But it was a much smaller ad, in tiny type, that intrigued me. In the midst of the classifieds, which consisted largely of desperately worded ads seeking housing, appeared a section called “Personal Services.” Here were found notices for professions that Alaska did not seem to need-professional tailoring, pet grooming, even a phrenologist. But, then: “Lily reads palms and tells fortunes in the Starhope Building, room 219, most days, 5-7. Careful and correct.”
So I went. Of course I went. Out of curiosity, and out of respect to Father Pabich, who I suspected would be disappointed if I didn't get in some kind of trouble downtown. And out of respect to a bomb disposal sergeant I'd trained under, whose three favorite words were
careful and correct.
It would be interesting to meet a woman who adhered to the sergeant's philosophy.
“First,” she said. “The rules.”
I had climbed the stairs of the Starhope, less sure with each step. Debris-paper, sand, bits of construction material-was scattered everywhere, as though the building were in the process of going up or coming down. The sounds of the street faded, the muffled din and occasional shouts now sounding like a far-off party that I'd been left out of.
I'd expected many doors-or at least nineteen-on the second floor, but found only three. One, missing a door, opened into a darkened office. More trash. The third door was locked. A smoked glass window gave no clue as to what lay behind it. The door to 219 was ajar. A bare bulb burned inside.
“No yelling. No laughing. No spitting. No taking your clothes off. No stupid questions.” That all seemed easy enough, if odd. The only difficult rule was the last one: once my eyes adjusted, all I had were questions.
Lily-I assumed-stood beside the room's one window, which overlooked the street. My first question was whether this really was the Lily from the ad-the palm reader. I had no idea what a palm reader looked like, but I suppose I thought of them as being older, heavier, maybe wearing some strange getup. Lily was none of that, or rather, she was her own strange getup. She was tall, tall as me, and when she stepped closer, taller. She had long straight black hair, black eyes that didn't reflect, a wide, flat face, and-well, which of the most striking facts should I mention first? The one that surprised me more then, or the one that surprises me more now?
Let me share the one that surprised me then, since that does more to explain the mix of idiocy and naïveté that I was in those days: Lily- was the enemy. It only took a single glance-at her face-to tell me this. Me, who had never exchanged a word with a Japanese citizen. No matter. I was a highly trained soldier. I'd seen newsreels. I read the papers. I knew, precisely and instantly, who or what she was. Japanese.
But the second surprise is better, and unlike the memory of the first, still brings a smile to my lips: Lily was wearing a man's shirt, long but not that long, a clunky pair of boots, and absolutely nothing else.
In that respect, in every respect, she was the most remarkable palm reader I had ever seen. And having seen her, I knew that I had to leave, immediately.
I ducked my head in a kind of goodbye, and then moved quickly to the door. Or I thought I moved quickly. But then there was some against-the-rules shouting-from her, I realized, but it took a moment because the noise seemed too loud, too off-key-and when the shouting was done, she was in the doorway, blocking my exit.
“Damn you,” she said, staring hard, breathing hard. “You're not a damn cop, are you? Or an MP? Because they've been through. And things were
taken care of.”
She'd been moving on me as she spoke, and before I knew it, I'd stuttered back half a step.
She frowned. “You're not a cop.”
“Ma'am,” I said, touching my hat like I'd seen the good cowboys do in the movies. “I'm sorry.” I looked down at her legs. They started where the shirt stopped, and descended, smooth, brown, and, here and there, bruised, into those boots.
“I said no laughing,” she said quietly. “I wear boots. So do you. It's cold. Welcome to Alaska.” She scuffed at the floor. “Why do boys get so hung up on the boots?” she asked, and then left the doorway to walk around me. “There's a discount if you've got some cigarettes.” I didn't. “And sometimes a discount if you're a gentleman.”
That's when she saw my shoulder insignia: that bright red bomb, fat and finned and ready to drop. On a trip into Anchorage a few years ago, I saw the patch disposal guys wear now-our World War II-era bomb is still there, but smaller, crowded by a base of lightning and laurels. Naturally, I prefer the one we wore. Nothing but that bomb, the red brighter than blood. People's eyes usually caught there a moment, but Lily did more than that. She flinched slightly, like I'd raised a hand to hit her.
