Karen made coffee, poured, stirred in sugar, gave me a mug, black. She was thinking along the same lines. “And plants, Joe. I’ll be back here in a few weeks planning war games. You’re on microbes. Take a walk around base, hell, look at the people in the other huts. Big oil. Diamonds. If Clay was working on something, why focus on the people studying seeds?”
“Unless the Harmons weren’t really studying seeds.” Then I laughed at myself. I let it roll out. I was tired. The most obvious explanation was still the first one. A man had cracked up. I told Karen, “Eddie said it’s time to get out of this work when you start thinking that a fourth grader taking selfies on the Metro is really a midget snapping photos of you.”
She drank coffee, cradled her mug as if it could spread warmth into her heart. “Oh, Joe. They took their child along! That girl! The poor mother. The last few moments, knowing that your child is… I can’t believe they’d drag that girl into something bad, endanger her. Those parents are exactly who they said they were. They had no idea what was going to happen out there!”
“There are toxins that go right to the brain, Karen.”
“And a high suicide rate locally. You know that. And alcohol abuse. Just look at those slogans on trash Dumpsters in town: DON’T DRINK!!”
“Merlin insisted that Clay didn’t drink. And we didn’t find drugs. Tomorrow we’ll do a more thorough search.”
Karen laid her hand on mine, leaned into me. I inhaled her smell of vanilla and fresh shampoo and detergent. More, I inhaled us, our mix, togetherness. Her eyes were the color of ice in a crevasse, a lone tear, a glass chip. I felt like I was home with her anywhere — in a Quonset hut, at sea, on ice — and it was this mixture of warmth and excitement that constituted to me the definition of love.
Her petite body was willowy and athletic, an inverted bow. Her voice was a soft Ozark lilt, but it could be candid to the point of bluntness. Her face was elfin, her movements liquid, her words usually punctuated by flying hands. But her most arresting feature was the silvery hair falling to the pit of her back; not gray, not old, it exuded youthful vibrancy. From the back she looked like a teen. She was thirty-two years old.
Karen worked as an engineer for Electric Boat, specializing in the operation of nuclear submarines. We planned a December wedding, and after that, when I left the unit, a move to Boston, where she would continue working on subs, and train for her upcoming all-women walk along Canada’s northern border. I’d give lectures at the Navy War College in Newport and, with Eddie, start up a private company looking for new pharmaceuticals in the High North. Cures this time.
“Mikael was right about one thing, Joe. You ought to eat.”
We’d planned a romantic evening; frozen sirloin from the AV Center, California burgundy, ten-dollar-a-bunch asparagus, microwaved Sara Lee apple pie, my fave.
We weren’t hungry now.
We went into the bedroom and laid down, said nothing, held hands and, at length, undressed and made love, the slow kind, that goes with grieving, with wanting to feel human connection, to feel life in the face of something bad. Her flat, muscled belly rose and fell and moved in muscular circles. I saw tendons in her thighs bunch and release. I kissed the three-freckle constellation decorating her left hip. Later, with the light fading outside, her hair on my face, I smelled her perfume in the fresh linen. And in the little mirror on the wall — with the sled-dog logo on top, Souvenir of the Arctic—I saw two naked people lying there, lovers framed.
Mirrors. What is it about mirrors?
“Joe, you need to get used to Mikael. He’ll be around in Boston, too, after we move.”
“No problem,” I lied.
“Did you know that he comes from White Russian nobility? His ancestor actually sailed under Vitus Bering and was given a land grant in Alaska by the czar. Not far from here! Thousands of acres.”
“Fascinating man,” I said.
“Mikael said his family would have still owned part of the North Slope if Russia hadn’t sold Alaska to the U.S. That’s so weird, isn’t it? That this town, this place, would be part of Russia? During the Cold War? Russia!”
I asked, more interested, “So the weasel’s family lost their fortune when the communists took over?”
“Don’t call him a weasel. One minute they owned farms, and serfs, and even a small palace in St. Petersburg. The next minute, they’re on the run, barely got out. They moved to Shanghai, and then fled to San Francisco when Mao took over. Mikael goes to Harvard. He doesn’t brag, but he was nominated for an Oscar for his dolphin-killing film.”
If he doesn’t brag, how do you know? I thought.
We both heard the knocking at the door. It was now dark outside.
“Does Mikael still have family in Russia?” I felt her stiffen beside me, rise on one elbow and stare.
“Joe, that was a century ago, okay?” she said, getting up, beautiful, pulling on lace underwear — she wore it even in the Arctic — and black cords, pulling a white turtleneck over her hair.
The knocking came again. She said, “The New York Times called Mikael a ‘visual poet.’”
“He touches you and he’ll be a visual dead guy.”
She giggled. “Short of that, Colonel, play nice. Now let’s see who’s here.”
It wasn’t Mikael but other neighbors, summer friends. What had been planned as a romantic evening turned into a wake, as people drifted in to talk, to remember, to grieve.
Still, I could not help but wonder, thinking of Clay Qaqulik as more than just cook and mechanic: Is someone here not who they seem?
“OhmyGawd! We heard about it in the post office!”
First to arrive were the brother-and-sister team — Dave and Deborah Lillienthal — employed by Longhorn North Oil Company, of Houston, which was expected to bid on undersea leases, up for auction soon by the U.S. Interior Department. Oil companies believed that a mini — Saudi Arabia existed fifty to a hundred miles away from Barrow, and it was expected that Shell, Longhorn, and Conoco would go head-to-head in bidding, trying to obtain rights.
In the interim, each company was conducting last-minute seismic surveys offshore to pinpoint areas in which they had particular interest, and to help them plan how much money to bid — billions would be offered for undersea land.
“The Harmons had such terrible luck all summer,” Deborah said. “First their truck busted up, then their computers went down. Then they had that records snafu, remember, Dave?”
“Right, the closet that caught fire.”
Dave and Deborah ran Longhorn’s exploratory efforts: seismic ships, engineers, and archaeologists employed to select inland pipeline routes, bypassing Eskimo historic sites protected by federal law; water experts to avoid locations where groundwater might be polluted by construction.
In person, they were usually jovial corporate ambassadors; their hut, number six, was the party hut stocked with liquor and tonight they deposited two liter-sized bottles of Tito vodka on the table, along with tomato juice, a semi-fresh lemon, quinine water, and orange juice. Alcohol could not be sold in stores or restaurants in Barrow. It could, however, be flown in, if buyers paid for a liquor tax and air shipment, and bought a city license to drink. They could then pick up bottles at a hut by the airport.