The Great Alone

by Janet Dailey

  “Do you see who’s here, Lisa?” her mother murmured, barely moving her lips. “I’ll bet he’s waiting for you.”

  “Just because he’s standing outside doesn’t necessarily mean Mr. Bogardus is waiting for me.” But she was afraid her mother was right, and she didn’t know what to do about the situation.

  It was ironic when she thought about it. Against her mother’s wishes, she had quit her clerking job at a local drugstore five months ago to take a better-paying job as a payroll assistant for a construction company from the States that had established a branch office in Anchorage to handle their government contracts in Alaska. Tall, boyish-looking Steve Bogardus was a partner in the company and managed the Anchorage office. He was her boss.

  A month after she’d gone to work for the company, he’d asked her out. Naturally she had refused. Then two months ago he discovered that she had no transportation and walked the several blocks from her house to the office. He offered to pick her up in the mornings and take her home at nights, insisting that it wasn’t out of his way and that it wasn’t a good idea for a young, single woman to be walking alone down dark streets, not to mention the cold weather. At the time, it had seemed foolish to refuse a ride to and from work, especially with winter on its way. So she had accepted his offer.

  Naturally her mother had met him the first time he’d come to pick her up. The minute she found out he was twenty-nine years old, an engineering graduate, unmarried, and a partner in the firm, all her objections to Lisa’s new job vanished. Then Lisa had made the mistake of mentioning that he’d asked her out and she’d turned him down. Now her mother badgered her constantly about him and demanded to know why she was throwing her life away on someone like Wylie Cole, who would never amount to anything, when she could have a man who had his own business and a bright future. She didn’t see why Lisa sat home every night when she could be going on dates with Mr. Bogardus. It made no difference to her that Wylie was stationed in Alaska and Lisa was able to see him, however infrequently. If anything, it made her more determined. Several times, her mother had taken it upon herself to ask Mr. Bogardus to stay for dinner when he’d brought Lisa home after work. He’d always accepted.

  Lisa was in an awkward situation. To make matters worse, she liked being with Steve Bogardus and that made her feel guilty. He was so different from Wylie. His face was so expressive she was always able to tell when he was tired or when the pressure to complete a job was building up or when he was excited about something. He was attentive and kind, always opening doors for her or praising her work or remarking on a dress or her hair—sometimes even flirting with her. Wylie tended to be more aloof, seldom complimenting her and rarely demonstrative in his affections unless they were alone. Lisa knew Wylie wasn’t as experienced as her employer. How could he be? Steve Bogardus was older. Sometimes the age difference frightened her as much as his persistence did. And her boss could be very persuasive when he wanted something.

  “Good morning, Mr. Bogardus.” Lisa forced a smile as she mounted the steps.

  “Good morning, Lisa.” Then he greeted the rest of her family with equal cordiality. “I didn’t see you drive up. Don’t tell me you walked to church this morning?”

  “It wasn’t far, really. Our car refused to start.” With the high wages her father was receiving, they’d finally been able to get rid of the old farm truck this last summer and buy a car. “I guess it hasn’t gotten used to these Alaskan winters yet.”

  “Neither have I.” He shuddered in a mock reaction to the cold temperature. In spite of herself, Lisa smiled. “I wish I had known about your car though. I could have given you a ride to church.”

  “We will let you take us home, Mr. Bogardus,” her mother said. “But only if you say you will stay to dinner.”

  “As usual, you’ve twisted my arm, Mrs. Blomquist.”

  Lisa avoided his eyes. “We probably should go inside. I think we’re blocking the door.”

  “You’re right. It’s probably warmer inside, too.” He opened the door and held it while the Blomquist family filed through.

  Lisa stepped farther into the lighted vestibule and paused to slip off her gloves and unbutton her heavy coat. She smiled and nodded to the ushers standing at the inner doors to the sanctuary, passing out the morning’s programs. As Steve Bogardus walked over to stand with Lisa and the rest of her family, she noticed Wylie’s mother and grandmother at the far end of the vestibule.

