Yes. I do. And I could see Lily's baby, just as well as I could see the boy from the balloon. I could see blood and hair and tiny hands and-
Ronnie was shaking his head. He held up a hand, palm up. “Like this,” he said.
“Like what?” I asked, staring at Ronnie's face, not his hand.
“A breath,” Ronnie said. “The boy was dead, maybe they thought he was born dead, but he had taken a breath, a single breath-did you know this?-and when I got there, it was still hanging in the air above him.”
“Ronnie-”
“No,” Ronnie said. “My wolf saw it, too, asked me if he should fetch it, take this spirit, this breath by the scruff of its neck, and plunge it back down inside the boy. The wolf looked at me. He asked me this. Lily was saying things, too. I did not hear. I just looked at the boy. The wolf looked at me. Then he lunged.”
Ronnie had been staring before him as he said this. Now he turned.
“But I was too quick for him. I was younger then. Faster. With two feet. I sprang for his spirit, that breath. I jumped and I got it.” Ronnie made a sudden fist and then opened his hand once more.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I jumped before the wolf. Because I understood. I thought I understood what the wolf did not. This boy was not to live here. Within him ran Yup'ik blood, but also the blood of another place. And I knew that this blood would be the end of us. Just as I knew when I first saw you and the priest before you and the priest before him. Such new blood would be the end of us. The end of how the Yup'ik lived.Yup'ik: this means the real people. This child was not real. I saw this. I knew this. When I saw the boy, when I saw his father.”
Worse than hearing this was believing it, and I tried to stop: “You were there, Ronnie? You were really there? This isn't alcohol or diabetes or-”
“You have the proof,” Ronnie said.
We stared at each other.
And I almost wish it had ended that way. That each of us, in turn, would feel our eyelids droop and close, our jaws go slack, and then, slowly at first, but with ever-increasing speed, our life seep out of us and into the floor.
But it didn't.
“When the wolf left, I knew I had done wrong,” Ronnie said. “I took the breath, I went to the boy-but it had been too long now, and without the wolf, I could not plunge his breath deep enough inside him. Lily only knew-Lily only knew that I tried. She saw my tears and saw my failure, but did not see all of it. Lou-is: when her lover came, this Saburo, when she asked me to help him out of town, help him deliver the baby's body into the tundra? Yes. I would never say no again.
“One of the aunties had talked-there were soldiers, police, everywhere. We almost got caught, several times. We took two kayaks; I led him an hour downriver, and from there, he insisted he go on alone. You would know the place? Where the bank is worn away? Where the ircenrrat gather? He said to wait there for him, that he would come back, return the map-the path Lily might take to see their son.” Ronnie shook his head. “Why there?”
“I know it,” I said quietly. “I know the place.”
“It was not a place I could go, not then, not after my tuunraq had left me, run before me and set all the other spirits against me. I could feel them coming, worming through the ayuq, the soil, down the bank, to the water. I ran for my kayak, I started upstream.”
“You left Saburo?”
“He found me,” Ronnie said. “I took the map from him, but-but by the time he caught up with me, I'd almost made it back to Bethel. A boat-with a light-it saw us. I went to shore, into the cottonwood. Saburo went downriver. I heard yelling, shots, then nothing.”
I waited before speaking.
“What did Lily say when she saw the map?” I asked.
“I couldn't face her, not then,” Ronnie said. “Not after what I knew had happened to Saburo. I found some gin. Then more gin. I got drunk. Police came. And when I woke up in my cell, the book was gone. I at least gave Lily and Saburo this: I would not let them beat the truth out of me. I played the drunk fool, said I had no idea where the map came from, what it meant.” Ronnie scrunched his face at the memory. “I was the drunk fool,” he said, and looked at me, shrugged. “Proof.”
I shook my head. Ronnie smiled, exhausted, and looked outside.
“The wolf, he's closer,” Ronnie said. “Not close enough.” The window looked the way our televisions up here used to before satellite: snow swirling against a dark screen, pressing to get in. “But you'll help him, Lou-is, won't you? Give him what he's coming for.” Ronnie paused, tried to smile once more. “Tell him he's late.”
