White Whale Page 2

  We're no different from all the other animals. We're just the animal that likes to wear clothes.

  * * * * *

  In the morning we had assembly, guard mounting, road march, training rounds, KP duty, and finally breakfast. We sat on the sunny ground outside the fat daub convent and ate stale Anzac crackers and chipped beef. I told Milk about the pemmican back home, the northern riceroot.

  "My mother cuts cardboard boxes for a living," he said glumly.

  I patted him on the back. He was young, Milk, probably about eighteen. He had the kind of baggy circles around his eyes that made him look like a raccoon. Everybody felt fondly toward him, in one way or another.

  Fox checked his wristwatch, his brown hair very oily today. He went through wristwatches like most people went through toothpaste. "Drills in an hour," he announced, in the same voice he might have used to describe the death of his dog.

  "But we just had drills," Irish complained, his hand under his chin. "I'm starting to look like a plucked chicken."

  He was right. His skin was flaking and pink.

  "An hour?" I asked, standing.

  Fox started. "Where are you going?"

  "He's going to the Land of Milk and Honey," Two-Ply posited. His mouth diarrhea was very strong today. "Nothing doing with present company. Can a dog and a donkey be friends without it meaning something?"

  "Sure they can," Irish said, and suddenly grabbed Two-Ply's head like he was trying to twist it off. He grinned, his eyeteeth showing. "There's you and me, ain't there?"

  "Don't be long," Fox called after me. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.

  I got rid of my trash and I went out to the dirt road, my hands in my pockets, my Browning on my back and my M1 on my hip. I passed the major and I saluted. He nodded back. There was something calming about the monotony, the routines, about knowing my place. I liked being a soldier. It was the killing I didn't like.

  A couple of tanks were parked at the field hospital. Some guy from the Second Battalion brandished a towel and chased after a nurse. Outside the watering hole a cloud of thick gray cigarette smoke hung uselessly on the air. I figured if I followed it inside the tent I'd find some very restless surgeons, a clerk or two. It was a slow day.

  Over by a stack of boxed supplies a nurse--or maybe an orderly--held a patient's hands and helped him to take baby steps. I felt cold just watching them. I looked around. There was a flagpole nearby, American colors hanging on the dead wind. They comforted me and incensed me in that way only American colors could.

  The skeletal man with the wooly hair sat with his back to the flagpole, a bowl of broth on his lap. I went over to him and sat down and we sat in companionable silence. The breeze made a feeble effort at tossing the flag. The heavy fabric echoed in our ears.

  "The UN's going to find you a new home," I said.

  I knew he didn't know what I was saying. The way he turned his head at the sound of my voice, I almost convinced myself he understood. What I didn't understand was where the UN were supposed to send two million Jews at a moment's notice. I didn't think America wanted them. Too much of an old boys' club.

  He finished his soup, the man with no name. The sleeve of his paper-thin gown rode up over his brittle arm and I saw black ink stamped into his skin. He caught me looking. His eyes were so soft I wanted to cry like a kid. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right.

  He put his hand on my wrist and I just about lost it. I don't know how I didn't break down.

  "You want a candy?" I asked him.

  I didn't have any candy, which meant the world was probably drawing to an end. I had a few Anzac crackers. I gave him those. They taste like plastic, those Anzac wafers. They go down about the same way. But he ate them, all three of them, and I was glad. Humans bounce back from the worst kinds of horrors all the time. I don't know how they do it. I think I might not be human. I was born into this world and I never bounced back.

  "You ever make it to America," I said, "look for Wapu Island. We've got riceroot there. We've got chocolate lilies. I'll make you candy."

  Maybe I imagined it when his eyes glimmered. He made me think of my grandfather.

  "My name is Orca," I told him. "Like the killer whale."

  So I couldn't help it. I couldn't help what I'd turned into. I hadn't turned into anything. I was a killer from birth.

  * * * * *

  The Germans surrendered in May. None of us were expecting it. The company clerk came dashing into our barracks with the announcement and Pogue was so surprised, he nearly strangled himself with his glasses chain.

