Grenade Page 12

  “It’s not poisoned,” Hideki promised them. “I’ve already eaten one, and I didn’t get sick.”

  The Miyagis were too hungry to refuse. They fed the children first, and Hideki gave a second can to the adults. They all ate with relief, moaning gratefully.

  “I don’t understand,” Grandmother Miyagi said when she’d finished eating. She had black squares and circles and arrows tattooed on the back of her hands, just like the kind old woman who had tried to help Hideki get rid of Rei’s mabui in the cave. “You say the American devils were nice to you, but we were told they would kill our babies.”

  “No,” Hideki said. “They’re only monsters when they’re afraid. Just like the Japanese. All the Japanese and Americans care about is killing each other. You should surrender to the Americans.”

  “Surrender?” Father Miyagi said. “But they’ll kill us!”

  “Not if you go to them now,” Hideki replied. “If you wait until they’re fighting, until they’ve all become monsters, they’ll eat you up. Do you understand? If you surrender to them without threatening them, they’ll help you.”

  Hideki’s suggestion caused a great deal of discussion, but he was too tired to be a part of it. After eating a bit of a candy bar, he laid his head on the American backpack and went to sleep.

  When Hideki woke, the Miyagi family had made a decision.

  “We’re going to surrender,” Mother Miyagi said. Father Miyagi didn’t look too happy about it, but there wasn’t much to argue about at this point. They had run out of food. They wouldn’t have lasted a day or two more if Hideki hadn’t come along, and he was out of tin cans.

  “Will you take us to the Americans?” Grandfather Miyagi asked Hideki.

  It would be going backward a little way for Hideki, but he agreed. He walked with the Miyagis out of the tomb, back out into that awful, rainy darkness, and led them the way he had come. He wasn’t moving forward anymore. He had been going back for days now, and now he was going back again. But this time it felt right. Like he was working toward something at last.

  The American soldiers had made camp for the night. They weren’t fighting, but they were wary. Hideki made sure the soldiers could see and hear them coming in the darkness, and soon flashlights were shining in their faces, blinding the poor Miyagis, who hadn’t seen daylight in more than two months. The Miyagis had tied a white piece of cloth to a pole, and Father Miyagi waved it frantically. An American who spoke bad Japanese demanded to know who they were, and Hideki answered back in slow Japanese that they were Okinawan refugees.

  The grenade in Hideki’s pocket had never felt heavier, more conspicuous. He was sure the Americans would see the bulge and shoot him. But after a tense few minutes of interrogation, the Americans finally lowered their lights and their weapons, and someone came to meet the Miyagis.

  Hideki tried to slip away into the darkness, but Mother Miyagi saw him. “Aren’t you coming with us?” she asked.

  Hideki was tempted. He knew the Americans would give him food. Shoes. A dry place to sleep. They would take him away from the fighting, the death. All this misery, all this suffering, would be over for him.

  But not for Kimiko.

  “No,” Hideki told her. “I have to keep going south, to find my sister. I have to make sure she’s safe. She’s the only family I have left.”

  Mother Miyagi suddenly pulled Hideki into a hug. He was old enough these days to grumble through a hug from his own mother. But she was gone now, and it had been so long since he’d felt a warm embrace. Hideki let Mother Miyagi hug him, and he hugged her back.

  “Ichariba choodee,” she said in Okinawan. It meant, “Now that we’ve met, we’re family.”

  Hideki nodded.

  “Thank you, Hideki,” she added, releasing him. “I hope you find your sister.”

  The American soldiers took the Miyagi family away to safety, and Hideki slipped away, headed south once more in search of Kimiko.

  Hideki slogged along the highway with thousands more Okinawans and Japanese. When the crowd reached Shikina, a village just outside Naha, some of the IJA soldiers detoured to a command post cave. Hideki decided to go with them. He was leery of setting foot inside another cave with Japanese soldiers, but he needed something more to eat if he was going to have the energy to find his sister. And the command post would have food.

