent here any more, so I don’t have to worry about that.”