The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

I

The eagle had been tortured to death.

That was what it looked like. It was staked out on the mountain on its back, wings and feet spread apart, head twisted to one side. Its beak was open wide, as if in a scream. Its open eye would have been staring up at me except that a long iron nail had been plunged into it, pinning the white head to the ground. More nails held the wings and feet in place. A few loose feathers swirled as the wind gusted.

The bird was huge, eleven or twelve feet from wingtip to wingtip. I’d seen bald eagles in the Aleutians before, but never up close. This was bigger than anything I would have guessed.

Given what had been done to it, I wondered if it might have been stretched to that size. The body had been split down the middle, and the guts had been pulled out on both sides below the wings. It wasn’t stinking yet, but flies were starting to gather.

I stood staring at the eagle for maybe thirty seconds. Then I got off the mountain as fast as I could and went down to tell the colonel. He had ordered me to report anything hinky, and this was the hinkiest thing I’d seen on Adak.

That was how I wound up meeting the fifty-year-old corporal they called “Pop.”

And meeting Pop was how I wound up seeing the future.

Trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to do that. Especially if the future you see isn’t even your own.

Because then there’s not a goddamn thing you can do to change it.

II

I found Pop in a recreation hut. I had seen him around, but had never had a reason to speak with him until the colonel ordered me to. When I found him, he was engrossed in playing Ping-Pong with a sweaty, bare-chested opponent who was about thirty years his junior. A kid about my age.

Pop had the kid’s number. He was wearing fatigues buttoned all the way up, but there wasn’t a drop of perspiration on his face. He was white-haired, brown-mustached, tall, and skinny as a stick, and he didn’t look athletic. In fact, he looked a little pale and sickly. But he swatted the ball with cool, dismissive flicks of his wrist, and it shot across the table like a bullet.

This was early on a Wednesday morning, and they had the hut to themselves except for three sad sacks playing poker against the back wall. Pop was facing the door, so when I came in he looked right at me. His eyes met mine for a second, and he must have known I was there for him. But he kept on playing.

I waited until his opponent missed a shot so badly that he cussed and threw down his paddle. Then I stepped closer and said, “Excuse me, Corporal?”

Pop’s eyes narrowed behind his eyeglasses. “You’ll have to be more specific,” he said. He had a voice that made him sound as if he’d been born with a scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“He means you, Pop,” the sweaty guy said, grabbing his shirt from a chair by the curving Quonset wall. “Ain’t nobody looking for me.”

Pop gave him the briefest of grins. I caught a glimpse of ill-fitting false teeth below the mustache. They made Pop look even older. And he had already looked pretty old.

“Cherish the moments when no one’s looking for you,” Pop said. “And don’t call me ‘Pop.’ ‘Boss’ will do fine.”

“Aw, I like ‘Pop,’” the sweaty guy said. “Makes you sound like a nice old man.”

“I’m neither,” Pop said.

“You’re half right.” The sweaty guy threw on a fatigue jacket and walked past me. “I’m gettin’ breakfast. See you at the salt mines.”

Pop put down his paddle. “Wait. I’ll come along.”

The sweaty guy looked at me, then back at Pop. “I think I’ll see you later,” he said, and went out into the gray Adak morning. Which, in July, wasn’t much different from the slightly darker gray, four-hour Adak night.

Pop turned away from me and took a step toward the three joes playing poker.

“Corporal,” I said.

He turned back and put his palms on the Ping-Pong table, looking across at me like a judge looking down from the bench. Which was something I’d seen before, so it didn’t bother me.

“You’re a private,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, sir.”

He scowled, his eyebrows pinching together in a sharp V. “Then you should know better than to call another enlisted man ‘sir.’ You generally shouldn’t even call him by rank, unless it’s ‘Sarge.’ We’re all G.I.’s pissing into the same barrels here, son. When the wind doesn’t blow it back in our faces.”

“So what should I call you?” I asked.

He was still scowling. “Why should you call me anything?”

I had the feeling that he was jabbing at me with words, as if I were a thug in one of his books and he were the combative hero. But at that time I had only read a little bit of one of those books, the one about the bird statuette.

And I had only read that little bit because I was bored after evening chow one day, and one of the guys in my hut happened to have a hardback copy lying on his bunk. I wasn’t much for books back then. So I didn’t much care how good Pop was at jabbing with words.

“I have to call you something,” I said. “The colonel sent me to take you on an errand.”

Pop’s scowl shifted from annoyance to disgust. “The colonel?” he said, his voice full of contempt. “If you mean who I think you mean, he’s a living mockery of the term intelligence officer. And he’s still wearing oak leaves. Much to his chagrin, I understand. So I suppose you mean the lieutenant colonel.”

“That’s him,” I said. He was the only colonel I knew. “He wants you and me to take a drive, and he wants us to do it right now. If you haven’t eaten breakfast, I have a couple of Spam sandwiches in the jeep. Stuck ’em under the seat so the ravens wouldn’t get ’em.”

Pop took his hands off the table, went to the chairs along the wall, and took a jacket from one of them. He put it on in abrupt, angry motions.

“You can tell him I don’t have time for his nonsense,” he said. “You can tell him I’m eating a hot meal, and after that, I’m starting on tomorrow’s edition. I’m not interested in his editorial comments, his story ideas, or his journalistic or literary ambitions. And if he doesn’t like that, he can take it up with the brigadier general.”

I shook my head. “The general’s not in camp. He left last night for some big powwow. Word is he might be gone a week or more. So if I tell the colonel what you just said, I’m the one who’ll be eating shit.”

Pop snorted. “You’re in the Army and stationed in the Aleutians. You’re already eating shit.”

He tried to walk past me, but I stepped in front of him.

He didn’t like that. “What are you going to do, son? Thrash an old man?” He was glaring down at me like a judge again, but now the judge was going to throw the book. Which was something I had also seen before, so it didn’t bother me.

“I’d just as soon not,” I said.

Pop glanced back at the poker players. I reckoned he thought they would step up for him. But they were all staring at their cards hard enough to fade the ink, and they didn’t budge.

“Did you see the boxing matches yesterday?” I asked.

Pop looked back at me. His eyes had narrowed again.

“There was a crowd,” he said. “But yes, I watched from a distance. I thought it was a fine way to celebrate the Fourth of July, beating the snot out of our own comrades in arms. I hear the Navy man in the second match was taken to the Station Hospital.”

I shrugged. “He dropped his left. I had to take the opportunity.”

Pop bared those bad false teeth. “Now I recognize you. You K.O.’d him. But he laid a few gloves on you first, didn’t he?”

“Not so’s I noticed.” Thanks to the colonel, I’d had two whole weeks during which my only duty had been to train for the fight. I could take a punch.

“So you’re tough,” Pop said. His voice had an edge of contempt. “It seems to me that a tough fellow should be killing Japs for his country instead of running errands for an idiot. A tough fellow should—” He stopped. Then he adjusted his glasses and gave me a long look. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “But it occurs to me that you may have been on Attu last year. In which case you may have killed some Japs already.”

I didn’t like being reminded of Attu. For one thing, that was where the colonel had decided to make me his special helper. For another, it had been a frostbitten nightmare. And seven guys from my platoon hadn’t made it back.

But I wasn’t going to let Pop know any of that.

“A few,” I said. “And if the brass asked my opinion, I’d tell them I’d be glad to go kill a few more. But the brass ain’t asking my opinion.”

Pop gave a weary sigh. “No. No, they never do.” He dug his fingers into his thick shock of white hair. “So, what is it that the lieutenant colonel wants me to assist you with? I assume it’s connected with some insipid piece of ‘news’ he wants me to run in The Adakian?”

I hesitated. “It’d be better if I could just show you.”

Pop’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, good,” he said. His tone was sarcastic. “A mystery.” He gestured toward the door. “After you, then, Private.”

It felt like he was jabbing at me again. “I thought you said enlisted men shouldn’t call each other by rank.”

“I’m making an exception.”

That was fine with me. “Then I’ll call you ‘Corporal.’”

A williwaw began to blow just as I opened the door, but I heard Pop’s reply anyway.

“I prefer ‘Boss,’” he said.

III

We made our way down the hill on mud-slicked boardwalks. On Adak, the wind almost always blew, but the most violent winds, the williwaws, could whip up in an instant and just about rip the nose off your face. The one that whipped up as Pop and I left the recreation hut wasn’t that bad, but I still thought a skinny old guy like him might fly off into the muck. But he held the rail where there was a rail, and a rope where there was a rope, and he did all right.

As for me, I was short and heavy enough that the milder williwaws didn’t bother me too much. But as I looked down the hill to the sloppy road we called Main Street, I saw a steel barrel bouncing along at about forty miles an hour toward Navytown. And some of the thick poles that held the miles of telephone and electrical wires that crisscrossed the camp were swaying as if they were bamboo. We wouldn’t be able to take our drive until the wind let up.

So I didn’t object when Pop took my elbow and pulled me into the lee of a Quonset hut. I thought he was just getting us out of the wind for a moment, but then he slipped under the lean-to that sheltered the door and went inside. I went in after him, figuring this must be where he bunked. But if my eyes hadn’t been watering, I might have seen the words THE ADAKIAN stenciled on the door.

Inside, I wiped my eyes and saw tables, chairs, typewriters, two big plywood boxes with glass tops, a cylindrical machine with a hand crank, and dozens of reams of paper. The place had the thick smell of mimeograph ink. Two of the tables had men lying on them, dead to the world, their butts up against typewriters shoved to the wall. A third man, a slim, light-skinned Negro, was working at a drawing board. It looked like he was drawing a cartoon.

This man glanced up with a puzzled look. “What’re you doing back already, Pop?” He spoke softly, so I could barely hear him over the shriek of the williwaw ripping across the hut’s corrugated shell.

“I don’t know how many times I have to tell you,” Pop said. “I don’t like ‘Pop.’ I prefer ‘Boss.’”

“Whatever you say, Pop. They run out of scrambled eggs?”

“I wouldn’t know. My breakfast has been delayed.” Pop jerked a thumb at me. “The private here is taking me on an errand for the lieutenant colonel.”

The cartoonist rolled his eyes. “Lucky you. Maybe you’ll get to read one of his novellas.”

“That’s my fear,” Pop said. “And I simply don’t have enough whiskey on hand.” He waved in a never-mind gesture. “But we’ve interrupted your work. Please, carry on.”

The cartoonist turned back to his drawing board. “I always do.”

Pop went to an almost-empty table, shoved a few stacks of paper aside, and stretched out on his back. The stack of paper closest to me had a page on top with some large print that read: HAMMETT HITS HALF-CENTURY—HALF-CENTURY CLAIMS FOUL.

“Have a seat, Private,” Pop said. “Or lie down, if you can find a spot.” He closed his eyes. “God himself has passed gas out there. We may be here a while.”

