“You active duty, yourself?” Benny asked.
“National Guard, the Philippines,” Fidelio said. “You know what I’m saying?”
Benny nodded. Fidelio had survived the Death March.
“We were stationed at Clark Field. Anti-aircraft was outgunned by the Zeroes. They hit the B-17’s right on the deck. We faded into the jungle, and MacArthur, that windbag, got on a PT boat and beat it for Australia.” Fidelio shook his head. “We held out until April. Dysentery, malaria. The drizzly shits and no quinine. The worst with the watery bowels, see, it ain’t the squirts so much, it’s how it makes your skin raw, the inside of your legs. Then you try walking seventy-five miles.”
Five thousand men died because they couldn’t keep up, shot or bayoneted, disemboweled, beaten to death.
“I was at a hundred and seventy-two pounds when I enlisted. I weighed ninety pounds when I was liberated,” Fidelio said.
How much had he aged? Benny wondered. Three years as a POW translated in physical terms to ten or twelve, he’d heard. So if Fidelio were thirty, he actually looked forty. He’d given up ten years of his life in the Philippines.
“We figured we were dead meat. After we surrendered, the Japanese thought we’d dishonored ourselves. They didn’t respect us as soldiers.”
“How’d you feel about them?” Benny asked him.
“How do you think I felt? I hated their guts.”
“What about the Japanese who were interned stateside?”
“Apples and oranges,” Fidelio said. “Those people weren’t Japs, they were Americans. Not to mention that a bunch of their kids died fighting for this country.”
Benny didn’t know if everybody was as forgiving as Fidelio.
“Your brother Oscar think the same?”
Fidelio shrugged. “Ask him,” he said.
“All right,” Benny said.
“See, the news stories about Bataan didn’t start coming out until later, because of wartime censorship, but I see where you’re going with this. You want to know if there were any hard feelings. Were people in the camps mistreated?”
If their treatment wasn’t inhumane, it was still demeaning. They lost their possessions, they were separated from their families, they were herded together into tarpaper shacks. Maybe he was fishing in the wrong pond, but Benny was still fishing.
“Thing is, there were casualties after the fact too,” Fidelio told him. “Three-and-a-half years on rice and rat meat, it takes a toll. Some guys got home, they died the first year back. They never recovered. And their families see what it did to them? Yeah. somebody might hold a grudge.”
Or want to make it look that way, Benny thought.
New Mexico boys had taken a disproportionately high hit. There were a lot of names on war memorials, some commissioned by the state, others put up with private contributions in smaller towns like Truchas and Alcalde.
Oscar Ramirez lived in Truchas, between Española and Taos, but he worked at Los Alamos, the Hilltop, local people called it, or simpler still, the Labs. The place had outgrown itself twice over from its early start in ’43, when it was known as Site Y, and security had been so tight it didn’t exist on paper.
These days, instead of Quonset huts and barbed wire, it was closer to becoming an actual town, with public schools and paved roads and open access. Many areas were still, of course, highly restricted, and the military presence was significant, but Benny met Oscar in an ordinary coffee shop.
“What do you do here?” Benny asked him.
“Maintenance,” Oscar said.
Well, that covered a multitude of sins. Benny knew better than to inquire further. Even a janitor had a clearance, on the Hilltop. You mopped up secrets.
“I talked to your brother Fidelio, down in Santa Fe,” Benny said. “He bought me a beer at the VFW.”
Oscar nodded. He wore Coke-bottle glasses and a wary look.
“You were a guard at the internment camp during the war.”
Oscar nodded again, but was obviously puzzled.
“I wanted to get a handle on what it was like, the internal dynamic,” Benny said.
“The who?” Oscar asked.
“How it was, who did what, the general climate. Was there any prejudice, was there any sympathy? What was the demeanor of the Japanese? Were they resentful?”
“They played a lot of softball,” Oscar Ramirez told him.
Which is what Emily Minamoto had said. “They any good?” he asked.
“Yeah, they were real good. They could hit it over the fence. We’d go pick up the ball and toss it back to them. They only had the use of one.”
“So your relationship was friendly, more or less?”
“Why not? They were mostly teenagers, and old farts.”
“What about their families?”
“What families?” Oscar shook his head. “The camp in Santa Fe was segregated. Men only.”
“What happened to the women and kids?”
“No idea,” Oscar said.
Benny digested this. Emily hadn’t told him she’d been sent somewhere else. “Tell me about the Nisei brigade,” he said.
“Army recruiters came in. Anybody who was draft age jumped at the chance, same as I would have.”
“Bother you?”
“Bother me, why?”
“You were Four-F, poor eyesight. They fought in your place, a bunch of Japs.”
“You trying to piss me off?”
“I appreciate what happened to your brother.”
“You don’t have a clue,” Oscar said. He stood up.
“You know a guy named Takeshi Minamoto?” Benny asked.
“Tashi? Sure,” Oscar said. “He’s a fruit farmer. Me and some of the other kids, we used to help him with the peach harvest, we were fifteen, sixteen years old. Hard money, but we worked for it.”
“He was in the camp.”
“What are you getting at? They said he was an enemy alien, which is baloney. He broke his ass, dawn to dusk.”
“He got shot dead in Santa Fe the night before last.”
“What?”
“I want to find out if it’s racially motivated.”
“And you’re coming to me?”
Benny was beyond embarrassment. “Give me something, Oscar. So far, I’ve got nothing.”
“I told you, there’s nothing to get.”
“I don’t buy it,” Benny said. “If you and your brother harbor no ill will toward the Japanese, you must be the only two guys this side of Tokyo.”
“Get lost,” Oscar said, and walked away.
The MPs stopped him on his way out of town and escorted him to the provost marshal’s office.
“What’s your business here, Sheriff?” the major asked him.
“It’s not Army business,” Benny said. “All due respect.”
“With all due respect, that’s my decision,” the major said. “I’m responsible for security on this installation.”
Benny thought about whether to play it hard or easy. “Take me into custody, you feel you’ve got the authority,” he said.
“Let’s not be hasty,” another voice drawled.
The soldiers jumped to attention, and Benny turned. It was Groves, in the flesh, in uniform, all three stars.
“You’re like the clap, Benny, you’re hard to get rid of, but I’m in your debt,” the general said. “Care to tell me how I can help?”
“It’s not a security question,” Benny said.
“Even better,” Groves said.
They stepped outside, onto the porch. The afternoon was clear and hot, the sky cloudless, the air still and dry. Benny rolled a smoke. The post CQ was just across the street from Fuller Lodge and what had once been known as Bathtub Row, where the senior Manhattan Project scientists and their families, like Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, had been quartered.