I stared at it. Mirrors…
Something about mirrors?
I’ve seen death on battlefields, and experienced the violent deaths of friends, but even after many years of service I’d never witnessed anything up close approaching this level of violence on an American civilian family. The carnage mocked the normal setting: the set table, three places for dinner, plastic fiesta-style plates, three plastic tumblers with bowhead whale logos, the massive mammals etched in black on the sides.
I saw a four-burner stove in the corner, attached by hose to a propane canister on the floor. There was a larger tank outside for heat even in summers, when temperatures could drop into the twenties this far north. The cabin was not insulated enough to be used by researchers in winter. That was when most scientists, along with birds and whales, migrated south.
Gas leak? What are the symptoms of a gas leak? Light-headedness, yeah. Blurred vision. Paranoia? I don’t think so. Mold? Is there mold here?
“Four people. But only three settings,” Eddie said.
“Meaning, Dr. Holmes?”
“An argument? A grudge? Three against one over something that set Clay off.”
“She called before that. She never said Clay was the issue.”
The camp emitted the stillness of a battlefield when the death-dealing is done. Gradually normal sounds returned to the world. I heard the hiss of wind outside, and the vague attentive scratch of a hail pellet at the window. I heard the creak of Eddie, kneeling, Ziploc bag out, rubber gloves on, beside Clay Qaqulik. I heard a half dozen harsh, grating barks from that owl outside. One… two… three in a row… like it was counting bodies.
Four… Like the animal was mourning.
Six. Predicting more?
Deputy Luther Oz’s voice reached us from outside.
“Chief. Over here! Four-wheeler tracks! Someone else was here!”
Luther Oz started up an ATV and headed out onto the tundra to try to follow the tracks. Deputy Steve Rice strung yellow crime-scene tape, pounded steel stakes into the ground, and wrapped the camp perimeter. It struck me as ridiculous. What would the tape keep away? Wolves?
Merlin and his men picked up shell casings, dusted the cabin for fingerprints, and snapped photos of the bodies. Our collective attempts to control disaster are never ending. In South Sudan once, where Eddie and I searched for hidden labs and Ebola, we spent a week tending Dinka tribesmen wounded in the region’s war with the Sudanese government. We were in a mud-and-wattle hospital near a swamp; no electricity, cots for beds, dank walls lined with silent patients — rebel fighters — awaiting donated prosthetics: artificial arms and legs made thousands of miles away.
Someone from the Red Cross had nailed a poster to the wall above the men waiting their turn to be fitted. RULES OF WAR, it announced to the amputees hobbling on rag-wrapped crutches around a packed earth floor.
You must treat prisoners humanely.
You must identify yourself when taking a prisoner.
Eddie had laughed harshly. “‘Rules’?”
There are no rules, of course, and now in this camp I knew that the tundra had mocked similar efforts over the centuries to apply “RULES” to disaster… British sailors walking off from an ice-trapped ship, heading south in a blizzard, in marching order, as if that would save their lives. Missionaries on their knees, sick with influenza, faces raised to heaven, as if prayers were contracts, bargains, rules. Here, Marine doctors Joe Rush and Eddie Nakamura sought order with tweezers — collecting hair, skin, and brain matter.
I noticed Merlin in the doorway, staring at the dead man on the floor. His voice sounded broken. “Clay and I grew up together. Except for his time in the Army, I saw him almost every day. He brings presents to my kids every Sunday.”
“I’m sorry, Merlin.”
“He was on my whaling crew. My dad hazed him good when we both were kids and went out with the hunters for the first time. The men gave us the jobs for the eight-year-olds. Clay took all their shit with a smile.”
Merlin stepped closer, grief stricken. But he was also too good a policeman to be distracted from his job.
He said, looking directly into my eyes, “You’ve been asking elders about new diseases, Joe.”
He stood only a foot from the body.
He said, “You were in Point Hope asking about flu and rashes. In Nuvvuak, you asked details of Jenny Aniruq’s son’s fever. You and Major Nakamura went to Point Lay to take samples of the dead walruses on the beaches, after that airplane spooked them and they crushed pups in the stampede. And the bears. Why are you really here?”
I lied, followed orders. “We’re with the Coast Guard, helping out on their annual med-visits. Of course we ask questions. That’s what doctors do, Merlin.”
He was too smart to buy it. As borough police chief, Merlin’s area of responsibility was a region the size of Michigan. He had more than a hundred officers answering to him; as well as detectives, drug experts, liaisons with federal agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and FBI. His eyes were almond-shaped dark brown with green-flecked irises. His complexion was olive. His shoulders were broad and powerful, as befitted a harpooner, able to throw a heavy missile far enough and accurately enough to penetrate the thick skin of a forty-ton bowhead whale. His hair was a short, thick brown, balding at both sides of his forehead, with gray streaks in back. His voice was soft but not unforgiving. I’d found during my brief time here that even the elders in Barrow, seventy and eighty years old, were often powerful men. During a health survey at the old folks’ home, I’d shaken hands with one eighty-one-year-old ex — caribou hunter, holding back pressure so as not to damage his delicate bones. He’d looked offended. Suddenly the strength in him was enormous. He’d squeezed my hand like a Marine in a bar contest. He’d bellowed out, with great satisfaction, “Colonel, you are WEAK!”
Merlin Toovik demanded, “You have something to tell me, Colonel? Tell me, right now.”
Well! Two roads stretched ahead and neither offered positive outcomes.
There had been no written language on the North Slope until a hundred years ago, and even in my brief time here I’d found that words were regarded as contracts. Tell someone you’ll call them next week, and you better do it. Make an offer, you better keep it. The Iñupiats have stopped billion-dollar offshore oil projects in court when they believed that the oil companies lied to them. They shut down the Atomic Energy Commission when the commission lied at Point Hope. They pay top lobbyists in Washington to safeguard their interests in that cesspool of backstabbing arts.
You don’t get two chances here if you lie.
Barrow, the little town eighty miles to our north — with its small houses and rural, tilting telephone poles and gravel roads and roller-skating rink — was run by leaders more sophisticated than half the VIPs I met at Washington cocktail parties. They spoke more quietly. They were more self-effacing. They wore Levi’s and anoraks and sealskin boots. Yet, they were just as quick and brutal — when necessary — in getting things done.
I felt Eddie watching me sideways, wondering what I would say. And probably thinking that I’d already disobeyed orders twice in the last few hours, first when I’d come along on the trip, then when I’d allowed us to be officially deputized, which I’m sure had unpleasant legal consequences back in Washington.
I told Merlin Toovik our true mission.
His voice remained soft afterward, but there was no hiding the accusation. “You’re here to check consequences from germ experiments and dumped radioactivity?”