I looked around at the hut’s dim interior. The bulb hanging over the drawing board was lit, but the only other illumination was the gray light from the small front windows. Wind noise aside, all was quiet. It was the most peaceful place I had been since joining the Army.

“This is where you make the newspaper?” I asked.

“You should be a detective,” Pop said.

I looked at the two sleeping men. “It sure looks like an easy job.”

Pop managed to scowl without opening his eyes. “Private, have you actually seen The Adakian? I suppose it’s possible you haven’t, since there are over twenty thousand men in camp at the moment, and we can only produce six thousand copies a day.”

“I’ve seen it,” I said. “I saw the one about the European invasion, and maybe a few others.”

Pop made a noise in his throat. “All right, then. When have you seen it?”

“Guys have it at morning chow, mostly.”

Now Pop opened his eyes. “That’s because my staff works all night to put it out before morning chow. Starting at about lunchtime yesterday, they were typing up shortwave reports from our man at the radio station, writing articles and reviews, cutting and pasting, and doing everything else that was necessary to produce and mimeograph six thousand six-page newspapers before sunup. So right now most of them have collapsed into their bunks for a few hours before starting on tomorrow’s edition. I don’t know what these three are still doing here.”

At the drawing board, the Negro cartoonist spoke without looking up. “Those two brought in beer for breakfast, so they didn’t make it back out the door. As for me, I had an idea for tomorrow’s cartoon and decided to draw it before I forgot.”

“What’s the idea?” Pop asked.

“It’s about two guys who have beer for breakfast.”

Pop grunted. “Very topical.”

Then no one spoke. I assumed parade rest and waited. But as soon as I heard the pitch of the wind drop, I opened the door a few inches. The williwaw had diminished to a stiff breeze, no worse than a cow-tipping gust back home in Nebraska.

“We have to go, Boss,” I said.

Pop didn’t budge, but the cartoonist gave a whistle. “Hey, Pop! Wake up, you old Red.”

Pop sat up and blinked. With his now-wild white hair, round eyeglasses, and sharp nose, he looked like an aggravated owl.

“Stop calling me ‘Pop,’” he said.

Outside, as Pop and I headed down the hill again, I said, “That’s something I’ve never seen before.”

“What’s that?” Pop asked, raising his voice to be heard over the wind.

“A Negro working an office detail with white soldiers.”

Pop looked at me sidelong. “Does that bother you, Private? It certainly bothers the lieutenant colonel.”

I thought about it. “No, it doesn’t bother me. I just wonder how it happened.”

“It happened,” Pop said, “because I needed a damn good cartoonist, and he’s a damn good cartoonist.”

I understood that. “I do like the cartoons,” I said.

Pop made a noise in his throat again.

“Would it be all right, Private,” he said, “if we don’t speak again until we absolutely have to?”

That was fine with me. We were almost to the jeep, and once I fired that up, neither of us would be able to hear the other anyway. The muffler had a hole in it, so it was almost as loud as a williwaw.

IV

Halfway up the dormant volcano called Mount Moffett, about a mile after dealing with the two jerks in the shack at the Navy checkpoint, I stopped the jeep. The road was barely a muddy track here.

“Now we have to walk,” I told Pop.

Pop looked around. “Walk where? There’s nothing but rocks and tundra.”

It was true. Even the ravens, ubiquitous in camp and around the airfield, were absent up here. The mountainside was desolate, and I happened to like that. Or at least I’d liked it before finding the eagle. But I could see that to a man who thrived on being with people, this might be the worst place on earth.

“The Navy guys say it looks better when there’s snow,” I said. “They go skiing up here.”

“I wondered what you were discussing with them,” Pop said. “I couldn’t hear a word after you stepped away from the jeep.”

I decided not to repeat the Navy boys’ comments about the old coot I was chauffeuring. “Well, they said they were concerned we might leave ruts that would ruin the skiing when it snows. After that, we exchanged compliments about our mothers. Then they got on the horn and talked to some ensign or petty officer or something who said he didn’t care if they let the whole damn Army through.”

Hunching my shoulders against the wind, I got out of the jeep and started cutting across the slope. The weather was gray, but at least it wasn’t too cold. The air felt about like late autumn back home. And the tundra here wasn’t as spongy as it was down closer to camp. But the rocks and hidden mud still made it a little precarious.

Pop followed me, and I guessed it had to be tough for him to keep his balance, being old and scrawny. But he didn’t complain about the footing. That would have been far down his list.

“Tell me the truth, Private,” he said, wheezing. “This is a punishment, correct? The lieutenant colonel stopped me on Main Street a few months ago and asked me to come to dinner and read one of his stories. But my boys were with me, so I said, ‘Certainly, if I may bring these gentlemen along.’ At which point the invitation evaporated. That incident blistered his ass, and that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

I turned to face him but kept moving, walking backward. “I don’t think so. When he sent me up here this morning, it didn’t have anything to do with you. I was supposed to look for an old Aleut lodge that’s around here somewhere. The colonel said it’s probably about three-quarters underground, and I’d have to look hard to find it.”

Pop was still wheezing. “That’s called an ulax. Good protection from the elements. But I doubt there was ever one this far up the mountain, unless it was for some ceremonial reason. And even if there was an ulax up here, I can’t imagine why the lieutenant colonel would send you looking for it.”

“He has a report of enlisted men using it to drink booze and have relations with some of the nurses from the 179th,” I said. “He wants to locate it so he can put a stop to such things.”

Pop frowned. “Someone’s lying. The 179th has twenty nurses here at most. Any one of them who might be open to ‘such things’ will have a dozen officers after her from the moment she arrives. No enlisted man has a chance. Especially if the lady would also be required to climb a mountain and lower herself into a hole in the ground.”

“Doesn’t matter if it’s true,” I said. “I didn’t find no lodge anyway.” I turned back around. We were almost there.

“That still leaves the question of why we’re up here,” Pop said.

This time I didn’t answer. Although he was a corporal, Pop didn’t seem to grasp the fact that an enlisted man isn’t supposed to have a mind of his own. If an officer asks you to dinner, or to a latrine-painting party, you just say “Yes, sir.” And if he tells you to go for a ride up a volcano, you say the same thing. There’s no point in asking why, because you’re going to have to do it anyway.

“Are we walking all the way around the mountain?” Pop shouted, wheezing harder. “Or is there a picnic breakfast waiting behind the next rock? If so, it had better not be another Spam sandwich.”

“You didn’t have to eat it,” I said.

Pop started to retort, but whatever he was going to say became a coughing fit. I stopped and turned around to find him doubled over with his hands on his knees, hacking so hard that I thought he might pass out.

I considered pounding him on the back, but was afraid that might kill him. So I just watched him heave and thought that if he died there, the colonel would ream my butt.

Pop’s coughing became a long, sustained ratcheting noise, and then he spat a watery black goo onto the tundra. He paused for a few seconds, breathing heavily, then heaved again, hacking out a second black glob. A third heave produced a little less, and then a fourth was almost dry.

Finally, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and stood upright again. His face was pale, but his eyes were sharp.

“Water,” he said in a rasping voice.

I ran back to the jeep, stumbling and falling once on the way, and returned with a canteen. Pop took it without a word, drank, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“That’s better,” he said. He sounded almost like himself again. He capped the canteen and held it out without opening his eyes.

I took the canteen and fumbled to hang it from my belt. “What was that?” I asked. “What happened?” I was surprised at how shook-up my own voice sounded. God knew I’d seen worse things than what Pop had hacked up.

Pop opened his eyes. He looked amused. “ ‘What happened?’” he said. “Well, that was what we call coughing.”

I gave up on fixing the canteen to my belt and just held it clutched in one hand. “No, I mean, what was that stuff that came out?” I could still see it there on the tundra at our feet. It looked like it was pulsing.

“Just blood,” Pop said.

I shook my head. “No, it ain’t. I’ve seen blood.” I had, too. Plenty. But none of it had looked this black.

Pop glanced down at it. “You haven’t seen old blood,” he said. “If this were red, that would mean it was fresh, and I might have a problem. But this is just old news coming up.”

“Old news?” I asked.

“Tuberculosis, kid. I caught it during the previous war to end all wars. Don’t worry, though. You can’t catch it from me.”

I wasn’t worried about that. But I was confused. “If you were in the Great War, and you caught TB,” I said, “then how could they let you into the Army again?”

Pop grinned. Those bad false teeth had black flecks on them now. “Because they can’t win without me.” He gestured ahead. “Let’s get this over with, Private, whatever it is. I have to go back and start cracking the whip soon, or there might not be a newspaper tomorrow.”

So I turned and continued across the slope. I could see the hillock I’d marked with rocks a few dozen yards ahead. I hoped Pop wouldn’t go into another coughing fit once we crossed it.

V

Pop’s eyebrows rose when he saw the eagle, but otherwise it didn’t seem to faze him.

“Well, this is something different,” he said.

I nodded. “That’s what I thought, too.”

Pop gave a small chuckle. “I’m sure you did, Private.” He looked at me with his narrow-eyed gaze, but this time it was more quizzical than annoyed. “When I asked you what this was about, you said it would be better if you just showed me. Now you’ve shown me. So what the hell does the lieutenant colonel want me to do? Write this up for The Adakian?”

“I think that’s the last thing he wants,” I said. “He says this thing could hurt morale.”

Pop rolled his eyes skyward. “Christ, it’s probably low morale in the form of sheer boredom that did this in the first place. Human beings are capable of performing any number of deranged and pointless acts to amuse themselves. Which is precisely what we have here. The brass told us we couldn’t shoot the goddamn ravens, so some frustrated boys came up here and managed to cut up a bald eagle instead. And they’ve expressed their personal displeasure with their military service by setting up the carcass as a perverse mockery of the Great Seal of the United States.”

“The what?” I asked.

Pop pointed down at the bird. “There’s no olive branch or arrows. But otherwise, that’s what this looks like. The Great Seal. Aside from the evisceration, of course. But I suppose that was just boys being boys.”

“You think it was more than one guy?” I asked.

Pop looked at me as if I were nuts. “How on earth would I know?”

“You said ‘boys.’ That means more than one.”

“I was speculating. I have no idea whether this was a project for one man, or twenty.”

I tossed the canteen from hand to hand. “Okay, well, do whatever you have to do to figure out who it was.”

Now Pop looked at me as if I weren’t only nuts, but nuts and stupid, too. “There’s no way of knowing who did this. Or even why. Speculation is all that’s possible. The bird might have been killed out of boredom, out of hatred, or even out of superstition. I have no idea.”

None of that sounded like something I could report. “But the colonel says you used to be a detective. Before you wrote the books.”

Pop took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I was a Pinkerton. Not Sherlock Holmes. A Pinkerton can’t look at a crime scene and deduce a culprit’s name, occupation, and sock color. Usually, a Pinkerton simply shadows a subject. Then, if he’s lucky, the subject misbehaves and can be caught in the act.” Pop put his glasses back on and held out his empty hands. “But there’s no one to shadow here, unless it’s every one of the twenty thousand men down in camp. Do you have one in mind? If not, there’s nothing to be done.”