“Ronnie,” I said, on my feet, desperate to stop him. Or the wolf. “It's no good, Ronnie-wait. I don't believe-”
Ronnie looked at his wrist. “I need the bracelet,” he said.
I slowly shook my head.
“I need it for the wolf,” he said.
“Not yet,” I said.
“I need it to tie him to me. I'm not going to let him escape again this time.”
“Ronnie,” I said.
“Lou-is,” Ronnie said. “What have I asked?”
I sat silent, then reached in my pocket, took out the pyx, opened it, and removed the bracelet. I unraveled it as carefully as if it were a chain of diamonds and then affixed it to his wrist. “Let's pray,” I said, not looking up.
Ronnie looked pleased, and shook his head. “I can't pray if I don't believe, Lou-is.”
I couldn't answer, only taunt: “Well, I'm getting ready to go after your wolf, and I don't exactly believe in him, so-”
“It's okay,” Ronnie interrupted. “He believes in you.” He smiled, but to himself, and then lay back on the pillow. “Now,” he said, the word coming quite clearly, “this is what you must give him-” But here his voice faltered again. He went down, deep in his chest to find his breath, to cough it out once more, but this time it did not come.
I shouted. I shook him. I ran to the hall. I called for help. I was crying, tears actually running down my face, my old man's face. I dropped the side rail. I bent over him. And then-
I breathed. Once, twice. My mouth to his. Then my hands on his chest. One, two, three, four, five. But it was no good: the bed was too soft. Sometimes there was a board beneath you could pull out for CPR. I couldn't find it. I thought about dragging him onto the floor, but there wasn't enough time. Jesus, Mary, and you, too, Joseph. Breathe. Again to his chest. One, two, three, four-I could hear footsteps, voices behind me.
Thank you, Lord, for this: for the help of doctors and nurses, for those who can truly bring the dead back to life. I explained between breaths, between compressions, what I was doing, how I was saving him, how I needed help. I was on the verge of saying why-of saying that I needed to save him from the wolf, or for the wolf, or that I needed to keep him alive long enough to tell me, an old priest, a believer, one baptized in the waters of everlasting life, just what it was that I had to give this wolf.
They pulled me away from Ronnie. I fought, but they pulled me away-and I decided: they know best. They know better than I: they are the professionals; they are younger. Let them breathe, let them save him.
They did not.
“Father! Stop!” I think this is what I heard as they struggled with me. “Father-what are you doing? You have to-” I think I may have hit someone at this point, but, let's be clear, I did not bite, did not bite at one of them. “You have to respect his wishes.” A nurse held up his wrist and the Comfort One bracelet, but I couldn't see it. I know it was there, but I couldn't see it. I could only hear it clink and wink and laugh at me, and then I couldn't hear it at all, because I was running, down the hall, out the doors, into the snow, off to the wolf.
YOU HAVE THE PROOF, Ronnie said, and I do.
Proof is in my pocket, the inside breast pocket of my parka, as I race my snowmachine down the frozen river. Proof is a small book of strange paper bound in green leather. Proof is what I bring the wolf.
Proof: this is what I searched for, years later, in Anchora
ge.
But there was none.
Everything had changed. Every street I walked down was paved, the sidewalks were clear. New buildings had gone up. Old buildings cleared away. The Starhope still stood, or its shell did. It had new windows. In the lobby, plants, and a guard in coat and tie. And on the second floor: nothing, nothing I needed to see.
And out at the base, where the strangely frightened teenaged soldier at the main gate waved me through when he saw my collar, I could see that Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Airfield had changed as well. They were separate bases now, but more important, the mud was gone, and so too the tents, the crowds. I picked my way down new streets, around new buildings, circumscribed, incredibly, by tidy green lawns. And finally, I turned down a street that I'm fairly certain is the one that used to terminate at the front door of our Quonset hut.
And it was gone, too, of course. Which I expected, though I was disappointed. I wondered what it was like when they tore it down, what happened when neither Gurley nor I returned from our secret mission, whether the major ever searched the tundra for some proof of plague, or whether he launched a search for some proof of us.
