"The Cloud Atlas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mitchell David)

CHAPTER 15

I DID NOT SLEEP HERE LAST NIGHT-I HAD PREPARATIONS to attend to-but it seems as though I missed little. Ronnie is still unconscious.

I thought this morning, when I entered and shouted, “Good morning!” that Ronnie flinched, or raised an eyebrow, but the nurse who was already there saw nothing. I sat with him awhile, and then checked the ward for Friday’s new arrivals.

I eventually returned, greeted Ronnie again-nothing-and sat. I opened my breviary and tried to read, but could not. Ronnie wasn’t flinching, but I was, every time the high hum of another plane finally grew loud enough to reach my hearing. Thursday’s weather had cleared, and long-delayed planes were pouring into Bethel. The bishop, or his emissaries, weren’t due in until late this afternoon, but perhaps they’d decided to play it safe and catch an early flight. Perhaps they’d decided not to come at all.

Could they really take me away from all this? Kidnapping is what it would be. Murder. I can’t breathe Outside. Some attic apartment in a Seattle rectory? A room, way at the end of the hall of some Gonzaga dormitory, in Spokane? No weather or shamans or wilderness to battle? I’d suffocate.

I imagine these men landing, the plane’s door popping open, and them peering out. I imagine them clambering down the steps and crossing the tarmac to the terminal. Inside, they’d look around for me with false but energetic smiles. (As though I would go to meet them, even if Ronnie didn’t need me at his side!) There was a pay phone there that sometimes worked; maybe they’d use it to call the church. Maybe they’d ask around. Maybe they would sit, and as the waiting area emptied, discuss what they planned to do.

I tried not to worry. I’d been gone for the night; Ronnie had gone without the sound of my voice. (But how far?) I studied him carefully, and then, after ducking into the hallway to make sure no one was around, went back to the bed and raised the sheet. I wasn’t sure what I would find, whether I’d be pleased or frightened to discover that another limb had fallen prey to something as invisible as it was ravenous.

THE AIRPORT TERMINAL at Bethel today is a sturdy, modern building, where the signs are all bilingual-“EXIT/ANYARAO”-and the atmosphere is informal. The male and female restrooms (“ANARVIK”) share the same bank of sinks, and those sinks are located in an alcove that’s wide open to the waiting room. Look in the mirror, and you can see everyone in the waiting room looking back.

Back at Elmendorf, back in the war, the airfield terminal was even more intimate, if that’s the right word. The building had but one window, and that was almost always covered with a giant chalkboard listing the day’s flights.

I remember searching the chalkboard the morning after Gurley had ordered me to the post on Little Diomede. To attract as little attention as possible to my supposedly top secret mission, I was to travel as far as I could on regularly scheduled flights. That meant I had to make my way first to Nome, and then determine the most efficient and least attention-getting means-sea or air-of continuing on to Little Diomede.

I’d already missed the 0600 flight to Nome. I’d not made it out of the forest until about eight-thirty. I’d spent some time looking for Lily time I should have spent lowering the balloon to the ground and rendering its payload safe. Instead, when I found my way back to the mysterious crash site she’d led me to, I found it ablaze. The incendiary bombs had fallen to the forest floor and ignited. The balloon itself, still trapped in the tree, had caught fire as well, and as I stood watching, the tree sloughed it off to the ground, a fiery scab. I thought the incendiaries meant it was unlikely germ weapons had been aboard-and if they had, they’d likely been incinerated.

Even so, I held my breath as much as I could as I ran for the river, expecting the fire or a belated blast to take me down before I’d made twenty yards. But twenty, fifty, one hundred yards went by, and I was still upright and running, ricocheting through the spruce down to the river. If anything exploded, the noise was lost to the rapids, which I followed back down to the trail, and then the trail into Anchorage. Instead of dissipating, the smell of smoke had only grown stronger the farther I had run. And once I was running along the city streets, I could see why-a great column of smoke now rose from the forest.