  "We're going home?" Irish asked, sounding disappointed.

  "I don't think so," Fox said carefully, when the clerk had gone away. "They still need troops here to make sure von Bolschwing sticks to his word. That's probably us."

  "I don't mind," Two-Ply said, pulling on his fatigues.

  Two-Ply wouldn't mind. I thought: Once we went home he went back to colored waiting rooms, colored drinking fountains, colored bus stops. In the army you don't have a color. Everybody's equally insignificant.

  We heard the bugle call and we all leapt to attention. I yanked on my boots and Milk tripped out the door.

  Out on the pitch we stood shoulder-to-shoulder as the captain, portly, red-faced, paced about the flagpole. He threw out disjointed instructions like he was talking to himself, like he didn't realize he had company. Our company was going to Japan, he said, to the Hardy Barracks in Minato. MacArthur was deploying us in July. Which meant--

  "Downtime," Fox breathed with relief.

  Home. My boy, my Rabbit. I could tell him I'd missed him. I could take him out to see the ice floes, to see the polar sun.

  "What are you standing around for?" the sergeant suddenly yelled, his bushy mustache flapping around his mouth.

  When we were dismissed we went back to the barracks and got to work folding up the Quonset huts. Two-Ply sang beneath his breath. I kept thinking of my boy and my home and the Arctic north. My fingers went numb with anticipation. Pogue and Milk helped me slide the plywood joists out from under the steel siding. The aluminum walls collapsed like putty.

  "Wasserleben tonight," Irish said, his toothy grin predatory.

  "What do you think that means in German?" Two-Ply wondered.

  "Hookers," Irish said.

  The whole company went to Wasserleben that night. It wasn't so much a city as a bunch of shops jammed in next to a rusty railroad. I went with my platoon to the Essbar, a real divey kind of place, brown walls and low lighting, filmy dust on every table. The lieutenant toasted us and everybody shouted. You can imagine how noisy it was, thirty soldiers screaming stupidly, victoriously, until the bare lights over the bar shook and the girl behind the counter grabbed the beer tap when it rattled on the keg.

  "See you in Fort Lewis, you Polack bastard," Irish said, tossing his arm around Milk's shoulders.

  "Anyone want to meet up in Tacoma?" Two-Ply said. Fox spritzed his wrists with cologne when he thought no one was looking at him.

  Behind the bar the server cast a skittish look at me. I caught it; but I think she didn't mean for me to. Her eyes hardened. She had short hair, the girl, the kind that curled thickly under her chin. She didn't know me. She looked at me and saw a uniform. I wondered about that. I wondered what it was to look at war without participating in it, to have a war change your life when it wasn't even about you. People like that, we forget to add them up when we tally the losses. This girl, she probably didn't care whether Japan wanted Manchuria or Germany wanted Austria or the Croatians were killing Gypsies. All she knew was that a bunch of noisy foreigners had come to her town and ruined her Sunday evening, maybe the rest of her Sunday evenings.

  She turned her back on me. She filled a shot glass with cherry soda, a splash of vodka.

  "Cola mit schuss," she said.

  She passed the drink to me, her eyes cool, tired, her hands calm.

  * * * * *

  At nine o'clock we boarded the Harz Railway.
The train was awfully nice, or at least nicer than any train I'd ridden before. I sat in a compartment with Milk, Fox, and some guy from II Corps, who immediately put his head back and started to snore. I stowed my rucksack under the stitched red seat. Fox slid the compartment door shut. It was made of glass and I could see the aisle outside it, the gleaming wood walls and the flickering bauble lights. The conductor in his little round hat tromped down the hall. Vera Lynn's voice crackled over an invisible radio in the padded ceiling. The smell of talc was strong on the polished walls and I put my head against the window, cool air seeping through the seamless glass, ghosting over my skin.

  Outside the window the stars swam like nightlights in a watery blue-black sky. They made me think of Rabbit when he was four years old, when he couldn't go to sleep without a sweetgrass candle in the doorway. I remembered worrying that he'd get up in the middle of the night and step on it. I didn't sleep much those nights myself.

