Here at the camp, having a buddy proved even more important than it had on the road. A buddy could hold your place in line if nature called or if you were busy trying to make some scheme pay off. A buddy might help you escape, too. Prisoners were duty-bound to try to get away. Nobody seemed hot to try it, though. Even under the Geneva Convention, the power holding prisoners could punish would-be escapees who failed. Since the Japs hadn’t signed the convention, no one was eager to find out what they’d do.
“I wonder what sort of gourmet treat we’ll have tonight,” Peterson said. “The pheasant under glass, do you think, or the filet mignon?”
“Shut the fuck up,” said somebody behind him in line.
“Hey, I can dream, can’t I?” Peterson tried to stay pleasant.
“Not while I gotta listen to you, goddammit.” The other prisoner didn’t bother.
It could have turned into a brawl. The main reason it didn’t was that Peterson was too worn and hungry to take it any further. He told McKinley, “Some people can’t take a joke,” but he didn’t say it loud enough for the angry POW in back of them to hear.
“Filet mignon… Hell, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to want to deck you myself,” McKinley answered. “Your belly’s empty, you take food serious.”
Peterson decided he must have stepped over a line if that was the most backing his friend would give him. Joking about steak and pheasant here felt like joking about somebody’s mother on the outside. You were asking for trouble if you did. But if you couldn’t joke, wouldn’t you start going nuts?
Such thoughts vanished from his mind when the chow line started snaking forward. His belly growled like a wolf. He had to clamp his lips together to keep drool from running down his chin. The spit flooding into his mouth reminded him that he took food as seriously as Prez McKinley, as seriously as the son of a bitch who’d resented what he’d said, as seriously as all the other sorry bastards cooped up here with him. The most beautiful prisoner-of-war camp in the world-but who gave a damn?
He looked down at his bowl. It was cheap, heavy earthenware, glazed white. It had probably come from a Chinese restaurant. He’d eaten chop suey out of bowls just like it plenty of times. Thinking about chop suey made him want to drool, too. I really was out of line with that crack, he decided.
Cooks slapped stuff into POWs’ bowls. Peterson wondered how they’d landed the job. Had they been cooks before the surrender, or had the Japs just pointed and said, “You, you, and you”? Either way, he was jealous of them. If anybody here came close to getting enough to eat, it had to be the cooks.
Plop! A ladleful of supper went into a bowl. Plop! Another ladleful, one man closer to Peterson. Plop! Another. Plop! Another. And then plop! — and it was his turn.
He stared avidly at the bowl as he carried it away from the chow line. Just behind him, McKinley was doing the same thing. Rice, some broth, some green things. He didn’t think the green came from proper vegetables. Some of it looked like grass, some like ferns, some like torn-up leaves boiled in with the rice. He didn’t care, not one bit. He drank every drop of the broth and made sure he ate every grain of rice and every bit of greenery-whatever the hell it was-the cook doled out to him.
He was still hungry when he finished-hungry, yes, but not hungry. Even partial relief might have been a benediction from on high. “Jesus!” he said. “That hit the spot.”
“Hit part of the spot, anyway,” McKinley answered. His bowl was as perfectly empty and polished as Peterson’s. “Give me about three of those, and some spare ribs to go with ’em…” Before the surrender, he wouldn’t have talked so reverently about anything but women. People had taken food for granted then, fools that they were.
The two men carried their bowls over to what looked like a horse trough. For all Peterson knew, it had been a horse trough once upon a time. He sloshed his bowl in the water, and his spoon, too. You did want to keep things as clean as you could. Otherwise, you were asking for dysentery. With so many men packed so close together, you might come down with it anyhow, but you were smart to try not to.
After supper came the evening lineup and count. Nobody got to sack out till the Japs were happy with it. Some of the guards couldn’t count to twenty-one without undoing their fly, which didn’t make things any easier. It started to rain while the Americans stood in their rows. Nobody tried to get away from the rain. That might have fouled up the count and left them out there longer yet. At least it wasn’t a cold, nasty rain, like so many on the mainland. Not even the Japs could ruin the weather. Peterson stood there with rain dripping from his nose and ears and chin and the ends of his fingers. He felt sorry for the guys who wore glasses. They probably went blind after a few minutes.
Finally, the Japs decided no one had escaped. The sergeant in charge of the count gestured. The men in the first couple of rows could see him. When they peeled off, the rest of the Americans did, too.
Peterson and McKinley had been smart enough to pitch their tent on the highest ground they could find. The rain wouldn’t get the ground inside too muddy. Besides, it would probably stop before too long. A little on, a little off, a little on… There was the tent. “Home, sweet home,” Peterson said, not altogether ironically.
“Right,” Prez McKinley answered. They dried off as best they could and rolled themselves in their blankets. Sleep slugged Peterson over the head.
LEARNING TO HANDLE the sails that had sprouted on the Oshima Maru kept Kenzo Takahashi busy. He and Hiroshi were both surprised to find their father a good teacher. Most of the time, their old man lacked the patience to teach well. Not here: he took everything one step at a time, and didn’t ask them for more than they knew how to do. “It’s his neck, too,” Kenzo said in English as they came in after a fair fishing run.
“That’s part of it,” Hiroshi said, also in English. “The other part is, he’s learning it at the same time as he’s showing us. He doesn’t have it down pat himself. If he did, he’d think we ought to know it just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
Kenzo didn’t need long to think it over. “Well, you’re right,” he said.
“What are you two going on about?” their father asked in Japanese. “You talking about me again?”
He knew they did that. He wasn’t a fool, however much Kenzo wanted to think of him as one. He didn’t have much education, but that wasn’t the same thing. “No, not about you-we were talking about the sampan and sailing,” Kenzo said, the second part of which held some truth.
Jiro Takahashi let out one of the grunts he used to show he didn’t believe a word of it. “You could do that in Japanese.”
“We feel more at home in English,” Hiroshi said, and that held nothing but the truth.
It got another grunt from the senior Takahashi. “Foolishness,” he said. “Foolishness any old time, but especially now. Japanese is the language everybody needs to know.”
He succeeded in getting his sons to stop speaking English for a while. Kenzo didn’t want to say anything in any language. Was Japanese going to drive English into second place in Hawaii? It would if Japan won the war and kept the islands. From all the news, that looked to be the way to bet right now. Wake Island and Midway were gone. The Philippines were going. Singapore had just fallen, finishing the British collapse in Malaya. And the Japanese were rampaging through the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch, the Australians, and the Americans seemed able to do little to stop them.