Weird Detectives (9 page)

None of that sounded like something I could report. “But the colonel says you used to be a detective. Before you wrote the books.”

Pop took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I was a Pinkerton. Not Sherlock Holmes. A Pinkerton can’t look at a crime scene and deduce a culprit’s name, occupation, and sock color. Usually, a Pinkerton simply shadows a subject. Then, if he’s lucky, the subject misbehaves and can be caught in the act.” Pop put his glasses back on and held out his empty hands. “But there’s no one to shadow here, unless it’s every one of the twenty thousand men down in camp. Do you have one in mind? If not, there’s nothing to be done.”

I looked down at the eagle. As big and magnificent as it might have been in life, it was just a dead bird now. What had happened here was strange and ugly, but it wasn’t a tragedy. It wasn’t as if a human being had been staked out and gutted.

But in its way, the eagle unnerved me almost as much as the things I’d seen and done on Attu. At least there had been reasons for the things on Attu. Here, there was no reason at all—unless Pop was right, and it had just been boredom. If that was the case, I didn’t want to know which guys had been bored enough to do this. Because if I knew, I might get mad enough to hurt them. And then there’d be something else I’d have to see in my sleep over and over again.

“All right, Pop,” I said, keeping my eyes on the eagle. “There’s a can of gasoline strapped to the jeep. What if we tell the colonel that when you and I got up here, we found this thing burned up?”

Pop cleared his throat. “You’d be willing to do that, Private? Lie to the lieutenant colonel?”

I had never sidestepped an order before. The colonel had made me do some stupid things and some awful things, but this was the first time that it looked like he was making me do a pointless thing. Besides, Pop was older and smarter than the colonel—even I could see that—and if he thought the eagle was a waste of time, then it probably was.

Besides, we were enlisted men, and we had to stick together. As long as there weren’t any officers around to catch us doing it.

“Sure,” I said, looking up at Pop again. “I’ve lied before. Back home in Nebraska, I even lied to a judge.”

Pop gave me a thin-lipped smile. “What did you do to wind up in front of a judge?”

I had done so much worse since then that it didn’t seem like much of a fuss anymore. “I beat up a rich kid from Omaha for calling me a dumb Bohunk,” I said. “Then I stole his Hudson, drove it into a pasture, and chased some cows. I might have run it through a few fences while I was at it.”

Pop chuckled. “That doesn’t sound too bad. Some judges might have even considered it justified.”

“Well, I also socked the first deputy who tried to arrest me,” I said. “But I think what really made the judge mad was when I claimed that I wasn’t a dumb Bohunk, but a stupid Polack.”

“Why would that make the judge angry?” Pop asked.

“Because the judge was a Polack,” I said. “So he gave me thirty days, to be followed by immediate enlistment or he’d make it two years. That part was okay, since I was going to sign up anyhow. But the thirty days was bad. My old man had to do the hay mowing without me. I got a letter from my mother last week, and she says he’s still planning to whip me when I get home.”

I noticed then that Pop’s gaze had shifted. He was staring off into the distance past my shoulder. So I turned to look, and I saw a man’s head and shoulders over the top edge of another hillock about fifty yards away. The man was wearing a coat with a fur-lined hood, and his face was a deep copper color. He appeared to be staring back at us.

“Do you know him?” Pop asked.

I squinted. “I don’t think so,” I said. “He looks like an Eskimo.”

“I believe he’s an Aleut,” Pop said. “And the only natives I’ve seen in camp have belonged to the Alaska Scouts, better known as Castner’s Cutthroats. Although that may be for the alliteration. I don’t know whether they’ve really cut any throats.”

I was still staring at the distant man, who was still staring back.

“They have,” I said.

“Then let’s mind our own—” Pop began.

He didn’t finish because of a sudden loud whistling noise from farther down the mountain. It seemed to come from everywhere below us, all at once, and it grew louder and louder every moment.

“Shit,” I said. I think Pop said it, too.

We both knew what it was, and we could tell it was going to be a fierce one. And there were no buildings up here to slow it down. It was a monster williwaw whipping around the mountain, and we had just a few seconds before the wind caught up with its own sound. The jeep was hundreds of yards away, and it wouldn’t have been any protection even if we could get to it. Our only option was going to be to lie down flat in the slight depression where the dead eagle was staked out. If we were lucky, the exposed skin of our hands and faces might not be flayed from our flesh. And if we were even luckier, we might manage to gulp a few breaths without having them ripped away by the wind. I had the thought that this wasn’t a good time to have tuberculosis.