I didn’t stop running until a hungover soldier, sprawled on the sidewalk, called out to me, “Didn’t have enough money to pay ’er?” Then I realized I’d attract less attention on the nearly empty streets if I walked, and so I did, straight to the Starhope. Lily had to have escaped the forest before me. But the front door was locked. Lily’s window was dark, and no one came to it when I called, not even Gurley

EVEN THOUGH IT WAS almost 10 A.M. when I got to base, I had decided to follow through on Gurley’s orders. To be honest, part of me wanted to escape Gurley and the growing mess-which now included a balloon crashing in our backyard, not to mention a forest fire-and part of me thought I might be better positioned to help Lily. Little Diomede might be a barren rock in the Bering Sea, but it was well out of Gurley’s sight. I’d discover a way to sneak off and find Lily-and Gurley would never know.

But Father Pabich would.

“My favorite sergeant!” he said when I walked into the terminal.

“Father,” I said, quietly.

Either Father Pabich didn’t detect my anxiety or didn’t care. He got up from the crate he was sitting on and came over to crush my hand.

“You look like twice-baked dogshit, Sergeant,” he said. “I’ll take that as evidence you’ve been working hard.” I thought he might take silence as evidence I agreed, but when I didn’t answer, he said, “Sergeant? Haven’t seen you around, haven’t seen you at Mass. Only one good excuse, and you better have it.”

I took a deep breath, trying to reacclimate myself to the real world: the war, Elmendorf, Father Pabich. I tried to smile. “I’ve been saying the rosary?” I said.

“Goddammit, son. Learn that joke from your little Protestant friends? Just for that, let’s have you say the rosary, three times, each day this week.”

“Sir,” I said.

“I warned you,” said Father Pabich.

“Father?”

“And pray a special devotion to our Blessed Mother,” he said. “Now then—”

Two other soldiers walked in, and Father Pabich smiled and shouted at them as well. I was relieved to be out of the spotlight, and maybe sad that I no longer warranted it. He brought the two men over, introduced me-two Polish boys from Chicago. Good boys. They were shipping out to the Aleutians, and he was going with them. They’d be there for six months; Father Pabich, two weeks. Laughter. Some of the soldiers out there hadn’t seen a priest for a year, he said. Any longer and we might lose them to a wandering Russian Orthodox missionary. Laughter. The two Polish guys looked younger than I, and even more embarrassed. We all smiled, though, and sincerely, because this was our priest. One of us. For us. And here he was, in Alaska, the abrupt edge of the world, tending to the likes of us-when we all knew none of us had souls worth tending. We were boys, after all, about to leave our teens, and we were being sent out to kill people.

Though Father Pabich had been out to the Aleutian Chain just last month, he was going again-all the other chaplains, of every faith, had been called elsewhere. Not that anyone begged for the duty. The conditions were too harsh, the men beyond saving: those who didn’t kill themselves or each other were often done in by the weather. Father Pabich had almost been stranded on Kiska during his last trip.

