The Bomb Read online

  Without the coconut they could not survive. There was little or no fresh water on the northern low atolls. After the pint of coconut water was drained, the nuts were split and the immature meat was fed to the pigs, dogs, and chickens. Food was never wasted. For centuries they had lived off what the island and the sea gave them.

  But it was always the coconut that was the true staff of life. The palm bark, scraped to a powder, would stop open wounds from bleeding. The root, mashed to a pulp, would stop a toothache. In his prayers, Grandfather Jonjen often talked about the amazing coconut.

  The only other usable tree was the bop, the strange pandanus, which Jonjen said was one of the oldest plants on earth. The female pandanus fruit looked like a pineapple. Jelly from it could be dried and used for food on long ocean voyages. In ancient times even sails were made of pandanus. The hard surface of the long, dry, ribbonlike leaves made perfect roofs and matting. Sorry often chewed the inner end of the pandanus fruit, the orange-colored starchy pulp. The pollen from male flowers, mixed in coconut oil, made a love potion.

  And Grandfather Jonjen also remembered the bop in his prayers, asking for the tree's good health.

  ***

  As soon as they'd piled the coconuts near the cookhouse, Sorry picked out a spear from his father's collection and returned to the barrier reef. He could have walked along the lagoon shore, but the fish there were usually smaller and harder to jab. And he wanted to get back to the magazine. The ocean side provided easier targets, though it was dangerous when the rollers were high—gathering far out, crashing on the lip of the solid reef, sending up salt spray, flooding white foam in, then sucking it out. Some days the sea warned with deafening noise, telling the islanders not to enter it. Other days, it smiled and welcomed visitors.

  The sea had been both his friend and his enemy from the time he could just crawl over the sand. Elders always explained to children about the sea, said to watch it and listen to it, hear it speak of love and speak of danger.

  Sorry believed his father had died somewhere along the barrier reef. Badina had not been in a canoe that day, fishing in the lagoon. He'd taken a spear and headed for the reef. That much was known. Sorry believed a shark had gotten him, probably a vicious tiger, while it swam in the inshore waters looking for a finned target. His body was never found. Sorry was always very careful when he speared in the reef waters.

  This day the waves were moderate, and he went beneath where they were breaking, swam under them, and came up in clear water, with blue coral heads and waving sea grass beneath him. Rainbows of fish were down there, going in and out of the coral valleys, caverns, and passages. There were wrasse and grouper and blacktail snappers and the usual smaller schools of pink and yellow and green. He saw a moray eel ducking into a crevice, there to await a meal.

  He was wearing a pair of homemade goggles, eyepieces he'd carved from hardwood with glass lenses from a washed-up bottle, broken and shaped by rubbing on coral. Diving, he could keep his eyes open. The goggles were attached to his head by sennit, palm twine. It was made by rolling coconut fiber between the hand and thigh, forming a thread an eighth of an inch thick. Sennit was strong enough to hold a sixty-pound tuna. By old law, women could not roll sennit. He'd rolled yards of it.

  He floated, barely pumping his feet, waiting for a chance to shove the sharp spear into a log grouper. Finally, one nosed within range, and he got it just behind the head. The wrist noose from the spear tightened as the grouper thrashed and pulled him deeper. He'd speared there before, and now he planted his feet on a smooth ledge of coral, jerking his head out of water to breathe. The grouper tugged and thrashed but finally gave up, and Sorry towed it back to shore.

  He could not remember a time when he didn't swim. The lagoon and barrier-reef waters were second homes.

  Out again in the surf, toward the drop-off, he spotted a bigger one, a grouper of ten or eleven pounds that would give the family two days of meals. It was coming up out of the murk, paying no attention to the shadow of Sorry's body above. It swam on up to a party of butterfly fish and gobies, set on having a meal.

  The spear punched a hole in its side to the rear of the gills, spilling blood out in a red cloud. Sorry heaved back. Then out of the corner of his eye he saw a great blue-gray shape coming fast.

  Mako, he knew, fastest shark in the Pacific.

