by Brian Payton
He wears everything at night. Karl’s clothes underneath, because they are smaller, then his own trousers and shirt over top. In the absence of coal, this has made some difference. Now, in the light of day, Easley removes his jacket and walks outside.
The fog has lifted, and the sky is alive with the confetti of descending birds. To the west, where the clouds have opened above the sea, the water is a deep, alluring blue. This is the most dangerous time of day. If the enemy is hovering above, or shuffling across the land, they will surely see him. Outside the cave, there is no place to hide. His mind calculates the risk, but his body won’t be denied the promise of light, the opportunity for movement, the hope of warmth.
He takes comfort in the great cacophony of ducks, geese, gulls, and terns. These and other birds have begun to arrive in unimaginable numbers. He is reminded of the assignment that first brought him to these islands, a profile that was to include the annual avian migration from the Pacific Northwest, California, the Sea of Cortez. Journeys from warm paradise to dank exile. Now he is grateful for the company—and the promise of meat. Easley feels the strongest kinship for the uncatchable albatross because they, like himself, are solitary travelers in an indifferent world.
He ate a dozen raw mussels in the morning, a frond of kelp midday, but now hungers for more. Among the exploding population of birds, Easley has trouble finding ptarmigan. He left the cave with high hopes of success, but as the day matures and the raft of clouds drifts back in, his desperation grows.
Easley throws stones at the gulls strolling the beach. The moment he winds up for the pitch, however, they are already on the go—a running hop and then into the air. He strikes one in the belly but the stone simply bounces off. The gull lets out a loud squawk, shimmies, as if trying to shake water off its back, then continues on its way. Easley sits down to rest. Tonight, when it comes time to face the mussels, he will attempt to mute the taste of the sea by calling up the fading memory of deep-fried chicken.
An unknown raptor circles above a chevron of geese. Thick golden beak, black body, white shoulders and tail. It is the biggest eagle Easley’s ever seen. Perhaps blown off course from Asia, a victim of unfavorable winds. He watches it bank sharply to the right, then dive down into the prey’s formation. The lead goose doesn’t see it coming, the others hold their course. The eagle strikes one near the back of the line and it falls flapping from the sky. Easley rises to his feet. The goose fights for control, but all it can do is tumble onto the grassy hill. The eagle swoops down directly. It travels so fast Easley thinks it too will crash. Then, at the last second, it pulls up and comes in for a controlled landing. Easley begins to move. The quarry still attempts flight with its remaining unbroken wing. This only pushes it in circles on the grass. The eagle loses no time jumping on the goose’s back, talons outstretched. It even attempts takeoff, but the payload proves unwieldy. Easley picks up the pace.
Desperate to get up and into the air, the eagle flaps its wings so hard that feathers fall away. It swings its head around and sees Easley approach. In one desperate move, it lifts the goose fully five feet off the ground, then drops the heavy load. The eagle swoops down and towers, panting over its kill.
Easley closes in. He swings his leg. The eagle spreads its wings to make itself appear even larger and more forbidding, then plunges its beak at Easley’s boot. Easley swings again and forces the eagle off the goose. The bird complains so loudly, Easley is sure every soldier on the island will come running with bayonets drawn. He backs in toward the goose, grabs it by the neck, and takes a few bounding leaps toward the beach.
The eagle takes to the air and flies low over Easley’s scalp. Planting his legs in the grass, Easley wields the goose like a sack of stones, daring the eagle to try again. It circles twice, then takes another plunge. Easley swings the goose aloft the second before the raptor arrives—the startled bird flaps and turns away. It flies back to the site where its prey first came down and searches for signs of a meal. Finding no stray morsels, it stands there, glaring at Easley as he skips toward the beach. Some hundred yards away, Easley switches the goose from one hand to the other. He turns toward the eagle and bows.
A short-necked Aleutian Canada goose, it is smaller than the familiar variety but still much larger than any previous bird he or the boy has been able to kill. The coal is long gone and he hasn’t seen a stick of driftwood in days. It must be eaten raw. Dead wings unfold as it is carried downslope.
