And that's where I stopped her. Because I didn't want to know if she knew the rest, how I'd taken the train-paying the fare with money the teary-eyed nuns had given me-to San Diego. How I'd never made it to the high school seminary they were finally sending me to, because I stopped at the armed forces recruiting station first.
I didn't want to know if Lily knew I had been scared. Scared of what, I can't really say, not even now. (Maybe she could have.) All I knew was that I was a kid on a train, suddenly aware of where he was going, guessing at what he was leaving. There were soldiers on the train. And girls on the train. The world was on that train, and the world was going to war. I was going off to high school, a high school seminary, and I could see it, smell it: wax and wood and incense. The train smelled like perfume and aftershave and the ocean, which was just outside the window. By the time we got to San Diego, I was sweating and queasy because I'd realized what I would do. It wasn't that I wanted to lie about my age and enlist-I enlisted because I thought it the only other option God might possibly forgive.
And now, alone in a dark room in the sway of a woman who practiced magic, I finally knew He would not.
“THAT'S ENOUGH,” I said. I pulled my hand away, although she hadn't really been studying it-she'd been holding it, but not reading it. For a while, she'd closed her eyes.
“A priest?” she said again, not mocking, not Gurley just curious.
“There are worse things,” I said.
She scrambled to her feet. “That's not what I meant.”
“I'm-sorry,” I said. “I guess it's not what I meant either.” Lurking in the back of my mind had been the faint expectation that she'd make this easy; she'd just rip my clothes off, then hers, and there we'd be. I gave her another second to. And two more. Then I said I had to go.
“You'll come back?” she said, and while I knew I shouldn't, I knew I would. I wanted to know how she'd done what she'd done. And I just wanted to see her again. But reflexes preceded thought, and I found myself mumbling about the base not being far away, and sure, I'd probably get a day or two of leave every now and then. I was halfway out the door when she caught hold of my jacket. “No,” she said, low and serious, “I mean, you'll come back, tonight.”
Again, I felt something flit in and out of my pocket. “And bring something to eat,” she said, even as the door was closing. As it clicked, I felt in my pocket. My wallet was still there. And along with it, a five-dollar bill, another message: “ 1.”
A few paces down the street, I heard, but refused to turn and see, someone climb the steps to the Starhope, open the door, and enter.
LILY SLEPT LIKE she'd been shot. Stomach-down on the floor, limbs and blankets scattered about, mouth agape, breaths coming in as noisily as they went out.
I'd gotten sandwiches, stale ones, really just slices of bread and some cheese, but I'd not had a lot of choice when I went out. Finding a diner that was still open took some time, but not enough; I spent an hour or so wandering what there was then of Anchorage, waiting for 1 A.M. to arrive, and worrying that when it did, she would have meant one in the afternoon. There were soldiers and sailors everywhere, never in groups of less than three, which meant that walking alone, I attracted some attention-at least from those who were still sober enough to focus and speak. But eventually I navigated away from the bars and found a tiny neighborhood that looked like it had been built within the last few hours. I walked each of the streets on its grid, and was going to start on a second lap, when a man who'd spotted me earlier shouted from a porch: “Get a move on, pal. This is all families. None of those type of houses here.” That's when I started to notice the signs tacked to some of the doors: “PRIVATE HOME.” Somebody later explained: women were rare enough in Anchorage in those days that when you saw one enter a house followed by a man, you might reasonably assume the premises were open for business.
I wondered where Lily lived. At the Starhope? When I got back to her office and found her asleep, I thought about leaving the food and going home-back to base-myself, but I couldn't leave. So I just shut the door behind me and slid down the wall until I was sitting opposite her. I opened one of the sandwiches and ate it, anticipating a good long period of studying her, memorizing her every feature. I wanted a picture, the way other guys had a picture-or half a dozen pictures-of sweethearts, of movie stars. But I wasn't going to get one, so I'd have to make one.