“I was supposed to be on Kiska for only an hour,” he said, settling back. “I was spending my time on Attu, but they flew me out to Kiska, said the men would like a visit-said they had more than twelve Catholics there, and that’s my rule: when you outnumber the apostles, you get a priest. So I went.” He patted his pockets for a cigarette, but one of the Chicago boys leapt in with his own pack. Father Pabich removed one, winked, and pocketed the pack. “Williwaws? You know what I’m talking about? Those Aleutian storms when the rain falls up as much as it does down? I’m in a PBY-Navy’s flying me-goddamn pilot is flying like he’s an atheist. Like he’s not going to have God to deal with if he crashes that goddamn bird into the side of goddamn Kiska. Excuse me.” Puff. The other Chicago boy wanted a cigarette. He pointed to the pack in Father Pabich’s pocket, but Father Pabich waved him off. “So we land. I almost drown getting to shore, but I get ashore. The pilot’s said I’ve got an hour. Maybe forty-five minutes. Storm coming in and then nobody’s taking off. So I get inside. First of all, there aren’t twelve Catholics. There’s six guys, tops. And one of them’s a Jew. Tells me he is.Tells me he is. But he says they’re all going to die. The island’s haunted with ghosts from the Battle of Kiska, storms a-coming, wild dogs-and I don’t know what. Scared. Wants to go to Mass. What am I supposed to do?” Shrug. “Like the Holy Father’s gonna know.” Puff. “But I’ve been using up precious time talking to this one. So it’s on to Mass. ‘Oh, no, Father,’ this other one, red hair, now says to me. ‘I got to go to confession. I can’t receive communion if I’m not in a state of grace.’ Jesus Christ, is what I tell him. We’re all going to be in a state of death, son. But-right, what does the Bible say? This might be Jesus Himself talking to me. So I sit down, send the other boys out, start with the confession. In the name of the Father. Now-of course you don’t reveal what’s said under the seal of confession, but mind you, he’s not saying anything of interest. He’s been on Kiska, for Christ’s sake. The world has been sinning against him. But he’s going on and on. Talks about his Friday fast. Says he’s been eating things on Friday. Like what? I say. ‘Like meat, Father,’ this one says. Meat! When he’d been lucky to get a goddamn ration of meat out there. No time now. It’s going to be a twenty-minute Mass at this point. No Litany of the Saints-like I can afford to piss them off. Hurry up, lad, I tell him. What other sins you got? Let’s go. You ate meat, now what else, what else?”

Father Pabich leaned back, took a long drag, grinned ear to ear. I remember thinking, here’s a man about to risk his life flying into the world’s worst weather, and he couldn’t be happier if he were the pope himself.

“You know what he says?” Father Pabich leaned forward, and then bellowed, “ ‘PEAS’! Oh, sweet Jesus, ‘What else, son?’ ‘Peas, Father.’ Oh my Lord.” We laughed. Everyone in the terminal laughed, but no one laughed harder than Father Pabich, who roared until he coughed and teared up and accidentally lit a small fire when his cigarette fell from his fingers into a nearby wastebasket.

I suppose that’s how Gurley was able to enter without anyone noticing.

I was helping the Polish guys put out the fire when I heard my name. I straightened up, but didn’t turn around-I wasn’t nearly ready. They called Father Pabich’s plane. He picked up his bags, smiled, and punched me the best he could with his elbow. “Be a good boy, now,” he said. “Fight us a good war.” I’d like to say that I ran after him, told him an elbow wasn’t good enough, that I wanted to shake his hand before we parted, receive his blessing, but I didn’t. Gurley was already coming toward me then, so I blame him, not the Japanese soldier who, a month or so later, overran Father Pabich’s position as he was giving last rites to a Marine on Okinawa. The Japanese soldier bayonetted them both.

“Sergeant,” Gurley said, grinning for some reason. “I greet you with the very best of news.” I studied the exits, decided which would be easier to reach. But I didn’t move.

First, Gurley said, he was not going to charge me for disobeying orders-though I had clearly done so since I was still in the terminal instead of on a flight to Little Diomede. But the better news was that he no longer wanted me to go. He had found a far more important and interesting task, much closer at hand. He couldn’t tell me this in the terminal, however, and so ushered me outside, hand at my elbow.

“Sir,” I said, “I thought we agreed. I thought it was clear that I should go. That this would be best.”

“Would have been best, Sergeant,” Gurley said. “But things have changed. This is what happens in war. We must let bygones be bygones, we must put our differences aside, and we must—”

“Sir,” I said. “Last night, the office-the paper?”

Gurley’s theatrical glee momentarily waned. “Yes, Sergeant?” he said. “And who have you told about that?” I looked away. “No one, I take it?” He waited until I met his gaze. He looked around to see if anyone was close to us, and then threw an arm around my shoulders, hissing into my ear as we walked. “You may think your captain mad, but what have you done about it? Nothing at all, it would seem.”

“Maybe I will do something,” I said. “Sir.”

He hustled me farther from the building before he spoke again. “Maybe you will, Sergeant. But you haven’t yet, and I daresay you won’t. Because your case is thin, because as scared as you are, you’re even more curious, and because…” He let the word hang there while he looked at me, as though waiting for me to finish the sentence. But I couldn’t, so he did, speaking slowly and evenly: “…you know that lives, the lives of certain people, depend on the actions you take.” Did I know whom he was referring to? This is what his gaze now asked. I lowered my own eyes; this was my answer.

