“Yes, sir.”
He scowled, his eyebrows pinching together in a sharp V. “Then you should know better than to call another enlisted man ‘sir.’ You generally shouldn’t even call him by rank, unless it’s ‘Sarge.’ We’re all GI’s pissing into the same barrels here, son. When the wind doesn’t blow it back in our faces.”
“So what should I call you?” I asked.
He was still scowling. “Why should you call me anything?”
I had the feeling that he was jabbing at me with words, as if I were a thug in one of his books and he were the combative hero. But at that time I had only read a little bit of one of those books, the one about the bird statuette.
And I had only read that little bit because I was bored after evening chow one day, and one of the guys in my hut happened to have a hardback copy lying on his bunk. I wasn’t much for books back then. So I didn’t much care how good Pop was at jabbing with words.
“I have to call you something,” I said. “The colonel sent me to take you on an errand.”
Pop’s scowl shifted from annoyance to disgust. “The colonel?” he said, his voice full of contempt. “If you mean who I think you mean, he’s a living mockery of the term intelligence officer. And he’s still wearing oak leaves. Much to his chagrin, I understand. So I suppose you mean the lieutenant colonel.”
“That’s him,” I said. He was the only colonel I knew. “He wants you and me to take a drive, and he wants us to do it right now. If you haven’t eaten breakfast, I have a couple of Spam sandwiches in the jeep. Stuck ’em under the seat so the ravens wouldn’t get ’em.”
Pop took his hands off the table, went to the chairs along the wall, and took a jacket from one of them. He put it on in abrupt, angry motions.
“You can tell him I don’t have time for his nonsense,” he said. “You can tell him I’m eating a hot meal, and after that, I’m starting on tomorrow’s edition. I’m not interested in his editorial comments, his story ideas, or his journalistic or literary ambitions. And if he doesn’t like that, he can take it up with the brigadier general.”
I shook my head. “The general’s not in camp. He left last night for some big powwow. Word is he might be gone a week or more. So if I tell the colonel what you just said, I’m the one who’ll be eating shit.”
Pop snorted. “You’re in the Army and stationed in the Aleutians. You’re already eating shit.”
He tried to walk past me, but I stepped in front of him.
He didn’t like that. “What are you going to do, son? Thrash an old man?” He was glaring down at me like a judge again, but now the judge was going to throw the book. Which was something I had also seen before, so it didn’t bother me.
“I’d just as soon not,” I said.
Pop glanced back at the poker players. I reckoned he thought they would step up for him. But they were all staring at their cards hard enough to fade the ink, and they didn’t budge.
“Did you see the boxing matches yesterday?” I asked.
Pop looked back at me. His eyes had narrowed again.
“There was a crowd,” he said. “But yes, I watched from a distance. I thought it was a fine way to celebrate the Fourth of July, beating the snot out of our own comrades in arms. I hear the Navy man in the second match was taken to the Station Hospital.”
I shrugged. “He dropped his left. I had to take the opportunity.”
Pop bared those bad false teeth. “Now I recognize you. You KO’d him. But he laid a few gloves on you first, didn’t he?”
“Not so’s I noticed.” Thanks to the colonel, I’d had two whole weeks during which my only duty had been to train for the fight. I could take a punch.
“So you’re tough,” Pop said. His voice had an edge of contempt. “It seems to me that a tough fellow should be killing Japs for his country instead of running errands for an idiot. A tough fellow should—” He stopped. Then he adjusted his glasses and gave me a long look. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “But it occurs to me that you may have been on Attu last year. In which case you may have killed some Japs already.”
I didn’t like being reminded of Attu. For one thing, that was where the colonel had decided to make me his special helper. For another, it had been a frostbitten nightmare. And seven guys from my platoon hadn’t made it back.
But I wasn’t going to let Pop know any of that.
“A few,” I said. “And if the brass asked my opinion, I’d tell them I’d be glad to go kill a few more. But the brass ain’t asking my opinion.”