I looked down at the eagle. As big and magnificent as it might have been in life, it was just a dead bird now. What had happened here was strange and ugly, but it wasn’t a tragedy. It wasn’t as if a human being had been staked out and gutted.

But in its way, the eagle unnerved me almost as much as the things I’d seen and done on Attu. At least there had been reasons for the things on Attu. Here, there was no reason at all—unless Pop was right, and it had just been boredom. If that was the case, I didn’t want to know which guys had been bored enough to do this. Because if I knew, I might get mad enough to hurt them. And then there’d be something else I’d have to see in my sleep over and over again.

“All right, Pop,” I said, keeping my eyes on the eagle. “There’s a can of gasoline strapped to the jeep. What if we tell the colonel that when you and I got up here, we found this thing burned up?”

Pop cleared his throat. “You’d be willing to do that, Private? Lie to the lieutenant colonel?”

I had never sidestepped an order before. The colonel had made me do some stupid things and some awful things, but this was the first time that it looked like he was making me do a pointless thing. Besides, Pop was older and smarter than the colonel—even I could see that—and if he thought the eagle was a waste of time, then it probably was.

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 appeared 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 island,” 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.

Still, this was different. In battle, death is expected. Back at camp, when the battlefields have moved elsewhere, it’s something else. So I was a little shook up myself.

The Cutthroat didn’t seem bothered at all. His mind was already on other things.

“This goddamn williwaw might take that eagle away,” he said. “If it does, I won’t get my feathers. I should have come in the other way, like you guys did. I saw you there with it, but then I felt the wind coming. I didn’t think you two were gonna make it here.”

“Neither did we,” Pop said. “But if you want an eagle feather, you can have the one I took from that young man.” He reached for his jacket pocket.

The Cutthroat made a dismissive gesture. “That one’s bent in the middle. It’s no good to me. The power’s bent now, too.”

“What sort of power do you get from feathers?” I asked. I immediately regretted it.

The Cutthroat gave me a look too dark to even rise to the level of contempt. “None of your fucking business. In fact, I’m wondering what you and your damn lieutenant colonel wanted with the eagle in the first place.”

Pop coughed. “The private and I wanted nothing to do with it at all. But the lieutenant colonel seems to be curious about who killed it, gutted it, and staked it out like that. He incorrectly assumed I could help him discover that information.”

The Cutthroat sat up straight. “Somebody killed it on purpose?”

“That’s what it looks like,” Pop said. “Couldn’t you see it from over here?”

The Cutthroat’s brow furrowed. “I just saw you two, and the eagle’s wings, and then the wind hit me before I could come any closer. You say somebody pulled out its guts?”

“Yes.” Pop’s color was getting better. “And staked it to the earth with nails. Does that mean anything to you?”

The Cutthroat scowled. “Yeah, it means that somebody’s a fucking son of a bitch. I ain’t heard of nothing like that before.” He scratched his sparse beard. “Unless maybe a shaman from a mainland tribe was here, trying to do some kind of magic.”

Pop leaned toward the Cutthroat. His eyes were bright. “Why would killing an eagle be magic?”

The Cutthroat’s hand came down to rest on the hilt of his knife. It made me nervous.

“The people along the Yukon tell a story about eagles,” the Cutthroat said. “It’s the kind of story you white people like to hear us savages tell. I even told it to some officers one night on Attu. Took their minds off the fact that they were getting a lot of kids killed. Got a promise of six beers for it. They paid up, too.” He gave Pop a pointed look.

Pop gave a thin smile. “I don’t have any beer at hand. Will you take an IOU?”

The Cutthroat answered Pop’s smile with a humorless grin. “Don’t be surprised when I collect.” He leaned forward. “Okay. Long ago, a pair of giant eagles made their nest at the summit of a volcano. I’m talking about eagles nine, ten times the size of the ones we got now. They’d catch full-grown whales and bring them back to feed their young. And sometimes, if they couldn’t find whales, they’d swoop down on a village and take away a few human beings. This went on for many years, with the giant eagles raising a new brood of young every year. These young would go off to make nests on other volcanoes and attack other villages.”

Pop took a Zippo and a pack of Camels from a jacket pocket. “So they were spreading out like the Germans and Japanese.”

The Cutthroat nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, one day, one of the original eagles, the father eagle, was out hunting and couldn’t find any reindeer or whales or nothing. So the father eagle said, fuck it, the babies are hungry. And he swooped down and took a woman who was outside her house. Carried her back to the volcano, tore her limb from limb, ripped out her guts, and fed her to his giant eaglets.”

The pitch of the wind outside dropped, and the Cutthroat paused and listened. Pop lit a cigarette and then offered the pack to me and the Cutthroat. The Cutthroat accepted, but I declined. I’d promised my mother I wouldn’t smoke.

The wind shrieked higher again as Pop lit the Cutthroat’s cigarette, and then the Cutthroat went on.

“But this poor woman happened to be the wife of the greatest hunter of the village,” he said, exhaling smoke. “And when the hunter returned and was told what had happened, he went into a rage. He took his bow and his arrows, and even though everyone told him he was a fool, he climbed the volcano.”

“Most truly brave men are fools,” Pop said. He gestured toward me with his cigarette. I didn’t know why.

“I wouldn’t know,” the Cutthroat said. “In the Scouts, we try to be sneaky instead of brave. Works out better. Anyway, when the hunter got to the eagles’ nest, he found six baby eagles, each one three times the size of a full-grown eagle today. They were surrounded by broken kayaks, whale ribs, and human bones. The hunter knew that some of those bones belonged to his wife, and that these eaglets had eaten her. So he shot an arrow into each of them, through their eyes, and they fell over dead. Then he heard a loud cry in the sky, which was the giant mother eagle returning. He shot her under the wing just as she was about to grab him, and then he shot her through the eyes. She tumbled off the mountain, and that was it for her. Then there was another loud cry, which was the father eagle—”

“And of course the hunter killed the father eagle as well,” Pop said.

The Cutthroat glared. “Who’s telling this fucking legend, old man? No, the hunter didn’t kill the goddamn father eagle. The eagle dived at him again and again, and each time the hunter put an arrow into a different part of its body. But he never hit the father eagle in the eye. So, finally, pierced with arrows all over, and his whole family dead, the giant eagle flew away into the northern sky, and neither he nor any of his kind were ever seen again. But the eagles of today are said to be the descendants of those who had flown away in earlier times.” The Cutthroat gave a loud belch. “At least, that’s the story.”

Pop leaned back again, looking up at the holes in the roof and blowing smoke toward them. “It’s not bad,” he said. “Not much suspense, though. I’m not sure it’s worth six beers.”

“I don’t give a damn what you think it’s worth,” the Cutthroat said, tapping ash from his cigarette. “It ain’t my story anyway. My mother heard it a long time ago from some Inuits on the mainland, and she told it to me when I was a kid. But we’re Unangan. Not Eskimo.”

“So you think an Eskimo might have killed this eagle too?” Pop asked. “Staked it to the ground, gutted it?”

The Cutthroat frowned. “Like I said, I ain’t heard of anything quite like that. But I ain’t heard of a lot of things. Some of those shamans might still hold a grudge against eagles. People can stay mad about crap like that for five, six hundred years. Or maybe some guy just thought if he killed an eagle, he could take its power. And then he could be a better hunter, or fisherman, or warrior. I’ve heard of that. And you white people like stuff like that, too. I’ll toss that in for free.”

Pop was giving the Cutthroat a steady gaze. “But you’re saying it wouldn’t have been you who killed the eagle. Or anyone else Unangan.”

The Cutthroat shook his head. “Doubt it. Sometimes the eagles show us where the fish are. And sometimes we toss ’em a few in return. We get along all right.”

Pop nodded, sat back against the earthen wall, and closed his eyes. He took a long pull on his cigarette. “I’ve been all over the post, both Armytown and Navytown, many times. But I’ve seen very few Aleuts or Eskimos. So just from the odds, I doubt that a native is our eagle-killer.”

As much as I hated saying anything at all in front of the Cutthroat, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore. Pop was infuriating me.

“There’s a dead man over there!” I yelled, pointing at the section of collapsed roof. “Who cares about the eagle now?”

Pop opened his eyes and regarded me through a smoky haze.

“Actually, I don’t care much,” he said. “But because of that dead man, the eagle has become slightly more interesting.”

“Why?” I asked, still furious. “Just because he had a feather in his pocket? That doesn’t mean anything. He might have found it.”

Pop’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t think so. He and the eagle have both been dead less than a day. So the coincidental timing, plus the feather in his pocket, suggests a connection. Either he killed the eagle, and then had an unfortunate accident…”

He fixed his gaze on the Cutthroat again.

“… or whoever did kill the eagle, or helped him kill it, may have then killed him as well.”

The Cutthroat ground out his cigarette butt. “I told you guys before. It wasn’t me.”

“And I still believe you,” Pop said. “I’m just wondering if you might have any idea who it may have been.”

“Nope,” the Cutthroat said. There was no hesitation.

Pop leaned back against the wall again and looked up at the holes in the roof.

“I don’t have any idea either,” Pop said. “But I think you were right about one thing.”

“Huh?” the Cutthroat said. “What’s that?”

“Whoever it was, he’s a fucking son of a bitch.”

The wind seemed to scream louder in response.

VIII

The williwaw finally slacked off a little after noon, leaving only blustery gusts. The three of us stirred ourselves on stiff joints and muscles and rose from our places in the main room of the ulax.

Pop and the Cutthroat had both dozed after finishing their cigarettes, but I had stayed wide awake. I knew who the dead man was. But I hadn’t told Pop yet for fear that the Cutthroat would hear me.

That was because, while I didn’t recognize this particular Cutthroat, I knew who he was, too. On Attu, the Alaska Scouts had saved my life and the lives of dozens of my buddies, but they hadn’t done it by being kind and gentle souls. They had done it by being cruel and ruthless to our enemies.

And I knew that a man couldn’t just turn that off once it wasn’t needed anymore. I knew that for a cold fact.

I boosted Pop up through the hole in the roof where we’d dropped in, and then I followed by jumping from the raised earthen shelf at the side of the room, grabbing a whalebone roof support, and pulling myself through.

I joined Pop on the hillock just beside the ulax, blinking against the wind, and then looked back and saw the Cutthroat already standing behind me. It was as if he had levitated.

“So this thing here is not our fucking problem,” the Cutthroat said, speaking over the wind. “We all agree on that.”

Pop nodded. “That’s the body of a Navy man. So the private and I will tell the boys at the Navy checkpoint to come have a look. And if they ask our names, or if they know who I am, I’ll be able to handle them. They’re twenty-year-olds who’ve pulled checkpoint duty at the base of an extinct volcano. So they aren’t going to be the brightest minds in our war effort.”

