Though Not Dead (16 page)

A month later Sam finagled a ride on a C-47 to Adak to see how Mac was getting on, and found his bed in the ward surrounded by a bevy of nurses dressed in olive drab. His leg was in a cast and elevated but it didn’t seem to be slowing him down much.

Mac looked up from his bed and saw Sam in the doorway. “Hey, buddy! Ladies, meet my partner, Old Sam.”

“Old Sam?” one of the nurses said with a skeptical look. Sam had been unable to grow the trademark Scout beard.

Mac grinned. “Skinny bastard’s old enough to know better but too young to die.”

He held out a hand and the nurses scattered when Sam came forward and took the hand and a seat next to Mac’s bed. “Guess I don’t have to ask how you’re doing.”

Mac laughed. “Aw hell, boy, I’m fine. They’re going to let me up pretty soon so I can start learning how to walk again. They say when I’m mobile enough they’ll ship me to a vet hospital Outside, put the expert mechanics to work on me. You?”

“Looks like some of us will be riding out the rest of the war right here,” Sam said. “You coming back after?”

“Who else’d have me?” Mac laughed, and then coughed.

Sam didn’t like the look of him. Mac had lost a lot of weight, and there was an unhealthy flush to his cheeks. “Did you do anything in particular in civilian life?” Sam took care to be as nonspecific as possible. It wasn’t good manners to ask an Alaskan about his past, and in spite of the instant rapport the two men had felt when they met in boot, it still made Sam a little nervous to ask the direct question.

But Mac was good-natured about it, shrugging a shoulder. “Fishing, hunting, a little prospecting. Did some longshoring in Juneau and Kodiak. Did some lumberjacking in Ketchikan. Why?”

Sam leaned his hands on his knees and met Mac’s eyes. “Haven’t heard you mention a lot in the way of family, or a home. You need a place to go when this is over, I got one.”

Mac raised his eyebrows. He was a tall man, almost as tall as Sam, with lighter hair, blue eyes, and a killer smile that explained the nurse contingent. He’d been very cagey about his age around the other Scouts, but he was one of those people upon whom the years sat lightly, and he could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty, although Sam did notice that recent events had deepened the lines in his face. “Where is this place?”

“North and east of Cordova, on the Kanuyaq River. Little town called Niniltna. It’s about four miles from the Kanuyaq Copper Mine.”

There was a moment of silence. Sam dropped his eyes. He didn’t want to see the gratitude, if gratitude there was.

Mac stirred, and Sam looked up to see that Mac had linked his hands behind his head and was staring at the ceiling. “Thought I’d heard the Kanuyaq closed down.”

“It did. But there’s plenty to eat walking around on four feet, and a man can stake a homestead in five years, as much as a hundred and sixty acres. Look.” Sam dug out his wallet. “I’ve got pictures.”

Mac accepted the wallet and flipped through the black-and-white pictures in silence. He came to one of a couple, the woman a Native, the man also a Native, with something added to the mix. He looked at it for a long time, his expression unreadable. “Your parents?” he said at last.

Sam nodded. “They live in Cordova. I’ll be claiming a homestead east of Niniltna.” He smiled to himself. “I’ve already filed on the spot. Here.” He took his wallet and flipped to another picture. It was a girl, another Native, plump and round-cheeked, dark of hair and eye. She ducked her head, as if she was shy, and looked at the camera from the corners of her eyes, but her beaming smile was impossible to hide.

“Your girl?”

Sam nodded. “We’re going to get married when the war’s over.” He looked down at the photo, and then, aware of Mac’s eye on him, closed the wallet and stuck it back in his pants. “When it’s over,” he said, “write to me care of general delivery in Ahtna. I’ll meet you there, get you started off right. There’s a pretty decent living to be made there if a man isn’t afraid to work.”

“Sounds good,” Mac said.

Sam was about to extend his hand to seal the deal when a gaunt soldier walked up to stand on the other side of the bed.

“Sergeant Hammett, as I live and breathe, you’re back again,” Mac said. “You’re as bad as the nurses, you just can’t stay away from me.”

“What can I say, Mac, you’re one of the best bullshitters on the base. I’m just naturally drawn to you.”

