Fuchida kept looking toward the American mainland. “Sooner or later, they will try to come back,” he predicted.
“Let them try,” Shindo said. “We’ll give them a set of lumps for their troubles, and then they can try again.” He and Fuchida smiled at each other. The sun shone down brightly. It was a perfect morning. But then, what morning wasn’t perfect in Hawaii?
ONCE UPON A time, in the dim and vanished days before the war came to Oahu, Kapiolani Park had been a place where tourists and locals could get away from the frenzy of Waikiki for a little while. Lying by the road out to Diamond Head, the expanse of grass and trees had featured, among other things, a fancy band shell where the Royal Hawaiian Band played on Sunday afternoons.
Now, barbed wire and machine-gun towers ringed Kapiolani Park. Japanese soldiers patrolled the perimeter. In the park itself, tents sprouted like a swarm of toadstools. This was what being a prisoner of war meant.
A mynah hopped along the grass between the tents, head cocked to one side as it studied the ground for worms and grubs. Fletcher Armitage studied the mynah the same way the bird studied the ground, and with the same hunger. He had a rock in his hand.
He also watched his fellow captives. If he knocked the bird over, could one of them grab it before he did?
That was an important question. Everybody on Oahu was going to get hungry by and by. Fletch had seen as much before the surrender. For POWs, though, by and by was already here. The Japanese fed them a little rice or noodles every day. Sometimes green leaves of one sort or another were mixed in with the mess. More rarely, so were bits of fish. Even when they were, the day’s ration wouldn’t have kept a four-year-old healthy, let along a grown man.
“Come a little closer, you stupid bird,” Fletch murmured. Mynahs took people pretty much for granted. Why not? People had always let them alone. People had… till they started getting hungry.
Fletch’s belly growled at the thought of mynah meat. He’d never been fat. He was getting skinnier by the day. He’d traded his belt for a length of rope and half a dozen cigarettes. He’d smoked all the cigarettes the day he got them. The rope would go on holding up his pants after he got too skinny for the belt to do him any good.
Closer came the mynah, and closer still, till it got within about six feet of him. Then it paused, tilting its head to one side and watching him with a beady black eye. It was fairly tame, yes, but not suicidally so like a zebra dove.
“Come on,” Fletch crooned. “Come on, baby.” The mynah bird kept on casing him. It came no closer. He crooned curses when he decided it wasn’t going to. He’d just have to take his best shot.
He let fly with the rock. The motion of his arm startled the bird. It was already on the wing and squawking when the rock thudded down somewhere close to where it had been. Would he have hit it if it hadn’t taken off? Maybe. Maybe not, too.
Coming out with some curses that weren’t crooned at all, Fletch turned away in disgust. “Too bad, buddy,” said a soldier in a tent across the narrow track. “Woulda been good, I bet.”
“Yeah,” Fletch said. “It would’ve been.” The rest of the day looked black and gloomy. If he’d made the kill, he could have had a few bites of real meat, even if mynahs weren’t anything to make you forget fried chicken. Now he’d have to get by on rations alone. The only trouble with that was, a man couldn’t possibly do it.
He went over and picked up the rock before somebody else got hold of it. It was a good size for clouting birds. Some time before too long, he’d get another chance. Don’t blow it, he told himself sternly.
How smart were birds? How long would they take to figure out that they’d suddenly become fair game? How long before they started staying away from Kapiolani Park? If they did, that would be very bad.
The Japs didn’t bother bringing drinking water into the park. They just left the drinking fountains in place. Generous of them, Fletch thought sourly. If a man had to stand in line for an hour just to wet his whistle… well, so what? That was no skin off the Japs’ noses.
Anyone who wanted to wash had to do it at the drinking fountains, too. That meant anything resembling real washing was impossible. Fletch noticed the stink less than he’d thought he would. When everybody smelled, nobody smelled. And everybody sure smelled here.
Rank had no privileges in line. As far as Fletch could see, rank had no privileges anywhere in the camp any more. If enlisted men obeyed officers, it was because they respected them or liked them, not because they thought they had to. And if they didn’t, what could the officers do about it? Not much. The Japs wouldn’t back them up. The Japs didn’t care what happened here.
Slowly, slowly, the line snaked forward. Fletch sighed. He was thirsty. He was tired. And he was hungry. Anyone who was hungry enough to want to eat a mynah bird was hungry, all right. Unless he caught a mynah or a dove, he’d stay hungry till he got supper. He shook his head. He’d stay hungry after he got supper, too, because it wouldn’t be nearly enough.
His turn at the water fountain finally came. He drank and drank and drank. If he drank enough, he could trick his belly into thinking he was full, at least for a little while. He splashed water on his face and hands, too.
“Come on, buddy. Shake a leg,” the soldier behind him growled. Reluctantly, Fletch moved away from the fountain. The breeze off the ocean a few hundred yards away dried the water on his face. As usual, the weather was perfect: not too hot, not too cold, moist but not too humid. Diamond Head towered in the middle distance. The inside of the dead volcano was supposed to be honeycombed with tunnels, fortified beyond belief. When the rest of Oahu was hostage to the Japs, though, that hadn’t turned out to matter a whole hell of a lot.
A bunch of things everybody had thought would be important hadn’t turned out to matter a whole hell of a lot. The innate superiority of the white man to the Oriental was one that occurred to Fletch. Here in this POW camp, he didn’t feel very goddamn superior.
The Japs went out of their way to rub it in that he wasn’t, too. A squad of guards strode through the camp, bayonets glittering on their rifles. Americans scrambled to get out of the soldiers’ way. Along with everybody else, Fletch bowed when the guards passed him. Everyone had learned that lesson in a hurry. The Japanese set on and savagely beat anybody who forgot. A couple of Americans were supposed to have died from their mistreatment. Fletch didn’t know if that was true, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. The Japs didn’t give a rat’s ass whether Americans lived or died.
Fletch sat down in front of his tent. There wasn’t much else to do. In fact, there wasn’t anything else to do. Hunger left him slow and lethargic. A fly landed on his arm. Slowly and lethargically, he brushed it away. There seemed to be more flies in the POW camp every day. That only made sense; the latrines got fouler every day. Fletch didn’t know how many thousands of prisoners were jammed in here. Enough so that their wastes overwhelmed the lime chloride the Japs deigned to sprinkle into the latrine trenches.
How long before they ran out of lime chloride altogether? How long before they ran out of chlorine for treating the drinking water? Probably not long-like damn near everything else, the chemicals came, or had come, from the mainland. What would happen when they did run out? Dysentery was the word that came to mind.