“Sir, you told me to use my judgment. We may be looking at something new here, exactly why we came.”
He wasn’t fooled. “Spare me, Joe. You went because of that big damn heart of yours. Perhaps you can tell me what I should say to Major General Wayne Homza when he demands to know why two thousand lawsuits have suddenly been filed by Barrow residents blaming every cough, sniffle, and flu on radioactivity that was dumped three hundred miles away from them, over sixty years ago.”
“Sir, in my opinion they would have found out in the end. It’s better to be up front. That’s been my experience up here, which is why you asked us to come.”
“Hmph!” Admiral Galli grumbled, but he processed the logic and seemed to accept it, even though it meant he’d have to do a bit of dealing with the legal departments. Then he said, “I thought you said it was a shooting.”
“After they all got sick.”
“You think the illness caused the shooting?”
“Probably not. But if you’re asking whether certain diseases or chemicals can heighten paranoia, the answer is yes. Sir, this location has been the site of many scientific inquiries over the years: digging, seismic, oil. I want to do more work before I sign off on Clay Qaqulik. I want to see the diary. And, sir, would it be all right if I used the research branch to run his social? I’ve got his ID card here.”
A sigh. “At this point, why not?”
He clicked off but not before he connected me with his secretary, and gave her instructions to link me up with our research folks, a trio of Georgetown University graduates who spent their workdays in a Foggy Bottom basement, where the only light came from bulbs, lamps, and multiple computer screens. Conceptually as far away from the wilderness as you can get.
I’d never met our researchers — only spoken to them via phone — and thought of them as The Baritone, Chicago-Voice, and Valley Girl, since all of her statements came out sounding like questions. Valley Girl was the quickest and smartest, although her high-pitched, gum-cracking voice irritated me at times.
“I’ll run his social? Hold on for ten minutes? This will be fast?” she said. “Or should I call you back?”
“I’ll hold. Just give me an initial.”
I sat there in the cab of the Ford with the heater running. The rain had stopped, and the sky was a uniform lead color. The ocean seemed more oily, maybe that was what happened to it before the big ice formed. It was calmer and looked darker, heavier. I saw a lone fin surface out there. Some sort of small whale. Minke or beluga, maybe. Then I saw a half dozen of them. A pod.
Over the phone came normal office sounds: a sucking noise — her gum, I figured — and keys tapping and a gurgling in the background that sounded like a coffeemaker. I heard music playing softly; something classical, Debussy, I thought. Impressionist. Swelling and ebbing. Maybe Ravel. Ten minutes became twelve, and twelve became fifteen. I might as well drive home while I waited, might as well risk losing the connection, which could happen, up here, at any time.
Suddenly Valley Girl was back. “Oh, wow! Cool! So Qaqulik is an Eskimo?” she said.
“Yes.”
“In-teresting! Wow!”
“Interesting to you because he’s an Eskimo? Or for some other reason?”
“He’s got one hell of an impressive background, sir.”
“He does?”
She told me highlights of Clay Qaqulik’s background.
I gasped, and said, everything changed now, “He was what?”
FOUR
My mind was churning with the news about Clay Qaqulik as I walked into our Quonset hut. A CD of Ray Charles singing “Georgia” was playing and the sight of my fiancée in her neon-blue and black spandex yoga suit made my heartbeat speed up. Then I saw the man who was in love with her across the room. I was in no mood for him and his camera tonight.
“Oh, Joe. I heard about the Harmons,” she said.
Karen Vleska was uncoiling on the plush gold pile carpet, from one of those pretzel poses that seem impossible for a man to achieve. She did yoga when she was stressed. Just the sight of her small, lithe body — the toned arm muscles, the petite energy and vibrancy, and her most stunning feature, the head-turning silver hair, shiny and youthful, falling beyond her back and pooling on the carpet — set my heart pounding, even now.
“Joe, those people. Horrible,” she said.
Mikael Grandy — award-winning HBO documentary filmmaker from Manhattan — was a lean, broad-shouldered man on the far side of the room. He infuriated me with his constant presence. He was filming her for an upcoming series, Arctic Women Explorers. Mikael was too smart to tell her of his feelings for her, but it was pretty obvious. It was in the way he watched her and held the camera, as if it were part of her, and it was in his voice. Always kind in a certain way, always attentive, and, as Eddie put it, The slimeball is waiting.
Mikael said, “I wish I could make my body do that.”
Karen said, “Good things come with practice.”
“Maybe you can show me, Karen.”
You’re asking for it, I thought.
A word about our temporary home, the Quonset hut, which was pictured, in an aerial photo last year, for Smithsonian magazine’s cover story, “Barrow, America’s Arctic Research Capitaclass="underline" The Frontier Town That Hosts More Scientists Per Square Foot Than Anywhere Else in the World.”
The hut sat in an old Navy base, revamped into a research center: two square miles of seaside campus, fences gone, open to the tundra… freshwater lagoon to the south, a satellite farm — a collection of golf-ball — shaped geodesic domes — on the western property, where NASA guys from hut six launched weather balloons daily and monitored about five hundred factors affecting Earth’s climate.
On the far side of the lagoon — accessible by a half-mile-long one-lane blacktop — sat a new twenty-five million dollar Arctic Research Center, where Eddie and I had our lab and freezers, filled with samples we’d collected all summer: a flu from the coastal village of Wainright; a rabies sample from an Arctic fox killed by hunters near Camden Bay; a batch of Arctic parasites—sarcocystis pinnipedi, shaped like crescent moons under the microscope — which were killing seal pups. A dissected brain of polar bear dead of toxoplasmosis, previously a warm-weather disease found in European cats, which had spread north as the Arctic warmed.
But at the heart of the base — the old cracked runway, the garages that housed snowmobiles and cold weather gear, the rusted conveyer systems and hangars — were four rows of military-style Quonset huts that had become a summer campus… roughly thirty huts in all, looking from the outside like dilapidated World War Two — era housing, but inside had been fixed up nicely, and heated by natural gas.
Other than the curved roof, we might have been in a comfortable middle-class home in Minneapolis. Gold-colored pile spread from the entranceway, through a closed foyer and into the kitchenette, past the four-burner stove and refrigerator and across the spacious living room; in which sat a three-cushion couch and leather Barcalounger, a flat-screen TV, landline phones, and four bedrooms grouped around the periphery, three with bunk beds, one with two singles, which Karen and I had pushed together.
Until two weeks ago, when Karen flew in, Eddie and I had shared the hut, staying in separate bedrooms. But Eddie had insisted on moving to a hotel so I could have a “pre-honeymoon.” I’d tried to pay for it. But Eddie had refused.
“Honeymoon gift, Uno,” he’d said. “It’s worth it to me not to have to deal with your grouchiness for two weeks.”
Now I wanted to tell Karen details, try to figure things out, but not in front of Mikael. He saved me the trouble.