I didn’t like what Pop was saying. But for the time being, I kept my mouth shut.

The Cutthroat nodded. “All right, then.” He turned away and started down the slope.

“We have a jeep,” Pop called after him.

The Cutthroat didn’t even glance back. So Pop looked at me and shrugged, and he and I started back the way we had come. A few seconds later, when I looked down the slope again, the Cutthroat had vanished.

When we reached the spot where the dead eagle had been staked, I thought for a moment that we had headed in the wrong direction. But then I saw the rocks I’d used as markers, so I knew we were where I thought we were. The eagle was simply gone. So were the nails. So was my canteen.

“The Scout was right,” Pop said. “The wind took it.”

If I tried, I could make out some darkish spots on the bare patch of ground where the bird had been staked, and when I looked up the slope I thought I could see a few distant, scattered feathers. But the eagle itself was somewhere far away now. Maybe the ocean. Maybe even Attu.

“This is a good thing,” Pop said, continuing on toward the jeep. “Now when you tell the lieutenant colonel that the eagle was gone, you can do so in good conscience. Or good enough. It’s certainly gone now. That fact should get me back to my newspaper until he thinks of some other way to torment me.”

He looked at me and smiled with those horrible false teeth, as if I should feel happy about the way things had turned out. But I wasn’t feeling too happy about much of anything.

“What about the man in the lodge?” I asked.

Pop frowned. “We’re going to report him to the Navy.”

“I know that,” I said. “But what should I tell the colonel?”

Pop stopped walking and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Listen, son,” he said. His eyes were steady and serious. “I’m not joking about this. Are you listening?”

I gave a short nod.

“All right.” Pop sucked in a deep breath through his mouth and let it out through his nose. “When you see the lieutenant colonel, don’t mention the dead man. You brought me up here to show me the eagle, as ordered, and it was gone. That’s all. Do you understand?”

I understood. But I didn’t like it.

“It’s not right,” I said.

Pop dropped his hand and gave me a look as if I’d slapped him. “Not right? How much more ‘right’ would the whole truth be? For one thing, there’s no way of knowing how the eagle got into the state it was in. So there’s no way to give the lieutenant colonel that information. But now it’s gone, which means that problem is gone as well.”

“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 G.I.’s lower than sergeant major. Unless the lower-ranking G.I. 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 going 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.

I hadn’t gotten any chow. My stomach was a hard, hungry knot, and I knew I should have eaten. But I was also pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to keep it down.

Sure, I had been in trouble before. But back then, I had just been a dumb Bohunk kid who’d gotten in a fight, swiped a Hudson, and insulted a judge. None of that had bothered me. But none of that had been anything like this.

I wasn’t even sure what “this” was. But I did know that another kid, a kid just like me except that he was Navy, had gotten his skull bashed in. And the colonel thought that maybe I was the one who’d done it.

It all went through my head over and over again, and the knot in my stomach got bigger and bigger. I lay in my bunk and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t sleep. Outside, the Aleutian wind whistled and moaned, and occasional short rat-a-tats of rain drummed against the Quonset tin. Every so often, I heard planes roaring in and out of the airfield. I tried to guess what they were, since the bombing runs from Adak had pretty much ended once we’d retaken Attu and Kiska. But I had never been good at figuring out a plane from its engine noise. If an engine wasn’t on a tractor or jeep, I was at a loss.

“First impressions can be so deceiving,” a low, smooth voice said.

I opened my eyes. Pop was sitting on a stool beside my bunk. He was hunched over with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped under his chin, his dark eyes regarding me over the rims of his glasses. I hadn’t heard him come in.

“How’d you know where I bunk?” I asked.

Pop ignored the question. “Why, just this morning, Private,” he continued, “you seemed like such a tough young man. Such a hardened fighter. Yet here we are, scarcely nine hours later, and you’re flopped there like a sack of sand. Defeated. Vanquished.”

“Don’t those mean the same thing?”

Pop gave me that thin smile of his. “My point is, you’re taking this lying down. That doesn’t sound like someone who’d dare to punch a rich kid from Omaha.”

I turned away from him and faced the cold metal of the Quonset wall.

“I’m under orders,” I said. “And I’m not supposed to be talking to you.”

Pop laughed a long, dry laugh that dissolved into his usual hacking cough.

“Under orders?” he asked through the coughing. “Just how do you think you got into this confusing court-martial conundrum in the first place? You followed orders, that’s how. Logically, then, the only possible way out of your current situation is to defy orders, just this once. It’s only sixteen thirty, and the lieutenant colonel won’t be looking for you until twenty-one hundred. You’ve already wasted more than two hours wallowing here, so I suggest you don’t waste any more.”

I turned back to face him.

“Just what am I supposed to do?” I asked. “My only choice is to tell him everything that happened, and the hell with our promise to the Cutthroat. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

Pop shook his head. “You can’t tell him everything,” he said, “because you don’t know everything.”

“And you do?”

“No.” Pop stood and jerked his thumb toward the door. “But I know some of it, and I’m going to find out the rest. You see, unlike you, I’ve spent the past few hours doing something. My job is to get the news, and a large part of that involves getting people to talk. So for the past two hours, people have been talking to me and my boys a lot. But now the boys have to work on the paper. And my cartoonist has to draw a new cartoon, which has put me into a vengeful mood.”

“So go get your revenge,” I said. “What’s it got to do with me?”

Pop leaned down and scowled. “It’s your revenge, too. And I don’t think I can find out the rest of what I need to know if you aren’t with me.”

I rose on my elbows and stared up at him. It was true that following orders hadn’t really worked out for me. But I didn’t see how doing what Pop said would work out any better.

“You say you know some of it already,” I said. “Tell me.”

Pop hesitated. Then he turned, crossed to the other side of the hut, and sat on an empty bunk.

“I know the lieutenant colonel placed a bet on your fight yesterday,” Pop said. “A large one. And I know that your opponent had a reputation as a damn good boxer. He’d won eighteen fights, six by knockout. How many have you won?”

“Two,” I said. “Yesterday was my second match. The first was with the guy whose bunk you’re sitting on. It was a referee’s decision.”

Pop’s eyes narrowed. “So any sane wager yesterday would have been on the Navy man. And I saw the fight, Private. He was winning. Until the third round, when he dropped his left. And as you told me this morning, you took advantage. Who wouldn’t?”

I sat up on the edge of my bunk. In addition to the knot in my stomach, I now felt a throbbing at the back of my skull.

“You’re saying it was fixed,” I said.

“If I were betting on it, I’d say yes.” Pop waved a hand in a cutting gesture. “But leave that alone for now. Instead, consider a few more things. One, we know that the ulax we found was used by Navy men for unofficial activities. The dead man is Navy. And the Navy boys we talked to said they didn’t know of anyone but sailors having any fun up there. After all, they control access to that part of the island. Yet the lieutenant colonel sent you up because, he claimed, he had reports of Army G.I.’s entertaining nurses there. Which doesn’t quite jibe with the Navy’s version.”

“That’s odd, I guess,” I said. “But that’s not anything you found out in the past two hours.”

Pop looked down at the floor and clasped his hands again.

“No,” he said. Now I could barely hear him over the constant weather noise against the Quonset walls. “I learned two more things this afternoon. One is that the lieutenant colonel will soon be up for promotion to full colonel. Again. After being passed over at least once before. And I know he wants that promotion very badly. Badly enough, perhaps, to do all sorts of things to get it.”

Pop fell silent then, and kept looking down at the floor.

I stood. My gut ached and my head hurt. And I thought I knew the answer to my next question. But I had to ask it anyway.

“You said you learned two more things,” I said. “What’s the second?”

Pop looked up at me. His expression was softer than it had been all day. He looked kindly. Sympathetic. I had wanted to hit him earlier, but not as much as I did now.

“It’s not really something new,” Pop said. “It’s what you already told me. Or almost told me. But of course I know the order that the lieutenant colonel gave you on Attu.”

I clenched my fists. Maybe I would hit the old man after all. Maybe I wouldn’t stop hitting him for a while.

“I won’t say it aloud if you don’t want me to,” Pop said.

I turned and started for the door. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew I was getting away from Pop.

He followed and stopped me with a hand on my shoulder, so I whirled with a roundhouse right. He leaned back just in time, and my knuckles brushed his mustache.

“Jesus Christ, son,” Pop exclaimed.

I grabbed his scrawny arms and pushed him away. He staggered back, but didn’t fall.

“He was a Jap,” I said. I was trembling. “He was trying to kill me not five minutes before. And it was an order. It was an order from a goddamn colonel.”

Pop took a deep, quaking breath and adjusted his glasses.

“It was an order,” I said.

Pop nodded. “I know. And now I need you to listen to me again. Are you listening, Private?”

I glared at him.

“Here it is, then,” Pop said. “No one, and I mean no one—not your chaplain, not the general, not anyone back home, and sure as hell not me—no one would condemn what you did. If the circumstances had been reversed, that Jap would have done the same to you, and he wouldn’t have waited for an order.”

I could still see him lying there, his blood staining the thin crust of snow a sudden crimson. He had been as small as a child. His uniform had looked like dirty play clothes.

He was a Jap. But he was on the ground. With his hands tied behind his back. His sword was gone.

Pop wasn’t finished. “The problem isn’t that you followed the order. The problem is that out of the three thousand Japs you boys fought on Attu, we took only twenty-eight prisoners. I’m not saying that killing the rest was a bad thing. But prisoners can be valuable. Especially if they’re officers. And a man with a sword might have been an officer. So someone would have wanted to ask him things like, what’s your rank, who are your immediate superiors, where are your maps, what were your orders, what’s your troop strength on Kiska, and where does Yamamoto go to take his morning shit. That sort of thing.”

Pop was talking a lot, again. It wore on my brain. And Yamamoto’s plane had been shot down a month before we’d hit Attu. But at least now I had something else to think about.

“You mean we need a supply of Japs?” I said.

Now Pop smiled his thin smile. “I mean that a lieutenant colonel in the Intelligence Section did a stupid thing. He wasn’t even supposed to be near the fighting. But that banzai charge came awfully close. So in rage or fear, he forgot his job and ordered you to destroy a military intelligence asset. That’s an act that could negatively affect his chances for promotion.” Pop pointed at me again. “If anyone happened to testify to it.”

I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to make the pain at the base of my skull go away.

“I don’t understand how anything you just said adds up to anything we saw today,” I told him.

Now Pop pointed past me, toward the door. “That’s why there’s more to find out, and that’s why I need you to help me with it. There was one other man on the mountain with us this morning. And since you and he were freezing and fighting on Attu while I was elsewhere, I think he might be more willing to part with any answers if you’re present.”

That made some sense. The Cutthroat hadn’t liked me, but he might respect me more than Pop.

Still, there was one thing that I knew Pop had left out in all his talk.

“What about the eagle?” I asked.

