He took questions then. Several people, Joe among them, asked about the Thach Weave. Hadley painfully levered himself to his feet and drew diagrams on the blackboard. They helped; Joe hadn’t been able to visualize the tactic well from words alone. The circles and arrows helped him see what needed doing. Whether he could do it, and do it in coordination with other pilots-well, that might be a different question. But he was practicing formation flying, too, so he figured he’d get the hang of it.
Then Orson Sharp said, “Sir, would you tell us about your ditching?”
Before Hadley said anything, he sat down again. Again, his bad leg stuck out in front of him. He reached out and touched that stiff knee. “I’d already got this by then. Damn bullet came in from the side. The armor in the seat is good; the stuff in the cockpit’s not so hot. Tell you the truth, that damn Jap filled the plane full of holes. My engine was starting to cook. Thank God those radials are air-cooled, though. A liquid-cooled engine would’ve lost its coolant and frozen up on me long before, and I’d’ve gone into the drink too far from home.
“As it was, I nursed her back toward where our ships were at. I was hoping we still had a working carrier, but no such luck. Every time the flames got going in the cockpit, I’d use the extinguisher to put’em out-mostly.” He looked down at his burned arm. Joe couldn’t tell if he knew he was doing it.
“I put her in the water as slow and smooth as I could,” Hadley said. “Then I pushed back the cockpit-that still worked great, in spite of all the damage I’d taken-dragged myself out, and managed to inflate my life raft. A destroyer picked me up-and here I am.”
He gave them that farmboy grin one more time. He made it sound easy. How much fear and pain hid behind the smiling facade? Enough so that even somebody like Joe Crosetti, who’d never seen combat, could tell they were there. But, since Jack Hadley pretended they weren’t, everybody else had to do the same thing.
Could I do that? Joe wondered. He hoped so, but he was honest enough to admit to himself that he had no idea.
JANE ARMITAGE STOOD in line to get what the community kitchen in Wahiawa dished out for supper. As usual, what plopped onto her plate would have been the butt of a Catskills comic’s joke. The food here is lousy-and such small portions. She got a boiled potato bigger than a ping-pong ball but smaller than a tennis ball, some greens that might have been turnip tops or might have been weeds, and, unusually, a chunk of fish a little larger than a book of matches.
By the way the fish smelled, it hadn’t been caught yesterday-or the day before, either. Jane didn’t complain. Wahiawa was as near in the middle of Oahu as made no difference. It wasn’t very far from the Pacific-nothing on the island was-but fish of any sort seldom got away from the coast. Too many hungry mouths, especially in Honolulu.
Other people were as glad to see the treat as she was. “Isn’t that something?” was what she heard most often. She sat down at one of the tables scattered around the elementary-school playground and dug in.
The fish had an undertaste of ammonia that went with the way it smelled. If she’d got it in a restaurant before the occupation, she would have angrily sent it back. Now she ate every crumb, all of the nondescript and rather nasty greens, and every bit of potato. She didn’t lick the plate when she was through, but some people around her did.
Haoles mostly sat together. So did local Japanese. So did Chinese. So did Filipinos. So did Wahiawa’s handful of Koreans-as far away from the local Japanese as they could. Not all the local Japs collaborated with Major Hirabayashi and the occupiers-far from it-but enough did that people from other groups were leery about having too much to do with them.
Jane sat and listened to the chatter around her-in English and otherwise. Blaming the local Japanese for all the troubles in Wahiawa wasn’t fair. Some of them really did see Japan as their country, more than they saw the USA that way. How could you blame them, when a lot of haoles had gone out of their way to make it plain they didn’t think Japs were as good as they were?
And besides, the local Japanese weren’t the only collaborators. Sitting one table away from Jane was Smiling Sammy Little, who’d sold jalopies to servicemen from Schofield Barracks before the invasion. He hadn’t quite been a loan shark, but his interest rates were as high as the law allowed, and a lot of his cars were lemons. He was still smiling these days. With next to no gas on the island, he didn’t sell cars any more. But the Japs were glad to buy what he had for them.
Jane hated him much more than she did someone like Yosh Nakayama. Smiling Sammy didn’t remember or care that he was supposed to be an American. If the Russians or the Ethiopians or the Argentines had invaded Hawaii, he would have sucked up to them, too.
“… Egypt…” “… outside of Alexandria…” “… Montgomery…” Jane got tantalizing bits of conversation from the table on the other side of her. She tried to listen without paying obvious attention.
Somebody over there either had an outlawed radio or knew someone else who had one. News that wasn’t Japanese propaganda did circulate in spite of everything the occupiers could do to stop it.
She swore under her breath. They were talking in low voices, and she couldn’t hear as much as she wanted. What was going on outside of Alexandria? Had the Germans broken through at last? Or had Montgomery somehow held them? She couldn’t make it out.
She looked back toward the pans and kettles where the cooks had fixed the evening slop. She hoped for dessert, even though she knew what it would be. If this nightmare ever ended, she’d taken a savage oath never to touch rice pudding again for the rest of her life. Hawaii still had sugar, and it had some rice. Boil them together till they were something close to glue, and there was a treat that counted as one only because there were no others.
Jane looked down at her arms. Every time she did, she thought she was a little skinnier than before. How long could that go on before nothing was left of her, or of anyone else? Not forever, and she knew it too well. And so she didn’t despise even the sweetish library paste that went by the name of rice pudding. Calories were calories, wherever they came from.
But the cooks gave no sign of having any dessert at all to dish out today. She swore again, not quite so softly. She was so tired of being hungry all the time. And she was just so tired…
Had it been less than a year ago that she’d walked into a restaurant and ordered a T-bone too big to finish? She hadn’t thought anything of it. She hadn’t even asked for a bag to take home the leftovers. Christ, what a fool I was! Had she eaten beef since the Japs occupied Wahiawa? She didn’t think so.
She carried her plate and silverware to the dishwashers. Everyone took turns at that. One of the women was saying something to another one when she walked over to them. They both clammed up before she could hear what it was. They started again when she walked off and got too far away to make out what they were saying.
Her stomach knotted, and for once it wasn’t the wretched food. Were they gossiping about her? About somebody she knew, somebody they knew she knew? About whatever was happening outside of Alexandria?
Whatever it was, she’d never know. They didn’t trust her enough to let her in on it. Before the war, she’d talked with her third-graders about the difference between freedom and dictatorship. She’d talked about it, yeah, but she hadn’t understood it. The difference lay in what people said to one another, and in what they didn’t say when other people might hear. It lay in trust.