Another question occurred to Shimizu: “How much drinking have you done before this?”
“Some, Corporal-san,” Wakuzawa answered. Not much, Shimizu thought. He didn’t push any more, though. Sooner or later, the youngster had to get hardened. Why not now?
They all had another couple of drinks. Shimizu could feel the strong spirits mounting to his head. He didn’t want to get falling-down drunk or go-to-sleep drunk, not yet. Plenty of other things to do first. He gathered up his men. “Are you ready to stand in line now?” They nodded. He pointed to the door. “Then let’s go.”
Under the Americans, prostitution had been officially illegal, which didn’t mean there hadn’t been plenty of brothels on Hotel Street. It only meant they had to be called hotels. The Japanese were less hypocritical. They knew a young man needed to lie down with a woman every so often. They thought nothing of importing comfort women to serve soldiers in places where there weren’t many local girls (and they didn’t wonder, or even care, what the comfort women-usually Koreans-thought). Here in Honolulu, they didn’t have to worry about that.
“Senator Hotel.” Senior Private Furusawa spelled out the name of the place. The line of men waiting to get in stretched around the block. Some of them-most of them, in fact-had been drinking, too. Nobody got too unruly, though. Ferocious-looking military policemen kept an eye on things. You wouldn’t want them landing on you, not before you got what you were waiting for.
A soldier started singing. Everyone who knew the tune joined in. Shimizu hadn’t drunk enough to make them sound good. Some of the soldiers from his squad added to the racket. “You sound like cats with their tails stepped on,” he told them. They laughed, but they didn’t stop.
More men got in line behind Shimizu and his soldiers. The line moved forward one slow step at a time. He wished he’d had another drink or two. By the time he went in, he’d be half sobered up.
More military policemen waited inside, to make sure there was no trouble. A sign said 16 YEN, 4 DOLLARS, 5 MINUTES. Four dollars! He sighed. Almost a month’s pay for him. Two months’ pay for the most junior privates. No one walked out.
He gave his money to a gray-haired white woman who could have looked no more bored if she were dead. She wrote a number-203-on a scrap of paper and shoved it at him. “Is this the room I go to?” he asked. She shrugged-she must not have spoken Japanese. One of the military policemen nodded. Shimizu sighed again as he went up the stairs. He’d hoped to pick a woman for himself. No such luck.
When he found the cubicle with 203 above it, he knocked on the door. “Hai? ” a woman called from within. The word was Japanese. He didn’t think the voice was. He opened the door and found he was right. She was a brassy blonde, somewhere a little past thirty, who lay naked on a narrow bed. “Isogi! ” she told him-hurry up.
Five minutes, he reminded himself. Not even time to get undressed. Part of him wondered why he’d bothered to do this. But the rest of him knew. He dropped his pants, poised himself between her legs (the hair there was yellow, too, which he hadn’t thought about till that moment), and impaled her.
She didn’t help much. For all the expression on her face, he might have been delivering a package, not plundering her secret places. Because he’d gone without, he quickly spent himself anyway. As soon as he did, she pushed him off. She pointed to a bar of soap and an enameled metal basin of water. He washed himself, dried with a small, soggy towel, and did up his pants again. She jerked a thumb at the door. “Sayonara.”
“Sayonara,” he echoed, and left. A military policeman in the hallway pointed him towards another set of stairs at the far end. Down the hall he went, trying to ignore the noises from the numbered cubicles on either side. A minute earlier, he’d been making noises like that. He felt a strange mixture of afterglow and disgust.
These stairs led out to an alley behind the Senator Hotel. It smelled of piss and vomit. A military policeman standing near the exit said, “Move along, soldier.”
“Please, Sergeant-san, I came here with friends, and I’d like to wait for them,” Shimizu said. He was a corporal himself, not a miserable common soldier, and he spoke politely. The military policeman grudged him a nod.
Over the next five or ten minutes, the soldiers from Shimizu’s squad came out. Some of them came happy, others revolted, others both at once like Shimizu himself. “I don’t think I’ll do that again any time soon,” Shiro Wakuzawa said.
“Of course you won’t-you won’t be able to afford it,” somebody else told him, adding, “The only thing worse than a lousy lay is no lay at all.” The whole squad laughed at that. It explained why they’d stood in line better than anything else could have done.
“Move along,” the military policeman said again, this time in a voice that brooked no argument.
“Salute!” Shimizu told his men, and they did. Some of them were clumsy, but the military policeman didn’t complain. When they got to the end of the alley, they turned left to go back up to Hotel Street. “You all still have money?” Shimizu asked. Their heads bobbed up and down. “Good,” he said. “In that case, let’s drink some more.” Nobody said no.
WHEN OSCAR VAN der Kirk paused at the water’s edge on Waikiki Beach to assemble his contraption, the men fishing in the surf paused to stare at him. One of them said, “That’s the goddamnedest thing I ever set eyes on.”
“I never saw anything like it,” another agreed.
“Glad you like it,” Oscar said. Because he was a happy-go-lucky fellow, he made them smile instead of getting them angry. It did look as if his surfboard’s mother had been unfaithful with a small sailboat.
He’d had to find a Jap to do the work. That made him queasy in a way it wouldn’t have before the war started. He’d paid that Doi character twenty-five bucks-which happened to be all the cash he had-plus a promise of fish when he went out to sea. Doi didn’t speak a hell of a lot of English, but he had no trouble at all with numbers.
What if I stiff him? Oscar wondered, not for the first time, as he fit the small mast and sail to the surfboard. Only a Jap, after all… But a Jap wasn’t only a Jap, not these days. If the handyman had any kind of connections with the occupiers… Well, that might not be a whole lot of fun.
And besides, Doi had giggled like a third-grade girl when he finally figured out what the deuce Oscar was driving at. “Ichi-ban! ” he’d said. Oscar knew what that meant, as any kamaaina would. How could you stiff a guy who got so fired up about your brainstorm? Oh, you could, but how would you look at yourself in the mirror afterwards?
Into the Pacific went the-whatever the dickens it was. Oscar didn’t know what to call it any more. It wasn’t exactly a surfboard, not now. But it wasn’t quite a boat, either. Neither fish nor fowl, Oscar thought. It would be pretty foul, though, if he couldn’t get any fish. Wincing to himself, he went into the Pacific.
Till he got out past the breakers, he lay on his belly and paddled as he would have with a wahine on the surfboard instead of a mast (he didn’t-he wouldn’t-think about Susie Higgins). But once he made it out to calm water… Everything changed then.
He stood up on the surfboard. He could do that riding a wave as tall as a three-story building. It would have been child’s play for him here even without the mast, but the tall pole did make it easier. And then he unfurled the sail.
“Wow!” he said.
The breeze came off the mainland, as it usually did in the morning. The sail filled with wind. Oscar had had an argument with Eizo Doi about how big to make it. He’d wanted it bigger. The handyman had kept shaking his head and flapping his hands. “No good. No good,” he’d said, and he’d pantomimed a capsizing. He’d been right, too. Oscar tipped the hat he wasn’t wearing to the Jap.