“Good,” he said, smiling once more. We started to walk. “I admit, we have had our difficulties. But I promise, dear Sergeant, that all that will be forgotten in the excitement of the days ahead.” He darted a quick look behind us, and then replaced his arm around my shoulders. “What did those fools say up at Ladd? Five days? We’d wait five days before searching the tundra for signs of sabotage, or saboteurs?”

I nodded. “Three now, I suppose.”

“Three days,” Gurley said. “Seventy-two hours to beat that major, that galoot Swift, and the rest of the Army to the waning war’s greatest prize.”

“Sir,” I started.

“Belk,” Gurley said, but I persisted.

“Sir, the major was right. They probably never got to launch their balloon. And even if they did, they probably did nothing more than make some moose sick. Maybe some mice, or ravens. And that’s assuming the infected fleas were able to fight their way through the tundra winds long enough to—”

Gurley put one hand to his lips, another lightly to my chest, and shut his eyes. “Sergeant Belk,” he said, and then opened his eyes. “We are no longer chasing fleas. Your captain’s snare may have finally caught a spy.”

GURLEY CONTINUED speaking, with very few interruptions, for the next two hours. At least, I remember it that way. I remember him meeting me at the terminal late that morning, and I remember him dismissing me from the Quonset hut that afternoon, and I remember him talking the entire time.

I don’t remember much of what he said, however. Because I learned one important piece of information early on, and after that, found it hard to focus on much of anything else he said.

Lily had told him about Saburo.

Not much, not everything, but enough. Enough to convince Gurley to venture out into the tundra in search of Saburo, and enough to insist Lily accompany him as a guide. I would come along, too, of course- one could never imagine what sort of menial or distasteful tasks might arise. In fact, Gurley wanted me to precede him and Lily to Bethel. He needed a bit of extra time to finagle Lily’s passage, but I could make the most of the delay by securing supplies in Bethel and “doing a bit of sleuthing” around town to see if I could come up with any information about Saburo on my own. Gurley and Lily would follow in a day or two. Depending on the weather-and Lily-we would disappear into the bush shortly thereafter.

Replaying these memories, it seems unmistakable now to me how completely mad he was. And I don’t mean madness like the kind that doctors like to cure nowadays with dollops of prettily colored pills. I mean old-fashioned, Edgar Allan Poe-type madness, incurable but for a gun placed at the temple. The words fast and steady, the volume rising and falling, the eyes darting this way and that.

Yes, that’s precisely how it looks now-insanity-but to have seen it through my eyes then, you would never have thought him so sane. Missing were the theatrics, the powder-keg rage-that way he had of flushing red and trembling like he was his own private earthquake, every extremity poised to fly off in pursuit of the leg that was already gone. In its place was this calm, constant, reasoned stream of language, punctuated every so often with words that almost set me to trembling: Lily, Saburo, Lily.

She had told Gurley about Saburo. She had told him his name. She had told him that he was Japanese, a soldier, a spy. She had told him almost everything that she had told me, except-and I listened carefully-that they were lovers.

The longer he went without mentioning this most important (only to me?) fact, the more rattled I became. How could she not have told him? Saburo: her first love, that golden summer, those perfect hands? As Gurley rambled on, however, I had time to think about it, and came to realize that she had every reason to lie to him. Her one desire was to make it out into the bush in search of-well, I’d never let her spell it out that night, but I knew she was searching for Saburo’s body. But she couldn’t get to Bethel without a military escort-that’s why she had wanted me to come. I’d failed her, so she’d gone to Gurley. Riskier, but also better-he would have access to better resources. He could operate with more autonomy. He was an officer, after all, unlike me. He was her lover.