  A shark that might or might not attack. The lemon and the nurse and the blackfin and the whitetip and the sand shark were seldom problems. The hammerhead, the gray reef shark, and most dangerous of all, the tiger, drove divers out of the water, hearts pounding. But no one could ever tell what was on the tricky mako's mind.

  Today it rolled its pointed head to take the grouper and spear in one bite.

  Rather than be pulled down into the darkness where the mako lived, Sorry slipped the wrist noose off and swam back to the surface, soon returning home with the first fish. He could easily make up for the loss tomorrow at the same spot, shark or no.

  The living reef and all the life around it would be there tomorrow, as it had been for more years than man could count, Sorry knew. Tiny animals made the coral from seawater lime, then died, leaving their empty dwellings to be filled with hidden food. Turn a stone, and snapping shrimp could be heard. Lift seaweed and find a spider crab. Small octopus lived all over the reefs. They writhed and wrapped tentacles around Sorry's head and throat until he killed them with a bite.

  ***

  At sunset, often the most beautiful time of day, Sorry was again looking at the magazine. He couldn't get enough of it.

  Grandfather Jonjen, sitting nearby in the sand, watching him, asked, "What do you see in there, Sorry?"

  "I see things I didn't know existed. Look at this building. See how tall it is." He showed Jonjen the building. "Did you know about places like this?"

  "I've heard..."

  "And would you like to go inside them and look around?"

  Jonjen shook his head. "I don't think so."

  He was hopeless, Sorry thought. Grown very old on this small island, seldom having left the atoll lately, all he could do was read his Bible every day and find something in it to talk about on Sunday.

  Sorry turned the page and pointed to a train. "This," he said. "Would you like to ride on it?"

  "I don't think so," said Jonjen, yawning.

  He was hopeless. He still had his tools from the old days—shark's-tooth awls and shell knives. He had four-inch trolling hooks made of pearl shell. They were fifty years old. The young men were gathering modern steel tools and fishing tackle from the outside world, but not Jonjen.

  Jonjen could walk out into a grove and weave a green basket or hat from the fronds within minutes: the old ways. Sorry could do that, too, but he didn't plan to practice the old ways.

  He loved his jimman but didn't want to be like him.

  Two days later, just before the atoll council was to meet for the first time since the Japanese occupation ended, his jimman demanded that they talk. Sorry said he had bad feelings about becoming an alab and sitting with the council, men twice or three times his age. They would laugh at him, scorn him, he believed.

  Jonjen said, "You must."

  "Unless you are sick or insane," his mother added. "You are neither, Sorry."

  "I'll sit beside you in the beginning," Jonjen promised.

  During the occupation, the council had met only twice, both times over property disputes on the outer islands. It met only when a decision was needed.

  "I won't know what to say," Sorry insisted.

  "You'll learn," Jonjen said. "It is usually simple. You think about it, whatever it is, then vote what you think."

  "It's your time, Sorry," his mother said firmly. "When you become fourteen, you must use your mind as well as your muscles."

  "Yes, Sorry, you must do that," Tara said.

  They were out by the cookhouse. Sorry's mother was making lukop, a pudding, from jekaro. The sap had many uses. Now and then she mixed it with grated coconut to make a c
andy, amedama. It could also be boiled into syrup to pour over taro.

  Sorry stuck his finger in the wooden bowl and raked out a daub of the sweet stuff. "But, Grandfather, if you are there to tell me how to vote, I'm not needed..."

  "I'll go with you five or six times."

  Sorry licked his fingers, blew out a breath, and shook his head.

  His mother said, "Your father would be so proud to see you there."

  Sorry sighed. Why couldn't they understand how foolish and ignorant he'd feel sitting there with the older men, afraid to open his mouth if he did have an opinion? And the idea that he'd suddenly become another person simply because he'd turned fourteen was wrong. He hadn't changed overnight.

  He looked at his mother, at Tara, and then at his jimman. "I'll do it jointly, and only if we tell everyone that we are both alabs but will vote as one."