“Well, hello!” she said, or stammered, unable now to meet my eye. I relaxed, sure that I was intimidating her rather than the other way around. A pause followed as we both tried to figure out something to say.
But a sharp voice behind me figured it out for us: “Problem here?”
I could feel someone step around me, and then, there he was: thin, taller, blond, milky blue eyes scanning Lily and me. “Young man getting out of line, Miss Lily?” he asked.
I could tell two things by his insignia: he, too, was in bomb disposal, but more important, he outranked me. Once he discovered the same, he smiled.
I shook my head, but turned to Lily: Had I been out of line, somehow?
“No,” Lily said. She laughed weakly, gave me a questioning look- surely this man and I knew each other?-and then retreated deeper into the office.
“No,” I mumbled.
“Good night,” the man said, not even looking at me. I felt like I was moving out the door without really moving my feet.
“Right,” I said, but by then I was outside, the door was closing.
Before it shut completely, Lily shouted for me to wait. The door eased open again, and I could see her rustling around in the room's pile of blankets while the man watched. As soon as I realized my vantage point afforded me a somewhat intimate view of her backside, I looked away. The other man did not. I looked again.
Lily came back with a closed fist, and pressed something into my left hand. “Your change,” she said, waiting until I met her gaze before she let go.
I shook my head, but only slightly and the man cut off any protest. “Make haste, young man.” He drew back and looked at me with disdain. “Change?” He exhaled. “As for myself, I intend to get my money's worth.” He turned to Lily. “Mademoiselle?” he said, and I left.
I DIDN'T REALIZE for several blocks that my hands were two fists in my pockets. Only then did I unclench, and only then, with a huddled display of instruments in a music store window looking over my shoulder, did I pull out my change and examine it. She'd given me a dollar. On it, she'd written a message. A very short message, actually, all she had had time to write: “ 11.”
I looked around, refolded the bill, and continued down the street. For whatever reason, I started walking faster and faster, until I reached the main road out to Fort Richardson. By then I was running, sure in some vague way that someone was pursuing me. But when I finally allowed myself to glance back into Anchorage 's blackout dark, I couldn't see anyone at all.
WHAT I FEARED then is what Ronnie fears now, and has feared for some time: the unseen forces that hound you through the night.
Old explorers who first witnessed this phenomenon struggled for words to describe it; eventually they settled on
arctic hysteria.
The affliction did not discriminate: both Natives and Outsiders occasionally succumbed to some force-often during this very time of year, deep winter, which is characterized less by snow than endless dark-that caused them to strip off their clothes and run outside, into the cold, into the tundra. If they're not caught in time, some wound up (wind up) running into the great beyond.
It's a story I like to share when people who have never been to Alaska ask me what it's like. This usually comes right after they've squealed something along the lines of “ Alaska! It's so big!” as though it might fall on them. But they don't really want to know what it's like. For them, asking me about Alaska is like pressing “play” to watch a horror movie; they just want to be scared:
Alaska
! A
short discussion of arctic hysteria usually satisfies them, as it has all the things they think an Alaska story needs: cold, dark, death. It's missing a bear or a wolf, but I have other anecdotes to cover that.
Years ago, when I asked Ronnie about arctic hysteria, he had a ready punch line:
Sometimes, they don't come after you.
Time was, he explained, before the white man, before Ski-Doos, before Village Public Safety Officers, before medevac helicopters-sometimes, they just let people run away and disappear.
He was trying to spook me, of course, but it didn't work. As it happens, I have found myself chasing after Ronnie a dozen times, more frequently of late. I'll hear him run howling past my window late some night and leave my warm bed to run him down. Sometimes I catch him, sometimes I don't find him until much later, when he's passed out, in the shelter of some truck or house or Dumpster, often on a night that's cold enough to kill.
Whenever he comes to, in a few hours or a few days, he rarely mentions just what drove him into the night. But sometimes the memory is fresh or frightening enough that he can't help but speak of it, and out it comes, a similar story every time: an eagle, a caribou, a bear, encounters him, alone, walking down some street in town. He's recognized, and the animal gives chase. And as the chase continues, the animal changes from one form to another, always drawing closer, closer, until finally it is at his heels, and then Ronnie knows, hears, smells, feels, who it was all along. “The wolf, Lou-is,” he says then.