But I got to Lily first that afternoon. I’m sure Gurley expected me to go directly to the airfield without even stopping at my barracks, but instead, I went directly downtown, where I found Lily, peering out her window, as if she was expecting me, or someone. She smiled and gave me a little wave. I ran up to the second floor, a new question popping up on each stair- Did we really see the northern lights? Did I really see a balloon? Did we really run into the forest, the two of us, together, last night?-but when I reached her, what came out first was Gurley’s decision to go to Bethel.

She looked both delighted and scared. “We’re going to go?” she asked. “You’re sure? Me, too? He said all of us?”

“He didn’t tell you? It seemed like things were pretty well decided.”

“Last night—” Lily began, “or I guess it was this morning, after I made it back into town, I came back down here, I found him wandering the street.”

“Was he angry?” I asked. “He must have asked why you ran. Did he see me? I was sure he saw me.”

“What did he tell you?” Lily asked carefully.

“About last night?” I said. “Nothing. Just that you’d had this conversation.” I waited for her to augment this, but she didn’t, so I went on. “About a ‘spy.’” I paused again. “Lily, what were you thinking? Look what’s happened-he’s carting us all off to the bush, and God knows what he’ll do there, where he won’t have to worry about anyone other than us witnessing him completely cracking up. He’s dangerous, Lily. He’s ready to kill. Starting with me.”

Lily went to the window and checked the street. “That’s why I told him,” she said, and then turned to me. “To spare you.”

LILY’S ACCOUNT OF the early morning hours differed from Gurley’s. Gurley hadn’t mentioned to me that he’d seen Lily or anyone else on the misty streets; and he’d heavily edited his conversation with Lily. He left out, for example, what Lily said was the first thing he’d asked her- Was that you and Louis I saw in the street?-and he’d left out her reply.

“Yes, it was me,” she told him. “But not Louis. You’ve scared him half to death. I’ll be lucky if I ever see him again.”

“I’ll be luckier if you don’t,” Gurley had said. I wondered how he’d looked when he’d said that. With me, it would have been behind a sneer, or preceding a fist. But it had to be different with her.

“He’s just a boy,” she told him, and didn’t even smile at me as she repeated the line now.

“Well,” Gurley said. Lily said he kept looking around, like I might still be lurking in the shadows. “Who was it, then? It was someone. It was someone. I know I saw someone with you. A man. Not a ‘customer’? I thought we had an agreement. I thought I’d taken care of that for you. You should have enough now, enough to get by without-God, Lily, we’ve talked about this. You know what I’ve said, what I’m planning for you, for us—”

“Not a customer,” Lily said. She told me now that she had been stalling, frantically trying to come up with a plausible scenario. He’d been watching her grow upset, and suddenly decided he knew what had happened.

“No, Lily-you-you were attacked,” Gurley said, grabbing her arm. “My God. My God: he hurt you. And me, limping along after you, your helpless defender. Did he-did he-my God, Lily, did he- rape-?”

Lily said she started crying: she could see no way out. He’d taken over her story-now rape was involved; should she admit to that, peg it on some random thug? One of those brawling sailors, unexpectedly returned? Lost and distraught, she blurted out-because it was true- “He was a friend.”

She gasped, destroyed now because she’d thought she’d revealed once and for all that it was me.

But I was apparently gone from Gurley’s mind, and he pressed in on this new quarry: “‘Was’?” he asked. “Who was he? A friend? Why would you cry if it was a friend? What kind of friend is that?”

And that was all Lily needed. Because when he asked the question, the obvious answer, the real answer, came to mind, immediately. What friend had she cried over, again and again?

Saburo.

She started telling Gurley before she’d even planned it all out, but the longer she talked, and the more fascinated she saw him become, the more she realized how it could all work, how well it could work. Saburo was the man who’d accosted her in the street, not Louis. Saburo was the reason she’d run from Gurley, not to him: she told Gurley that she couldn’t admit, not then, that she knew-that, long before she’d met Gurley, she’d befriended-a Japanese soldier, a spy.

