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.