“The wolf,” he says now, blinking awake, and staring straight up at the hospice ceiling. “The wolf, Lou-is, he's closer now. He knows. He remembers. The boy. His mother. The baby. The wolf. My
tuunraq
.” Ronnie turns to face me, to make sure I am listening, though I myself can't be sure. Am I listening? Or dreaming? I feel a kind of fire in my legs, an urge to run myself. “He's heard I've been acting as an
angalkuq
once more. Without him. After all these years. He heard I was working right here. This place. That's how he found me. He's coming now. I hear him. He's coming now. Lou-is. Tell me-”
“
YOU
ARE NOT CRAZY.”
First day, first hour of bomb disposal training, and a dozen of us enlisted were crammed into a makeshift classroom barracks at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Gottschalk was still alive. That first balloon, Alaska, Lily were all in my future.
First question: How can you tell the difference between a BD officer and a BD enlisted man? Some of the guys actually worried it out, raised their hands and gave answers about insignia or uniforms. One guy said something about the way a man stands, which caused another to mutter something lewd, and that's when the sergeant instructing us gave the correct answer: the difference between us guys and officers? We are not crazy.
Because it turned out there was a basic principle in bomb disposal, one they taught you before they taught you anything about bombs.
The officer defuses the bomb.
“Then what do we do, Sarge?” asked a guy nearby, whom I took to be even younger than I.
The sergeant smiled. “Grow old.”
* * *
THIS DIVISION OF DUTIES was British and was already in the process of changing. Soon enough, both enlisted and officers would be trained to render bombs safe. But when I went through, guys like me mostly had just one duty: dig. Think about bomb disposal today, and you're thinking of ticking, wiretangled things, hidden under a desk or a bridge. Maybe that sounds scary, but to us, something tucked under a desk would have sounded like roast turkey with trimmings. The bombs we went after had, for the most part, tumbled out of planes. Drop a bomb from that height, and if it doesn't explode when it's supposed to, all one hundred pounds-or five hundred or one thousand or more-of it disappears right into the ground.
That's when you start digging. Down a story or more, depending on the soil and the weight of the bomb. When you're not digging, you're timbering, to keep the hole from collapsing. To prevent anything from exploding too soon, everybody's using special, nonmagnetic tools and wearing cloth shoes without metal eyelets and belts without buckles-or that's what they were always doing in the training films.
Lit cigarettes are forbidden, obviously. They dangle from everyone's lips.
When you've finally gotten the ugly squat cockroach of a thing all exposed, you climb-carefully-back out, and call for an officer. He dusts off his hands (he's been eating, watching, trying to radio someone who can tell him more about where this bomb came from). Then he grabs his tools and goes down, taking his knowledge with him.
But you couldn't dig too many holes without learning a thing or two about bomb disposal yourself, and smart officers-older officers-always welcomed input from their crews.
AUGUST 1944. A B-17 is returning from a practice bombing run in the California desert. The story goes that they had had a lousy day on the test range, missing targets left and right. Then again, they may have been just holding their skills in reserve, because they hit their last target dead-on.
Officially, it was an accident. Unofficially, it was a miracle, because there's really no other explanation for a bomb falling into the middle of the Japanese-American Relocation Camp at Manzanar without killing anyone. It fell through the roof of a small building that was housing some recently arrived ceramics equipment. The equipment was destroyed-a true silver lining for internees who hadn't been looking forward to the prospect of the make-work pottery program, devoted to crafting lumpy ashtrays and bowls-but the bomb failed to explode. All five hundred pounds of it managed to drill through two packing cases, the pallet beneath, and continue on fourteen feet deeper into the arid soil beneath the floor.
My Aberdeen classmates and I had the misfortune of being relatively nearby, stationed just south of San Francisco at Fort Ord, waiting to be dispersed across the Pacific. Someone somewhere looked at a readiness roster, realized he had a BD crew in his backyard, and sent us off to put our newly completed training to use. It must have seemed ideal. Give some new guys a real challenge, with relatively low risks: it was our own bomb, right? Something we knew inside out? And ultimately, what's the worst that could happen? Some trainees die, maybe take a few Japanese with them.
Our detail numbered eight. A lieutenant, sergeant, plus six of us who didn't know any better, and so were excited, almost giddy at the prospect of our first real job. The lieutenant was young, but again, that was to be expected in our line of work.
