The Cloud Atlas (27 page)

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.”

WHEN I GOT BACK TO TODD FIELD, THERE WAS A MESSAGE waiting from Gurley. They'd arrive late that afternoon. Continue my preparations. Tag along on a reconnaissance flight, get a better idea of the terrain.

I'd assumed Lily had all the knowledge of the “terrain” that we would need, but with all the other supplies for our expedition secured, I had nothing else to do, and so hopped on a flight the next morning.

To my surprise, the crew hardly protested at my joining them-the flights were so boring, they said, they'd love someone like me along. When I asked what that meant, I was greeted with some mumbles and laughs, and I realized they knew about Shuyak and the infamous sergeant who jumped out of planes.

I disappointed them. I got up to look out the window once we were in flight, but I didn't jump. And the landscape disappointed me. Or rather, shocked me. It was the first time in my life that I have ever seen that much nothing. No balloons. No bombs. No soldiers. No smoke, no villages, no people, not even animals, at least animals visible from the air. And you couldn't see fleas from this high up.

We flew for hours over the same terrain-grasses, a clump of scrub alder here and there, mountains in the distance, and everywhere, water puddling and flooding, curling and spilling from one spot to another via waterways fat or thin. If the angle was wrong, or right, the water's surface would catch fire with the reflection of the sun, and if you didn't look away in time, that burst of sun would stay with you, even after you'd blinked. It glowed behind your eyelids, and then reappeared in some other portion of the sky-sometimes looking briefly like a balloon, if that's what you were looking for, or a second sun, which, if you thought about it (and we didn't), was no less impossible to believe.

WHAT RONNIE HAS always found difficult to believe is that Alaska 's mosquitoes bother him more than me. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the departure of his
tuunraq
, but Ronnie has always been impotent when it comes to Alaska 's unofficial state bird. Mosquitoes have driven him crazy every summer, especially during what became our annual expedition into the delta. As soon as we were clear of the city limits, the mosquitoes would descend on Ronnie, masses of them, until any remaining patch of exposed skin bore at least one or two drops of blood. Honestly, they never found as much interest in me, a fact I attributed to the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church's path to salvation, and one that Ronnie attributed to my love of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips.

We'd go for a month or more. Originally, the trips were designed to get me out and around to some of the smaller villages and seasonal camps that would emerge each summer over the delta. But in recent years, Ronnie and I had done a kind of joint revival wherever we stop; I said Mass in the morning, he told stories and attended to shamanic requests at night.

Our pairing was both fun and funny, and surprisingly collegial. Even before he'd gotten wind of what we were up to at the hospice, my bishop frowned on such professional camaraderie. He'd liked things better, it seemed, when Ronnie had been more serious about trying to do me in. Try to pin my boss down on the issue, and the good bishop would always laugh and say “Now, I'm not about to tell you we need to go back to the days when missionaries outlawed dancing and we shipped the kids off to boarding school, but-”

“Then don't,” I'd say, and things between the bishop and me would be set for another six months or so.

I see now, of course, how it was all adding up.

One thing I never told anyone was how I liked the traveling part of the trips best. Once we'd
arrived
somewhere, I was Father Louis, and in demand for a steady stream of confessions, baptisms, Masses, a calming word solicited here, a scolding one requested there. But
traveling
from one spot to another-in a beat-up old skiff that Ronnie had helped me find and repair-I was no one again, just a man out enjoying the widest skies on earth.

Ronnie stayed up most nights. More often than not, I did, too. Because whatever skills Ronnie lacked as a shaman, he more than had as an amateur astronomer, or meteorologist, or skywatcher. It wasn't that he knew scientific names, or that he had a talent for predicting the weather (although he was fairly good). He simply had a way of using the sky as a canvas at night, using it as a means of telling a story. He'd analyze the way the winds were pushing a cloud, point out how the sun this far north was always fighting to keep from sinking below the horizon. In time I learned that you could get at least half the story from watching his hands alone, the way they moved a cloud or poked a hole in the blue and let a star shine down.

