Honolulu Story Read online

  HONOLULU STORY

  By

  LESLIE FORD

  Honolulu Story

  Copyright © 1946, 1973 by Zenith Brown.

  Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post under

  the title The Man from Japan.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  WITH ALOHA

  HAROLD STANDIFORD, Seaman 1st Class USN

  HOWARD L. CANTZ, Cpl. USMC

  WILLIAM P. ERVIN, Pvt. USMC

  RICHARD E. OLY, Pfc. USMC

  PAUL E. SWAIN, Pfc. USMCR

  1

  NIGHT LAY LIKE A CLOAK OF SABLE FEATHERS, silver-bordered where the quiet rollers of the Pacific broke on the outlying coral reef and broke again as they swept up the long concave line of the shallow beach.

  The boy stood motionless by a wind-stunted clump of kiave trees in the dunes, his rifle in one hand, his dog held hard on the leash with the other. His eyes, trained to darkness and the deceptive shimmer of shifting starlight, picked out the rock that when the spray subsided for a moment on the reef looked like a swimmer poised to dive. He looked slowly over the inlet to the empty beach, across the narrow plateau, arid, sparsely grown with the kiave, and up at the black volcanic rock towering in a sheer palisade above him.

  Every other night of his solitary patrol along the beach he had looked up at the mountain fortress stretching the whole length of the Island and thought of it as he did in the daytime—a grim barren wall that cut off the windward side of Oahu from Honolulu, shutting him off from the only civilized spot on the God-for-saken dump . . . the Rock, the GI’s called it, and the missionaries could have it back tomorrow. But tonight it was, different. It was closer to him, higher, more densely black and impenetrable, brooding, powerful and alive.

  He moved sharply and the dog stiffened and strained forward. But there was nothing on the beach. He was just jittery.

  He thought about it, looking up into the black wall of silence again. The Hawaiian girl had begged him and the other boy from camp not to go into the burial cave. They wouldn’t have gone, maybe, if she hadn’t been so frightened. It was funny, too. They had been all over there a dozen times when there wasn’t anything to do at camp. It was funny they hadn’t seen the mouth of the cave before. It wasn’t big but it was hard to see how anybody could have missed it. This morning it was right out in plain sight when they climbed up the ledge to pick some ground orchids for the girl. It almost looked as if they were supposed to find it.

  His body went taut again, and the dog, responding instantly, strained on the leash, silent and alert. Again it was nothing, just the wind in the kiave. It wasn’t the music of the People they said came singing out of the mist at night, or the distant beating of drums he’d read about being heard in the hills.

  The burial caves were like that too. Only one person was allowed to know where any one was buried, and he handed the secret down to one other in sacred trust when he knew, as Hawaiians seemed to know, when death was coming to him. Even the burial place of Kamehameha the Great, whose statue was everywhere, had never been found, and no one knew who the guardian of his secret was.

  The girl’s pale frightened face seemed to come to him out of the mountain wall, her great liquid brown eyes imploring them not to go into the cave. He could hear her frantic words telling them the terrible things that had happened to other people, and hear their laughter echoing back as they wriggled in on their stomach, and the sudden silence when they were inside. The air was heavy and their GI lighters kept going out. They had crouched down and felt around on the ground. He had found a long bone, the other boy a calabash. Then they couldn’t find their way out again. The sweat stood out on the sentry’s forehead as he remembered that silent panic, and the dog quivered on the leash. When they had found the way at last the girl was gone. They had stopped at her house, on a back road on the way to camp, but the house was locked and barred and the blinds pulled down. Not even a dog came out to meet them. It gave them a funny kind of feeling that they felt again as an old Hawaiian up the road shrank out of their path, mumbling quickly to himself, his eyes tightly closed, as if the curse was already visible in their faces.

  He still had the bone, and the other boy the calabash he’d broken when he slipped coming down the ledge. He wanted to throw the bone away but he didn’t want the other boy to think he was afraid. And it was the other boy the car hit when they crossed the road to camp. That was funny too, because the road was empty and the car in plain sight.

