“I hope you’re still around,” he said after that calculation, all of which took maybe a second and a half. He wondered if he ought to add anything, and decided not to. It said what needed saying.

Susie cocked her head to one side. “I kind of hope I am, too,” she said. “But you never can tell.”

She didn’t yell, I look out for Number One first, last, and always, but she might as well have. It wasn’t anything Oscar didn’t know. Drop Susie anywhere and she’d land on her feet. That was one more way she was like a cat.

She did the dishes as well as she could with cold water and without soap. Neither she nor Oscar had come down with anything noxious, so it was good enough. He dried. He’d become domesticated enough for that. As she handed him the last plate, she asked, “You want one for the road?”

“Sure,” he said eagerly, and she laughed-she’d known he would. They always got on well in bed. This time seemed special even for them. Only afterwards, while he wished for a cigarette, did Oscar figure out why. This was, or might have been, the last time.

Susie leaned over in the narrow bed and kissed him. “Trying to make me want to stick around, are you?” she said, so he didn’t have to worry about Was it good for you, too? tonight. Not that he was going to worry about much right then anyhow. He rolled over and fell asleep.

When he got up the next morning, she was already out the door, heading for her secretarial job in Honolulu. No good-bye kiss, then, and no early morning quickie, either. But a note-Good luck! XOXOXO-made him hope she’d still be here when he came back from the north shore.

Breakfast was cold rice with a little sugar sprinkled on it. It wasn’t corn flakes-and it sure as hell wasn’t bacon and eggs-but it would have to do. He’d just finished when Charlie Kaapu banged on his door.

“Ready?” the hapa-Hawaiian demanded.

“Yeah!” Oscar said. They grinned at each other, then hurried down to Waikiki Beach.

As usual since the occupation, surf fishermen were already casting their bait upon the waters. They moved aside to give Charlie and Oscar room enough to get their sailboards into the Pacific. For a wonder, they also stopped casting till the two boards were out of range.

“How many times have you just missed getting hooked by the ear when you went out?” Oscar asked.

“Missed? This big haole reeled me in once. Bastard was all set to gut me for a marlin till he saw my beak wasn’t big enough,” Charlie Kaapu said.

Oscar snorted. “Waste time, fool!” They both laughed.

Once they got out past the breakers, they set their sails. Oscar was used to sailing out a lot farther than that, to get to a stretch of the Pacific that hadn’t been fished to death. Instead of running with the wind today, he swung the sail at a forty-five degree angle to the wind and skimmed along parallel to the southern coast of Oahu. Charlie’s sailboard glided beside his.

“You want to talk about waste time, talk about fishing,” Charlie said.

“Since when don’t you like to eat?” Oscar said.

“Eating is fine. Fishing is work. Would be worse if I didn’t get to surf-ride there and back again.” That qualifier was as far as Charlie would go. Oscar knew the native Hawaiians had fished with nets and spears. If that hadn’t taken the patience of Job, he didn’t know what would. But Charlie, like too many Hawaiians and hapa-Hawaiians these days, was willing to work only on what he enjoyed, and was convinced haoles would run rings around him everywhere else.

They sailed past Diamond Head. These days, an enormous Rising Sun floated from the dead volcano. So much for the Kingdom of Hawaii, Oscar thought. He didn’t say anything about that. Charlie Kaapu had no use at all for King Stanley Laanui, though he thought the redheaded Queen Cynthia was a knockout. From the pictures Oscar had seen of her, he did, too.

The empty road struck Oscar like a blow. There was still traffic in Honolulu, even if it was foot traffic instead of automobiles. Here, there was just-nobody. No tourists heading up to see the Mormon temple near Laie. No Japanese dentist off to visit his mom and dad at the little general store they ran. No nothing, not hardly.

Charlie saw the same thing. “Whole island seems dead,” he said, and spat into the Pacific.

“Yeah.” Oscar nodded. The otherworldly pace at which things happened when you were under sail only added to the impression. The landscape changed only very slowly. The emptiness didn’t seem to change at all. And then it did: Oscar and Charlie passed a long column of Japanese troops marching east. They passed them slowly, too, for the Japs marched almost as fast as they sailed. A couple of Japs pointed out to sea as the sailboards went by. Oscar said, “I’m almost even glad to see those guys, you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” Charlie said. “I ain’t glad to see them any which way. We’re lucky the bastards aren’t shooting at us.”

Oscar’s head whipped back toward the coast. If he saw Japs dropping to one knee or even raising their rifles, he was going to jump in the water. They’d been known to kill people for the fun of it. But the soldiers in the funny-colored khaki uniforms just kept trudging along. After another moment, Oscar figured out what made the Japanese uniforms seem funny: they were of a shade different from the U.S.

Army khaki he was used to. That was all.

Slowly-but not slowly enough after Charlie’s comment-the soldiers fell astern of the sailboards. “We don’t want to go ashore where they can catch up with us,” Charlie said, and Oscar nodded once more.

When they rounded Makapu Point, Oscar saw that the lighthouse there had been bombed. That pained him. The light had been welcoming and warning ships for a long time. To see it ruined… was another sign of how things had changed.

Oahu itself changed on the windward coast. Oscar and Charlie got spatters of rain almost at once, and then more than spatters. It rained all the time here. The air felt thick and hot and wet, the way it did back East on the mainland. The sea began heaving erratically, like a restless beast.

Everything he could see on the shore was lush and green. The Koolau Range rose steeply from the sea. The volcanic rocks would have been jagged, but jungle softened their outlines; they might almost have been covered in emerald velvet. Remembering a paleontology class, he pointed to the mountains and said, “They look like giant teeth from an Iguanodon.”

Charlie Kaapu looked not at the Koolau Range but at him. “What the hell you talkin’ ’bout?” he asked. Oscar decided the world could live without his similes.

He quickly rediscovered why they called this the Windward Coast: the wind kept trying to blow him and Charlie ashore. Long stretches of the coastline were rocky, not sandy. He had to keep fighting to claw his way out to sea.

Kaneohe Peninsula was the last obstacle he and Charlie got by before putting in for the evening. They barely got by it, too. If they had to put in there, they could have, at least as far as the beach went. But what had been a Marine base was manned these days by Japanese soldiers. Oscar had no desire to get to know them better.

Wrecked American flying boats still lay along the beach like so many unburied bodies. None of them had engines on their wings. Various other bits were missing from this machine or that one. As the Japs had all over Hawaii, they’d taken whatever they could use.

Light was fading when Charlie pointed to a small stretch of sand beyond Kaneohe. Oscar nodded. They both guided their sailboards up onto the beach. “Whew!” Oscar said, sprawling on the sand. “I’m whipped.”

“Hard work,” Charlie agreed; the phrase, translated literally from the Japanese, had become part of the local language. “Don’t have much in the way of fish, either.”