If he was idle, he felt guilty and conspicuous, though of course he was much more conspicuous when he was working: an eccentric figure at an easel, some en plein air fanatic obliviously scraping away with his brushes in the middle of a war. This was what the navy wanted him to do, he reminded himself. We believe we are giving you the opportunity to bring back a record of great value to your country, the letter had said. Had the letter been sincere? Sometimes he felt almost mocked by it.
He ate meat because it seemed impossible not to. He drank but not too much.
Before he learned to lash down his boards and canvases, more than one had been lifted off his easel by the wind, sent cartwheeling through the mud to lodge against the wheels of some machine or smash into the side of a building, leaving a smear of color.
The barracks’ interiors were collaged with women, barrel-vaulted Quonset huts densely papered with smiling movie stars and nameless models the way some cathedral ceilings were crowded with angels and apostles. The women from home, the real women, were kept in pockets or pinned above bunks and washstands like patron saints. Men were always showing their sweethearts and wives to Jamie. Proudly, anxiously. They worried their girls wouldn’t wait, not that they themselves usually turned down the chance to stray, if it arose. You just want someone to touch you, the guys said. There was no point in feeling guilty.
In the nurses’ quarters were photos of men in uniform. They worried those men would die, but also that they would stray.
“Is someone waiting for you at home?” This was a nurse, Diane, who showed Jamie a photo of her parents and another of her sister in a WAAC uniform.
“No,” he admitted. “No one at all.”
On their first outing, he kissed her in the lee of a boulder. After their second, a dance in the Officers’ Club, in the cab of a bulldozer left unlocked, he put his hand down her woolen trousers. She lifted her hips and he tugged off her pants, maneuvered around the bulldozer’s various levers and knobs until he could wedge himself between her knees. She gave him a little nod, and he pushed into her. He hadn’t been with anyone in months, didn’t last long, pulled out and came into his handkerchief. Then followed an awkward parting, a heavy melancholy filled with thoughts of Sarah.
The captain had decided he liked Jamie’s paintings. He asked gruffly if Jamie would paint one of the harbor for him personally. When Jamie delivered it, the captain asked where he wanted to go next. To the action, Jamie said, though that word made him queasy: chipper, dishonest shorthand for violent death. The captain said he would see what he could do.
Jamie was put on the passenger manifest of a shovel-faced PBY Catalina seaplane, bound for Dutch Harbor. Five days in a row they tried to go, but the weather was terrible. Three days, they didn’t even take off. The other two, they turned back. He stopped bothering to say goodbye to Diane. On the sixth day, finally on their way, over the ocean with only gray cloud in the windows, the plane jolted and bounced with awful swoops and groans, and Jamie held his paint box against his chest, closed his eyes. Almost daily, planes and crews vanished into the Bering Sea, downed by weather more often than enemy fire. He wished Marian were flying the plane.
In Dutch Harbor, bombed by the Japanese six months earlier but mostly repaired, he made more paintings, sent them off. Planes were smudges in the sky, one or two small brushstrokes each. He wasn’t there long, was only waiting to go west again, following the sweep of the perforated Aleutian arm toward Attu and Kiska, tiny, muddy, storm-scoured islands far out in the chain that the Japanese had invaded in June and needed routing from.
He was lucky with his flight to Adak. Arriving at all was lucky, and at times the clouds had even broken open, revealing the islands below: steep, snowcapped, smoke-plumed volcanic cones sloping down into collars of sheer cliffs fringed by waves.
He stayed in a Quonset hut with a cohort of army journalist types. adak press club said a sign on their door.
The Seabees had filled in a lagoon with bulldozed volcanic ash and hammered down perforated steel planking to make a runway. After a storm, planes returning from bombing runs would land in standing water, their propellers driving up dense clouds of mist as they hurtled down the runway in angry white puffs, only their noses and wing edges visible.
The Japanese flew over sometimes, strafing and bombing, usually not doing much damage. The tundra swallowed their bullets and bombs. “We do better than that, don’t we?” Jamie said to an army photographer after an attack.
The man gazed after the departing planes. “Yeah, their mud is probably much more shot up than ours.”