“Hey, One! What are you going to do about Karen? You told off RoboCop, but truth is, he can yank you, or arrest you, he can stick you in ward seven,” he said, referring to a fourth-floor hallway at an Air Force mental hospital in Nevada. “Or he can do it the bureaucratic way, bust you down, post retirement, wipe away your pension.”
“You’re a bundle of laughs today,” I said. “Anyway, its not like Homza can hear what we say in our hut, right?”
Two days later all the results were in on our tests.
“Nothing.”
There are no funeral homes in barrow. The Iñupiat bury their own dead. A cakewalk held before the burial — the sale of homemade cakes and pies — raises expense money.
The cemetery was a half mile from the airport, a small patch of tundra dotted with disorderly rows of crosses and markers, dwarfed by sky and horizon, rich with wildflowers in summer, but summer was over, and a big yellow borough-auger drilled loudly through thin topsoil, slashing into permafrost, to carve out a resting place for Clay. Four-wheel-drive vehicles circled the cemetery like wagons.
Tomorrow we’d go home.
On our last day in Barrow, Karen stood beside me at the graveside, as Clay’s wife, neighbors and friends remembered him, and a northeast wind whipped away every second word. The chill in the air seemed small beside the frost that had marked our Quonset hut since the dance. Nothing overt. No arguments. But something about my dance with Tilda Swann had set off a red flag inside my fiancée. I didn’t push. She would talk about it when she was ready. The truth was, I’d dreamed of Tilda for two nights running: graphic dreams, sex dreams, pumping bodies. It made me wonder if Karen’s intuition had picked up on even my dreams.
I’d told Karen about our orders shutting her out of things, and she’d shrugged. “No problem, Joe. You retire in a few months anyway.” She’d been more concerned about the deaths we’d come to commemorate.
“Clay was a servant of the borough,” Mayor Rupert Brower was saying. “He was my friend.”
Karen had plunged herself into her prep for her film over the past few days. I’d hit the investigation hard, testing soil samples from the camp, food samples, wood scrapings, victims’ medical records, from here, and home.
We’ve found nothing. And Merlin’s detectives found nothing useful in their interviews, either. No sign of aberrant behavior. No drinking or drugs. No big problems or depression, mood changes, or resentment of the Harmons. Nothing useful on the tip lines. Nothing found at the site.
No speaker uttered the words suicide or murder but even among a people who lived with sudden death — small plane crashes, snowmobiles falling through ice, fishing boats capsizing — what had happened stood out as special tragedy. Merlin Toovik remembered Clay as a skilled hunter. I met Clay’s sobbing wife, a bewildered nephew, an Army buddy from Germany who flew in from Juneau. I looked over the grouped residents of our little Quonset hut community.
The Harmons will be shipped south, but somehow this service is for all the dead, although the earth only receives one on this day.
Calvin DeRochers, the diamond hunter, stood to the side, near fourteen-year-old Deirdre McDougal, who was weeping. I spotted morose Leon Kavik, staring at the ground. Alan McDougal made a speech about how he’d only known Clay for six years, but that Clay had been a kind, smart, generous man.
My eyes roved over the crowd. Dr. Sengupta stood beside Bruce Friday, and wore enough clothing for three people, and still stamped his feet to keep warm.
Mikael Grandy stood alone, camera sweeping right to left, discreetly aimed at Karen, then on me.
But funerals have a way of putting smaller problems in perspective. Karen and I moved closer, until my arm was around her shoulder. By the time we got to the Presbyterian church for the post-funeral singspiration, the warmth I felt was not only from gas heat. It was us. Our argument was over. Whatever had been wrong, I knew, would be okay, at least for a while.
Truth was, our year together had been exciting, but part of that was that we’d lived in different cities. Our periods of togetherness — thus far — had been enhanced by the knowledge that they’d be short and sweet. Oh, we’d talked by phone every day, texted, e-mailed — all the modern substitutes for actual presence — and we’d look forward to the next romantic rendezvous in the Costa Rican mountains, or the white, deserted beaches of North Carolina, or the Broadway play weekend in Manhattan. All great.
But after our meetings, I’d go back to Anchorage. She’d fly back to California.
I told myself now that the mundane parts of our life together had not yet been given a chance to settle in, and turn from boring routine to intimate rhythm, which is what they do when relationships work. Our issues had been big tricky ones; not small, insidious ones. We’d settled on where to live, how to stay in contact when one of us was in the field, how long to hold off on having children. Karen did not want to be an explorer and mother at the same time.
“Once I have a child, I’ll be there one hundred percent,” she’d said.
“I can wait a few years.”
“It will be a challenge, you and me, Joe.”
“You mean, having children?”
“No. I mean, just living. Because one of us will usually be traveling. Because there will always be aspects of our work we can’t discuss. Because we’ll need to get used to the other person… the one you love… being in danger. You with diseases. Me and my long Arctic walks.”
I shook it off. When we gathered up our parkas, I saw her turn and make a hand gesture to Mikael Grandy, who was in a rear pew, and it meant, Not now, not today, go away.
“Let’s take a drive,” she said. “And talk.”
The wind had risen, and snow had fallen last night, so two inches of fresh fall coated the town. It looked more like sand, hard and granular, the way it collected on rooftops and stop signs. Barrow is technically a desert. Little precipitation falls but what does stays there all winter. Plows move it around at night, pushing drifts into piles that, during the day, spread out again.
We wore extra layers, stocking hats, fur-lined gloves, calf-high boots, and wool socks with liners. The ocean had a glaze, stretching to the horizon. Night had fallen with particular sharpness. The stars were bright, a rarity in a place where 90 percent of the time the land sat beneath thick cover of clouds.
When she walked past my truck I said, confused, “I thought you wanted to take a drive.”
A smile. “You’ll see, Marine.”
So! A peace mission. We strolled down empty streets, stopping finally before a two-story home with detached garage, and a warren of chain-link cages cramming the side yard. I heard deep excited barking from many throats.
“Oh, that kind of drive,” I said.
“I took the dogs out earlier this week, when you were at the lab. Luther Oz let Mikael and me borrow them, once he saw me mush. Twelve-dog power. Got my sat phone and trusty GPS. Help me start the engine, Joe.”
The huskies were enormous, shaggy, and more wild than domesticated, each one chained to a small wooden box that served as home. They knew Karen, eyed me but gave up suspicion when they realized we were going running. They leaped and howled with excitement when they saw her pull the wooden sled from beside the garage and lay the harnesses on the snow, in each animal’s place. This was the last dog team in Barrow. The Iñupiats used snowmobiles on the tundra. They were cheaper than dogs and didn’t have to be fed every day. This team was a last vestige of the old Arctic. Hell, Deputy Luther Oz — who raced in the Iditarod each year — spent hours catching more than two hundred fish a week with spread nets just to feed the animals.