A Boy at War Read online

  He pushed the choke in. “Right.” He knew it. Why hadn’t he remembered that you only choked a cold engine?

  He didn’t drive well. He’d done a lot better other times. He either let the clutch out too fast or didn’t feed enough gas. The car bucked. “Ride ’em, cowboy,” his father said. He was still cheerful, but Adam was a mess. He stalled a couple of times, and then he backed into their neighbor’s hibiscus hedge.

  “Stop!” his father ordered. “Whoa! Hold it!”

  Adam got the car back on the driveway. His father didn’t say anything else, but Adam was done. He didn’t want to practice anymore.

  “Good,” his father said, taking the keys. “You got the idea. A little more practice on the fine points, and you’ll be okay.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” Adam went to his room and flopped down on the bed. He felt exhausted.

  “Hey, Snowman!”

  Davi Mori, the kid with the sleepy eyes and the sticky brain, was calling Adam. They had a couple of classes together, and whenever Davi saw him, it was, “Hey, Snowman.” Adam couldn’t figure the kid out. Maybe he wanted to be friends, but all he talked about was snow. He was at it again.

  “How cold is snow?” he asked. “If you hold snow in your hand, how long does it take to melt? How high does it pile up?”

  Adam held his hand over his head as high as he could reach.

  “Baloney, haole boy.”

  “Believe it or don’t, I don’t care. Would you believe ten feet of snow?”

  “So how do you get out of your house?”

  “Climb out the upstairs window.”

  “You are a straight-faced haole liar.” Davi walked away.

  Later that day, Adam saw Davi again. Well, he didn’t see him till Davi smashed into him in the hall. “Out of my way, haole boy.” And he was gone. Hit and run.

  “Is that the Hawaiian way of being friendly?” Adam yelled after him.

  Davi came right back and challenged him to a punching contest. Adam was bigger than Davi and heavier. “Not a good idea,” Adam said.

  “Afraid to take a punch?” Davi said, and punched him, no warning, nothing. Punched him hard.

  Adam rubbed his shoulder. “You are a real jerk.” Not correct behavior. You were never supposed to let on that you’d been hurt, but he didn’t care. He started to walk away, but Davi got in his way and offered his shoulder.

  “Hit me,” he said. “It’s your turn. Hit me as hard as you can.”

  Adam’s father always said what made a throw a throw and a punch a punch was follow-through. Punch like you’re going to put the other guy through the wall.

  Adam punched Davi, gave it all he had, a really solid punch.

  It took Davi a moment to get his breath. Then he shrugged. “I’ve been hit harder by a marshmallow.”

  After that they had a kind of friendship, if you could call it that. Whenever they met, they exchanged insults and pounded each other.

  Then, at a general assembly early in December, Adam got a big surprise. It was a Friday, the last day of school that week, and there was Davi up on the stage reading his winning essay in the American Legion “I’m Proud to Be an American” Contest. He stood in front of the whole school and read in a voice that carried to the last row of the auditorium, where Adam was sitting. A man from the American Legion who stood ramrod straight presented Davi with a ten-dollar check.

  Adam tried to be unimpressed, but he had to admit that standing up there was not something that he could see himself doing. And besides, Davi’s essay really was good.

  Later that afternoon, in biology lab, where they had teamed up to do the frog dissections, Adam congratulated Davi. Sort of. “That’s some voice you’ve got,” he said. “Have you thought about a career calling in pigs?”

  Davi swung. Adam ducked, and they ended up horsing around till the teacher got fed up and put them at opposite ends of the room.

  “Look,” Bea said, holding up her stuffed animal. It was Saturday morning and she was sitting on Adam’s bed. “Bear says good morning to Adam.”

  Bea was still in her nightgown. She slept in an alcove in a corner of their parents’ room. Adam’s room was off the kitchen. The model planes he’d built hung from the ceiling. They were never still.

  Bea pushed her teddy bear in his face. “Bear says time to kiss.” Adam put down the model plane he’d been maneuvering and gave Bear an extra-loud kiss. “Stop it.” She pinched his nose. “Do you want to play?”

