East Wind, Rain Page 7

  -This visitor’s not our doing, Howard said suddenly, over the rumble of the cart. Malahini don’t know the rules, that’s not our problem.

  -Yes, Yoshio said. His voice was squashed by the wrenching wheels and the loud snorts of the horse. He repeated himself louder. Yes. Mr. Robinson handles this. Not to worry.

  -He left a huge mess of metal and wheel parts in a field. He’s not disinfected. He certainly wasn’t invited. Howard flipped one hand behind him in disgust. Mr. Robinson can’t be angry with us for that. Not our fault. What do you think, Mr. Harada? The boy drops in like a flying fish, what can we do?

  -These things happen, agreed Yoshio.

  Of course, this was patently untrue. These things, these sudden visitors, did not just happen. There had been, Yoshio had heard, a redheaded man who had washed ashore after a shipwreck, but that was more than a century ago. Captain Cook, the famous white man pictured as tall and handsome and kind in all the schoolbooks, came too, but that was also long before the Robinsons had the island. Except for the outbreak of measles more than a decade ago, little since the Robinsons’ arrival had been unplanned.

  -It’ll be fine, said Howard.

  -Of course, said Yoshio.

  But he did not believe this. All morning his imagination had been crowded with terrible visions: Robinson stepping off the boat with a contingent of Japanese military men prodding bayonets into his back, Robinson handcuffed and slouched beside a fierce Japanese commander barking orders to execute them all, Robinson floating faceup in the water, his wide blue eyes staring all-knowingly at Yoshio. Robinson, forgiving nothing. Not that Yoshio had done anything. But Irene was right, he’d thought about it. And he had deliberately withheld information, though it was information that surely was of little use to his neighbors. He repeated to himself that he had made no direct move to help the pilot and that the Niihauans had always been protected from the outside world, but his hands maintained a vise grip on the muscles above his knee bones.

  For a while they traveled in silence, both men listening to the creak of the axles over the rutted ground, the surf and snort of the horse’s breath. The pilot made no sound behind them, and when each glanced to see whether he’d fallen out or fled they saw him clutching the sideboard and staring out to sea.

  Homesick, Yoshio heard Howard mutter. But he knew better. Submarine, he thought.

  The dirt path wound quickly above steep cliffs and Yoshio could see the corner of a beach below. He had heard that there were caves all along the stone precipices, but the Niihauans had never shown him where. There were springs around the island too, but these were closely guarded secrets as well, from the days when water was not kept in thousand-gallon tanks or piped from cistern to cistern. Even Mr. Robinson had no idea where this precious resource bubbled from the ground into small, muddy pools, a fact that Yoshio liked. He had even hoped, upon hearing this, that one day the Niihauans would show him where they were. Now he knew that this was vain and ill-deserved; he was keeping secrets from his neighbors just as they kept secrets from him.

  -Harada-san, said a voice loudly by his ear. Something touched him on the shoulder. He jumped; the pilot raised his hands to show he meant no harm.

  -Tell me, he said, what is this emperor we’re going to meet like?

  -Mr. Robinson? He’s not the emperor. He owns this island.

  -Does he come with many men?

  -Not usually. But don’t try anything funny out here. There’s no water, you’ll die within hours.

  -I’m not afraid to die, Harada-san. The pilot smiled calmly. But I do have a job to do, which is to destroy my plane and my papers. So I’m not going anywhere. The papers are with this crooked-toothed man here and I need to get them back, so I thought it would be best to do what he says until I understand where he put them. Also I get a chance to talk to you.

  -We have nothing to talk about. Yoshio abruptly turned his back.

  -But we do. The pilot tapped him on the shoulder again.

  -No. Yoshio refused to look around.

  He fixed his eyes on the undulating hills scraped with rock outcrops, brown against the heavily blue sky. The pilot’s openness startled him, his willing divulgence of his plans made Yoshio uneasy. Did he think that Yoshio was an ally? Yoshio felt angry then, and almost turned to Howard. He wants to destroy his plane and papers and then all of us, he tried to shout. But he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. He wasn’t sure of what to do, as usual. He only pressed his hands together and stayed quiet.

