Besides, we were enlisted men, and we had to stick together. As long as there weren’t any officers around to catch us doing it.
“Sure,” I said, looking up at Pop again. “I’ve lied before. Back home in Nebraska, I even lied to a judge.”
Pop gave me a thin-lipped smile. “What did you do to wind up in front of a judge?”
I had done so much worse since then that it didn’t seem like much of a fuss anymore. “I beat up a rich kid from Omaha for calling me a dumb Bohunk,” I said. “Then I stole his Hudson, drove it into a pasture, and chased some cows. I might have run it through a few fences while I was at it.”
Pop chuckled. “That doesn’t sound too bad. Some judges might have even considered it justified.”
“Well, I also socked the first deputy who tried to arrest me,” I said. “But I think what really made the judge mad was when I claimed that I wasn’t a dumb Bohunk, but a stupid Polack.”
“Why would that make the judge angry?” Pop asked.
“Because the judge was a Polack,” I said. “So he gave me thirty days, to be followed by immediate enlistment or he’d make it two years. That part was okay, since I was going to sign up anyhow. But the thirty days was bad. My old man had to do the hay mowing without me. I got a letter from my mother last week, and she says he’s still planning to whip me when I get home.”
I noticed then that Pop’s gaze had shifted. He was staring off into the distance past my shoulder. So I turned to look, and I saw a man’s head and shoulders over the top edge of another hillock about fifty yards away. The man was wearing a coat with a fur-lined hood, and his face was a deep copper color. He appeared to be staring back at us.
“Do you know him?” Pop asked.
I squinted. “I don’t think so,” I said. “He looks like an Eskimo.”
“I believe he’s an Aleut,” Pop said. “And the only natives I’ve seen in camp have belonged to the Alaska Scouts, better known as Castner’s Cutthroats. Although that may be for the alliteration. I don’t know whether they’ve really cut any throats.”
I was still staring at the distant man, who was still staring back.
“They have,” I said.
“Then let’s mind our own—” Pop began.
He didn’t finish because of a sudden loud whistling noise from farther down the mountain. It seemed to come from everywhere below us, all at once, and it grew louder and louder every moment.
“Shit,” I said. I think Pop said it, too.
We both knew what it was, and we could tell it was going to be a fierce one. And there were no buildings up here to slow it down. It was a monster williwaw whipping around the mountain, and we had just a few seconds before the wind caught up with its own sound. The jeep was hundreds of yards away, and it wouldn’t have been any protection even if we could get to it. Our only option was going to be to lie down flat in the slight depression where the dead eagle was staked out. If we were lucky, the exposed skin of our hands and faces might not be flayed from our flesh. And if we were even luckier, we might manage to gulp a few breaths without having them ripped away by the wind. I had the thought that this wasn’t a good time to have tuberculosis.
Then, just as I was about to gesture to Pop to drop to the ground, I saw the distant Cutthroat disappear. His head and shoulders seemed to drop straight into the earth behind the hillock. And in one of my rare moments of smart thinking, I knew where he had gone.
“Come on!” I shouted to Pop, and I dropped the canteen and started running toward the hillock. But I had only gone about twenty yards when I realized that Pop wasn’t keeping up, so I ran back to grab his arm and drag him along.
He didn’t care for that, and he tried to pull away from me. But I was stronger, so all he could do was cuss at me as I yanked him forward as fast as I could.
Then the williwaw hit us, and he couldn’t even cuss. Our hats flew away as if they were artillery shells, and I was deafened and blinded as my ears filled with a shriek and my eyes filled with dirt and tears. The right side of my face felt as if it were being stabbed with a thousand tiny needles.
I couldn’t see where we were going now, but I kept charging forward, leaning down against the wind with all my weight so it wouldn’t push me off course. For all I knew, I was going off course anyway. I couldn’t tell if the ground was still sloping upward, or if we were over the top of the hillock already. But if I didn’t find the spot where the Cutthroat had disappeared, and find it pretty damn quick, we were going to have to drop to the ground and take our chances. Maybe we’d catch a break, and the williwaw wouldn’t last long enough to kill us.
