Rage of Battle wi-2

by Ian Slater

  Suddenly La Roche’s whole body shuddered violently, smacking her head hard against the wall, and then, breathing laboriously, satiated, he stumbled back from her, turning, his back to the wall, sliding down, eyes closed. “I love you,” he said.

  The terrible thing was, she knew he meant it. She ran to the bathroom and vomited.

  Early in the morning, his eyes bleary from drink, he staggered from the bedroom, picking up a spilled bottle of Scotch on the way. She could tell from the way he paused to pick it up rather than kicking it out of the way as he normally would have that he was entering his magnanimous “let’s be reasonable” phase — his “must,” as he called it, now expended.

  Still half-drunk, standing unsteadily in the bathroom doorway, his shirt out, his reflection reeling, disappearing from view in the mirror, his body reeking of deodorant, sweat, and booze — so powerful, it seemed to engulf her — he told her, his tone of magnanimity as revolting to her as the sight of his spent body, “If you don’t want to stay with me, okay. But—” he used the bottle as a pointer “—don’t you ever try for a divorce. You’re mine.”

  No matter how much she had rinsed and washed her face, she still felt dirty. “So you want a respectable front,” she said bitterly, holding an ice pack to her jaw.

  He nodded. “So? That’s what we all want, isn’t it? A front. You don’t know who the hell you are.”

  Lana wanted to say something about his mother — of what she would think if she knew the real Jay La Roche — but instinctively she refrained. It was too dangerous. He was offering a deal. Best to take it while she could. “All right,” she said. “But I’m going back to the States.”

  He walked slowly away from the door, stopped, and came back, bottle of Scotch still in hand. “Lana!”

  She cringed, her flesh turning cold and clammy, with the sensation of something reptilian crawling over it. She knew what he was going to say. She could tell him not to say it, but to do that would only drag the whole thing out. It was easier to go along, let him play it out, then he’d leave her alone for a few days, if past performance was anything to go by — enough time to pack and make the arrangements. “What?” she asked sternly.

  “Love you, babe.”

  It was a different man speaking, but she despised the supine, ingratiating tone as much as she hated the psychopath who’d attacked her like an animal.

  “Hear me?” he pressed, his voice even, modulated — as forgiving as a father making up with a child after a bad day.

  “I hear you,” she said without turning around from the sink.

  “Look at me, babe!”

  She stared up at him, lost in the mystery of how it was that she had ever been attracted to him. But of course, then he had been someone else. He met her stare and did not avert his eyes from the burning hatred he saw in them.

  * * *

  How could she ever begin to explain to anyone about the disaster that had been her marriage? She had told no one, not even her friends among the nurses she’d worked with in Halifax before her exile to the Aleutians. And certainly not her parents. All they knew was that “things hadn’t worked out.” Certainly she had never gone into any of the sordid details with anyone, and only in her letters to her older brother, Robert, somewhere on duty in the North Atlantic, had she hinted at anything like the full horror of it all.

  “Can’t you work things out?” her father had asked. “Your mother and I — well, we’ve had our tiffs now and then. But you don’t just get up and—”

  “No!” she had told him. They couldn’t work things out. And that was that. There was no one at Dutch Harbor she could talk to, no one in whom she could confide. There was the padre, of course, but she was only a nominal churchgoer and, at least for now, couldn’t bring herself to resurrect the things she wished exorcised.

  * * *

  She began walking back to the base. At Dutch Harbor, the lights were twinkling brightly against the cold, blue twilight, and beyond, the cloud cover was lifting. The isolation and boredom of the place would have been more bearable if the weather were not so foul, so unpredictable. It wasn’t unusual for rain and snow driven by gale-force winds to sweep down from the Arctic and then the next minute to see clouds rent by the sun.

  Her job so far had been to assist in making an inventory of medical supplies throughout the Aleutian Chain, and had it not been for the Unalaska-Alaska flights, the boredom would have been overpowering. Keeping to herself, she had not made any really close friends either here or in Halifax, except William Spence, the young British sailor, when turmoil had enveloped her again. Or had it really? Was her life more the consequence of her own actions than she was willing to admit? Was she what her father so disparagingly called “one of the world’s willing victims”? Was there something deep in her psyche that sought to purge itself by seeking out the worst as a form of punishment? Did she enjoy the “heroic” pain of the victim as an athlete takes secret pride in the pain of the effort? How else could she have possibly become embroiled with the young Englishman, a boy really, who was to die before his twentieth birthday? His loneliness, she had thought, was there for anyone to see, and surely it had only been fate that had put her on the ward aboard the hospital ship when the big Chinook choppers brought young Spence in, hands bloody stubs which had to be amputated following a savage Russian Hunter/Killer attack on the British and American convoy hundreds of miles north of Newfoundland.