Hammett was as tall as the both of them, with hair cut close on the sides and a sprouting mess of white turkey feathers on top. Heavy pouches beneath the eyes and a thick white mustache provided the only stopping places in a long face with cavernous cheekbones. He wore round glasses perched on a thin blade of a nose, and carried a notebook.

“Pop, this is Old Sam Dementieff, my buddy. Sam, this is the editor of the camp newspaper, so be careful what you say around him.”

Hammett looked at Sam and raised an eyebrow. “Old Sam?”

“It’s just a nickname,” Sam said, a little testily.

Hammett looked at him a little longer, and then turned to look at Mac a little longer than that. “You brothers?”

“Not hardly.” Sam was looking at Mac when he said it. Mac was looking at Hammett, and his eyes carried a clear warning.

After a moment Hammett said, “Had a few more questions I wanted to ask for my piece on the mop-up.”

Mac rolled his eyes, but Sam could feel his relief. He got to his feet. “I gotta get going; I got a pilot talked into a ride back to my unit. You know flyboys and how they don’t like to be kept waiting. Mac.”

Mac took Sam’s hand in a painful grip. “Sam.”

“Thanks, Mac,” Sam said. He looked at the leg encased in plaster, suspended with ropes and weights and pulleys. “Thanks a lot.”

Mac shrugged. “You saved my ass on that friggin’ mountain a couple of times, way I remember it. Call it even.”

He let Sam’s hand go, finally. Sam walked down the ward and paused for a look back, and saw Hammett and Mac both watching him. He raised his hand in half wave, half salute, and left.

*   *   *

Sam got back to his unit in time to board a ship bound for the navy base on Kodiak Island. He spent the rest of the war there, the tedium of camp life broken by occasional reconnaissance missions to the outer islands, but the Japanese had left before the invasion of Kiska and they didn’t come back. The Lend-Lease route for hop-scotching war materiel across Alaska to Russia was safe.

Six months after the Battle of Attu Sam got word that Joyce had married Davy Moonin. He’d known of her parents’ opposition to himself, but it was still a very heavy blow. For the next year he did his duty in a robotic funk, until the end of 1944, when he heard that Davy had died and that Joyce was now a young widow. He began to be very anxious for the war to be over.

The bomb fell on Hiroshima in August 1945 and the war in the Pacific was over. He was demobbed in September and he went straight home, by boat to Valdez, by thumb and on foot to Ahtna.

He’d been writing to Mac once a month, although the writing did not come easily to him. Mac’s replies were infrequent and seldom more than a few sentences scribbled on the back of a postcard.

Mac wasn’t in Ahtna when he got there, but he hadn’t really expected him to be.

There was a package waiting for him at the post office. The return address was in an unfamiliar hand. He opened it up and found another box, securely taped, along with Sam’s last four letters to Mac.

The accompanying note read, “Private McCullough died of tuberculosis just before being shipped stateside. He asked me to forward this to you when you got in touch.”

It was signed Sgt. D. Hammett.

Eleven

Her first realization was that she was upside down. Her second was that she was cold. Very cold.

She blinked, recognized the cab of the pickup. She was hanging from the seat belt, and her first instinct was to fumble with the catch to open it. “No,” she said out loud, “don’t do that.”

The sound of her own voice reassured her. Something was still working.

She looked at the dashboard. The engine was off. That was a good thing. She sniffed the air. No gasoline smell. Good again. She squeezed her hands, moved her feet, stretched her spine as much as she was able. The rest of her seemed to be working, too. The good news kept on coming. Although she had a sore spot on the back of her head, where she presumed her skull had come into brief, violent contact with the back window. “My week for running my head into firewood and car windows,” she said.

Although this was good news, too, in a backassward kind of way. Hitting the back of her head this time meant she shouldn’t get another set of shiners. Maybe.

She listened. There was nothing to hear but the wind. The windshield, cracked but still intact, was buried in snow. The driver’s-side window was, another miracle, also still intact. She turned her head to look right.

The passenger window was gone. So was Mutt.

Not a good thing.

She braced one hand against the roof of the cab, released the seat belt with the other, and dropped down in a sort of controlled tumble. Her knee knocked against something prickly, and she felt around until she found it. The pineapple.