Pop gave a weary sigh. “No. No, they never do.” He dug his fingers into his thick shock of white hair. “So, what is it that the lieutenant colonel wants me to assist you with? I assume it’s connected with some insipid piece of ‘news’ he wants me to run in The Adakian?”
I hesitated. “It’d be better if I could just show you.”
Pop’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, good,” he said. His tone was sarcastic. “A mystery.” He gestured toward the door. “After you, then, Private.”
It felt like he was jabbing at me again. “I thought you said enlisted men shouldn’t call each other by rank.”
“I’m making an exception.”
That was fine with me. “Then I’ll call you ‘Corporal.’ ”
A williwaw began to blow just as I opened the door, but I heard Pop’s reply anyway.
“I prefer ‘Boss,’ ” he said.
III
We made our way down the hill on mud-slicked boardwalks. On Adak, the wind almost always blew, but the most violent winds, the williwaws, could whip up in an instant and just about rip the nose off your face. The one that whipped up as Pop and I left the recreation hut wasn’t that bad, but I still thought a skinny old guy like him might fly off into the muck. But he held the rail where there was a rail, and a rope where there was a rope, and he did all right.
As for me, I was short and heavy enough that the milder williwaws didn’t bother me too much. But as I looked down the hill to the sloppy road we called Main Street, I saw a steel barrel bouncing along at about forty miles an hour toward Navytown. And some of the thick poles that held the miles of telephone and electrical wires that crisscrossed the camp were swaying as if they were bamboo. We wouldn’t be able to take our drive until the wind let up.
So I didn’t object when Pop took my elbow and pulled me into the lee of a Quonset hut. I thought he was just getting us out of the wind for a moment, but then he slipped under the lean-to that sheltered the door and went inside. I went in after him, figuring this must be where he bunked. But if my eyes hadn’t been watering, I might have seen the words THE ADAKIAN stenciled on the door.
Inside, I wiped my eyes and saw tables, chairs, typewriters, two big plywood boxes with glass tops, a cylindrical machine with a hand crank, and dozens of reams of paper. The place had the thick smell of mimeograph ink. Two of the tables had men lying on them, dead to the world, their butts up against typewriters shoved to the wall. A third man, a slim, light-skinned Negro, was working at a drawing board. It looked like he was drawing a cartoon.
This man glanced up with a puzzled look. “What’re you doing back already, Pop?” He spoke softly, so I could barely hear him over the shriek of the williwaw ripping across the hut’s corrugated shell.
“I don’t know how many times I have to tell you,” Pop said. “I don’t like ‘Pop.’ I prefer ‘Boss.’ ”
“Whatever you say, Pop. They run out of scrambled eggs?”
“I wouldn’t know. My breakfast has been delayed.” Pop jerked a thumb at me. “The private here is taking me on an errand for the lieutenant colonel.”
The cartoonist rolled his eyes. “Lucky you. Maybe you’ll get to read one of his novellas.”
“That’s my fear,” Pop said. “And I simply don’t have enough whiskey on hand.” He waved in a never-mind gesture. “But we’ve interrupted your work. Please, carry on.”
The cartoonist turned back to his drawing board. “I always do.”
Pop went to an
almost-empty table, shoved a few stacks of paper aside, and stretched out on his back. The stack of paper closest to me had a page on top with some large print that read: HAMMETT HITS HALF-CENTURY—HALF-CENTURY CLAIMS FOUL.
“Have a seat, Private,” Pop said. “Or lie down, if you can find a spot.” He closed his eyes. “God himself has passed gas out there. We may be here a while.”
I looked around at the hut’s dim interior. The bulb hanging over the drawing board was lit, but the only other illumination was the gray light from the small front windows. Wind noise aside, all was quiet. It was the most peaceful place I had been since joining the Army.
“This is where you make the newspaper?” I asked.
“You should be a detective,” Pop said.
I looked at the two sleeping men. “It sure looks like an easy job.”
Pop managed to scowl without opening his eyes. “Private, have you actually seen The Adakian? I suppose it’s possible you haven’t, since there are over twenty thousand men in camp at the moment, and we can only produce six thousand copies a day.”
