“We got to get out of here,” Charlie whispered to him one evening before exhaustion knocked them over the head. “We got to. Those fuckers gettin’ ready to do us all in. You can see it in their eyes.”
Peterson nodded. He’d had the same thought himself. Every time artillery fire got closer, every time American fighters flew by overhead, they might have been twisting a knife in the Japs’ guts. The guards would lash out then, the way a kid who’d just lost a schoolyard brawl might kick a dog. They didn’t have any dogs to kick, though. They had POWs instead, and kicking was the least of what they did to them.
At the same time, Peterson shook his head. Even that took effort. “Go ahead, if you think you can get away. I’d just hold you back.”
“You can do it, man,” Charlie said. “Gotta be tough. Get back to Honolulu, you be okay.”
He might be okay if he got back to Honolulu. Flesh melted off him day by day, but he still had some. The first Jap who saw Peterson would know him for what he was-he didn’t think he weighed a hundred pounds any more. And that would be all she wrote. The outskirts of Honolulu weren’t more than three or four miles away. They might as well have been on the dark side of the moon, for all the good that did Peterson.
“I’m done for,” he said. “Not enough left of me to be worth saving.”
“Shit,” Charlie said. “Don’t you want to get your own back? Don’t you want to watch these assholes get what’s coming to ’em? How you gonna do that if you lay down and die?”
“I’m not laying down,” Peterson said, remembering how fiercely he’d sworn revenge back when captivity was new. “I’m not laying down, dammit, but I can’t go anywhere very far, either. Look at me.” He held out his arm: five knobby pencils attached to a broomstick. “Look. How am I going to run if we get spotted?”
Charlie Kaapu looked. He swore, his words all the more terrible for being so low-voiced. “I’ll go. I’ll bring back help. Bet I find American soldiers in Honolulu.”
Maybe he would. There’d been a hell of a lot of shooting from somewhere down that way a few nights earlier. Whatever it was all about, the guards had been even nastier since. Peterson wouldn’t have imagined they needed an excuse for that, but they seemed to. He said, “If you make it, tell ’em we’re up here. Far as anybody knows, I bet we’ve fallen off the edge of the world.”
“I’ll do it,” Charlie said. “You really can’t come, man?” Peterson shook his head again. The hapa — Hawaiian reached out in the darkness and set a hand on his bony shoulder. “Hang on, brother. I’m gonna get away. I’m gonna bring help.”
In spite of everything, Jim Peterson smiled. “Just like in the movies.”
“Fuckin’-A, man!” Charlie said. “Just like in the movies!”
“Well, if you’re gonna do it, do it fast,” Peterson said. “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to last, and God only knows how long the Japs’ll let anybody last.”
“Cover for me at roll call in the morning,” Charlie Kaapu said.
“Will do,” Peterson answered, though he feared the Japs would notice Charlie was missing even if their count came out right. They had trouble telling one emaciated white man from another, yeah. All Occidentals look alike to them, Peterson thought, and damned if he didn’t smile again. But Charlie was only half white-and only half emaciated, too, which counted for more. He stood out. He had as much life in him as half a dozen ordinary POWs put together. He…
As if to prove his own point, Peterson fell asleep then, right in the middle of a thought. He woke up some time later-he didn’t know how long. Charlie Kaapu wasn’t lying beside him any more. Good luck, Charlie, he thought, and then he fell asleep again.
Three men died during the night. The POWs who lived on carried the corpses out with them so the guards could keep the precious count straight. And those living POWs did what they could to keep the guards from noticing one of their number wasn’t there and wasn’t dead. They shifted around in the ranks that were supposed to be still and unmoving. The Japs clouted several of them. The guards would do that without an excuse. When they had one, they did it even more.
But they were stupider than Peterson had figured them for. He thought the Americans were going to get away with their deception, and wondered how the Japs could fail to miss what wasn’t right in front of their noses. The answer wasn’t all that hard to find. Their officers didn’t want smart bastards here. They wanted mean bastards-and what they wanted, they got.
Still and all, the Japs would have had to be dumber than a pile of pebbles not to notice pretty damn quick that Charlie Kaapu wasn’t there. They were just about to let the POWs queue up for the miserable breakfast when a corporal let out a yelp, as if somebody’d poked him with a pin: “Kaabu!” When the Japs tried to say p, it mostly came out as b. Peterson had got used to being called Beterson.
Naturally, Charlie didn’t answer. The guards had the conniptions they should have had twenty minutes earlier. They started beating people in earnest, with swagger sticks, with rifle butts, and with their fists. They kicked men who fell, too. They were even more furious than Peterson had figured they would be.
And they weren’t just mad at the POWs. They also screamed at one another. The men who’d been on watch during the night would surely catch holy hell. That didn’t break Jim Peterson’s heart. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.
The prisoners didn’t get breakfast that morning. They got marched straight into the tunnel instead. The Japs cut them no slack. If anything, the guards worked them even harder than usual. Anyone who faltered got beaten or kicked without mercy. Along with taking out endless buckets of rock, the POWs dragged out several corpses.
They got no supper that night, either. Nobody dared say a word. If the Japs kept that up for another few days, they wouldn’t need to worry about escapes from the Kalihi Valley any more. All the POWs here would be dead.
A few months earlier, mistreatment like this might have prompted lots of men to try to escape. No more. Next to nobody had the strength. And the guards would be shooting at their own shadows now. The prisoners went nowhere. The timing was bad.
Just before sunup the next morning, two trucks came up to the camp in the Kalihi Valley from Honolulu below. Jim Peterson and the other prisoners stared in amazement. The trucks themselves were ordinary: U.S. Army vehicles the Japs had commandeered, painting over the white star on each driver’s-side door. But their being here wasn’t ordinary. They were the first trucks Peterson had seen since coming to the punishment camp.
And, instead of getting the prisoners to do the work for them the way they almost always did, the Japs unloaded the trucks themselves. The contents seemed harmless enough: crates with incomprehensible Japanese squiggles on the sides. The guards lugged them over to the mouth of the tunnel. Then they set up another machine-gun position nearby, and posted several riflemen next to the crates, too.
“They treat that shit like it’s the Hawaiian crown jewels,” another prisoner remarked to Peterson.
“How do you know it’s not?” he said. “If their side’s losing, this is a hell of a place to stash ’em.”
He got a lesson in the way rumors worked. By the time the POWs assembled for roll call half an hour later, everybody was convinced the Japs were going to stow the Hawaiian crown jewels in the tunnel. No one had any evidence that that was so, but nobody seemed to need any, either. In nothing flat, a chance comment swelled into one of those things everybody knew.