Kenzo talked his way past two more barricades before he made it to Elsie Sundberg’s neighborhood. No soldiers were on her street, which relieved him. Nobody else was out and about, either. That struck him as smart. This was the haole part of town, and the Japanese trusted whites even less than they trusted anybody else. Farther west, the occupiers had plastered up propaganda posters saying things like ASIANS TOGETHER AGAINST IMPERIALISM! in several languages. They didn’t bother here. The haoles lay low and hoped neglect wouldn’t turn to massacre.
Elsie opened the door even before Kenzo knocked. “Come in, honey,” she said. “Come in quick!” He did. She shut the door behind him. The Venetian blinds were closed; nobody could see in from the street.
“Are you okay?” she asked, giving him a hug.
“Me? Yeah, sure. I’m fine.” Kenzo didn’t say anything about running the machine-gun gauntlet on the way over here. He just clung to her.
“Hello, Ken.” Mrs. Sundberg came out from the kitchen. Before he’d got Elsie away from the soldiers in the park-and before what happened afterwards-her arrival would have made him let go of her daughter as if Elsie had become red-hot. Not now. He kept on holding her, and Mrs. Sundberg didn’t say boo. She just went on with the rituals of hospitality: “Would you like some lemonade?”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you,” Kenzo said. She did make good lemonade. As she went back to the kitchen to get some, he asked Elsie, “You folks have enough to eat?”
She shrugged. “We’re all right. We’re not great, but we’re all right.” She was a lot skinnier than she had been when they went to school together. He was thinner, too, but not to the same degree; there were advantages to being a fisherman in hard times.
“How are things out in the city?” Mrs. Sundberg asked, returning with lemonade for Kenzo and for Elsie.
“We, ah, don’t get out much these days.”
“You’re smart not to,” Kenzo answered. “If you weren’t staying close to home, I sure would tell you to.” He talked about the barricades, and about how the occupation troops were getting antsier by the hour. “I think they’re liable to make a big fight right here in town, and to… heck with civilians. It looks that way, anyhow.”
“That’s not good,” Elsie said, which was a pretty fair understatement.
“Not even a little bit,” Kenzo agreed. “It’s one of the reasons I came over here-to ask if you people have any kind of hiding place you can duck into if things get really bad.” He didn’t go into detail about what really bad might mean, or how bad it might be. He had the idea he didn’t know in any detail himself, and that that might be just as well for his own peace of mind.
Elsie’s mother sniffed. “These houses aren’t like the one in Connecticut where I grew up. They don’t have a proper basement.” By the way she sounded, that might have been Kenzo’s fault.
By the way Elsie said, “Oh, Mom!” she must have thought the same thing.
“It’s true,” Mrs. Sundberg said. “And you know how much harder it made things when your father dug that hidey-hole under the walk-in closet during the… first round of unpleasantness.” She didn’t like talking-or thinking-about the Japanese invasion. Kenzo had seen that before. She would if she had to-she wasn’t far enough out in left field not to believe in it or anything-but she didn’t like it. It had turned her world upside down, and it meant she wasn’t on top of the world any more.
When the USA finished the job here, she would be again. How would she feel about Kenzo then?
That was a worry for another day. “Hidey-hole?” Kenzo echoed.
“See for yourself.” Mrs. Sundberg led him into the bedroom she shared with her husband. He’d never been in there before. The closet made him want to laugh, or to scream. All by itself, it seemed half the size of his family’s apartment. Why would anybody need all that stuff ?
The trap door in the floor, though, had to be of recent vintage. It lay under a throw rug, and was hard to spot in the gloom even with the rug off. Elsie’s mom made an oddly courteous gesture of invitation. Kenzo bent and lifted up the trap door. The hinges worked without a sound. The scent of damp earth rose from below into the closet.
As Mrs. Sundberg said, the house had no basement, only a crawl space. Her husband had dug out a hole under the trap door, and had heaped the dirt he’d dug out around it to help protect it from gunfire and shell fragments. It wouldn’t do much if a bomb fell on the house. For anything short of that…
“Wow!” Kenzo said, lowering the trap again. “That’s swell!”
Mrs. Sundberg neatly replaced the rug. “Ralph was in France in 1918,” she said. “He knows something about entrenching.”
“He never talks about what he did in the war,” Elsie said. From the times Kenzo had met him, Mr. Sundberg rarely talked about anything. He made money for the family; his wife and daughter did the talking. They all seemed content with the arrangement. Elsie went on, “This was the first time he ever did anything that showed he really had been in the fighting.”
What horrors had her father seen Over There? What had he done? He probably had reasons to keep quiet. Having got a glimpse of what war looked like when the Japanese pounded Honolulu, a glimpse and a pounding that cost him his mother, Kenzo had some idea how lucky he was not to know more. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than antiaircraft guns started hammering much too close by.
“Look, if there’s any sign of trouble, you use that hole, you hear?” he said. “Don’t wait. It’s… pretty bad.”
“We will.” Elsie and her mother spoke at the same time.
“Okay. I better go, then. That’s what I wanted to make sure about.” What he really wanted was to take Elsie back to her bedroom and close the door. He couldn’t say that or do anything about it, not with Mrs. Sundberg standing right there. He just dipped his head awkwardly. “Be careful.”
Elsie wasn’t as shy as he was. She hugged him and gave him a kiss that made him want to take her back there more than ever. And she whispered in his ear: “My time of the month came, so that’s okay.”
“Good,” he whispered back. Worrying about a girlfriend was hard enough. Worrying about a girlfriend who was expecting would have been twice as bad, or maybe four times. After a moment, Kenzo kissed Elsie. Mrs. Sundberg was still standing right there, and she didn’t say a word.
MAJOR GENERAL YAMASHITA HAD MOVED HIS HEADQUARTERS out of Iolani Palace and over to Pearl City. Minoru Genda wished the commanding general hadn’t. For one thing, it gave him fewer excuses to visit Queen Cynthia. For another, it put the defense of Honolulu in the hands of Captain Iwabuchi and the special naval landing forces. Iwabuchi was a samurai of the old go-down-fighting school. He could not have cared less if he took all the civilians and the whole city down with him.
“We still have a lot of sailors at Pearl Harbor,” Genda said. “The Americans put men like that in the line against us. If you want to do the same, sir, they are ready and willing to fight alongside your soldiers.”
“They’ll probably have to.” Yamashita’s voice was gloomy. “The American soldiers who tried fighting as infantry got slaughtered. The same will likely happen to our men.” He glowered at the map spread out on a table in front of him. Blue-headed pins and pencil marks showed the American advance between the Waianae and Koolau Ranges. Despite desperate Japanese counterattacks, U.S. forces ground forward day by day. Yamashita went on, “We don’t really need sailors fighting on land. We need carriers and planes.”
“Yes, sir.” Genda knew too well that all the carriers Japan had left, put together, couldn’t launch half as many planes as the U.S. armada off the north coast of Oahu. He also knew that the planes the Japanese could launch were nowhere near a match for their American opponents. “We have requested reinforcements,” he said. “So far, Tokyo has not seen fit to send them out.”