Yeah, why not? Fujita thought. He couldn’t find any reason-not that he looked very hard.
Strange birds made strange noises in the bushes. Fujita wished he knew what they were. They had calls unlike any he’d heard in Japan or China or Siberia. Many of them, even the ones shaped like sparrows, were gaudy beyond belief. If their like had lived in the Home Islands, they would have been prized cage birds. The Burmese took them utterly for granted. Most of the time, they ignored them the way Fujita would have ignored a white-eye. Sometimes they caught them and killed them and ate them.
One of the privates fell asleep. A few minutes later, Fujita did, too. He woke up when engines announced the bombers’ return. One by one, the planes bounced to a stop on the rutted grass airstrip. Fujita counted them. They’d all come back. One had a chunk bitten out of its tail, but the groundcrew men could fix that. Before long, they’d go out again-and, pretty soon, more Chinese would sicken and die.
“All aboard!” the conductor shouted.
“See you in a week!” Herb Druce said on the platform at the Broad Street station. He hugged Peggy like a sailor going off on a cruise that would last for months. He kissed her like a sailor going to sea, too. Then, agile as a man half his age, he hopped up into the car that would take him-well, wherever he was heading. He’d always been conscientious, and he took security seriously. What Peggy didn’t know, she couldn’t blab if Japanese spies stuck burning slivers of bamboo under her fingernails.
That there probably weren’t any Japanese spies within a thousand miles of Philadelphia, and that they were unlikely to grab Peggy and start torturing her to learn what he was up to even if they were around, bothered him not a bit. It was the principle of the thing, dammit.
He reappeared a moment later at a window seat. Peggy waved. He waved back. The train started to roll. It was bound for Dallas. Where he would get off, whether he would get back onto another train after he did … All that was stuff he knew and she didn’t need to.
She kept waving till she couldn’t see his car any more. She wasn’t the only woman on the platform doing that-nowhere near. A few men waved, too, but only a few. Not far from her, two boys in short pants, one maybe six, his little brother a couple of years younger, were crying as if their hearts would break. Their daddy was going off to do something far away, and they didn’t like it for beans.
Well, Peggy wasn’t thrilled when Herb went off and did whatever he did for the government, either. She walked out of the train station and caught a northbound bus. The Packard mostly sat these days. The gas ration was too small to let you go anywhere you didn’t really need to.
Things could have been worse, though. She knew that. In Hitler’s Germany, doctors were the only civilians who could get any gas at all. Most private cars had had their batteries and tires confiscated for the war effort. The Nazis weren’t melting them down to turn them into tanks and U-boats, but that was probably just a matter of time. From all she’d heard, things weren’t much better in France and England. She wondered what they were like in Japan. How many cars had the Japs had to begin with? It wasn’t as if they built them for themselves, the way the European countries and America did.
The very idea of Japanese-made autos set her to laughing softly as she got off the bus. What were Japanese factories good for except cheap tin knockoffs of better goods made somewhere else? If you saw something with MADE IN JAPAN stamped on it, you knew it would fall apart if you looked at it sideways.
But the laughter stopped as she headed home. American fighting men had assumed the Japs’ planes and warships were made of tinfoil and scrap metal and rubber bands, too. That turned out not to be quite right. The Jap Navy ruled the Pacific everywhere west of Hawaii, and it seemed only dumb luck that the Rising Sun didn’t fly over Honolulu, too.
She hadn’t bothered locking the front door when she and Herb headed for the station. She knew there were burglars, but she didn’t worry that anyone would break into the house the minute the people who lived there left for a little while. People who did worry about silly stuff like that were also people who snapped their fingers all the time to keep the elephants away.
Sure enough, no one had absconded with the silver and the fine china by the time she got back. No masked thug waited in the foyer to knock her over the head and beat it out the door with her handbag. It was just the good old familiar house, empty but for her. She turned on the stove and waited for the coffee to start perking again.
Coffee, now, coffee was a blessing she appreciated. Considering the horrible stuff that degraded its name and reputation on the Continent, she didn’t think she’d ever take the real McCoy for granted again.
She turned on the radio. A chorus of singers was celebrating the virtues of Ivory soap. Another chorus, this one masculine, sang the praises of Old Gold cigarettes. A happy couple made it plain they wouldn’t have been happy if not for Spam. A local shoe store told the world-or as much of it as this station’s signals reached-that it was having a sale. Eventually, music that wasn’t trying to sell you something came on.
That didn’t mean it was good music. Peggy turned the dial. The next station over boasted-if that was the word-a fast-talking comic going through ways of beating the very mild American rationing system. His routine lacked the essential quality of humor known as being funny.
Peggy thought so, anyhow, and changed the station again. Maybe somebody who hadn’t seen what real shortages were like would have thought the comedian was a riot. But all the commercials she’d listened to before made it plain how much the United States still had, and how much of that abundance remained available to civilians. If you complained about it, what were you but a spoiled little brat?
Or maybe you were just an American who’d never been abroad and had no standards of comparison. By all the signs, that made you the world’s equivalent of a spoiled little brat. People here hadn’t the faintest idea of how lucky and how well off they were.
On the next station Peggy found, a woman was talking seriously about wives and girlfriends who feared their menfolk would be unfaithful to them after being in the service for a while, or who were afraid they might decide to look for new companions themselves once they got lonely enough. That was a genuine problem, all right, here and in every other country at war. Even so, Peggy twisted the tuning dial again, and twisted it hard. She knew too well what a problem it was, and didn’t want to have to think about it now.
She finally found some news. The world report was over, though. A train derailment in South Dakota had killed four people. The longshoremen’s union on the West Coast was threatening a strike if working conditions didn’t improve-and local authorities were threatening to jail all the union leaders if the longshoremen did presume to strike. The mayor of Kansas City was under arrest on corruption charges, some of which went all the way back to before the last war. “Another machine politician bites the dust,” the newsman intoned piously.
“Business as usual,” Peggy said, and turned the dial again. This time she discovered, to her surprise, a baseball game. The Athletics had scheduled their matchup with the Browns for ten in the morning: “To give the people who work the later shifts the chance to see it,” their broadcaster explained. Since the A’s and the Browns had both sunk like a rock in the standings ever since Opening Day, odds were not too many fans would have gone to Shibe Park no matter when the game started. Peggy did admire Connie Mack. He’d managed the A’s since the start of the American League, back when she was a little girl. The Tall Tactician, people called him. He wore a suit and a hat, even in the dugout. He’d had some great teams-but not lately.