And there it was: Saburo was the reason Gurley needed to take her to Bethel. Saburo had run off after her, into the dark, had begged her to leave with him, that night, told her he was going back to Japan, that he would take her with him, if only she would come, right then. “Someone sympathetic to the cause” had a floatplane waiting, would fly them west, as far west as he could. Then there would be a ship, or a submarine…

I was awestruck. First, by the facility of Lily’s storytelling, and second, by the slow realization that this story might have been, must have been, at one time, true. There had never been a midnight race through Anchorage with Saburo, but there had been promises of an airplane, of a ship, of a home across the ocean.

“More than a friend” is how Gurley answered all this, both mollified and roused, and Lily nodded, as though he had broken her, and because he had.

“More than a friend,” Lily repeated to Gurley. “That’s what he thought,” she said, and then fell to Gurley’s chest. She didn’t have to say it: the spy asked and I did not go. “I don’t know what he thinks now,” she told Gurley then.

“I do,” I told Lily now.

IT DID NOT LOOK LIKE its nickname-“Paris of the Tundra”-not from the air, not from the river, which I had to cross to get from the airfield to the town, not from my walk up its main street, nor the walk I took back down that same street, having quickly run out of road. But Bethel must have looked like Paris to the communities that dotted the tundra around it. If a clock hand began its circumnavigation of Alaska at Anchorage -about five o’clock-it would find little to interrupt its sweep west and then north to Nome, at nine o’clock. Little, except Bethel.

Bethel sits at around seven or eight on that clock face, smack on the banks of the Kuskokwim River. The Kuskokwim shares the duty of draining western Alaska with the Yukon. The two rivers conspire each summer to turn the tundra into a vast delta so soggy and remote that, even as tourism booms elsewhere in Alaska today, it sometimes seems there are fewer humans in this corner of the continent now than there were during the war.

When I first arrived in Bethel, however, it wasn’t bustling, even then. There weren’t many people around, almost no cars, just a few jeeps. I later learned that vehicles were something of an extravagance-you couldn’t drive to Bethel from anywhere; you could only drive around in Bethel, or, when the weather was right, around the wide unbroken tundra that surrounded the town. In the winter, you could drive down the frozen river when they plowed it. In Anchorage or Fairbanks, if you ever get a hankering and the road’s open, you can drive right out of Alaska, into Canada, and hell, on to Miami. But in Bethel, you always have to turn around eventually and come back.

The flight from Anchorage had lasted long enough for me to work out a plan, or as I think of it now, a kind of essential theology. Gurley represented evil, a powerful, but not unbeatable, foe. Lily was Eve, of course. Lovely, and susceptible. Did that make me Adam, or did Saburo have more claim to that title? Maybe I was Adam after he’d eaten the apple. Maybe I was the snake.

DEALING WITH THE LOCAL military authorities was easier than I had expected. The same frenzied culture of secrecy permeated Bethel as it did Anchorage; the soldiers I met at Bethel ’s Todd Field were so interested in keeping their mission a secret that they were scarcely interested in mine.

But Lily had kept another secret from just about everyone, as I was soon to discover.

I was standing on the long, low porch in front of the optimistically named Bethel Emporium of Everything, sleuthing. After a short walk around town, I’d been unable to find Lily’s old store, Sam’s Universal Supply, and was starting to wonder if she’d told me the truth-about that, or about anything.

Four men were on the porch. One heavyset white fellow, standing, and three men I took to be Yup’ik, all sitting, all watching the white man like they were waiting for him to leave.

“Jap Sam, sure,” the white man said. “Good fella,” he said. “Never went there much, but heard he was a good fella.” He looked to the others on the porch, and so did I. “Mind you, the man had products of inferior quality.”

“Good prices,” one of the Yup’ik men said to the empty street. “Good man,” another said.

“‘Good prices,’” the white man repeated. “Not if you’re buying junk. Mind you, that’s what I thought at first, when I saw them come up in the jeep and take him off: I thought, there you go, he’s getting arrested for selling inferior products. But no, wasn’t that at all.” He looked again at the Yup’ik men, all of whom stared at me.

“Where’d you take him?” one of the Yup’ik men said.