Then my foot slipped on the tundra, and I fell to my knees. I twisted to try to catch Pop so he wouldn’t hit the ground headfirst, and then we both slid and fell into a dark hole in the earth.
VI
THE SOD ROOF OF THE ULAX WAS MOSTLY INTACT, BUT THERE WERE HOLES. So after my eyes adjusted, there was enough light to see. But Pop had landed on top of me, and at first all I could see was his mustache.
“Your breath ain’t so good, Pop,” I said. “Mind getting off me?”
At first I didn’t think he heard me over the shriek of the williwaw. But then he grunted and wheezed and pushed himself away until he was sitting against the earthen wall. I sat up and scooted over against the wall beside him.
Pop reached up and adjusted his glasses, which had gone askew. Then he looked up at the largest hole in the roof, which I guessed was how we’d gotten inside. It was about eight feet above the dirt floor.
“Thanks for breaking my fall,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the wind. “I hope I didn’t damage you. Although you might have avoided it if you’d told me what you were doing instead of dragging me.”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I looked around at the mostly underground room. It was maybe twenty feet long by ten feet wide. At the far end was a jumble of sod, timber, and whalebone that looked like a section of collapsed roof. But the roof above that area was actually in better shape than the rest. The rest was about evenly split between old sod and random holes. Some empty bottles and cans were scattered around the floor, and a few filthy, wadded blankets lay on earthen platforms that ran down the lengths of the two longer walls.
But there was no Cutthroat. I had watched him drop down into the same hole that Pop and I had tumbled into. I was sure that was what had happened. But I didn’t see him here now.
“What happened to the Eskimo?” I asked.
Pop scanned the interior of the ulax and frowned. “He must have gone elsewhere.”
“There isn’t any elsewhere,” I said, almost shouting. I pointed upward. “Listen to that. And this is the only shelter up here.”
Pop shook his head. “The man we saw was a native. He may know of shelters on this old volcano that we wouldn’t find if we searched for forty years. Or he may even be so used to a wind like this that he’ll stand facing into it and smile.”
I looked up at the big hole and saw what looked like a twenty-pound rock blow past. “I saw him jump down here. That’s how I knew where to go. And I think I would have seen him climb back out. Unless he can disappear.”
And then, from behind the jumble of sod and whalebone at the far end of the ulax, the Cutthroat emerged. His hood was down, and his dark hair shone. He was in a crouch, holding a hunting knife at his side. A big one.
“Who the fuck are you people?” the Cutthroat asked. His voice was low and rough, but still managed to cut through the howling above us. This was a man used to talking over the wind.
Pop gave a single hacking cough. Then he looked at me and said, “Well, Private, it doesn’t look as if he disappeared.”
Right then I wanted to punch Pop, but it was only because I was scared. I wished the Cutthroat really had disappeared. I didn’t recognize his dark, scraggly-bearded face, but that didn’t mean anything. I didn’t remember many living faces from Attu.
But I did remember the Cutthroats as a group. I remembered how they had a
ppeared and vanished in the frozen landscape like Arctic wolves.
And I remembered their knives.
“I asked you two a question,” the Cutthroat said, pointing at us with his knife. “Are you M.P.’s? And if you’re not, what are you doing here?”
Pop gave another cough. This time it wasn’t a tubercular hack, but a sort of polite throat-clearing. And I realized he didn’t understand what kind of man we were dealing with. But maybe that was a good thing. Because if he had ever seen the Cutthroats in action, he might have stayed stone-silent like me. And one of us needed to answer the question before the Cutthroat got mad.
“We aren’t M.P.’s,” Pop said. “So if you’ve done something you shouldn’t, you needn’t worry about us.”
“I haven’t done a fucking thing,” the Cutthroat said. Even though his voice was gravelly, and even though he was cussing, his voice had a distinctive Aleut rhythm. It was almost musical. “I just came up here because a guy told me there was a dead eagle. And I thought I’d get some feathers. I’m a goddamn native, like you said.”