  Howard spoke incessantly of horses, of honey production, of surfing, of the impending drought. Yoshio tried to be interested. Howard was a talker, and what he said came out impossibly exaggerated, but he was in other ways a sincere man. He had taught Yoshio to ride an especially high-spirited Arabian. He’d shown him how to herd sheep and cattle, keeping the ornery ones in line and the laggards from getting lost. And though he regaled him with fanciful riding tales that inevitably had himself at the center, his teaching was sound. Most times Yoshio liked to hear Howard’s stories of bravado and danger. The man had a grand sense of showmanship that Yoshio enjoyed because it was so unlike the way his parents spoke. Their stories had always been carefully modulated and short; Howard’s were overlong and inevitably ended dramatically, with the light of God helping him make the right decision and Jesus holding his hand while he did whatever that decision demanded. But now Yoshio couldn’t listen; he wanted only to arrive quickly at the Kii boat landing and hand the pilot over to Robinson’s care.

  But the boat was not there. Howard stopped the wagon and stretched his arms for effect. When the three got off, each tried to cover his disappointment; Yoshio knelt and began to dig absently in the dirt, Nishikaichi stood with his feet planted wide and continued to stare out at the ocean, Howard walked out onto the dock as if testing its seaworthiness. Finally, when each had turned his head surreptitiously toward Kauai a few more times, Howard pointed out it was early enough yet and that they would wait in the old storehouse that faced the beach.

  They left the door open so that they could sit and watch, but the pilot indicated he needed to stretch his legs and walked slowly around the dilapidated interior. Yoshio watched him assess the place with a keen eye. There were empty crates piled on one side, and a bench that looked as if it might fall over if someone sat on it. Light fell through the slats like clutching fingers, and the place was stuffy with heat and dust. Above the entrance and to the left was a crudely made cross of heavy wood. It was balanced on one of the joists. Of all the things in the warehouse, this was the most cared for. It looked less dusty, its edges were smooth, and it was perfectly perpendicular to the floor, as if it had been fussed over recently. Yoshio wondered briefly if it would serve as a viable club in the pilot’s hands, knocking both Howard and him down with one brutal and ironic blow. But the pilot sat down without so much as a glance at it, and seemed to nod off. Yoshio cleared his throat.

  -Don’t you want to take that thing off? It’ll be more comfortable. He waved his hand at the pilot’s flight suit. Despite the heat, it was still buttoned to the chin, and the sleeves had not once been pushed to the elbow. Only the flight hat had been removed in a small concession to the sun, thrown in the corner of the cart and left there.

  Nishikaichi opened his eyes and shook his head; Yoshio shrugged. He opened his mouth to say something else, but decided against it. He leaned against the wall on the far side and from the corner of his eye watched Howard, who hummed a Christian song and ran a small comb through his hair in short, hard strokes, as if he was digging an especially deep hole in difficult soil. The comb was metal, so it flashed periodically in the sunlight that fell through the walls and made small circles of light dance on beams above him; behind Howard’s back the villagers often made fun of this small vanity. It was an old electric comb, with its small battery no longer around, and it had been given to him by a shopkeeper on Kauai because he couldn’t sell it like that and not, as Howard thought, as a sign of his high esteem.

&nbs
p; Presently all three men sat against the far wall, spaced apart from each other, but each with a good view through the lopsided doorway of the dock and the ocean beyond. The warehouse remained mercifully dark at the edges, though the light bled in with the strength of a powerful searchlight, so that the dust hung like millions of orbiting stars. It seemed as if hours passed, and that perhaps they slept. Without any of the usual chores to mark the day, time slowed, as if melting in the heat.