But the picture kept going out of focus. She was snoring. Snoring: I'm glad I remember that detail. Sometimes, I forget it-though I don't see how that's possible. She snored like she was gargling, or choking, or drowning, or was a dog engaged in any one of those activities. I'm glad I remember her snoring, because it's real enough to reassure me that this memory actually occurred.
Otherwise, the moment seems made up of too much magic: outside, that weak, watery blue Alaskan version of midnight twilight, Lily lying there, me sitting there, she sleeping, me watching. I didn't think, then, that we could ever be closer. I'm not sure anyone can. I'm not sure there is a place closer to someone than being at their side, awake, while they're asleep.
I found it increasingly difficult to breathe myself-as if what sounded like snoring were actually her wolfing down what air remained in the room. I was watching her, but not as a voyeur-I was watching over her. And nothing stirs a young man's heart-particularly one so new in uniform-as the thought that his vigilance and restraint is keeping some woman safe.
But after a few minutes of listening to her snore and wheeze, my restraint failed. Something deeper stirred within me, starting as a shiver and then finishing as flat-out, coughing laughter.
The snoring stopped. Lily sat up and looked around, wide-eyed, not smiling, not frowning. I fell silent. She saw the remaining sandwich and slid it toward her, peeking inside the wax paper.
“Sorry-” I said.
Lily said nothing, just took a bite and chewed, staring ahead. “Not the worst way to wake up,” she said. She took another bite and chewed for a while. “You're really-curious,” she said. “You know that? Curious. Comic, soldier, priest. I'm not sure who you are.”
“You did a pretty good job earlier figuring me out,” I said. She yawned. “What about what happens next?”
“I'm not so good at ‘next,’” Lily said. “Maybe if I was,” she continued, but stopped to take another bite, “I wouldn't be here, eating this sandwich, hanging out with some sailor thinks I'm Jap.” She stuffed the remaining sandwich in her mouth with the heel of her palm and smiled, cheeks bulging, as I stared at her.
“Do I look Japanese now?” she said, cheeks still huge, bits of sandwich spittling out. She took a big swallow, and then pulled on her ears, stuck out her tongue. “How about now? Martian?”
“You're not-?”
She swallowed the last of the sandwich and looked around. “You only bought one? I gave you five bucks.”
“Two, but I ate one. You're not Japanese?”
“How much did it cost? That wasn't enough change. What, you think I'm Jap, you can steal from me?”
“I'm sorry, I-”
“Well, I'm not sorry. In fact, I am-” and then she said a word I didn't understand. Or was it a word? It sounded like something she'd done with her throat, her mouth. She said it again: “Yup'ik.”
“What's that?”
“It's whaddyacallit, Eskimo. Or it's whatever you get when you take a Russian sailor who's far from home, and add a Native woman who's not,” she said. She held up a hand for each and then slapped them together. “Boom: you get one of me. Tallest Eskimo gal for a thousand miles.”
“Not Japanese?” I said, relieved, confused. Eskimos lived in igloos. That is, I knew better, but the truth is, I knew as much then about Eskimos as I did about the Japanese-or palm readers.
“Eskimo,” she said. “Russian-Eskimo,” she added, yawning. “Which means, that whole bit you did about fire and snow-not so far off, after all.” She looked up. “And I didn't pick up language from raindrops, although I might as well have, b
ecause my father hauled my mother off when I was four or five.”
“To where?”
“To Siberia,” Lily said. “To Russia, Japan, the moon. Who knows? They left, and they left me.”
“I'm sorry,” I said again.
“I'm sorry,” she parroted in a high-pitched voice. “You like saying that,” she added. “I thought they tried to get rid of ‘sorry’ in the army.”
I was about to say it again before I stopped myself.
“So you know my secret, or secrets. Now let's get one out of you.” She pointed to my insignia. “What do you do?”
She waited.
“Well, it's secret,” I said.
“Well, tell me,” Lily said.
“Actually, it's, well, obvious,” I said, looking at the patch, with its fat beet of a bomb.
“Bombs,” she said. “Bomb disposal? Right. But what do you do? What's your assignment?” She was very serious now, which startled me as much as anything else that evening.