  When he was first transferred from the chopper to the hospital ship as one of the most seriously injured from HMS Peregrine and one of the first casualties of the Atlantic war, he was simply that — another casualty — and one who, despite the double amputation, was given a fair chance of survival because of his youth. Then the oil-caused pneumonia — which so often lay undetected in a man’s lungs for several days before it was discovered, when it was too late — began racking Spence’s body, depleting his strength so quickly that the earlier prognosis for recovery suddenly changed. In those last desperate days, thousands of miles from home, Lana knew it was not at all unusual for a patient, especially a young man, to transfer to her all the adoration he might have given the woman he would have loved, had he lived. Like so many before him, in war or not, the intensity of William Spence’s feeling for his nurse could be understood only by those who, like him, had lain in the morning hours in that death watch between two and four — who had known the chilling fear that soon they would be no more and who wanted nothing more than a human touch, to reassure them there was hope when there was none.

  When the morphine ceased to work, the pain so intolerable that it shamed his manhood and he wept like a child, she drew the sheet down below his waist, unpinned her hair, letting it fall down on him, lips closing about him, her tongue enveloping and drawing him into her own ecstasy until it was his — in the way she had learned from Jay in his gentler honeymoon incarnation period. Was it possible that out of Jay’s evil came good? And for that she was banished to “Devil’s Island,” as Dutch Harbor was called by the Waves. She told herself she no longer cared. She had helped a young man confront death, given him pleasure before the ultimate obscenity claimed him, and no matter how sordid a thing they would make of it behind her back, she knew she had been right and that they would not break her on this island or any other.

  As Lana turned around, heading back to the thirty-bed hospital, the blue light changed dramatically. Invading masses of bruised cumulonimbus cloud swept in from the western sea, where the warm Kuroshio Current and the Bering Sea collided to produce the towering thunderhead storm clouds. It was the unmistakable signal that the 124 islands strung along the 3,000-mile arc were about to be hit by yet another millimaw, the name given to the wind storms by the Aleuts who had lived on the sparsely vegetated and forlorn islands even before the promyshlermiki, the Russian fur traders who had settled the barren but sea-rich volcanic outcrops over two hundred years before.

  Lana watched the seabirds driven landward by the approaching storm — yellow-tufted puff
ins, their bright white faces and rust-red beaks atop the black bodies irrepressibly happy-looking, and always bringing a smile to her no matter how depressed she felt. But even in the abundant bird life, from cormorants and fulmars to kittiwakes, she saw pain and battle. Where others reveled in the wildness of the place, she yearned for the quiet life — not boring but the kind of life she had experienced in Nova Scotia while based in Halifax, doing what now she felt she did best, looking after others, hoping not only to help them bear their pain but to escape from her own.

  The truth on Unalaska, however, was that to date there had not been much work to do. The island’s main function was twofold: to provide safe anchorage in Dutch Harbor for the U.S., Japanese, and Korean factory ships from the storms that plagued the nutrient-rich fishing ground off the Aleutian Trench, and more important, to serve as a depot between the handful of American bases. As depot, its primary responsibility was to Adak Island Naval Station and tiny Shemya Island, which few Americans had ever heard of and which, being the most western extension of the United States, possessed an air force station and was, as all the interceptor and transport pilots knew, the most heavily armed piece of real estate in the Western world. If ever the Russians moved against the United States’ western flank, Shemya Island and Adak, the big submarine base 360 miles eastward, would be more strategically important than Midway Island over five hundred miles south had been in World War II. The island, which, like England in the Atlantic, was in effect a United States forward aircraft carrier to the Soviet Union, was not something Lana Brentwood had given much thought to, for one’s own world had a way of dwarfing world conflicts that were supposed to dwarf one’s own. Besides, neither she nor anyone else believed the Russians would be so foolish as to head eastward and try to use the island arc as a stepping stone to America’s back door through the Alaskan and the Canadian West Coast.

  The millimaw was moving in fast, and by the time Lana reached the hospital, snow flurries mixed with rain were swept in by the millimaw at over ninety miles an hour, the rain and snow striking the Quonset huts horizontally, the only place in the world, the transport pilots told Lana, where such a phenomenon occurred. All around she could hear the beginning of the “Aleutian wail,” which some bureaucrats in Washington, over four thousand miles away, thought was ‘‘Aleutian whale” but which was the peculiar beating and howling sound of the millimaw on the sheer basaltic cliffs and treeless slopes of the islands. She could see the double-glazed windows in the Quonset huts as square orange eyes staring out from the bleakness. Unlike the native Aleuts, some of whom still lived in their underground sod houses or barabaras and who eked out a living subsisting on reindeer and seafood, Lana knew she would never get used to the place. Were it not for the VCR and the big high-definition TV screen they had at the recreation center for the three thousand inhabitants of Dutch Harbor, she believed there would be many more cases of severe depression — to date, the most common complaint at the base hospital.

  Some of the men, most of them pilots, had attempted to alleviate their boredom by trying to date her, but she had refused most. Despite the gentleness she’d experienced with William Spence, after her experience with Jay La Roche, she was still leery of men, especially when she discovered that the confidentiality of her naval file, which had spelled out the reason for her banishment, had been breached. They obviously thought she was an easy lay.