  He shook himself a little and tightened his grip on the leash. The solid wall of the great mountain seemed to loom closer and blacker, and the flesh along his spine prickled cold and hot. The dog jerked abruptly. He looked away from the mountain out to the reef. His hands were trembling and the wind was like fingers crawling across his face. If he could only light a cigarette, he thought. There was no use patrolling the beach any more, anyway. Nothing would come. The Japs were licked—they needed all the submarines they had closer home. He fixed his eyes on the reef where the spray subsiding left the rock that looked like a swimmer about to dive. That was something he was sure of. Then, as he looked, he knew he was not sure of anything any more.

  The rock jutting up looked wider. It looked as if it were moving too, like the mountain wall moving closer. He closed his eyes quickly, gripping his rifle tighter, gripping the leash. When he looked again he took a long breath. It was just an illusion. The rock was solid again and motionless as the spray came up around it, blotting it out.

  He turned abruptly and started along the beach. The dog held back, bristling.

  “Don’t be a dope,” the boy said aloud. “Come on. It’s just a ghost trying to get his shin bone back.”

  As he said it there was something, a sound, behind him, and for the first time on his patrol of the lonely beach he knew fear, so strong that he knew he was afraid to turn around. For an instant it paralyzed his feet and held his heart frozen as it tingled like drops of molten steel down his spine and poured cold sweat out of every pore in his body. Then he turned suddenly, to face it, and there was nothing there . . . nothing but the empty beach, the breaking waves, the kiave on the wind-swept dunes under the black fortress of the Kuloo Range, and the dog, straining, quivering, on the leash.

  His own body went taut, his heart pounded, alive again. He leaned forward quickly and unleashed the dog. The lean black body flashed as it leaped forward, silent as a savage arrow, to where the slithering sound had come from the trees. The boy’s finger was steady on the cold trigger of his rifle as he crept forward, holding his breath. The cave of the secret dead was forgotten, and the boy with the broken calabash. The mountain receded and diminished. He waited, tense and coordinated and sane again, and crept forward, crouching low. He could see the dog’s tracks, crossing the beach through the dunes to the narrow concrete road. He ran to the road, crouched lower still as he crossed it, and stopped.

  The sand was wet there. He looked down at it, back at the road, across the beach to the edge of the ocean and out to the reef where the solid black column jutted up, the swimmer about to dive. He lay there silently, listening, crouched low to the ground. There was no answer to his low call to the dog, nothing but the wind in the dry trees, and the muted roll of waves breaking on the reef and whispering along the shallow beach.

  He crept forward, tense, under the black fortress of the mountain. He should go back and report, he knew, but if he could get the man . . . ? If there was a man, he thought . . . a man of flesh and blood. . . . The dark swift shadow behind him moved almost noiselessly. The boy turned too late even to see the white ghost’s face and the flashing gleam of the naked blade. . . .

  They found him there very e
arly in the morning, staring sightlessly up at the dark empty sky. The dog lay at the bottom of a rock, his throat slashed open. It was still before dawn when the young officer came back with the thick-set, gray-haired colonel.

  “Thought you’d want to see this, Colonel Primrose,” he said. “I’ve got orders to keep you informed. This isn’t the man you’re after, though. It looks like a dirty Jap to me. White men don’t use a knife this way.”

  The man he spoke to, standing in front of the huge sergeant, looked down, his black eyes softening for an instant, at the dead boy’s body. He looked back to where the single track of footprints, too solidly indented to be a ghost’s, came up the lonely beach out of the Pacific Ocean. He looked up at the black volcanic rock. No one had ever charted the hidden caves formed in the gigantic turmoil that thousands of years ago threw up the floor of the ocean in masses of molten lava to make the islands and atolls of the Pacific. Somewhere up there, in a cave, or beyond, invisible in the growth of bush and vine and tree that stretched into a wilderness of jungle, was the man who had crept silently up out of the midnight sea. Unless, Colonel John Primrose thought, he had already found his friends. . . .

  Colonel Primrose’s black eyes hardened as he looked down again at the dead boy.