It sounds funny, I know, to be so fascinated with another man, let alone his hands, but it has something to do with being a priest. No, not in
that
sense, thank you, but more of a professional interest. A good priest is sensitive to his hands the way a pianist might be to his. They are essential to his work-praying, celebrating the sacrifice of the Mass, offering communion, the sign of peace. It's well known, at least among missionaries, certainly among Jesuits, how Isaac Jogues, Jesuit missionary to Canada in the 1600s, had to later receive special dispensation from the Vatican to say Mass. His hands had been mutilated during his tenure in North America, fingers frozen or eaten, and without the pope's express permission, he would have been considered unfit to serve at the altar. (Jogues's later plea to return to Canada was reluctantly granted, but his arrival coincided with sickness and blight. The Mohawks took this as evidence of sorcery and cut off his head.)

I think the real reason I admired Ronnie, or those hands of his, was that he clearly had never used his hands the way I had mine. He was a drunk, a failure, a grifter, but the earth was no worse for his being on it. If Saint Isaac Jogues had ever descended from the sky during one of those trips in the bush, he would have reached for Ronnie's hand first, and Ronnie would have taken it, whatever condition Saint Isaac's hand was in, and shook it firmly. Ronnie had a grudge against missionaries but admired men who, like him, had survived.

More to the point, if Jogues ever dropped down, Ronnie would have been the first to see him. Ronnie was always looking up, especially in summer, especially out in the delta. He had a theory that if you sat in one spot long enough, stared at the sky carefully and remembered all you'd seen, you would be the wisest man in the world. All the knowledge of the world was contained in the skies, he said. He was going to write it all down one day, he swore, a book of
amirlut
, an atlas of clouds, and it would sell better than any bible. I asked him how he'd ever manage to chart on paper something that was always changing. He shook his head at my stupidity. “Not a map of where things are now,” he said. “No: where they will be.”

I WONDER IF RONNIE'S right, though. That staring at the sky will give you a better sense of what's to come. After the morning reconnaissance flight, for example, I was back out at Todd Field, searching the skies for some sign of the C-47 Gurley said he'd be on. And when I finally caught sight of one, I followed it all the way down to the ground, half thinking that, if I concentrated hard enough, I'd be able to see if Lily was inside.

But Gurley could have had Saint Isaac or Saint Nicholas aboard; staring revealed nothing. It wasn't until I saw them emerge that I knew.

They'd taxied to a stop some distance from the terminal, and a pair of jeeps raced out to meet them. I couldn't make out faces, but the first man at the opened door was certainly Gurley, whose preening I could have spotted from the moon.

And the second person: no hat, no uniform. Just long black hair, black trousers, and a knee-length, Native-style shirtdress I've since learned is called a
kuspuk
.
Though I could see well enough that I saw her turn to face my direction briefly before continuing down the stairs, I could not see her features. I couldn't be sure, but I was. Military men are trained, after all, to recognize the silhouettes of aircraft and ships, friendly and foreign. And Lily had trained me to believe in what I knew, what I knew because I was certain of it, not because I had evidence.

So it was Lily. Gurley hadn't sent me to Bethel just to get rid of me; the three of us really were going to journey into the bush. But then something happened that shook my faith a bit. Gurley and Lily exchanged words, it seemed, and then Gurley stepped back. The MPs took Lily by both arms, placed her in the jeep, and sped off toward some buildings at the other end of the field.

Gurley watched them go, then turned and began to walk toward me.

GURLEY HAD A NEW name for Lily: Sacagawea. We were discussing their arrival in an office he'd commandeered. I interrupted to ask him where she was. He said she'd been taken to Todd Field's “VIP quarters,” and then pressed on with his monologue.

“I introduced her this way, as ‘our very own Miss Sacagawea,’ thinking that a rather clever shorthand introduction-to wit, our Native companion and guide-when, to my slowly building horror and delight, I realized that the good men of this forgotten outpost were assuming that that was her actual
name.
Sacagawea. Tell me, Sergeant, of the many subjects no longer taught in school-is American history among them?”

Gurley seemed hurt when I did not reply.

His eyes were sunken and dark and he looked even more skeletal than usual. His hands were covered with fine scratches, as though his Franklin bouts had devolved to his fighting stray cats. But then I remembered the wall map, the pushpins, and the trails he'd trace across his skin.