  Just the thought of eating made Hideki’s head swim and his knees weaken. Almost all his best memories of food were wrapped up with memories of his family. His little brother, Isamu, slurping long Okinawa soba noodles with him at the lantern festival. His mother dishing out a big bowl of goya champuru, a sloppy, delicious mix of bitter goya melon and whatever else was in season, whenever their cousins visited. He and his father eating rafute, the brown sugar-glazed pork belly so delicate it fell apart in their fingers. Burning his mouth on deep-fried sātā andāgi, a kind of round doughnut ball, at a food stall with Kimiko on their way home from one of her yuta house calls.

  Hideki began to miss his family more than he did a warm meal. And then his appetite for food was erased completely by the sights and smells that greeted him at the command post.

  The post was hot, humid, and stinky. Buckets of human waste festered in the corridors. Bags of fermenting, ruined rice sat in puddles of water on the floor. Soldiers walked around in nothing but their loincloths to battle the heat, and no one here had bathed in months. The command officers took turns sticking their heads up the ventilation shafts, desperate for a breath of fresh air. It was like a toilet mixed with a sauna, and Hideki gagged.

  One of the half-naked soldiers spied Hideki and grinned. “Hey, girls,” he called. “One of your boyfriends has arrived!”

  Boyfriend? Girls? What was he talking about?

  And then Hideki saw them: nurses. Student nurses, like his sister! They were tending to dozens of injured Japanese soldiers, all laid out on boards. The Shikina Command Post was also a field hospital!

  Hideki rushed over to the nearest nurse, a girl just a year or two older than he was. She was wrapping a dirty brown bandage around a soldier’s wounded arm.

  “Do you have a nurse here named Kimiko?” Hideki asked her. “She’s my sister!”

  The girl shook her head. She hadn’t heard of a nurse named Kimiko, and neither had any of the other people Hideki asked. The excitement Hideki had felt on seeing nurses ebbed away like the tide, and the oppressive heat and stink returned. It was too much to hope that he’d find his sister in the first place he looked.

  “Come out!” someone yelled in broken Japanese through the cave entrance. “Come out with hands up!”

  Hideki froze. The Americans were here. Right outside the cave. They were calling for everyone to come out and surrender!

  “We should do it,” Hideki said to a Japanese corporal. “We should all surrender.”

  The soldier stepped away from Hideki in disgust. “Surrender?” he said. “Never!”

  Hideki grimaced. The IJA would never give up a command post without a fight. Which meant they were all going to die.

  Hideki grabbed the arm of the first nurse he had talked to. “Quick! Is there another way out of this cave?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she told him. “At the back.”

  “Go, go!” Hideki told her.

  “But the patients …” the girl said.

  At the cave entrance, an American soldier peeked inside, his rifle raised. One of the guards at the door slipped out of the shadows and bayonetted him in the gut, and the American screamed.

  “Everybody get out, now!” Hideki yelled, and suddenly the air itself exploded. Liquid, dripping flames came shooting through the entrance of the cave, torching the guards and anyone else within twenty feet. The sauna of the command post became an oven. A handful of grenades came clattering in with the flames, and—B-BOOM!—the cave entrance collapsed in an explosion of rock and dirt.

  Hideki cried out again for everyone to run, but no one was listening anymore. Everyone was screaming and yell
ing and stampeding for the back of the cave. Soldiers pushed civilians out of the way, and wounded men on the floor cried out for help as they were trampled. Hideki pushed the nurses ahead of him toward the back of the cave. Something came pouring down the ventilation shafts above, splashing everyone ahead of him. Hideki recognized the smell from the car that had brought the Japanese photographer to his school.

  Gasoline. The American monsters were pouring gasoline down the ventilation shafts.

  A box full of grenades clattered down through the holes, and Hideki knew what came next. He grabbed an empty metal cabinet that stood against the wall and pulled it down on top of himself and the nearest nurse. The cabinet had just banged down on top of them when—KATHOOM!—the command post became an inferno.

