A captain from Wainright, and one from St. Lawrence Island, both more than seventy years old, nodded, remembering.
Dave said, “It wasn’t until you taxed oil that you took control of your own destiny. But if you shut us down, if offshore fails, you go back to the past.”
The board thanked the Lillienthals and asked to discuss this in private, and the brother and sister left. They’d paid for the coffee and sandwiches; turkey on wheat, ham on rye, bacon cheeseburgers from Northern Lights Café.
George’s headache was worse now, so bad that he forgot the sex, as the board argued about offshore drilling. Some favored it, because without oil tax money, the borough would go broke and without oil the ASRC would lose business. Others feared that a spill or explosion would drive away whales. Everyone felt the pull of logic on both ends, but half of the board came down on one side, half on the other.
“George? You’re not saying anything,” Merlin said.
“What?”
“We’re going around the table.”
His hand wouldn’t move. He told them he needed to think more, needed to pray on it. He sat there trying to look normal, caught sight of his face again in the window, and turned his eyes away.
But then the numbness passed as suddenly as it had come, as it had several times already. It would probably go away by itself in the end. The meeting ended without resolution. George waited until he was the last to leave — so no one saw where he went next. He made his way outside and across the street to the Wells Fargo Bank building, and up in the elevator to the fourth floor, where she waited in the tiny, unoccupied Teens Against Drugs suite. Longhorn funded the organization, so she had a key.
“Georgy.”
He could not control himself. He had her gasping. She lay eagerly below him on the couch. His knees pressed into thick carpet and he knelt behind her, ramming. His big hands encircling her tiny dancer’s back, squeezed her small breasts. A coffee table was knocked over. The smell became rank and musky. All of it drove him to new heights.
He looked down, and son of a bitch, HE WAS STILL HARD.
“George, how old did you say you were? Seventeen?”
He made a grunting sound, like an animal.
“A little bird told me that you didn’t vote in there, Georgy. Is there something bothering you about our plan?”
George knew that the “little bird” was thirty-six-year-old Patrick Ahmogak from Nuigsut, who had once worked as a marine mammal spotter on the BP seismic boats out of Prudhoe Bay.
Deborah jerked up on the couch when he answered, looked alarmed and asked, “What did you say?”
“I said I want to think about it.”
“Why are you making those noises?”
“What noises?”
“George, stop that! This isn’t funny! Speak English!”
He stood up. He could see the reflection of a startled, ape-like man, naked in the window, and a small woman, head turned to him, her white body stiff on the sofa. He sat beside her. He tried to explain about the headache. Except she backed off and then stood, quickly gathering up her clothes, looking frightened. He tried to reach out to soothe her, but his hand remained at his side. She was dressing, telling him that no one was supposed to know that they spent time together and she’d see him later and just STOP MAKING THOSE NOISES!
And that was when George realized that he’d only thought he’d been speaking English. Because the sound of barking in the room, the sound that he believed to be coming from outside, from a dog, was actually coming from deep inside his own throat.
George dressing now also, baffled and afraid. He needed to see a doctor. He’d go to the hospital. But he waited for her to leave first, as she always did, to keep their secret, before he took a step toward the door to leave.
He fell down.
His foot would not work. It simply refused to function. He told himself to stand but the command did not reach his limbs, so they did nothing. Instead little shooting pains started up in his ankle, worming their way toward his hip, so that his knee began stinging, too.
He lay on the carpet. He fought away fear. He was a captain and he had faced many dangers worse than this, he thought. There was the time that the engine stopped forty miles out, during a fall hunt, in a storm, and they’d been towing a dead thirty tonner and he’d kept the crew safe until help arrived. And the time on the tundra when he’d been alone, hunting caribou, and the snowmobile engine jammed and he’d walked twenty-nine miles home in a blizzard. So now he lay there and waited for opportunity. He waited for the numbness to pass and he told himself that he would then get up and go to the hospital emergency room.
He could see a clock on the shelf and at length thirty minutes had passed, then forty. His throat seemed to be closing. He was thirsty, REALLY thirsty but at the same time the thought of water in his mouth was repulsive, and he watched the clock and waited for the bad to pass.
George told himself that when he got to the hospital, he would need to tell doctors about the symptoms. He tried to think back and pinpoint when they had begun. He’d been fine four days ago when he and Agatha had boarded the flight from Wainright, his village, to Barrow. He’d felt fine on the plane, and on the first night here, at the potluck at the high school. That was the evening he had gotten into that argument with the woman from Greenpeace, the fiery Brit who was always trying to stop any kind of development on the North Slope.
“Longhorn is lying to you,” she’d said. “Nobody can clean up spilled oil under ice. Why not make this land into a beautiful park for tourists, and make money that way.”
“That’s all we need, thirty thousand tourists a year,” he said. He’d been to several public parks and remembered crowds, trash, blaring radios, buses. George had told the woman, “You want to put us in a snow globe, and shake it, so snow falls on the quaint Iñupiat people. You want us to be the endangered species, not the animals.”
That same evening he’d had a pleasant talk with Alan McDougal, who ran the research base, and told him that caribou herds were growing instead of shrinking even with pipelines crossing part of the borough. Then he and Agatha had stayed up until two, catching up with his cousin, Ned, and his wife and son, Leon Kavik, in Browerville. He’d felt a bit of headache the next morning, and attributed it to the hotel bed, and the odd angle with which his head had lain on the overly soft pillow. And then later that day he’d felt a little fatigue, and Agatha had taken his temperature and told him it was low grade, little cold probably, 99.2, a nuisance, a go-away-fast fever, not worth thinking about.
George tried to move his hand. It worked! He filled with gratefulness. He tried his feet. They slid forward a few inches. He felt as if he had won an Olympic race. He stood. He felt dizzy. His fever had spiked.
Get to the hospital, he thought.