White Whale

  "I was in the Eastern Bloc," Pogue said, "and they wanted us to escort this guy back to the US. But they wanted us to keep quiet about it. You know how I am, I can't just take orders without questioning them. So I looked into it."

  I gave Pogue a dull look, so he knew I didn't approve.

  "It was von Bolschwing," Pogue said.

  "Who?" I said. The name sounded familiar.

  "You don't remember him?" Jona asked, sitting back down with us. "He's the guy who was running Buchenwald."

  My heart might have stopped.

  "What is a Nazi doing in the US?" I asked.

  "Getting promoted to the head of the CIA's State Department," Pogue said blankly.

  It's almost funny how sick I felt. My head spiked with pain and my hands went cold.

  "Then what were we doing in Germany?" I said. "If we're just going to take them and give them jobs over here? What's going on?"

  Pogue shrugged. "It's not as if we cared about the Jews in the first place. We let the SS do whatever they wanted to them for years."

  "At some point we decided to care," I said. "Why?" I broke off. "If we only got involved for Pearl Harbor--"

  "We didn't have to," Jona reminded me. "I've read the McCollum Memo. We knew what was going to happen to Pearl Harbor. We could have stopped it. We chose not to. If we had stopped it we wouldn't have had a reason to go to war."

  "That doesn't explain anything," I said. I couldn't help how frustrated I felt. "That doesn't explain why we're fighting Nazis one minute and hiring them to run our government the next."

  "Were we?" Pogue asked.

  "Were we what?" Jona asked, frowning.

  "Were we actually fighting them?" Pogue said. "They wanted the Jews out of Germany. Technically they got it. We took the Jews out of the camps and sent them to Palestine."

  "But we killed Jerries," I said. "You know that. You were there when we stormed Buchenwald."

  "Doesn't matter," Pogue said swiftly. "In a war there's always killing. Especially if there's a pretense to maintain."

  I sat stiff and silent in my chair. Jona turned his mug in his hands and stared at the steam. Pogue looked from Jona's face to mine.

  "You're telling me," I began. I didn't entirely trust myself to speak. "You're telling me were fighting on the side of the SS? And we didn't know it?"

  "I think so," Pogue said quietly.

  "Why?" was all I could think to say.

  "That's just it," Jona said. "We don't know. We'll probably never know."

  I thought of the prisoners from Buchenwald, the brittle, smiling man who had reminded me of my grandfather. I thought of the tattoo inside Jona's elbow, the way he used to rush out of the showers so we wouldn't see it.

  "Are the Ustasha still active?" I asked Pogue.

  Pogue shook his head. "No idea."

  Jona's fingers went tight around his mug. I was afraid he'd break it with his bare hands.

  * * * * *

  I told Pogue he could stay with us if he wanted. He refused.

  "First I have to talk to Terry," he said. "Afterward I'm going somewhere very far. I don't dare tell even you where I'm going, really."

  "You really think we're going to go blabbing to the first CO who shows up here?" Jona asked, frowning.

  "If they torture you, you can't help it," Pogue said, very diplomatic. "You can tell them I was here, I don't mind. But you won't be able to tell them where I went. We're all protected that way."

  "If they find you, they'll kill you," I told Pogue.

  It hardly needed to be said. I could see it in the way Pogue grimaced. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

  Pogue left the island around noon. My headache didn't go away. Jona washed our cups in the wash basin. He was so quiet about it I might have forgotten he was even there.

  "At least we pulled out of the Depression," Jona finally muttered.

  "I don't understand it," I said. "We're supporting eugenics. I don't understand it."

  "You don't understand it?" Jona said.

  He sat back on his knees. He looked up at me. It was one of those rare moments I couldn't tell what he was feeling. Usually he wore his emotions for everyone to see.

  "You're an Indian," Jona said. "You're living out here in the Arctic Circle because the US pushed you out of your home. You don't understand why they'd want to support eugenics? I do."

  I couldn't think of anything to say to that.

  "If Pogue gets himself killed..." Jona began. He sat down opposite me at the table, his skin losing color.