Pop bared his false teeth.

“That’s the key,” he said. “That’s why we have to talk with the Scout again. Remember what he said about magic and power? Well, he also said that he told those same stories to officers on Attu.” He went past me to the door. “Now, will you come along?”

I turned to go with him, then hesitated.

“Wait a minute.” I was still trying to clear my head. “Are you saying the colonel believes in Eskimo magic?”

Pop held up his hands. “I have no idea. But magic and religion are based on symbols, which can be powerful as hell. And I know the lieutenant colonel does believe in that. After all, there’s one symbol that he very much wants for his own.”

I was still confused by most of what Pop had said. But this one part, I suddenly understood.

A full colonel was called a “bird colonel.”

Because a full colonel’s insignia was an eagle.

I went with Pop.

XI

The 179th Station Hospital wasn’t just one building. It was a complex of Quonset huts and frame buildings, and it even had an underground bunker. When Olivia de Havilland had come to Adak in March, she had spent an entire day there, visiting the sick and wounded. There were a few hundred patients on any given day.

But all we needed to do was find the Cutthroat. So I waited outside the main building while Pop went in and charmed whomever he needed to charm to find out what he wanted to know. I was beginning to realize that there were some things, even in the Army, that superseded rank.

When Pop came out again, his hands in his jacket pockets, he tilted his head and started walking around back. I followed him to three Quonset huts behind the main building. He stopped at the lean-to of the first hut and looked one way and then the other as I joined him. There were a few G.I.’s trudging along nearby with no apparent purpose. Maybe, I thought, they were just trying to look busy so they wouldn’t be sent to the South Pacific.

“Do you see anyone you know?” Pop asked. “Anyone who might tell the lieutenant colonel we’re here?” I tried to take a good look. But the usual gray light was dimming as evening came on, making all the soldiers appear gray as well.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But everyone’s starting to look alike to me.”

Pop gave me an annoyed glance. “You sound like the Scout,” he said. He stepped away, moved quickly to the center Quonset, and slipped into its lean-to. I followed. Then he barged into the hut without knocking.

The Cutthroat was in a small open space in the center of the hut, surrounded by shelves packed with boxes and cans. He was sitting on the edge of a cot under a single lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, leaning over a battered coffeepot on a G.I. pocket stove. The smell was not only of coffee, but of old beef stew, seaweed, and mud. My still-knotted stomach lurched.

The Cutthroat looked up, and his slick dark hair gleamed. “You guys.” He didn’t sound surprised. “Did you bring my beers?”

Pop and I stepped farther inside, and I closed the door behind us. There were two folding stools set up on our side of the pocket stove.

“I’ll bring your beers tomorrow.” Pop went to the right-hand stool and sat down. “In the meantime, I want you to know that both the private and I are doing our best to live up to this morning’s agreements. For one thing, we haven’t mentioned your presence on Mount Moffett to anyone else.”

“I believe you,” the Cutthroat said.

“But we have a problem,” Pop continued. “So we may not be able to keep that confidence much longer. There’s a lieutenant colonel who’s trying to use that Navy man’s death to make our lives hell.”

The Cutthroat looked back down at his brew. “Yeah, I know.” He rubbed his right thigh. “Goddamn, my leg is hurting tonight. I better not climb any more mountains for a while.”

I sat down on the left-hand stool. The fumes from the stuff bubbling in the coffeepot were intense.

“What do you mean, you know?” I asked. “How could you know that?”

The Cutthroat glanced up at me. “Because I wasn’t sure I trusted you guys. So I followed you. You didn’t drive fast. I was outside the back wall of the newspaper hut when you got your asses chewed. I couldn’t hear it all, but I got most of it. He’s got it in for both of you. And I recognized his voice.”

Pop’s eyebrows rose. “That was quite stealthy of you.”

The Cutthroat snorted. “I’ve snuck up on Japs in machine gun nests, and they knew I was coming. Buncha desk soldiers who don’t expect me ain’t a challenge.”

“Nevertheless,” Pop said. “I respect a man who can shadow that well. Especially if I’m the one he’s shadowing.”

The Cutthroat reached to a shelf behind him and brought down three tin cups. “You guys want coffee before you start bothering me with more questions?”

“Is that what that is?” I asked.

The Cutthroat gave me a look almost as dark as he’d given me in the ulax. “You need to work on your fucking manners.”

Pop and I both accepted cups, and the Cutthroat poured thick, black liquid into both of them. It was something else that reminded me of what Pop had coughed up that morning.

Then the Cutthroat poured a cup for himself and set the pot back down on the pocket stove. He took a swig and smiled.

“That’s good,” he said. “This stuff will help you think better.”

Pop took a swig as well, and I took a tentative sip of mine. It didn’t taste as bad as it smelled, so I drank a little more. There was a hint of rotted undergrowth. But at least it was hot.

“Thank you,” Pop said. He took a long belt. “But now I’m going to bother you, as you suspected. How did you recognize the lieutenant colonel’s voice?”

The Cutthroat blew into his cup, and steam rose up around his face. “Because I’ve heard it before. On Attu, he was one of the shitheads who wouldn’t listen to our scouting reports. But he loved our colorful stories. Here on Adak, I’ve been bringing him and his officer pals booze and coffee while they play poker right here in this hut. And when they get good and drunk, they want me to tell more stories. Like I said, you people can’t get enough of that noble-savage crap.”

“Do those poker pals include a Navy commander?” Pop asked.

“I guess that’s what he is,” the Cutthroat said. “He and the lieutenant colonel set up yesterday’s boxing matches. They made a bet on the Army-Navy one.” He pointed at me. “The lieutenant colonel bet on this guy.”

“I know,” Pop said. “For a lot of money, correct?”

The Cutthroat scowled and took a long drink. “Maybe there were side bets for money. But the bet between the lieutenant colonel and the Navy officer was for something else. See, the Navy guy has friends and family in high places. Like fucking Congress. So if the Army boxer won, the commander promised to have these friends pull strings and help with a promotion.”

“What if the Navy man won?” Pop asked.

The Cutthroat grinned and shook his head. “Then the commander was going to have dinner with you, Corporal. That’s what the lieutenant colonel promised. You must be famous or rich or something. Gotta say, it seemed like a lopsided bet to me.”

Pop drained his cup and set it on the floor. He seemed to wobble on his stool as he did.

“Very lopsided indeed,” he said, “since I wouldn’t do a favor for the lieutenant colonel if my life depended on it.”

I had been sipping the hot coffee and listening, but now I spoke up. “What about the eagle?”

The Cutthroat fixed me with an even gaze. “I still don’t know about that. Not for sure. But nobody ever knows anything for sure. No matter who you ask, or what you find out, you’ll never know all of anything that’s already past.”

The single lightbulb began to flicker. My stomach knot had relaxed, but now I found myself feeling lightheaded. I knew I should have had some chow.

“So I’m giving you both the opportunity to know as much as the lieutenant colonel,” the Cutthroat said. “I told him the legend I told you. And once, he asked me about taking power from animals. I said I couldn’t really explain that, since I didn’t understand it myself. But if he were to take a spirit journey or have a vision, like some shamans do, he might have a chance to know all the secrets he wanted. He might die and be reborn. He might be torn apart and remade. He might meet his totem animal and be given its strength. He might gain whatever he desired. He might even see his entire life from his birth to his death.” The Cutthroat shrugged. “Or he might go crazy. Or he might just pass out and sleep it off. It all depends on the individual.”

The Cutthroat stood up from the cot, and he split into five men before me. “Here,” they all five said in harmony. They reached for Pop and grasped his forearms. “You take the cot. My mother got this recipe from the same people who told her the eagle story, and she always said that the most important part was to lie the fuck down. There’s some mushrooms and other shit in it, and you don’t want to know what I have to do to mix it right. But it hardly ever kills anyone.”

The five Cutthroats put Pop on the bunk, and Pop curled up on his side. He looked like a toy made out of olive-drab pipe cleaners with a cotton-swab head. I could see his eyes behind his glasses, and they were like hard-boiled eggs.

Now the Cutthroat condensed into one man again, and he reached for me.

“You’ll have to take the floor,” he said. “But you’re younger. It’s fair.”

As he grasped my wrist, I watched my tin coffee cup tumble from my numb fingers. It turned over and over, and brown droplets spun out and circled it. The cup turned into the sun.

The bright light was high above my eyes. I could see it between Pop’s fingers.

“That’s the best I can do for you,” the Cutthroat’s voice said. I couldn’t see him anymore. He was far away. “Your enemy took this journey before you. But maybe you’re better suited for it. I don’t say that this means you’ll beat him, or that you’ll understand what he’s done. But at least now you have the same magic. So it’s a fair fight. You’re welcome.”

The earth shook with a deafening rumble, and the back of Pop’s hand fell against my forehead.

Then, in brilliant flashes, in a cacophony of voices and noise and music, I began to see everything.

Everything.

I began to see both the past and present of every place I had ever been, every object I had ever touched, every thing I had ever done. It was as if I were a movie camera in the sky, looking down and watching it all.

Then, even as the past and present were flashing and roaring around me, I saw the future as well. And not just mine.

Pop’s, too.

My advice: Never see the future.

Not anyone’s.

I’m in my foxhole when the Japanese make their charge. I have to struggle for my helmet, for my weapon. When I make it out of the hole I run backward, firing as they come toward me. Some keep coming even after I hit them. One gets very close and sets off a hand grenade, trying to kill us both. But he trips and falls, his body covers it, and I’m all right. Then, to my left , I see my sergeant bayoneted. I shoot the one who did it. But it’s too late.

A younger Pop, his hair not yet all white, is at a typewriter. It clacks and clatters, and the bell rings over and over again. He puts in page after page. He smokes cigarette after cigarette and drinks two bottles of whiskey dry, but he doesn’t stop typing. He does this for thirty hours without a break. When he finally stops I can see his eyes. And I know he has emptied himself. There is nothing left.

The colonel points at the little man on the ground and shouts at me. I look at the little man and know he’s a Jap who just tried to kill me. But now he’s lying facedown, his hands behind his back. He hardly looks like a Jap now.

The colonel points and shouts again and again, louder and louder. I put the muzzle of the M1 at the base of the little man’s skull and pull the trigger.

Pop, much, much younger, is wearing a uniform and walking into a hospital. He doubles over coughing as he climbs the steps. A pretty nurse rushes over and puts her arm around his shoulders.

I am much, much older, sitting in a tangle of metal and plastic. A young man is using huge steel jaws to push the metal apart and make a hole for me. You’ll be okay, sir, he says. I’ll get you out. I manage to take a small plastic rectangle from my pocket. It has little square buttons. I punch the buttons and call my daughter. You’re right, I tell her. I shouldn’t drive anymore.

The colonel is standing over the dead eagle. He is holding a knife. The sailor who fought me appears at the hillock beside the lodge, and the colonel goes to him. You’ll have to trust me for an IOU, he says. It’ll be a while before I can collect my winnings. But you did good. And thanks for the bird.

