When the song was almost over, when she knew I’d be walking off in a moment, she leaned close, breath warm in my ear. “Blame it on Greenpeace,” she said.
“You don’t strike me as a victim, Ms. Swann.”
“Because I’m good-looking? Your oil rig has an accident? Your whaling ship spills oil? Blame Greenpeace!”
“Are we going to talk or just rant?”
“Fire away, mi colonel! Batteries three and six aimed at the Rainbow Warrior!”
It was like starting a conversation in the middle; no preliminaries. Well, two could do this. She did not seem like someone who would respond to any subtle strategy except to mock it, and she was clearly clever enough to recognize any roundabout approach.
I said, “Okay, straight out. You were seen tampering with the Harmon’s water.”
She stopped dancing. Hands on slim hips. Then she smiled. “Good for you! Who exactly saw me?”
“We have a record of it.”
Lips curling. “Uh-huh. A camera, you’re saying?”
“Audio recording,” I said. Her perfume was getting to me.
“Oh, audio! Someone heard me tamper with water. I wonder! What do you hear when that happens, gurgling? And who is this ‘we’ anyway? The Marines?”
“The police, Tilda.”
“I’m a little confused. Which one are you?”
“I’m helping them out,” I said.
“Are you sure?” She resumed dancing, rotated her hips like a Brazilian at Ipanema. The top and bottom parts moved in entirely different rhythms. She said, “What are you really doing here anyway? In Barrow?”
“Dancing.”
“Touché. Oh, too bad, the music stopped. So tell me, Colonel. Just what did you guys do to them?”
“Excuse me?”
From our table where Karen watched, and I could feel her eyes on us, we probably looked like a couple caught up in intimate conversation. Tilda Swann’s eyes sparked with passion, and her fragrance overcame the mélange of sawdust, sweat, and bad electronics that seemed a permanent background in the old rink. The finger that poked me in the chest was slender. The wrist was encircled by a single silvery bracelet. Her rage, unfeigned, blotched her angular cheeks with color.
“What was it, Colonel? What did you guys do on the tundra when nobody was looking? What was tested? A gas?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Anthrax? Radiation?? Give me a break, jarhead. Two detectives show up at my hotel this afternoon and want to know if I was anywhere near the warehouse that held water for the Harmons? It’s not just me, you know, that you’re accusing. My organization is used to being attacked.”
“No one accused you. You’ve got the wrong idea.”
“Really!” The finger poked me again. The floor had cleared but we remained in front of the stage, face-to-face. I grabbed her wrist to stop the poking. She didn’t even look down at her hand. People stared at us. She was fury incarnate, that blown-up passion represented one of the finest acting jobs I’ve ever encountered, or the best ambush.
She said, softly, “I want you to know that I called Washington. We have people there and in London and every fucking capital in the world. And, Colonel, those people are making inquiries. Why are two Marine officers here, asking about bad water? Why are local detectives in Alaska co-opted into the goddamn U.S. military machine?”
“How do you know what I’ve been doing?”
“How do I know? Because when someone starts asking about me, I ask about them, too. That’s how I know!”
“And how well did you know the Harmons?”
“Little accident? Little gas leak? Planning on blaming Greenpeace? It won’t work. I’ll find out what you did.”
We went back to the table, where Karen paid more attention to Mikael than before, like I wasn’t there. Screw you, Joe, for ignoring me. Tilda pulled up a chair between me and Eddie. Karen smiled dazzlingly and asked Mikael to dance. She flashed me a look when she stood up. Not rage. Just a kind of raw intensity. Karen looking from Tilda to me, sensing more than just antagonism. The whole scene one of crazy feminine misinterpretation. Planet of the women. Planet of miscommunication. Planet of trouble for Joe Rush.
“I didn’t touch their water, Colonel. I didn’t even know them. But if you’re thinking that somebody tampered with supplies, why not talk to those two perverts from Texas, brother and sister, my ass. Why not grill the pilots and mechanics. No. Gotta be Greenpeace. You know why people always think it’s Greenpeace?”
“Why?”
“We’re convenient targets.”
Eddie said, “I thought it’s because you always claim the credit!”
Karen was back and she’d had enough. “Joe, let’s go home.”
If I thought it was cold inside, that was nothing compared to what happened when we stepped outside, and into the small, streetlamp-lit parking lot. We were on another planet. Merlin had been right. In the time between my entrance here and my departure, winter had arrived. The temperature had plunged. The season had crashed down with all the swiftness of an avalanche in the Rockies.
Everything was the same, but different. The night air was brittle. Our breath had steamed out before but now it shot away in small, white puffs. Even Karen, mad as she was, stopped dead and looked outward…
I had the sense of the horizon contracting, the planet shrinking, the sky losing its third dimension: depth. Altitude sucked down, gravity grown monstrous. Distance seemed eradicated and the scale of the place shrank. There was a drawing-in feeling, a sense of reduced possibility. There was, in the air, a palpable promise of isolation.
Take care of yourself. Winter is back.
I shivered as the air knifed through my parka. The stars blinked, as if startled, then cloud cover smothered them up. The moon went from a low orb to a suggestion. Breathing seemed like something we needed to plan. The smell had altered, too, the briny ocean tinge was gone, as was the peaty wet mud and decayed floral essence of autumn tundra. Now an almost sterile frigidity had replaced it.
And the rhythmic background shoosh of that vast sea across the road — as we rode silently home — went from liquid to something filled with friction. As if shore was trying to extend, reach out, become tectonic.
“I had to talk to her,” I said.
“Of course.”
I did not need this shit. “There’s nothing to apologize for.”
“Oh? Maybe it’s me that needs to do it, you mean?”
We slept in the same bed that night, but as separate planets. We woke the next morning and said we were sorry and the argument had been stupid. We made love. We made up.
Outside, there was frost on the window. Outside, the sky had a sucked out, ominous cast. Inside, we made coffee and cooked our breakfast but the residue of something distasteful remained in the hut. I was glad when Eddie arrived to pick me up, for us to head over to the lab, to check the samples. I was glad to get away from Karen, I had to admit. The truck passed the Harmon hut, where the lights were off. It passed the oil hut and Bruce Friday’s hut and the hut where Kelley’s friend lived, where lights glowed.
Goddamn Tilda Swann!
We took the curving half-mile road that linked the huts to the new twenty-five million dollar Arctic Research Center where we had our lab, and planned to redo Sengupta’s toxic tests just to be sure. Eddie said, “Uno, can I just say one thing?”
“No.”