Kennet flicked his Zippo, studying his brother’s scarred profile. Minor’s right side was his brooding, cautious side, and even with half a grin and a cigarette poking jauntily from the corner, his face was set in a way Kennet had never seen before. Minor seemed smaller. Not diminished, but condensed. All the unnecessary and immature distractions of his personality shaved off or pinned firmly down. His devil-may-care attitude had found a damn to give. For the first time in his life, he appeared to measure his words before doling them out.

Nalle hitched forward and reached a hand over the front seat, looking for a drag. He ruffled first Minor’s hair, then Kennet’s, then stretched longer to turn up the radio dial, catching the tail end of the Merry Macs:

If the words sound queer and funny to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey,

Sing “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.”

Oh, mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey.

A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?

“Park it, junior,” Minor said.

Nalle settled back in his seat with his head against the window, his feet in the opposite well. In three years, he’d packed two more inches and about twenty pounds onto his frame. The little bear was now a full-grown grizzly.

He had just turned seventeen when Pearl Harbor was bombed, irritated when he needed parental consent to enlist, furious when Emil wouldn’t give it.

“Ma would do it,” Nalle said.

Emil banged a fist on the table. “She would not. She’d want you to go to college. If you don’t know what being accepted would’ve meant to her, then you didn’t know her at all.”

Nalle couldn’t argue. With his acceptance to University of Vermont, he’d be the first Fiskare to ever attend college. He conceded the point, Emil smoothed his fist into a palm, and they brokered a deal: no enlisting until Nalle had a year of higher learning under his belt, at which point Emil could protest, but he couldn’t forbid.

Nalle came into his own in Burlington and became captain of the university’s cross-country ski club. And it was from this club that he was recruited by the 87th Infantry Regiment, the Army’s first mountain unit to be trained specifically for winter combat. Out of deference to Emil, Nalle completed his sophomore year before heading to train at Camp Hale in Colorado.