Maybe no one noticed, or didn't notice for a while. The war was ending then. We disappeared in July, the war ended in August. And the balloon that carried that boy was either the last or among the last, or so I've deduced from the odd article or two that I've read in the decades since. They gave up, Japan. Credit Gurley, I guess, or the editors who voluntarily obeyed the press ban: until it was lifted, not a word about the balloons was printed or broadcast, and the Japanese were left to conclude that their massive undertaking had failed.
No trace of plague weapons was ever found in Alaska or farther south, though I've read there were plans for plague-laden kamikaze planes to attack San Diego in the fall of '45. Northern China, Unit 731's home, offers a glimpse of what might have been: in the years following the war, tens of thousands died in successive waves of plague, likely spread by animals escaping from, or released by, those who'd spent the war experimenting on them.
The plague failed to reach us, but the balloons did not. They rose from the ground into the clouds and flew across the ocean. They landed in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. In Alaska, in Washington, in Oregon, in California, in a dozen other states, and who knows what's still concealed today beneath the forest floor? After the war, researchers reinflated a captured Japanese paper balloon and launched it from Southern California, just to see how hardy it was, just to see how far it would travel, having already made the trek from Japan.
It landed in Africa.
But that one balloon doesn't interest me so much as the dozens Gurley and I left behind in Anchorage. How strange it must have been in those first days without us, those last days of the war, MPs guarding a building uninhabited but for balloons.
In time, of course, the Army would have sent someone up to take inventory and look for clues of what had happened among the items that we'd left. What would they have found?
Balloons, still hanging from the rafters, crates upon crates of balloon parts, and those pieces too big to be crated, stacked along the floor, the whole place looking less like a home for decommissioned war matériel than the breeding ground of some terrible new weapon.
In his office, after they'd snapped the padlock? They'd find the wall map, of course, the pins running red across it, the clocks above. Gurley's dog-eared Japanese-English dictionary. The blackguard's tooth.
There I was, years later, half afraid some MP would finally take this long-absent soldier prisoner, and there was nothing there.
There's nothing there: Lily was as amazed as I at those final pages in the book, page after page of gray wash that I had read as blank, as failure, as proof of Saburo's inability to show Lily where he had gone, what he had done, what had happened to their little boy.
It's only now I understand that he could no more have mapped their son's death than he could the clouds, blood coursing through a body or spilling into the sea. The pattern is unknowable, out of reach, divine. It's only now I see, in my mind and in the overcast sky ahead of me, those washed gray pages for what they were. There may be no sharper map of grief than this, no more precise way to show a war's worth, a life's worth, a love's worth of ache and loss and absence.
Rest, write, my superiors told me, almost sixty years in the bush, what stories you must have! And this is how I would tell them, not with pen or pencil but a brush, dipped in water, dipped in paint, sweeping back and forth across an empty page.
Look how the gray gathers here, how here it stumbles into white.
Look closer, how each square inch, each speck of color is made up of smaller specks of moisture. Of water from the brush, of Ronnie's rain falling to those grieving parents' faces, of snow, of molecules, of the hydrogen escaped years ago from those balloons.
Of breaths escaped from mouths.
And the last thing I would draw or paint or write is what I see emerging now: eyes, ears, tail, snout, a thick mane. I throttle back and stop. Red tongue, white teeth.
Ronnie's wolf.
It must be: any other wolf would have run at the sound and light- or maybe this one has sized me up and seen me for what I am. An aging priest. A soldier who couldn't shoot. The one the others left behind.
The wolf paces left, then right, fast at first, then slow. I don't know what holds him at bay: fear of a gun? I do not have one. I raise my empty hands, and he stops and stares, his muscles tense, and so do mine.
I believe in God the Father Almighty and I believe in the wolves He made, their claws, their bite. But He did not make this one, so I have nothing to fear. This is Ronnie's wolf. A tuunraq. A spirit, a familiar, a work of the mind. Isn't he? I cannot come to harm from something imaginary.
But something in me is frightened, enough to hammer my heart and make me sweat in the subzero cold. Frightened and almost teary with joy, because the longer the wolf paces and pants, the more I find this proof that he is not, in fact, a tuunraq, he is the work of no one's imagination but God's, or that there is no such thing as imagination out here, that everything is real, that he is real, teeth and all, and this is why Ronnie sent me to meet him. To die, and in doing so join Lily, and the rest.
