Somebody else out there in the darkness asked a low-voiced question. Dutch Wenzel’s reply was loud enough to let Les hear it: “Oh, hell, yes, sir, that’s him. Ain’t a Jap in the world talks English like that.”
“I dusted some sulfa powder on the wound, too, Sarge,” Randy Casteel said.
“Good. That’s good. You did everything just right,” Dillon answered. “What time is it, anyway?”
“Uh, half past ten.”
“Think you can sleep another hour and a half? I’ll go back on watch. I won’t be able to get any shuteye for a while anyway-not till the arm quiets down a little.” He said nothing about the pounding of his heart, which also needed to ease. Nothing like damn near getting killed to keep you up at night.
Casteel said, “I’ll give it a try.” He needed almost ten minutes to start snoring this time. Les envied him his youth and resilience. I’m supposed to be the smart one, he thought. So how come I’m the one who got cut?
THE JAPANESE OFFICER ON TOP OF JANE ARMITAGE squeezed her breasts one last time, grunted, and came. She lay there unmoving, as she had while he pumped away inside her. He didn’t care, damn him. He patted her head, as if she were a dog that had done a clever trick. Then he dressed and walked out of the room.
Dully, she waited for the next violation. She knew she ought to douche, but what was the point? With so many Japs every day, douching seemed a pitiful stick in the wind against pregnancy and disease.
How long did the average comfort woman last? How long before the sheer physical endurance you needed to take on man after man after man-none of whom gave a damn about you except as one convenient hole or another-combined with mind-numbing self-loathing to make you decide you couldn’t stand to go on for one more cock, let alone one more day? Jane was stubborn. The end hadn’t come for her, because she still wanted to see the Japs dead more than she wanted to die herself. But new girls had replaced several from the original contingent by now, and the ones who’d left hadn’t gone on rest cures. They’d died, died by their own hands.
Jane flinched when the door opened. But it wasn’t another horny Jap wanting a few minutes of fun before he went back to killing American soldiers. It was one of the Chinese women who ran the soldiers’ brothel for the occupiers. She fluttered her fingers, a gesture that meant Jane had taken on her last man for the day.
Wearily, she nodded. The Chinese woman closed the door and went on to the next room. Occupiers. The word echoed in Jane’s head. In Shakespeare’s day, she remembered from a lit course at Ohio State, to occupy a woman meant to screw her. Jane had never thought to see the connection so vividly illustrated in the twentieth century.
Not far away, Japanese field guns boomed, shooting at the Americans pushing down from the north. She wished the guns would blow up in the Japs’ faces. She hadn’t really understood the futility of wishing till she got here.
Before long, American shells screamed in. Counterbattery fire, they called it. That was what she got for being an artilleryman’s wife. Ex-wife. Almost ex-wife. She shook her head in sour disbelief. She’d thought Fletch wasn’t the lover she deserved. Maybe he wasn’t. But a million years of Fletch would have been paradise next to what she’d gone through the past few weeks.
A white woman poked her head into the room. Beulah stayed-was stuck in-the room next door.
“Come on,” she said. “We might as well get something to eat.”
“Okay.” Jane made herself climb to her feet. More shells burst within a few hundred yards of the apartment building-turned-brothel. “I wish a couple of those would land on this place and blow it straight to hell.” Even though she knew wishing was useless, she couldn’t stop. What else did she have left?
Beulah only shrugged. She was broad-shouldered and stolid and, Jane suspected, not very bright. If anything, that helped her here; not thinking was an asset. “Gotta keep going,” she said. “What else can we do?”
Hang ourselves. But Jane didn’t say it. She’d been taught as a girl that saying something made you more likely to do it. She wasn’t sure she believed that any more, not after a couple of psychology classes, but any English major would have said words had power. If they didn’t, why pay attention to them in the first place?
The comfort women gathered together in what had been a storeroom and now, with the addition of chairs and tables no doubt stolen from people’s homes, did duty for a dining room. Some of the women didn’t want to have much to do with anybody. Jane was one of those. Others talked about what they’d done and what their Japs had done; they might have been factory workers comparing the behavior of machines. If they were going to talk, they didn’t have much else to talk about.
Supper was rice and vegetables-more than Jane would have got if they hadn’t kidnapped her. The Japs might not have wanted to fuck her if she looked like a starving woman. She didn’t care. She wouldn’t have done this for all the gold in Fort Knox. She wouldn’t even have done it for a T-bone smothered in mushrooms and onions.
Somebody said, “What’ll the Japs do if it looks like they’re gonna get kicked out of Wahiawa?” There was something new to talk about after all.
“Please, God,” somebody else said, “and soon!” A woman sitting near Jane crossed herself. That anyone could still believe in God impressed her-and horrified her, too. What did it take to get you to see nobody was on the other end of that telephone?
“Maybe they’ll let us go,” Beulah said.
“Not the Japs!” Jane said. “They never do anything for anybody. They do things to people instead.”
“So what’ll they do to us?” Beulah asked. “What can they do that they haven’t already done?”
Jane winced. That question made altogether too much sense. After weeks of having to lie down for endless men she hated, what was left in the way of degradation? But someone had an answer: “They’re liable to kill us all. That way, we won’t be able to tell anybody what they made us do.”
No one spoke for a little while. The unwilling comfort women weighed the odds. Would the Japanese murder them in cold blood? It didn’t strike Jane as the least bit unlikely. Dead women told no tales. She said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“How?” three women asked at the same time. The windows were barred. The doors were guarded. The Chinese women who ran the brothel for the Japs-their boss was a snake named Annabelle Chung-kept their eyes open for trouble all the time. Even talking about escaping was dangerous. Some of the miserable women in this room informed. No one knew who, but the fact seemed inarguable. What could they get that would make squealing on their fellow sufferers worthwhile? Not more food, the usual currency of betrayal in the rest of Wahiawa. Fewer horny Japs? After a while, what difference did that make? But Jane couldn’t see any other reason to snitch except general meanness. Of course, that wasn’t impossible, either.
No matter how many women asked the question, nobody answered it. An answer did occur to Jane: give the guards some of what she had to give the other Japanese soldiers. Before she landed here, sucking a stranger’s cock to get something she wanted would no more have occurred to her than killing herself.
She probably would sooner have killed herself. She remembered that, as if from very far away. Now… She’d had to get down on her knees so often for nothing at all, why not do it once more if she really needed to? And it wasn’t as if suicide were a stranger to her thoughts nowadays.
She looked around at the other comfort women. Were they thinking along with her? How could they not be? A few weeks of this had coarsened the women it didn’t kill. Some of them hadn’t even bothered to put on clothes before they came to supper. There had been evenings when Jane didn’t bother, either, though she’d thrown on a muumuu now. Would they all be thinking, Well, why not? What’s one more after so many?