  There. That would make the ghost of his father, somewhere along the barrier reef, proud and happy.

  Grandfather Jonjen allowed a narrow smile.

  On January 19, 1941, President Roosevelt approved research toward the making of an atom bomb.

  6

  Nantil was an island five miles to the northwest, between Bikini and Aoeman. It was about one mile long and a quarter mile wide. Sorry had gone there with other boys five or six times, sometimes staying overnight, mainly to get away from home.

  Today he was going alone to celebrate his coming of age and his assuming responsibility for the family. It was an island tradition.

  Many atoll males had done this over the years, going away to one or another atoll island for a night or two simply to be alone for a while, not see the same faces as every day, not hear the same voices. They'd gone to places where they could think about a lot of things. His father had done it off and on. Once, after an argument with Sorry's mother, Badina went to Bokabata, up in the northwest corner, and stayed for a week.

  You could walk very slowly from one end of Bikini to the other in less than an hour. There wasn't a single secret that could be kept overnight in all that closeness, and it was a wonder there wasn't a fistfight every so often in or between families. Yet Sorry couldn't recall any. Maybe it was the soft air and the quiet in the necklace of white-and-green islands that kept an even-tempered peace. But sometimes the closeness was overwhelming.

  Nantil had never been permanently inhabited by humans, so far as was known. It had a nice grove of palms and about sixty scattered pandanus. Sorry liked its barrier reef's crevices and holes, dwellings for the clawless lobsters. He'd dug in the sand for turtle eggs. The usual fish population was there as well.

  The moon would be full this night for the second time since the Japanese killed themselves, and in midmorning he loaded some bed matting into one of the small canoes along with a piece of fish netting, two spears, and the magazine. Lokileni had made the pandanus pouch he'd asked for to protect it against the weather. The magazine was his prize possession. He slid the canoe into the water, pulled up the sail, and headed for Nantil. The wind was steady and moderate; the canoe skated through wavelets. It was usually a paddling craft, so he'd rigged the sail himself.

  Marshall Islands double-enders, with their high, narrow hulls and arched outriggers, were known throughout the South Seas for speed and handling, riding out sudden storms, and spilling wind from the cloth sail. The island had eight big canoes, capable of high-seas sailing, twenty-five or thirty feet in length, with twenty-foot masts. It took two or three men to sail one. Then there were three smaller canoes, for in-shore lagoon travel, that Sorry could handle alone.

  His father had taught him how to fish and sail; his jimman had taught him the stare and how to navigate the way Polynesians and Micronesians had done centuries ago. They used stick charts, mattang, made from palm-frond ribs bound together with sennit, and plotted the islands, working with a knowledge of wave patterns, of how they slapped against the bow of a canoe.

  Jonjen had told him the stories he'd heard as a boy. The old religion was tied to the stars, planets, the sea, the sun. When a long voyage was scheduled, hundreds of miles, the warriors prayed to their god, Ani, for fair winds and safety. They would wait for days, until their priest gave them Ani's blessing.

  Sometimes Sorry imagined himself back in those days, sailing with nine other strong men in canoes fifty feet long, five or six canoes abreast, singing war songs, going far, far away; not returning for months. Skimming along now, he was thinking of those men in their great canoes, bound for other lands. How long would it be before he could go, too?

  He reached Nantil in less than an hour. Going home, against the wind, would take longer. Without humans around, birds owned the island. Reef herons, terns, tattlers, black and brown noddies, red-tailed tropic birds, and gulls rose from the sands, squawking as he pulled the canoe up above the tideline. There were hundreds of nests in the sand and brush.

  He shouted a yokwe at them, knowing that if he got too near any of their nests they'd attack. From other trips to Nantil and some sharp pecks on the head, he'd learned to avoid the nests if possible. Once, the birds had bloodied him.

  The haks, the black frigates, with seven-foot wingspans, were dangerous at nesting time. They were out feeding when he arrived, soaring over the sea with their wings held motionless, waiting for other birds to dive on fish, then robbing the catch. They didn't have web feet and didn't land on water.

