George Martin: Down These Strange Streets

I hadn’t gotten any chow. My stomach was a hard, hungry knot, and I knew I should have eaten. But I was also pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to keep it down.

Sure, I had been in trouble before. But back then, I had just been a dumb Bohunk kid who’d gotten in a fight, swiped a Hudson, and insulted a judge. None of that had bothered me. But none of that had been anything like this.

I wasn’t even sure what “this” was. But I did know that another kid, a kid just like me except that he was Navy, had gotten his skull bashed in. And the colonel thought that maybe I was the one who’d done it.

It all went through my head over and over again, and the knot in my stomach got bigger and bigger. I lay in my bunk and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t sleep. Outside, the Aleutian wind whistled and moaned, and occasional short rat-a-tats of rain drummed against the Quonset tin. Every so often, I heard planes roaring in and out of the airfield. I tried to guess what they were, since the bombing runs from Adak had pretty much ended once we’d retaken Attu and Kiska. But I had never been good at figuring out a plane from its engine noise. If an engine wasn’t on a tractor or jeep, I was at a loss.

“First impressions can be so deceiving,” a low, smooth voice said.

I opened my eyes. Pop was sitting on a stool beside my bunk. He was hunched over with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped under his chin, his dark eyes regarding me over the rims of his glasses. I hadn’t heard him come in.

“How’d you know where I bunk?” I asked.

Pop ignored the question. “Why, just this morning, Private,” he continued, “you seemed like such a tough young man. Such a hardened fighter. Yet here we are, scarcely nine hours later, and you’re flopped there like a sack of sand. Defeated. Vanquished.”

“Don’t those mean the same thing?”

Pop gave me that thin smile of his. “My point is, you’re taking this lying down. That doesn’t sound like someone who’d dare to punch a rich kid from Omaha.”

I turned away from him and faced the cold metal of the Quonset wall.

“I’m under orders,” I said. “And I’m not supposed to be talking to you.”

Pop laughed a long, dry laugh that dissolved into his usual hacking cough.

“Under orders?” he asked through the coughing. “Just how do you think you got into this confusing court-martial conundrum in the first place? You followed orders, that’s how. Logically, then, the only possible way out of your current situation is to defy orders, just this once. It’s only sixteen thirty, and the lieutenant colonel won’t be looking for you until twenty-one hundred. You’ve already wasted more than two hours wallowing here, so I suggest you don’t waste any more.”

I turned back to face him.

“Just what am I supposed to do?” I asked. “My only choice is to tell him everything that happened, and the hell with our promise to the Cutthroat. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

Pop shook his head. “You can’t tell him everything,” he said, “because you don’t know everything.”

“And you do?”

“No.” Pop stood and jerked his thumb toward the door. “But I know some of it, and I’m going to find out the rest. You see, unlike you, I’ve spent the past few hours doing something. My job is to get the news, and a large part of that involves getting people to talk. So for the past two hours, people have been talking to me and my boys a lot. But now the boys have to work on the paper. And my cartoonist has to draw a new cartoon, which has put me into a vengeful mood.”

“So go get your revenge,” I said. “What’s it got to do with me?”

Pop leaned down and scowled. “It’s your revenge, too. And I don’t think I can find out the rest of what I need to know if you aren’t with me.”

I rose on my elbows and stared up at him. It was true that following orders hadn’t really worked out for me. But I didn’t see how doing what Pop said would work out any better.

“You say you know some of it already,” I said. “Tell me.”

Pop hesitated. Then he turned, crossed to the other side of the hut, and sat on an empty bunk.

“I know the lieutenant colonel placed a bet on your fight yesterday,” Pop said. “A large one. And I know that your opponent had a reputation as a damn good boxer. He’d won eighteen fights, six by knockout. How many have you won?”

“Two,” I said. “Yesterday was my second match. The first was with the guy whose bunk you’re sitting on. It was a referee’s decision.”

Pop’s eyes narrowed. “So any sane wager yesterday would have been on the Navy man. And I saw the fight, Private. He was winning. Until the third round, when he dropped his left. And as you told me this morning, you took advantage. Who wouldn’t?”

I sat up on the edge of my bunk. In addition to the knot in my stomach, I now felt a throbbing at the back of my skull.

“You’re saying it was fixed,” I said.

“If I were betting on it, I’d say yes.” Pop waved a hand in a cutting gesture. “But leave that alone for now. Instead, consider a few more things. One, we know that the ulax we found was used by Navy men for unofficial activities. The dead man is Navy. And the Navy boys we talked to said they didn’t know of anyone but sailors having any fun up there. After all, they control access to that part of the island. Yet the lieutenant colonel sent you up because, he claimed, he had reports of Army G.I.’s entertaining nurses there. Which doesn’t quite jibe with the Navy’s version.”

“That’s odd, I guess,” I said. “But that’s not anything you found out in the past two hours.”

Pop looked down at the floor and clasped his hands again.

“No,” he said. Now I could barely hear him over the constant weather noise against the Quonset walls. “I learned two more things this afternoon. One is that the lieutenant colonel will soon be up for promotion to full colonel. Again. After being passed over at least once before. And I know he wants that promotion very badly. Badly enough, perhaps, to do all sorts of things to get it.”

Pop fell silent then, and kept looking down at the floor.

I stood. My gut ached and my head hurt. And I thought I knew the answer to my next question. But I had to ask it anyway.

“You said you learned two more things,” I said. “What’s the second?”

Pop looked up at me. His expression was softer than it had been all day. He looked kindly. Sympathetic. I had wanted to hit him earlier, but not as much as I did now.

“It’s not really something new,” Pop said. “It’s what you already told me. Or almost told me. But of course I know the order that the lieutenant colonel gave you on Attu.”

I clenched my fists. Maybe I would hit the old man after all. Maybe I wouldn’t stop hitting him for a while.

“I won’t say it aloud if you don’t want me to,” Pop said.

I turned and started for the door. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew I was getting away from Pop.

He followed and stopped me with a hand on my shoulder, so I whirled with a roundhouse right. He leaned back just in time, and my knuckles brushed his mustache.

“Jesus Christ, son,” Pop exclaimed.

I grabbed his scrawny arms and pushed him away. He staggered back, but didn’t fall.

“He was a Jap,” I said. I was trembling. “He was trying to kill me not five minutes before. And it was an order. It was an order from a goddamn colonel.”

Pop took a deep, quaking breath and adjusted his glasses.

“It was an order,” I said.

Pop nodded. “I know. And now I need you to listen to me again. Are you listening, Private?”

I glared at him.

“Here it is, then,” Pop said. “No one, and I mean no one—not your chaplain, not the general, not anyone back home, and sure as hell not me— no one would condemn what you did. If the circumstances had been reversed, that Jap would have done the same to you, and he wouldn’t have waited for an order.”