The Wind Is Not a River

by Brian Payton

  The boom of a 37 mm gun is followed by popping grenades and the distant hail of rifle fire. A muffled cough just inside the entrance to the tent is followed by the growl of Easley’s own stomach.

  Hushed English voices a few yards out mix in the wind with distant and unintelligible shouts. Inside, that cough can be heard again, louder and more defined. Easley slowly cranes his neck to see. Finally, a bandaged and bare-chested soldier flings back blankets, staggers to his feet, and wanders out into the weak morning light.

  EASLEY MARVELS at the range of response to this horrific scene. Deep, uncontrollable sobbing. Cold rejection. Anger silent and smoldering. From where he lies near the back of the tent, Easley can see numerous men peer inside. One makes the sign of the cross, the next spews a torrent of obscenities.

  When they begin pulling bodies out into the fog, one man shouts, “Praise the Lord!” A survivor has been found near the entrance of the tent. He is lifted up and carried away. Easley now calls out for help—timidly at first, then with determination. A pair of boots approach as Easley struggles to push the Greek away.

  “I’m alive.” It’s all he can think to say.

  A teenage soldier inspects the Greek’s body, gasps, draws back his own blood-covered hand. He crouches down and gazes into Easley’s face with stunned disbelief.

  Easley’s bloodied shirt is pulled up over his head. He is hastily searched for wounds. Finding nothing new, the soldier lifts him up and carries him past upturned litters, twisted blankets, arms, and legs. Outside, Easley blinks against the light. His beardless face tingles in the chill as men look up and gawk, as if he has risen from the dead.

  Easley is set down upon an empty litter beside his fellow survivors. He learns that not one but two medical tents were attacked, tents clearly marked with the Red Cross. The slaughter was part of a suicide charge to capture the big howitzers and turn them on the Americans. It very nearly worked. Caught in the dark and fog, the disorienting rampage and screams, some men ran, others resisted, desperate hand to hand combat ensued. The Japanese regrouped, but grenades blew holes in their advancing line. The attack was finally put down a stone’s throw from their objective. But farther up the valley, the battle is heard moving on.

  Above Easley’s litter, men huddle with arms crossed, murmuring in low, reverential tones. One of them turns and looks down with glassy eyes, then yanks a sock from his hand as his pale face breaks out in a grin. Cohen bends over and palms Easley’s cheek, inspecting the quality of his work. He pulls a smooth line across the jaw that ends with a snap of his fingers.

  Cohen stands, glances over his shoulder, past the gutted tent, toward the rifle fire just a few hundred yards deeper into the fog. His expression falls as the shock creeps back in.

  “WHERE’S THE REPORTER? I want that goddamn reporter.” A staff sergeant strides with his rifle cradled across his chest, at the ready, as if the enemy might be lurking among the wounded. Smoke-blackened face, twisted with the urge to avenge. Someone points down at Easley. “Get him up there. I want you to see this. See what kind of enemy we’re fighting.”

  Two men are ordered to lift Easley’s litter and follow the staff sergeant and a half dozen soldiers over the sodden and pockmarked fields. They travel so far the men are forced to take turns with the litter. All the while Easley fights the pain pounding in his head and stump. He shivers against the cold. He forces himself to take in every detail of the scene surrounding him.

  At the top of a rise, the men set down their burden and help Easley up into a sitting position. Together they stare out over heaps of bodies strewn across fields of last year’s rye. A pair of disembodied legs still joined at the hip. An arm, severed at the shoulder, with the hand still balled in a fist. Dead men splayed, tangled, split in two by hand grenades clutched tight against their chests. Dead men in the hundreds. All of them Japanese.

  “This is how they fight.” The staff sergeant points at the gruesome sight. “First, they kill their own wounded before coming after ours. Kill the helpless men, then blow themselves to smithereens. This is the value they place on human life. Even their own. Where’s the honor in that?”

  Easley has no answer.

