“What was the game?”
“Ah, I married him because he was the life of the party. I divorced him because he never shut up. I married him because he was stylish. I left because he couldn’t stop buying clothes. See? If you’re not prepared to live with both sides of anything, don’t get involved.”
She seemed comfortable in her own skin, seemed to know why she did things. It occurred to me that what I’d taken for bluntness earlier, rudeness, was merely an impatience with saying things in roundabout ways.
“Why submarines?” I asked.
She looked at me sharply, as if wondering whether I’d really asked, Why submarines for a mere woman? But I hadn’t meant it that way, she seemed to know it, and the look subsided as quickly as it had come.
“Because submarines go places where people can’t.”
The ship struck something harder and we bounced off but continued moving. Her face was elfin inside the furred hood. The gloves made her hands huge on the handrail, and melting ice ran in rivulets down wind creases in her cheeks. Her skin was an outdoorswoman’s, abraded by nature. It would age faster than other women’s skin. Her eyes would remain younger. Her posture was an inverted bow, so that she thrust forward into the violence, as if welcoming it, and her answer came as if we’d been chatting like tourists getting to know each other on a pleasant Arctic cruise.
“Submarines,” she said, “reach a different world.”
“And going on the polar expedition? The same?”
“If two things are the same, why do them?” she said.
She kept looking forward, not ignoring me, simply not wanting to miss the view. The ship wallowed in a small open area — a gap in ice, then slugged through a mass of gust-sheared, flat-topped waves, and plowed into a new floe. But the ice was getting thicker and was clinging to us now.
I looked down. Clumped ice covered every inch of my parka, a coating of gray rubbly slush.
“If you never do anything twice,” I said, “you must get bored with people.”
She peered out through ice-rimmed lashes. I’d been overt, asking that personal question. I was surprised I’d said it, even thought it. I’d not launched into this sort of stumbling, adolescent probing session since I’d met my wife. Some tough Marine you are, I thought.
“Colonel, my father was a history professor. My mother was an engineering professor. All they did was talk. Their friends, also academics. We’d sit at the dinner tables, or in backyards, at parties, and they’d talk and drink and talk and eat. They talked about fascinating places and never went there. They talked about policies and never voted. They made the world outside seem exciting and made me want to do the things they feared, and see places they avoided. For a long time I thought they were scared, and I mocked them. But I just didn’t understand them. One time, I was eighteen, having an argument with my mother, I yelled, You never do anything! You just talk! And she smiled, patted me on the head, and said, But, darling, we like to talk. You’re different. Do things. It’s who you are.”
It was a funny sort of talk to be having in a blizzard. It was the sort of talk you have with a girl at a small restaurant table, with a candle burning between you, with an open bottle of chardonnay. She seemed just at home with herself in a sixty-mile wind as in a restaurant.
“Sounds like you had good parents,” I said.
“I didn’t answer you just to make a chat, Colonel. I answered because now I get to ask you one,” she said.
“Oh?”
“The Marines call you ‘Killer Joe.’ Why?”
I never knew it possible to feel so much heat in a blizzard. They say that Scotch whiskey will warm a man, but it’s nothing compared to the blast I felt at that moment from my face to my toes. She explained that she’d overheard the Marines talking in the mess, at a table behind her. I’d heard the nickname at Quantico: Killer Joe.
Her eyes turned full on me now, and through the flakes hissing between us, I saw the keen glow of scientific curiosity. For a moment I’d forgotten who I was, and why I no longer deserved things that I’d once thought a basic human right. I’d been wrong to talk with her about anything except the submarine Montana. I deserved this.
The coldness in my voice startled even me. “Why didn’t you just ask the Marines what they meant?”
“I don’t like gossip. If you have a question, either ask the person directly or shut up,” she said.
“Marine nicknames are hard to figure out,” I said.
“Meaning you don’t know why they call you that name? Or that you’re glad the answer isn’t obvious?”
What was I seeing in her face? Amusement at my discomfort? Challenge to the mission leader? Rampant, directionless curiosity that never stopped?
“Meaning that we all have to live with who we are.”
The answer seemed to surprise her. She studied me. “Fair enough, and who you are,” she said, “is the man in charge when we get off the ship, out there,” she said, indicating the storm with a wave, “even though you’re not the one with the most polar experience. So you’re not the only one who has to live with you, Killer Joe.”
She looked like a slush statue, eyebrows white, hood rimmed with white, shoulders coated, breath white.
I retorted, “That seems like a valid reason to ask the Marines. Why come to me?”
“So that’s your answer?” She didn’t seem angered. It was like anything I said provided information. She peered into the microscope. I was the specimen on the slide.
“Yes, that’s it,” I said.
I left Karen Vleska at the prow of the ship, and later, an hour afterward, saw from the bridge that she was still there, a lone human figurehead, her face forward into the elements, the fierce snow blowing around her, as if all else in the world was gone.
Time crawled by. The radio beacon flickered on and off…
Ninety-two miles separated us from the Montana…
Seventy-four miles…
Satellite communication remained blocked, so there was no way to know if the Chinese icebreaker was ahead of us.
DeBlieu announced to the crew the truth about the crippled Montana. There was no point keeping the rescue quiet anymore. He told them — as they stopped work, as they stared at intercom boxes — that we were in a race to save fellow sailors, but he gave the impression that the race was only against time. He did not mention any Chinese icebreakers or submarines. He did not mention potential Russian movement in the region.
Thirty-two miles…
The wind was now audible, even when inside the ship, in those rare moments when we didn’t hear ice. It had thickened and both engines ran at full power — probably damaging them, DeBlieu said — and we were like a steel bronco smashing, pushing, nudging, and backing and ramming our way north. In the stairwells we needed to hold railings, moving between decks. During sleep periods the ice clawed and screamed at us on the other side of the hull. I lay in my bunk. I could not sleep. I stared at the mass of wires and vents bouncing and quivering with each impact of steel against ice.
“Colonel, good news. The floe is moving them toward us at a good three miles an hour. We picked ’em up for a minute. Then they were gone again.”
Twenty-two miles… Crewmen with ice mallets and baseball bats smashed at ice coating the railings.
As DeBlieu had predicted, once the mission was known, his crew doubled the intensity with which they worked. They brought new care to each job, more attention to detail, whether it was serving steaks in the mess, or checking on the Arktos. It was in their posture and faces and the way the crew, in ones and twos — kids to me — came up in the corridors or mess and volunteered to be part of the rescue trip, if we needed help.