  “Perhaps,” he said quietly. “We’ll find out.”

  2

  THE THIRD TIME TOMMY DAWSON SAID, “JEEPERS, it’s time for us to go home,” I realized it was double talk, and not meant for himself alone of the three boys there. The only move he’d made when he said it was forward in his chair a little until some gal with bare brown arms and legs and a red or yellow hibiscus in her black hair had passed along the street out of sight of his roving eyes.

  The four of us—Tommy Dawson, Dave Boyer, Swede Ellicott and I—were sitting in the broad open lounge of the Moana Hotel in Waikiki. The three of them were lieutenants in the Army Air Force, back from the Marianas for ten days’ rest. And I thought, at the time, that I was Grace Latham, just arrived in Honolulu from Washington, D. C., on what they call “invitational orders.” They seemed important and even impressive the day they were issued, but they were a snare and a delusion, as perhaps I should have realized before I heard any one else say so. It’s clear to me now that what I actually was was nothing other than a plain booby-trap, the brain child of my old friend Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers U. S. Army (Retired) and acting special agent in Military Intelligence. And no doubt it’s the chief reason why Colonel Primrose’s guard, philosopher and friend, and self-styled “functotum,” Sergeant Phineas T. Buck, doesn’t really have to worry—dreadfully though he does—about his colonel’s ever marrying me. He’d have to find another lady fall guy if he did.

  Tommy Dawson craned his red head forward again. “Baby!”

  Dave Boyer growled irritably.

  “Oh, shut up. For cripe’s sake lay off, can’t you?”

  His sensitive sun-blackened face went a shade darker and his mouth tightened. Of the three he was the only one who looked as if he really needed the rest he’d been sent back to get. The casual way he sat there was deceptive, but his finger nails were chewed down to the quick. Twice Tommy Dawson had stuck a foot out, given him a quiet nudge and said, “Hi, boy,” and I’d seen the hunted shadow in his brown eyes disappear as he’d raised his thumb and forefinger in a circle with a quick “Okay, thanks.” But he was sore now.

  “Just lay off,” he said. “For about ten seconds.”

  Tommy Dawson lay back in his chair, grinning.

  “Why, David,” he said. “My dear old friend and brother officer, don’t get me wrong. All I’m saying is, I can’t take it. I just can’t take lolling here in this whispering paradise of sunlight and palm trees. It’s sapping my fiery determination to win the Pacific war single-handed. Listen to the sapphire wavelets caressing the silver strand. Listen to the haunting melody of romance floating through the tender moonlit stillness——”

  “Just shut up, is all I said.”

  The only haunting melody of romance audible at the moment was coming from the juke box across the streaming Sunday afternoon madhouse of Kalakaua Avenue, and it was all but drowned out by the jeeps and taxis and buses and the shrill congress of mynah birds in the palm tree outside. The wide street, glaring white in the intense clarity of the afternoon sunlight, was a swarm of sailors and seabees, soldiers and marines. A few of them were with girls—Waves, Wacs and the little lady Marines in their bright green and scarlet and white. A few were with the civilian girls with bare brown arms and legs and red or yellow hibiscus in their coal-black hair. Most of them hunted singly or in packs. They jammed the curio shops with the grass skirts in the windows. They stood endlessly in line for food or a movie or a bus to take them somewhere to stand in other lines for food or a movie or a bus to take them somewhere else, wishing to a man they were back at the corner drug store on Main Street.

  To our left across the lounge, the line to the dining room already stretched half the length of the lanai. GI’s and sailors, officers and men and an occasional civilian, stood drearily inching forward, paying no attention to the sapphire wavelets on the famous beach at Waikiki. It was just at the end of the crowded courtyard, within what Sergeant Buck would have called spitting distance and could easily have proved it. The silver strand was hardly visible for sun-tanned bodies, but beyond it were thousands of blue miles of ocean, as calm as an inland lake except where the long low rollers broke for an instant in great white feathers on the coral reef. Surfboards and a few outrigger canoes gave it a slight touch of the tourist ads, a semi-tropical Coney Island, but chiefly the whole scene was like a cross between the Grand Central Station and Market Street when the Fleet’s in.

