“Well…” The other man looked sorry he’d spoken. But he’d drunk enough to have a hard time keeping his mouth shut, and so he went on, “It could be worse if we spent more time in the field. Then she would’ve seen even less of you, and all this would’ve come on sooner.”
“Oh, yeah. If.” But that only flicked Fletch on another gripe of his, one older than his trouble with his wife (or older than his knowledge of his trouble with his wife, which was not the same thing). “Don’t hold your breath, though.”
“We do the best we can.” Gordon Douglas sounded uncomfortable, partly because he knew he was liable to touch off a rant.
And he did. Fletch exploded. “Do we? Do we? Sure doesn’t look that way to me. This is a hell of a parade-ground army, no bout adout it.” He paused, listened to what he’d just said, and tried again. “No… doubt… about it.” There. That was better. He could roll on: “Hell of a parade-ground army. But what if we really have to go out there and fight? What will we do then, when we’re not on parade?”
“We’d do all right.” Douglas still sounded uncomfortable. But then he rallied, saying, “Besides, who the hell would we fight? Nobody in his right mind would mess with Hawaii, and you know it.”
Down the hatch went Armitage’s latest whiskey sour. He gestured to the Filipino bartender for another one. Even before it arrived, he went on, “All this shit with the Japs doesn’t sound good. They didn’t like it for beans when we turned the oil off on ’em.”
“Now I know you’re smashed,” his friend said. “Those little fuckers try anything, we’ll knock ’em into the middle of next week. I dare you to tell me any different.”
“Oh, hell, yes, we’d lick ’em.” No matter how drunk Fletch was, he knew how strong Hawaii’s defenses were. Two divisions based at Schofield Barracks, the Coast Artillery Command with its headquarters at Fort DeRussy right next to Waikiki Beach, the flyboys at Wheeler right by the barracks complex here, and, just for icing on the cake, the Pacific Fleet… “They’d have to be crazy to screw with us.”
“Bet your ass,” Douglas said. “So how come you’ve got ants in your pants?”
Armitage shrugged. “I just wish…” His voice trailed away. He wished for a lot of things that mattered more to him right now than just how prepared the men at Schofield Barracks were to turn back an attack unlikely ever to come. And those weren’t ants in his pants. He and Jane had been married for five years. He was used to getting it regularly. These past three weeks had been a hard time in more ways than one. He sipped at the drink. “Life’s a bastard sometimes, you know?”
“Plenty of people in it are bastards, that’s for goddamn sure,” Gordon Douglas agreed. “You keep the hell away from ’em if you can, you salute ’em and go, ‘Yes, sir,’ if you can’t. That’s the way things work, buddy.” He spoke with great earnestness.
“Yeah. I guess.” Fletch’s head bobbed up and down. He didn’t feel like nodding. He felt like crying. He’d done that only once, the night he moved out of the apartment and into BOQ. He’d been a lot drunker then than he was now. Of course, he could still take care of that. The whiskey sour vanished. He signaled for a refill.
“You’re gonna feel like hell tomorrow morning,” Douglas said, also putting his drink out of its misery. “If they have live-fire practice, you’ll wish your head would fall off.” That bit of good advice didn’t keep him from reloading, too.
Armitage shrugged. “That’s tomorrow morning. This is now. If I’m drunk, I don’t have to worry about… anything.”
“Look on the bright side,” his friend suggested. “If we were back home, there might be snow on the ground already.”
“If you were back home, there might be snow on the ground,” Fletch said. “That’s your worry. I’m from San Diego. I don’t know any more about it than the Hawaiians do.”
“You grew up in a Navy town,” Douglas said. “You’re here where they’ve got more goddamn sailors than anywhere else in the world. So what the hell are you doing in the Army?”
“Sometimes I wonder,” Armitage said. If he had one more whiskey sour, he was going to start wondering about his own name, too. The only thing getting drunk didn’t make him wonder about was Jane. She was gone, and he wouldn’t get her back. That was why he was drinking in the first place. It didn’t seem fair. He turned his blurry focus back to the question. “What the hell am I doing in the Army? Best I can right now. How about you?”
Gordon Douglas didn’t answer. He’d put his head down on the bar and started to snore. Fletch shook him awake, which wasn’t easy because he kept wanting to yawn, too. They lurched back to BOQ together. Patrolling sentries just kept patrolling; it wasn’t as if they’d never seen a drunken officer before, or even two.
The next morning, aspirins and most of a gallon of black coffee put only the faintest of dents in Fletch’s hangover. He managed to choke down some dry toast with the coffee. In his stomach, it felt as if it were all corners. Douglas looked as decrepit as he felt, a very faint consolation indeed.
And they did go through live-fire exercises. Having a 105mm gun go off by his head did nothing to speed Fletch’s recovery. He gulped more aspirins and wished he were dead.
JIRO TAKAHASHI AND his two sons carried tubs full of nehus onto the Oshima Maru as the sampan lay tied up in Kewalo Basin, a little west of Honolulu. Takahashi, a short, muscular, sun-browned man of fifty-five, had named the fishing boat for the Japanese county he’d left around the turn of the century. He watched the minnows dash back and forth in the galvanized iron tubs. They knew they weren’t coming along for a holiday cruise.
He wondered if his sons knew the same. “Pick up your feet! Get moving!” he called to them in Japanese, the only language he spoke.
Hiroshi and Kenzo both smiled at him. He didn’t see that they moved any faster. They should have. They were less than half his age, and both of them were three or four inches taller than he was. They should have been stronger than he was, too. If they were, he hadn’t seen it. They didn’t have the fire in their bellies, the passion for work, that he did. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to give it to them.
Hiroshi said something in English as he set his tub down on the deck. His younger brother answered in the same language. They’d both been educated in American schools on Oahu. They used English as readily as Japanese, even though Jiro had sent them to Japanese schools after the regular schools ended. They went by Hank and Ken as often as by the names he’d given them.
They both laughed-loud, boisterous, American laughs. Jiro shot them a suspicious glance. Were they laughing at him? They sometimes used English to keep him from knowing what they were saying.
All over Kewalo Basin, big diesel engines were growling to life. Blue-painted sampans glided out of the basin and into the wide Pacific. The blue paint was camouflage. The fishermen hoped it fooled the tuna they caught. They knew good and well it fooled other fishermen who might try to poach in fine fishing spots.
Back when Jiro first came to Hawaii, sampans had been sail-powered. Diesels let them range much farther asea. Takahashi muttered to himself as he started the Oshima Maru ’s engine. He liked to be one of the first boats out of the basin. Not today, not when he’d had to drag his boys out of bed. Did they think the tuna were going to sleep late, too?
Up at the bow, the two of them were tossing a hollow glass globe as big as their heads back and forth. The net float had drifted here all the way from Japan. A lot of sampans carried one or two of them, sometimes more. They showed up around Kauai more often than anywhere else: some trick of the currents, no doubt.
Jiro hauled in the mooring line and got the Oshima Maru going. His sons went right on tossing the float back and forth. He finally lost patience with them. “Will you two knock off that foolishness?” he shouted.