One Second To Watch Out
"One second to watch out, your whole life if you eat it. . ." -from the song "Samba/Bomber: Akuma No Mi" lyrics and translation from the site "Destination: Paradise"
Chapter 2: No Smoking
The room where the garbage incinerator is can be surprisingly cosy provided you bring the right friends along. My friends are small, and like to travel in packs.
I lit one up. This was probably the only time in the day I'd have to myself, between classes, exercises, duties, and of course, the various punishments. I think it was potato peeling today. Life on a marine base doesn't give you a lot of leisure time, especially when you're a new recruit on the bottom of the ladder. But at least I could have a few minutes alone here, in this filthy concrete lump in the middle of the woods, to have a smoke and feel my stress burning up with the tobacco and drifting away in the wind.
"Ah-ha! Here you are!"
I groaned. She'd found me. So much for even a few minutes alone.
"What do you think you're doing?" Her eyes shot daggers from behind her dark-rimmed glasses. "Don't you know what'll happen if you get caught again?"
"I won't get caught. They just dumped the garbage in, lit it and left. Nobody's gonna notice a little extra smoke coming out of here."
"And what if somebody comes back to dump something else, huh?" She was flushed, whether from anger or from the heat, I don't know. Or maybe she'd come running all the way out here from the barracks when she noticed I was gone, so that she could have the satisfaction of catching me in the act. Tashigi was the best friend a guy could have, but sometimes she could be pretty self-righteous.
"These are contraband, you know!" she continued. "All Marine bases are smoke-free!"
"When I'm in charge that'll be the first rule to go."
"You'll never BE in charge if you can't obey the rules! You've already gotten our barracks more substance-related demirits than any other crewman in Marine history! What would your mother say if she knew?"
"She'd probably be proud." She wouldn't have named me Smoker if she'd wanted me to grow up sucking on mineral water and celery, that's for damn sure.
"You're impossible!"
"So give up." I leaned back against the cement wall and tried to look nonchalant.
"I won't give up! You're my friend, and I won't let you go to an early grave with holes in your lungs!" she cried passionately in the voice of someone who paid far too much attention to public-service placards as a child.
"Look," I said, trying to calm her down. If she kept yelling like this, somebody WOULD come in. Besides, maybe it wasn't ALL sanctimony and petty obedience. This was really bothering her. "If it makes you feel better, I'm not even smoking that much." I pulled out my last pack. "I'm rationing until our next free weekend. I've been only having one a day. It's not like I'm standing here with a couple of giant cigars in my mouth."
With the same agility that she's usually only able to draw on in fencing practice, she snatched them out of my hand and whipped them into the incinerator. Time seemed to stop for a second.
Tashigi grinned smugly. "There, I guess that's the only way to keep you from -- hey! Get out of there, you idiot!"
"But they're burning!"
"YOU'LL burn if you crawl in there after them!" She forcefully hauled my upper torso back out of the incinerator.
"Get your hands off!" I snapped, shoving her back. "That was my property, you, you--"
I punched her in the face. She wasn't expecting it and went down with a bloody nose. I stalked off, leaving her there trying to staunch it with her uniform, fantasizing about tossing HER into the incinerator for a little while.
I spent most of the afternoon waiting for some sergeant or other to come around and load more punishments on me, but it never happened. Eventually I decided that Tashigi must not have reported me. That figured, she'd rather suffer in silence than bring down more demerits on our barracks.
As it turned out, I wasn't scheduled for potato peeling that evening after all. Instead, I was assigned as a pack mule for some visiting courier who was too dignified to carry his own luggage.
Once I saw him, I revised that opinion. I don't think he could have carried his luggage if he wanted too -- he was so skinny he looked about to snap like a dry twig. I don't know how he managed to work his way through the grunt ranks up to a level that didn't require him to do anything. All he had with him was a government-issue Secret Documents Satchel, but it was so full it was heavier than you'd expect, and I think even that would have given him problems if he hadn't had me to dump it on.
"Be careful with that!" he whined at me in a voice like a mosquito's as I picked the satchel up roughly. It was only a few hours since my last cigarette, but somehow the knowledge that there wouldn't be anymore made my crave them more than usual, and the entire world was starting to irritate me.
