At first I thought the chirping sound was coming from Karen’s parka. Then I realized it was my phone and, seeing it was Eddie’s number, calling, clicked it on.
“Colonel Rush?”
It wasn’t Eddie but I recognized the musical intonations of Dr. Ranjay Sengupta, who had released the bodies for a flight home tomorrow morning. They’d be leaving at 9 A.M.
“What is it?” I asked, assuming it was one more piece of nonstop North Slope or State of Alaska paperwork.
“I think you had better come to the hospital. I am afraid that we have another case,” Dr. Ranjay Sengupta replied.
EIGHT
It was hard to think about business when all he could imagine was sex.
George Carling—38, respected whaling captain, board member of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, coach of the Alaska state championship high school wrestling team, and descendant of a Danish-born whaler — and his Iñupiat wife sat at the long conference table on the third floor of the ASRC headquarters, trying to concentrate on the oil people’s words, but his heart was roaring with anticipation, his throat was dry with lust.
Longhorn Oil’s Dave Lillienthal, smiling at the dozen assembled board of directors, including George, said, “Believe me, our drilling will be done under the safest specifications. We will stop work when you are whaling, to avoid driving bowheads away.”
Unlike Native Americans in the lower forty-eight, Alaska’s Eskimos had not been given reservations by the federal government, in exchange for signing away rights to land. They got money, and established corporations under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Each tribe’s corporation had authority over their land. Any Iñupiat was an automatic shareholder, and received tax-free dividend checks annually. The ASRC, George’s corporation, owned twenty million acres on Alaska’s North Slope.
Dave Lillienthal said, “Longhorn North would be grateful if the ASRC supported our pipeline route, in Washington.”
So far this morning the board had approved a bid by a Los Angeles — based Arctic Tours Company to acquire a fifty-year lease for an eco lodge on sixteen thousand acres of land south of Barrow, to bring in tourists. They’d gone thumbs-down on an application by a Minnesota-based copper mining company to dig a mine to the west, even though the company promised that half their employees would be Iñupiats.
The proposed pipeline route/offshore drilling plan was the main thrust of today’s meeting.
“What can we do to get you to agree?” Dave asked.
Board members were almost all whaling captains, the most-respected leaders in their villages. They were responsible for the lives of their crews, usually relatives and friends. They brought food to their people, and so, in meetings like this, they wore two hats. As board members, they wanted to expand business. As whaling captains, they wanted protection for the hunt. In fact, their captains organization, the Alaska State Whaling Commission, paid lawyers in Washington, D.C., who filed lawsuits against oil companies when plans conflicted with hunting times.
Merlin Toovik, sitting beside George, said, “Put your promises on paper, Dave. That would help.”
Dave sighed, nodded as if that was a good idea, but then said, “That’s complicated. That sets a precedent. But we promise. You know our promise is always good.”
It was little Deborah on whom George concentrated, his mouth dry, and heartbeat strong, as he anticipated the pleasure in store for him across the street, up in the Wells Fargo Bank building when this meeting was over. George imagining that small dancer’s body naked, lying on the Naugahyde couch by the window; George remembering the feel of those slim arms around his neck, and those soft fingers gliding down, the dirty things that she whispered; George in wonder at the excessive physical zeal of which he’d been capable during the last three days, even with his wife at the hotel. Like he’d become twenty years old again. George shook his head in wonder. He and Agatha must have done it four times last night… and STILL this ceaseless urge made him hard right now, made it difficult to hear the mélange of babble from the brother, as he delivered the same promises that captains had heard from so many corporations over the years.
“There will be many jobs for local people.”
George read the lips of one of the Point Hope captains, a young man, and angry. Lies.
But Point Hope people were always angry. They never trusted outsiders and George could not blame them. First they’d been decimated by diseases that the whalers carried in the 1800s. Then the U.S. government had tried to blow up the village with atomics, during Project Chariot, and government scientists had dumped cesium in nearby water.
“I’m sure none of you want,” Dave Lillienthal said, looking around, palms out, “to go back to pre-oil days, when you chopped ice for drinking water.”
The sister actually thought she could influence his vote by sleeping with him. George found this amusing. But he was not going to turn down excellent sex.
George tried to take notes but his fingers began going numb again, damnit, he was losing feeling at the endings. The tingling and deadness had come in waves over the past two days, starting a day after he’d arrived in Barrow. In fact, when he’d walked into this room an hour ago, he’d almost fallen into the chair, because his right leg didn’t work right. Fortunately no one had noticed.
I must be getting a flu, he thought.
George caught sight of his reflection in the window and it disgusted him; the clean-shaven squarish face, bullet head, and fleshy cheeks on a trunk of a neck, a worker’s face, strong, the same as always and yet it seemed wrong to him, ugly, something he did not want to look at.
Like this morning, at the hotel, after the post-sex shower… First the water had felt slimy, like there were chemicals in it, and then his reflection in the bathroom mirror was so disturbing that’d he’d draped a towel over it to shut the sight of himself off.
Weird. Well, he’d gotten flus before. Whatever this stupid thing was, it would go away.
Dave Lillienthal got his attention again, holding up the TV clicker, gesturing at the teleconference screen in front of the room, by the coffee and ham and turkey sandwiches. He said, “Our engineers in Houston want to show you our new drill machinery, safer and more efficient than before.”
George distracted, catching Deborah’s wink. George thinking, I can’t believe I’m so hard!
Last night he had been incredible, insatiable, better than when he was courting Agatha, better than his honeymoon or even anything he’d imagined when he was a teenager watching James Bond. He’d done it with Agatha again and again and left her gasping, both of them gloriously sore, and STILL he’d seen her with the towel this morning, gotten aroused and gone at it again.
And now he could not stop glancing at Deborah, the way her hair fell around her face… the way her slender fingers caressed a pen. He smelled her Shalimar fragrance over the scents of coffee, Paco Rabanne from Dave, leather chair cleaner, and muktuk. Someone had it in a pocket, or breathed it.
And now, in his head, pain, growing… Boom… Boom… Boom!
“As you know,” Dave said, through George’s headache, as if he needed to remind them of what they all never forgot, “in the days of your grandparents, the Iñupiats had no plumbing. In the Indian Affairs schools children cried themselves to sleep at night. The Iñupiat language was banned in class.”