Then, just as I was about to gesture to Pop to drop to the ground, I saw the distant Cutthroat disappear. His head and shoulders seemed to drop straight into the earth behind the hillock. And in one of my rare moments of smart thinking, I knew where he had gone.

“Come on!” I shouted to Pop, and I dropped the canteen and started running toward the hillock. But I had only gone about twenty yards when I realized that Pop wasn’t keeping up, so I ran back to grab his arm and drag him along.

He didn’t care for that, and he tried to pull away from me. But I was stronger, so all he could do was cuss at me as I yanked him forward as fast as I could.

Then the williwaw hit us, and he couldn’t even cuss. Our hats flew away as if they were artillery shells, and I was deafened and blinded as my ears filled with a shriek and my eyes filled with dirt and tears. The right side of my face felt as if it were being stabbed with a thousand tiny needles.

I couldn’t see where we were going now, but I kept charging forward, leaning down against the wind with all my weight so it wouldn’t push me off course. For all I knew, I was going off course anyway. I couldn’t tell if the ground was still sloping upward, or if we were over the top of the hillock already. But if I didn’t find the spot where the Cutthroat had disappeared, and find it pretty damn quick, we were going to have to drop to the ground and take our chances. Maybe we’d catch a break, and the williwaw wouldn’t last long enough to kill us.

Then my foot slipped on the tundra, and I fell to my knees. I twisted to try to catch Pop so he wouldn’t hit the ground headfirst, and then we both slid and fell into a dark hole in the earth.

VI

The sod roof of the
ulax
was mostly intact, but there were holes. So after my eyes adjusted, there was enough light to see. But Pop had landed on top of me, and at first all I could see was his mustache.

“Your breath ain’t so good, Pop,” I said. “Mind getting off me?”

At first I didn’t think he heard me over the shriek of the williwaw. But then he grunted and wheezed and pushed himself away until he was sitting against the earthen wall. I sat up and scooted over against the wall beside him.

Pop reached up and adjusted his glasses, which had gone askew. Then he looked up at the largest hole in the roof, which I guessed was how we’d gotten inside. It was about eight feet above the dirt floor.

“Thanks for breaking my fall,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the wind. “I hope I didn’t damage you. Although you might have avoided it if you’d told me what you were doing instead of dragging me.”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I looked around at the mostly underground room. It was maybe twenty feet long by ten feet wide. At the far end was a jumble of sod, timber, and whalebone that looked like a section of collapsed roof. But the roof above that area was actually in better shape than the rest. The rest was about evenly split between old sod and random holes. Some empty bottles and cans were scattered around the floor, and a few filthy, wadded blankets lay on earthen platforms that ran down the lengths of the two longer walls.

But there was no Cutthroat. I had watched him drop down into the same hole that Pop and I had tumbled into. I was sure that was what had happened.

But I didn’t see him here now.

“What happened to the Eskimo?” I asked.

Pop scanned the interior of the
ulax
and frowned. “He must have gone elsewhere.”

“There isn’t any elsewhere,” I said, almost shouting. I pointed upward. “Listen to that. And this is the only shelter up here.”

Pop shook his head. “The man we saw was a native. He may know of shelters on this old volcano that we wouldn’t find if we searched for forty years. Or he may even be so used to a wind like this that he’ll stand facing into it and smile.”

I looked up at the big hole and saw what looked like a twenty-pound rock blow past. “I saw him jump down here. That’s how I knew where to go. And I think I would have seen him climb back out. Unless he can disappear.”

And then, from behind the jumble of sod and whalebone at the far end of the
ulax,
the Cutthroat emerged. His hood was down, and his dark hair shone. He was in a crouch, holding a hunting knife at his side. A big one.

“Who the fuck are you people?” the Cutthroat asked. His voice was low and rough, but still managed to cut through the howling above us. This was a man used to talking over the wind.

Pop gave a single hacking cough. Then he looked at me and said, “Well, Private, it doesn’t look as if he disappeared.”