  Howard got up and stretched noisily. Yoshio opened his own eyes rapidly and saw that Nishikaichi stared through the open doorway, his face rigid. Yoshio followed his gaze to the ocean, where a shape curved above the surface like the dark side of a quarter moon, and vanished. It rose again, black and shiny and metallic. Then it was under once more.

  Dolphins, Yoshio thought. He had no idea what the word would be in Japanese, but there would be no need; he saw disappointment quickly stretch the pilot’s features and that he touched something white near his collar, under the flight suit. Neither man knew that in fact the sub captain would never come; he had instead been redirected from his mission to search for downed airmen and told to head to the mouth of Pearl Harbor.

  Howard sat down again and reached into his pocket, unaware of the dolphins or the pilot’s momentary hope or its ultimate futility. He laid a small square of paper on the dirt floor. He glanced once at Yoshio, but the man’s eyes were closed and his mind far away. Still, Howard felt sheepish. While his neighbors tolerated his small indiscretion, attributing it to the fact that he had been polluted by growing up in the outside world, they did not wholly approve. The cowboys looked away pointedly, as if a mere glance would tempt them, and the women openly frowned, but still he could not resist the pull, and anyway Yoshio was a kind man, and a forgiving one, not to mention that he too had grown up off-island and must have a sense of just how weak a man could be, how strong corrupting influences. Anyway, Mabel wasn’t around, and he should take his chances while he could.

  Howard drew tobacco quietly from a small leather pouch.

  He looked again at Yoshio, who had not made a sign he had heard the rustle of the shirt or the just perceptible crackle of the dried plant between fingertips. He sprinkled the tobacco into a neat line on the paper and with prim concentration began to knead it between his thumb and forefinger. For a long time he did this, rolling it back and forth, back and forth. Finally he licked the paper carefully, sealed it, and seeing the pilot staring at it, grinned (he had lost a lot of his embarrassment by now), and proffered it in an outstretched hand. Nishikaichi shook his head. Howard frowned slightly and motioned again with the cigarette, jabbing it in his direction.

  -What’s he keep fiddling with in there, Mr. Harada? That a pack of cigarettes he’s hiding?

  -No, said Yoshio. It’s, I think, his shirt.

  -It’s cigarettes. Tell him to show to me. I’ve never seen Japanese cigarettes.

  Yoshio waved him off.

  -It’s nothing.

  -Okay, said Howard, rising from his place by the wall. I’ll just—

  Yoshio scrambled to his feet.

  -You’ll just scare him, he said. I’ll go ask.

  Yoshio paused until Howard had sat back down, and then walked slowly to the pilot. He thought about squatting next to him but decided to continue to stand. He looked down at the pilot.

  -What do you have there, Nishikaichi-san?

  -Nothing.

  -Don’t make Howard suspicious. Show me.

  Nishikaichi pushed opened the collar a little more, so that Yoshio could see a pattern of small red dots.

  -We’re not going to steal it, said Yoshio. Howard just wants to know what it is.

  -It’s a good-luck charm. A thousand knots sewn by a thousand people. To bless us in our mission.

  -A thousand? said Yoshio. Nishikaichi nodded.

  Yoshio leaned in and stared at the cloth that the pilot wore hanging from his shoulders. He glanced at Nishikaichi’s face, then back down at the red-dotted sash. He wanted to touch it but couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  -Not exactly a thousand, he said instead. Stitches, I mean. Probably less.

  -Of course it is, snorted Nishikaichi. One thousand exactly. I’d let you count it but you’ve insulted our samurai tradition.

  -I didn’t mean—He sighed. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that people lie about these things.

  -In this country perhaps, but not in Japan.

  -Okay, okay, not in Japan. I get it. So tell me, samurai—and here he lowered his voice—when are your people going to land here?

  He said “your people” deliberately, to separate himself, to show the young pilot that he was no friend of his, that he did not forget that he had bombed his country, his Pearl Harbor.

  Nishikaichi blinked. He took in Yoshio’s intent face, his pale, uncertain frown.

