Though Not Dead (15 page)

October 1945. The same month Old Sam’s homestead claim had been affirmed. Kate couldn’t see what the connection might be, if any. A lot of veterans coming home at the same time. “Your dad was in the Aleutians?”

Ben nodded. “Castner’s Cutthroats. Same as Old Sam. You know the kind Castner was looking for. The Aleutians in wartime weren’t for sissies.” He shuddered. “Ever read up on the Battle of Attu? Two weeks of some of the bloodiest fighting of the whole war, including Europe and the South Pacific. When you look at the casualty rate as a percentage of troops involved, the Battle of Attu rates second only to Iwo Jima. And that’s just the Americans. When it was over, there were only twenty-eight Japanese taken prisoner, none of them officers. Six hundred Japanese troops committed suicide at once by exploding their own grenades against their chests.”

“Old Sam never talked about it.”

“Neither did Dad. I learned most of what I know about their war the way we all did.”

Kate gave a rueful nod. “Garfield’s
The Thousand-Mile War
. Who ran the paper while your dad was gone?”

“Mom and Granddad. Mom would write any stories that came in the door and Granddad ran the press. Never missed an issue. Even if it was mostly rip-and-read.” He saw Kate’s look and elaborated. “Cut and paste from the wires, like the Associated Press and Reuters. But hell, Granddad said all anybody wanted to read back then was war news, and that’s about all there was on the wires.”

On impulse Kate said, “Did your father ever talk about meeting Dashiell Hammett in the Aleutians?”

“Dashiell Hammett?”

Ben raised an eyebrow, and Kate supposed it was something of a stretch for a segue. “The guy who wrote
The Maltese Falcon
.”

“I know who wrote
The Maltese Falcon,
Kate. He also wrote
The Thin Man.
”

“Yeah, well—”

“Also
Red Harvest, The Dain Curse
,
The Glass Key
—”

“Yeah, okay, Ben—”

“And a bunch of short stories about the Continental Op under various titles, my favorite of which is ‘The Creeping Siamese.’ His CO in the Aleutians was a big fan and made him the editor of the camp newspaper. The
Adakian
was said to be the best written and the best edited newspaper in the army.”

Kate waited a moment before saying, “Are you done?”

“Not even.” He was still a little miffed. “Why do you ask if Dad met Hammett?”

“Jane Silver was telling me yesterday that Old Sam met him.” And Tony at the Ahtna Lodge, and who knew who else before she was done winding up Old Sam’s affairs.

Ben frowned. “Old Sam met Hammett, did he?”

“That’s what Jane said. When they were both in the Aleutians.” She paused. “Did your dad say anything about meeting him?”

He shook his head. “Not a peep. I’ll have to rod on over to the courthouse, interview Jane myself.”

“Jane Silver is dead,” she said.

He stared at her. “You’re kidding me.”

“No. She died at her house this morning.” The blood on the knees of her jeans had dried to a mud-brown.

“I … I didn’t know,” he said, and Kate thought she saw his eyes tear up. But then he cleared his throat and straightened his shoulders. “No surprise, I guess. She was six hundred years old. I guess I’d better work up another obit.”

Kate opened her mouth, and closed it again. Kenny Hazen would not thank her for spreading his business around town.

But he had seen. “What aren’t you telling me, Kate?”

She stood up. “Thanks for your help with the obituary. It reads a lot better than if I’d written it.”

“Kate?”

She opened the door and without turning around, “It’s Chief Hazen’s business now, Ben. Talk to him.”

Mutt got to her feet and shook herself vigorously. She looked at Kate as if to say, Can we just go home now?

*   *   *

At least they were once again safely across the Lost Chance Creek bridge before the snow hit. When it did hit, it hit fast and it hit hard. One minute there was a low-hanging, dour gray sky, the next a nearly impenetrable curtain of giant fat white flakes so thick Kate had a hard time seeing the fluorescent road markers, which in her opinion were spaced too far apart on the side of the road. She slowed down, way down, picking her way from one marker to the next at twenty miles an hour. Another vehicle passed them, with the speed of its passage pulling up a cloud of snow behind it so thick that Kate had to slam on the brakes because for a few minutes she saw nothing but white. The engine stalled and the pickup bucked and skidded, the back end coming around a little until the freight in the back reminded the rear wheels it was there and stopped the slide. Mutt lost her purchase on her seat and did a kind of scrambling slam against the dash, letting out a very un-Mutt-like squeal. She righted herself and gave Kate a reproachful look.