  "You're not his squad leader anymore," I reminded Jona. "There's nothing you can do."

  "He's gone to talk with Two-Ply. Maybe he means to hide in Japan."

  Japan looked too obvious, but I didn't say as much.

  "You know what I heard?" Jona said, and leaned across the table. "On the radio this morning they were talking about it. That McCarthy nutcase went and launched some kind of investigative committee. You think it's about shutting us up?"

  "Do you?" I asked.

  "I don't know," Jona said. "I'm worried about the captain. He's the one who told me about Japan surrendering. Don't know who else he told."

  "You worry about everyone," I said. "You're going to worry yourself sick."

  Jona flashed me a brief smile. "You're the one who looks sick," he said. "You sure you aren't coming down with something?"

  "Shark fumes," I said.

  "I'll make you a bath," Jona said.

  "Just me?" I said.

  "Cut it out," he murmured. He was smiling. That was the main thing.

  * * * * *

  After I'd washed I left for Fawn's house. Mrs. Kabocha answered the door when I knocked on it. She shuffled out of the doorway and let me inside with one of her kind gummy smiles. The whale oil lanterns were lit on the walls, the floor hearth in the sitting room sweet with spiced pemmican. I didn't see Fawn anywhere.

  "Tanewa Wapos?" I asked.

  Mrs. Kabocha didn't speak English.

  "You don't know?" Mrs. Kabocha asked in Cree.

  Her face drooped. She twisted her hands together nervously. A sinking feeling settled low in my chest.

  "Where is Rabbit?" I repeated.

  Fawn came out from the side room. She halted when she saw me. She smoothed out the wrinkles in her pencil skirt.

  "Where is Rabbit?" I asked Fawn.

  "The BIA came," Fawn said. "I sent him to the boarding school."

  The coldness inside me boiled over into anger. I told myself I'd heard her wrong. I told myself she wouldn't have made that kind of decision without me.

  "I told you I didn't want him going there," I said.

  Fawn went on staring at me like I was a stranger.

  "Is this the one in Juneau?" I asked. "St. Verity's?"

  "I think so," Fawn said.

  I wanted to shake her shoulders. I wanted to ask what she had been thinking. "I'm going after him, and I'm taking him home."

  "No," Fawn said.

  "How could you do this to him?" I asked.

  I wondered if Rabbit had been scared. I wondered if he had cried, if he had thought that I'd abandoned him.

  "It's the law," Fawn said.

  "I don't care if it's the law."

  Mrs. Kabocha glanced from her daughter's face to mine. The poor woman looked frightened. I wish I could say I'd tried to calm her down. I couldn't think about anything except my son.

  "They'll break him, Fawn," I said.

  "Sometimes," Fawn said, "you have to be broken to fit into the mold."

  "I'm not letting them do this," I said. "I'm not letting you do this."

  "He can be a doctor," Fawn rallied back. "He can be a lawyer. If he goes to a white man's school and gets a white man's education he can be anything he wants in this life. I'm a woman. I don't get to be a doctor. My son has more chances than I do. I'm letting him take them."

  I stared at her. I knew what I wanted to say but I couldn't bring myself to say it. Before white men came to A
merica Fawn could have been anything she wanted. She could have been a medicine woman. She could have been a peace chief. She could have bred horses, she could have ridden them into battle.

  If colonization was the problem, I didn't see how it would ever be the solution.

  * * * * *

  I needed to clear my head. I went to the warm springs with Jona. The snow had thawed, new riceroot already poking out of the ground. We sat together by one of the shallow pools and watched a fat sea lion trundling around, batting his wet nose at the hot, misty surface.

  "So we'll go to Juneau," Jona told me, his arm looped over his knee. "If we have to, we'll move there. They can choose where he goes to school, but they can't keep you from your son."

  "I don't want him in one of those schools," I said.

  I thought of the star blankets hidden in the back of my closet, wrapped around Mom's caribou bone harp. I thought of Mom's ribbon clothes burning in a heap outside our house. Most of all I thought of the last time I saw my father.

