The black man who advanced into the room in an Air Force flight suit had short gray hair and very straight posture and a stern voice, although his face looked friendly, as did his copper-colored eyes, catching overhead light. The rescue squad office was empty. It was large and lit well and broken into partitioned-off cubicles for the pilots, and a side office for the head of the department.
Just now the pilots were out, one on a rescue mission to pick up a hunter who had broken his leg two hundred miles inland, at a fishing camp; one to ferry a couple of electrical maintenance men three hundred miles west to Point Hope, on the coast, so they could fix that village’s electrical generator.
The boys had been told by Seth’s uncle, Drew, who ran the rescue squad, that they could hang out here and listen to the emergency radio. If they heard someone calling for aid — maybe the pregnant lady with “complications” in Atqasuk, maybe a fisherman whose engine had died at sea, maybe someone with appendicitis at a hunting camp — they were to call Drew on his cell phone, at the AC Value Center, the big supermarket, where he’d gone to the pickup counter for fried chicken and cheeseburgers and fries and fried onions and a liter of Mountain Dew soda for dinner for them all.
Drew had a radio in his Outback, but while shopping, even for a few minutes, he preferred to have someone at the office, listening in case something went wrong.
Uncle Drew had taught Seth to use the radio. Seth was to tell whoever was calling to wait, hold on, while he contacted Uncle Drew.
The boys told the man in the flight suit this, and he just smiled, and shrugged, believing them, and he looked out the window over their shoulders at the jet, and said, “Nice bird, isn’t she?”
“Terrific,” breathed Seth.
“She came in so fast,” Leo said. “Whoooooosh!”
The boys were dressed in mid-weight jackets and T-shirts — New York Giants logo for Seth, Carlsbad Caverns on Leo, and new blue jeans from the AV, and their banana seat bikes were leaning against the hangar outside, not far from where the taxicabs idled during breaks, their Pakistani or Korean drivers chattering away in foreign tongues, waiting for tourists to take to the hotels, or scientists to take up to the research campus.
The boys had had a great summer riding around in broad daylight at all hours of the night, going out to fishing camps, and hunting camps, and now, with autumn coming, they were looking forward to high school football games on the blue Astroturf field by the beach, to ice coming back, and not particularly to schoolwork, especially math lessons.
The man in the flight suit asked if there was coffee anywhere here, and Seth directed him to the big Krups fourteen-cupper by the Zenith TV, where the pilots relaxed on Sundays and watched cable TV football games. The man poured brew into a ceramic mug, stirred in coffee creamer and sugar, and plopped onto the couch. He seemed friendly, but also worried, Leo thought.
Leo said, “Are you the whole crew?”
“Yep.”
“Like, the only one in there?”
“That’s me, son.”
“Where did you come from?”
“Anchorage. Elmendorf.”
“What kind of bombs are inside?”
The man’s head swung up, and for a moment the boys were frightened by the intense look on his face. At first Seth thought he was angry. But then he saw that the question seemed to have aged the man by ten years. There were furrows by the mouth that had not been there earlier. There were wavy lines on the forehead, and the posture, which had been straight and proud, looked more like an elder’s posture, bent.
“Who told you I’m carrying bombs?”
“My uncle said they go inside. He also said the Navy planes have missiles that can sink ships.”
“Yes, harpoons,” the man said in a low voice.
Which got the boys giggling, because “harpoons” were what their fathers, uncles, and elders worked on, in garages and toolsheds and in the Heritage Center, all winter, to use on the bowheads during the spring hunt in May, and the upcoming fall hunt in October. The boys were now old enough to go out to the hunting camps with their uncles, at the edge of the ice, where they’d run errands, be quiet, or be sent home, study the way the men waited for the big whales to appear, the way they’d positioned their sealskin-covered umiaqs — open boats — to be ready when the bowheads showed up, coming from their summer feeding grounds in Canada, heading toward their winter grounds to the west.
The man seemed to understand why the boys were laughing. He smiled. “Oh, right,” he said. “Harpoons.”
Whale hunts were more exciting than fighter planes, but Seth asked the man in the flight suit, “Are you going to blow up bad guys with your bombs?”
And the man in the flight suit looked up at them and sighed. Then he looked at his watch. He seemed to be waiting for something, “orders,” Seth would later insist when he told his friends the story.
The man in the flight suit shook his head and looked sad, just about the saddest man they’d ever seen. He didn’t answer. He stared into space. For a moment he reminded Seth of the scary way his cousin Elliot had looked on the night before he shot himself.
“No, boys, I’m not going to blow up bad guys,” he said in a dead voice. “Not the bad guys at all.”
TWENTY-SIX
Clinton’s fever was dropping.
I stood beside his cot, staring down with hope at the thermometer. There was no doubt about the two-degree change, down from a raging 104 two hours ago, to a dangerous but better 102. Eyes more focused. Chest sounding a trifle clearer. Mucus still clotted and yellow, but the sweat running at a sheen on his broad forehead was not a flood anymore.
“Clinton?”
The eyes were red, exhausted, but did I see a spark of interest there that had previously been absent?
“Don’t land,” he said weakly.
“How do you feel? Any better?”
“I’d be better if you stayed away from Barrow.”
Fevers, of course, wax and wane. The new development could be a temporary abatement. It did not mean he was getting better, and if he was, it did not mean the medicine was responsible. He could be manifesting natural resistance. After all, a majority of the stricken, so far, had recovered. But Janice Cullen took my arm and excitedly pulled me to the next cot in line, this one occupied by a Montana fire control technician, a lean Italian-American from Rhode Island, one of the original sick, who had been gray as death last time I’d come by. The hand-scrawled chart at the foot of the cot read age thirty. Last time I’d checked, he’d looked more like seventy.
Now I saw a spot of color on his cheeks. I watched the chest moving in and out more regularly — still fitful, but an improvement. I hoped it wasn’t just a coincidence.
Cullen whispered, “Everyone in this row is getting better. But, um, only people in this row. No one else.”
I blinked, uncomprehending. “Repeat that, please.”
She nodded. “Nineteen of them, all improving. I don’t understand it either. Why just this row?”
I gazed in puzzlement around our makeshift hospital, the rows of cots, three for the sick, and the other, separated section for quarantined people — the rest of us — who showed no signs of illness yet.