  The explosion of the grenades touched off the ammunition the Japanese army had stored in the cave. The ground beneath Hideki and the nurse rocked like an earthquake. But the metal cabinet stayed on top of them, protecting them from the worst of it. Fwoosh. The nurse next to Hideki screamed, and it was only minutes later that Hideki realized he was screaming too. Through their shrieking, they could hear the metal of the cabinet popping as it twisted and warped in the heat. Hideki and the nurse huddled closer as the heat bore down on them. Hideki’s bare foot touched the metal cabinet, and it burned against his skin like a wood stove.

  With a start, Hideki remembered the grenade in his pocket. How insulated was a ceramic grenade? Would the intense heat set it off? What if he and the nurse had found a safe place in the fiery cave only for his grenade to blow them both to pieces? But there was no place he could throw the grenade now without lifting the cabinet and exposing them to the flames. Hideki curled himself tight around the grenade instead, hoping to shield the nurse from the blast if it went off.

  After what seemed like years, the roar of the fire outside died away, and Hideki and the nurse stopped screaming. Hideki’s throat was ragged and tight, and his whole body still shook with fear, but he was alive. He put a hand to the cabinet wall. It was hot to the touch. He lifted the cabinet with his back instead, putting Rei’s backpack between him and the hot metal.

  No one had survived except Hideki and the girl. The bodies of nurses and soldiers lay all around them. The girl retched at the sight. Hideki didn’t.

  Heaven help me, Hideki thought. I’ve gotten used to it.

  Hideki took the girl by the hand and ran as quick as he could for the exit at the back of the cave.

  The girl’s name was Masako. She had been a student at a girls’ high school in Naha before she and her classmates were conscripted as nurses for the Shikina field hospital.

  “It was terrible,” she told Hideki as they picked their way slowly up a muddy slope in the darkness. They were only going a few hundred yards, to another command post nearby that Masako knew had nurses. But they had waited until night, when it was safer. Masako had decided to come along with Hideki because she had nowhere else to go.

  “At first, it was just scrapes and bruises,” Masako said. “But as the Americans pushed south, we received more and more wounded. We ran out of medicine within the first few weeks. Bandages too. We reused those when we could. It was the nurses’ job to wash the bandages out in the river while American bombs fell all around us. The only other thing we could do was hold the wounded soldiers’ hands and talk to them while they died.”

  So that was what his sister had been doing the whole time too, Hideki thought. If she was still alive.

  Any hope he had to find Kimiko at the next command post was dashed when he and Masako crept through the entrance. It had already been abandoned by the IJA.

  Hideki and Masako split up to search the cave for anything to eat or drink. Hideki took a narrow tunnel away from the main passage and came to a small observation room cut into the side of the hill. He stopped to look through the opening and gasped at what he could see in the distance.

  Shuri Castle was on fire.

  The whole hill was a bright red bonfire in the darkness. The castle’s pillars toppled as its ancient walls collapsed in flame.

  Hideki was numb as he watched Shuri Castle burn. Of course it was on fire. Of course it was destroyed. He’d been a fool to think the Japanese army could defend Okinawa, and a fool to think that Shuri Castle would survive. Everything on Okinawa would burn. A Divine Wind might still come to save Japan, but no kamikaze was coming to save this island. Shuri Castle was gone, and Okinawa was gone with it.

  “Hideki! Look! Food!” Masako cried.

  Hideki’s growling stomach won out over his heartache, and he rushed back to the main cavern. Masako had found a half-empty crate of IJA rations. Food in tin cans. Hideki and Masako had to use bayonets that had been left behind to punch holes in the cans, but it was worth the effort—the tins were filled with delicious pineapple slices. Hideki gulped down two whole cans, making sure to drink every last drop of the sweet pineapple juice.

  He was just getting to work on his third can of pineapples when a squad of Japanese soldiers from another command post came into the cave searching for leftover supplies. They immediately confiscated all the tin cans Hideki and Masako hadn’t opened.

  “Why are you here?” a lieutenant demanded.

  “We came here from the field hospital,” Hideki said. “The Americans attacked and drove us out.”

  The lieutenant nodded. “Well, it’s time for you to both rejoin the army. Come with us.”