Easley sits and stares at the prize for a time. Beak half open in silent protest, hematite eye glazed with sand. He unfolds the boy’s pocketknife.
The meat glistens when exposed to the light. Each muscle clearly defined. The flesh is soft and pliant in his teeth, the flavor faint and not unpleasant. It is a shame not to be able to roast it, to crisp and darken the skin. Because the meat will go bad within a day, the job is to consume as much of the bird as possible. Easley tosses the entrails on the sand, and the seagulls are quick to respond. After consuming the breast and legs, he belches, takes a break, then goes back at it again. He cracks bones for the marrow. His head feels clearer by the minute.
All this time, the eagle circles above, watching. Easley can ill afford another foe. He keeps track with peripheral vision.
At last he stands, cheeks smeared in blood and grease. He abandons the feathers and carcass to the gulls. Scrubs his hands with wet sand, splashes cold surf in his face. Then drowsiness overtakes him.
Easley finds a ribbon of green near the edge of the beach where spring has come ashore. He lays himself down, hands clasped over full stomach. All around, new shoots of sedge inch toward the light, cradling him. He imagines himself lying next to Helen. He recalls how she’d often hold his hand while dozing off, the way her arms and legs sought him out, even in sleep. He can feel none of these things. Easley strains to picture her eyes, recall the sound of her voice. He finds that he cannot. Now, cut off from all human contact, memory quickly betrays. He falls into a heavy sleep.
Easley walks empty streets until at last he reaches the park. A warm summer day, there should be people about, traffic in the streets. Instead there are only birds shuffling past on the pavement, in a hurry to get someplace else. They gawk at him, then turn to whisper to one another. He passes playing fields and looming Douglas fir until he sees a single vehicle in the parking lot. An old Ford pickup. Could this be Karl’s truck? There appears to be people inside. Easley steps around and over murmuring birds as he closes in on the cab.
In the side window, he can see the bare head and shoulder of a man. As Easley draws near, the man moves into shadow. As Easley reaches the truck, he peers inside and sees a woman atop the man. She grips his shoulder above what appears to be the smear of a tattoo. But it is not Karl. It is Warren who reaches up her thighs and hips, kneading the skin. The woman’s hair is draped across her eyes until she tosses it back, revealing herself to be Helen.
Easley sits up and blinks at the sky, head throbbing with the beat of his heart. The sun has abandoned the island and now reaches through distant clouds to the sea. Two hard shafts of light, as in religious paintings of old. They set a patch of ocean ablaze with the promise of something better.
Long before he met Helen, when he was twenty-two, Easley brought home the only other girl who had ever meant anything to him. He saw the problem with his brother almost from the start. The way Warren turned on that smile, told stories out of turn, made her laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
It wasn’t that his brother was consciously making a pass at the girl. Warren was simply born to charm. Yet watching it happen right in front of him, with a girl Easley had chosen, loosened something terrible inside. When he confronted him, Warren simply laughed at the ridiculousness of it. Claimed he could get a dozen better girls if he’d been so inclined. Easley hit his eighteen-year-old brother so hard and fast, Warren didn’t even have time to raise his hands. Laid him out flat in the hallway of their parents’ home with a broken cheekbone and a gash below the eye.
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sp; Easley hadn’t just wanted to put his little brother in his place. He had also wanted to hurt him. Specifically, that handsome face. He wanted to leave a mark. Years later, when Warren met Helen, he made a point of ignoring her—until Easley told him to stop.
Back on his feet, Easley sets an ambitious pace. He must keep moving. Movement means survival. He soon finds himself at the site of the rotten post, the broken splint. He stops and surveys the spot once again. The only man-made marker encountered outside the village. What is it doing here?
The post lies in pieces, where it was tossed on Karl’s last night. The impression of Easley’s own body remains in the wild celery where he tripped and fell. There is a shallow indentation to the left of the marker where last year’s weeds are especially thick. A grave? If this is the result of a collapsed coffin, then why are the stones piled twenty feet away? Don’t Aleuts bury their relatives in the Russian churchyard? Easley circles the pile, looking from stones to weeds, then back again. He falls to his knees.