“I don’t know,” I tried, taking a moment to figure out what he was asking. “Some soldiers took him?” My questioner turned away.

“Now, boys,” the white man said. “Not every soldier knows every other soldier. See here, he’s not from that kind of a unit.” Instead of pointing to my bomb disposal insignia, he pointed to my sergeant’s stripes. “No, the government took Jap Sam down to California, I hear, for his capital-S safety. Mind you, he was Japanese, and I’m sure we’re all safer, too, knowing all them Japanese are safe in that camp.”

“No one’s never heard from Sam,” one of the Yup’ik men said. “Never since.”

“Mind you, boys,” the white man said. “There’s a war on.” He looked out into the street. “Good day, Captain,” the man said to me, and left.

I stood there a minute, trying to decide what to do next, growing tense under the collective stare of the men. “What you want Jap Sam for, anyway?” said the one who’d spoken up earlier.

“Met a friend of his down in Anchorage,” I said.

“Jap friend?” the man said.

“No,” I said. “She’s Yup’ik.” Glances were exchanged; I must have gotten the pronunciation close. “Well, Yup’ik and Russian.”

“Lily!” one of the other guys said with a shout and smile. Suddenly they were all talking. “How’s our Lily?” “How’s that girl?” “She still tall and pretty as anything?” Then one guy gushed, “Wasn’t there a kid? How’s he doin’?” and the other two frowned and fell silent.

No one said anything for a moment, and if you’d asked me, in that very instant, if I’d ever be able to speak again, I’m not sure if I’d have said yes. I’d been asked to believe a lot of things over the course of the war-that bombs could float through the air for thousands of miles, that teenagers could be given guns after a few weeks of training and be called soldiers, that the frozen-solid emptiness of Alaska was of strategic importance-but now I was being asked to believe that Lily had once been pregnant, had had a child.

The Yup’ik man who’d first questioned me looked up. “You’re going to want to see Auntie Bella,” he said. “She’s going to want to know about Lily, what she’s doing and all.” He gave me directions, and when he finished speaking, it was clear I was to leave, immediately, without asking another thing.

BELLA: THAT NAME PROMISED someone huge, and round, and, I assumed, Yup’ik. But Bella was as thin and worn and white as the wooden posts that held up the porch outside her small boardinghouse.

Before I could say anything, she told me she had no vacancies, but when I told her I had news of Lily, she reluctantly let me in. Bella asked a lot of questions, mostly about Lily’s health. Whenever I tried to ask a question, she interrupted with another one, asking questions about me when she’d run out of ones about Lily.

A noise outside distracted her and I jumped in. “One of the men I met, he said something about a kid-Lily has a child? Here?”

Bella gave me a hard look. “If she didn’t tell you, don’t imagine she wanted you to know,” Bella said, and we sat in silence for a bit.

Finally, Bella spoke up. “Wasn’t no kid” she said. We sat a while longer. “I’m thinking about telling you a story,” she said. “But if I do, it’s only because I want you to feel bad for having asked.”

“I already do,” I said. She snorted, and then got up and left the room. When she returned, she had a single, steaming mug of something, which she put on the table. After a moment, she picked it up and took a sip.

“I’m down to the one decent mug these days,” she said. “So I don’t mind if I do.” Another sip. “Now, from all that you said, you sound like you’re a friend.”

“I am,” I said.

“Boyfriend?” she asked, and I was so taken aback, I said nothing.

“Didn’t think so,” she said, and shifted in her chair. “Well, you’ll still feel bad,” she said. “But you’ll probably also want to help her. And that’s reason enough, I suppose.” She put the mug back down. “Feel free,” she said, nodding to it. But once she started talking, I couldn’t move, and lost myself to the story.

LILY HAD RETURNED from her summer trip alone. People took some notice, but not much; few had seen her leave on her trip weeks back with Saburo, and in the meantime, the person who probably knew the most about Saburo, Sam, had been taken off to California, interned at Tule Lake.

And as the months passed, few people even noticed Lily had returned from her summer pregnant. Winter clothing concealed her secret from most everyone, except Bella, of course, who’d given Lily a room in the back.