Pop, looking only a bit older, but wearing a nice suit, is being escorted from a bus by armed guards. They take him into prison and put him into a cell by himself. He stays in the prison for six months. He writes a lot of letters. But all his books go out of print. The radio money stops. When they let him out, he is sicker than ever and looks twenty years older. He is broke and goes to live in a tiny cottage owned by friends.

Guess I don’t have any choice, the sailor says. But I know you’re good for it, sir. Do I still get the date with the nurse? The blonde who swabbed my face and said I was handsome for a Navy man?

I am standing at the altar with my younger brother beside me, looking down at the far end of the aisle, when the pipe organ blares and all of the people on either side of the aisle stand up. A gorgeous woman in white appears on the arm of an older man, and they walk toward me, smiling. I can’t wait for them to get here so I can find out what her name is.

You still get the date, the colonel says, holding out a bent eagle feather. Show this to her when she comes. It’s dark down there, and she has to know it’s you. She’ll be here in a little while. Go on down and wait.

The heavy, sweating man with greasy, wormlike hair leans forward and looks down from his high, long podium. I would like to ask, he says in a thick voice. Is Mr. Budenz being truthful when he told us that you were a Communist? So now Pop leans forward too, toward the microphones on the table where they’ve made him sit, and he says, I decline to answer on the grounds that an answer might tend to incriminate me. He is out of prison, and he is poor. But they won’t leave him alone. They won’t let him at least try to write.

The sailor goes down into the lodge, and the colonel walks away, past the eagle. Another sailor approaches. He’s in there, the colonel says, pointing back toward the lodge. Down where you boys have your fun. He threw the fight. He lost your money.

I am holding a baby. Her eyes look like mine. How the hell did this happen, I wonder. How did we finally have a girl after all these years? After all the bad things I’ve done, how did my life turn out to be this good?

The second sailor stops and stares down at the eagle. Never mind that, the colonel says. It’s just a dead bird. It’s none of your business. Go talk to your friend. He threw the fight.

In the hospital bed, Pop opens his eyes and he sees the woman. There have been dozens of women. Even a wife. But this is the one. The only one, really. She’s there leaning over him.

In the lodge, the two sailors argue. You sold us out, the second sailor says. The first says, no, I’m going to share the winnings with you guys. I don’t have any of it yet. But I will. Joe, calm down. Joe, no.

My daughter claps her hands the first time I walk to the mailbox and back without the crutches. You are one tough old bird, she says. Yes, I say. Yes I am. Guess what kind of tough old bird. I have its feather in my room. Have I ever shown you?

The woman leaning over Pop is at once plain and beautiful. That paradox was the first thing that drew him to her. And then her frighteningly sharp mind kept him there. More than thirty years now. She is his best friend, was several times his lover, has always been his savior. But he’s been hers too, so that’s only fair. She looks so frightened. Why? Pop wonders, and then he knows. That makes him frightened too. And angry. He’s sixty-six. That’s not old enough for this, is it?

The two sailors fight. The first catches the second with a punch to the jaw, but then the second shoves him back into the little room behind the jumble of sod and bone. He knocks him down, then slams his head back. He does it again.

Pop is frightened and angry for only a moment. Then he sinks away, down into warm black cotton, and can only hear the woman’s sobs from far, far away. It’s okay, Lilishka, he tries to say. It’s okay.

My little grandson and granddaughter run out and throw their arms around my legs, and I drop all the mail. So I look up at my daughter on the porch and ask her to go get her mother to help me. But she frowns and says, Dad, don’t you remember?

I don’t. So she begins to tell me.

XII

Then Pop was slapping my face, hard, back and forth on both cheeks.

“That’s enough,” he said. “That’s more than enough, goddamn it. Get up. Get your ass up right now, soldier.”

He grabbed my collar and tried to pull me to my feet, but he wasn’t strong enough. So he let me drop back down. My head thumped on the plywood floor, and then he started slapping me again. The light hanging above us shone around his wild white hair like a halo.

I almost slipped back into the visions, but Pop wouldn’t stop slapping me. Finally, I came up from limbo enough to grab his right wrist with my left hand. My right fist clenched.

“Hit me again, old man,” I said, my words slurring. “Hit me again, and I’ll lay you out.”

Pop sat down on the edge of the cot and ran his hand back through his hair. “All right,” he said. “I’d like to see that. You tried to slug me once before, and all I got was a cool breeze. I’m beginning to think you aren’t actually capable of hitting anyone who hasn’t been paid to take a dive.”

I struggled up to my knees, tried to make it all the way to my feet, and fell back onto one of the stools. It tipped, but Pop reached out and grabbed my sleeve to keep me from going over.

I didn’t say thanks. I was mad at him for smacking me around. My cheeks were burning.

Pop let go of my sleeve and then shook his head as if trying to clear it.

“That may have been the worst coffee I’ve ever had,” he said.

My head was muzzy, and Pop was going in and out of focus. But I was in the hospital’s supply hut again. I was in the here and now. I looked around the room for the Cutthroat and didn’t see him anywhere.

“He was gone when I came out of it,” Pop said, anticipating my question. “Then I heard you talking to people who obviously haven’t been born yet. So I decided that whatever you were experiencing, you’d better not experience any more of it. You’re too young for family responsibilities.”

I began to feel less angry toward Pop as I looked at him and remembered what I’d just seen. His hand had been touching my forehead, and I had seen everything about him.

Including his death.

“Did you… hallucinate?” I asked.

Pop looked at his wristwatch and stood. “We both know those were more than hallucinations. And I believe you and I saw and heard the same things, up to the point where I snapped out of it. But now it’s eighteen thirty, and I have to piss like a thoroughbred. Then I have to go into Navytown and ask around for a certain commander. I understand he’s an admirer of mine. Are you all right to take yourself to your bunk, or to mess, or wherever you need to go?” I stood too, but I was feeling considerably wobblier than Pop looked.

“Why aren’t you shook up?” I asked. “If you’d seen anything like what I saw, you’d be shook up.”

Pop smiled that thin smile. “I’ve seen a lot of things, Private. And they’ve all shook me up, even when they didn’t involve Aleutian magic. But the key is to realize that it’s all like that. It’s all magic, it’s all insane. So you make sense of what little you can, and you rely on alcohol for the rest.” He gestured toward the door. “And now I really must be going.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you, Pop?” I asked. “I don’t like the thought of you dealing with those Navy goons all by yourself. And I don’t have to be at the colonel’s office until twenty-one hundred.”

I really wanted to stick with him so I could keep my mind off that meeting. I still had no idea what I was going to say to the colonel. What could I tell him? That I’d had a vision of what he’d done? I doubted that would go over too well with him. Or with a court-martial, either.

Pop shook his head. “No, Private, I don’t want you with me this time. Frankly, you don’t get along as well with those Navy people as I do. But while I’m gone, I would like you to do two things for me.”

“Whatever you want,” I said. “Shoot.”

Pop held up an index finger. “One. Do not go to the lieutenant colonel’s office at twenty-one hundred. I know he ordered you to be there. But again, ask yourself how well his orders have worked out for you so far. Stay in your barracks or hide somewhere. With luck, I’ll be back before twenty-one hundred anyway. And I’ll take care of all of this.”

He stepped past me and headed for the door.

“How, Pop?” I asked. “How are you going to do that? We don’t have proof of anything. All we have are hallucinations.”

Pop paused at the door and looked back at me.

“No offense, Private,” he said, “but that’s all you’ve got. I plan to return with considerably more.” He turned away and opened the door.

“Wait,” I said. “You said you wanted me to do two things. What’s the second?”

He held up two fingers and answered without looking back.

“Don’t call me ‘Pop,’” he said. Then the door swung closed behind him. I stepped out just a moment later and found that a thick Aleutian fog had fallen. The wind, for a change, had died. I looked down past the third storage hut. But between the fog and the dim light, I only caught a glimpse of Pop’s thin, shadowy form before he disappeared.

XIII

My squad was back at our Quonset by the time I returned, and I went with them to mess. A couple of them tried to rib me by asking about what kind of soft duty I’d pulled that day, but I wouldn’t even look at them. Pretty soon they got the idea and left me alone.

I made myself eat. I don’t remember what it was. Some kind of gray Adak food that matched the gray Adak fog outside. I didn’t want it. But I knew I had to put something in my stomach if I didn’t want to collapse. I hadn’t had anything to eat since the Spam sandwich more than twelve hours earlier. Besides, I wanted something to soak up whatever remained of the Cutthroat’s black sludge. Whatever it had been.

The whole platoon had the evening off, which meant that my hut would be full of talking and card games. I didn’t want to have to put up with any of that, so I took off after chow and slogged northward up Main Street, toward the airfield, in the opposite direction from Navytown. Pop had made it clear that he didn’t want me around. So I didn’t want to be tempted to go look for him.

I hadn’t even met him before that morning, but now he seemed like the only friend I had on the whole island. I had considered my old sergeant to be my friend, but he had died on Attu. The closest I had gotten to anyone since then had been to the poor Navy guy at the Fourth of July boxing match. But apparently that hadn’t been an honest relationship.

Somehow, I wandered my way eastward to the rocky shore of Kuluk Bay. The iron-colored, choppy water stretched out beyond the fog, and a frigid wind blew in and numbed my face. There weren’t even any ships visible, since they were all anchored to the south in Sweeper Cove. So I had the feeling that I was alone at the edge of the world, and that all I had to do was step off into the cold dark water to be swallowed up, frozen and safe.

Then I glanced at my wristwatch, which my old man had given me as I’d left for basic. It was a lousy watch and lost almost fifteen minutes a day. Right now it said that it was 8:36, which meant that the actual time was about nine minutes before twenty-one hundred hours. Which was when the colonel had ordered me to be at his office. An order Pop had said I should disobey.

I thought about it.

Then I started back the way I had come, trudging through the muck as fast as I could. Maybe Pop was right, and I was an obstacle to the colonel’s promotion. Maybe he was going to blame me for the sailor’s death. Maybe he was going to have me court-martialed. Or maybe he was just trying to scare me into keeping my mouth shut no matter what anyone else might ask me.

It didn’t matter. Whatever was going to happen to me now, I wasn’t going to count on Pop to get me out of it. I had seen that he was going to have his own problems soon enough.

And I knew my life was going to be all right. I had seen that, too. I hadn’t seen every day or every detail. And I knew there would be some tough times, too. But overall, it was going to be better than what most people got. Better than I deserved.

It was going to be better than what Pop had coming, anyway.

When I reached the small frame building that housed the colonel’s office and living quarters, I had to stop and stare at it from across the road. The edge of the peaked roof was lined with ravens, stock-still except for a few ominous wing flaps. Normally, they would be swooping and squawking over my head. But now they were sitting on the colonel’s roof in silence. There must have been fifty of them.

