“You better be back before we go out again, that’s all I’ve got to tell you,” Hiroshi warned.
“Yeah, yeah.” Kenzo ducked out of the tent before his brother could nag him any more. The way his father kept taking fish to the Japanese consulate, and the way he kept coming back looking as if he’d just had tea with Hirohito… Some of the reverence for the Emperor Kenzo had learned as a little boy still lingered, but knowing that Hirohito reigned over a country at war with the USA carried more weight. No matter what his old man thought, Kenzo remained determined to stay an American.
He had to bow, though, when a Japanese patrol marched up the street toward him. He’d learned how to do that properly as a little boy, too. The noncom who headed up the patrol recognized him as a countryman and bowed back, which he wouldn’t have done for a haole. That made Kenzo angry, not proud, but he didn’t show what he was thinking.
He bowed again several times as he walked through Honolulu. His route would have looked random to someone who didn’t know the city well-and who didn’t know what had happened in it and to it since the Rising Sun went up over Iolani Palace. Since almost all food was supposed to go into community kitchens, the markets that had sprung up here and there were highly unofficial. Sometimes the Japs closed down one or another. More often, the people who ran them figured greased palms were part of the cost of doing business.
Fish here (sure as hell, he’d seen Eizo Doi selling some of what he got), taro there, rice somewhere else, yet another place for fresh vegetables… Yeah, you had to know your way around. You had to know your way around when you were buying, too, or you’d lose your shirt. The way things were these days, people with food they could sell had the whip hand.
But Kenzo wasn’t looking to buy. Going out on the Oshima Maru kept him fed. It also gave him food to bargain with. If he wanted a coconut, he could trade a flying fish for it. He didn’t need to lay out a stack of greenbacks fat as his fist. You could still buy almost anything if you had enough money, but enough swelled every day. People bargained frantically. Kenzo heard curses in half a dozen languages.
Whenever he saw a blond girl about his own age, he tensed. Was it…? Whenever he got close enough to tell, he added some curses of his own to the electric air because, again and again, it wasn’t. He began to wonder if he was wasting his time. That only made him shrug. How could he be wasting it if he was doing what he wanted to do?
And then, when he was almost sure he wouldn’t run into Elsie Sundberg, he did. She was carrying a cloth sack that looked heavy, but that didn’t show what it held. Smart, Kenzo thought-a lot smarter than carrying food out in the open. The hungrier people got, the likelier they were to steal.
He waved. For a moment, Elsie didn’t think that was aimed at her. For another moment, she looked alarmed that she’d caught an Oriental’s eye. Then she recognized him. He almost laughed at the look of relief that passed over her face before she smiled and waved back. He picked his way toward her past hard-faced sellers and excitable buyers.
“Hi,” he said. “How are you? How are things?”
“Hi, yourself,” Elsie answered. “Not… too bad. I want to thank you again for that fish you gave me. That really helped my whole family a lot.”
“No huhu.” Kenzo did laugh then. Why not? A Jap tossing a Hawaiian word to a haole girl… If that wasn’t funny, what was? “Hope people aren’t giving you a rough time.” Hope the Japanese aren’t treating you the way whites treated local Japs before the war. He wondered why he hoped that. Wasn’t turnabout fair play? But Elsie had never treated him like a Jap-not till things got strange after the shooting started, anyhow, and then only for a little while.
She shrugged now. “Sign of the times,” she said, which neatly echoed what he was thinking.
“You have any trouble getting that tuna home?” he asked.
Elsie shrugged again. “A little. But I was lucky. There were cops around both times, so things didn’t get too messy. If those so-and-sos had got any pushier, I would’ve kicked ’em right where it hurts most. I was ready to.” She did her best to look tough.
Back in high school, Kenzo wouldn’t have imagined her best could be that good. But everybody’d had some painful lessons since then. “That’s the way to do it,” he said. “Uh-you want company taking your stuff home today?”
She hesitated, much the same way she had when he waved to her across the makeshift market. Then, as she had that time, she smiled again, smiled and nodded. “Sure, Ken. Thanks.”
“Okay.” Now he paused. “Your folks gonna start pitching a fit when you come up to the front door with a Jap?”
She blushed. He watched in fascination as the color spread up from her neckline all the way to the roots of her hair. But, yet again, she didn’t need more than a moment to gather herself. “Not when it’s somebody I went to school with,” she said firmly. She eyed him. “Is that good enough for you?”
“Yeah.” This time, Kenzo answered right away. She would have got mad at him if he hadn’t, and she would have had a right to. “You ready to go or you need more stuff?”
“I’m ready.” As if to prove it, Elsie hefted the bag. “Come on.”
Kenzo had hustled till he was almost breathless, hoping to run into her. Now that he’d succeeded, he had trouble finding things to say. Honolulu wasn’t a great big city; every step brought him that much closer to good-bye, which was the one thing he didn’t want to tell her.
Elsie did her best to help, asking, “How are your brother and your father?”
“Hank’s okay.” Kenzo used the name by which Hiroshi was known to haoles. “My dad…” He didn’t know how to go on with that. At last, he said, “Dad was born in the old country, and he’s… he’s happier with the way things are now than we are.”
“Oh.” She walked on for a little while. “That must make things… exciting to talk about.” Like him, she was looking for safe ways to say inherently unsafe things.
“Exciting. Yeah.” He laughed, not that it was funny. “Things get so exciting that most of the time we don’t talk about anything but fishing. You don’t want to whack somebody over the head with a brick on account of fishing.”
“I guess not.” Elsie took another few steps. He realized she had to feel as wary around him as he did around her. “You’re lucky that you’re able to go out there, especially with so many people hungry.”
“Some luck,” he said bitterly. “If I were really lucky, I’d be in college now. Then I could be working on a degree instead of a line full of hooks. Of course, afterwards I’d probably go out fishing with my old man anyway, because who’s gonna hire a Jap with a degree?”
“Was it really that bad?” Elsie was white. She hadn’t had to worry about it. She hadn’t even had to know the problem was there.
“It wasn’t good-that’s for darn sure,” Kenzo answered. “Lots more Japanese with good educations than places for them to work. You put somebody with a university degree in a shoe store or a grocery or out on a sampan and he starts wondering why the heck he bothered. You let him watch somebody with green eyes and freckles get the office job he’s better qualified for and he won’t be real happy about it.”
Quietly, Elsie said, “It’s a wonder you aren’t happier about how things are now.”
“I’m an American,” Kenzo said with a shrug. “That’s what everybody told me, even before I started going to school. People told me that, and I believed it. Heck, I still believe it. I believe it more than the Big Five do, I bet.” The people who ran the Big Five-the firms of Alexander and Baldwin, American Factors, C. Brewer and Company, Castle and Cooke, and the Theo. H. Davies Company-pretty much ran Hawaii, or they had till the war, anyhow. They ran the banks, they ran the plantations, they did the hiring, and they did the firing. And the higher in their ranks you looked, the whiter they got.