You did
not
expect the officer to be skittish, or for his eyes to be red-rimmed, even watery, but who knows where the lieutenant had been the night before. And you definitely didn't expect him to have a tremor in his hand, but no one else seemed to notice that, so I kept quiet. When it came time, after all, he'd be the one down in the hole, alone.
The sergeant, Redes, was the oldest of the group by far. He had plenty of experience but wasn't much interested in sharing it. He had just rotated stateside from France, and would only snort and roll his eyes if you asked him about his time there.
Before we arrived, camp security evacuated the affected area, save for a few internees left in our care, “in case there's any dirty work.” Sergeant Redes took one look at them and then ordered them to guard the area's perimeter. “For starters, don't let that security officer back in here,” he told them.
The hardest part came first. It was obvious where the bomb had fallen-the partially destroyed building was a solid clue, even to guys as new at the job as we were-but it wasn't so obvious where the bomb was now. Inside, amidst the wrecked equipment, or burrowed in the ground well beneath? Ordnance locators detected nothing around the perimeter; the bomb had to be directly under the building. The lieutenant and Redes talked for a while, and then Redes came over to us. Clear out the pottery equipment, he said, but slowly. “Don't go banging around in there,” he said. “Pretend the whole building is a bomb.” Then he lit a cigarette, while we all stood and watched him. “We're going to do this today, girls,” he said, and stared at us until we moved.
The work went slowly, even more slowly than the sergeant or the lieutenant would have liked, but since they'd told us to be cautious, they must have felt they couldn't rush us. Once we'd moved out all the equipment and packing material without finding anything, we tore up what remained of the floor. Still nothing. Glad to discover the building wasn't sitting on a cement slab, we started digging.
We were at it for one hour, and then two, and when the third began, we'd lost almost all sense of the bomb-we were just here to dig, and keep digging until we were told to stop.
Clink.
I knew infantry guys who would always claim the bullet, or shell, or bomb that was actually going to hit you had a different sound, different from the bullets that whizzed by safely, I suppose. But in bomb disposal, there was only that one sound-
clink
, the sound of a shovel or pick gone too far-and if you herd it, you usually weren't around afterward to describe the experience in detail. Of course, the other reason you almost never heard it was because experienced bomb disposal men were more careful than I-probing first, then digging, probing, digging, never just diving in. I'd been probing, I promise. I'd been cautious.
It wasn't that loud a clink.
But this was a bomb that would not go off. It had fallen thousands of feet from a plane, it had broken through a roof and a floor and a mess of equipment for making pots, and it wasn't going to explode just because some trainee had nicked it with a shovel. It was designed for rough handling, after all-it had to survive transport from the factory, loading onto the airplane, and whatever rough weather the plane encountered.
Still, a bomb's patience was usually about spent by the time guys like us found it. So after my clink, none of us breathed, none of us moved, and none of us said anything, until someone weakly said, Sarge…
Redes was in the doorway above us before the sound had left the air. “Who's the dipshit trying to get us killed?”
I suppose I could have put down the shovel and pretended it was someone else, but I was still motionless, scared.
“Belk,” Redes said.
“I was being careful, sir,” I said, though I wasn't sure I had been.
“‘Careful’?” To our great relief, he started climbing down into the hole. He wasn't scared. “Jesus, Belk,” he said at the bottom. “ ‘Careful’? What do we say?”
I wasn't smiling then, but I'm smiling now, because we said what Lily said.
We said:
careful and correct.
Though Redes hadn't said much since joining our unit, he'd said enough that we knew this was a favorite phrase. I'd heard half a dozen instructors say it, but Redes made it his own through repetition and embellishment: you could be as
careful as
you wanted, he'd always say, but if you didn't follow procedures
correctly
, you could still blow yourself up-with great care. I should have been paying more attention. Watching the soil, stopping to test with the probe.
“Careful and correct,” I said.
“Correct,” Redes said. “Since you're the whiz kid, you've earned the prize of finishing this job off. The rest of you, out. Belk, finish exposing the bomb.”
The rest of the gang climbed out, delighted to get away from the bomb and the sergeant's wrath.
