“You know I don’t mean the eagle,” I said.
Now Pop’s eyes became more than serious. They became grim.
“Yes, we discovered a dead man,” he said. “And the gutted eagle nearby, plus the feather in the dead man’s pocket, raise some questions. But they’re questions we can’t answer. The simplest explanation? The sailor’s death was an accident. He came up here, either alone or with comrades, got drunk, and hit his head when he passed out. But even if it was manslaughter or murder, he was Navy, and the guilty party is probably Navy as well. So we’re telling the Navy. After that, it’s out of our hands. Besides, Private, what do you suppose the lieutenant colonel would do if you did tell him about it?”
I didn’t answer. I just stared back at Pop’s grim eyes.
“I’ll tell you what he’d do,” Pop said. “He’d question us repeatedly. He’d make us trek back up here with M.P.’s. He’d order us to fill out reports in triplicate. He’d force me to run a speculative and sensational story in The Adakian, even though it’s a Navy matter and affects our boys not at all. And then he’d question us again and make us fill out more reports. And all for what? What would the upshot be?”
I knew the answer. “The upshot,” I said, “would be that the man would still be dead. And it would still be a Navy matter.”
Pop pointed a finger at me. “Correct. And telling the lieutenant colonel wouldn’t have made any difference at all.”
I glanced back toward the ulax.
“It’s still not right,” I said.
The cold grimness in Pop’s eyes softened. “There’s nothing about a young man’s death that’s right. Especially when it was for nothing. But a lot of young men have died in this war, and some of those died for nothing, too. So the only thing to do is simply what you know must be done, and nothing more. Because trying to do more would be adding meaninglessness to meaninglessness.” He stuck his hands into his jacket pockets. “And in this case, what we must do is tell the Navy. Period.”
Then he started toward the jeep again. But I didn’t follow.
“That won’t be the end of it,” I called after him.
He turned and glared at me. His white hair whipped in the wind.
“Why not?” he shouted.
I jerked a thumb backward. “Because I gave him that bruise on his face.”
Pop stood there staring at me for a long moment, his stick-thin body swaying. I didn’t think he understood.
“That’s the guy I whipped in the ring yesterday,” I said.
Pop just stared at me for a few more seconds. Then he took his right hand from his pocket and moved as if to adjust his glasses. But he stopped when he saw that he was holding the bent eagle feather he’d found on the dead man.
I saw his thin lips move under his mustache. If he was speaking aloud, it was too quietly for me to hear him over the wind. But I saw the words.
“Nothing but trouble,” he said again.
IX
This time, I stayed in the jeep while Pop talked with the Navy boys at the checkpoint. He had said things would go better if I let him handle it. I thought they might give him a bad time, since that had been their inclination with me that morning. But Pop had given a weak laugh when I’d mentioned that. He assured me it wasn’t going to be a problem.
It took twenty minutes or more. But eventually Pop came back to the jeep. Through the shack’s open doorway, I could see one of the Navy men get on the horn and start talking to someone.
“Let’s go,” Pop said.
I still didn’t feel right. I had known the dead man, even if it had only been for a few minutes in a boxing ring. And although I had seen what had happened to the back of his head, and I knew that it had to have happened right there where we’d found him, I couldn’t shake the notion that my clobbering him had somehow led to his death.
Pop nudged my shoulder. “I said, let’s go. We may have to answer a few questions for whoever investigates, but the odds are against it. Those boys told me that the ulax we found is well known to their comrades as an unapproved recreation hut. They’ve never even heard of Army personnel using it. So this really is a Navy matter.”
I didn’t respond. Instead I just started the jeep, which clattered and roared as I drove us back down to camp. I didn’t try to talk to Pop on the way. I didn’t even look at him.
He didn’t say anything more to me, either, until I had stopped the jeep on Main Street near the base of the boardwalk that led up the hill to the Adakian hut. I didn’t mean to shut off the engine, but it died on me anyway.
