Not forgotten, at least by me, is the exchange Gurley and I had after we'd deposited Leavit in Cheyenne and taken off for home.
“Dodged one there, sir,” I said, flush with the success of duping Leavit, disarming the balloon single-handedly, and, most important, discovering a germ-free balloon. I assumed we'd formed a new kind of camaraderie on the way down, and thought I'd take advantage of it by needling him. “Course, sir, when you slapped the side of the truck there,” I said, “I thought that might just have been enough to get that little demo block to go-”
Gurley slowly raised his fist. I'd been mistaken about our friendship. I noticed it was the same fist he'd kept clenched all this time. But he hadn't swung at Leavit, and he didn't swing at me. Instead, he turned his hand over and slowly opened it. I stared down. Ribbing me for my supposed love of palm reading?
But you didn't need to be Lily to read the story there. A smear of dried blood and two black specks, crushed carcasses of the tiny flying insects he killed. I shook my head, I held my breath. If he spoke, I didn't hear him. I just watched him, hollow-eyed, as he fished the jewelry store clipping out of his bag and numbly scraped the fleas' remains onto the paper.
CHAPTER 11
OH, RAPTURE.
An aging priest, I fear this most, this rapture. Evangelical Christians claimed rapture-sorry, Rapture-from Revelations, promising that the good would be sucked skyward When The Time Came. The truth is, the good disappear even earlier than that-lovely, ordinary Catholics are sucked out of my church and into the arms of these new, fresh-faced teetotaling missionaries. The young are thunderstruck, the old relieved; what a glorious, dramatic, prospect this Rapture is.
But they've not seen previous Raptures. I remember when brave and good Alaskans began disappearing before. The Japanese immigrants were the first to go; overnight, it seemed, they began disappearing from storefronts and sidewalks in Anchorage, shipped well south to California. Native Alaskans vanished, too. As Gurley had said, Aleuts had been relocated by the military, but in a most disorienting fashion: they were taken from their weatherworn, mostly treeless islands and deposited in the hush and dark of a thick southeastern Alaska forest.
And they were the lucky ones: other Aleuts, farther out on the Chain, were dragged from their homes by Japanese soldiers and taken back to Japan, where they spent the remainder of the war. Close to half died there.
That was rapture; that was when governments presumed to play God and did so with requisite carelessness. Anything in Alaska could be done if required by the war (or whim, the two terms so close, it seems now). Homes, buildings, towns, and airports were taken up and dropped elsewhere.
That was when the end of the world was nigh, not now as penny-ante preachers would have us believe. I believed then, I most definitely did. Thunderous hellfire. The dead blanketing the earth. Plague and pestilence: upon our return to Anchorage, Gurley and I waited anxiously for test results-his own, mine, and of the two fleas Gurley had “captured.”
Those were the days of Armageddon, when one horror slipped into the next, from the threat of your skin erupting with pox to that of a spy approaching from behind and slipping a wire around your throat.
It was this last threat Gurley and I returned to. As nervous as we were about finding ourselves on the front lines of the germ war, a small part of us-a very small part-had also been pleased that we would be back in the spotlight.
But our hopes were dashed, as the Army unfailingly would do. Gurley was greeted with new bulletins announcing that the germ warfare threat was now believed to be traveling our way by both balloon and human means: saboteurs might even now be in our midst, ready to release animals and insects ridden with disease, or perhaps, in the manner of kamikaze pilots, they had been infected themselves, their only goal to ensure they did not die alone.
Alaska was thought to be a likely point of entry, its vastness a perfect cloak for the solitary spy. It sounds mad now, doesn't it? But there we were, with those bulletins, with word of captured Japanese documents and messages describing one-and two-man submarines, paratroopers dropped from impossible altitudes, frogmen leaping from the surf.
And, of course, those balloons: that soldiers (however small) would someday arrive in them seemed inevitable. We had done experiments: the balloons would have to be larger; the soldier aboard would need additional gear, but they had the technology, rudimentary as it was. They had the balloons. They had men willing to pledge their lives. It was absolutely possible, as possible as shipping fleas.
Alaska was not unfamiliar territory to the Japanese. Even before the landings on Attu and Kiska, even before the war, there had been reports from Alaska 's southwestern coast of repeated visits by Japanese “fishermen” who seemed more interested in touring and photographing than fishing. Were Japanese spies here now? No one would say.
But I discovered a second, trusted source who could.
LOVERS. I SAY Lily and I were lovers because we had secrets, but other men who knew her wore the title more accurately than I. Gurley for one. She did not speak as freely of him as he did of her. But I knew, through his innuendos and her silences, that he still visited. In the hopes of avoiding him, and perhaps disrupting their plans, I always tried to get Lily out of her “office” whenever I went to see her. She liked leaving less and less, though, what with the recent rapture of those other Asiatic faces from the sidewalks.
Gurley and I entered a quiet period when we returned from Kirby a kind of self-imposed quarantine as winter devolved into a wet and muddy spring.
Then the results arrived, and relief and disappointment with them: Gurley had killed two all-American fruit flies. They were clear; no sign of plague. But still we kept to Anchorage. I felt fine-I knew I was fine, with a certainty that seems altogether foreign to me now. But Gurley was convinced they'd made a mistake with the tests-he worked his way through a variety of symptoms, and produced a fairly convincing rash on his torso. He sulked in the office and waited for calls from the hospital.
The balloons weren't venturing out much either, it seemed. We'd had no new reports of sightings or groundings. This was evidence, Gurley said (and I agreed), that the Japanese were pausing while they changed over to the new, germ-carrying balloons. The new wave would arrive soon.
Until then, we would wait. And while we did, I wandered. Downtown, as often as I could, where I cultivated a growing hatred of Gurley.
Now, consider the sailors Lily and I had battled in her office. I hadn't seen or heard them since we'd left the two bleeding on the second floor of the Starhope. But Gurley I saw every day. And the more I got to know him, and the more I got to know Lily, the more I despised my captain. In a way, I was glad of his connection to Lily; it made his iniquity total and freed me from worrying that I was overlooking some part of him that was worthy of respect or charity.
As the object of my fascination, as the only friend I had in Alaska, Lily was beyond reproach, but as time wore on, her relationship with Gurley wore on me. I became increasingly indignant. Sometimes my thoughts restricted their wandering to the moral high ground-I had defended her against those evil sailors; surely I should defend her against Gurley as well.
Other times, I wandered lower.
I teased her, or rather, I was past the point of teasing; I taunted. I wanted to know her as these other men had, but she showed little interest, and I, less courage. In the meantime, I derived what bitter enjoyment I could from making her feel bad about her “relationships,” even though I could see she loathed her employment as much as I did. She no longer talked of leaving town, though I knew she still wanted to. I almost wanted her to, as well. I knew I would ache at the loss, but I'd still draw some pleasure knowing she was out of Gurley's arms.