“Well,” I said. “That-that I can't tell you. Japanese or no. Of course. I can't.”
“Yup'ik,” she said, and then studied me for a beat or two. “Well, that's a shame.”
“Why? Why would you even ask?”
“Well, I thought you might be somebody I needed to get to know better.” She leaned closer, imperceptibly to anyone but me, who was measuring every fraction of an inch.
“Who?”
“Somebody useful, soldier,” she said, and waited. But I didn't say anything, and she didn't say anything. Instead, she smiled briefly, and stood.
“I got the sandwiches,” I said, a little desperate. She leaned down, extended a hand.
“Thanks,” she said, pulling me up. “But you run along home.”
“I thought we were-” and then I think I said something tiny, like “friends.”
Whatever it was, she laughed, and put her hand on the doorknob. “That's really sweet,” she said. “But I got guys who pay to be friends with me. For now, near as I figure, I've been paying to be friends with you.” She gave me another tight smile. “That's not good business.”
All of a sudden, the doorknob jerked out of her hand. The door flapped open on two sailors, both drunk, both blond, both taller than Lily and I. Their faces were doughy, and their heavy, puffed features almost looked unfinished, infantile. It didn't occur to me then that the reason their noses appeared that way was because they'd been broken so many times. One was more drunk than the other; his name strip read “ Jackson,” and the way he held on to his partner, “Sanger,” with a modified headlock, made his arm seem impossibly long.
Jackson tried to say something, but it fizzled into a drooling smile. Sanger lurched them both into the room.
“We're here,” he said to Lily, “for a reading.” He held up both hands, palms out, and doing so made Jackson slide off him and onto the floor.
Jackson looked up at Lily. “She's a Jap!”
“I'm closed,” Lily said, her voice, eyes, shoulders all new to me, a different person, from a different place.
“You mean, busy?” Sanger said, reaching forward to grab a wrist of Lily's, which she flicked away just in time. He and Jackson looked at me. “ 'Cause he don't look like he's keeping you busy.”
“He's not busy,” Jackson said, and wormed across the floor toward me with surprising speed. I jumped away.
“He's leaving,” Lily said. “You're leaving. I'm leaving. I'm closed.”
“We've come a long fucking way, lady,” Sanger said, moving on her.
“All the way from the fucking mooooooon,” said Jackson, and before I knew it, he had a hold of my ankle. “He don't look closed, Davey do he?”
“Get out of here,” I said, but it was useless; my voice had flown into its highest registers.
“He's a girl” Jackson said, pulling himself up on my knee and getting a good look at my face. “Look at this. He's a girl gotten all beat up by another girl”
“Poor little girl,” said Sanger.
“Leave,” said Lily. “Now.”
“I could leave,” Sanger said. “But then you'd be on your own with Jackson, here. And he don't do well on his own. Spent the whole trip here from Seattle locked in the brig for hitting an officer.”
“Locked in a fucking closet,” Jackson said, on his knees now, his hands on my hips, head at my stomach. “Fucking closet with two other guys.”
I don't know if Jackson was fainting or attacking, but he wound up pulling me to the floor. After that, I remember his breath, his nails, his weight; I remember the way my hands wouldn't go all the way around his wrists.
Sanger, suddenly sounding sober and reasonable, broke in like a radio announcer with a product to shill. “What's the matter now, boys? We're all on the same team here. Let's not-”
I don't remember Lily leaping on Jackson, or how or when his ear started to bleed. But I remember him coming off me and then the two of them on Lily, who was writhing on the floor with such fury, it seemed she was doing more damage to herself than they ever could. It was too hard to separate out a hand, an arm, but more and more bare skin, mostly hers, became visible. I tore off my belt, and with someone else's strength, fell onto Jackson 's back, looping the belt around his neck.
Lily shrieked, I yanked, Jackson bucked and would have thrown me had his buddy not fallen on top of me, his drunken logic insisting that would help. And it might have; he might have smothered me before I finished choking Jackson, but then a louder shriek entered the room, and when I twisted around, I found it was him screaming, not Lily. There was blood everywhere now, it seemed-on the floor, smeared on a wall, on Lily's palms, and most of all, on Sanger. He rolled off me; I sprang away from Jackson, leaving him coughing, using a finger to eke some breathing room out of my belt.