  Tommy Dawson’s hair was red, his face freckled, and he had in him what Lilac, who’s my cook and friend in my house on P Street in Georgetown, District of Columbia, calls a devil as big as a house.

  “Jeepers!” he said again.

  Dave Boyer’s lean body moved.

  “—Relax, David. Just relax.”

  Swede Ellicott reached a long leisurely arm out of the deep wicker chair beside Tommy and knocked the dottle out of his pipe into the ash stand between them. He was big and blond and unhurried. The Central Pacific had bleached his eyebrows so they looked like thick patches of straw above his light blue eyes. His face was burned and weather-beaten, not handsome and in fact far from it, and curiously ingenuous, I thought, for anything so rugged and hard-bitten. He had the casual matter-of-fact air that seems to be as much a part of a flyer’s uniform as the dog-eared nonchalance of his cap.

  “Don’t pay him no mind, David,” he said placidly. “I’m deaf. I ain’t heard nothin’ he been sayin’.—Hullo, they must be looking for somebody.”

  He pointed out the window. I saw two small planes that looked like white birds flying very low against the back drop of the mountain range above the city. They were moving so slowly that they looked stationary until they banked and wheeled back, mounting a little higher each time until they were against the blue sky.

  We had all bent down and looked at them, and we were all silent for a moment, watching them. I can believe, now, that we were each aware of some subtle kind of premonitory warning, coming maybe out of the deep substratum of primitive mysticism that’s lingered on in the Hawaiian atmosphere in spite of the missionaries and in spite of modern science. I don’t insist on it, but we were silent, for a moment, watching those searching planes, and no one else seemed to be interested, and it was the four of us, of all the people there in the Moana lobby or on the street, who were to be caught up and vitally affected . . . Swede Ellicott, who’d noticed them first and commented on them, the most vitally and fundamentally of us all.

  Maybe, of course, it was only because Swede and the other two were just back from an area where it’s important to be acutely conscious of any plane that’s acting in an unusual fashion. But there were other flyers just back too, not even aware of the two white ships, searching, against the hills and the sky.
And we dismissed them at once, rejecting the warning if it was a warning. We’d not heard then that a sentry had been killed on the other side of the Island, or that a man had come up out of the Pacific Ocean who had forfeited every right of God or man to set his foot ever again on Hawaii nei so long as he lived. Nor did we recognize, a very few minutes later, in what appeared to be a purely personal matter between the three boys and a girl, another stone in the bridge already building that would reach, when it was finished, far across the grim valley where death sits, waiting.

  Swede Ellicott turned back to me.

  “How’s Washington, Grace? And how’s the ancient and honorable, my aunt?”

  Up to that point none of the three had so much as mentioned Washington, not even in asking what kind of a flight I’d had and when I started on it. Since it was in Washington I’d seen them last, and had met them in the first place, when the three of them and a boy named Ben Farrell were keeping what is sometimes called bachelor hall at Swede’s aunt’s place next door to mine, I’d assumed they were avoiding the whole subject with reason. I was avoiding it with what I thought was tact.

  The reason was a girl named Mary Cather. The tact was because I’d never been very sure as to what had happened. I knew they’d all been in love with her and that Swede Ellicott had been engaged to marry her. It was one of those things that happen with the speed and brilliance of light, for Swede and Mary. The enchantment she wore like a star in her shining gold hair that night wasn’t visible to me, but it was devastating magic to the three young men who’d just got their wings, and to Ben Farrell newly commissioned in the Marine Corps. It wasn’t a full two days later before Swede told me they were going to be married. Right away, he said, but I knew Mary’s mother would see to that, and probably Swede’s aunt, because Mary was a stranger in Washington. She was there with her mother as a reluctant evacuée from the bombing of Pearl Harbor, resenting it silently but bitterly. That may, of course, have been part of the magic glamor she had for the four boys that night. It was definitely part of the situation there that moment when we were sitting in the lobby of the Moana Hotel, because Mary Cather was back in Honolulu.