  He was on the wharf, his fishing boat tied to one of the berths. I'd followed him, but he'd told me not to. The polar sun fell low over the watery horizon, dim and orange and shrouded in silver. Dad sat on the pier and wiped his eyes with his hands. He was crying. I didn't know what to do. I was twelve years old; I'd never seen him cry.

  "I can't stay here anymore," Dad told me.

  He had the same chin as me, the same long nose. I wore my hair long and he wore his short, the way a civilized man was supposed to.

  "Where are you going?" I asked.

  "I don't know," Dad said. "But you can't come."

  I hadn't wanted to. I didn't tell him that.

  "Marry a white woman, Orca," Dad told me. "Have white kids. Don't make the same mistake I did."

  Dad got in his fishing boat, cut loose the mooring and rowed out to the mainland. I watched him until he was a distant speck. I'd never been called a Mistake before. I was glad I finally had a name for all the ugly looks he'd given me, all the times he'd turned away and shook his head and held me at arms' length.

  "Orca," Jona said.

  I breathed. I breathed in the vapors of the warm springs, thick and wet and mild in the back of my mouth.

  Jona looked at me the way he used to look at the laps on the drill pitch, the way he used to look at his ammo belt when he was counting the shells, calculating the rounds. It was a look of deep concentration, of certainty. It calmed me like a tonic.

  "We're going to get him back," Jona said. "Remember that he's an Indian. Remember that this country doesn't care about Indians. They're not going to fight you on this. We're going to get him back."

  * * * * *

  The ferry didn't run for the rest of the day. I could have rowed us out to the mainland myself, only I didn't like the idea of leaving the fishing boat unattended while we knocked on the BIA's door. One time I'd gone to Qanuk Island to get a tooth capped. When I left the dentist's office I caught two brats crouching next to my boat, trying to make off with the sealskins.

  When I went to bed that night I was restless, agitated. I kept wondering what kind of a bed Rabbit was sleeping in, whether the other boys were treating him kindly, whether the school administration had cut off his hair like they'd done my dad's. It was the hair that worried me most. Your memories are in your hair. Up until now Rabbit had only good memories. Fawn and I had seen to that. I wondered if Rabbit was scared. I could have cried just thinking about it. I wanted to reach out and hold him and stroke his scratchy hair. I wanted to take him to the carnival and put him on the rides. My earlier headache hadn't gone away. Now my spine was crawling, clammy and cold. I thought I might really be sick.

  Jona's hands came to a rest on my back. Warmth spread through the base of my spine. I liked the feel of another person next to me, another person beneath the blankets with me. I'd never really had that before. It was oneness; it was belonging. It didn't matter if it was another man. All of us need to belong somewhere. In a world as lonely as ours is, as hypocritical, we don't have the right to get picky about where people find their comfort.

  * * * * *

  The next morning I made shark fin soup, although I didn't really want any. Jona listened to the weather on the radio. More snow. I got out an old capote for him to wear over his jacket. He flashed me a fast smile.

  We went to the wharf and waited for the ferry to pull in. I pulled my jacket tight around my shoulders. I don't get cold easily, but today I felt like someone had stuck my head in an icebox.

  "It's going to be alright," Jona told me.

  Coming from him it shouldn't have been credible. This was the guy who freaked out if he went to bed on the right side and got out on the left side. This was the man who had been a boy in a concentration camp, had lost everyone he'd ever loved and spent the rest of his years scratching up his arms and shaking in his sleep. I'd held him in his sleep for a few nights now, had learned the curve of his body, had learned which ways he fit into mine.

  I squeezed his hand and let go. The ferry pulled into port and we climbed up the apron ramp.

  The ride to Qanuk Island was about an hour long. The boat skimmed across clear water, past Vancouver Island, the fisheries bloated and busy. It was weird to think we were closer to Canada than we were America. I thought about giving my cousin and her kids a visit. Jona sat on deck and prayed the rosary, not because he was particularly scared of anything, but because he prayed at the drop of a hat.

  "God's always listening," he'd told me once. "So we should always be talking."