  “Excuse me. I’m just going over to speak to Mrs. Cole for a minute. I’ll join you inside.” She moved away from her family and her boss, hoping that Mrs. Cole might have heard from Wylie. More than three months had passed since she’d seen him, and almost that long since she’d had a letter from him, although she had written to him regularly. His warning that he was a notoriously poor correspondent was small consolation. “Good morning.” She smiled at both women, then belatedly noticed the aging Eskimo woman with them and nodded to her as well. “Matty.”

  “Lisa.” Trudy Cole greeted her warmly. “I was hoping I’d see you in church this morning. We received a letter from Wylie yesterday. I was just showing it to Mother Cole. He said he might not have time to write you and asked me to pass on his news.”

  “His news?” She took the sheet of paper his grandmother offered to her. The letter was short, covering little more than half the page.

  “Yes. The Army asked for volunteers with knowledge of Alaska and its terrain to form a group called the Alaska Scouts. I think he gives the full name of it in his letter.”

  “ ‘All-Alaska Combat Intelligence Scouts,’ ” Lisa read.

  “That’s it. They’re going through a lot of specialized training. That’s why he wasn’t sure he’d have time to write you.”

  “He sent along a picture.” Matty handed her the snapshot she’d been studying. “Wylie’s the one in the middle.”

  Lisa stared at the three men in the photograph, dressed alike in parkas, each with a rifle slung loosely over his shoulder. Between the parkas’ fur hoods and the straggly beard growth, their faces were barely visible. They didn’t look like soldiers at all. In fact, Lisa wasn’t sure she would have recognized Wylie immediately if Matty hadn’t already pointed him out to her.

  “He’s growing a beard.” She wasn’t very thrilled about that.

  “Yes.” The tone of her voice seemed to indicate that his mother shared the opinion. “He says it will keep his face warm.”

  “I suppose it will,” Lisa conceded, but she thought it made him look like some wild and woolly mountain man.

  The resonating notes of the church organ filled the air as the organist struck the opening chords of the call to worship. “I think it’s time we took our seats.”

  “Yes.” Lisa returned the letter and the photograph. “Thanks for letting me know about Wylie.”

  “You don’t have to thank me for that,” his mother assured her. “Some evening when you don’t have anything to do, come over to the house. I’m usually there by myself anyway. Between the Army and all the contractors, Ace is flying parts and equipment all over Alaska. I hardly see him any more.”

  “I’ll do that,” Lisa promised.

  Her family was seated in one of the rear pews. She noticed that her mother had conveniently saved her a place on the end next to Steve Bogardus. She sat down beside him and reached for the hymnal. As she listened to the organist play, her thoughts centered on Wylie. He hadn’t forgotten her even if he hadn’t had time to write. Then the service began and she gave her attention to it.

  Midway through the minister’s sermon, she heard a distant rumbling that resembled muffled explosions. Others heard it too, and heads turned and ears strained to identify the odd sound. A faint questioning murmur went through the congregation.

  For once the minister didn’t drone on, and the morning service ended at its appointed time. As Lisa took her place in the long line slowly filing out of the church doors, everyone was asking a variation of the same question: “Did you hear th
at noise?”

  “At first I thought it was thunder.”

  Lisa turned to Steve Bogardus. “What do you suppose it was?”

  “More than likely they were conducting some maneuvers out at Fort Richardson. We probably just heard the echo of their guns.” He smiled to indicate his lack of concern.

  The explanation seemed more plausible than thunder in December. After shaking hands with the minister, Steve Bogardus led the family out of the church. “My car’s parked down the street.”

  Before they reached the bottom of the steps, Lisa heard the wail of a siren, then realized there were more than one. She stopped. So did everyone else around her.

  Then someone came running up. “It’s on the radio. The Japanese are bombing Hawaii.”

  “No,” she murmured.

