And if by some accident they got out of this, what would their lives be like? Jane tried to imagine wanting a man to touch her. The picture refused to form. And she tried to imagine a decent man wanting to touch her if he knew what the Japs had made her do. That picture wouldn’t take shape, either. She shook her head. What was left for her? Nothing she could see.
Sometimes a woman broke down and sobbed here. Sometimes crying jags ran through them all, contagious as chicken pox. Not tonight, though. Maybe they were all trying to figure the odds.
Artillery and small-arms fire through the night didn’t keep Jane from sleeping like a stone. One more thing nobody’d told her: screwing all day was hard physical labor. And it wore out the spirit much worse than the body.
No rooster announced the dawn. As far as Jane knew, all the roosters in Wahiawa except one saved for stud were long since chicken stew. Since coming here, she’d wondered once or twice if he got sick of fucking strangers all day every day. She figured the odds were against it. After all, he was a goddamn male.
Usually, the breakfast gong took the rooster’s place. The women woke for that. If they didn’t get breakfast, they couldn’t eat till suppertime. Today, though, just as the eastern sky was beginning to go pink, four 105mm shells slammed into the brothel.
That got Jane out of bed-literally. She woke up on the floor, with one of the walls tilted sideways and with chunks of plaster falling on her head from the ceiling. Somebody was screaming, “Fire!” at the top of her lungs. Somebody else was just screaming, the agonized, unthinking cries of the badly wounded.
Jane scrambled to her feet. She cut one of them on broken glass, but she hardly cared. She let the muumuu fall over her head, then rushed out the door. It had been locked from the outside, but the blasts blew it open.
Beulah’s door had come open all by itself, too. Jane looked into the room. “Let’s get out of here!” she shouted. “We’ll never have a better chance!”
“I guess not,” Beulah said-she must have been in another line when they were handing out brains. All she had on was a pair of panties. She didn’t stop for anything else. Come to think of it, that wasn’t so dumb.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Annabelle Chung stood in the corridor, hands on her hips. Jane wasted no time on conversation. She hauled off and belted her oppressor in the chops. The Chinese woman shrieked and staggered, but tried to fight back. Jane gave her a pretty fair one-two. Maybe she’d been listening after all when Fletch went on and on about Joe Louis and Hank Armstrong.
The Chinese woman went down on hands and knees. When she started to get up, Beulah kicked her in the ribs. That wasn’t in the Marquis of Queens-berry rules, but it sure as hell worked. Annabelle Chung stayed down. “Way to go!” Jane shouted.
The side of the building had a hole in it you could drive a bus through. Comfort women streamed out. Some wore muumuus like Jane; one or two were buck naked. Several of them were limping or bleeding. None of that mattered. Getting out did.
Out in the open. Two Japs had stood nearby. Only the bottom part of one of them was left. The other had had his head almost blown off. Jane looked longingly at the Arisakas by the dead men. She knew how to use a bolt-action rifle. But lots of Japs still occupied Wahiawa. Even with a rifle, she couldn’t kill them all. Oh, but I want to! she thought. They could kill her, though, and they would if they saw her with an Arisaka in her hands. She hated to leave the rifles there, but she did.
“Let’s get away!” she said. Her partners in misery didn’t need the advice. They were already scattering as fast as they could. Some of them would have friends and families to go back to. Would they still be friends, would the families stay loving, when they found out what the women here had had to do? Maybe. Some of them might, anyhow. The rest? Well, they couldn’t be worse than the Japs.
Jane had nothing and nobody here. Fletch was a POW if he hadn’t died since she last saw him. For all practical purposes, he was an ex-husband, anyway. Would I take him back now? Jane laughed as she ran. That wasn’t the question, was it? Would he take me back now? She had no idea. Everything she’d done, she’d been forced to do. Everybody had to know that. Would anyone care, or would she stay soiled in the eyes of the world for the rest of her life?
She’d worry about that later. All she wanted to do now was get away from the brothel, get away from the Japs, and let the world scorn her if it would.
More artillery shells screamed in. Jane threw herself flat before they burst. Fletch had talked about that, too, and she’d seen it worked when the Japs came down from the north. Now her own country was doing its best to kill her. She forgave it. As she lay there in the gutter with fragments of sharp steel screeching by above her head, she cried tears of pure, unadulterated joy.
LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO HELPED MECHANICS gut wrecked Zeros and Hayabusas, salvaging machine guns and 20mm cannon for use against the Americans on the ground. He’d already gutted his own fighter. To his mortification, the Yankees had caught it on the ground and shot it up bad enough to keep it there for good. He’d wanted to die in the air, with luck taking a few more enemy planes with him. The kami in charge of such things paid no attention to what he wanted.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a Japanese fighter in the air. The Americans ruled the skies now. Their fearsome planes roared over Oahu like flying tigers, shooting up anything that moved. When the Japanese landed here, Zeros dominated the air. Now Shindo was finding out how taking what he’d dished out felt. He would rather have stayed on the other end of it.
“Pass me those tinsnips,” he said. The mechanic working with him did. He sliced away at the aluminum skin of a Zero’s wing. The fuselage had burned. The other wing had gone up with it. This one, by a freak of war, was pretty much intact. Put that cannon in some kind of improvised ground mount and it would make a few Americans sorry they’d ever been born.
The thought had hardly crossed his mind before he heard a sound he’d come to hate: the roar of enemy engines in the air. American radials had a deeper note than their Japanese counterparts; anyone who’d heard both would never confuse the two. Shindo threw down the snips and ran for the nearest trench. The Japanese had dug lots of them when they thought they would still be able to fly out of Wheeler Field. That proved optimistic, but the trenches still gave people a place to hide when Yankee planes came over.
A few soldiers fired at the fighters and dive bombers with rifles. So Americans had fired at Zeros when the war was new: furiously, but without much hope. The Americans had knocked down a couple of Japanese planes-put enough lead in the air and you would. Much good it had done them. No doubt the Japanese here would knock down a few American planes, too, and much good that would do them.
In fact, the muzzle flashes told the Yankees where the trenches were. Shindo huddled in the damp-smelling dirt as heavy machine-gun slugs chewed up the ground all around him. Some of them struck home. Few men who were hit cried out, as they would have if a rifle-caliber round struck them. If a high-velocity bullet the size of a man’s thumb hit you, you were usually too dead to scream.
Bursting bombs made the earth shake under him. The noise was tremendous, something beyond the normal meaning of the word. Shindo felt it through his skin as much as he heard it. Dirt rained down on him. Fragments of bomb casing howled past not nearly far enough over his head.
And then, like a cloudburst, it was over-till the next time. Shindo looked at his wristwatch. He shook his head in slow wonder. All that horror, compressed into less than ten minutes? It was as abbreviated as air-to-air combat, and seemed even slower. In the air, he could have fought back. Here, he just had to take it.