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.
And trust, in Wahiawa, was as dead as comfortable American rule over Hawaii. If the United States came back, if the Stars and Stripes once again flew over the school and the post office and Schofield Barracks, would that trust return? How could it, once it was so badly broken?
But if it didn’t, would the islands ever really be free again?
FLETCH ARMITAGE WAS SICK OF DIGGING. He would have been sick of digging even if he weren’t doing it on starvation rations. He looked like a skeleton with callused hands. The Japs didn’t care. If he got too weak to dig, they wouldn’t put him in the infirmary till his strength came back. They’d just knock him over the head, the way you would with a dog that got hit by a car. Then they’d give his shovel to somebody else, and use that poor, miserable bastard up, too.
And why not? As far as they were concerned, prisoners were fair game. They had tens of thousands of them. If they worked POWs to death, they wouldn’t have to worry nearly so much about plots and escape attempts. Skeletons with callused hands didn’t have the energy or the strength to try anything drastic. All the energy they had was focused on staying alive, and they had to put all their strength into the work. If they didn’t, the Japanese noncoms who lorded it over them made them pay.
This was going to be a gun emplacement. It was nicely sited: on the south side of a low hill, to make it harder to spot from the north-the probable direction of any invasion-but there’d be an observer at the top of the hill to guide the firing. He’d be hard to spot, too, especially once they got done camouflaging his position; running a phone line between the one place and the other would be easy as pie. Fletch had a thoroughly professional appreciation of what the Japs were doing right here.
He didn’t appreciate having to work on it. Making him do that went dead against the Geneva Convention. The Japs were proud that they hadn’t signed it. Anybody who complained on that particular score caught hell-or even more hell than anybody else caught.
Odds were the phone line the Japs used to link the top of the hill and the gun emplacement would be captured American equipment. They were using as much of what they’d grabbed here as they could.
And they were fortifying Oahu to a fare-thee-well. The United States had put a lot of men, a lot of equipment, and a lot of ships in Hawaii. Having done that, the Americans smugly decided no one would have the nerve to attack them here. And look what that got us, Fletch thought, turning another shovelful of earth.
The Japs labored under no such illusions. They knew the USA wanted Hawaii back. If the Americans managed to land, they would have to fight their way south an inch at a time, through works their own countrymen had made. Every time Fletch stuck his shovel in the ground, he gave aid and comfort to the enemy.
He didn’t like feeling like a traitor. He didn’t know what he could do about it, though. If he didn’t do what the Japs told him to, they would kill him. It wouldn’t be as neat or quick as knocking him over the head, either. They would make him suffer so nobody else got frisky ideas.
“Isogi!” the closest Jap noncom shouted. Like everybody else who heard him, Fletch worked faster for a while. He didn’t look back to see if the bandy-legged bugger was yelling at him in particular, he just sped up. Looking back suggested to the Japs that you had a guilty conscience. It gave them an excuse to wallop you, as if they needed much in the way of excuses.
Ten minutes later, Fletch did look back over his shoulder. The Jap was standing there spraddle-legged, his back to the POWs, taking a leak. Fletch promptly eased off. He wasn’t the only one who did.
One of the fellows in his shooting squad was a tall, sandy-haired guy from Mississippi named Clyde Newcomb. “Lord almighty,” he said, wiping his sweaty face with his filthy sleeve. “Now I know what bein’ a nigger in the cotton fields feels like.”
Fletch dug out another shovelful of dirt and flung it aside. “I do believe I’d sell my soul to be a nigger in a cotton field right now,” he said, “as long as it was a cotton field on the mainland.”
“Well, yeah, far as the work goes, I would, too,” Newcomb said. “I wouldn’t ask more’n about a dime for it, neither. But that’s not what I meant. Nobody ever treated me like a goddamn nigger till I stacked my Springfield and surrendered. We ain’t nothin’ but dirt to the Japs, an’ low-grade dirt at that.”
“So you Southern guys treated niggers like dirt?” Fletch didn’t care much one way or the other, but anything you could talk about helped make time go by, and that was all to the good.
“You’re agitatin’ me.” Newcomb spoke without heat. “But seriously, you gotta let the niggers know who’s boss. You don’t, and pretty soon they’ll start thinkin’ they’re just as good as white folks.”
“You mean like the Japs here in Hawaii started thinking they were just as good as haoles?” Fletch asked. Whites here hadn’t lynched local Japanese, the way whites lynched Negroes in Mississippi. They’d found other, not quite so brutal, ways to keep them in their place. Even so, they were paying now for what they’d done then. If the Japs here had been treated better, there would be fewer collaborators these days.
Clyde Newcomb gave him a funny look. “Yeah, kind of-only niggers really are down lower than we are.”
Fletch took it no further. What was the point? Newcomb was so blind to some things, he didn’t even know he couldn’t see them. And we’re supposed to win this war? God help us! Did the Japs have clodhoppers like Newcomb running around loose? Maybe they did. Some of these guards sure acted as if a rifle was far and away the most complicated thing they’d ever had to worry about. Fletch hoped so. If the other side’s yahoos didn’t cancel out ours, we were in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Another load of dirt flew from Fletch’s shovel, and another, and another. Every so often, a noncom would yell at the POWs to hurry up again. And they would… for a little while, or till he turned his back. Even if Newcomb didn’t know his ass from third base, it was the rhythm of a cotton field, but of a cotton field back in slavery days before the Civil War. Nobody here worked any harder than he absolutely had to.
The overseers knew it as well as the slaves. They made an example out of somebody who moved too slowly to suit them-or maybe somebody chosen at random-almost every day. And they were more savage than the overseers of the American South. Negro slaves had been expensive pieces of property; overseers back then could get in trouble for damaging them. None of the Japs cared what happened to POWs here. The more of them who dropped dead, the happier they seemed.
A whistle blew when the sun went down. The work gang lined up for the little lumps of rice and greens that wouldn’t have been enough to keep men alive if they’d lain around doing nothing. Then they slept. Exhaustion made bare ground a perfect mattress. Fletch closed his eyes and he was gone.
When he dreamt, he dreamt of Jane. That hadn’t happened in a while. But he didn’t dream of her naked and lively in the bedroom, the way he had after they first broke up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d dreamt of Jane-or even of a Hotel Street hooker-that way.