  “Take a good, long look. Write about how crazy these fuckers are. And this is American soil. Just wait and see how crazy they get once we invade Japan.”

  It seems so long ago that Easley returned to these islands to bear witness and report. The writer’s vainglorious belief that he can somehow make sense of the world by capturing events, rendering them down to words on a page. Easley never really accounted for the possibility that this place, these events, would rewrite his own life so utterly.

  The soldiers spread out among the dead, testing intact corpses for signs of life with the toes of their boots.

  “Count ’em,” the staff sergeant shouts. “Lay ’em out in some kind of order.”

  He and Easley watch as the men set about the hateful task.

  “Mark my words,” he says. “This war will never end.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  SHE GENTLY PULLS THE FRONT DOOR CLOSED AND finds her way back to the kitchen. Helen braces herself against the sink, gathering her wits, staring past the soaking pots and pans and through the open window to the apple tree beyond. The fruit is barely the size of crabapples. Despite this week’s welcomed sun, it will be a couple more months before they swell, sweeten, and blush in the heat.

  “Who was that?” Helen’s father is in the living room, shouting over the radio.

  “Just a minute.”

  She stands up straight again, sticks her hands into the water, and resumes soothing task. She needs a moment to collect herself, to think. The sight of Ilya Hopikoff at the door, hat in hand, still has her weak at the knees.

  It’s been thirteen days since the Battle of Attu. Helen read the reports of the amphibious assault and the resulting death of 549 Americans and 2,351 Japanese. A handful of accredited war correspondents were brought in to cover the battle. She chased down the bylines of the few published articles she’d seen, enquiring whether the authors had encountered any prisoners held by the Japanese, or survivors of a missing plane, whether they had made the acquaintance of an RCAF lieutenant, Warren Easley. None of them had even the slightest lead. To stay focused, she keeps lists of people to contact, leads to follow up, things to do. It makes her feel as if progress is being made, as if progress is still possible. She heard that there might still be casualties at Fort Lewis near Tacoma, and has been working up the courage to go down and search. Thousands of soldiers who fought on Attu have already been reassigned to fight elsewhere—Italy, the South Pacific. They’ve been forced to move on with their war. Since Helen returned from the Aleutians, she has told herself that she too must learn to live in the present, move beyond her failure, even as she continues her search. She had learned to ration hope, along with life’s other necessities. And then came the knock at the door.

  Ilya Hopikoff was on his own today, his son Jesse still has a few more days of school. Compared to his ashen appearance over two months ago, today he looked rested, revitalized. He stood several yards away from the door, declined her invitation to step inside. While Jesse recovered quickly from pneumonia, his own symptoms were more persistent. The doctors discovered that he did have tuberculosis, but he is no longer contagious and is well on the mend. He sent Jesse to live with a family from the Orthodox church and had him enrolled in the third grade. That way, all this time won’t have gone to waste. Jesse thrives in the society of other young boys. Ilya finally joined his son almost two weeks ago.

  When Helen explained that she had met his late wife’s cousin in Sitka, he looked down, fiddled with the hat in his hands. He said, as long as the people from Atka remain interned at the cannery, he and Jesse won’t be joining them. Better for both of them to stay safe and well cared for here, then return to the Aleutians after the war is over and all the outsiders have gone home.

  And then he found himself arriving at the business that brought
him here.

  Last week he met a soldier in the hospital who’d fought in the Battle of Attu. The man had never heard of the missing Aleuts but had vivid tales of what it took to rid the place of Japanese. He also mentioned hearing of an airman who had been marooned on the island before the invasion, hiding from the enemy, surviving off shellfish and birds. April in the Aleutians? Alone on the land? He initially dismissed this rumor but then recalled Helen’s visit, found her card, and simply couldn’t let it go. “I don’t want to raise hopes unnecessarily,” he said, “but wondered if you had heard the story. Wondered if this might be your man.”

  Joe calls from the living room. “I said, Who was at the door?”