  He had in mind combing the beach and looking for shells, looking at the magazine again, picking coconuts to take back, and then going after lobster on the barrier reef when night fell and the moon was overhead. He was alone and celebrating his manhood and could do whatever he wanted.

  There'd been a tragedy on Nantil the past year. An Ijjirik boy—August, a year younger than Sorry—had come over to spend the day, along with an older cousin, Jasua. It was Jasua who told everyone what had happened.

  Arriving, they saw a big, round metal object washed up on the sands. It had horns.

  Jasua told August not to touch it. He thought it had something to do with the war. August didn't listen, and after Jasua walked off, he pounded on one of the triggering horns with a giant clamshell. Jasua said the explosion knocked him down where he was, several hundred yards away. There wasn't even a piece of August to bury. He had tampered with one of the Japanese mines that had slipped its mooring on the bottom of the lagoon.

  Poor August. Poor Nantil. The boom was heard on Bikini.

  Until today Sorry hadn't been back to Nantil, and he had told no one except family he was going. He didn't think anyone else had visited recently, either. The people of the Marshalls, especially the older ones, like Yolo, believed in evil spirits. They saw the death as being caused by an evil spirit, as if August had heard a yilak say, "Pound on the horn."

  Since no one had come near Nantil in almost a year, there were many coconuts on the ground, sprouting palm blossoms, as well as many green ones in the trees. The past season's pandanus clusters had fallen and were rotting in the sand.

  There were harsh bird cries, the usual palm flutters, and the rumble of the ocean at the barrier reef. No shouts from Bikini children at play, no sounds of a canoemaker hollowing a log, no murmur of the women as they plaited pandanus. He'd left all that behind to be alone.

  He plunged into the lagoon and rolled like a porpoise, swam out a bit, then turned back toward shore. In the waist-high water he could see the garden below. Oarweed and waving, green sea fan, bright blue moss and red sea cucumbers, scarlet and yellow sponges, fish in every color.

  Then he walked along the lagoon beach and found things washed ashore from the American ships that had freed the islands: empty boxes, empty bottles, a wooden chair, and many other objects he could not identify. Similar things had washed up on Bikini beach after the ships departed. He made a pile near the canoe to take home and share. The chair would go to his family, joining their chest of drawers. He spent almost two hours walking the shore and adding to the pile.

  After that he looked for shells. There were a lot more n
ow than on his past trip to Nantil. There were moon shells and tiger cowries and cat's eyes and helmets, and he gathered them in a canvas navy bag that had floated to the beach. Those would be for Lokileni. He found three empty conch shells to give away. Scavengers, conch lived on the sandy bottom and moved slowly, in jerks. Tiny crabs had made homes in the empty shells.

  As he walked he thought about the last conversation he'd had with Tara. They often talked. She'd said to wait until he was eighteen to leave the island, then find a way to Kwajalein or Majuro, get a job of any kind, and eventually go on to Hawaii, finish schooling, and enter college. That would be his goal, he decided. Four more years. Tara hoped the war would be over by then. But who would head the family? That bothered him.

  When the sun was highest, he climbed for green coconuts, drank their water, ate some pandanus fruit, and got into the shade to look, once again, at the magazine. By now, he'd probably looked at it a hundred times. Pages were ragged around the edges.

  Each time, he'd found something new to study and think about. There was the laughing Japanese boy on a sled in that expanse of white he'd learned was called snow; there was another boy riding a two-wheeled machine on a country road. Tara had told him about machines.

  Then he came to war pictures. Soldiers marching and aircraft flying and ships spouting black smoke and shooting big guns. He could not understand how the same people who were having fun in the snow and riding the machine were also fighting a war.

  Confused about the habits of the people of ailīnkan, he finally fell asleep, thinking of August and what had happened several hundred feet away. There was still a crater in the sand where the mine had exploded at the high-tide line. The sand there was black.

  In June 1942, the Manhattan District, a U.S. scientific-military organization, was established to continue nuclear fission research, which might lead toward the making of an atom bomb.