As a result, a can of Bud might cost twenty dollars in Barrow. A bottle of vodka was worth hundreds. The Lillienthals carried a thousand dollars of alcohol in their arms.
“Figured we’d all need this,” said Dave, pulling out logo mugs from above our sink; Sandia labs, Woods Hole cup, National Science Foundation glass, leavings of former visitors. No mug said, SPY.
He was a big, round ex-fraternity president at Texas A&M, two years older than his sister, and he was a ferocious eater and dedicated gym rat, with a Johnson City twang. The pudgy features gave him a cherubic air accentuated by the thick, curly hair cut close to his head. The red face said drinker, eventual heart attack, or both. The eyes were merry but the mouth was not. Dave was an engineer by training and his mission was to drill.
Deborah, mixing vodka and tonics, was small, skinny, and had the same facial features, except on her they were squeezed into a narrow face — big blue eyes, slightly bulgy midsection, small mouth but striking cheekbones — and she moved with a sexy walk that drew glances in town. She ran the daily morning phone tree conferences — from their hut — between company copter pilots, Eskimo elders in outlying villages, and headquarters. The elders would alert the company if fishermen or hunters were in an area, to keep copters away that day. The pilots were freelancers out of Anchorage. Longhorn had two seismic ships going back and forth offshore, looking for likely oil finds.
Dave took a long draw of Tito. “We’ve used Clay Qaqulik as a mechanic.”
Deborah’s voice was low, as if the dead could hear and take offense. “It could have been one of us.” She smelled of Shalimar perfume and violets. She wore a moose logo sweater, background cobalt-blue, the animals white, over tight, faded blue jeans. Visitors took their shoes off usually when entering a Quonset hut, so as not to track in dirt or mud. Her socks also had a moose logo. She had small feet.
“Joe, I hear you’re not just a colonel anymore,” Dave said. “Now you’re a gen-u-ine North Slope dep-u-tee, too.”
“Merlin asked me not to talk about what happened.”
Dave made a noise in his throat. “That would make you the only one in town not talking about it.”
“Legal reasons,” I said, accepting a beer, taking a draught. “You know, if there’s a trial.”
Deborah perked up. “Trial? Of who? Isn’t Clay dead?”
“Good beer,” I said.
“I heard they had rashes all over their bodies,” said Deborah. She had a habit of idly raising and lowering one leg like a ballerina when in conversation. Eddie believed she’d taken dance training. She had the posture for it. Eddie also thought she slept with lots of guys, or at least was always seen in town hanging on to different ones. Visiting politicians. VIP visitors. Eskimo leaders. She liked putting herself on display.
Dave said, “Clay Qaqulik. What kind of past does this guy have? He was in the military, right? I mean, people get in trouble elsewhere, and no one asks questions here. Another beer, Joe?”
“No thanks.”
“Purple rashes,” Deborah said, opening the refrigerator. “You got any cheese? Rashes with little bumps all over. Is that true, Joe?”
They were grilling me. They wanted answers. Which made them normal. A knock interrupted their questions and our second visitor walked in — an enemy of the Lillienthals.
Dr. Bruce Friday was a retired professor turned environmentalist from Rutgers University, in New Jersey. He was a sixty-two-year-old ex-researcher of ecosystems who Karen believed had the hots for Deborah. He grew nervous around her, fumbling during arguments with Dave, losing things: his glasses, a book. Karen always speculated, “Something happened between those two. Or he wants it to.”
“Hell of an age difference.”
“Maybe he came on to her, and she shut him down. It’s like he loses control of his thinking when she’s close.”
Bruce was divorced, had lost his wife and two sons twelve years back to his passion for work. The wife had remarried. The boys were in business school, as if to reject his idealism, and never spoke with him anymore. He kept their photos in his hut; cracked, fading reminders of family.
I felt sorry for him, but he seemed at home on the base — a permanent expatriate. “Ecology is a science, not a social movement,” he always said. At Rutgers he’d studied the way that all life-forms in an area— animal, vegetable, and microbial — interact. After retiring he’d signed up with the Arctic Warrior Fund and now studied the demise of polar bears. He gave speeches attacking oil companies, which he blamed for global warming. Usually, when in the same room, the talk grew heated between Bruce and Dave.
Bruce Friday was the oldest resident of the base. He’d been coming to Barrow for thirty-two years. These days he lived on a small grant from the Warriors and testified at government hearings about offshore drilling. You can’t clean spilled oil under ice, so don’t allow any drilling! Tonight he just held up his hands and said to Dave, “Truce?”
“Truce,” Dave replied. “Beer?”
“Vodka.”
“Tell me when to stop pouring.”
“Don’t,” said Friday, looking wan and ill. “What a horrible day, Joe. Horrible, horrible day.”
Visibly, he seemed poorly equipped for the rigors of Arctic research, with a hook-shaped body, skin that was the kind of white that erupted with cancers if exposed too long to sun, a mop of chestnut hair, more boyish than donnish, and round wire-framed out-of-date glasses, that enlarged his gray eyes and gave him a permanently startled air.
But his appearance was misleading. Dr. Friday spent weeks on the ice alone, seeking bears and measuring snowmelt. He was an expert snowmobiler. He routinely went out solo to the bone pile, to gather polar bear hair, DNA. One time, I’d heard, he’d camped out on pack ice, and in the middle of the night it broke off and floated into the Chukchi. Rescued four days later by copter, the pilots found him dozing in a parka, the bones of an eaten fish beside him — and a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce.
Friday got me in a corner, pumped me with questions.
“Do you think Merlin capable of figuring this out?”
“He’s a good policeman.”
“I can’t believe that replacement dispatcher spread the story. If someone poisoned their water, the guilty person could just leave town, run away!”
“You heard about the water, too?”
“I heard it at the research center. I heard it at the Mexican restaurant. I heard it when I gave Luther Oz’s sled dogs a run this afternoon.”
Eddie should be here by now.
Bruce Friday went over to talk to Dave and Deborah. I noticed, as he got close to Deborah, that the liquid topping his glass began to shake. Deborah held Bruce’s wrist, steadying it.
Where’s Eddie? He should be here by now.
Without knocking, the diamond hunter walked in next.
Calvin Derochers came from Arkansas, the only place in the U.S. where commercial diamonds are found. He was a home-educated geologist who insisted that, as in Arctic Canada, a huge cache lay somewhere beneath Alaska’s North Slope.
“Canada’s pulling out billions,” Calvin always said. “I aim to find those kimberlite pipes.”
His family had been slaves two hundred years ago; sharecroppers after that, then chicken-factory assembly-line workers. He was a short, powerful man, fullback more than cyclist, clothing bought secondhand, to save money for his project, and through sheer diligence he’d raised funding from a Chicago hedge fund — talked his way into their president’s office — to pay for the rental hut, a copter pilot, geology supplies, and gear. But his time and money were rapidly running out as autumn began. He’d not yet found any evidence of what he sought.