The little pile itself is only two feet high. Unless someone was looking for it, it would likely go unnoticed. It hasn’t been here long. After removing the stones, he digs with his hands. The soil is soft, perhaps recently disturbed. He’s dug barely a foot into the earth when his finger snags on something metal. He sucks the finger, spits red mud on old blades of rye.
Easley excavates around what appears to be a small metal box wrapped in sheets of tinfoil. It hasn’t been long in the ground. Tea tin? He shakes it and hears a dull thump inside. He turn it upside down, inspects it from every angle. Easley clutches it to his chest and scans vacant land and sea. He pushes soil back into place, tamps the earth, then reassembles the stones much as they were found.
At the mouth of the cave, where the light is still of use, Easley gingerly removes tinfoil as if it were fine Christmas wrapping. Upon reaching the can itself, he smiles at the sight of the familiar red letters on gold and green, his first suspicion confirmed. Nabob Pure Indian & Ceylon Tea, Kelly, Douglas, & Co. Limited Vancouver, B.C. 3 lbs net. He pops the lid, pulls out and unwraps a length of red flannel concealing the point of an ivory harpoon. Exquisitely carved, complete with barbs and a socket for a shaft, it is nearly as long as his hand. Packed beneath the harpoon point is a small, framed photograph of a young native woman in a dark wool coat casting off on a voyage. She stands at the rail of a ship, waving a gloved hand down at whoever holds the camera. Her smile is quiet, her posture unsure.
He studies the image a good long while, then wipes a fresh spot of mud from the glass with the least offensive part of his sleeve. Below the portrait lies an icon of the Madonna and Child adorned in gold leaf. Russian, presumably. Next, a roll of cash held tight with a red rubber band. He counts 373 U.S. dollars. Encircling the other contents is a folded rectangle of bright-white linen embroidered with buttercups and fireweed. It is a shock to see its purity in the gray scar of the ravine. Easley holds it in cold, filthy hands as if it were the Shroud of Turin.
At the bottom of the tin is a folded piece of paper amid a trace of black powdered tea. Easley removes the paper with one hand, sucks his free index finger, then rubs it clean on the front of his shirt. He presses it into the tin, then to the tip of his tongue. He holds the flavor there, pressing sweet dust against soft palate. He closes his eyes and smiles.
A gust of wind bends the paper back over itself, then Easley shakes it open. There, in elegant blue script:
August 10, ’42
My Dearest Love,
You have found me gone and our things hid safe.
They came to the village June 7 and we fear they will take us away.
I will wait for you. Think of your promise to me and remember, the wind is not a river.
Yours,
Forever,
Tatiana
Easley rereads, then carefully folds the note and returns it to the bottom of the can. The wind is not a river? He replaces the cash, the linen, the Russian icon, the ivory harpoon tip, then secures the can on a shelf high in the back of the cave. He flattens and folds the tinfoil for some future use unseen.
He sits holding the photograph, straining to see the girl’s vulnerable face in remnant light. He feels something shift inside.
PART TWO
TEN
HELEN SITS SANDWICHED BETWEEN STEPHEN AND Judith, whispering an endless loop of Hail Marys into the constant wail of the engines. Sarah and Jane are strapped in their seats along the opposite wall, legs crossed, clumsily flipping through the latest issues of Life and Look with gloved hands. Over their flight suits, they wear new parkas zipped to the top. Gladys, having grown up in Chicago, has the most experience with the cold. She’s on the far side of Sarah, head tilted back, sound asleep. The rest of the space is filled with a cargo of desks, filing cabinets and chairs, colossal black tires, canned carrots and beets. It’s the third leg of Helen’s first airplane journey. This dim, unglamorous scene bears no resemblance to her previous notions of air travel.