Bella said you’d never seen a woman so happy who had so little reason to be. Here Lily was, alone, and with child. Sam, the man who’d taken care of her for so long in Bethel, had been hauled away and imprisoned. Saburo, the man she’d loved, had vanished-Lily wouldn’t say where or how, but Bella assumed Saburo was attempting to return to Japan.

“Lily says he’s dead,” I blurted out.

“Dead,” Bella said. “Not sure how she would know, but-then, I’m not sure how she knows half of what she does. Or how she could be so fool stupid, too.” Bella counted off the degrees of foolishness on her fingers: no money, no family, no husband.

“But she had you,” I said, and Bella nodded, puckered her lips.

“What we needed, in the end, was a doctor,” Bella said. Bethel shared its doctor with several towns up and down the Kuskokwim. One evening, Lily told Bella that dinner hadn’t gone down well; a few hours later, Bella said, it was clear it wasn’t dinner but the baby who was making problems.

“Now here we were, seven months in, I’d say, though she never knew when exactly she got in the family way, of course. Or wouldn’t tell.” Bella exhaled. “And no doctor-he’s two villages up, and bad weather’s keeping him there. But this baby-this baby is coming. I got some of the other aunties in town over here double-quick, but all of us just knew wasn’t going to be nothing we could do once that child come out.”

Bella sent word over to the airfield, to see if their doctor was around. He was, the report came back, but he couldn’t work on civilians. “Couldn’t work on Eskimos is what they meant,” said Bella. “Couldn’t then, couldn’t now. Couldn’t or wouldn’t? Well, you tell me, soldier boy, why we got problems with the soldiers in this town, drunk or sober?”

Lily read the panic in the eyes all around her, and grew panicked herself. She knew as well as they did that the baby was coming. She sent them all away and then called them all back in; she screamed for Saburo, she screamed for her mother. And then, twelve hours after dinner, two months too early, she delivered. A baby boy. Perfect in every way, but one: he was dead.

“Not a mark on that child,” Bella said. “Just the biggest head of black, black hair you’ve ever seen.” It looked like Bella was crying, but I couldn’t be sure; the light was dim and nothing else had changed in her face or voice. “Tiny. Tiny, tiny thing. And here’s where we disagree, the other women and me. I think-I know-that little boy took a breath, a single breath”-she gave a little gasp-“and that was all. Lily said so, too.” She reached for her mug and saw there was nothing in it. “No matter. Nothing any of us could do but sit there and cry with her a spell.”

But the hardest part came later, Bella said. Lily wouldn’t give the baby up. The ladies let Lily have the day with the child, but when they came for him that night, she wouldn’t move. “Saburo has to see him,” Lily said, though she wouldn’t answer any questions about where Saburo was or how he would know what had happened.

“She wasn’t making a whole lot of sense,” Bella said. “Said we needed to send for help-and I’m thinking, ‘A doctor? It’s too late for a doctor’-and she’s saying no, someone much better, much smarter than that.” Bella stopped. “Well. If this Saburo had been so smart, I don’t think she would have found herself in this predicament in the first place. Course, I didn’t tell her that.”

Bella looked in her mug once more. “Imagine they’re expecting you back about now,” she said, but she didn’t make a move herself.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Baby died,” Bella said. “Was dead. Told you that.”

“But who did you—”

“Aw,” Bella said, “this part of the story ain’t worth the telling. What you might call a medicine man, a shaman: that’s what she wanted. Hell of a bad idea, turns out. Oh, we got this man-young man- down visiting from Lower Kalskag. He comes in-drunk as a fart- I’m ready to turn him out. But Lily, she was beyond hollering by then, just screeching, and the fact is, none of the other aunties wanted to be in there. I didn’t want to be in there. I don’t think this shaman much did, either. But we left, he went in, and—” Bella thought about this for a moment, and then drew herself up before going on. “The next morning, it’s just Lily lying there, wrecked, like something’d exploded. And she won’t talk, but she don’t have to. No baby. No shaman. No father. She’s in there all alone.”