I managed to take my eyes off the Cutthroat long enough to glance at Pop. Pop had the same expression on his face that he’d had when I’d first seen him, when he’d been whipping the strong, shirtless kid at Ping-Pong. He was calm and confident. There were even slight crinkles of happiness at the corners of his eyes and mouth, as if he were safe and snug in his own briar patch, and anybody coming in after him was gonna get scratched up.
It was the damnedest expression to have while sitting in a pit on the side of a volcano facing a man with a knife while a hundred-mile-an-hour wind screeched over your head.
“I understand completely,” Pop said. “We came up to find the eagle as well, although we didn’t have as good a reason. We’re only here because an idiot lieutenant colonel couldn’t think of another way to make us dance like puppets. It’s a stupid, pointless errand from a stupid, pointless officer.”
The Cutthroat blinked and then straightened from his crouch. He lowered the knife.
“Fucking brass,” he said.
“You’re telling us,” Pop said.
The Cutthroat slipped his knife into a sheath on his hip. “Colonel Castner’s not too bad. He lets us do what we know how to do. But the rest of them. Fuck me, Jesus. They didn’t listen on Attu, and they ain’t listened since.”
I knew what he was talking about. The Cutthroats had scouted Attu ahead of our invasion, so they had told the brass how many Japs were there and what to expect from them. But they had also warned that Attu’s permafrost would make wheeled vehicles almost useless, and that we’d need some serious cold-weather boots and clothing. Plus extra food. Yet we’d gone in with jeeps and trucks, and we’d been wearing standard gear. Food had been C-rations, and not much of that. It had all been a rotten mess, and it would have been a disaster if the Cutthroats hadn’t taken it upon themselves to bring dried fish and extra supplies to platoon after platoon.
Not to mention the dead Jap snipers and machine gunners we regular G.I.’s found as we advanced. The ones whose heads had been almost severed.
“I cowrote the pamphlet on the Battle of the Aleutians,” Pop said. “But of course it had to be approved by the brass, so we had to leave out what we knew about their mistakes. And we also weren’t allowed to mention the Alaska Scouts. The generals apparently felt that specific mention of any one outfit might be taken to suggest that other outfits weren’t vital as well.”
The Cutthroat made a loud spitting noise. “Some of them weren’t.” He sat down with his back against the sod-and-whalebone rubble. “Don’t matter. I was there, and I killed some Japs. Don’t much care what gets said about it now.”
The noise of the williwaw had dropped slightly, so when Pop spoke again his voice was startlingly loud.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Pop said, “why are you on Adak? I was told the Scouts had gone back to Fort Richardson.”
The Cutthroat’s upper lip curled, and he pointed a finger at his right thigh. “I got a leg wound on Attu, and the fucking thing’s been getting reinfected for over a year. It’s better now, but it was leaking pus when the other guys had to leave. Captain said I had to stay here until it healed. But now I got to wait for an authorized ride. And while I wait, they tell me I’m an orderly at the hospital. Which ain’t what I signed up for. So I tried to stow away on a boat to Dutch Harbor a couple weeks ago, and the fucking M.P.’s threw me off.”
“I assume that means you’re now AWOL from the hospital,” Pop said. “Which explains why you thought that the Private and I might be police.”
The Cutthroat shook his head. “Nah. The hospital C.O. don’t really give a shit what I do. He let me put a cot in a supply hut and pretty much ignores me. I’m what you call extraneous personnel.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I just thought you might be M.P.’s because of this dead guy back here. I think it’s the same guy who told me about the eagle, but maybe not. You people all look alike to me.”
It took me a few seconds to realize what the Cutthroat had said. When I did, I looked at Pop. Pop’s eyebrows had risen slightly.
“Would you mind if I have a look?” Pop asked.
The Cutthroat shrugged his shoulders. “What do I care? He ain’t my dead guy.”
Pop stood up stiffly, and I stood up as well. With the williwaw overhead now a somewhat diminished shriek, we walked, hunched over, to where the Cutthroat sat. And now I could see that the ulax had a second, smaller chamber whose entrance had been partially obscured by the fallen sod and bone.