  "Sie verlassen jetzt Wasserleben," said a new voice in the ceiling vents. Vera Lynn was gone.

  The train began to move. The stars and the shadowy trees rolled past us without a goodbye. Milk tried to start a conversation but Fox only nodded, distracted. I lifted my head off the window and my opaque reflection stared back at me.

  I hated the sight of myself with short hair. Growing up I was told our memories are in our hair. You don't cut your hair unless there's a memory you want to get rid of. If there was a memory I wanted to get rid of it was the memory of those people with the sunken eyes and starved bodies. I wouldn't have minded losing the bad memories; it's just that I didn't want to lose the good ones, too. America didn't care about my memories. It didn't care that I'd walked its shores since before it was America, since before I could walk. I could see my ancestors in my face, in my black eyes and brown skin and square chin, the too long nose and the too wide lips, the cheeks so tall they cast shadows over my jawbone. I looked like America, and in the way of all parents who don't want to be parents, America hated me for it.

  "What do you think, Chief?" Milk said, interrupting my thoughts.

  I turned and looked at him. He was smiling, his face full of baby fat, and for a moment I thought: He's not eighteen. It was a fleeting thought. But the suspicion lingered in the back of my mind.

  "Whatever you think," I told him. "That's what I think."

  Satisfied, he unwrapped the last of his Anzac crackers. I didn't know how he could stand to. I was glad to be rid of those things for the next few weeks.

  * * * * *

  The train took us as far as Hamburg, where we boarded the troopship headed for the North Sea. The boatswain yelled at us and herded us up the gangplank and into the quarterdeck. Below deck we climbed through a maze of bloated steel pipes. Crammed into the far back of the ship was what I guess you would have called the cabin, although I only saw a forest of dirty gray hammocks, rucksacks and duffel bags sliding across the sleek metal floor, hundreds of soldiers climbing up onto their would-be beds. The lights on the walls looked like bug zappers. They even made the same fizzing sound when two of them flickered and died.

  Fox got the squad together and we climbed up the sloping wall and onto our hammocks. I wound up on the hammock above Pogue's. I knocked a roach off the dingy fabric and tucked my rucksack beneath my head. I couldn't bring myself to take off my shoes. I thought I'd lose them in the clutter.

  "We're going home," Two-Ply said, a couple of hammocks above me. "I'm dying for a hot dog. You know they're really made of rat? I never knew rat could taste so good but someone must've."

  "Christ," Fox moaned.

  The ship lurched against the bobbing ocean. The movement soothed me. I closed my eyes and pretended I was in my whalebone boat, drifting down the Arctic Ocean. I drifted off to sleep and I could hear the whales singing in my ears.

  We woke to foghorns the next morning and it took several minutes' worth of recollection before I remembered the U-boats weren't coming for us. I dropped down from my hammock, dirty and unkempt. Milk's legs wobbled like jelly and he crashed to the floor. I helped him up by the back of his shirt. Fox saw to it that our supplies were in order; and then we followed the rest of the company out onto the deck.

  The ocean was so blue it almost hurt to look at it. The choppy waves licked the ship's steel walls. I could taste the salt in my mouth, on my skin. The Maunsell Forts made for a funny sight, giant concrete towers standing in the middle of the ocean like no one's business. The stilts underneath them looked soft with rust.

  "Hardtack," the boatswain yelled, swinging a giant, obnoxious bell. "Hardtack, over here..."

  We docked outside of London and trekked north to the Knightsbridge Barracks. It looked more like an apartment complex than a barracks, but I guess I don't know all that much about British garrisons. We lined up on the runway and boarded the rapid transport plane. I took a seat next to Two-Ply and pulled the heavy straps down over my chest. Fox got out his rosary and started praying.

  I don't know how many hours it was before we landed at Fort Lewis. We got off the plane and I was glad to stretch my legs. Welcome home, said the sight of the red ochre tarmac, the milky clouds flitting through the subarctic air. The sun was high and hot overhead and I could hear the popping of training shells in the distance. Easy Company must've got back before us.