This courier was visiting the general -- the top general, a guy I'd never seen except from a distance while he was making speeches that I didn't listen to. The courier left me sitting in the anteroom with the satchel, giving instructions to bring it in when he called for me. I wasn't familiar with how secret documents are transported at the time, but after gaining a few ranks I know that that courier definitely shouldn't have left me alone with anything that top secret. He should have had the thing chained to his wrist, in fact. It was a lucky thing for me in the long run that he didn't, though.
Sitting out there as the interminable minutes crept by, I began to fidget. I thought about Tashigi. Sure, I'd kicked my share of asses, but those were with flat-out jerks who deserved it. Today was the first time I'd hit a friend.
But she deserved it too, I reminded myself. Because of her, I'll have to go cold turkey for a week! The thought was horrifying.
Still, it bothered me. I should have waited until she was ready, I thought. Smacking her out of nowhere like that -- it wasn't a fair fight.
I tried to think of something else. Unfortunately, emptying my mind just made me thinks of cigarettes, and there was no way to get those.
Then, I had an idea, a ridiculous idea but one that stuck in my mind as though it were anchored there. Lots of these upper-rank officers smoke. So where would they hide their contraband? Someplace nobody else was supposed to look! Like a top-secret-documents satchel, for instance! The more I thought about it, the more my brain convinced me that there MUST be a pack hidden in there.
I decided it couldn't hurt just to take a look.
I eased the latch open, as slowly as I could stand, and peered inside. Nothing but a thick sheaf of papers. Maps and battle plans. Surely there had to be something else! I shuffled through the papers, getting more and more desperate, and then I found it.
Fruit!
I had to be guarding the satchel of the ONE general in the world who preferred a fruit snack to cigarettes. Of all the miserable, lousy luck.
It was a stupid thing to do in retrospect, but if it wasn't smokes, it was at least something to put in my mouth. So I ate the fruit myself. It tasted terrible too, like something that had been left in the oven a few hours too long.
I wiped my mouth and carefully re-fastened the satchel. He wouldn't notice. He'd just think he'd forgotten to bring it.
"You! Come here, crewman, and bring that satchel!" I leapt to my feet. Hadn't even heard him opening the door. I was fervently glad that I'd gotten the thing closed.
I entered the office. I've never been one to suffer from excessive respect of authority figures, but I'll admit, actually being in the general's presence made my stomach flutter and my palms sweat. Tashigi would have said it was because of his aura of command. I'd describe it more as his ability to crush me like a gnat. My hands were shaking from nerves.
Then again, maybe it was just the nicotine withdrawal.
Dammit, Tashigi!
I placed the satchel on the desk, trying hard to convey nonchalance and respectful nonentity at the same time. I noticed the half-full ashtray by the general's right arm. No smoking on the base. Yeah, right.
"Well, then, let's see this thing." the general said, opening the satchel and leafing through the papers. "Where is it?"
"It should be right there in the bottom."
"I can't find it! What's all this garbage?" barked the general, ripping out the sheets of parchment and tossing them on the floor.
"Oh, dummy plans, a red herring, you know." the courier explained. "In case of a theft, the thieves would take that which appeared to have value, not our real cargo."
"Well it didn't work, you bloody idiot!" the general roared, his face turning crimson as he turned the satchel upside-down and shook it, letting the last few papers flutter out. "The blasted Mokumoku fruit isn't IN here!"
Oh, shit.
"But. but I don't understand!" the courier stammered. "It was in here when I arrived! I checked! Where could it have gone in --"
They both turned to look at the crewman who was trying very hard not to be part of the room. As if my grave wasn't well dug enough already, I burped up some of the air I'd swallowed along with the fruit. A plume of smoke rose up from my mouth and hovered in the air.
When the next day dawned, I'd already been swabbing out the officers' latrines (or as they say, "washroom") since four A.M. Two hours of punishment down, about two decades or so to go.
"Smoker? Are you in here?" came the familiar voice. I felt a little pang of conscience seeing that bandage across her nose.
"Yes, and if you want to find me any time in the next five years, you can just come back to the same place. I'll be here." I grunted. "Don't slip. The floor is wet."
She slipped anyway.