  The only exception she had even thought of making was a pilot, Lieutenant Alen, who regularly flew the resupply route to the big antisubmarine base on Adak halfway along the chain and on to Shemya and Attu loran station over 420 miles farther west near the international date line between the United States and USSR. He had asked her if she had wanted to go along for a ride to see Attu. She’d said no, but he wasn’t one to be deterred, and this night as she walked into the officers’ club, she saw his boyish grin.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked, brushing the snow off her collar.

  She felt awkward. “Yes,” she said. “Hot chocolate. If that’s all right.”

  “One hot chocolate coming up.” Alen ignored the guffaws of several pilots farther down the bar. Handing her the steaming mug, he asked her if she’d changed her mind about a flight — this time to Adak.

  “Not particularly,” she answered, not wishing to be rude but having already seen as many of the forty-six active volcanoes in the chain as she intended.

  “What’s the matter? You haven’t got a sense of history? Big battle there in forty-three. Banzai attack by the Japanese. Just kept coming against our boys.”

  “Now they‘re our boys,” she said.

  “Well, sort of-”

  “Last I heard, they’re supposed to be on our side,” she answered.

  “Support capability. Escorted our troop ships to Korea. But they’re crafty. Tokyo hasn’t actually declared war on the Soviets. Or China.”

  “If they’re supporting us, aren’t they on our side?”

  “What I’m saying is, they haven’t pulled out the stops. Not even with the North Koreans hitting a few of their west coast ports. Economically they’re more powerful than most, but they need oil, raw materials. If that stops, Japan stops. They want to alienate as few countries as possible.”

  “Sounds like a bit of a high-wire act to me,” said Lana.

  “It is. Come on, come see Adak. Your brother’s on a pig-boat, isn’t he?”

  She didn’t know whether he meant Ray or Robert.

  “Sub,” he explained.

  “Oh, yes. He is.”

  “Then it’s your patriotic duty to see Adak. Cheer the boys up. Big sub base there.”

  “I was going to watch the new movie tonight.”

  Alen shook his head. “There isn’t any.”

  “Lieutenant,” replied Lana, “I heard it announced this morning. Some new Jane Fonda movie.”

  “It got lost.”

  She glanced across at him, shaking her head. “You guys. You never forget. She apologized, you know — to the Vietnam vets.”

  “No, she didn’t. She said she was sorry if she upset any of them. She didn’t apologize for what she said. Still Hanoi Jane.”

  “That was a long time ago, Lieutenant. Anyway, I heard Vietnam might come in on our side — if China goes up against us.”

  “No one knows what China’ll do,” said Alen. “They don’t like the Russians any more than we do. Anyway, to hell with it. Let me take you to Adak.” He lowered his voice and smiled. “Maybe we can stop along the way.”

  She hesitated. “I’m still married, Lieutenant.”

  “Why don’t you use your married name?”

  “Because I don’t like it and it’s none of your damned business.” She realized for a second that she would never have talked like that before she’d known Jay. He’d taken some of her civility along with her innocence, and she hated him as much for that as for anything else. And she’d been taught not to hate anyone.

  “Sorry,” said the lieutenant. “You’re right. It’s none of my business what name you—”

  She didn’t want to say any more, but something bottled up inside her kept rising. “You think I’m an easy mark?”

  Alen’s eyes avoided hers, his gaze now shifting out, looking at the swirling snow. “Yeah, I did,” he conceded. He looked back at her. “I was out of line.” He walked away and opened the door, to a howl of protest from the bar, greeting the icy wind.

  “Lieutenant?” she called.

  He turned, shut the door, hand still on the handle, flecks of snow in his sheepskin collar. “Yes?”

  “Maybe some other time,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  When he left the Quonset hut, Lana felt drained; a conversation like that with a man these days was harder on her than the hospital’s night shift. She always thought she’d be able to handle it better after knowing Jay, but her confidence had been so badly shaken by him, it penetrated any brave front she presented.

  Arriving on the ward, she was told the head nu
rse wanted to see her. A rush of apprehension took hold of her. The last time a head nurse, the “Matron” in Halifax, had wanted to see her, it had been the disciplinary hearing about Spence, followed by exile to the godforsaken islands. Lana already felt guilty as she made her way around the potholed blacktop of the quad to the head nurse’s station on the first floor, snow melting the moment it landed on her cape, the thought that each snowflake in the world was different comforting her. To date, the head nurse at Dutch Harbor had given no sign that she was a dragon, like Matron, a prune-faced, portly woman who acted quickly to dampen high spirits the moment anyone looked like they might possibly be enjoying themselves, if such a thing was possible on the Aleutian bases. Still, Lana knew that all head nurses, by bent of their responsibilities, were usually sticklers for rules and regulations, and as she entered the Quonset hut, she was trying to think of which one she’d violated. The clock above the reception desk showed she was five minutes late for her shift.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but the snow—”

  The head nurse waved her apology aside and gave her the notification from the Department of the Army that her kid brother David, a member of a rapid deployment force, was missing in action—”somewhere” on NATO’s central front.