“Sorry, girl,” Kate said. She took a deep breath and let it out, and managed to unclamp her hands from the painful grip they had on the steering wheel. “What idiot passes in a whiteout?”

Mutt growled.

“With any luck we’ll find them in a ditch and you can teach them some manners.” The engine came back to life at a single turn of the key and Kate started down the road again, one marker at a time, as slowly as possible without stalling out. The pineapple tucked behind her seat gave off a tropical scent, incongruous in the present circumstances. The windows were starting to fog up, so she cranked the fan to high, and hit the on button on the CD player, which held the CD Johnny had most recently burned for her. Jimmy Buffett advised her to take another road to a higher place. Or was it hiding place? Either would have been preferable in her present circumstances. Still, she was on her way home, always a good thing, and she raised her voice in a rough-edged sing-along.

Mutt put up with it, and with John Hiatt belting out “Child of the Wild Blue Yonder,” but when Tommy Tucker showed up in high-heeled sneakers she couldn’t stand it. Her head came up and she started to howl along.

Kate started laughing and couldn’t stop, and they crept along, laughing and howling and blaring music down the road through the blizzard, one marker at a time. Each marker was seventy-eight inches high, made of white recycled plastic pressed into a single slender curve, the top twelve inches coated with super-high-intensity retroreflective sheeting, a blindingly bright yellow in color. Their official name was Standard Traffic Delineator. Kate knew this because at her instigation the Niniltna Native Association had bought them and, further, had hired this year’s senior class of Niniltna High School to install them on the Niniltna-Ahtna road in late August. Never had money been better spent. She whiled away a few miles by imagining the letter she would write to the state Department of Transportation. Just because the state didn’t maintain this road didn’t mean people didn’t drive on it.

Even when they shouldn’t.

Michelle Branch, “Sweet Misery.” Kate could relate, although “stay with me a little while” was a little too close to the target, especially when she was going home to a house that didn’t contain Jim Chopin.

“So what?” she said out loud, irritated. If she had dared she would have used the skip button, but she was too scared to take her eyes off the road. Or the markers, because her headlights illuminated about three feet into a swirling cloud of white and that was it. The yellow tops of the markers were all she could see. She was amazed she could see that much. The pickup lurched a little. Great, now the wind was picking up, which meant the snow would begin to drift. She looked at the odometer. Another twenty-five miles to go. Crap.

The windshield wipers beat back and forth in time to the music. Marc Cohn, “Walking in Memphis.” She’d never been to Memphis. She’d only ever been to Quantico, Virginia, for the FBI course, and Arizona and New Mexico on that vacation with Jack. Alaska was big enough. So various, so beautiful, so new. Who said that? Matthew Arnold, right. Typical dreary Brit. She’d take Robert Frost any day. Cranky as he could be, the old bastard still had a sense of humor. “At present I’d rather be living in Vermont, too,” she said out loud.

Next to her Mutt stirred but made no reply. She was as tense as Kate, strung like bow, staring through the windshield as if by sheer force of will she could see through the whiteout to clear road on the other side.

“If anybody can do it, you can, girl,” Kate said.

Almost in response to her remark the snow eased for one fleeting moment to reveal two enormous cottonwoods on either side of the road, with immense ridged trunks and limbs like lightning bolts, before the snow closed in again.

The Two Towers, a mile up from Deadman’s Curve, a bitch of a curve where the road from Ahtna met and married the old railroad grade that ran from Kanuyaq to Cordova. She slowed down to a crawl.

John Hiatt again. “Drive South.” She was trying. Southeast, anyway. And she was with the one she loved. “Right?” she said to Mutt.

It wasn’t like she could be mad at Jim for leaving. His father had died. Of course he had to go. Although from the phone call it didn’t sound as if he was enjoying himself. His mother must be a serious piece of work. Still, he had one, living. Maybe she’d mellow while he was there. Maybe she’d invite Sylvia Hernandez over for dinner.

Easy, Barenaked Ladies. “I’ve been burned before…”

“No kidding,” Kate said.