“I’ve seen it,” I said. “I saw the one about the European invasion, and maybe a few others.”
Pop made a noise in his throat. “All right, then. When have you seen it?”
“Guys have it at morning chow, mostly.”
Now Pop opened his eyes. “That’s because my staff works all night to put it out before morning chow. Starting at about lunchtime yesterday, they were typing up shortwave reports from our man at the radio station, writing articles and reviews, cutting and pasting, and doing everything else that was necessary to produce and mimeograph six thousand six-page newspapers before sunup. So right now most of them have collapsed into their bunks for a few hours before starting on tomorrow’s edition. I don’t know what these three are still doing here.”
At the drawing board, the Negro cartoonist spoke without looking up. “Those two brought in beer for breakfast, so they didn’t make it back out the door. As for me, I had an idea for tomorrow’s cartoon and decided to draw it before I forgot.”
“What’s the idea?” Pop asked.
“It’s about two guys who have beer for breakfast.”
Pop grunted. “Very topical.”
Then no one spoke. I assumed parade rest and waited. But as soon as I heard the pitch of the wind drop, I opened the door a few inches. The williwaw had diminished to a stiff breeze, no worse than a cow-tipping gust back home in Nebraska.
“We have to go, Boss,” I said.
Pop didn’t budge, but the cartoonist gave a whistle. “Hey, Pop! Wake up, you old Red.”
Pop sat up and blinked. With his now-wild white hair, round eyeglasses, and sharp nose, he looked like an aggravated owl.
“Stop calling me ‘Pop,’ ” he said.
Outside, as Pop and I headed down the hill again, I said, “That’s something I’ve never seen before.”
“What’s that?” Pop asked, raising his voice to be heard over the wind.
“A Negro working an office detail with white soldiers.”
Pop looked at me sidelong. “Does that bother you, Private? It certainly bothers the lieutenant colonel.”
I thought about it. “No, it doesn’t bother me. I just wonder how it happened.”
“It happened,” Pop said, “because I needed a damn good cartoonist, and he’s a damn good cartoonist.”
I understood that. “I do like the cartoons,” I said.
Pop made a noise in his throat again.
“Would it be all right, Private,” he said, “if we don’t speak again until we absolutely have to?”
That was fine with me. We were almost to the jeep, and once I fired that up, neither of us would be able to hear the other anyway. The muffler had a hole in it, so it was almost as loud as a williwaw.
IV
Halfway up the dormant volcano called Mount Moffett, about a mile after dealing with the two jerks in the shack at the Navy checkpoint, I stopped the jeep. The road was barely a muddy track here.
“Now we have to walk,” I told Pop.
Pop looked around. “Walk where? There’s nothing but rocks and tundra.”
It was true. Even the ravens, ubiquitous in camp and around the airfield, were absent up here. The mountainside was desolate, and I happened to like that. Or at least I’d liked it before finding the eagle. But I could see that to a man who thrived on being with people, this might be the worst place on earth.
“The Navy guys say it looks better when there’s snow,” I said. “They go skiing up here.”
“I wondered what you were discussing with them,” Pop said. “I couldn’t hear a word after you stepped away from the jeep.”
I decided not to repeat the Navy boys’ comments about the old coot I was chauffeuring. “Well, they said they were concerned we might leave ruts that would ruin the skiing when it snows. After that, we exchanged compliments about our mothers. Then they got on the horn and talked to some ensign or petty officer or something who said he didn’t care if they let the whole damn Army through.”
Hunching my shoulders against the wind, I got out of the jeep and started cutting across the slope. The weather was gray, but at least it wasn’t too cold. The air felt about like late autumn back home. And the tundra here wasn’t as spongy as it was down closer to camp. But the rocks and hidden mud still made it a little precarious.
Pop followed me, and I guessed it had to be tough for him to keep his balance, being old and scrawny. But he didn’t complain about the footing. That would have been far down his list.