  “Surely, little girl.” He gave her his newest Japanese fighter plane. “It’s called a Zero, and this game is called dogfight.”

  “I don’t like dogs who fight.”

  “It’s not dogs fighting, it’s planes fighting each other the way they do it in a war. This is the way we play. You’re high, against the sun, so I can’t see you till the last second, and you come out of the sun, shooting down at me.”

  “You don’t shoot your brother.”

  “It’s only a game.” He moved her arm so her plane was above his. “Make believe you’re going to shoot me.”

  “I can do it,” she said, pushing his hand away. “You don’t have to show me. Bap! Bap! Bap!”

  “Good! See how you’re behind me, on my tail? It looks bad for me, but watch this.” He sent his navy Corsair into a rolling dive and came back up under the Zero. “You see that? I just blew your plane into a thousand pieces.”

  “You did not.” Bea held her plane up triumphantly. “See, you missed me.”

  “Okay, test time,” he said. “What’s the Punchbowl?”

  “Where we live.”

  “Do you know it’s a dead—”

  “Volcano! I know that already.”

  “Do you know that Hawaii is built on all dead volcanoes that came out of the ocean?”

  “You told me.” She yawned, patting her mouth. “That is so boring.”

  He picked up another model plane with square-tipped wings. “What’s this plane called?”

  “I don’t know. No fair.”

  “Grumman Wildcat. It’s the navy fighter plane. And this one here, next to it, is a P-40 Curtiss Warhawk. It’s the army fighter, and this one’s a German Messerschmitt Me 109.”

  “Which plane is the best?”

  “The American planes are always the best.”

  “We always win,” Bea said.

  “Hello . . .” Their mother looked in. “Anybody home? It’s time for breakfast.”

  “We’re playing dogfight,” Bea said. “Bap, bap, bap! I won, Mommy.”

  “Is it really time for breakfast, Mom?” Adam asked.

  “It’s almost time for lunch, kiddo. Let’s clear the decks and get this bunk ready for inspection.”

  When his father was home, their house was a ship. The floors were decks, beds were bunks, windows were portholes, the kitchen was the galley, and if Adam said “bathroom,” his father said, “I think you mean the head.”

  “Your father sees this mess, you’re in for a lecture,” his mother said.

  “And maybe a sock on the behind,” Bea said. “And you’re going to cry and cry.”

  “Let me remind you, little girl,” Adam said, “boys don’t cry.”

  He lifted her off his bunk, then made it navy style, by the book, everything taut, hospital corners, no wrinkles. His father was still asleep, so his mother would do the inspection. It was their regular Saturday-morning ritual, whether his father was here or not.

  When he was ready, he called her, then stood by the door. His mother did a tough inspection. There was always some place he’d forgotten to dust. It was the shelf in the closet this time. When his father did the inspection, he’d bounce a quarter on the bunk and if it didn’t bounce high enough for him to catch, Adam would have to tear the bunk apart and make it over again.

  After his mother had finished the inspection and he had wiped the shelf, she interrogated him exactly as his father did, even deepening her voice. “Do you appreciate that you have a room of your own, sailor?”

/>   “Yes, sir, I do!”

  “I didn’t have a room of my own when I was a boy, sailor.”

  “No, sir, I know that.”

  His mother stood at attention. She enjoyed this little game they played. “All I ever got for Christmas was a pair of itchy red socks. No model airplanes, no Raleigh racers.”

  “No, sir,” he said. “I know that, sir!”

  “Are you thankful for what you have?”

  “Yes, sir, I am. I know that I’m one fortunate son of a gun. And I have to give back, I know that, too. Yes, sir, I am a grateful boy.”

  “Are you mocking me, sailor?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “That’s going to get you six months of KP, sailor.”

  In the kitchen a few minutes later, his mother put the yellow cornflakes box on the table with a bowl and a banana. Bea was on the floor playing with Bear. “I want Jell-O, please,” she said. Koniko, their Japanese maid, didn’t work on the weekends, although she’d be in later to baby-sit Bea. Adam and his parents were going to the movies.