  “I said, I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Joe has been impatient of late. His initial excitement about his upcoming journey is now tempered with reluctance and apprehension—at leaving the home in which he raised his children and nursed his wife, at leaving his daughter behind. His train departs on Saturday.

  Four weeks after Helen left for Alaska, a pair of swallows built a nest among the pipes above the organ at St. Brigid’s. Joe wanted to remove the nest before the birds had a chance to lay eggs, patch the breach that allowed them to come and go as they please. But the birds came back to claim their space and startled him on the ladder. Joe fell, sprained his one good wrist, and suffered a concussion. The priest couldn’t track Helen down, so an urgent telegram was sent east to his sons. To her surprise, Joe allowed himself to fall again—this time for Frank’s urgent plea for help with the booming family business. He and Patrick could use their old man on any number of building sites, he said. Remarkably, Joe has consented to living under the same roof as his eldest son. But he refused to leave until Helen was safe at home again.

  Helen knows he will pay careful attention as she recounts the details of her conversation with Ilya Hopikoff, searching for signs she’s indulging in impossible dreams again. She can already hear his objections: This could be another man from the same lost plane, a man from any number of lost planes, a light-skinned Aleut who escaped the Japanese. All these cautions seem so reasonable, mature. So why can’t she stop smiling?

  TWENTY-THREE

  HE FINDS HIMSELF ALONE AGAIN, ALTHOUGH OTHERS are close at hand. As when he lived like a shadow in a cave, Easley is free to move about and yet remains trapped—now by his physical limitations and the law. After several rounds of shifting between hospital bed and prison cell, he passed the last two nights in a surplus office in the hospital at Fort Richardson, a few miles outside of Anchorage. He assumes he remains under arrest until otherwise informed.

  They said they no longer know what to do with him, and yet this room appears to have been designed to mock him. A ribbon-less typewriter sits alone on a sturdy desk not ten feet from his cot. He has not felt compelled to touch it. He remains forbidden from contacting anyone outside this building: not editors, wire services, lawyers, or relations. He is under strict orders not to write about Attu, or the Aleutian campaign, until his case is “settled.” When he first arrived, he was unable to do much more than raise his head from the pillow. And yet they remain worried he might try and file a story, somehow compromise the official account of the Battle of Attu.

  Easley gazes out the window at blue sky over birch and black spruce, vibrant and alive in the northern sun that beams so earnestly. He reaches for his shirt and trousers, then sets about getting dressed. These civilian clothes were given to him by a junior officer from Bellingham, a town midway between Vancouver and Seattle, between his childhood home and the life he built with Helen. He swings his leg over the side of the cot, pulls the wheelchair into position. He readies himself for departure.

  Easley pleaded with the officers, doctors, nurses, and guards to let him get word to her, to let her know that at least he is alive. Helen would then let his mother know that she still had a son. The knowledge that he could not relieve their worry plagued him, especially at night, when the lingering northern twilight pushed sleep well beyond reach. All in due course, they said. But due course stretched into twelve days before he learned of his imminent release. Now they say he will be home by tomorrow afternoon. At last he might be able to beg the use of a telephone, hear her voice echo and fray across the miles, but he holds himself in check. In just one more day—less than twenty-four hours—he will be able to deliver his message in person. He will see his joy reflected in her eyes, he will return her embrace.

  When Easley was first evacuated to the mainland, he was debriefed extensively. He freely admitted to having impersonated an officer, trespassed U.S. military installations, defied the terms of his previous expulsion from the territory, proved himself a nuisance. The book Karl stole from the Japanese camp—the book with Easley’s tribute to him scrawled between the lines—was seized and scrutinized. It turned out to be classical poetry. Easley took his time, told them everything. They shook their heads in disbelief. What little intelligence he was able to provide on the Japanese occupation was welcome, and earned him some grace. But he doubts he was able to provide anything of use for their inevitable assault on Kiska, where the larger enemy force awaits.