  Fox got the squad together and brought us to the armory. We turned in our weapons. We reconvened at the commons, a pile of halfhearted picnic tables underneath a grove of fresh whitebark pines. The sap on the ground smelled like spearmint.

  "Japan," Irish said, grinning like the devil's cousin. "I'm gonna get me a geisha girl."

  "You'll all be careful," Fox said, troubled. "Don't die. I mean, we might die anyway. But beforehand--"

  I knew when he was about to go off on one of his tangents. I think I was pretty much hard-wired to them. I gave him a Look. He shut up in record time.

  "See you all in a month," Milk said.

  Irish ran off without saying goodbye. I hated that about him.

  When we'd all parted ways I shouldered my rucksack and made for Alder Road, just outside the gates of the fort. The road was gravel under my feet, loose, rocky. It cut a straight path through the Nisqually Plain, the chilly prairie dusted in clumps of fuzzy blond shortgrass. I looked over my shoulder at Mount Rainier, the gentle silver slopes blurred around the edges, covered in cotton-white snow. Only when I saw that mountain did it really hit me: I was home. I didn't have to kill anybody tomorrow. I was going to see my son.

  I was going to see my son.

  I broke into a run and I heard the buoy bells ringing in the distance, the ferry boats out at sea. They sounded like solace. They sang and echoed in my heart. I felt the tug of the Arctic north calling for me and it stripped the weariness from my bones.

  2

  Little Nee-Hee-Low

  I stepped off the pier and onto the wharf. When the ferry boat was empty the foreman snapped up the apron ramp. The boat glided away.

  Cold air blasted my face in welcome home kisses. I laughed. A little old lady handing out jars of jam gave me a strange look. If I stared at her I couldn't help it. It had been months since I'd seen anyone who looked like me, the smooth brown skin and the long slanted eyes. Too bad I didn't have her fuzzy white hair. Then we could have been twins.

  "Tansi," she muttered, and waved me away.

  The ribbons on her velvet gown were shining white silk. The elk teeth at the hem of her dress were pale and gold and clinking. I blew her a kiss and she stared after me.

  I walked south across the island, my rucksack on my shoulder. I looked around at the muddy brown soil, the patches of permafrost, the faded wooden signs written in Cree. To my right were the geysers, smoky with mist. Furry sea lions came crashing out from behind them and I laughed again, shocked. I'd forgotten how rambunctious they were. They barked and dashed and slid everywhere and a pair of boys in ribbon shirts chased after them, long hair tossing in the wind. Children are supposed to have long hair. They're suppo
sed to have good memories.

  The sun was weak and silvery white and the clouds were hazy yellow, buttery and brilliant. Out west the glaciers stood tall and craggy and runny bright blue. I could see the powdery snow crystals sparkling on the rocky slants, the clear, fresh water streaming down the sides. Just behind the glaciers was the Sugow River. In summer the sheefish swam upstream, right into the ocean. I told myself I'd take the boat out tomorrow. I'd take Rabbit with me.

  I raced down the hard, cold incline to the village. The birchbark houses dotted the chilly horizon as far east as the Arctic inlet, where fingers of ice still floated in the shallow water. I skidded to a halt outside a smooth gray house with a flat roof, outer walls scrubbed and weathered with years' worth of icy sea breeze.

  Mrs. Kabocha opened the door when I knocked. She was a tiny woman, her silver hair in a figure eight bun, her glasses so big they swallowed up her eyes. She smiled at me, more gums than teeth. She let me inside her home.

  The front room was warm and smelled of smoked pemmican. Pale sunlight streamed in through the dusty window off to the side. Mrs. Kabocha shuffled away in her moccasins, humming to a song only she could hear. Whale oil lanterns lit the wall above the bone table where Rabbit sat writing in one of his schoolbooks. He looked up at me. He looked twice.

  He flew into my arms like a mortar, winding me. His hard little head dug into my stomach and his arms barely fit around me. I knelt down and hugged him. I could feel the loneliness leaving me, pouring out of me in waves. He was warm, Rabbit, and he smelled like snow, and his scratchy hair buffed my face when he rubbed his cheek furiously against mine.