“You can go on back to work,” I said, staring down Main Street at the long rows of Quonset huts interspersed with the occasional slapdash wood-frame building . . . at all the men trudging this way and that through the July mud . . . at the wires on the telephone poles as they hummed and swayed . . . and at the black ravens crisscrossing the gray air over all of it. I still wouldn’t look at Pop. “I’ll tell the colonel the eagle was a bust, like you said.”
Pop coughed a few times. “What about the dead man?” he asked then. “Are you going to mention him, or are you going to take my advice and leave it to the Navy?”
Now, finally, I looked at him. What I saw was a scrawny, tired-looking old man. He might have been fifty, but he looked at least eighty to me. And I wanted to dislike him more than I did. I wanted to hate him.
“I’m going to tell him I found the body,” I said. “But I’ll leave you out of it. And I’ll leave the Cutthroat out of it too, since that’s what we said we’d do. I’ll just say that I spotted the lodge and went to have a look, but you were feeling sick and headed back to the jeep instead. I’ll tell him I found the dead guy and told you about it, but you never saw him. And that we went down and told the Navy.”
Pop’s eyebrows pinched together. “Not good enough. With a story like that, he’ll want to play detective. So he’ll try to involve me regardless.”
I shrugged. “That’s the best I can do. I found a dead man while I was doing a chore for the colonel, and I have to tell him. Especially since he arranged for me to fight that same guy. So even if the Navy handles it, he’ll still hear about it. And once he knows where they found him, and when, he’ll ask me about it. So I have to tell him. It’ll be worse later, if I don’t.”
Pop bit his lip, and I saw his false teeth shift when he did it. He pushed them back in place with his thumb. Then he stared off down Main Street the way I just had.
“Ever since this morning, I’ve been puzzled,” he said in a low voice. “How is it that a lieutenant colonel is using a private as an aide, anyway? Officers over the rank of captain don’t usually associate with GI’s lower than sergeant major. Unless the lower-ranking GI has other uses. As I do.”
“Then I guess I have other uses too,” I said. “Besides, I’m not his aide. He has a lieutenant for that. But when we got back from Attu, he said he was getting me transferred to a maintenance platoon so I’d be available for other things. And now I run his errands. I shine his shoes. I deliver messages. I box. And when he doesn’t need me, I go back to my platoon and try not to listen to the shit the other guys say about me.”
Pop gave another cough. He didn’t sound good at all, but I guessed he was used to it.
“You haven’t really answered my question,” he said then. “You’ve explained what you do for him. But you haven’t explained how you were selected to do it. Out of all the enlisted men available, what made him notice you in particular?”
He was jabbing at me yet again. I thought about dislodging his false teeth permanently.
Instead, I told him. As much as I could stand to.
“It was on Attu,” I said. My voice shook in my skull. “Right after the Japs made their banzai charge. By that time some of those little bastards didn’t have nothing but bayonets tied to sticks. But they wouldn’t quit coming. My squad was pushed all the way back to the support lines before we got the last ones we could see. We even captured one. He had a sword, but one of us got
him in the hand, and then he didn’t have nothing. So we knocked him down, sat on him, and tied his wrists behind his back with my boot laces.” I glared at Pop. “Our sergeant was gone, and by then it was just me and two other guys. Once we had the Jap tied, those guys left me with him while they went to find the rest of our platoon. Then the colonel showed up. He’d lost his unit, too, and he wanted me to help him find it. But I had a prisoner. So the colonel gave me an order.”
Pop looked puzzled. “And?”
“And I obeyed the order.”
Pop’s eyes shifted away for a second, then back again. I thought he was going to ask me to go ahead and say it.