  We got off the boat on Qanuk Island. The cold air from the far valleys hit me in the face. All the houses were neat and white and uniform; all the streets were sleek and paved. That's how you know you're in white-owned territory. You can hear the soil crying out in pain.

  "Do you know where we're going?" Jona asked.

  Juneau was too far to visit in one day; and anyway, I didn't know for sure that Rabbit was at St. Verity's.

  "BIA office," I told Jona.

  "Alright," Jona said.

  We crossed the street. A couple of kids played kickball on the sidewalk. The rubber ball bounced out onto the curb and a car drove over it, flattening it between its tires. All the kids started to complain. We rounded the corner and my headache came back, worse than yesterday. I've heard about people showing physical symptoms when they're in distress, but I'm not that type of person. I couldn't even blame the shark fins. I hadn't eaten any.

  The BIA office building looked like any corporate building, dull and gray, nondescript, except for the fact that the windows were barred and no cars were parked outside. We climbed up the steps, Jona's hands in his pockets, his brow dark. Maybe he knew what I knew, that this looked more like a prison than a place equipped to deal with Indian tribes. We went into the lobby and it was bright, coffee-brown, jammed with desks and filing cabinets; and no one was around doing any work.

  "Should we start shouting?" Jona asked, bewildered.

  "I'm stealing," I yelled.

  A man in a suit came hurrying out from an open archway. Jona tossed me a sideways look.

  "We're closed," the man told me, when he noticed that I was not, in fact, stealing.

  "Then why is your door wide open?" I asked.

  The man frowned. I guess it was a real mystery.

  I gave the guy my name. I gave him my son's name and told him our tribe. The guy went over to one of the desks, opened a giant card catalogue and looked through it. Jona stuffed his hands in his pockets, his eyes flitting from window to window. I wondered what he was thinking. After sifting through that heavy book the guy in the suit looked up at me and told me what I already knew:

  "He's in one of the assimilation schools."

  "Which one?" I demanded.

  "Sir," the man went on. "If you're trying to interfere with federal--"

  I gave him a Look.

  "Wait a moment," he said quickly, and pulled out an even bigger catalogue.

  Jona invited himself to sit o
n one of the padded little chairs against the wall. I finally started to relax. Just as soon as this man told me where my boy was I could go and get him and take him home. I'd hide him somehow; I'd hide all three of us if I had to. If Rabbit’s hair was cut it would grow back. Mine was growing back.

  "Manitoba," the man said, and slapped his book closed.

  Jona's head shot up.

  "Manitoba?" I repeated. That didn't sound right. "Are you talking about Canada?"

  "Sure am," the man said, lighting a cigarette.

  "My son is American," I said. My knees felt weak. Manitoba was more than two thousand miles away. "What's he doing in Canada?"

  The guy blew a puff of smoke that sent Jona into a coughing fit. I wanted to grab the cigarette and crush it in my hands.

  "No, he's not," the guy said, puzzled.

  "Not what?" I repeated, my head spinning. Maybe I'd heard him wrong. Rabbit couldn't be in Canada.

  "American," the guy said. "You're not American. You're just an Indian."

  * * * * *

  Jona took me to the little cafe looking over the western seaport. I didn't feel like eating anything. I felt like someone had pulled a dark shroud over my head and the only way I could see was by squinting through a veil of darkness.

  "Alright," Jona said, and tried to sound level, the way he had when we were in the army, the way he had when I was good enough to fight for this country but wasn't good enough to call it mine. "We'll go to Canada. We'll get in through Vancouver Island. No one'll know we jumped the border."

  My cousin Bee lived in Saskatchewan with her husband, her kids. I thought: We could stay with them a while if we had to.

  I thought: The US had taken my tribe, shoved us out of our home, and now that we were settled in a new place they had to try and displace us all over again.

  Manitoba. I couldn't believe it.

  "We need to get masking tape," Jona said. He didn't touch his coffee. "And a box cutter."

  I tried to focus, tried to draw myself back to the present. "Why?"

  The bright sun leaked in through the glass door, the glass windows. It poured over black and white tiles, chrome tabletops, the coffeemaker on the glass counter, the chilly ice cream underneath it.