We went around the pile of debris, through the narrow entrance beside the wall, and into the second chamber. It was about ten by eight feet, and its roof was also pocked by holes that let in light. But these holes were smaller, and they changed the pitch of the wind noise. The shriek rose to a high, keening whistle.
On the floor, a stocky man lay on his back, his open eyes staring up at the holes where the wind screamed past. His hair looked dark and wet, and his face was as pale as a block of salt except for a large bruise under his left eye. His mouth was slack. He was wearing a dark Navy pea jacket, dark trousers, and mud-black boots. His bare, empty hands were curled into claws at his sides.
Pop and I stared down at him for a long moment, neither of us speaking.
At first, I didn’t recognize the man because he looked so different from how he had looked the day before. But then I focused on the bruise under his eye, and I knew who he was. My gut lurched.
Right behind me, the Cutthroat said, “Back of his head’s bashed in.”
Startled, I spun around, fists up.
The Cutthroat’s knife shot up from its sheath to within two inches of my nose.
Then Pop’s hand appeared between the blade and my face.
“Easy, boys,” Pop said. “I’m the camp editor. You don’t want your names in the paper.”
I lowered my fists.
“Sorry,” I said. I was breathing hard, but trying to sound like I wasn’t. “It was just a reflex.”
The Cutthroat lowered his knife as well, but more slowly.
“Now I recognize you,” he said, peering at me intently. “You boxed yesterday. And you were on Attu. Okay, mine was just a reflex, too.”
I still didn’t know him, but that still didn’t mean anything. The Cutthroats hadn’t stayed in any one place very long when I had seen them at all. And some of them had worn their fur-lined hoods all the time.
Pop took his hand away, and then all three of us looked down at the body. I opened my mouth to speak, but suddenly had no voice. Neither Pop nor the Cutthroat seemed to notice.
“He’s Navy,” Pop said. “Or merchant marine. A young man, like all the rest of you.” Pop’s voice, although loud enough to be heard over the wind, had a slight tremble.
“Don’t worry about it, old-timer,” the Cutthroat said. “He’s just another dead guy now. Seen plenty of those.”
Pop got down on one knee beside the body. “Not on this islan
d,” he said. “Other than sporadic casualties generated by bad bomber landings, Adak has been relatively death-free.” He gingerly touched the dead man’s face and tilted it to one side far enough to expose the back of the head. The skull had been crushed by a large rock that was still underneath. The dark stuff on the rock looked like what Pop had coughed up earlier.
Feeling sick, I turned away and stared at the Cutthroat. I tried to read his face, the way I might try to read an opponent’s in a boxing match. I’d been told that you could tell what another fighter was about to do, and sometimes even what he was only thinking about doing, just from the expression on his face.
The Cutthroat gave me a scowl.
“Don’t look at me, kid,” he said. “I would’ve done a better job than that.” Pop opened the dead man’s coat, exposing a blue Navy work shirt. I could see his hands shaking slightly as he did it. “I believe you,” he said. “Whatever happened here was sloppy. It may even have been an accident.” He opened the coat far enough to expose the right shoulder. “No insignia. He was just a seaman.” He opened the shirt collar. “No dog tags, either.”
Then he reached into the large, deep coat pockets, first the left, then the right. He came up from the right pocket clutching something.
Pop held it up in a shaft of gray light from one of the ceiling holes.
It was a huge, dark-brown feather, maybe fourteen inches long. It was bent in the middle.
“That bird,” Pop said, “is turning out to be nothing but trouble.”
VII
WE LEFT THE BODY WHERE IT WAS AND WENT BACK INTO THE LARGER ROOM. The wind was still furious overhead, so we were stuck there for the time being. Pop and I sat back down against the wall at the far end, and the Cutthroat lounged on the earthen shelf along the long wall to our right.
Pop didn’t look so good. He was pale, and he coughed now and then. I think he was trying to pretend that the dead man hadn’t bothered him. He had probably seen death before, but not the way the Cutthroat and I had.
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