  -Land? he said. The submarine?

  -Take over. The whole troop, not just the sub. On Kauai, here. When do you expect them?

  Nishikaichi paused. He was only a pilot, and not privy to the grand will of his emperor, or even of his unit commanders. He did as he was told, and, like the rest of his squadron, never fully understood why he was attacking what, then, just that it was important that he do so. This operation against Pearl Harbor had been especially secretive. But he was fairly sure—through gossip among the ranks, and from things his immediate superior had said—that there were no plans to take over the Hawaiian Islands. Japanese interest was in one thing only these days: fuel. The United States had led international sanctions against Japan for the past few years, and now fuel, a precious resource for a nation with ambition, was scarce. Military operations in China and elsewhere were threatened, and living conditions in his homeland had deteriorated rapidly. Of course, the people were happy to practice austerity for the emperor. Still, there were fuel reserves scattered about the Orient, which the Japanese nation deserved.

  The Son of Heaven had rightly decided to decimate the Pacific Fleet, based in Pearl Harbor, knowing that once these battleships and fighter planes were out of the way, the eastern oil ports would be easily taken. Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines, these were the targets Nishikaichi had heard about. But clearly this man Yoshio understood none of that. He’d heard of Pearl Harbor’s devastation and destruction and logically thought that this island was next.

  There was a moment’s hesitation as the pilot stared at the Japanese man in front of him. Then he slowly shook his head and lowered his eyes and took a deep breath.

  Then he lied.

  -They should arrive any day, he said. To make this island Japanese. If you are to fare well in that, you must help me in my mission.

  Yoshio inhaled sharply and felt his skin prickle. Any day? He opened his mouth to speak, but Howard interrupted from the far corner.

  -What’s he got there? He squinted and leaned forward, as if to get a better view in the dim light.

  Yoshio straightened. His mind was racing ahead to put together what the pilot had said. Any day, soldiers were arriving. He fought the urge to run out of the warehouse and crane his neck at the sky, listening for the drone of bombers and the high-pitched victory cry his old neighbor on Kauai used to imitate when he was drunk and nostalgic for his days in Japan.

  -What’s he got there? repeated Howard, louder now, breaking Yoshio’s reverie.

  -He’s got, it’s a…

  Yoshio stopped, realizing that he couldn’t tell Howard without explaining what “mission” the pilot had been on, why he needed a good-luck charm in the first place.

  -Nothing, he finally said. Just part of his shirt.

  Howard rearranged his cigarette so that it hung precariously (and, Howard himself thought, charmingly) from the corner of his mouth, a skill he had secretly perfected after he had seen a movie, on his only trip to Oahu, many years ago, in which the hero spoke every line with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

  -Well, tell him to stop itching and scratching, he said. I’ll wager my hat, dirty as it
is, that Mr. Robinson’ll be here soon enough.

  11

  The white emperor, the pink barbarian, the Old Lord, this Ka Haku Makua—by whatever name he was called—still, he did not appear. The men sat in their hunched positions, each against his own warehouse wall. Nishikaichi, himself hunched now, his military bearing softening under the heat, wondered if this was a good or a bad thing. After the adrenaline of the initial crash, alertness had given way to bafflement at how to proceed. He had never made his own decisions before, he realized. Always, he had been guided: by his parents, his military superiors, the Senjinkun. He was given orders and he followed them with the exactness of a tailor, as if the orders were measurements and he the scissors with which to cut a fine coat; for this he was considered a good Japanese man and a gifted pilot. But now he was on his own. What would he do if the pink barbarian, this White Emperor Robinson-san, arrived and knew all about Pearl Harbor? If he was combative and cruel, unlike these islanders? Nishikaichi accepted, even welcomed, death, but not the capture of his plane and papers. There was little time now: he must convince the Japanese man to destroy the plane and papers with or even without him. He would need the nervous man’s help, no matter what, that one thing was clear.