But then he rubbed his jaw, raised his eyes skyward, and sighed.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll go with you to speak with the lieutenant colonel. You won’t have to tell him that I didn’t see the corpse. But we’ll still have to leave our friend from the Alaska Scouts out of it. And I’ll have to go up to The Adakian first, to make sure the boys have started work on tomorrow’s edition. There’s nobody there over corporal, and they each refuse to take direction from any of the others unless I say so. I’m a corporal as well, of course, but our beloved brigadier general has given me divine authority in my own little corner of the war. He’s an admirer. As were those Navy boys at Mount Moffett, as it turned out. Although I had the impression that what one of them really likes is the Bogart movie, while the other thinks I might be able to introduce him to Myrna Loy. But they were both impressed that I actually met Olivia de Havilland when she was here.”
Pop liked to talk about himself a little more than suited me. But if he was going to do the right thing, I didn’t care.
I got out of the jeep. “I’ll go with you to the newspaper. In case you forget to come back.”
Pop got out too. “At this point, Private,” he said, “I assure you that you’ve become unforgettable.”
After a detour to the nearest latrine, we climbed up to the newspaper hut. Pop went in ahead of me, but stopped abruptly just inside the door. I almost ran into him.
“What the hell?” he said.
I looked past Pop and saw nine men standing at attention, including the three I had seen there that morning. They were all like statues, staring at the front wall. Their eyes didn’t even flick toward Pop.
Someone cleared his throat to our left. I recognized the sound.
I looked toward the table where Pop had napped that morning, and I saw the colonel rise from a chair. His aide was standing at parade rest just beyond him, glaring toward The Adakian staff. I had the impression they were being made to stand at attention as a punishment for something.
The colonel adjusted his garrison cap, tapped its silver oak leaf with a fingernail, then hitched up his belt around his slight potbelly and stretched his back. He wasn’t a large man, but the stretch made him seem taller than he was. His sharp, dark eyes seemed to spark as he gave a satisfied nod and scratched his pink, fleshy jaw.
“It’s about damn time,” he said in his harsh Texas accent. Then he looked back at his aide. “Everyone out except for these two. That includes you.”
The aide snapped his fingers and pointed at the door.
Pop and I stepped aside as Pop’s staff headed out. They all gave him quizzical looks, and a few tried to speak with him. But the colonel’s aide barked at them when they did, and they moved on outside.
The aide brought up the rear and closed the door behind him, leaving just the colonel, Pop, and me in the hut. To Pop’s right, on the drawing board, I saw the finished cartoon of two soldiers having beer for breakfast. One soldier was saying to the other:
“Watery barley sure beats watery eggs!”
Pop’s eyebrows were pinched together. He was glaring at the colonel.
“I don’t know how long you made them stand there like that,” Pop said. “But I’ll be taking this up with the general when he returns.”
The colonel gave a smile that was almost a grimace. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. At the moment, we’re in the middle of another. I’ve received a call from a Navy commander who tells me a dead sailor has been found on Mount Moffett. He says the body was discovered by you, Corporal. I play cards with the man, and he’s sharp. So I believe him.”
Pop sat down on the cartoonist’s stool, which still kept him several inches taller than me or the colonel.
“That’s right,” Pop said. He was still frowning, but his voice had relaxed into its usual cool, superior tone. “At your request, the private and I were looking for the dead eagle he’d found earlier. But it had apparently blown away. Then a williwaw kicked up, so we found shelter in an old Aleut lodge. That’s where we found the unfortunate sailor.”
The colonel turned toward me. “I understand it was the sailor you fought yesterday.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I had gone to attention automatically.
“What happened?” the colonel asked. “Did he try to take another swing at you?” He was still smiling in what I guessed he thought was a fatherly way. “Was it self-defense, Private?”
It was as if an icicle had been thrust into the back of my skull and all the way down my spine.
“Sir,” I said. I don’t know how I managed to keep my voice from quaking, but I did. “He was dead when we found him, sir.”
The colonel’s fatherly smile faded. “Are you sure about that? Or is that what the corporal said you should tell me?”
Now Pop was staring at the colonel through slitted eyelids. And now he had a slight smile of his own. But it was a grim, knowing smile.
“Son of a bitch,” he said.
