“You’re doing fine. Tell me more. She said plants are dying out.”
“Yeah, my cousin lives down in Teller? He says a lot of their wild berries are dying off as it gets warmer there. I guess that’s the kind of thing that the Harmons were looking at, I mean, in the lakes.”
I watched him carefully for guilt or anger. A sharp intake of breath. A tell. I saw only pain, but plenty of liars look as innocent as babes.
I don’t know why we discount young love as puppy love, as if the number of years you’ve spent on Earth qualifies you to experience more sincere emotion, as if age is a requirement for love, as if we cynical adults have cornered the market on wisdom about the one thing that too many of us don’t appreciate until too late.
“Kelley told me maybe I could get a scholarship to Prezant College. You know, for my work.”
Leon swept his arm toward the table, and I realized that the artwork was his: the exquisite six-inch-tall walrus-ivory Eskimo woman, sparkly flecks of baleen as eyes; the baleen mask — made of a whale’s mouth filter — a black smooth surface etched with figures of seals; and a small painting that caught my attention most: a lone hunter in a parka, his back to the viewer as he stood on a floating bit of ice, lost at sea, rifle over his shoulder. Sky a claustrophobic gray.
“He looks lonely,” I said.
“He’s in trouble because he did not pay attention. He will float off and die because he made one mistake.”
I found Karen dancing with the filmmaker, and the sight, Mikael trying to get closer to her as she kept her distance, his arms outstretched as if to embrace her, the quiet pleasure on his face, filled me with rage.
It’s your own fault, Joe.
The roller rink was one of Barrow’s big social centers on Friday nights. There were no movie theaters in the city, no bowling alleys, malls, or bars. None of the nexuses of idle leisure marking other towns. There were church meetings and socials. There were potluck dinners at churches. There were high school sports contests or traditional Eskimo dance groups, where Karen had dragged me onto the floor last week for the “everyone invited to join” dance.
When she saw me she waved me onto the floor, smiling. Mikael Grandy turned and his grin faltered but he gamely retreated toward the folding chairs and four-person tables grouped in a semi-circle facing the raised stage. Grandy did not have his camera. The fucker hadn’t even brought it.
Karen put her index finger over my mouth, which meant, Not one word about Mikael. She put her head on my chest. Her arms went around me. The tension began to drain away.
The skating rink was over a half-century old, a vacuum to be filled with weekly performances of the Barrowtones, a half dozen middle-aged amateur rockers: the electric-piano-playing Eskimo Ph.D. geologist from the Iñupiat-owned Arctic Slope Regional Corporation; the guitar-playing Serbian who owned one of the town’s three pizza joints; the long-haired San Francisco — born radio jock; the Arkansas guitarist who played like Stevie Ray Vaughn; and, I saw with surprise, Deputy Luther Oz doing pretty good on the drums.
We danced — so did five other couples — to oldies, “Devil with a Blue Dress” and “The House of the Rising Sun” and we slow moved to “Georgia on My Mind.” I wiped the deaths away. I felt her small, strong body move with mine, her arms warm against the back of my neck. I’m not a good dancer, I’m too stiff, but she made me melt and manage synchronization. When the third dance was over she took my hand and led me to a table. The asshole was sitting there, nursing a can of Pepsi from a machine out in the hall.
“Where’s the camera, Mikael?” I asked, feeling Karen stiffen beside me. My voice had been too rough.
“All work makes a filmmaker lose his edge, Joe.”
“You’re a good dancer.”
“I go to clubs sometimes in Brooklyn,” he said. “Maybe if you and Karen come east, I’ll show you around.”
“I heard your family once owned a big piece of Alaska.”
A shrug. “The czar giveth. Then he selleth to America.”
Karen looked terrific in light brown cords and a cobalt-colored fitted sweater, a gold necklace showing a miniature walrus-ivory snowy owl between her bud breasts. Her hair smelled of coconut shampoo. When she took my hand, Mikael studiously avoided looking in that direction. Eddie Nakamura strode up, glanced down at the filmmaker with displeasure, smiled broadly at Karen, shook his head at me as he sat down, meaning: I can’t find the redhead.
“Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” began playing. About four dozen people had wandered in off the street, a few were sipping from beer cans, more women present than men. The single women often danced together, the single men were usually at tables, watching the women. The dancers’ ages ranged from the twenties to the sixties. Overheard from the adjacent table, during a pause, Alan McDougal, who ran the base, and diamond hunter Calvin DeRochers, talking about the Harmons.
Alan said, “Ted was so determined to finish up this year, despite the accidents. The guy never gave up.”
Calvin said, “We used to sit around for hours poring over the maps of the lakes. Man, ten thousand lakes! Me thinking, Which ones have the diamonds? Him going on about plants and algae… Who cares about that goddamn stuff? Huh?”
The music was free. Someone had fixed up one of those rotating mirror spheres so it threw sparks of bright, multicolored light across the audience and stage. The mood was slow and easy, even when the music was vibrant. The Barrowtones usually played until 2 or 3 A.M.
“Are you looking for me, Colonel?”
The sharp, British-accented voice startled me, coming from close behind me. I turned and looked into a stunningly gorgeous woman’s face, framed by a lioness mane of red hair so close that it almost brushed my head. The eyes were deep aqua, the nose classic, and the teeth as white as in a TV commercial. She seemed to throw off heat. The freckles — a light copper color — were so numerous they seemed more like a tan. The lips glistened. Karen’s shampoo smell mixed suddenly with something stronger: musk and alcohol and tobacco.
“I’m the one looking for you,” corrected Eddie.
“You’re a major. He’s a colonel. He’s the boss,” she said, staring boldly into my eyes. “Want to dance?”
“Have a seat. Join us. Let’s talk.”
“I don’t want to talk. I want to dance.”
It was not a social invitation. I recognized a calculated preemptive strike. Merlin had told me she was a professional agitator. Mikael stared up at the model-quality face with fascination. Eddie looked wary and Karen surprised. If I stood up, if I danced with her, I knew instinctively this would cripple every future argument with Karen limiting time she spent with Mikael Grandy. I’m not the one who walked off with that woman!
I needed to ask questions. I stood up. Tilda Swann reached for my hand. No way, I thought, but followed her out onto the floor anyway; an act which, I knew, constituted a strategic loss on the field of domestic tranquility. No sex for you tonight, Joe!
I tried to ask questions but she had none of it, not at first. She was the kind of dancer who probably got sex-crazed cavemen to kill each other with clubs. She closed her eyes, pretending not to be aware of me, yet her rotating hips managed to stay close, and her arms wove circles in the air… the effect one of abandon, and of consciousness of the eyes upon her. She was trying to irritate and she was succeeding. She was so beautiful that most men in the rink stared. A guitar player hit a bad note. Deputy Luther Oz, on the drums, glared with disapproval. He’d heard Merlin warn me in the chopper to keep to the medical end, leave interviews to the cops.