Shank’s mare, bicycles, a few horse-drawn carriages exhumed from God only knew where, rickshaws, and pedicabs did their best to take up the slack. Kenzo hated the idea of one man hauling another-by which he proved how American he was. Some of the haulers were haoles, which also would have been unimaginable before December 7. The smug look on a Japanese officer’s face as a big blond man pulled him along Vineyard Boulevard stuck in Kenzo’s memory forever.

The Stars and Stripes was gone. Hawaii’s flag still flew here and there, and looked much like that of the USA at a distance, but Old Glory was as extinct as moving motorcars. The Rising Sun had replaced it. Japan’s flag flew over post offices and other public buildings, and also over or in front of houses and businesses owned by people who wanted to get in good with the new occupiers. Not everyone who flew the Rising Sun was Japanese-not even close. Plenty of people of all bloods judged the Japanese Empire was here to stay.

Also gone, or nearly so, were the pigeons and the once even more numerous zebra doves. Kenzo knew what had happened to them. Lots of people were hungry these days, and zebra doves weren’t hard to catch. The foolish little birds did everything but carry EAT ME! signs. Mynahs, by contrast, persisted. They were less appetizing than pigeons and doves, and also had the brains to fly away when people started sneaking up on them.

Kenzo saw plenty of soldiers and sailors heading down toward the red-light district centered on Hotel Street. The uniforms and the faces had changed. The look of greedy expectation on those faces hadn’t.

When Kenzo got farther east, into the haole part of town, the absence of moving motorcars was the main thing that told him how times had changed. Lawns remained neatly mowed; trees were still neatly trimmed. A majority of the houses wrecked by bombs and shellfire had been pulled down by now, so their lots looked as if they were just vacant.

Elsie had always liked him fine. Before the war, her folks wouldn’t have been so happy if he’d shown up to take her out. They weren’t so stuffy about that kind of thing as some haoles, but they wouldn’t have been dancing in the streets, either. Now… When he knocked on the door now, Elsie’s mother opened the door and smiled and said, “Hello, Ken. Come in. Elsie will be ready in just a minute.” The smile seemed genuine. If it wasn’t, she could have gone on stage with it. She used his first name now, too, he noticed, which she hadn’t the first time he’d come over.

“Thank you, Mrs. Sundberg,” Kenzo answered, and did. So much room inside! He’d had that thought before. The apartment where he’d grown up couldn’t have had a quarter as much space. He refused to think about the tent where he was living now.

“Would you like some lemonade?” Mrs. Sundberg asked.

“Sure, if it’s not too much trouble,” he said. He didn’t suppose it would be. Factories had gone right on making sugar even after anybody with a brain in his head could see they weren’t going to be able to ship it to the mainland. And, while you could cook with lemons and use their juice, eating them as fruit took real determination.

The lemonade was perfect: sweet and tart and cold. Kenzo had taken only a couple of sips before Elsie walked into the front room. “Hi!” he said.

“Hi, Ken.” She smiled.

“You look nice,” Kenzo said. She was wearing a sun dress, but not one that was too revealing. Part of him was sorry. The rest, the sensible part, wasn’t: why borrow trouble with leering soldiers or, worse, with soldiers who wanted to do more than leer? He sniffed. “You smell nice, too.” She’d put on some kind of cologne. He could smell it in spite of the Vitalis he’d used on his own hair.

Elsie wrinkled her nose at him. “As long as I don’t smell like old fish, I’d smell nice to you.”

Since she was right, he grinned back at her. “Shall we go?” he said. Elsie nodded. He drained the glass of lemonade and set it down on a doily to make sure it didn’t leave a ring on the furniture. “Thanks very much,” he told Mrs. Sundberg.

“You’re welcome, Ken,” she answered. “I hope you have a nice time.” If her voice held the thinnest edge of worry, he could pretend he didn’t notice.

Little spatters of rain were coming down when he and Elsie stepped outside. They both ignored it, confident it would let up in a few minutes-and it did. Some adman had no doubt got a bonus for coining the phrase “liquid sunshine.” Advertising for tourists or not, though, it held a lot of truth. The sun hadn’t stopped shining while the rain fell, and it was warm and more refreshing than annoying.

Elsie looked up at the sky as the clouds drifted away. “If I’d just had a permanent, I’d be mad,” she said, and laughed. “I don’t think you can get a permanent here any more, so I don’t have to worry about that.”

“I hadn’t even thought about it,” Kenzo confessed.

“Men.” Elsie condemned half the human race. She laughed again while she did it.

“Hey!” Kenzo played at being more wounded than he really was. “Most of what I’ve been worrying about lately is fish. They don’t care about permanents. The rest is trying to keep Dad from… you know.” He didn’t want to say turning into a quisling, even if that was what it amounted to.

“Nothing you can do about that. You can’t live his life for him,” Elsie said. “I’m just glad you don’t think that way yourself.”

“Nope. I’m an American.” But Kenzo looked around to make sure nobody overheard him before he said it. He trusted Elsie-and he was sure she was on the same side as he was. Some stranger? A stranger, Japanese or advantage-seeking haole, was liable to report him to the occupiers. He didn’t like having to be careful that way, but he didn’t see that he had any choice, either.

“I should hope so.” Elsie spoke in a low voice, and she looked around, too. She made an unhappy face. “It’s like living in France or Russia or something and worrying about the Nazis listening all the time.”

“It’s just like that,” Kenzo said. His father’s homeland was on the same side as Adolf Hitler. If that wasn’t enough to give Dad a hint… But Hitler had got a much better press in the Japanese papers his father read than he did in the English-language press. What can you do? he thought.

The closest theater was showing a Gary Cooper Western. What can you do? Kenzo thought again. He gave the ticket-seller two quarters. The theater had long since run out of tickets. Kenzo and Elsie extended their hands. The fellow stamped PAID on the backs of them. They showed the stamps to the man who would have taken tickets if they’d had any. He stood aside and let them through.

Gone from the snack bar were the familiar odors of hot dogs and popcorn. All it sold were lemonade and salted macadamia nuts-another local specialty. Kenzo got some for Elsie and him. They cost more than admission had.

Japanese sailors had taken a lot of the best seats. Kenzo and Elsie sat down near the back of the theater. They wanted to draw as little notice as they could. When they started to eat their snacks, they discovered that macadamia nuts were a lot noisier to chew than popcorn. Crunching, they grinned at each other.

No coming attractions filled the screen when the house lights went down. Theaters on Oahu swapped films back and forth among themselves, but even they didn’t think their audiences would get too excited about it. Instead, the projectionist went straight into the newsreel.

That was a Japanese production. It seemed to have American models, but watching it was like looking in a mirror: everything was backwards. The Allies were the bad guys, the armed forces of the Axis the heroes. To blaring, triumphal music, Japanese soldiers advanced in China and Burma. Japanese bombers knocked the stuffing out of towns in Australia and Ceylon. They also pounded a British aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. “Banzai! ” the sailors shouted as flames and smoke swallowed the carrier.