Brittle Innings

62

Three years later I received a registered letter from Seattle, Washington. It contained round-trip airline tickets to Seattle from Tulsa, with stopovers in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Spokane. From Seattle, I had other tickets to Juneau, Alaska, from Juneau to Anchorage, and from Anchorage to Kodiak Island. The packet also contained a money order for two hundred dollars and a note:

Dear Daniel,

I have found your father’s grave on Attu Island, at the westernmost extremity of the Aleutian archipelago. Allow yourself two weeks and embark upon a pilgrimage to your sire’s final resting place. I enclose money and tickets to return you to Oklahoma at the conclusion of your valedictory journey. I will meet you at the airfield at Kodiak. You may recognise me by the stalk of wild celery I wear as a boutonniere.

Faithfully, “J.” H. C.

Like I’d need some sort of corny sign. Unless he’d cut himself down to a Munchkin’s height or had plastic surgery on his ugly mug.

Anyway, the idea of a trip scared me. I’d never flown before, and the distance and the layovers terrified me. I broke the news to Mama, though, and told her both who’d sent the tickets and that I planned to go. She knew Henry from a creased team photograph as “that big ugly-gawky fella m the back,” and from my letters home as a pretty decent roommate, and from stories out of Highbridge at the end of the ’43 season as an on-the-lam murder suspect.

It’d crossed my mind that Mama might take this news and pass it on to Miss Tulipa, or Mayor Stone, or our new county sheriff, but I couldn’t fly off thousands of miles without taking that chance and trusting Mama to trust me.

“Dick Boles don’t deserve a graveside visitor,” Mama Laurel said. “Nor such a journey from the son he fled.”

“Even so, I’m going, Mama.”

“Take the Brownie then. Take some pictures.”

On my trip, I must’ve smoked a carton-two cartons-of cigarettes in all those different airports and on the flights themselves. I was twenty years old, almost legally an adult, but because of all my travel, bad meals, and missed sleep, I had an outbreak of schoolboy acne that upped my dependence on tobacco. By the time my umpteenth flight-this one aboard a small Electra prop plane-came down through a tattered fog and landed on Kodiak’s airstrip, I had a lung-crumping cough.

Henry stood on the edge of the field near the parking lot. No one could miss him, even though he’d separated himself from the other two parties there to greet the plane. As a sure ID, though, he clutched a pale yellow stalk of wild celery in one hand. It also struck me, as I wobbled towards him, his face looked awfully ugly and fearsome that afternoon-most likely because of the ivory labrets, carven like polar bears, he’d inserted in the cheek holes (in Highbridge, mere scar-tissue welts) at the corners of his mouth.

“Roomy,” I said.

Henry glanced about him, at the overarching sky and the nearby mountains visible through cloud or fog wisps. “Yes,” he said, “but on clear days it seems even moreso.”

A Russian Aleut by the name of Dorofey Golodoff-Henry called him Fego-flew us in a beat-up light aircraft to Nikolski, an Aleut village on Umnak, where my father’d been stationed during the war. Fego lived near Nikolski in a barabara, or dugout sod house, that put me in mind of Henry’s underground hideaway in a branch of Tholocco Creek in Alabama. We spent the night with Fego, a burly Asiatic-looking man with a broad squashed nose and long jet-black hair. I had a couple of inches of height on him, but he out-weighed me by forty pounds or more, even though he moved from room to room in his house with the speed and agility of an otter. For supper, he fed us steamed clams, batter-fried octopus, and a salad of kelp, wild onions, and Fox Islands celery.

As we ate, Fego told us, “When the tide goes out, the table is set.” Beyond repeating this comment, he said little else, and all I recall of what he did say is that Aleut folk saying, which explains how this hardy people could subsist in such a forbidding place. Fego, however, also received pay from the United States government as a surveyor and a backup mail pilot, and the next day he flew us to Attu, the remotest island in the chain, with a single delivery and refueling stopover at the naval station airfield on Adak Island, not quite midway between Umnak and Attu.

Luckily, or we wouldn’t’ve flown, the day broke and stayed clear, with no fogs or willawaws arising from the collision of Bering Sea waters and the warmer flow of the Kurishio or Japan current, and an easy pewter chop moving along beneath the high whine of Fego’s prop plane.

On Attu, Henry led me inland on foot from Massacre Bay towards the island’s western mountains. Fego didn’t accompany us. Through most of this trek, it drizzled on us. Towards late afternoon, the drizzle thickened into a light snow, and my injuries put an extra hitch and a gnawing round of lesser and greater pains into my limp.

We took shelter from the snow, the day’s chronic gauziness, and the ache that’d settled in my legs in a Japanese hut not demolished during the U.S. invasion four springs earlier. In the hut’s litter, I found an empty sake bottle, a half-burnt diary in Japanese characters, and two sets of weather-warped snow skis. We ate from tins we’d backpacked in.

“Henry, what’re you doing in this godforsaken place?” I asked between spoonfuls of lumpy pork and beans.

“Escorting you to your father’s grave.”

“I mean, besides that. Did you come back up here to live, to be the Eskimo Hiding Man-?”