“Tell me the truth, Private,” he said, wheezing. “This is a punishment, correct? The lieutenant colonel stopped me on Main Street a few months ago and asked me to come to dinner and read one of his stories. But my boys were with me, so I said, ‘Certainly, if I may bring these gentlemen along.’ At which point the invitation evaporated. That incident blistered his ass, and that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
I turned to face him but kept moving, walking backward. “I don’t think so. When he sent me up here this morning, it didn’t have anything to do with you. I was supposed to look for an old Aleut lodge that’s around here somewhere. The colonel said it’s probably about three-quarters underground, and I’d have to look hard to find it.”
Pop was still wheezing. “That’s called an ulax. Good protection from the elements. But I doubt there was ever one this far up the mountain, unless it was for some ceremonial reason. And even if there was an ulax up here, I can’t imagine why the lieutenant colonel would send you looking for it.”
“He has a report of enlisted men using it to drink booze and have relations with some of the nurses from the 179th,” I said. “He wants to locate it so he can put a stop to such things.”
Pop frowned. “Someone’s lying. The 179th has twenty nurses here at most. Any one of them who might be open to ‘such things’ will have a dozen officers after her from the moment she arrives. No enlisted man has a chance. Especially if the lady would also be required to climb a mountain and lower herself into a hole in the ground.”
“Doesn’t matter if it’s true,” I said. “I didn’t find no lodge anyway.” I turned back around. We were almost there.
“That still leaves the question of why we’re up here,” Pop said.
This time I didn’t answer. Although he was a corporal, Pop didn’t seem to grasp the fact that an enlisted man isn’t supposed to have a mind of his own. If an officer asks you to dinner, or to a latrine-painting party, you just say “Yes, sir.” And if he tells you to go for a ride up a volcano, you say the same thing. There’s no point in asking why, because you’re going to have to do it anyway.
“Are we walking all the way around the mountain?” Pop shouted, wheezing harder. “Or is there a picnic breakfast waiting behind the next rock? If so, it had better not be another Spam sandwich.”
“You didn’t have to eat it,” I said.
Pop started to retort, but whatever he was going to say became a
coughing fit. I stopped and turned around to find him doubled over with his hands on his knees, hacking so hard that I thought he might pass out.
I considered pounding him on the back, but was afraid that might kill him. So I just watched him heave and thought that if he died there, the colonel would ream my butt.
Pop’s coughing became a long, sustained ratcheting noise, and then he spat a watery black goo onto the tundra. He paused for a few seconds, breathing heavily, then heaved again, hacking out a second black glob. A third heave produced a little less, and then a fourth was almost dry.
Finally, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and stood upright again. His face was pale, but his eyes were sharp.
“Water,” he said in a rasping voice.
I ran back to the jeep, stumbling and falling once on the way, and returned with a canteen. Pop took it without a word, drank, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“That’s better,” he said. He sounded almost like himself again. He capped the canteen and held it out without opening his eyes.
I took the canteen and fumbled to hang it from my belt. “What was that?” I asked. “What happened?” I was surprised at how shook-up my own voice sounded. God knew I’d seen worse things than what Pop had hacked up.
Pop opened his eyes. He looked amused. “ ‘What happened?’ ” he said. “Well, that was what we call coughing.”
I gave up on fixing the canteen to my belt and just held it clutched in one hand. “No, I mean, what was that stuff that came out?” I could still see it there on the tundra at our feet. It looked like it was pulsing.
“Just blood,” Pop said.
I shook my head. “No, it ain’t. I’ve seen blood.” I had, too. Plenty. But none of it had looked this black.
Pop glanced down at it. “You haven’t seen old blood,” he said. “If this were red, that would mean it was fresh, and I might have a problem. But this is just old news coming up.”
“Old news?” I asked.
“Tuberculosis, kid. I caught it during the previous war to end all wars. Don’t worry, though. You can’t catch it from me.”
I wasn’t worried about that. But I was confused. “If you were in the Great War, and you caught TB,” I said, “then how could they let you into the Army again?”
Weird Detectives Page 6