Sergeant Redes descended and watched me dig for a minute or two before he spoke. “I did the same thing, you know. ‘Clink.’” He looked up out of the hole and shook his head.
I thought he would get mad if I stopped digging, but I did anyway. “Did your sergeant get mad?” I asked.
“I was the sergeant,” he said. “Last day before I left France. Right in the middle of the town square. Ten yards, maybe, from the front door of the church, which was a thousand years old or something. Everybody from my lieutenant to the monsignor to some passing colonel looking on, watching the experienced sergeant do his work.
Clink”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. Same as here.” He bent down, ran his hands lightly over the bomb, and let out a long breath before muttering, “This is odd.” He studied it for a minute more, agreed with himself about something, and then said, “You know the lieutenant's got a sister?”
I didn't, but I knew enough about army life to brace myself for something coarse.
“Redhead,” he said. “So I hear. Showed me her picture, black and white. Pretty. I suppose the lieutenant's a little red up top, too.” He turned to look at me. “That's the thing of it. They were twins, he tells me. Boy-girl twins. Whaddya call that?”
I shook my head, and he turned back to the bomb.
“So she's a WAC nurse,” he said. “Was. Died Monday. Italy. Jeep. Land mine.”
“That's-hard,” I said, and Redes waited for me to say something more, something adequate.
When I didn't, he turned back to the bomb. “They're not giving him leave till the end of the month.
That's
hard. Now give me a hand here.” Redes had both hands on the bomb and was trying to roll it back toward him. We steadied it, and then he paused and looked out of the hole.
“You're my best student, you know,” he said. “Or were.” He smiled. Then the lieutenant called his name, and Redes told me to wait. He climbed up to the lip of the hole and told the lieutenant that he needed just a few more minutes to finish clearing the site. Then he came back down to the bottom of the pit, excited.
“So let's finish your training, whaddya think?” he said quickly. “What do we do next?”
“We, well, let's see. I go and get a couple of sticks of C2 or C3, run some blasting wire back clear of the fragmentation zone, hook it up to the blasting machine.” I could see the little pages of my training manual flutter past in my head.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Redes said.
“I'm sorry, the,
uh, fifty-cap
blasting machine,” I said. “I think.”
“The what? Let's call it what it is, soldier. You're talking about the little box, with the plunger you push down and make everything go boom?” I nodded my head. “That's the hell box, right? Don't bother telling me they taught you something else in your fancy little school.” I nodded again. “Okay,” he said. “That's a lovely plan. But what's the problem with it?”
I was still stuck on
hell box
, so his question caught me off guard. “Not enough wire?”
Redes looked at me and then rubbed his hands together, slowly. “Right, not enough wire. Belk, there's not enough wire in the world for this job. The problem with that plan is, we blow this bomb where it is, we flatten the camp, which, since it looks like it's built with balsa wood, we could probably level with a couple of lit farts, for that matter. In any case, that all means we take care of the problem
here.”
He pointed to the bomb. “So let's get started. There's something extremely strange about this bomb. What is it?”
I looked at it for a long time. It didn't look strange. It looked just like the bombs in the manual, markings and all. I shrugged.
“Where's the fuze pocket?”
I relaxed, glad to be back on familiar ground. This question was easy. Like most guys, I'd come into the bomb disposal squad thinking the business end of the bomb was always the nose, but that wasn't the case. Sometimes the fuze was in a cylinder, or pocket, embedded in the middle, as it was here.
“Right there,” I said, pointing to the middle. “Transverse fuzing. German specialty.” Sergeant Redes looked at me and waited. I waited, too, pleased with my vocabulary. And then I gasped. “This is a German bomb, Sergeant? The Nazis are- Sergeant? Oh my God.” I was breathless; a German air raid over California?
Only now did Redes look concerned. “Not so loud, Belk. You already tried to set the bomb off, let's not try to set the camp gossips off, too.” He squatted. “The truth-according to the lieutenant, who radioed the airfield-is that they've been using some captured Nazi ordnance out on the test range. Why waste good American ammo, and so on. Though the lieutenant doesn't quite buy that, and neither do I- for starters, they'd have the wrong damn charging shackles, though that's probably a good thing, because the condensers wouldn't-well. I'm guessing there's a pilot and crew who are going to have a hell of an interesting debriefing.”