  Adam peeled the banana. “What was Dad like when he was my age, Mom?”

  “He was a farm boy, and he had to work terribly, terribly hard. If there was work to be done, he got up at five every morning before school. A lot of times he never made it to school. He was the oldest, and your grandpa needed him on the farm. Grandpa couldn’t do a lot with just one arm.”

  Adam’s grandfather Pelko had lost an arm in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. That arm ended just below the elbow. He usually kept a sock over the stump. He could always make Adam jump by wriggling the bare stump in his face.

  “Dad ran away from home, didn’t he?”

  Adam knew the answer, but this was the thing about his father that most fascinated him. His father, so disciplined, so regular, so sober, was once free enough—or wild enough—that he left his family and took to the road. Fourteen years old, Adam’s age. He had thought about that a lot. That was really brave.

  His mother emptied the contents of a Jell-O package into a bowl. “Your father ran away, but he wasn’t a bad kid. He joined the navy—”

  “—And lied about his age,” Adam said.

  “Your father doesn’t lie! I don’t like the way you said that, Adam.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She poured boiling water over the Jell-O. “It wasn’t the same as real lying. He wanted the navy. He needed a home. Sometimes life forces you to do things. We don’t know how hard his life was, Adam. We can’t even imagine it. He had to work like a man from the time he was eight years old. You will never have to make the choices he did.”

  She stirred the Jell-O. “And what he’s accomplished, the position of trust and authority that he’s risen to, everything he’s achieved—he did it all by himself. He came up from nothing. Your father—I have to say it—your father is an admirable man. Really, a great man.”

  “Maybe he’ll be admirable of the fleet someday.”

  A flip remark. It just sprang out of his mouth. He really agreed with his mother, his father was admirable, but there was something about his being so admirable that, well, scared Adam. Would he ever be capable of doing what his father did? Could he ever be even half the man his father was?

  If his mother caught the admirable pun, she didn’t let on. “There might be a war,” she said. She refilled the teakettle.

  “War with Japan?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She sighed. “Nobody wants it, but—”

  “Dad wants it.”

  “What do you mean ‘Dad wants it’? What kind of thing is that to say, Adam?”

  “I mean that’s his job, Mom. That’s what all the training exercises are about. Don’t worry, we’re ready for them.”

  “Ready is one thing, war is something else.”

  “You don’t have to worry, Mom. There’s nothing safer than a battleship. If war comes, Dad’s going to be okay.”

  He made his hand into a gun. War was exciting. It was action. It was ships, planes, and guns. It was being faster and smarter than your enemy. It was defending your country.

  “Dad says all that talk in Washington is a waste of time. The Japs want to push us out of the Pacific, but if they try, we’re going to knock their heads off.”

  “Don’t say ‘Jap,’” his mother said. “It’s vulgar.”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  He put his bowl in the sink. He just hoped that if war came, it wouldn’t be over too soon. “I’m going out now,” he said.

  “Get me some papayas first,” his mother said.

  He stepped out into the garden. The grass was wet and tickled his bare feet. It was December, and there were flowers in the bushes and bird sounds in the air, and everywhere there was the smell of summer. A big, ugly toad sat under the papaya tree. Adam inched his foot toward it. “Buffo,” he said, and it jumped away.

  He picked a few papayas and brought them in to his mother. “I’ll be back at 1800.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Where was he going? He didn’t know. “I’m just going to poke around.”

  “Be home on time. You know your father.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll be here.”

  Adam, on his bike, stood high up off the seat, riding the pedals. The palms and the monkeypod trees turned the street into a long green tunnel. Flowers flashed by—red and white and lavender—on every lawn and house. He was going nowhere in a hurry. Nobody to meet, no friend, no game waiting, but it was good to be moving.

  He rode down Punchbowl Street, past the Iolani Palace, the home of the Hawaiian kings and queens, and the statue of Kamehameha the Great, a Hawaiian general who had united the islands more than one hundred years ago. He rode through the downtown area to the pier, then turned up along the shore.