  No! Not again! Hideki just wanted to find his sister, not get pulled back into the war. He looked around for some place to run, to hide, but one of the soldiers was already grabbing him and Masako by the arms and dragging them to their feet.

  “This is your island, after all, not ours,” the lieutenant said. “You should be the ones fighting for it.”

  What island? Hideki thought. What was there left to fight for? And who should he be fighting? Hideki hated the Americans for attacking it, and the Japanese for giving them a reason to attack.

  The Japanese soldiers dragged Hideki and Masako to another cave. It wasn’t far away, but it hadn’t yet been discovered by the Americans. This bunker was crammed full of Japanese soldiers, both healthy and wounded, and eight Okinawan children who had taken refuge with them. Hideki and Masako were quickly forgotten, and the food they had found was taken away and given to the soldiers. Hideki fumed, but didn’t say anything. He knew better than to argue.

  “We’ve got to find a way out of here,” Hideki told Masako.

  “Why?” Masako asked. “Isn’t it safer with the soldiers?”

  “It wasn’t very safe in the field hospital, was it?” Hideki pointed out.

  “No, you idiot.”

  It wasn’t Masako who had spoken. It was another girl nearby, a nurse, scolding one of the children. Hideki couldn’t see who the girl was, but there was something about the way she said the word idiot, something in the scolding yet compassionate tone that made his heart skip a beat. His eyes went wide. Could it be?

  Hideki broke away from Masako and flew across the room. Two Japanese soldiers barked at him for squeezing between them, and he almost fell pushing his way through a knot of arguing children, but at last he found her. The nurse had her back to him, tending to a young boy’s scraped knee, and Hideki grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around.

  It was Kimiko!

  “Hideki?” Kimiko gasped, her eyes growing huge.

  “Kimiko!” Hideki cried.

  Hideki couldn’t believe his good fortune. His sister was alive, and he’d found her! After all he’d been through, after all he’d done and all he’d lost, finding Kimiko felt like the sun emerging after weeks of rain, and he basked in its warmth.

  Hideki hugged his sister tight. After a long minute, Kimiko held Hideki at arm’s length and gazed at him like they hadn’t seen each other in years. Hideki wondered what he must look like: stick-thin, barefoot, hair a wet, tangled mess, wearing an oversized Japanese uniform. Did he look years older, the way Yoshio had? Kimiko definitely looked older. Mor
e adult. Her round face had lengthened, and her full cheeks had flattened. She looked weary and wary, like she had seen too much to be shocked by anything anymore. Wiser too.

  Kimiko wore her nurse’s uniform: a gray Western-style pleated dress with short sleeves and a wide white sailor collar. Pouches for bandages and medicine hung from a wide black fabric belt worn high above her waist, and a white nurse’s hat covered most of her black hair. Just a hint of the white streak still showed.

  Kimiko looked as happy to see Hideki as he felt, but then her face fell and she smacked him hard on the head.

  “You idiot,” Kimiko told him. “You got here just in time to die with the rest of us.”

  “Ow! Don’t! I hurt my head!” Hideki cried.

  Kimiko felt gently in his hair for the wound and found his stitches. “What did you do?” she asked.

  “What do you mean die with the rest of you?” Hideki asked, deliberately ignoring her question.

  “The Japanese soldiers here are going to attack the Americans tomorrow morning, and we’re the first wave,” Kimiko told him. “They’re going to use the Okinawan children as human shields.”

  Hideki’s heart cracked into pieces and fell apart. He sat down on an empty ammunition box and stared at the boys and girls at the back of the cave. They were all much younger than him, around five to ten years old. They couldn’t know what was coming and couldn’t do anything about it if they did. To think about these little boys and girls, after all they had already lost, being thrown to the American guns … Hideki closed his eyes and cried without tears.

  “What are you even doing here?” Kimiko asked him.

  “I came to rescue you,” Hideki told her.

  “Rescue me? I was about to rescue myself! And now I have to rescue my little brother too.”

  “You don’t have to rescue me!” Hideki protested. “I’m rescuing you!”

  Kimiko’s expression shifted from exasperated to suspicious. She squinted and looked him up and down.