Jane picked up a cookbook she didn’t particularly want. Cookbooks made good cover; everyone was obsessed with food these days. She poked around through the store before casually adding the mystery to the cookbook. “How much for these two, Louise?” she asked.
Louise’s jaw worked. She might have been chewing gum, except there was no gum to chew. “Fifteen dollars,” she said after making whatever arcane calculations she made. Those calculations worked. She wasn’t as skinny as most people in Wahiawa.
“Fifteen?” Jane squeaked. “That’s outrageous!” And it was. She hadn’t expected Louise to say more than ten.
The bookstore owner shrugged. She chewed on the gum that wasn’t there. “Twelve, then,” she said reluctantly, “and you won’t jew me down another dime.”
“I’m not made out of money,” Jane protested. Louise shrugged again. Jane asked, “How much for each of them?” That boiled down to, how well had she hidden her reaction when she saw Murder Must Advertise? If Louise thought she was mostly after the cookbook, she won. If the other woman knew she wanted the mystery, she didn’t.
Still more jaw-working followed. Louise was calculating what the traffic would bear. “Eight for this one, four for the other,” she said at last.
She wanted more for the cookbook. Jane didn’t cheer, even if she felt like it. Instead, she looked disappointed. “That’s too much,” she said, sending a longing glance toward the book full of recipes for Chinese chicken wings and Polynesian pork chops and bananas on the half shell and fish with pineapple sauce and suffering bastards.
“Take it or leave it.” Louise had the business manners of a snapping turtle.
Sighing, Jane put the cookbook back on the table where she’d found it. “I guess I can afford this one,” she said, tapping the mystery. “I sure wish you’d done it the other way, though.”
Louise looked smug. Jane gave her a five-dollar bill and got back two halves in change. She left the store in a hurry, before Louise figured out she was really ready to jump for joy.
The Japs had confiscated radios. A bomb had fallen on the local movie house. Making time go by was one of the hardest things you could do these days. A good book would kill several hours. If it was good enough, you could read it more than once, too. Jane could hardly wait to get back to her place, open up the novel, and be transported from Oahu to a larger, cooler, foggier isle.
But she hadn’t slipped the surly bonds of reality yet. Up the street came a work gang of American POWs herded along by Japanese guards with bayoneted rifles. She eyed them with horrified fascination. As always, they reminded her how things could have been worse.
She was thin. They were emaciated. Her clothes were worn. They still had on the tattered remnants of whatever they’d been wearing when they surrendered. She made do with cold-water showers without soap. By the way they looked-and smelled-they hadn’t bathed for more than a year. Some of them stood defiantly erect, and marched as if on parade at Schofield Barracks. Others, plainly, were on their last legs, and could barely stagger along.
One of them fell down in the middle of the street. Two Japanese guards stood over him, screaming what had to be curses. When he didn’t get up, they started kicking him. They paused after a minute or so to see if he would rise. He tried, but couldn’t get past his knees. They kicked him some more and paused again. When he still didn’t get up, two of them bayoneted him. He groaned and thrashed and bled.
Jane’s nails were short these days-whose weren’t? — but they bit into her palms anyhow. The Japs didn’t put the POW out of his misery. They left him there to die slowly. Then, laughing, they got the rest of the prisoners moving again.
It wasn’t Fletch, Jane thought as she willed her hands to uncurl. Whenever prisoners of war went through Wahiawa, she couldn’t help scanning their faces to see if she spotted her ex-husband. As decrepit and shaggy as the POWs were these days, he might have stumbled past her without her even recognizing him. She wondered why she bothered. She had no idea whether he was alive. She didn’t love him any more. Even if she did, what could she do for him? Nothing. Less than nothing. And if the Japs here found out she was an officer’s wife-even if she and Fletch had been getting a divorce-they might make things unpleasant for her. More unpleasant, she thought with a shiver.
But she couldn’t help looking. Getting a divorce wasn’t as final as lawyers made it out to be. She wished it were.
By the time the guards were out of sight, the prisoner they’d butchered had stopped moving. Sooner or later, someone would drag the body out of the street. Jane looked away from it as she scurried back to her apartment. What worried her was how little the atrocity upset her. She’d already seen too many others.
MARCHING UP THE KAMEHAMEHA HIGHWAY was more fun than paving it or building gun emplacements for the Japs. That was how Fletcher Armitage measured his life these days. He wasn’t quite so exhausted when he marched as when he worked. He didn’t starve quite so quickly, either. These were things to treasure, though he wouldn’t have thought so before December 7, 1941.
He understood Einstein better than he’d ever dreamt of doing. There was bad, and then there was worse. What would have looked like the worst thing in the world to him before the Japs overran Oahu now didn’t seem bad at all. If that wasn’t relativity, what the hell was it?
When the POWs worked, the guards pushed them hard. Why not? The Japs didn’t do any road work or digging themselves. But when they marched, the pace stayed bearable. If the Japs made the prisoners doubletime, they would have to doubletime themselves, and they wouldn’t have cared for that one bit. A few of them were actually plump.
Fletch’s standards about what constituted a proper human form had changed radically since the surrender-so radically, he didn’t altogether realize it himself. The Americans with whom he labored seemed normal to him. They were, after all, the people he saw every minute of every day. He forgot how scrawny they were because they surrounded him.
But they made the Japs, some of whom were prewar average and a handful even heavier than that, seem grotesquely obese by comparison. Why didn’t they fall over dead from carting that extra weight around all the time?
Intellectually, Fletch knew he’d had that much flesh himself once upon a time. Emotionally, he didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t believe it. If everyone who mattered to him seemed made of sticks and twigs, then anyone who didn’t had to have something wrong with him.
“Wahiawa ahead,” somebody said.
“Hot damn.” That wasn’t Fletch; it was a Texan named Virgil Street. He added, “Who gives a damn, anyways? We went through this lousy place fallin’ back when we still had guns in our hands. Goin’ through it forwards doesn’t mean anything, on account of the Japs got the guns now.”
Fletch kept his mouth shut. Wahiawa meant something to him. He wondered if he’d see Jane. He also wondered if she’d care if she saw him. Not likely, he feared. He never had figured out why she dumped him. He hadn’t seen it coming. (That he hadn’t seen it coming said a good deal about him, but one of the things it said was that he wouldn’t understand what it said.) He still loved her, as much as he had before. If only…
He laughed. He had a picture of the Jap sergeant who bossed the work gang letting him fall out for a heart-to-heart with his ex. It was right next to his pictures of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.
And even if the sergeant did, would Jane listen to him? That was another fat chance. She hadn’t wanted to hear a word he said, not after she threw him out of the apartment. Suddenly and powerfully, he wanted a drink. Thinking of Jane made him think of bourbon. He’d done a hell of a lot of drinking after she dumped him. What with forcibly separating him from hooch, the Japanese invasion might have saved him from turning into a lush.