“You oughta go on the radio,” Dillon said. “You’d run Benny and Fred Allen right off the air.” He looked at the new helmet-the M1, the supply sergeant had called it. “Maybe they think they’re changing our luck or something. I don’t know why, though, honest to God. We’ve used the old one for twenty-five years, and there wasn’t anything wrong with it.” Like a lot of Marines, he was conservative, almost reactionary, about his equipment.

But Wenzel went on cracking wise. “That’s what they said about this broad on Hotel Street.”

“Can’t make that joke on the radio,” Dillon said. They both laughed. Dillon went on, “If we can get off the base this afternoon, you want to go see a Padre game?”

Wenzel nodded. “Why not? Who’s in town?”

“The Solons. They’re in second place,” Dillon said. The closest big-league teams, the Cardinals and (stretching a point) the Browns, played just on this side of the Mississippi, and the Mississippi was a hell of a long way from San Diego. Pacific Coast League ball was pretty good, though. A lot of the players had put in time in the majors. A good many who hadn’t, the younger ones, would sooner or later. And some of the ones who wouldn’t lived on the West Coast, enjoyed playing here, and didn’t give a damn if they ever went back East.

Lane Field lay right across Harbor Drive from the beach. The Pacific was right behind the third-base stands. If you looked out past the left-field fence, you could see the Santa Fe railroad yard. It was a long look; it was 390 down the line in left and 500 to dead center. Outfielders who played in that park had to be able to run like the devil. Catchers, on the other hand…

Dillon and Wenzel armed themselves with hot dogs and popcorn and beer. Les pointed to the backstop.

“That’s the goddamnedest thing I’ve ever seen in any ballpark anywhere, and I’ve been in a bunch of ’em.”

After a swig of beer, his pal nodded. “Whoever laid out this place musta had himself a snootful.” Nothing was wrong with the backstop as a backstop. That didn’t mean nothing was wrong with it: it stood only about twelve feet back of the plate. Dutch Wenzel raised the bottle to his lips again. “Not a hell of a lot of wild pitches or passed balls in this park.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Dillon said.

The Padres took the field. The organist played the National Anthem. Boots Poffenberger loosened up on the mound for the Padres. He’d had two or three years in the big leagues, and hadn’t particularly distinguished himself. He got the Solons out in the first. Tony Freitas, another big-league retread, took the hill for Sacramento. He gave up a leadoff single, but the Padre runner was out trying to steal.

When he argued, the Padres’ manager came out to yell at the ump, too. He waved his arms and shouted and carried on, even though he had to know he didn’t have a chance in hell of getting the umpire to change his mind. “Who is that guy?” Wenzel asked. “He’s having a fit out there.”

“That’s Cedric Durst,” Dillon answered. “He played for the Browns and the Yankees back in the Twenties.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember him-sort of,” Dutch Wenzel said. “He’s gonna get his ass thrown out if he doesn’t shut up.”

“Watch your language, buddy,” a man behind them said. “I’ve got my daughter here.”

Dillon and Wenzel looked at each other. They both shrugged. A ballpark was no place for a brawl. They let it go. The man in back of them never knew how lucky he was. The Solons’ first baseman ambled over to the argument to put in his two cents’ worth. Pepper Martin could do that, because the veteran of the Gas House Gang also managed Sacramento.

Durst finally retreated to the third-base dugout, and the game resumed. Poffenberger was sharp, but Freitas was sharper. He hadn’t done much in the majors, but he’d won twenty or more for Sacramento five years in a row, and was well on his way to doing it a sixth straight time. The Solons beat the Padres 3 to 1.

Lane Field wasn’t far from the base. As Dillon and Wenzel waited with some other Marines for the bus that would take them back, Les said, “That wasn’t bad.”

“Nope-not half,” Wenzel agreed. “Sorta reminds you what we’re fighting for, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, but the goddamn Japs like baseball, too,” Les said. “When I was in Peking-this was before they took it over-their soldiers had a team, and they’d play against us. They’d beat us some of the time, too, the bastards. They had a pitcher with the nastiest curve you ever saw. It just fell off the table.”

“Fuck ’em. Lousy cocksucking monkeys,” Wenzel said. None of the Marines standing around waiting for the bus told him to watch his language. A couple of them, including a captain, nodded emphatic agreement. The bus wheezed up, belching black smoke. Les and the rest of the leathernecks climbed aboard. With a clash of gears, it got rolling again and took them back to Camp Elliott.

AS ALWAYS, KENZO TAKAHASHI was glad to escape the tent where he and Hiroshi and their father slept when they weren’t aboard the Oshima Maru. Living and sleeping under canvas reminded him that their apartment was only ashes and charcoal, and that his mother had died in it.

And living under canvas with his father reminded him how different they were. He laughed a sour laugh. Before the war came to Hawaii, he and Hiroshi had desperately tried to get accepted as Americans. To the haoles who’d run things here, they were just a couple of Japs. Dad never understood why they wanted to be as American as the blond, blue-eyed kids they went to school with. He was always Japanese first.

Well, now things had gone topsy-turvy. The Japanese were on top. They’d thrown the haoles out of the saddle. Dad was as proud as if he’d commanded the army that fought its way across Oahu. And Kenzo… still wanted to be an American.

He laughed again, even more bitterly than before. He seemed doomed to swim against the current. The black-suited white executives who ran the Big Five, the companies that controlled Hawaii, hadn’t wanted or known what to do with Japanese who acted American. The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy didn’t want them or know what to do with them, either. The two sides probably had more sympathy for each other than they did for people like Kenzo.

Several Japanese soldiers-a patrol-came up the street toward him. He bowed, holding the canvas sack he carried under his left arm. The soldiers didn’t acknowledge him, though they might have beaten him up if he hadn’t bowed. They chattered among themselves in Hiroshima dialect much like the Japanese his father spoke. His and Hiroshi’s were a little purer, because they’d studied with a sensei from Tokyo after American school was done.

Kenzo went past a couple of informal and not quite legal markets in the Oriental part of Honolulu. When the official ration meant hunger and a slow slide toward starvation, people with extra money or things to trade supplemented it when and as they could. Japanese soldiers and sailors sometimes traded in the markets, too. They got better food than civilians, but not a whole lot better. And their higher-ups no doubt got paid under the table to look the other way.

Once Kenzo got some little distance east of Nuuanu Avenue, there were no more markets. Chinese and Koreans and Japanese ran them. Haoles went to them, but didn’t set up any in their own part of town. Kenzo didn’t understand that, but he’d seen it was true.

Haoles in Honolulu mostly did their best to pretend nothing had changed since December 7. Houses were still well tended; the white clapboard ones, and the churches built in the same style, seemed more likely to belong to a New England small town than to the tropical Pacific. Lawns were bright green and for the most part short and neat.

Here and there, vacant lots reminded a passerby that war had touched this place. Almost all the houses that had stood on those lots were gone, scavenged for wood and anything else people thought they could use. More often than not, neighbors to either side kept grass and shrubbery from running wild.