"I got you something." Tashigi explained, getting to her feet. She held it out to me. "They said that after eating that fruit, smoking won't have any effect on your health, and anyway I do owe you some--"
"You got me cigarettes?" I said incredulously, looking at her in disbelief. "How you get these? Weren't you worried about getting caught and spoiling your perfect record? You didn't sneak them into the base hidden up your--"
"Don't be ridiculous! I bought some of Morgan's."
Ah, Morgan. The base dealer, at least for younger recruits. If you could pay his crazy jacked up prices, which I couldn't, and I was surprised that Tashigi could have. I said as much.
"Well, it cost a lot of my money from home, but -- it was wrong of me to throw your cigarettes into the fire, even if I do disapprove of it. I mean, as a friend, I wanted to convince you not to do it anymore, but I should have respected your property. And now because of my actions, you're being punished so much. I owe you an apology, but I hope - I hope I don't lose your friendship because of this."
"Forget about it." I said. "It's not so bad. They can punish me all they want, but they can't take THIS away-" I turned one arm into billows of smoke, which shocked her even if she had heard about it. "- and this will be one hell of an advantage for a Marine in the long run. Anyway, all you really need to apologize for is burning my cigarettes. I ate the fruit on my own. Hell, I'm the one who owes you an apology - I was really out of line, losing it like that, I shouldn't have punched you --"
"No! No, don't apologize for that!" she said hastily. "I'm glad you did it."
"What?" This is new.
"Well, I mean, not that I want you to do it again or anything. But a lot of the guys here wouldn't have done it."
"Yeah, I'm just a loose cannon, huh?"
"No, my point is, they wouldn't have hit me because I'm a girl."
"So? That's stupid. You're not an invalid or something. A girl can take a punch as well as a guy can, especially a girl who's gonna be a Marine. What? Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Oh, no reason. Here, let me give you a hand with that. If I help between my other duties, maybe you can finished before midnight." She looked oddly happy for some reason. I wouldn't have thought that a willingness to sock you when the situation called for it would be anybody's criterion in choosing a friend, but Tashigi is no ordinary person, and neither, I guess, am I.
She ended up getting her first demerits ever shortly after that when the general himself walked in. Until then, neither of us had thought about the fact that she wasn't supposed to be in the male officers' washroom.
I don't know which of them blushed redder.
End of Chapter 2
"One second to watch out, your whole life if you eat it. . ." -from the song "Samba/Bomber: Akuma No Mi" lyrics and translation from the site "Destination: Paradise"
Chapter 2: No Smoking
The room where the garbage incinerator is can be surprisingly cosy provided you bring the right friends along. My friends are small, and like to travel in packs.
I lit one up. This was probably the only time in the day I'd have to myself, between classes, exercises, duties, and of course, the various punishments. I think it was potato peeling today. Life on a marine base doesn't give you a lot of leisure time, especially when you're a new recruit on the bottom of the ladder. But at least I could have a few minutes alone here, in this filthy concrete lump in the middle of the woods, to have a smoke and feel my stress burning up with the tobacco and drifting away in the wind.
"Ah-ha! Here you are!"
I groaned. She'd found me. So much for even a few minutes alone.
"What do you think you're doing?" Her eyes shot daggers from behind her dark-rimmed glasses. "Don't you know what'll happen if you get caught again?"
"I won't get caught. They just dumped the garbage in, lit it and left. Nobody's gonna notice a little extra smoke coming out of here."
"And what if somebody comes back to dump something else, huh?" She was flushed, whether from anger or from the heat, I don't know. Or maybe she'd come running all the way out here from the barracks when she noticed I was gone, so that she could have the satisfaction of catching me in the act. Tashigi was the best friend a guy could have, but sometimes she could be pretty self-righteous.
"These are contraband, you know!" she continued. "All Marine bases are smoke-free!"
"When I'm in charge that'll be the first rule to go."
"You'll never BE in charge if you can't obey the rules! You've already gotten our barracks more substance-related demirits than any other crewman in Marine history! What would your mother say if she knew?"
"She'd probably be proud." She wouldn't have named me Smoker if she'd wanted me to grow up sucking on mineral water and celery, that's for damn sure.
"You're impossible!"
"So give up." I leaned back against the cement wall and tried to look nonchalant.
"I won't give up! You're my friend, and I won't let you go to an early grave with holes in your lungs!" she cried passionately in the voice of someone who paid far too much attention to public-service placards as a child.