But Jack had never burned her. Not once.

Neither had Jim.

Not yet.

She kept waiting for him to, watching, knowing it was just a matter of time. The man was a dog, had been one long before she’d come along, would be one again when he moved on.

Thing was, he showed no signs of moving on. Unless you counted getting on a plane for California.

“God damn it,” she said out loud, spacing out the words with deliberation. “I’ve got other things to worry about than Jim Chopin. Who clobbered me? Who stole the judge’s journal? What was in it they wanted? Did Jane Silver surprise a random burglar in the act and he knocked her over on his way out the door? Or did she die because of what she wanted to show me? Something she had about Old Sam, and the same person who walloped me walloped her?”

Bo Diddley. “Up your house and gone again.”

She checked the odometer. Deadman’s Curve coming up. She slowed down to ten miles an hour. The markers moved to the left. She followed them carefully.

Mutt sat up and barked, once, sharply.

“What?” Kate said.

Headlights, suddenly, right in front of them.

“What the—Get out of the way!”

The headlights were exactly at the height of her eyes, and they were so bright she could feel her eyeballs blister. She flinched and realized she couldn’t look away because the headlights were on the same side of the road. She laid on the horn and the brakes simultaneously.

The headlights kept coming. The brakes locked up and the back end of the pickup started coming around. It was an older model, no anti-lock brakes, and she turned into the skid and pumped them.

The headlights kept coming. In the very few seconds she had left to think about it, she tried frantically to remember what was on which side of the road. A ditch? A meadow? A steep slope ending in a creek? Trees? Boulders?

The headlights kept coming, and in the end she yanked the steering wheel to the left and hit the gas, hoping to pull the ass end of the pickup around, try for a controlled skid that would swing the pickup onto the other side of the road facing in the opposite direction, anything to get out of the way of the oncoming vehicle.

She almost did it. The Chevy’s bed swung hard right, pivoting around the weight of the engine in front, so that they were facing back the way they had come.

That helped, too, when the other vehicle hit them going at what later estimates put at thirty miles an hour. It didn’t sound fast after the fact.

It felt like it, though, and it was more than enough to jolt the right front tire off the road, where the ditch caught it and flipped the pickup.

The last thing she remembered was reaching for the ignition and turning it off.

They landed upside down and the lights went out.

May 1943

Long before Pearl Harbor, even longer before the Japanese invasion of the Aleutians, General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. sent out the call for men schooled in the Alaskan Bush and skilled in survival to form a combat platoon to do reconnaissance and find landing zones for amphibious assaults on Japanese emplacements in the Aleutians. They were hunters and trappers, miners and engineers, doctors and anthropologists, whites, Aleuts, Eskimos, Indians. They were lightly armed with their own choice of weapon, and Colonel Castner went easy on the military discipline, which included saluting and shaving.

Sam Dementieff signed up as soon as the unit was formed. He was twenty-one years old, a keen eye with a rifle, a steady hand with a knife, and a seemingly inexhaustible store of energy. He took everything Castner threw at them in training, accepted all the inevitable ragging and practical jokes from his older and more experienced brethren, Quicksilver, Aleut Pete, and Haystack, and came back for more. In the fullness of time and in recognition of his talent and abilities he was awarded his own nickname, Old Sam, in recognition of his relative youth.

It didn’t have to make sense. This was war.

On May 11, 1943, he was one of those hung by his heels over the side of a landing craft so he could help feel the way ashore through dense fog and perilous shoals to land on Beach Red, the first day of the Battle of Attu.

The Japanese had the heights, and they’d had plenty of time to dig in. The Americans got lost in the fog and stuck in the mud and developed frostbite from the cold temperatures. It took twenty-four hours for their first meal to arrive, and all the while the enemy troops pounded at them with artillery fire. Five hundred forty-nine Americans and 2,351 Japanese lost their lives in nineteen days.

Sam was among those who stayed on for the mop-up that followed, flushing Japanese soldiers out of the hills. One of them nearly shot him, would have if his buddy Mac the Knife hadn’t spotted the sniper and tackled Old Sam to the ground. The bullet missed him and hit Mac in the hip. Tore him up pretty good, and Old Sam toted Mac out of the hills on his back and got him on a destroyer bound for Adak and the 179th Station Hospital.