A few G.I.’s walking by looked up, and one of them made a comment about “those weird birds.” But otherwise, Main Street was almost empty. And that was weird, too.

I crossed the slop, went up the wooden steps, and wiped my feet on the burlap mat at the top. The real time was almost exactly twenty-one hundred. I knocked on the door and waited for the colonel’s aide to let me in.

Instead, as if from a great distance, I heard the colonel’s voice say, in a rough monotone, “Enter.”

I opened the door and went in. The first small room was the colonel’s aide’s vestibule. The lamp on the desk was on, but the aide wasn’t there. Beyond the desk, the door to the colonel’s office was ajar. I crossed to it and hesitated.

Beyond the door, the colonel spoke again. “I said enter.”

I pushed the door open just far enough and stepped into the colonel’s office. The room was small and plain and lined with filing cabinets. The colonel’s desk was dead center, with the overhead light shining down onto a small stack of papers between the colonel’s hands. His garrison cap, its silver oak leaf shining, was flattened neatly beside the papers. The colonel’s face was mostly shadowed, with just the tip of his nose glowing in the light.

I stepped smartly to within a foot of the desk, front and center, then saluted and stood at attention. It was the same thing I had done every time I had ever been summoned here.

“Thank you for coming, Private,” the colonel said.

I almost laughed. He had never thanked me for coming before. But now he had thanked me as if we were equals and I had done him a favor. He had thanked me as if I weren’t there because of a direct order that had been wrapped around a threat.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “My pleasure, sir.” I kept my eyes focused on an invisible point just over his head. But I could still see everything he did.

The colonel touched the top of the small stack of papers with his fingertips and pushed the top sheet across the desk toward me.

“I won’t waste your time or mine, soldier,” the colonel said. “This is a statement to the effect that this morning, 5 July 1944, you assisted your friend the corporal in a drunken escapade in which you killed an American bald eagle and then recklessly contributed to the accidental death of a Navy seaman. You are to sign at the bottom. I personally guarantee that you yourself will serve no more than one year in a stateside stockade, after which you’ll receive a dishonorable discharge.”

He placed a fountain pen atop the piece of paper.

I didn’t even try to think. I just stayed at attention with my arms stiff at my sides and my eyes staring at that invisible spot above his head.

“Sir,” I heard myself saying. “I decline to sign that statement on the grounds that signing it may tend to incriminate me.”

I had heard words similar to those just a few hours before. But they wouldn’t be spoken for a few years yet.

The colonel gave a growl. He picked up the pen, pushed across the next piece of paper, and put the pen down on top of it.

“Very well,” he said. “This next statement is to the effect that you weren’t intoxicated at all, but had an altercation with the sailor and committed manslaughter. And the corporal witnessed it.”

“Sir,” I heard myself saying again. “I decline to sign on the grounds that signing may tend to incriminate me.”

The colonel stood, put his hands on the desk, and leaned forward into the light like a Nebraska judge. Now my eyes were focused on the top of his head. He had the same greasy, wormlike hair as the man at the high, long podium in my vision.

“Son, you’d best listen up and listen good,” the colonel snarled. He pushed the remaining three pages onto the first two. “I have five confessions here, each with a slightly different version of what you and the corporal have done. You can sign any one of them. The consequences vary depending upon which one you choose. But if you don’t choose one, then I’ll choose one for you. And you won’t like that. Nor will you like the way things go for you when both my aide and I swear that we witnessed the aftermath of your crimes as well as your signature.”

I heard every word he said, and I knew what each one meant.

But what I said in reply was, “Sir, I decline to sign on the grounds—”

Then I heard the telltale sound of a hammer clicking back, and my eyes broke focus from the top of the colonel’s head. I looked down and saw his .45 service automatic in his hand. It was pointing at my gut.

“Let me put this another way, Private,” he said. His Texas accent slid into a self-satisfied drawl. “You can sign one of these pieces of paper, or I can tell the judge advocate that you went berserk when I confronted you with the evidence. I can tell him that you attacked a much superior officer, namely myself, and that the officer was therefore compelled to defend himself.”

I stared at the muzzle of the .45 for what seemed like a long, long moment. Then I snapped my eyes back up to a point above and behind the colonel’s head.

Maybe I hadn’t seen the future after all. Maybe this was the future, right here. And maybe that was fair.

Maybe this would make me even again.

“Sir,” I said. “I decline to sign. You already know why.”

The colonel gave a disgusted groan. “That’s a damn poor choice, son. But if that’s the way you want it…”

Another hammer clicked.

This one was behind me. It was followed by a thick, hacking, tubercular cough. But that only lasted a second.

Then I heard that smooth, sophisticated voice.

“Speaking of damn poor choices,” Pop said.

I looked down at the colonel again. His eyes were wide, and his face was twitching with mingled fury and fear.

But the fear won. He put his left thumb in front of the .45’s hammer, let it down slowly, and then set the pistol on the stack of confessions.

“Lovely,” Pop said, coming up on my right. He held up a fifth of Johnnie Walker Red with his free hand. God knows where he’d gotten it. “Now, let’s have a drink.”

XIV

Pop didn’t even glance at me. He kept his eyes on the colonel, giving him the same thin smile I had been seeing all day. He had a .38 revolver in his right hand and the fifth of Johnnie Walker in his left.

“You can sit back down,” he told the colonel. “But we’ll stand.”

The colonel sat down. He looked up at Pop with a mockery of Pop’s thin smile. It was a repellent sneer.

“A Communist corporal holding a pistol on a lieutenant colonel,” he said. “This is not going to end well for you.”

Pop set the bottle of whiskey beside the stack of confessions. “Nothing ends well for anyone,” he said. He picked up the .45 and dropped it into a small metal wastebasket on the floor beside the desk. “Do you have any glasses? I’d rather not pass the bottle.”

The colonel nodded past my shoulder. “In the bottom drawer of the file cabinet beside the door. But don’t touch my brandy.”

Pop’s eyes didn’t move from him. “Private, would you mind?”

I took a few steps backward, bumped into the filing cabinet, and squatted down to open the drawer. There were two short glasses and a cut-glass bottle of liquor. I took out the glasses, closed the drawer, and brought the glasses to the desk.

“We need three,” Pop said.

I set the glasses down beside the confessions. “I decline to drink,” I said. My mother had asked me to avoid alcohol, too.

Pop still didn’t take his eyes off the colonel, but he grinned. His false teeth didn’t look so bad all of a sudden.

“You’re an amusing young man, Private,” he said.

The colonel crossed his arms. “Neither of you will be very amusing once my aide returns. You’ll both be damned.”

Pop shrugged. “We’re damned anyway. Besides, I happen to know that your aide is at the movies with a nurse of my acquaintance. He’ll be there at least another hour. I believe tonight’s film is They Died with Their Boots On. Which isn’t too surprising, since Olivia de Havilland has been popular here lately. Although the story of Custer’s Last Stand might not be the most tasteful selection for an audience of G.I.’s.”

The colonel glowered. “If you shoot me, it’ll be heard. There’ll be dozens of men converging on this building before you’re out the door.”

Pop finally looked at me. His eyes were bright, and he laughed out loud.

“Can you believe this joker?” he asked. “Now he’s worried about a shot being heard.”

Pop turned back toward the desk, reached out with his left hand, and unscrewed the cap from the whiskey. He dropped the cap, picked up the bottle, and poured a hefty dose into each glass. Some of the booze splashed out onto the confessions.

“I have no intention of shooting you,” he told the colonel. “I only brought the gun so you wouldn’t shoot us.” He tilted his head toward me. “That’s right, Private. I knew you’d be here. You’ve hardly listened to me all day.”

“Sorry,” I said. “You’re not an officer.”

Pop put down the bottle and picked up one of the glasses. “I’ll drink to that,” he said, and downed the whole thing in three swallows. Then he set it down and refilled it. “Better have yours, sir.” He said sir with deep sarcasm. “You’re falling behind.”

The other glass sat where it was, untouched, the amber liquid trembling.

The colonel bared his teeth. “I don’t drink that stuff.”

Pop picked up his glass again. “Ah. But I know something you do drink. You had a little belt of something cooked up by one of our Alaska Scouts, didn’t you? But what you didn’t know is that some men can hold their mystical potions, and some men can’t. You see, to take a spiritual journey, you have to have a fucking soul to begin with. Otherwise, you just suffer from delusions of grandeur. Especially if that was your inclination to begin with.” He downed his second glass of Johnnie Walker.

The colonel leaned forward. “Have another, corporal,” he said. His voice was almost a hiss. “I really wish you would.”

Pop poured himself another.

“Uh, Pop…” I said.

Pop picked up his glass a third time. “Mother’s milk, son,” he said. “And don’t call me ‘Pop.’”

As Pop slammed back the drink, the colonel lunged sideways and down, reaching for the wastebasket. But Pop kicked it away with the side of his foot, simultaneously draining his glass without spilling a drop. He moved as casually and smoothly as if he were swatting a Ping-Pong ball.

The colonel fell to his hands and knees. Pop leaned down and put the barrel of the .38 against the base of his skull.

“Feel familiar?” Pop asked.

The colonel made a whimpering sound.

“Bang,” Pop said. Then he straightened, set down his glass again, and stepped over to the filing cabinet where the wastebasket had come to a stop. Pop picked up the wastebasket, brought it back, and set it on the corner of the desktop.

The colonel awkwardly hauled himself into his chair again. His face was florid and sweating.

“If you aren’t going to shoot me,” he said, “then what do you want?”

Pop scratched his cheek with the muzzle of the .38 before turning it back toward the colonel.

“I suppose I just want to see your face as I tell you what I believe I know,” Pop said. “I want to see how close I am to the truth. And then I should return this pistol to the commander. Fine fellow, by the way. He says you stink at poker.”

The florid color in the colonel’s face began to drain. But the sweat seemed to increase. His wormlike hair hung in wet strands before his eyes.

“While you were drinking and playing cards,” Pop said, shaking the .38 as if it were an admonishing finger, “you listened to stories told by our friend the Scout, some of which he’d told you before on Attu. And you decided you wanted to try out some of what he said for yourself. Well, that was fine with him. What did he care what a stupid white man might want to do to himself? Besides, you’re a lieutenant colonel. If he crossed you, you might take him out of his hut behind the hospital and put him to work digging latrines.

“So he gave you the magic, and you drank it. But as I said, you and the magic didn’t mix. So your overall unpleasantness became a more specific, insane nastiness. And you decided you were tired of waiting for that promised promotion. You decided you’d do a few things to make it happen.

“You’d kill the symbol of the power you desired, thus making its strength your own. And while you were waiting for that chance, you’d befriend a Navy commander with power of a different kind. The power of political connections.