Right then I wanted to punch Pop, but it was only because I was scared. I wished the Cutthroat really had disappeared. I didn’t recognize his dark, scraggly-bearded face, but that didn’t mean anything. I didn’t remember many living faces from Attu.

But I did remember the Cutthroats as a group. I remembered how they had appeared and vanished in the frozen landscape like Arctic wolves.

And I remembered their knives.

“I asked you two a question,” the Cutthroat said, pointing at us with his knife. “Are you M.P.’s? And if you’re not, what are you doing here?”

Pop gave another cough. This time it wasn’t a tubercular hack, but a sort of polite throat-clearing. And I realized he didn’t understand what kind of man we were dealing with. But maybe that was a good thing. Because if he had ever seen the Cutthroats in action, he might have stayed stone-silent like me. And one of us needed to answer the question before the Cutthroat got mad.

“We aren’t M.P.’s,” Pop said. “So if you’ve done something you shouldn’t, you needn’t worry about us.”

“I haven’t done a fucking thing,” the Cutthroat said. Even though his voice was gravelly, and even though he was cussing, his voice had a distinctive Aleut rhythm. It was almost musical. “I just came up here because a guy told me there was a dead eagle. And I thought I’d get some feathers. I’m a goddamn native, like you said.”

I managed to take my eyes off the Cutthroat long enough to glance at Pop. Pop had the same expression on his face that he’d had when I’d first seen him, when he’d been whipping the strong, shirtless kid at Ping-Pong. He was calm and confident. There were even slight crinkles of happiness at the corners of his eyes and mouth, as if he were safe and snug in his own briar patch, and anybody coming in after him was gonna get scratched up.

It was the damnedest expression to have while sitting in a pit on the side of a volcano facing a man with a knife while a hundred-mile-an-hour wind screeched over your head.

“I understand completely,” Pop said. “We came up to find the eagle as well, although we didn’t have as good a reason. We’re only here because an idiot lieutenant colonel couldn’t think of another way to make us dance like puppets. It’s a stupid, pointless errand from a stupid, pointless officer.”

The Cutthroat blinked and then straightened from his crouch. He lowered the knife.

“Fucking brass,” he said.

“You’re telling us,” Pop said.

The Cutthroat slipped his knife into a sheath on his hip. “Colonel Castner’s not too bad. He lets us do what we know how to do. But the rest of them. Fuck me, Jesus. They didn’t listen on Attu, and they ain’t listened since.”

I knew what he was talking about. The Cutthroats had scouted Attu ahead of our invasion, so they had told the brass how many Japs were there and what to expect from them. But they had also warned that Attu’s permafrost would make wheeled vehicles almost useless, and that we’d need some serious cold-weather boots and clothing. Plus extra food. Yet we’d gone in with jeeps and trucks, and we’d been wearing standard gear. Food had been C-rations, and not much of that. It had all been a rotten mess, and it would have been a disaster if the Cutthroats hadn’t taken it upon themselves to bring dried fish and extra supplies to platoon after platoon.

Not to mention the dead Jap snipers and machine gunners we regular GI’s found as we advanced. The ones whose heads had been almost severed.

“I cowrote the pamphlet on the Battle of the Aleutians,” Pop said. “But of course it had to be approved by the brass, so we had to leave out what we knew about their mistakes. And we also weren’t allowed to mention the Alaska Scouts. The generals apparently felt that specific mention of any one outfit might be taken to suggest that other outfits weren’t vital as well.”

The Cutthroat made a loud spitting noise. “Some of them
weren’t.
” He sat down with his back against the sod-and-whalebone rubble. “Don’t matter. I was there, and I killed some Japs. Don’t much care what gets said about it now.”

The noise of the williwaw had dropped slightly, so when Pop spoke again his voice was startlingly loud.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Pop said, “why are you on Adak? I was told the Scouts had gone back to Fort Richardson.”

The Cutthroat’s upper lip curled, and he pointed a finger at his right thigh. “I got a leg wound on Attu, and the fucking thing’s been getting reinfected for over a year. It’s better now, but it was leaking pus when the other guys had to leave. Captain said I had to stay here until it healed. But now I got to wait for an authorized ride. And while I wait, they tell me I’m an orderly at the hospital. Which ain’t what I signed up for. So I tried to stow away on a boat to Dutch Harbor a couple weeks ago, and the fucking M.P.’s threw me off.”