found it was him screaming, not Lily. There was blood everywhere now, it seemed-on the floor, smeared on a wall, on Lily's palms, and most of all, on Sanger. He rolled off me; I sprang away from Jackson, leaving him coughing, using a finger to eke some breathing room out of my belt.
“Fucking Jap fuck,” Sanger spat, each word weaker than the one before. “I'm going to go over to that fucking Japland and fuck and kill every one of your cousins. Your mother, your brother, your fucking father.” Jackson had the belt off his neck now, and fell back, exhausted.
“Cripes, lady,” Jackson said, and I suddenly realized he wasn't much older than me. It didn't seem possible that he'd really wanted to hurt me, or Lily. But a quick look at Lily made it clear that she'd wanted to hurt them. Quite improbably, I began to worry that the two would leave-and leave me alone with Lily.
“Can't read your palm now,” Lily said. “Too messy.” She stepped out of the tiny office quickly. I paused for a moment. Jackson was staring toward me but not focusing. Sanger looked ready to start again. I sprang for the door and dashed down the stairs.
Lily was waiting for me outside. She started walking, and I followed, neither of us saying a word until we were some blocks away. “Like I said,” she muttered then. “Sailors.”
I tried to figure out a reply, anxiously shifting the duty of holding up my beltless pants from one hand to the other.
She sniffed, half a laugh, looked me up and down. Then she stepped close to me and carefully hooked a finger through a belt loop. She was holding them up now, so I let go. “Soldier,” she said quietly and then shook her head and added something Ronnie only recently had taught me how to spell:
“What?” I said, matching her whisper.
“Friend,” she said, even softer, and then removed her hand.
CHAPTER 7
FORT RICHARDSON HID ITS BIGGEST SECRET FROM VIEW in a flimsy, leaking, large Quonset hut, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with rusting razor wire. A single MP was stationed at the gate to the mini-compound, right next to a little wooden placard that read “ 520” and nothing else.
I didn't have time to take in much more the first morning I reported for duty. Before I could finish studying the outside, the MP on duty told me to move along. I almost did, but instead, gave my name, told him my purpose, and waited while he gave me a long, exaggerated, head-to-toe inspection. Clearly, Gurley had handpicked him. He asked me to repeat my name. I did; he unlocked the gate, nodded me in, and then locked it behind me.
I had to admit: Gurley was doing a good job of intimidating me, and, I assumed, the rest of the base. Sure, everyone said they had top secret jobs, but how many worked in an outsized Quonset hut protected by fencing, razor wire, and a twenty-four-hour sentry?
A yellow bulb above a doorway directly before me seemed to indicate the building's entrance; the door itself had a small window that was blacked out. Inside, the darkness was almost total. I moved slowly; after our initial meeting in the bar, I was sure of an ambush. The door swung shut. I put up my hands to fend off the attack, but instead it came from below-a steel pipe of sorts to my shins. I staggered, cursed, and fell into a crouch, hands futilely-pathetically-around my head. “Stop!” I shouted, although that is probably me revising: I wailed.
No response. No second blow. At the far end of the Quonset hut, a door opened and light spilled out. I could now sense a vast open space. At the end of it, where the light was, an office had been carved out. The rest of the floor was devoted to all manner of war materiel, much of it unrecognizable. Giant tarps hung in odd profusion from the ceiling. Looking down, I could see that it had been some sort of a metal fitting, protruding from a cage the size of four or five milk crates, that had attacked me.
“Belk!” Gurley shouted from the office doorway. I lifted a cautious hand. “Always doing things the hard way, aren't you? That's the back door. The front door is over here.” As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could see a door near the office at the far end of the building. But it was still too dark to see how I was supposed to get from where I was to where he was, so I started back toward the entrance I'd just come through, thinking that I'd walk around the outside. But before I'd made the door, Gurley threw some switch that illuminated the entire building. “It's an easier walk with the lights on,” he called, and then stepped back into his office.
I could see, but I couldn't move.
Gurley's Quonset hut looked like the official Army Air Corps circus tent. Ropes and tackle were everywhere. Strange metal-crates, for lack of a better word-lined the walls. Piles of sandbags appeared at regular intervals. And those tarps I'd seen-with the light, I could tell they were much more than that: great fabric teardrops, upended (or balloons, once I'd thought about it), all of them limply hung from on high.
GURLEY'S OFFICE WAS an even stranger sight. Tyrannically neat, of course. Everything was gunmetal gray-the desk, the lamps, the filing cabinet, and a locker against the wall. Even the walls themselves were covered in gray metal paneling. My first impression was that the army had stuffed Gurley into a giant footlocker. I later decided that the metal fixtures and smooth walls resembled something else: I had picked my way into a bomb.
Along the back wall, a series of clocks, each labeled with a Roman numeral-up to VII, I believe. But much more interesting was the map below the clocks. It stretched across the entire rear of the office. It was a map, mostly of the North Pacific-except that it extended all the way south to Hawaii, and as far east as Michigan -and it was the only untidy thing in the room. Bright pushpins spread across the map's rinsed-out blue, brown, and green like a virulent disease, appearing singly and in clumps.
“Fifty,” Gurley said.
“Looks like more than that, sir,” I said, still staring at the map. The truth was, it would have been impossible to count the pins. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds. At first I took them to be army bases, but dismissed that idea. Then I decided that Gurley had marked the map wherever he'd struck a man. White for where he'd wounded them, red for where he had killed them. There was a cluster of red just outside Anchorage.
“Fifty men,” he said. Maybe I was right.
“What I am about tell you, no more than fifty men in the country now know.” I started to believe him, but wondered, as he took a deep, melodramatic breath, if Gurley had not delivered this line dozens of times before. I could see him savoring the moment; he had that slight suggestion of a smile I now know steals across some actors' faces before a favorite speech. If I were mapping my own path in the war, I would stick a pin right there to mark that moment, in that office, in the light of that smile, because that's when I should have seen how helpless Gurley really was. It was as though he thought of the theaters of war as theaters, and that his role in the war was exactly that, a role.
He had paused after his “Fifty men” preamble, and now leaned forward to deliver the coveted secret. “The Japs,” he intoned, “have reached North America.”
I sat back: I think I was supposed to be frightened, but instead, I was confused. “The Aleutians, you mean?” A lot more than fifty people knew about that debacle.
Kiska and Attu, two brutally wet and cold islands at the end of the Aleutian chain, had been occupied by Japanese troops in 1943. The islands were of little strategic value, except in the sense that Roosevelt was enraged that the Japanese were occupying American soil. The U.S. had stumbled in its initial response; America 's Army, Navy, and Air Corps all fought each other for a while before turning their attention to the Japanese. Then the weather set in. Then the Japanese dug in. Three thousand Japanese on Attu held off an