“Dear Sergeant,” he said. “You're rather glum. This is a lonely outpost, and I imagine quiet duty, but look here: you have been given a reprieve, and your friends have come to join you. Where flees your smile? Think of what lies ahead: to catch a
spy
.”

For a moment, my mind had seized
on fleas.
I'd been out of Gurley's company for so long, I'd lost some of my ear for his strange language. As a result, it took an extra beat for the words to come out of my already-open mouth. “Sir, I'm not sure that-”

“Splendid, dear Belk. You are still among the living. You are sentient and curious and apparently sober. And so you have your questions. But more important, do you have my spy? Or will we, in fact, have to set out after him?” The words sped from his mouth, faster and faster. He smiled, as if he noticed this, too, and thought it delightful. “Forgive my eager possessiveness: but yes, before we speak of the devil we know-fair Sacagawea, dear Lily-let us speak of the devil we don't. Mmm?”

Mmm. I told Gurley about my wandering around town. I told him about the Emporium of Everything, and about Jap Sam. Maybe Lily wasn't worried if Gurley didn't find anything-anyone-but I was. So I tried to describe the now-interned Sam in such a way that Gurley might take
him
for our missing quarry. That would mean we could just pack up and leave Bethel -ruining Gurley's fun and Lily's quest, but giving us all, I thought, a better chance of finishing out the war alive. You didn't need Lily's kind of magic to sense the evil that was looming. Or maybe you did, and that magic had attached itself to me: here in Bethel, far from the numbing, civilizing influences of Anchorage, the spiritual world hummed that much closer to everyone.

Gurley wasn't the least bit interested in Jap Sam. He wanted Saburo. Lily's Saburo. The enemy's Saburo.
His
Saburo.

“No sign of him, sir,” I said. “I didn't go house to house, of course. But you'd think-in a town this small-he'd attract attention, too much attention to hide.” I made another attempt to derail the search. “If you want to know what I think, sir-”

“Always a dangerous preface, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir. But I think he died. I think he's dead. Captured, and we don't know about it, maybe, but I bet he”-I tried to call on a little magic for inspiration-“drowned. There's a lot of water around here,” I added, not hearing how foolish that sounded until I saw Gurley's face.

“There is
that”
Gurley said. “I assume you're joking?” he added, suddenly brusque. He patted his pockets for cigarettes that weren't there, and stood. “Perhaps you forgot we
saw
him. Lily and I, both. In the mist. In Anchorage. Perhaps you-” He started to pace. “I'm afraid I-I'm afraid I didn't tell you everything about the other night, about what Lily told me.” He was scanning the room as he spoke, not looking at me. If he had, he would have seen me turning red with alarm: What now? “She swore me to secrecy,” he said, talking more to himself now. “And what could I say? I shouldn't tell you, but I will, because it's relevant to what we have to do. To our mission. To our
quest.
But I tell you this in the strictest of confidence because-because-no woman, no girl, no girl even with a past as-as-weathered as Lily's deserved to have happen to her what happened-Louis!” He spun on me, with such force I almost burst out,
I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't have gone to see her!
He knew! He had to; he was just toying with me, but before I could speak he said something even more bizarre: “He
raped
her, Belk. The filthy, yellow-when we find him, Belk, no quarter. Lily. Lily.”

My heart was still pounding at the news he'd just delivered, and it was a moment or two before I was able to remind myself that he'd made this up-that the shadowy figure in the mist with Lily had only been me, that Saburo's presence had been Lily's invention, just as this rape was now Gurley's. But was it? Had she told him something else? Had Saburo been there, in the forest, farther on, in the dark, Lily running toward him, his having just arrived by balloon? No: Lily had lied to Gurley She'd told the truth to me. She always did. But-maybe- just not-Lily, what about the baby? Why hadn't you ever told me-

“So it was wrong to grow attached,” Gurley said, his eyes full of tears, but not full enough to cry. I wondered now if it mattered whether Gurley had invented the rape; he clearly believed there had been one, just as Lily believed there had been a Saburo. He wiped his nose with the heel of his hand, and then held his face for a moment. “A ring. There was a ring, Belk.”