  “Come on.” Steve took her arm. “Let’s go to my car. There’s a radio in it.”

  Lisa broke into a run. All the things Wylie’s father had said were running through her mind. She tried to tell herself it wasn’t true, that it was all a false alarm. There wasn’t really going to be a war.

  But the radio announcer confirmed the story that Japanese bombers had struck Hickam Field and the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and he further stated that more than a dozen warships in the harbor were in flames and predicted monstrous losses. All off-duty soldiers in Alaska were ordered to report immediately to their units, all non-military aircraft were grounded, and the streets were to be cleared of all civilian traffic. Everyone was to return home and wait further instruction.

  When the announcer began to outline evacuation procedures in the event of an enemy attack, Lisa murmured, “My God, they really believe the Japanese might invade Alaska.”

  “Why did we ever come here? I knew it was a mistake.” Her mother panicked. “Jan, what are we going to do?”

  “We are going to do what the man said—go home and wait.”

  “Lisa.” Steve Bogardus gripped her hand. “I’d better go to the office. There might be bulldozers or other equipment the Army will need. Will you be all right?”

  “Yes.” At the moment, she was numb with shock.

  They abandoned the car and set out on foot, Steve to his office and the Blomquists to their home. The shriek of sirens added to the atmosphere of confusion and panic as transport trucks charged through town picking up soldiers. Military trucks and armed vehicles of every description rumbled through the streets, and bombers and pursuit planes thundered through the air over the city, heading out on patrol.

  All day Lisa stayed close to the shortwave radio, as did everyone else. By the door sat the knapsacks, packed with the recommended two-week supply of food and survival gear for a flight into the mountains. Propped beside them were her father’s and brothers’ hunting rifles in case they had to provide civilian resistance. Heavy curtains and blankets were already in place to observe the strict blackout orders.

  When the Alaska radio stations went off the air on orders from General Buckner to facilitate military communications, the Blomquists tried tuning their radio to a Canadian station. Instead they picked up Radio Tokyo. When its announcer reported that Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians and Kodiak had been bombed to rubble, Lisa started to cry. Wylie was supposed to be based at Kodiak. Then Radio Tokyo claimed Fairbanks had been attacked by air and that Sitka and Anchorage were in Japanese hands. Lisa knew she was in Anchorage and so far the Japanese weren’t, which allowed her to doubt the accuracy of the previous report on the destruction of Kodiak.

  In that first harried week after Pearl Harbor, the Army’s air force in Alaska—which consisted of six obsolete bombers and twelve obsolete pursuit planes—was in the air patrolling eighteen hours a day. On Tuesday, three fighters shot down a U.S. weather balloon. Navy planes out of Sitka bombed a “submarine” they sighted—and sank a whale. After that, Alaskans seemed to recover both their equilibrium and their sense of humor.

  The Japanese threat was real. They had only to look at the Philippines, where the Japanese forces had landed after Pearl Harbor and had MacArthur’s troops in retreat, to know that. Alaska was too strategically located for the Japanese to ignore for long. They had to be prepared for an invasion. All military dependents were evacuated from the entire territory of Alaska, which had been declared a military area.

  The flurry of construction projects that had begun in the fall turned into a full-scale storm that winter, as the threat of invasion lent a new urgency to the need for defensive installations. The increased workload affected everyone from contractors like Steve Bogardus and construction workers like Jan Blomquist to bush pilots like Ace Cole, who was flying men and supplies to remote sites. Despite persistent rumors that Alaska would be abandoned by the War Department and not receive the additional troops, planes, and naval vessels needed to improve its meager defenses, as had happened in the Philippines, all work was speeded up. Lisa left the payroll department and went to work filing and filling out the numerous forms, putting in long hours in an effort to keep up with all the paperwork created by additional contracts and new deadlines for completion.

