Rat Island

White crosses sunk into the iron-gray earth. A frostbitten wind skipped along gunmetal waves, carrying with it sprays of salt and the stench of turpentine. It shook the sign staked into the mud: Little Falls Cemetery. Though, it was less a cemetery and more of a lawn. White picket fences be damned.

There were no inscriptions on the crosses. Small brown rectangles sufficed instead. Yua wanted to trace one, hoping maybe it would miraculously be the one that marked her great-uncle’s remains. Maybe she would know instantly. A feeling would come over her, and she would weep for him and her cold-capped fingers and her suffering bank account. She wondered for the millionth time why she had paid for this.

Yua had read an article a few years ago about a collection of foot bones they had found here, decades after the Japanese occupation of the Attu Island had ended. The bones belonged to a Japanese soldier. How they figured that out, Yua had no idea (why there were only foot bones was another matter altogether.)

Probably something to do with the rats. They were giant, hiding in burrows fit for moles. Since they had no natural predators on Attu, they had run rampant since Russian fur traders dropped them off in the late eighteenth century after renaming the Unangan tribe that inhabited the island the Aleuts. Up until World War II, the Unangan tribe had remained on Attu and only left after being captured by the Japanese, liberated by the Americans, and then shipped off to the Alaskan mainland by the same Americans, far from their ancestral home. The Americans had erected a metal sculpture that looked like a golf ball mid-explosion on the island and a military post that was recently vacated and pollution that would take billions of dollars to clean.

Yua had walked past muddy streams fed by overturned diesel canisters and gaped at the coastline protected by old artillery shells, shrapnel, and oil tankers that created a greasy rainbow across the water.

She stared out at those white crosses, imagining oil coating the bones, chemicals soaking in the marrow and glowing bright green in the absolute dark of an Alaskan winter. What would she find if she dug up the graves? She doubted there would be many remains left even if there had been anything to bury in the first place.

Had there been anything left to bury of her great-uncle? He had been killed by an artillery shell; his head had probably looked like that giant metallic sculpture in a freeze frame just after the shell detonated. Was there even a cross for him? How many forgotten soldiers did each piece of floating debris ringing the coastline represent?

She did not know.

How many people had died anywhere without being given a fixture in the world they had left? How would it feel to know that you are one of the lucky ones, someone the world will recognize was alive at some point in time when they look at a cross staked into an island overrun by real-life ROUSes?

The tour guide who had taken her, a wiry old white man with one eye that bugged from his head at all times, was mumbling about something, turning back and forth as if trying to follow each gust of icy wind that whistled by. “Is it time to go back?” she asked. The little light afforded land this far north in autumn was dwindling. They had only been here two hours.

“Don’t wanna be here after dark. The rats’ll getcha,” he said, and without looking at her, he began ambling toward the cleanest patch of beach they had found to dock on.

He was a fisherman, or a retired one, and he did not often fish anymore because it was hard on his back. Yua had been referred to him after numerous phone calls to tour guide places that did not go to Attu. The last woman she had called had said, “You know, hold on. George might take you. His son was stationed out there, and he’ll go from time to time just to feel closer to his son. The kid’s stationed in Afghanistan now, poor dear.”

So, Yua had called George. He had actually answered, saying he just happened to get his telephone fixed. Luck was a funny thing. It had led her here to this gray, dingy island where her great-uncle was supposedly buried. She would never have come searching for some relative she had never known if not for the past three years; she had lost her father, her grandparents, and her older brother in that short span of time. Her mother, just last month, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and the medicine the doctors had given her was hardly slowing the disease’s progress.

The last time Yua had seen her mom before she had left was in an assisted living home back in Vancouver. She had called Yua by the wrong name first then five minutes later called her the right name then ten minutes later called her by her father’s name. She had also struggled to remember that Yua was going on a trip and needed to be constantly reminded that Yua would not be visiting her. When Yua left that day, her mom had called out as Yua walked down the hallway, “See you next week!”

George was twenty years older than Yua’s mother, but he did not seem angry or troubled or forgetful like her. Loneliness had driven her out to a desolate, polluted rock sticking out of the ocean, and it would likely drive her somewhere else to visit the grave of another dead ancestor who could not help her through her grief.

She stopped when they reached the boat. George climbed on, whistling a quiet tune. She stared out as the sky darkened, turning the charcoal waves to pitch. There was no moon out tonight, and the only light came from the boat’s headlamps that George switched on.

Yua wondered what it would be like to stand here after collecting tubers or sea shells or crabs and look up to see a huge carrier breaking through the froth, creating its own tide. She wondered if her great-uncle was on the first ship that sailed here, if he came by night or by day. It was not worth it to wonder what would have happened had the Japanese not invaded Attu or even Kiska because it was already written. History with its steel maw had already snapped around it. But still, it did not matter much if they had not. They would have attacked somewhere else instead with the same troops. The Americans would have built their base somewhere else too and damaged, as humans tend to do, another icy rat-infested corner of the world.