  A jumble of little cottages was plunked down near the ocean. Narrow lanes and cars parked every which way. Sand everywhere, the buildings weathered, faded and battered almost flat by the sun.

  The sky was a cloudless blue. The wind gusted, and the ocean rose and fell. Frothy rollers rippled toward the shore. In the distance Adam saw sampans and Japanese fishing boats.

  “Flarraaah . . .” A tiny Japanese woman was selling flowers door-to-door. “Flarraaah . . .” she sang.

  He walked his bike down to the water. The beach was almost empty. Nearby was the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and beyond it, the Moana and the Halekulani, where his parents went to dance.

  Suddenly a bunch of boys burst from a lane and onto the beach. Some were on bikes, some were running. They were tossing a ball back and forth.

  Adam wouldn’t have minded playing, but they were all Hawaiian kids, and he didn’t know them. Then someone yelled, “Haole!” It was Davi Mori, barefoot and wearing a pair of old pants and one of those flowered Hawaiian shirts. “Hey, haole! You wanna play?”

  Adam hesitated. He was glad to see Davi, but he never knew what to think of that haole stuff.

  “We need one more player,” Davi said.

  “What’s the game?”

  Davi tossed a coconut to him. “Football, only we play it with a coconut.”

  “Ah, so. Coconut ball,” Adam said, and he was sorry. It sounded too much like a Charlie Chan movie. Maybe Davi would think he was making fun of him.

  “Tackle is one knee down,” Davi said.

  “Okay.”

  “Come on, then.”

  The others were waiting. “This is my friend Adam,” Davi said. “He’s on my team.”

  The other team leader was a big, noisy kid called Martin Kahahawai. “What you need the haole for, Mori? No brains of your own?”

  “You got five on your team. Now I got five.”

  The end zones were marked in the sand. Sidelines, too.

  “We’re the Devil Sharks,” Davi said.

  “Hey,” Martin said, “that’s Hawaiian.”

  “So?”

  “You’re a Jap.”

  “And you’re a moron. You can have Devil Sharks.” Da
vi turned to the others. “Give us a name, quick.”

  “Uhrr . . .”

  “Mmmmm . . .”

  “Ahhh . . .”

  “Barracudas,” a dark, skinny kid named Joseph said.

  “Rattlesnakes.”

  “How about Sea Scouts?”

  “Too much like Boy Scouts.”

  “How about Girl Scouts?”

  “Sure, we can be the Girl Scout Cookies.”

  “Wildcats,” Adam said.

  “Wildcats?” Davi said.

  “Like the F4F navy fighter.”

  “Nah,” Davi said, but then Martin said, “Devil Sharks eat Wildcats for breakfast.”

  That did it. “Let’s go, Wildcats,” Davi said.

  Davi’s team got the coconut first. The guys were talking back and forth, watching each other but never saying anything to Adam, not even looking at him. Davi was the quarterback. He faked a throw to the left, then ran to the right and got past the whole Shark team, all the way to the end zone.

  “Hey, Sharks,” Davi said, “that was so easy.”

  Now the Devil Sharks had the coconut. “Martin’s going to keep it,” Davi said. “So pile up on him.”

  “What if he passes?” Adam asked.

  “You’ll see, he won’t.”

  Martin ran like a truck in low gear, but those arms and legs of his knocked the Wildcats off left and right. Nobody could bring him down. He went through them like a bowling ball through a bunch of tenpins.

  “I told you guys,” Davi kept saying. “You got to hang on to him.”

  Adam had his hands up for the ball a lot, but Davi never threw to him. He kept passing to the other guys, especially Joseph, who made two touchdowns. But then the next time Joseph carried the ball, Martin popped it out of his hands and ran with it. It looked like another sure Martin touchdown.

  “Stop him,” Davi shouted. “Get him!”

  Adam caught up to Martin. Then he was in front of Martin, trying to slow him down, until Martin tripped and they both fell. “Got him, you got him!” Davi shouted. After that Adam felt more like part of the team.

  They took their shirts off and played away the afternoon.

  Afterward, they threw themselves into the ocean, then sat around near the ashes of a fire and insulted one another.