  It was late afternoon on the first Saturday in March when Steve Bogardus brought Lisa home after working in the office all day. Lisa was too tired to care when her mother invited him to stay for dinner that night, or when she refused Lisa’s help in the kitchen and shooed her into the living room with her boss. She turned on the radio to catch the latest war news, then sank onto the couch, wishing fervently that she could slip off her shoes.

  “We really should be celebrating tonight.” Steve Bogardus sat slumped against the back couch cushions, his boyish features with their dusting of freckles looking worn and haggard. “That contract the government awarded our company for work on the Alaska-Canada Military Highway is going to amount to a lot of dollars.”

  A road running through Canada and linking the United States to its Alaska Territory had been talked about for so long that Lisa had never believed it would actually be built in her lifetime. But the war with Japan and the knowledge that its superior naval power was capable of closing the sea lanes to Alaska had changed all that. Construction of the fifteen-hundred-mile-long military road had been authorized and given the highest priority. The massive undertaking was to be a joint effort of civilian contractors and workers and the Army Corps of Engineers and its regiments.

  “I’m sure you’re right.” Lisa sighed. “But I keep thinking about the amount of paperwork there will be.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll be hiring more help in the office.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard yet, Mr. Bogardus.”

  “When are you going to start calling me Steve?”

  She became conscious of his arm draped along the back of the couch and the closeness of his hand to her shoulder. “It isn’t really proper to call your employer by his first name.”

  “I thought we were friends, too.”

  She felt his fingertips brush the ends of her hair and quickly stood up to elude them. “I never said we weren’t, Mr. Bogardus.” In an attempt to cover her agitation, she walked over to the radio.

  “You know I should be taking you out to dinner. It’s time I started paying back all your generous hospitality.” He pushed himself off the couch and wandered over to the radio.

  “My mother would like that.”

  “Lisa, you know I meant you—not your family.”

  “Yes.” She turned and faced the small snapshot that she’d stuck in the corner of the framed photograph of Wylie. The larger picture showed Wylie in his Army uniform, and the smaller one was more recent, taken after he’d joined the Scouts.

  “Is this your soldier boy?” He removed the snapshot from the corner of the frame for a closer look.

  “Yes, that’s Wylie.”

  “His name’s Wylie?”

  “Yes. Wylie Cole. He’s with the Alaska Scouts.” She had never told Steve anything except that she was dating someone in the service.

  “One of Castner’s Cutthroats,�
� he murmured.

  “I beg your pardon?” Lisa frowned.

  “That’s the nickname they’ve given Colonel Castner’s hand-picked platoon of commandos. They’re supposed to be a rough bunch of men from all parts of Alaska—miners, trappers, hunters, natives, all crack shots able to live off the land. And very deadly, too, from what I’ve been told. Some claim they’re a group of misfits who found Army discipline not to their liking.” He eyed her thoughtfully. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “Wylie’s not like that.” She took the photograph and tucked it back in the frame, angered by his attempt to make Wylie sound dangerous.

  “It’s probably Army propaganda to create the image of a tough commando unit.” His comment seemed an attempt to satisfy her more than anything else. “Does he really expect you to sit home every night and never go out and have any fun?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why do you turn me down every time I ask you out?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  “Steve, please,” she protested.

  “At last you’ve said my name.”

  Rattled by the slip, she blurted, “It just came out. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “What you mean is that you said what you were thinking. It’s encouraging to know that you do think of me as Steve and not that cold Mr. Bogardus.”

  It was true. She did think of him as Steve. She had for some time now. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she insisted.

  “It means we can drop this Mr. Bogardus nonsense.”

  She heard the tramp of booted feet on the front porch and turned gratefully toward the sound. “That must be Dad.”

  But when the front door opened, a tall, rough-looking man with a heavy black beard stepped inside. Dumbstruck, Lisa stared at the stranger. There was a flash of white in the middle of the dark beard growth as the man smiled.

  “Mom said I should call, but I thought I’d surprise you. It took some doing, but I managed to wangle a weekend pass out of the sarge.”