"Look," I said, trying to calm her down. If she kept yelling like this, somebody WOULD come in. Besides, maybe it wasn't ALL sanctimony and petty obedience. This was really bothering her. "If it makes you feel better, I'm not even smoking that much." I pulled out my last pack. "I'm rationing until our next free weekend. I've been only having one a day. It's not like I'm standing here with a couple of giant cigars in my mouth."
With the same agility that she's usually only able to draw on in fencing practice, she snatched them out of my hand and whipped them into the incinerator. Time seemed to stop for a second.
Tashigi grinned smugly. "There, I guess that's the only way to keep you from -- hey! Get out of there, you idiot!"
"But they're burning!"
"YOU'LL burn if you crawl in there after them!" She forcefully hauled my upper torso back out of the incinerator.
"Get your hands off!" I snapped, shoving her back. "That was my property, you, you--"
I punched her in the face. She wasn't expecting it and went down with a bloody nose. I stalked off, leaving her there trying to staunch it with her uniform, fantasizing about tossing HER into the incinerator for a little while.
I spent most of the afternoon waiting for some sergeant or other to come around and load more punishments on me, but it never happened. Eventually I decided that Tashigi must not have reported me. That figured, she'd rather suffer in silence than bring down more demerits on our barracks.
As it turned out, I wasn't scheduled for potato peeling that evening after all. Instead, I was assigned as a pack mule for some visiting courier who was too dignified to carry his own luggage.
Once I saw him, I revised that opinion. I don't think he could have carried his luggage if he wanted too -- he was so skinny he looked about to snap like a dry twig. I don't know how he managed to work his way through the grunt ranks up to a level that didn't require him to do anything. All he had with him was a government-issue Secret Documents Satchel, but it was so full it was heavier than you'd expect, and I think even that would have given him problems if he hadn't had me to dump it on.
"Be careful with that!" he whined at me in a voice like a mosquito's as I picked the satchel up roughly. It was only a few hours since my last cigarette, but somehow the knowledge that there wouldn't be anymore made my crave them more than usual, and the entire world was starting to irritate me.
This courier was visiting the general -- the top general, a guy I'd never seen except from a distance while he was making speeches that I didn't listen to. The courier left me sitting in the anteroom with the satchel, giving instructions to bring it in when he called for me. I wasn't familiar with how secret documents are transported at the time, but after gaining a few ranks I know that that courier definitely shouldn't have left me alone with anything that top secret. He should have had the thing chained to his wrist, in fact. It was a lucky thing for me in the long run that he didn't, though.
Sitting out there as the interminable minutes crept by, I began to fidget. I thought about Tashigi. Sure, I'd kicked my share of asses, but those were with flat-out jerks who deserved it. Today was the first time I'd hit a friend.
But she deserved it too, I reminded myself. Because of her, I'll have to go cold turkey for a week! The thought was horrifying.
Still, it bothered me. I should have waited until she was ready, I thought. Smacking her out of nowhere like that -- it wasn't a fair fight.
I tried to think of something else. Unfortunately, emptying my mind just made me thinks of cigarettes, and there was no way to get those.
Then, I had an idea, a ridiculous idea but one that stuck in my mind as though it were anchored there. Lots of these upper-rank officers smoke. So where would they hide their contraband? Someplace nobody else was supposed to look! Like a top-secret-documents satchel, for instance! The more I thought about it, the more my brain convinced me that there MUST be a pack hidden in there.
I decided it couldn't hurt just to take a look.
I eased the latch open, as slowly as I could stand, and peered inside. Nothing but a thick sheaf of papers. Maps and battle plans. Surely there had to be something else! I shuffled through the papers, getting more and more desperate, and then I found it.
Fruit!
I had to be guarding the satchel of the ONE general in the world who preferred a fruit snack to cigarettes. Of all the miserable, lousy luck.
It was a stupid thing to do in retrospect, but if it wasn't smokes, it was at least something to put in my mouth. So I ate the fruit myself. It tasted terrible too, like something that had been left in the oven a few hours too long.
I wiped my mouth and carefully re-fastened the satchel. He wouldn't notice. He'd just think he'd forgotten to bring it.
"You! Come here, crewman, and bring that satchel!" I leapt to my feet. Hadn't even heard him opening the door. I was fervently glad that I'd gotten the thing closed.