“Finally, you’d eliminate some obstacles and settle some scores. And you’d use both the dead eagle and a fixed fight to do that. You’d set up the soldier who could testify to your panicked fuckup on Attu. And you’d set up the dirty, unjustly famous Marxist corporal who’d snubbed you and your talent—and who might also cause you trouble because of his habit of talking to every G.I. in camp. Including the occasional sailor.”

Pop reached down with his free hand, picked up the confessions, and dropped them into the wastebasket on top of the .45. Then he pointed the .38 at the colonel’s chest.

“Are there any carbons?” Pop asked. “Tell the truth, now. I was a Pinkerton.”

The colonel, pale and perspiring, shook his head. Pop picked up the colonel’s untouched glass of whiskey and poured it into the wastebasket.

“The one thing I can’t figure,” he said, “is how you arranged the timing and the murder. I know how you got your fall-guy sailor to show up at the ulax this morning—money and sex. But I don’t know how you managed to have him capture an eagle for you to kill at almost the same time. And I don’t know how you could be sure that the second sailor, even as angry as he was over being cheated, would go so far as to kill the boxer.”

Now the colonel, still pasty and sweating, smiled. He looked happy. It was the scariest thing I’d seen since Attu.

“I saw the future,” he said. His voice was as thick and dark as volcanic mud. “That’s how.”

Pop cocked his head. “Ah. Well, that wouldn’t have made sense to me yesterday. But it’s not yesterday anymore.” He reached into a jacket pocket and brought out his Zippo. “So maybe you already saw this, too.”

He lit the Zippo and dropped it into the wastebasket. Blue and yellow flames flashed up halfway to the ceiling, then settled to a few inches above the lip of the basket and burned steadily.

“We’re going to leave now,” Pop told the colonel. He picked up the bottle cap and replaced it on the Johnnie Walker. “You aren’t going to bother us again. The private here isn’t your slave anymore. And I don’t have the time or stomach to read your stories.” He picked up the bottle with his free hand and took a few steps backward toward the vestibule.

I hesitated, thinking that perhaps I should put out the fire. But neither Pop nor the colonel seemed concerned by it.

“You can’t prove any of it,” the colonel said. His voice was shaking and wild now. “You don’t have anything you can tell anyone. You can’t do a thing to me.”

Pop stopped, then stepped forward again. He held out the bottle of whiskey toward me. I took it.

Then Pop uncocked the .38 and slid it into in his right jacket pocket. He stepped up to the desk again. I could see the light of the flames dancing in his eyeglasses as he nodded to the colonel.

“You’re partly right,” Pop said. “No one can go to a court-martial and submit visions as evidence. But I do have a few things I can use in other contexts. I have a new friend in the Navy, a great admirer of my work, who has high connections. And I gave this same friend the name of a possible murderer. A sailor named Joe. I didn’t have to tell him why or how I had the name. My reputation in matters of murder, fictional though those murders may be, seemed good enough for him.

“Now, the naval investigators might not find the right Joe, and even if they do, they might not be able to prove what Joe did. Especially if he’s smart enough not to confess. But the Joe in question is a bit of a hothead. So, since those Navy boys will be questioning every sailor on Adak named Joe, it’s possible that an angry Joe might reveal that one of yesterday’s boxing matches was fixed. And he might tell them who else knows about that, and who he saw by that dead bird this morning. And then those Navy boys might come talk to some of their colleagues in the Army. Don’t you think?”

The colonel began to rise from his chair again.

“Goddamn slimy Red—” he began.

As quick as a snake striking, Pop reached into his right jacket pocket and came up with the bent eagle feather. He thrust it across the desk and held it less than an inch from the colonel’s nose.

“You,” Pop said. “Will not. Fuck. With us. Again.”

Then Pop reached down to the desk with his left and picked up the colonel’s garrison cap. He dropped it into the wastebasket.

The flames shot higher, and something inside the basket squealed.

The colonel’s mouth went slack. His eyes opened wide and stared at the fire without blinking. He looked like a wax statue. Or a corpse in rigor mortis.

Pop turned and put the feather back in his pocket. Then he gave me a glance and jerked his head toward the door. I turned and went out with him.

But Pop looked back toward the colonel one last time.

“By the way,” he said. “If you’ve ever thought about asking for a transfer, now would be an excellent time. I understand MacArthur wants to get back to the Philippines in the worst way. And I’m sure he could use the help.”

Then we went out. The fog was still thick, but we could see where we were going. Even this late in the day, there was a sun shining somewhere beyond the gray veil. It was summer in the Aleutians.

I looked back and saw that the ravens were gone.

XV

The lights were burning bright in the windows at the Adakian hut when Pop and I came up the hill. They were shining down through the fog in golden beams. And as we drew closer, I could hear the clatter of typewriters and the steady murmur of voices. Pop’s staff was in there hard at work on the July 6 edition.

“I’m sorry your cartoonist has to draw his cartoon over again,” I said as we climbed the last dozen yards.

Pop coughed. “He was upset. But between you and me, it wasn’t his best work. I suspect he’ll do a better one now. Unfair losses can be inspirational.”

As we reached the entrance lean-to, a figure stepped out from behind it. It was the Cutthroat. Neither Pop nor I was startled.

“What took you guys so long?” the Cutthroat asked. “The colonel’s shack ain’t that far. I’ve been here five minutes already. Thought you might have died or something.”

Pop and I exchanged glances.

“You were listening outside again, weren’t you?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I were a moron. “What do you think? I wanted to know what you guys were gonna do. Which wasn’t what I expected, but I guess it was okay. Might’ve been better if you’d gone ahead and shot him.” He scratched his jaw. “You sure he’s gonna let you be? More important, is he gonna let me be?”

“I suspect he’ll have no choice,” Pop said. “You see, I’ve already asked my new Navy comrade to inquire with his high-placed friends regarding a transfer for the lieutenant colonel. So whether he asks for one or not, one will soon be suggested to him. Assuming he doesn’t find himself in Dutch before that happens. Because whenever the general returns, I may be having a conversation with him as well.”

The Cutthroat gave a snorting laugh. “You are one strange fucking excuse for a corporal.”

“That I am,” Pop said. “And you brew the goddamnedest cup of coffee I ever drank. Next time, I’ll make my own.”

But the Cutthroat was already heading down the boardwalk. “Leave my six beers outside my shed,” he called back. He glowed in the golden shafts of light from The Adakian for a few seconds, and then was gone.

Pop turned to me. “It was kind of you to walk back with me, Private. But unnecessary. I may seem like a frail old man. But despite my white hair and tuberculosis-ravaged lungs, I do manage to get around, don’t I?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Jesus Christ,” Pop said. He pointed at me with his bottle of Johnnie Walker. “What did I tell you about ‘sir’ and enlisted men?”

I held out my hand. “Well, I’m sure as hell not going to salute you.”

He gave me a quick handshake. His grip was stronger than he looked.

“It’s been a long and overly interesting day, Private,” he said. “And I sincerely hope, you dumb Bohunk, that I only encounter you in passing from now on. No offense.”

“None taken.”

He turned to go inside. “Good night, Private.”

But I couldn’t let it go at that.

“That Navy boy is dead,” I blurted. “It was the colonel’s fault, and we’re letting him get away with it.”

Pop stopped just inside the lean-to. “Maybe so.” He looked back at me. “But sometimes the best you can do is wound your enemy… and then let him fly away.”

“Is that what happened?” I asked. “Is that what it meant when you showed him the feather?”

Pop rolled his eyes upward and grinned with those bad teeth.

“That didn’t mean a thing to me,” he said. “But it meant something to him.” He checked his wristwatch. “And now I really do have a newspaper to put out. Any more silly questions?”

There was one.

“How can you do that?” I asked.

Pop frowned. “How can I do what?”

All the way back from the colonel’s office, I had been struggling with the words in my head. I wasn’t good with words. And Pop already thought I was stupid. So I knew I wouldn’t say it right. But I had to try.

“How can you go back to what you did before?” I asked. “How can you do anything at all now that—” I closed my fist, as if I could grab what I wanted to say from the fog. “Now that you know what happens.”

Pop’s shoulders slumped, and his eyes drifted away from mine for a moment.

But only a moment.

Then his shoulders snapped up, and his eyes met mine again. They were fierce.

“Because I’m not dead yet,” he said. He turned away. “And neither are you.”

He opened the door with the words The Adakian stenciled on it. He raised the whiskey bottle, and a roar of voices greeted him. Then the door closed, and the long day was over.

I started back down the boardwalk. I thought I might go back to the bay and just watch the water all night. I’d probably get cold as hell without a coat, even in July. But as long as there wasn’t a williwaw, I’d survive.

In the morning, at chow, I would tell my squad leader that I was all his.

Epilogue

There was buzz for the next several days about the Navy murder, and I eventually heard that they arrested a seaman named Joe. But no one ever questioned me, and I never heard what they did with him. And I didn’t try to find out.

I saw the Cutthroat only once more, at a distance, just a few days after the fifth of July. He was boarding a ship at the dock in Sweeper Cove. It didn’t look like he was sneaking on. So I think he probably made it back to Fort Richardson and finished the war with the Alaska Scouts. But I don’t know.

The lieutenant colonel left Adak less than two weeks after that. I didn’t hear where he had been sent. But a few years after V-J Day, my curiosity got the better of me, and I made some inquiries. I learned that he had gone to the Philippines and had died at the outset of the Battle of Leyte in October 1944. A kamikaze had hit his ship, and he had burned to death. He never received his promotion.

I never spoke with Pop again. I saw him around throughout the rest of July and the first part of August, because he was hard to miss. I even passed by him on Main Street a few times. Once he gave me a nod, and I gave him the same in return.

That was all that passed between us until Pop was transferred to the mainland. We had all heard it was happening, since he was the camp celebrity and there was a lot of debate as to whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that he was going. But no one seemed to know just when it would occur.

Then, one evening in August, I came back to my bunk after a long day of working on a new runway at the airfield. And there was a manila envelope on my pillow. Inside I found the bent eagle feather and a typed note:

I have not honored his request.

Toward the end of the war, I heard that Pop had made sergeant and been reassigned back to Adak in early 1945. But by then I was gone. I had been sent south to rejoin my old combat unit and train for an invasion of the Japanese home islands.

Then came the Bomb, and I was in Nebraska by Christmas.

Now, as an old man, I take the bent eagle feather from its envelope every fifth of July. Just for a minute.

My life has been good, but not much of it has been a surprise. I saw most of it coming a long time ago.

But then Pop slapped me awake. He slapped me awake, and he kept me from seeing the end.

I’ve always been grateful to him for that.

I don’t know whether he was a Communist. I don’t know whether he subverted the Constitution, supported tyrants, lied to Congress, or did any of the other things they said he did.

But I know he wore his country’s uniform in two World Wars. And I know he’s buried at Arlington.

Plus one more thing.

Just today, decades after I first saw that hardback copy on another guy’s bunk…

I’ve finally finished reading The Maltese Falcon.

And you know what? I wish I could tell Pop:

It’s pretty goddamn good.