“My God,” Susie said after trying to imagine that. “How come they aren’t all dead?”
“Lot of ’em are,” Charlie answered. “More dyin’ every day, too. But a hard case is a hard case, and some of ’em stayed alive just to spite the Japs. This guy named Peterson shoulda been dead months ago, but he was still breathin’ when I got away. One tough son of a bitch, you bet.”
“What the heck did they have you doing in the Kalihi Valley?” Oscar said. “I’ve been up there. It’s nothing but the river and trees, all the way back to the mountains.”
“Don’t I know it!” Charlie said. “What were we doin’? We were digging a tunnel through the mountains to the damn windward coast, that’s what. Digging with picks and shovels and crowbars and baskets, mind. The Japs didn’t give a shit if we ever got there. It was something to work us to death with, that’s all.”
“My God,” Oscar muttered. People had talked about ramming a tunnel through the mountains for years. He supposed they would have got around to it sooner or later. When they did, he supposed they would have used dynamite and jackhammers and all the others tools mankind had invented to make sure jobs like that didn’t take forever.
“Can I have a bath or a shower or something?” Charlie said. “I’m filthy, and I’m lousy, too. I hope you guys don’t get company on account of me.” Oscar hoped the same thing. He automatically started to scratch, then jerked his hand down. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Susie doing the same thing. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so grim. And Charlie was filthy; the rank smell that came off him filled the apartment.
“Go ahead,” Oscar told him. “I wish I had soap and hot water, that’s all. You can wear some of my clothes when you come out. Toss yours out and I’ll get rid of ’em.”
“Will do,” Charlie said. “We’re about the same size-well, we used to be, anyway. I can’t get over how fat people look.” Oscar and Susie were both skinnier than they had been when Japan took Oahu, and they were better off than most people because Oscar caught so many fish. To a skeleton, though, a skinny man had to look fat. Charlie went into the bathroom, then stuck his head out again. “What was all the shooting about a couple of nights ago? That’s why I thought the Army would be back here.”
“They cleaned out the prison camp in Kapiolani Park,” Oscar answered. They rescued a bunch of guys who looked just like you. He didn’t say that. Except by not screwing around with women he should have left alone, Charlie couldn’t help the way he looked. Oscar added, “I guess they were afraid the Japs would start killing people if they just left ’em there.”
“Jeez, I believe that,” Charlie said. “I was hoping I could take soldiers back to Kalihi Valley. God knows what’s gonna happen to my buddies now.”
He closed the door again. Water started to run. In a low voice, Oscar said, “He’s gotta stay here for a while, babe. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what else we can do.”
Susie waved the words aside. “It’s okay. You’re right. We can’t do anything else. My God! Did you see him? He looks like a photo in Life or National Geographic where they’re talking about famine in India or China or somewhere like that.” Now she did scratch her head. She smiled sheepishly, but said, “For heaven’s sake, throw his clothes somewhere far, far away. I’m going to imagine I’m itching for the next week, whether I really am or not.”
“Yeah, I know.” Oscar got a flowered shirt and a pair of pants out of the closet and tossed them into the bathroom. He didn’t have a belt that Charlie could use to hold up the pants; none of the ones he owned had enough holes. But a length of rope would keep his pal decent.
He glanced over at Susie. How… sympathetic would she feel if Charlie stayed here all the time? How would she show her sympathy? Like that ? Oscar shrugged a mental shrug. If she did, then she did, that was all. And if she did, didn’t that tell him she wasn’t the girl he wanted to spend the rest of his life with? When Charlie got out of the tub, he threw his old clothes out from behind the door. He emerged a couple of minutes later, much cleaner. Maybe because he was cleaner, maybe because of the way Oscar’s shirt and pants hung on him, he looked even scrawnier than he had before.
Oscar picked up Charlie’s reeking rags with thumb and forefinger, like a fussy maiden lady. He didn’t care how he looked. If he’d had tongs, he would have used those. He took the clothes out to the front door of the building, poked his head outside to make sure no Japs spotted him, and threw everything into the gutter. He frantically wiped his hand against his own trouser leg as he went back to his apartment.
Charlie was telling Susie what things were like in the Kalihi Valley. She hung on his every word. Well, Charlie could tell stories with anybody this side of Will Rogers. Oscar wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t in Charlie’s league. He shrugged to himself again. He’d see what happened, that was all. Whatever it was, he was glad Charlie had got out of the Kalihi Valley in one piece.
JANE ARMITAGE HAD MADE A LAIR OF SORTS for herself in the Wahiawa experimental planting station. A stream ran through it, so she had water. Some of the trees had fruit on them, and gave her a little something to eat. Zebra doves weren’t nearly so common as they had been before the Japs invaded, but the little blue-faced birds were still around. Jane didn’t dare make a fire. If you got hungry enough, you could eat them raw. Jane wouldn’t have believed it, but it was true. And she was hungry enough.
She couldn’t have had a simpler plan: stay out of sight and try not to die till the Americans took Wahiawa. No one seemed to have come after her or the other comfort women who’d escaped from the blasted brothel. Jane knew exactly what that meant: the Japs had more important things to worry about. They were getting screwed now instead of doing the screwing. And they had it coming to them, too.
Every so often, other people came into the station to gather fruit. Jane hid from them like an animal, cowering in the thick bushes by the stream. That was partly because she feared they might betray her to the occupiers. And it was partly because, after what the Japanese had made her do, she felt unclean. Surely anyone who knew her, anyone who knew what she’d had to do, would think she was unclean, too. From third-grade teacher to whore in one easy step…
The front was getting close to Wahiawa, but not fast enough to suit her. The Japs made a stand in front of the town. They would, the bastards, Jane thought as she got hungrier. Even though they didn’t know she was here, they kept on trying to ruin her life.
They’d done it, all right. Here she was, not quite thirty, and she hoped to heaven she never saw, never touched, and most especially never tasted another cock as long as she lived. Maybe one day she’d change her mind. She laughed at that. Yeah-when I get to be ninety. Or maybe ninety-five.
There were times when she wouldn’t have bet she could make it to her thirtieth birthday, let alone to ninety-five. Except by standing and fighting, the Japs didn’t have anything to do with that. American shells had been falling on Wahiawa ever since the brothel got hit. Sometimes they fell in or near the planting station. Those fearsome crashes uprooted trees and sent shrapnel snarling through the leaves and the undergrowth. None of it hit Jane, but some came scarily close.
She’d been at the station four or five days when machine-gun bullets began snapping past overhead-because the gardens followed the course of the stream, most of the land here was lower than the surrounding countryside. Fletch had told her that when you could hear a bullet snap, it came closer than you wanted it to. She thought these bullets were wonderful. They meant the Americans were almost as close as she wanted them to be.