“Inyookootuk.”

“Yeah, Inyookootuk. To be the Hiding Man forever?”

“I am not an Aleut. I would hide forever among the Innuit of the mainland, but not in this storm-wracked island chain.”

“Is that what you plan to do? Hide forever?”

“This is a temporary exile, Daniel, a mere sabbatical. I wish to re-create myself. As Wordsworth wrote, ‘So build we up the Being that we are.’ But I despair of the authenticity of my materials.” He removed and pocketed his labrets, so as not to be distracted by them on our hike tomorrow, and refused to say another word that night.

The next day we reached a peak called Sarana Nose. The snow had stopped. The drizzle had stopped. Sunlight dropped through the whirling fog like lamplight through an aquarium full of seaweed. We reached an embankment on the mountain, a tierlike balcony on its flank, where several small stone cairns and a group of flat-nailed wooden crosses jutted up out of the muddy soil to mark burial plots. One cross boasted a round Japanese grave marker with Oriental paint-brush characters on it. I stood next to Henry in the chill, sweeping wind, dwarfed by him on a big volcanic sea rock at the top or maybe the end of the world.

“Here your father lies,” Henry said.

“How do you know?”

“A party of Eleventh Air Force personnel came out here during the Army’s mopping-up exercises-as hunters, not merely observers. They were shot or hand-grenaded by snipers. The snipers buried them here and memorialized their sacrifice.”

“How do you know?” I said again.

Henry read the hand-lettered inscription: “ ‘Sleeping here, five brave soldier heroes who forfeited youth and happiness for their motherland.’ ”

“A Jap wrote that?” I said.

Henry said nothing.

“A Jap my daddy and his pals had come out here to hunt down and shoot?”

Henry still said nothing.

“How do you know it’s the graves of Dick Boles and his friends? Does the inscription list names?”

“I fear it doesn’t.”

“Then how do you know?”

“ ‘Sleeping here, five brave soldier heroes who forfeited youth and happiness for their motherland,’ ” Henry read again.

“That doesn’t answer my-”

“Shhhh,” Henry said, a mittened finger to his lips, exactly between the ugly labret holes at each mouth corner. “In this place, Daniel, before your father’s grave, and in the presence of his enemy’s uncommon integrity, you should stand speechless, humbly mute.”

“B-B-But I-”

“Shhhh.”

I bowed my head. Memories welled. When next I looked up, a bald eagle’d caught a towering updraft. It wheeled in the high Aleutian gauze. Its talons seemed to spiral through my feelings like the threads of a screw. Finally, I looked at Henry, almost blinded by the sting of the wind and the thin wax of grief in my eyes.

Henry reached into his pack and rummaged out a brand-new National League baseball. He flipped it to me. I caught it with both hands, like an amateur. I stood there for a minute turning that ivory ball in my gloves before it occurred to me to wedge it into the natural cup of the stone cairn supposedly marking my daddy’s grave. In that cup, the ball glinted like a lighthouse beacon and focused the whole of Attu Island around it, a pivot for the world to turn on.

I got out Mama’s Brownie and took a picture.

As evening drew on, Henry and I walked back to the hut where we’d spent the night. The ache in my knee had let up some, and my limp seemed less pronounced. I asked Henry what he’d done with his old man. He didn’t answer.

“Come on, Henry. You didn’t leave him in ’Bama, did you?”

He shook his head, still striding, still thoughtful.

“Then what? What’d you do?”

“He lies among a host of ancient Aleut mummies, fur- and grass-wrapped carcasses in a cave on one of the Islands of Four Mountains southwest of Umnak. I never intend anyone to move him again. His traveling days are over. There he will rest until the generative vulcanism of this archipelago drowns its islands, Daniel, or until the world expires in either fire or ice. I am resigned.”

Henry refused to fly back to Kodiak with Fego and me aboard Fego’s battered prop plane. He said he’d eventually return for a look-see to Oongpek, on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, but in the meantime wanted solitude and a chance to sort through his options. He gave Fego a small stack of U. S. bills of various denominations, for flying us to Attu and for returning me to Kodiak to pick up a commercial flight to Anchorage. Then he hugged me and stood clear as Fego and I taxied for takeoff, under a streaky sky, in a moderate crosswind.

“Whachu thinka that Henry fella?” Fego asked me when were up and rippling over the ashy chop of the Bering Sea.

His question startled me because he didn’t talk all that much. I said, “Why do you ask?”

“Sumfin funny bout him. Not joos how beeg he is- sumfin else. Lak mebbe summa his feelins been cut loose. Lak beeg as he is, you know, sum parta him’s missin.”

“Which part?”

“Dunno. Soul mebbe. The spirit part,”

“How long’ve you known Henry, Fego?”

“Hey, I don’t know him. Joos met him lass winter. I work for him sumtimes since, thass it.”

“Oh.”

“He tol me you roomed with him. Gude. Cause I lak to know the pipple I fly bettern I know this beeg ol Henry guy.”

“Oh.”

“So whatchu thinka him?”

“I think he’s working hard on his soul,” I said. “I think he’s becoming a real person.”