  He has not seen his interrogators for over a week. Perhaps they have been reassigned. This morning the armed guard outside his door was downgraded to an orderly, who chain-smokes cigarettes and strikes up conversations with whoever happens by. In the case of displaced person John Easley, the U.S. military seems to have lost interest.

  The doctors, however, are paying increased attention. It is now clear that what remains of his left leg is not healing properly. The infection has returned, the heel of the femur seems intent on breaching the surface of the skin. This will require more surgery, a procedure and convalescence best undertaken stateside and in civilian care. The doctor has arranged for this transfer, but no one seems to know what this means for his status, or the charges that were to be laid against him. Easley has not been told if he will ever hear of the matter again. He concludes it is best not to raise his hand.

  It is a surprise to learn how much can be accomplished with three points of contact. Remaining foot on the floor, two hands on the rail of the cot, then push up and away. Pivot, grab the arms of the wheelchair, reverse pattern, knead thigh until the throbbing subsides. Easley reaches into his shirt pocket for the pills the doctor said to save for the flight to come. He tosses them back and swallows them down.

  Over the past few days, he has begun to stand at the urinal, lean against the sink to shave, even shower in an upright position. He forces himself to stand before the mirror and face the hollow eyes, sunken cheeks, and butchered limb confronting him. The doctor won’t hear mention of getting fitted for a prosthesis until the infection is under control, until after the next operation, when the stump has fully healed. Still, these simple victories have his thoughts shifting from regret to possibility.

  True to his word, Easley has not written about the events that brought him here. It has not been a difficult promise to keep. He has neither the strength, desire, nor clarity of mind to summarize events, to face writing about solitude or war. Such an undertaking demands a measure of time. Time to weigh all he has seen and endured against the new life yet to come. Time to let it settle and cure, reveal its shape, see if he discovers any kind of meaning at all. Easley dwells on none of these things. Mostly, he thinks of Helen.

  Easley set himself the goal of reclaiming some of this stolen time by writing to her each day, describing his progress, his purgatory, his dreams for their future. These letters he keeps in a growing stack. He put down all the things he felt but seemed unable to say in his waking life, his life before the war. He began by asking for forgiveness for leaving her alone and bringing back so little in return. Then he found himself not describing the degrees of diminishment their separation has caused, but compiling a list of the small, the innumerable, the previously overlooked pleasures of their shared life that now seem to tower over all.

  But given what he encountered on remote Attu—the
all-consuming urge to self-preservation, an enemy willing to self-destruct—it is difficult to shake the feeling that this war might yet prove a curse passed on to the generation to come. A new Hundred Years War. If, somehow, he lives long enough to see it end, he will do things differently. Together they will buy and learn to tend a modest piece of land, plant and grow their own vegetables. If not children, then they will raise dogs and rabbits, keep chickens and bees. Perhaps he will start a small, local newspaper, or try his hand at teaching. Neither of them will ever sleep alone again.

  There is a knock at the door. The orderly has come to escort the amputee to the airfield, make sure he gets settled and safely strapped into position. The decision as to whether the patient should be lying down or seated for this journey—a topic of some debate between hospital and hangar—has yet to be revealed. Should he be allowed to sit, Easley will spend the time composing one more letter to Helen, a letter describing this long-sought emancipation. The letter to complete the stack.

  He calls the man in, hands over his bag, but declines the offer of help with the chair. He will roll through the door and return to his life with whatever strength remains.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IF ONE RELIED ON APPEARANCES ALONE, TOM SORENSON might be suspected of having spent the war playing tennis. Only two weeks into June and he’s deeply tanned and toned. In fact, Easley’s former colleague has just returned from Sicily, where he saw his fair share of violence while filing dozens of stories. But he has also played by the rules. Easley does not hold this against him. Sorenson pumps the clutch and presses the gas, crosses one big, burnished forearm atop the other to turn the steering wheel. Easley has never owned a car himself, never considered himself a driver, but now realizes that the option has been taken from him entirely. This latest, newfound loss must find its place in line.