The Winter Over(36)

As she reached the door, she heard Biddi shout her name and she turned. Her friend waved at her to wait or not to go, she wasn’t sure which. Behind her, watching, smiling, then lifting his cup in a mock toast, was Keene.





PART II

MARCH





CHAPTER FIFTEEN


“I haven’t seen you lately. Have you been spending more time down here in the tunnels?”

He nodded.

“It’s quiet down here.”

Another nod.

“Tell me more about your sister.”

“Why?”

“She sounds like an important part of your life.”

He scowled. “Everyone asks about her.”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

He was silent. “What do you want to know?”

“What did she look like?”

Leroy’s breath puffed into tiny clouds. “She was pretty, I suppose. Long hair. Brown eyes. Tall.”

“Brown eyes? Not blue, like yours?”

“Brown,” he said firmly.

“Was she older or younger?”

“Older.”

“And your mother was . . . not present?”

Leroy shook his head and tugged the flaps on his trooper’s hat down. His balaclava covered most of his face. “She left my dad when I was a kid.”

“Was your mother also your sister’s mother?”

A long pause. “No.”

“Your father had a girlfriend.”

“Yes.”

“Is that why your mother left?”

He shrugged. “I guess.”

“And your father didn’t remarry?”

“No.”

“So, neither you nor your sister grew up with a mother?”

He shook his head. A shudder rippled through his shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Leroy. That must have been very hard to understand as a young boy.”

Leroy nodded.

“You only found peace when you ran into the fields. And listened to the wind.”

He started to speak, coughed, tried again. “Yes.”

“When you listened to the wind, did it say things to you?”

Leroy made a sound, then said, “Yes.”

“Did you understand what it said?”

“Yes.”

“The wind blamed you, didn’t it? It told you that you were the reason your mother left. That you were the reason your father was all alone.”

He said nothing.

“What else did it tell you, Leroy? That maybe your sister was as much to blame as you were? That she reminded your mother of your father’s infidelity? That maybe she deserved punishing for hurting your mother, your father, you?”

Leroy leaned against the icy wall.

“Do you sometimes see other women, other girls, who remind you of your sister?”

Leroy shook his head again, but made no answer. His upper body quivered as though pulled by a million tiny strings.

“Ah, well, we’ll leave that for now.” A pause. “It must be difficult. Lying in your bunk at night, the wind constantly talking to you. Is it hard, Leroy?”

“Yes.” He twitched.

“Is that why you come down here, Leroy? To get away from the wind? To stop it from talking to you?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Did you know these tunnels are just the beginning? They keep going far, far under the station. Almost no one ever goes there. You should explore them sometime. Perhaps you could find your own little getaway. Away from the wind.”

Leroy’s shoulders stopped quaking. “Below the base?”

“Yes. You’ll have to be careful. If anyone hears you’ve started spending time down there, they’ll stop you. But if you don’t tell anyone and only go down there when you need to, you can do it. You can start to create your own space, away from the others. Away from the wind.”

Leroy stared for a moment longer, then nodded and shuffled away.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


Cass ran her mittened hand along the ice wall as she moved down the tunnel, wrinkling her nose as she went.

In the supernaturally cold air below Shackleton, smells didn’t actually travel far, but master pressure gauges and the computer monitoring system had suggested something was wrong with the station’s sewer pipes, and it was pretty easy to fool herself into thinking she smelled the accumulated sewage of hundreds of people over decades of use. Or maybe she was being hypersensitive; a busted shitter was a five-alarm mechanical emergency for a small group stuck together for nine months and it was her job to fix it. Or else.

Finding the problem was the challenge. In the early days of Shackleton, leaving sewage at the site where it had been deposited was a distasteful, if necessary, reality. When simple survival was in doubt, no one bothered to haul out months of accumulated excrement. Even as technology improved and year-round residence at the South Pole was established, it was still considered impractical to remove waste, despite the environmental impact.

Hence, the invention of the sewer bulb, which was a fancy word for shit hole. Two dozen of them had been plumbed when the new station had been built but, like anything else involving fluid mechanics and pipes at the bottom of the world, the delivery system sometimes failed.