The colonel turned on Pop with sudden rage. His pink face went scarlet.
“I wasn’t speaking to you, Corporal!” he snapped. “When I need answers from a drunken, diseased has-been who hasn’t written a book in ten years, you’ll be the first to know. At the moment, however, I’ll take my answers from the private.”
Pop nodded. “Of course you will. He’s just a kid, and he doesn’t have a brigadier general in his corner. So you’re going to use him the way you’ve used him since Attu. What happened there, anyway?”
“We won,” the colonel said. “No thanks to the likes of you.”
Pop held up his hands. “I’d never claim otherwise. At that time I was stateside having my rotten teeth pulled, courtesy of Uncle Sam.”
The colonel stepped closer to Pop, and for a second I thought he was going to slap him.
“You’re nothing but a smug, privileged, Communist prick,” the colonel snarled. “The general may not see that, but I do. I’ve read the fawning stories you print about Soviet victories. You might as well be fighting for the Japs.”
Pop’s eyes widened. “Colonel, I realize now that your attitude toward me is entirely my fault. In hindsight, I do wish I could have accepted your dinner invitation. However, in my defense, by that time I had seen a sample of your writing. And it was just atrocious.”
The colonel’s face went purple. He raised his hand.
Then, instead of slapping Pop, he reached over to the drawing board, snatched up the new cartoon, and tore it to shreds. He dropped the pieces on the floor at Pop’s feet.
“No more jokes in the newspaper about beer,” he said. “They undermine discipline. Especially if they’re drawn by a nigger.”
Then he looked at me, and his color began draining back to pink.
“Private,” he said, his voice lowering, “you and I need to talk. Unfortunately, I’m about to have lunch, and then I have to meet with several captains and majors. The rest of my afternoon is quite full, as is most of my evening. So you’re to report to my office at twenty-one hundred hours. No sooner, no later. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
The colonel gave a sharp nod. “Good. In the meantime, I’m restricting you to barracks. If you need chow, get it. But then go to your bunk and speak to no one. While you’re there, I suggest that you think hard about what happened today, and what you’re g
oing to tell me about it. If it was self-defense, I can help you. Otherwise, you may be in trouble.” He glanced at Pop, then back at me. “And stay away from the corporal.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
The colonel pointed at the door, so I turned and marched out. I caught a glimpse of the colonel’s aide and the newspaper staff standing up against the wall of the Quonset, and then I headed down the boardwalk toward Main Street. The wind cut through me, and I shivered. I still had to return the jeep to the motor pool. Then get some chow. Then go to my bunk. One thing at a time. Jeep, chow, bunk. Jeep, chow, bunk.
The colonel seemed to think I had killed the Navy man. And that Pop had advised me to lie about it.
Jeep, chow, bunk.
Of course, Pop had advised me to lie, but not about that. Because that hadn’t happened.
Or had it? Could I have done something like that and then forgotten I’d done it? Why not? Hadn’t I already done things just as bad?
Jeep, chow, bunk.
All I knew for sure was that the colonel hated Pop, and that I had been in trouble ever since finding the eagle.
Jeep, chow, bunk. It wasn’t working.
How I wished I had never seen the eagle. Or the ulax.
How I wished I had never met another Cutthroat after Attu.
How I wished I could have stayed in my combat unit.
How I wished I had never met Pop.
How I wished I had never been sent to the Aleutians in the first place.
How I wished I had never punched that rich kid from Omaha, and that I had stayed home long enough to help my old man with the hay.
X
I had my Quonset hut to myself while I waited for the afternoon to creep by. I didn’t know what job the rest of my bunkmates were out doing, but it didn’t matter. I would have liked to find them and do some work so I wouldn’t have to think. But I was under orders to stay put.
Other than the truth, I didn’t know what I would tell the colonel when 2100 finally came. Even if I included every detail, including the ones Pop and I had agreed not to tell, it still wasn’t going to be the story the colonel wanted to hear. And whatever story that was, I knew I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out.
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