Not long after dinner, the phone rang. Thinking it might be someone from the White House, Charlie grabbed it. “Hello?”
“Mr. Sullivan?” a woman’s voice asked. When Charlie admitted he was himself, she went on, “I am Miss Hannegan, the principal at your children’s school. I’m calling about what unfortunately happened this afternoon.”
“Oh, sure,” Charlie said. “We gave Pat a good talking-to. I don’t think you’ll have any more of that kind of trouble out of him.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Miss Hannegan didn’t just sound glad. She sounded massively relieved. “I wanted to be positive you weren’t angry at Miss Tarleton for bringing Patrick to my office, and to remind you that of course”-she bore down hard on that-“Melvin Vangilder had no idea what you do, or he never would have said what he said to your son.”
“Uh-huh. If you hadn’t called, I never would have thought of that,” Charlie said. Miss Hannegan seemed more relieved than ever. He said his good-byes as quickly as he could and hung up.
Then he fixed himself a drink. Esther gave him a look, but he did it anyway. The principal had called to make sure he wasn’t an ogre. She assumed that someone who worked at the White House had but to say the word and Miss Tarleton (who taught Pat’s kindergarten class) would disappear into a labor encampment. So would Melvin Vangilder’s mother and father. So would Melvin himself, and never mind that he might or might not have had his sixth birthday. She might not have been wrong, either.
“But doggone it, I’m not an ogre,” Charlie muttered when he’d finished the drink-which didn’t take long.
“What?” his wife asked.
“Never mind.” The real trouble was, he understood why Miss Hannegan had been so worried. If he were an ogre, she couldn’t stop him from doing whatever he wanted to Miss Tarleton and to the Vangilders. All she could do was beg him. If he didn’t feel like listening, what would he do? He’d pick up the phone and call J. Edgar Hoover. The Jeebies would take it from there.
He’d never used his influence that way. It hadn’t occurred to him, which he supposed meant that his own parents had raised him the right way. He wondered whether Lazar Kagan, say, had got even with somebody who beat him up on a school playground back around the turn of the century. He couldn’t very well ask the next time he bumped into Kagan in the White House. And, all things considered, he was bound to be better off not knowing.
* * *
When American soldiers in Japan got some leave, they often went to Shikoku. Yes, the natives there resented their presence more than Japs in other parts of South Japan did. But the cities and towns of Shikoku had just had the hell bombed out of them. They hadn’t had the hell bombed out of them and then been fought over house by house. It made a difference.
Along with Dick Shirakawa, Mike took the ferry from Wakayama on Honshu to Tokushima on Shikoku. The ferry was a wallowing landing craft, the kind he’d ridden towards unfriendly beaches too many times. The only part of Wakayama that had much life, even now, was the harbor, and Americans were in charge there.
Tokushima. . wasn’t like that. It was the friendliest beach Mike had ever landed on. It was, in fact, a quickly run-up, low-rent version of Honolulu. The whole town, or at least the waterfront district, was designed to give servicemen a good time while separating them from their cash.
You could go to the USO and have a wholesome good time for next to nothing. Or you could do other things. You could gamble. You could drink. You could dance with taxi dancers who might or might not be available for other services, too. You could go to any number of strip joints-Japanese women, even if most of them were none too busty, had fewer inhibitions about nakedness than their American sisters did. Or you could go to a brothel. The quality of what you got there varied according to how much you felt like spending, as it did anywhere else.
MPs and shore patrolmen did their best to keep the U.S. servicemen from adding brawling to their fun and games. They also stayed alert for Jap diehards who still wanted to kill Americans even two years after the surrender. Japs not in the Constitutional Guard or the police forces weren’t supposed to have firearms. Mike knew what a forlorn hope that was. Before the American invasion, the authorities had armed as many people in the Home Islands as they could. You could get your hands on anything from one of those sad black-powder muskets to an Arisaka rifle or a Nambu light machine gun with no trouble at all.
You could also get your hands on what American soldiers still called knee mortars. You couldn’t really fire them off your knee, but you could lob the little bombs they threw for most of a mile. Every so often, Japs in the suburbs would shoot at the bright lights of the waterfront. They were only a nuisance-unless you happened to be standing where a bomb went off. The Americans seldom caught anybody. Knee mortars were too easy to ditch.
Nobody fired anything at Tokushima while Mike and Dick were in town. The days were hot and muggy: a lot like New York City in the summertime. Nights were warm and muggy. A lot of the eateries by the harbor featured hamburgers and hot dogs, or steaks if you had more money.
But you could find Japanese food, too. Mike was the only round-eye in the place he and Dick went into. He’d got halfway decent with hashi, which made the serving girl giggle in surprise. When Americans did come in here, they usually asked for a fork, not chopsticks. Between pieces of sushi, Mike said, “Before I crossed the Pacific, I never would’ve touched raw octopus or raw fish or sea urchin. I guess I know better now.”
“We mostly ate American food in L.A.,” Dick said. “Except for the rice-my mom always made sticky rice. But oh, yeah-this is good, too.”
Mike held up his empty glass. “Biru, domo.” He went back to English: “Beer washes it down great.”
“You got that right,” Shirakawa said.
They also tended to other pleasures, and went back to Wakayama four days later, lighter in the wallet but sated and otherwise amused. Mike signed for a jeep in the motor pool there, and he and Dick started north again, back toward the Agano River and the increasingly nervous demilitarized zone. Almost all of the traffic was American jeeps and trucks. That was a good thing. The Japs had driven on the left, British-style, before the occupation. Sometimes-especially when they’d had a snootful-they forgot the rules had changed. Head-on collisions with American-driven vehicles happened all too often.
A flight of F-80s screamed overhead, racing north. A few minutes later, more of the jets roared by. “Wonder what’s going on,” Dick Shirakawa said.
“Beats me,” Mike answered. “Goddamn, but those jets are noisy! Just hearing ’em makes me want to ditch the jeep and dive into a foxhole. If you didn’t know what they were, just the racket might scare you into giving up.”
They were still south of Tokyo when they got stuck behind a column of tanks, Shermans and a few of the newer, heavier Pershings, all on the way north. There was just enough southbound traffic to make Mike hesitate about pulling into the other lane and trying to pass the column. Bends in the road showed it was long. He fumed instead, crawling along at fifteen miles an hour.
An MP at a crossroads waved the jeep over to the shoulder. “Show me your papers, you two!” he barked. He kept not quite pointing his M-1 at Dick Shirakawa. Seeing a Japanese man in an American uniform made him jumpy, even if most of the Constitutional Guard wore them. He examined both sets of leave documents with microscopic care, Dick’s even more than Mike’s.
Finally, Mike got fed up and said, “What’s the story, anyway?”