Chad Thumann - The Undesirables

“Head back and try to land her.”

Suddenly the sky flashed, followed by the sound of a deafening explosion. Bobby turned his plane for a better view of Dutch Harbor, on Unalaska Island. The entire airfield seemed to be on fire. While the Zeros kept the American Airacobras busy, Nakajima B5N2 torpedo bombers had snuck in and bombed the base.

“Shit.” Bobby sighed.

“Don’t think about it. Just get back and land that plane. Battle’s over anyway.”

Bobby knew Jack was right. Even though the dogfight still raged behind him, the Japanese had achieved their objectives.

He passed the enemy torpedo bombers going the opposite direction. But they didn’t break formation to hunt him down. They’d already succeeded in their mission. Now they were heading back to their aircraft carrier. A few minutes later, Bobby was flying directly over Dutch Harbor. They’d hit the fuel-and-ammunition depots. The airfield was a cauldron of rising black smoke and flames, surrounded by snowy, jagged peaks on one side and an icy bay on the other.

Fire and ice, Bobby thought to himself, glancing nervously at his fuel gauge. It had settled. Apparently his fuel level had dropped below the leak in his shot-up gasoline tanks. All he had to do was keep it slow and steady, and he ought to get back to Fort Randall still in one piece.

Karen never liked hoboes. She’d seen a lot of them in her young life, growing up as she had during the Great Depression and spending a lot of that young life on trains.

As a child prodigy, she’d traveled throughout the American Northeast, performing with her father at various venues, big and small, famous and unknown. Tanglewood, Jordan Hall, Alexander Hall, and Mortensen Hall were the more prominent stops during her so-called summer vacations, which were really just yearly concert tours organized by her father.

She enjoyed the travel, largely because she loved the New England countryside, and she enjoyed meeting artists of all genres and walks of life. She met Martha Graham in Boston, Sidney Bechet in New Jersey, and Rosa Ponselle in Connecticut.

But she dreaded the train stations because they were often haunted by destitute vagabonds riding the rails in search of work.

Her father, being a socialist, sympathized with the hoboes. It wasn’t their fault they were poor, he tried to explain to her. In fact, they should be respected, if not applauded, for battling to rise above their unfortunate circumstances. And battle they did. Karen would never forget leaving Boston on a night train and looking out the window to see railroad workers hunting the switching yard for hoboes, dragging them out of boxcars, and beating them almost to death with baseball bats.

Karen realized then that she disliked the hoboes because she was afraid of them. She wasn’t afraid they might attack her, mug her, or hurt her. She was afraid of becoming like them. And her father’s lectures only made that fear worse. After all, if they weren’t responsible for their own poverty, if they were simply victims of circumstance, couldn’t that same circumstance happen to anyone? Couldn’t it happen to Karen?

The answer was yes. Not only could it happen to Karen, it had happened to Karen. Now she was living like the hoboes she’d grown up to fear, walking long miles along the railroad tracks, hiding in the tall grass at the approach of a train, and jumping aboard for a free ride if an open boxcar passed by slowly enough. It was exactly what had always terrified her.

And yet she loved it. There was a strange peacefulness to the countryside, because the war was both behind and in front of her. Here, between the battle fronts, she had little to be afraid of. Karen never worried about violence. No one would attack her or mug her. Everyone was reserving their aggression for the enemy, it seemed, knowing they might have their fill of violence any moment if the Nazis came.

Even when Karen and Petr were discovered stowing away in boxcars, they weren’t dragged out and beaten like the hoboes she’d seen in the United States. Instead, they were offered a cup of tea and asked whether their dog was friendly. They were still dressed in soldiers’ uniforms, and everyone wanted to help a soldier, even if it meant helping a soldier desert.

The NKVD was nowhere to be found, either. Their agents were stretched too thin to bother with tiny villages and rural train stations. Even though those stations were on an important supply route, they were largely left to the management of locals. If trains started showing up in Tikhvin with half their cargo, or if there was any sign of theft or corruption between Moscow and Leningrad, no doubt the NKVD would have swooped in and found out what was going on. But that didn’t happen because, unlike politicians or army officers, the civilian rail workers were mostly honest and simple folk.

Karen and Petr rode more often than they walked. The trains heading southeast were mostly empty because little in the way of supplies was being sent from Leningrad to Moscow. There was the troop train Karen and Petr had originally ridden in, which they then hid from as it passed two days after they went AWOL. And there was a train filled with Leningrad refugees that passed them a week later. But mostly the railway was traveled by supply trains on the return trip from Tikhvin—locomotives hauling lines of empty boxcars.

The engines rolled along at little more than a walking pace, which made it easy for Karen, Petr, and Duck to jump on and off. But it also made the journey a very long one, especially since the trains often had to wait hours at a time for more important traffic to pass in the other direction.

They ate well. During their fifth day of travel, they passed a herd of deer. The deer had obviously become accustomed to the trains, for they continued to graze unconcerned as the loud and smoky locomotive approached. Petr sat in the open door of a boxcar and waited patiently. Even when the car was only a hundred yards from the deer, the animals didn’t flinch. It wasn’t until he pulled the trigger and dropped one that the rest of the herd panicked and bounded away.

Petr jumped off, Karen and Duck close behind him. When they approached the deer, Petr was happy to see the shot had been a clean one, straight through the animal’s heart. It hadn’t suffered. But he was distressed to see that flies were already buzzing around the carcass. It would be only a matter of time before the meat was rotten with maggots.

Petr had to get to work fast, and he needed Karen’s help. He taught her how to skin and quarter the animal, breaking it into smaller pieces for easier cooking and transport.

But even that wasn’t enough. Until the meat was somehow preserved, it would continue to attract vermin. So he hung the large shanks of venison from the branches of a tree and built a large bonfire beneath them. It wasn’t nearly as efficient as a smokehouse, but it would have to do.

The whole operation took the better part of two days, but they ended up with enough meat to last five more.

Karen was impressed. Here was proof positive that her fantasy of living in the woods might become a reality, after all. She hadn’t eaten so well in almost a year, and it had cost them only a single bullet.

They began sleeping in each other’s arms. It began by sharing the worn copy of War and Peace between them. They sat in a corner of a boxcar, backs propped against the walls, reading aloud. When Karen’s voice grew hoarse, Petr would take over. And when Petr’s voice grew hoarse, they would continue to read in silence, shoulder to shoulder, turning each page only after a nod indicated that they were ready.

Duck grew jealous of their closeness, so he wiggled and pushed his way between them. The three of them snuggled together, enjoying the feel of Duck’s downy fur.

But eventually the dog got hot, that same fur trapping the excessive heat of three bodies. So he would get up and wander to a distant corner of the slowly rocking boxcar before flopping back down with a satisfied groan. That left Petr and Karen together. Neither one of them wanted to move. They just lay there quietly until they fell asleep.

Every night thereafter they did the same, without a word, without acknowledgment. Karen told herself it was innocent enough; they were still fully dressed, and they hadn’t even kissed again since the day of the dance. It wasn’t as if she was really being unfaithful to Bobby. She enjoyed lying in Petr’s arms, and not because it was comforting. In fact, it was distracting. The feel of his body was electric, even maddening. But she didn’t dare move, for fear of breaking the spell. Lying like that together, every night, prevented her from sleeping much, and it made the journey feel even longer.

Karen secretly looked forward to the sun going down so they could put down the book and once again lie together.

When they finally arrived in Moscow, Karen marveled at how different it looked from Leningrad. Both cities had been fortified with a series of deep trenches bristling with log bunkers, machine guns, and antiaircraft cannons. And it was clear that, like Leningrad, Moscow had been militarized.