“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.
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.”