“Fucking Jap fuck,” Sanger spat, each word weaker than the one before. “I'm going to go over to that fucking Japland and fuck and kill every one of your cousins. Your mother, your brother, your fucking father.” Jackson had the belt off his neck now, and fell back, exhausted.
“Cripes, lady,” Jackson said, and I suddenly realized he wasn't much older than me. It didn't seem possible that he'd really wanted to hurt me, or Lily. But a quick look at Lily made it clear that she'd wanted to hurt them. Quite improbably, I began to worry that the two would leave-and leave me alone with Lily.
“Lady?” Sanger said, and swore. He put a hand to the back of his head, and then brought it forward, impossibly bright with blood.
“Can't read your palm now,” Lily said. “Too messy.” She stepped out of the tiny office quickly. I paused for a moment. Jackson was staring toward me but not focusing. Sanger looked ready to start again. I sprang for the door and dashed down the stairs.
Lily was waiting for me outside. She started walking, and I followed, neither of us saying a word until we were some blocks away. “Like I said,” she muttered then. “Sailors.”
I tried to figure out a reply, anxiously shifting the duty of holding up my beltless pants from one hand to the other.
She sniffed, half a laugh, looked me up and down. Then she stepped close to me and carefully hooked a finger through a belt loop. She was holding them up now, so I let go. “Soldier,” she said quietly and then shook her head and added something Ronnie only recently had taught me how to spell: ”Yugnikek'ngaq.”
“What?” I said, matching her whisper.
“Friend,” she said, even softer, and then removed her hand.
CHAPTER 7
FORT RICHARDSON HID ITS BIGGEST SECRET FROM VIEW in a flimsy, leaking, large Quonset hut, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with rusting razor wire. A single MP was stationed at the gate to the mini-compound, right next to a little wooden placard that read “ 520” and nothing else.
I didn't have time to take in much more the first morning I reported for duty. Before I could finish studying the outside, the MP on duty told me to move along. I almost did, but instead, gave my name, told him my purpose, and waited while he ga
ve me a long, exaggerated, head-to-toe inspection. Clearly, Gurley had handpicked him. He asked me to repeat my name. I did; he unlocked the gate, nodded me in, and then locked it behind me.
I had to admit: Gurley was doing a good job of intimidating me, and, I assumed, the rest of the base. Sure, everyone said they had top secret jobs, but how many worked in an outsized Quonset hut protected by fencing, razor wire, and a twenty-four-hour sentry?
A yellow bulb above a doorway directly before me seemed to indicate the building's entrance; the door itself had a small window that was blacked out. Inside, the darkness was almost total. I moved slowly; after our initial meeting in the bar, I was sure of an ambush. The door swung shut. I put up my hands to fend off the attack, but instead it came from below-a steel pipe of sorts to my shins. I staggered, cursed, and fell into a crouch, hands futilely-pathetically-around my head. “Stop!” I shouted, although that is probably me revising: I wailed.
No response. No second blow. At the far end of the Quonset hut, a door opened and light spilled out. I could now sense a vast open space. At the end of it, where the light was, an office had been carved out. The rest of the floor was devoted to all manner of war matériel, much of it unrecognizable. Giant tarps hung in odd profusion from the ceiling. Looking down, I could see that it had been some sort of a metal fitting, protruding from a cage the size of four or five milk crates, that had attacked me.
“Belk!” Gurley shouted from the office doorway. I lifted a cautious hand. “Always doing things the hard way, aren't you? That's the back door. The front door is over here.” As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could see a door near the office at the far end of the building. But it was still too dark to see how I was supposed to get from where I was to where he was, so I started back toward the entrance I'd just come through, thinking that I'd walk around the outside. But before I'd made the door, Gurley threw some switch that illuminated the entire building. “It's an easier walk with the lights on,” he called, and then stepped back into his office.
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