Elsie caught him doing it and wrinkled her nose in mock severity. Doing his best to be gallant, he said, “We can go under a tree if you want.”
She shook her head. “It won’t make any difference. The water’ll just drip through.” She was found to be right about that. She went on, “I don’t mind it. It’s nice and warm. And when it stops, we’ll dry out pretty fast.”
“Okay,” Kenzo said. “In the meantime…” He put his arm around her. She slid toward him on the bench. He kissed her. What could be better than necking in the park, even if it was raining? Actually, he knew what could be better. But Elsie didn’t want to do that-or if she did want to, she pretended not to like any other well brought-up girl.
Kisses could take on a life of their own. Kenzo opened his eyes and came up for air after what seemed like forever. Elsie’s eyes stayed closed, waiting for him to bend down to her again. But he didn’t. Instead, softly, he spoke her name.
However softly he spoke, it wasn’t the way a lover talked to his beloved. Her eyes came open, too. He pointed and said, still in a low voice, “I think you’d better get out of here.”
Three Japanese soldiers were coming into the park. They weren’t on patroclass="underline" they weren’t carrying weapons and they weren’t marching. What they were was falling-down drunk. One of them was singing something raucous.
“They won’t be any trouble,” Elsie said, but her voice lacked conviction.
The only way they wouldn’t be any trouble was if they hadn’t seen her. Kenzo hoped that was so; they were pretty well sloshed. But, like so many things, it turned out to be too much to hope for. “Hey, sweetheart, kiss me, too!” one of them called.
“Kiss my dick!” another one added. They all thought that was funny. Kenzo didn’t like the baying quality of their laughter, not even a little bit.
Elsie’s face didn’t change. For a foolish instant, Kenzo wondered why not. Then he realized they’d yelled in Japanese. He could go back and forth between the two languages without even realizing he was doing it. Elsie couldn’t. She didn’t know how lucky she was, either. “Sweetheart,” he said, “you’ve got to get out of here right now.”
That got through to her. She scrambled to her feet. But even then she asked, “What will they do to you if I take a powder?”
“Whatever it is, it won’t be half as bad as what they’d do to you. Now get lost.” He swatted her on the fanny to make sure she got the point. She yipped, but she took off. She was no dope, either. Instead of heading for any of the sidewalks, she went straight away from the Japanese soldiers, even though that was through some of the thickest bush.
“Come back!” “Where do you think you’re going, you stupid bitch?” “We can catch her!” The soldiers shouted at Elsie and at one another. They pounded toward the park bench at a staggering lope. One of them fell on the wet grass. The other two hauled him upright again.
Seeing that, Kenzo waited till the very last instant before he got up and ran. He went in the same direction as Elsie had, wanting to stay between her and the soldiers. If he went any other way, they were too likely to forget about him and just keep on after her. He thought they were too drunk to catch her, but you never could tell.
He also thought they were too drunk to catch him. The Three Stooges couldn’t have put on a clumsier act than that pratfall of theirs. But then he took a pratfall of his own, tripping over a root and landing splat! on his face. Worse yet, he knocked the wind out of himself.
He was just lurching to his feet when one of the soldiers grabbed him. “Let me go!” he yelled in Japanese. “I didn’t do anything!”
They seemed momentarily startled to hear him speak their language. One of them hit him anyway. “Shut up, you bastard!” the soldier shouted. “You told the girl to get away!” He couldn’t have known enough English to be sure of that, but he didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.
Kenzo tried to twist free. He didn’t try to fight back. One against three, even three drunks, was bad odds. All he wanted to do was get away. To his dismay, he discovered he couldn’t. They hit him a few more times, knocked him down, and started kicking him. That was bad. He did his best to roll into a ball and protect his head with his arms.
Then one of the soldiers said, “We’re just wasting time. That stupid cunt is getting away.”
They forgot about Kenzo and pounded off after Elsie. This time, Kenzo lay there for some little while before he painfully pulled himself upright again. He hoped he’d bought Elsie enough time to escape. His biggest fear had been that they would decide she had got away and it was his fault. In that case, they might have stomped him to death.
He spat red. He hadn’t done a perfect job of covering up. And that wasn’t just rainwater trickling down his jaw. Breathing hurt, too; his ribs had taken a shellacking. But he didn’t feel knives in his chest when he inhaled, so he supposed nothing in there was broken. In the movies, the hero recovered from a beating as soon as it was over. Life, unfortunately, didn’t imitate Hollywood. Kenzo felt like hell, or maybe a little worse.
None too steady on his feet, he lurched over to the water fountain in one corner of the park. When he turned the knob, water came out. He washed his face. It hurt. He started to dry it on his sleeve, but didn’t. For one thing, his shirt was already pretty soggy. For another, he didn’t want to get bloodstains on it. They hardly ever came out clean.
All he could do was hope Elsie had got home safe. He wanted to find out if she had, but he didn’t do that, either. If he ran into those Japanese soldiers again, it might literally be the last thing he ever did. And he didn’t want to lead them to the Sundbergs’ house.
Instead, he walked back to the tent he shared with his father and brother. Nobody stared at him, so maybe he didn’t look too bad. Or maybe people in Honolulu had just got used to seeing guys who’d been roughed up.
To his enormous relief, his father wasn’t in the tent. His brother was. Hiroshi did stare at him, and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ! What happened to you?”
So much for not looking too bad, Kenzo thought. “Japanese soldiers,” he answered shortly. “Could have been a hell of a lot worse. I think Elsie got away from them, and I’ll be okay.”
“Jesus Christ!” Hiroshi said again, and then, “You gonna tell Dad?”
“What’s the use?” Kenzo said. “If I did, he’d probably say it was my own damn fault.” He waited, hoping his brother would tell him he was wrong. Hiroshi didn’t. Kenzo sighed, disappointed but not much surprised.
“COME ON. Let’s go!” Lester Dillon shouted as the Marines in his platoon filed onto a bus. “Move it, you lazy lugs! You want to keep Hirohito waiting?”
His company commander grinned at him. “That’s pretty good,” Captain Bradford said.
“Thank you, sir.” Dillon didn’t think it was all that funny himself, but he wasn’t about to say so, not if his CO liked it. He did say, “About time we got another shot at those slanty-eyed bastards.”
“You better believe it,” Bradford agreed. “Maybe this time the Navy’ll hold up their end of the deal.”
“They damn well better,” Dillon exclaimed. “If they don’t-”
“If they don’t, I reckon they’ll be too dead for us to complain about it,” Braxton Bradford said. “That’s how it worked out last year, anyways.”
Since he was both right and an officer, Dillon let it rest there. This was a funny kind of war. If the Navy pukes didn’t do their job, if they got killed, he and his buddies were pretty safe. But if the sailors and flyboys cleared the Japanese Navy out of the way in the Pacific, the Marines and the Army got to land on Oahu and tackle the Japanese Army. It only stood to reason that a lot of them wouldn’t live through the campaign. But he was champing at the bit, and so was every other Marine he knew. The Army’s opinion mattered to him not at all.