I entered the office. I've never been one to suffer from excessive respect of authority figures, but I'll admit, actually being in the general's presence made my stomach flutter and my palms sweat. Tashigi would have said it was because of his aura of command. I'd describe it more as his ability to crush me like a gnat. My hands were shaking from nerves.
Then again, maybe it was just the nicotine withdrawal.
Dammit, Tashigi!
I placed the satchel on the desk, trying hard to convey nonchalance and respectful nonentity at the same time. I noticed the half-full ashtray by the general's right arm. No smoking on the base. Yeah, right.
"Well, then, let's see this thing." the general said, opening the satchel and leafing through the papers. "Where is it?"
"It should be right there in the bottom."
"I can't find it! What's all this garbage?" barked the general, ripping out the sheets of parchment and tossing them on the floor.
"Oh, dummy plans, a red herring, you know." the courier explained. "In case of a theft, the thieves would take that which appeared to have value, not our real cargo."
"Well it didn't work, you bloody idiot!" the general roared, his face turning crimson as he turned the satchel upside-down and shook it, letting the last few papers flutter out. "The blasted Mokumoku fruit isn't IN here!"
Oh, shit.
"But. but I don't understand!" the courier stammered. "It was in here when I arrived! I checked! Where could it have gone in --"
They both turned to look at the crewman who was trying very hard not to be part of the room. As if my grave wasn't well dug enough already, I burped up some of the air I'd swallowed along with the fruit. A plume of smoke rose up from my mouth and hovered in the air.
When the next day dawned, I'd already been swabbing out the officers' latrines (or as they say, "washroom") since four A.M. Two hours of punishment down, about two decades or so to go.
"Smoker? Are you in here?" came the familiar voice. I felt a little pang of conscience seeing that bandage across her nose.
"Yes, and if you want to find me any time in the next five years, you can just come back to the same place. I'll be here." I grunted. "Don't slip. The floor is wet."
She slipped anyway.
"I got you something." Tashigi explained, getting to her feet. She held it out to me. "They said that after eating that fruit, smoking won't have any effect on your health, and anyway I do owe you some--"
"You got me cigarettes?" I said incredulously, looking at her in disbelief. "How you get these? Weren't you worried about getting caught and spoiling your perfect record? You didn't sneak them into the base hidden up your--"
"Don't be ridiculous! I bought some of Morgan's."
Ah, Morgan. The base dealer, at least for younger recruits. If you could pay his crazy jacked up prices, which I couldn't, and I was surprised that Tashigi could have. I said as much.
"Well, it cost a lot of my money from home, but -- it was wrong of me to throw your cigarettes into the fire, even if I do disapprove of it. I mean, as a friend, I wanted to convince you not to do it anymore, but I should have respected your property. And now because of my actions, you're being punished so much. I owe you an apology, but I hope - I hope I don't lose your friendship because of this."
"Forget about it." I said. "It's not so bad. They can punish me all they want, but they can't take THIS away-" I turned one arm into billows of smoke, which shocked her even if she had heard about it. "- and this will be one hell of an advantage for a Marine in the long run. Anyway, all you really need to apologize for is burning my cigarettes. I ate the fruit on my own. Hell, I'm the one who owes you an apology - I was really out of line, losing it like that, I shouldn't have punched you --"
"No! No, don't apologize for that!" she said hastily. "I'm glad you did it."
"What?" This is new.
"Well, I mean, not that I want you to do it again or anything. But a lot of the guys here wouldn't have done it."
"Yeah, I'm just a loose cannon, huh?"
"No, my point is, they wouldn't have hit me because I'm a girl."
"So? That's stupid. You're not an invalid or something. A girl can take a punch as well as a guy can, especially a girl who's gonna be a Marine. What? Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Oh, no reason. Here, let me give you a hand with that. If I help between my other duties, maybe you can finished before midnight." She looked oddly happy for some reason. I wouldn't have thought that a willingness to sock you when the situation called for it would be anybody's criterion in choosing a friend, but Tashigi is no ordinary person, and neither, I guess, am I.
She ended up getting her first demerits ever shortly after that when the general himself walked in. Until then, neither of us had thought about the fact that she wasn't supposed to be in the male officers' washroom.
I don't know which of them blushed redder.
End of Chapter 2