She noticed that her hands felt almost numb with cold. Now that she thought about it, her feet weren’t much warmer. Also not a good thing. She reached up to fumble with both hands behind the seat for her emergency kit, which included a flat white metal box twelve by eighteen inches, and her parka. She eeled into her parka and opened the latches on the box.

Taped to the inside of the top was a book light. She clipped the light to one of the visors and turned it on.

She found the hand warmers and stuffed one each into the mittens in the parka’s right hand pocket. She put her back to the open window and removed her boots to stick toe warmers to the bottoms of her socks. She pulled the boots back on, zipped up her parka, and pulled on the mittens. Blessed warmth began to seep into her extremities.

She was aware enough to realize she was light-headed, and that there had to be more aches and pains that would begin to register the moment she stopped moving. She knew enough to stay with the truck, but some reconnaissance was a must. Even if she could have gotten one of the doors open she wouldn’t have dared for fear she wouldn’t be able to get it closed again. Snow was already drifting in through the broken window. She squeezed through it, parka and all, and stood up to get a snootful of snow courtesy of the wind that was blowing fiercely and horizontally over the ground.

She circled the pickup, right hand maintaining contact with the truck bed, leaning into the wind, the snow stinging her face. It was wheels up; no possibility of righting it without a come-along. The tarp over the supplies in the back was bellied out into the snow, but so far as she could tell her knots had held on the lines tying it down. There was a Swiss Army knife with a can opener on it in the parka’s left pocket, another one in the glove compartment, a third in the emergency kit. She wouldn’t starve.

She pulled off a glove and laid a hand on the engine. It was cold, which meant she’d been out for a while. Maybe not, in this wind. She didn’t have a watch, and with the engine off so was the clock on the truck’s dash. She tried to remember when sunrise was this time of year. Seven? Seven thirty?

“Mutt? Mutt!” She circled the truck again, calling. “Mutt! Come here, girl!” There was no response. Two steps away and she couldn’t see the book light through the cab windows. Three steps away and she couldn’t see the truck. She didn’t dare go any farther than that.

She wriggled back inside the cab and took further inventory. There was a moth-eaten olive drab army blanket she hadn’t remembered putting there beneath the seat, and there was a roll of duct tape in the emergency kit. She took the blanket and the tape outside and rigged a cover for the broken window. She crawled back inside and invented a whole new language for popping the bench seat loose so she wouldn’t have to sit on the metal roof all night.

It did come loose, finally, in a shower of candy wrappers and loose screws and bits of gravel she’d tracked into the cab. She beat it clean, pulled the sleeping bag that was the last item of her emergency kit free of its stuff bag, unzipped it, tossed in a couple of the hand warmers, and crawled inside, boots, gloves, parka, and all. It hadn’t been out of the stuff bag in years and it smelled pretty musty, but so far as she could tell the only livestock in it was her.

She wasn’t hungry but she forced herself to eat one of the power bars in the emergency kit, and washed it down with some water. The water was starting to get a little slushy inside its plastic bottle so she put it inside the sleeping bag with her.

She didn’t know how long the book light’s battery would last and she didn’t know how long the storm was going to last, either, so she turned the light off. She checked the blanket. The weight of snow drifting outside was pushing it into the open space left by the broken window but it was big enough that it should hold.

She pulled the hood of the parka over her head and zipped up the sleeping bag as far as it would go and lay there and listened to the wind howl and the trees creak ominously in the gale. She cursed herself for leaving Ahtna when it should have been obvious to any near idiot that a storm was about to hit. When images of Mutt hurt and helpless out there somewhere in that maelstrom threatened to take over, she forced herself to think of something else.

She wondered what the temperature was in LA.

*   *   *

The memorial at the church had been everything that was dignified and restrained. The graveside service was brief and decorous. Afterward, Jim and his mother were driven in a black stretch limousine to the reception at the club, where the driver, appropriately subdued, deposited them at the front door, where another appropriately subdued functionary whisked them inside.

The room was large, with a wall of windows overlooking the first hole of the golf course in the foreground and the Pacific Ocean in the background. The bar had a line in front of it and one wall was taken up by a banquet table laden with food. Jim stood at the door, watching his mother move slowly across the room, black-silk-clad spine straight, perfectly coiffed head erect, shaking hands, accepting condolences, offering a cool cheek for those brave enough to offer her affection. If you could call it that.