They touch down seven hundred miles north of Portland at the Royal Canadian Air Force Station in Prince Rupert, British Columbia—a place that seems newly hacked out of the otherwise impenetrable forest. Snow is still on the mountains, but beyond the pavement the grass is greening up with the promise of spring. They have lunch on the grass by the edge of the taxiway while the plane is being refueled. They eat egg salad sandwiches out in the sun, wax paper balanced on knees, while men run around as if there is some sudden, unseen of emergency. A uniformed member of the RCAF Women’s Division greets them with coffee, which she pours into thin paper cups. Helen soaks up the heat in her hands. When it’s time to go, she stands and performs a set of jumping jacks to stretch her legs and back. The other girls join in, and soon they are all jumping up and down, waving their arms by the side of the plane.
On the final leg of the flight, they belt every song in their opening set over the persistent A-flat of the engines, then huddle at the window and watch the sun disappear in a purple and orange sky.
Each of these women has the same dream: to somehow make their mark in show business. Gladys considers this gig a leg up, a chance to be seen and appreciated beyond Chicago, an opportunity to gain much needed exposure. Judith, with her movie experience, sees it as a step down, a necessary place to exercise her skills while waiting for more worthy opportunities and the end of the war. Jane and Sarah are grateful for the work. All have someone they care about serving in uniform and believe they are being of service in the Cause, a part of history in the making.
Late at night the plane bounces, then careens down the runway near the city of Anchorage. It is colder here than in Prince Rupert, but not far below freezing. The wind is cold and wet against Helen’s cheeks as they move from plane, to bus, to barracks in the dark. A thin crust of spring snow covers the ground beyond the slivered headlight beam, except where the earth has worn through in twin, muddy tracks. No one speaks. The airplane’s roar has been replaced by a ringing in their ears, and now the bus’s lumbering whine.
They lurch to a stop in front of the last in a row of Quonset huts, which resemble enormous tin barrels toppled over and half-buried in the earth. A solitary bulb hangs over a door marked #17. The driver shuts off the engine, then glances back over his shoulder and flashes a star-struck grin. “Well, this is it!” he declares.
Judith has fallen asleep on Jane’s shoulder. Jane is in no rush to finish her cigarette. Gladys and Sarah whisper in a private conversation as Sarah ties a scarf over her head. Someone has to move. Helen makes her way to the front of the bus, thanks the driver, then steps down into the mud and is reminded that her boots are still in her bag. These were one of her two good pair of shoes. Ignoring them for a moment, she looks up into the sky to catch a glimpse of the aurora borealis, which she’s read so much about, but clouds obscure the view. Her relief at having made it this far is quickly overtaken by the thought that John might be out in some thin walled tent, shivering through the night.
The other girls quit th
e bus with limp hair and sour looks, pulling parkas tight at the neck. Stephen shakes the driver’s hand, then steps down as the door swings shut behind him. He looks at Helen and musters a smile.
“Weaker girls would not have survived,” she says, rewarding him for the effort.
Inside the Quonset hut, Helen discovers a large open room with a dozen canvas cots. A warm coal fire glows in the center stove. The girls stumble in behind her. Even their most sour expressions melt at the discovery that a single paper rose has been placed upon the pillow of each immaculately made cot. On a table near the stove is a bright bowl of oranges and a white layer cake with WELCOME TO ALASKA, USA inscribed in cherry red icing. Beside the cake, a handmade card stands at attention, crammed with welcoming signatures. The girls smile and coo over the card as Stephen cuts the cake. Helen is standing near the stove, warming her legs, when a song suddenly erupts outside.
Helen is the first to the door. The other girls press at her back as she is met with a chorus of over a dozen men singing and swaying in the dark. They hold flashlights up to their young faces, which makes them look like kids in a Halloween stunt. Voices turn to vapor above their heads as they sing “I’m in the Mood for Love.” When their song is through, the girls clap and cheer and yell “bravo!” The men wish them sweet dreams and want to know if there is anything they need to make their stay more enjoyable. Anything, they repeat.
“Thanks for comin’ by,” Judith says for them all. “Tomorrow night we’ll give you boys something to dream about.”
This draws whistles and groans of anticipation. The men wave good-bye and turn back down the road, singing and shoving each other around.
Sarah soon declares that it’s time to call it a night and summarily switches off the lights. Helen undresses in the dark and settles into her cot.
