It turned out to be a lovely morning, all blue sky, just enough breeze. The other four included a boy-faced former paratrooper, two local Hawaiian vets from the looks of them, and one grizzled gooney bird dogface—most of them likely a year or two younger than he and Jock, though only the younger local looked it. They talked among themselves.

Jock talked to Lett. Jock was from a coastal town in Oregon: Coos Bay. He thought volunteering to fight would beat working in the mill. Jock said he knew a Marine from Ohio like Lett who bought it on Okinawa, mortar hit his hole, they never found one shred of him. Lett knew a guy from Oregon who took a direct tree burst in the Hürtgen Forest, and Jock joked that the man was probably a logger, the way this world worked, and indeed he was. They didn’t laugh, though.

“How did you get the special invite?” Lett asked Jock. “It’s not like they looked you up at the Royal Hawaiian.”

“Oh, no. My trouble first started finding me in Manila. Leave wasn’t helping me, see. I’d roam the countryside on benders. Then we got transferred. It was here in Hawaii Territory where they found me. Honolulu. I was hunkered down in Schofield Barracks stockade, starting to worry they were going to throw me in the sort of hospital you don’t get out of. The VA. You hear stories.”

“I heard them,” Lett said. “But now look at us, me and you. We’re doing well enough.” He added a slap on Jock’s shoulder.

“We sure are.”

They were doing so well that they compared their memories of the different ways the putrefying enemy dead reeked, the German as opposed to the Japanese because of their different gear, and then it was how dogfaces in the ETO smelled versus gyrenes in the Pacific, wool versus twill. It was quite the icebreaker.

“We on da Belt Road,” the soldier at the tailgate said, the local Hawaiian kid. Lett could tell they had headed south. The old highway ran along the coast, and long stretches of black lava rock fields replaced the barren, wind-swept rises of shrubs and boulders and scrubby grass. The black rock spread down to the water, jagged and punctuated with holes and crevices. “Heading for da big volcano,” the kid added, though no one was asking. “Mauna Loa.”

Seeing all the rock didn’t seem to help Jock’s mood. His right foot started tapping.

“We’re going around the other side,” said the other Hawaiian. He had a Japanese face but sounded as American as Gary Cooper. Lett wondered if he was kotonk instead of bulahead but wasn’t about to ask.