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do, the officers so tight-ass because they were going to serve under MacArthur Himself that there was no card playing on board either, he had stood on deck and observed the sea. He watched for big events and small events, from surfacing whales to families of dolphins to haphazard flying fish. One day he noticed a new occurrence: contradiction. The wind was stiff and easterly, driving rows of whitecaps from stern to bow. But the ship was plunging, trudging like a farmer in boots, through heavy swells churned up by storms a thousand miles ahead in the west. The surface of the water, the ragged spume, was merely sliding, a deception, over the true internal intent of thesea. The hidden intent. Joe remembered because it was the first moment he realized that he and everyone else on the ship might not be coming back from Manila.
    “Sir, I think we’re there.” Joe killed the car engine and lights. An easier snow of fewer, fatter crystals fell.
    Fuchs sat bolt upright and said like a vaudeville comic,
“Was ist das?”
    Heading over a rise and toward the car were three men carrying rifles.
    “Mescaleros,” Joe said. “Apaches.”
    “Talk to them,” Oppy said.
    Groves said as Joe got out, “Keep them away from the car so they don’t recognize us.”
    Two of the men were father and son, each almost as big as Joe, both in snowshoes. They wore long hair, wool hats, greasy jackets, one sheepskin and the other corduroy. Clothes and hair were dusted with snow and their faces shone with sweat. The third man had a slightly squarer head, shorter hair, a plaid Pendleton jacket, rags wrapped around his hands and feet. Navajo, Joe thought. None of them looked as if he would recognize Groves and call Tokyo, but what the hell was a Navajo doing down here?
    “See the horses?” the old man asked Joe.
    “Horses?”
    “Horses everywhere,” the old man said.
    Joe passed out cigarettes. Apaches were Chinese to Joe. Navajos were thieves. Likewise, Apaches and Navajos thought all Pueblos were women. The Navajo moved close enough to take a smoke and stepped back.Flakes drifted down. The storm was resting, not leaving. The Navajo’s rifle was held casually toward the car.
    “They kicked off the white ranchers,” the father said. “They,” Joe knew, meant the Army. “Still horses, though. If we don’t take them, they just shoot them.”
    “They come over in planes and machine-gun them,” the son said. “Sometimes they bomb them. Day and night.”
    “Could be Texans,” Joe said.
    The Apaches erupted. They slapped each other on the shoulder and then slapped Joe. Even the Navajo laughed nervously.
    “Those bastards,” the son said. “Army planes, they’re crazy.”
    “Army bought the ranchers out,” the father confided, “but they made it in one payment so the ranchers had to give it all back in taxes, and if the ranchers try to get back on the land, they bomb them.”
    “Sheep up north.” The Navajo had a high voice and clipped his words in half. “Someone in Washington says an Indian can only have eighty-three sheep. Part of the war effort. What do sheep have to do with the war?”
    “Nothing,” Joe said.
    “Indian Service comes and kills the sheep. Shoot you if you get in the way.”
    Now Joe remembered. Near Gallup, a gang of Navajos had taken a couple of Service riders hostage and then vanished. Across the state, newspapers were treating it like an uprising. The Indian Service and the FBIwere looking for the fugitives all the way north to Salt Lake City. Not south, with Mescaleros.
    The young Apache looked speculatively at Joe. “You ever fight in Antonio?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You fought my brother in Antonio. They put up a ring at the motor lodge behind the cafe. Kid Chino?”
    “He was drunk, he shouldn’t have got in the ring.”
    “He was sure sober when you were done.” He stomped his snowshoe for emphasis. “That was the soberest I ever saw him.”
    Joe recalled the brother, all piss and steam the first