Park rangers say: appear larger than you are, make a noise, speak; remind the animal that you are human, not standard prey.
So I stay silent, I move away from the snowmachine, I crouch down, I put one knee in the snow. I shift my weight, the snow gives, I sink a little. I put down the other knee and sink a little more. I recover my balance, extend a hand, and then the other.
And the wolf steps closer, unsure.
I look at his eyes, and then remember: his mouth! Who or what is he carrying by the scruff of its neck? Lily's baby? Saburo? The boy from the balloon? Ronnie? I can't see. I look at the eyes again.
The wolf steps closer, close enough that our breath now clouds together, and I am on both knees, trembling, remembering: This is what you must give him-
Breath, cloud. Breath, cloud.
I breathe out the breath Ronnie gave me as he died, the breath Ronnie took from Lily's baby after he died.
Bring this to her son, I tell the wolf.
Breath, cloud.
And to Ronnie, breathe his life back. And the boy who flew across the ocean: fill his lungs once more, his balloon as well.
Breathe life into Lily.
Into me.
Deep in the snow, I feel a flash of how that first Yup'ik man of stone felt. A staggering jumble of blocks sinking, too slowly, into the tundra. I am cold and wet, and old.
The wolf steps closer and then around me. I can feel him at the small of my back, now my shoulder, now he's before me once more. I breathe deep; I'm ready. But then, without a look, without a sound, he leaps away, lands in a trot, then leaps again, and lands galloping, fleeing or leading me to some new and distant place.
I rise.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Those interested in the historical and cultural
issues raised here should consult the following sources, to which I am indebted: Robert Mikesh's definitive Japan's World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America; James H. Barker's beautiful and informative Always Getting Ready: Upterrlainarluta: Yup'ik Eskimo Subsistence in Southwest Alaska; Ann Fienup-Riordan's Boundaries and Passages: Rule and Ritual in Yup'ik Eskimo Tradition, where I first found a version of the myth of the sobbing boy buried beside his mother; Bethel: The First One Hundred Years by Mary Lenz and James H. Barker; Segundo Llorente's Memoirs of a Yukon Priest; and A. B. Hartley's Unexploded Bomb.
I am very grateful to the following individuals and institutions for helping me ground this work of fiction in fact: former Comdr. Hansel T. Wood, Jr., USN; CW04 John D. Bartleson, Jr., USN (Ret.), historian of the Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal Association, Inc.; Maj. Sean Bourke, M.D., USAF; Robert C. Mikesh, former senior curator, National Air and Space Museum; Alan Renga, assistant archivist of the San Diego Aerospace Museum; Dr. William Atwater, Ph.D., director of the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum; Dr. Amy R. Cohen, Ph.D., Randolph-Macon Woman's College; Lt. Amy Hansen and the public affairs staff of Elmendorf Air Force Base; the National Air and Space Museum Archives and Library; the National Archives facilities in Washington, D.C., and College Park, Maryland, especially the archivists of the Motion Picture, Audio and Video collection; the Rare Book and Special Collections Room of the Library of Congress; the John Wesley Powell Anthropology Library of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History; the Alaska Room librarians at Anchorage's Z. J. Loussac Public Library; Aaron Micallef, director of education and public programs, and the archive staff at the Anchorage Museum of Art and History; the General Research Division of the New York Public Library; the Seattle Public Library; George Mason University's Fen-wick Library and Georgetown University's Lauinger Library; and the Martha Washington Library of the Fairfax County (Virginia) Public Library System.
A wide variety of patient and knowledgeable Alaskans helped me avoid making cheechako errors (such as misusing the word cheechako); I'm particularly thankful to Mike Martz and John Active of KYUK/Bethel Broadcasting; Joan Hamilton and Michael Stevens of the Yupiit Piciryarait Museum; Grant Fairbanks; Sarge Connick; Elias and Bernie Venes; Gladys Jung; Crusty Old Joe Stevens; Olivia Terry of Island Aviation; VPSO Mark Haglin; the folks at KNBA; and the extraordinary Susan Oliver (and her extraordinary family) of Kodiak.
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