Philly waved in the direction of the burial detail. Several civilians carried shovels and had set to work digging graves in which to bury the American dead.
“Who are those guys? They look like Japs.”
“Not Japanese,” Yoshio said, finally speaking up. “Chamorros.”
“Who?”
“The Chamorros are the native people of Guam,” Yoshio explained. “They are Pacific islanders, not Japanese. In fact, the Japanese enslaved many of them and forced them to work building their fortifications and expanding the airfield. The Japanese were very cruel to these people. I would say it is safe to say that they hate the Japanese.”
“How the hell do you know so much?” Philly asked suspiciously.
“We were briefed before the landing.”
“If those Chamorros hated the Japanese so much, you’d think that they’d fight back,” Deke pointed out.
Yoshio nodded. “Some have tried. There have been guerrillas fighting in the jungle for many months. But you see, they have very little to fight with — maybe a few old rifles and not much ammunition.”
“Just goes to show that it never hurts to have a good rifle handy if you want to stay free.”
“That may be true,” Yoshio said. “However, it is my understanding that the Chamorros are a very peaceful people. Do not forget that they were under the protection of the United States for more than forty years until the Japanese invaded. In a way, we let them down.”
Deke looked more closely at the Chamorros laboring under the hot sun. They were built small, like the Japanese, and most of them looked underfed and exceedingly thin. Their clothes were little better than rags, except where some of them had donned cast-off pieces of American uniforms. Even then, the sleeves and pants were too long, and they had to roll them up. To Deke, who was no stranger to farm labor, the Chamorros looked tough and hardworking.
Lieutenant Steele came by. He still had a bandage over his eye, but he was struggling to keep it in place. The bandage might have started out white, but it was now smudged with mud and blackened with gunpowder and gun oil. “How are you boys holding up?” he asked, absently adjusting the bandage.
“We’ll be fine as long as the Japs keep to the jungle,” Philly said.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Steele said. “Better keep a sharp lookout. There’s no telling when they’ll be back.”
Steele moved off down the line.
Seeing the lieutenant struggle with his eye patch gave Deke an idea. He picked up the abandoned boot that he had found earlier in the foxhole.
The leather upper was still in good shape, and Deke thought that he could salvage something from it. Growing up on the farm, he always had been good at working with leather, whether it was repairing harnesses for the horses or getting a little more life out of a pair of shoes. There was something satisfying about working with leather — perhaps the durability of it.
Using his razor-sharp knife, he carefully cut an oval patch from the upper. He then used a bit of black greasepaint to finish the edges. He used the tip of the knife to punch holes at opposite ends of the oval. Finally, he threaded one of the waxed bootlaces through the holes.
When Lieutenant Steele came by a half hour later, Deke called out to him.
“Honcho, I’ve got something for you.”
“I hope it’s a Jap prisoner,” the lieutenant said. “HQ wants one bad, but the Japs aren’t cooperating. The only live ones we’ve found are mostly shot to pieces and aren’t much for talking. Speaking of which, Yoshio, you need to get down to the beach and see if you can talk to any of those Jap wounded.”
“Sorry, but it ain’t a Jap,” Deke said as the Nisei interpreter crawled out of the foxhole and hurried away. Deke held out the leather patch, and the lieutenant looked at it quizzically.
“What is it?”
“It’s an eye patch,” Deke said. “Try it on.”
“Huh,” Lieutenant Steele said. He took off his helmet and turned his face away from them to shed his bandage and put on the patch. Even so, Deke caught a glimpse of the red, puckered scar — all that remained of the eye that he had lost in that sniper battle on Guadalcanal. Having a few scars of his own, Deke understood if the lieutenant was a little self-conscious.
When he turned back, the eye patch was in place. It was a good fit and would stay securely in place. All in all, it was a vast improvement over the dirty bandage that Lieutenant Steele had been using to hide what remained of his wounded eye.
“You look like a pirate,” Philly said with a hoot, but he was grinning. “But I’ve got to say, Honcho, that eye patch makes you look kind of badass. I watched Deke make that out of a piece of boot leather. And here all I thought that old country boy could do was shoot and terrorize sheep. Next thing you know, he’ll be knitting scarves.”
Steele touched the leather eye patch. He seemed genuinely moved by Deke’s efforts. “Deke, I’ve got to say that’s a big improvement. I can’t thank you enough, son.”
“Aw, it was nothin’,” he said.
Lieutenant Steele reached out and gave his shoulder a quick squeeze, then moved on. Deke gulped hard and turned his face away from the others, suddenly overcome by emotion. His own father used to squeeze Deke’s shoulder that same way.
“Keep that up and you’ll get yourself promoted,” Philly said. “They’ll have to come up with some kind of exalted rank for you, I guess.”
“If you say so.”
Deke hadn’t made the eye patch to get promoted. He realized that the approval he had received from Lieutenant Steele was all the thanks that he needed. He hadn’t even known what a void his own father’s death had left in his life. He had known Lieutenant Steele for only a few short days, but he was already the closest thing to a father figure that he had known for years.
“You know what, Deke?” Philly said, interrupting his thoughts. The city boy was giving him a lopsided grin that signaled one of his wisecracks was brewing. “I’ve got a hole in the seat of my pants, and my ass is sticking out something terrible. Think you could fix it for me?”
“Philly, the only thing I’m gonna do with the seat of your pants is kick you in it,” Deke said. “Now keep an eye on that jungle. Like Honcho said, you never know when the Japs might be back.”
As if the heat wasn’t enough to contend with, by late afternoon thunderclouds had built on the horizon. They could see the gray line of rain approaching like a curtain. Spikes of lightning shot through the brooding clouds.
“Here it comes,” Philly said. “I don’t know which is worse around here, the Japs or the weather.”
Deke snorted. “That ain’t no contest, Philly. A little rain won’t kill you, but a little Jap will.”
A few minutes later, Deke reflected that maybe he’d been wrong about that. The storm approached ominously. Nearby, Whoa Nelly started to whine as the sound of thunder picked up. Funny that gunfire didn’t seem to bother her. The thunder was a different story.
“It’s all right, girl,” Egan reassured her. “Just a little thunder is all.”
The sun vanished, but there was no sense of relief in the respite from the heat, because the sun was replaced by deep gloom and thunder. The storm hit them with a squall; then the rain came down in buckets, quickly turning the foxholes into soupy quagmires. Deke’s broad-brimmed hat kept the worst of the rain from running down the back of his neck, but there was nothing that he could do about the rainwater bubbling up around his knees and thighs as he crouched in the foxhole, looking out at the jungle. It might have been his imagination, but he thought that the broad foliage of the jungle plants and even the tall palms that hadn’t been shattered by the bombardment lifted their leaves to welcome the rain.
Maybe the Japs would welcome it, too, because the rain grounded the US planes that had been patrolling the island. Now that the Americans had captured the airfield, there was little worry about Japanese planes.