Snow rushed in sheets against the car as it pushed over the rise and fall of the ground. When he found the road again, Joe was happy to lay his wheels in the ruts and try to stay in them. He put his head out the window to avoid Fuchs’ urgent wiping. There were signs of humped earth, craters frozen in the snow.

“It’s like sailing.” Oppy was delighted. “Same dark sky, same white, same swells.”

“I remember my first time at sea,” Fuchs said. “It was when the British shipped us to Canada as enemy aliens at the start of the war. U-boats attacked the convoy. They sank the ship just before us.”

“I didn’t know you were an enemy alien,” Groves said.

“I’m British now,” Fuchs assured him.

“German and British,” Groves added it up dryly.

Implode. Explode. Two events at the same time. On the troopship to Manila, Joe had watched the ocean. For lack of anything else to 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 the sea. 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.