Girl in Ice(12)
“So, this weather! Crazy, right?” Pitak called to Wyatt. “Summer forgot Greenland this year.”
“It was bizarre!” Wyatt said. “Two weeks in the fifties, a little melt, then boom, back to this.”
“When this happens,” Pitak said, “when there is no summer, we say the winters are like two dogs fucking.”
Wyatt smiled as he balanced a crate of eggs on a wooden box of fresh fruit. “Thanks for that, Pitak.”
He raised his gloved hands as if trying to erase his words. “Sorry, ladies.”
Nora laughed. “We’ve heard the word before.”
Pitak turned back to Wyatt, his face serious. “The girl is okay?”
Wyatt nodded. “My friend Val here’s going to help us out with her.”
“She a doctor? From America?”
“Sort of,” Wyatt said, clearly interested in changing the subject. He sidled up to Pitak. “So, did you get them?”
“Oh, man, I almost forgot.” Pitak hopped back up into the cabin of the plane. Grinning, he tossed Wyatt a plastic bag tied at the top. Wyatt caught it and tore at the sack, cursing the knot. Three avocados, perhaps the only green objects in hundreds of miles, fell onto his orange boots, rolling a yard or so across the ice.
Wyatt dove down, stuffing them in his pockets as if they were bricks of heroin and we were the DEA. “Damn it, Pitak,” he said, laughing, “I owe you my life, man. My fucking life.”
Smiling, the pilot climbed back into the plane. “Eat them slowly, friend. See you in seven weeks.”
Seven weeks.
Wyatt, Jeanne, Nora, and Raj headed toward the bleak buildings, all of them banana yellow, doors painted orange, like children’s toys dropped in a sea of white. Andy had told me the bright colors made the buildings easier to spot during a blizzard. I wondered which orange door he’d come out of that terribly cold night just five months ago. Would we be walking through it with all the gear, talking and laughing and getting to know one another just yards from where he had lain his head for the very last time? Tripping across the hallowed ground where he’d taken his last breath, hopefully past all pain? Maybe he was at peace; how could I know? Maybe he was in ecstasy that he’d finally taken the step he’d been mulling for so long, drifting off where none of us who loved him wanted him to go.
The wind froze tears to my cheeks; I leaned into it and headed toward the blur of yellow and orange and the sound of human voices.
five
Wyatt cracked open the door, motioning for me to hurry up, so I slipped in behind everyone else. For a minute or two we all crowded together awkwardly in the drab hallway, shedding our parkas and stomping the snow off our boots as we coughed the dry, cold air from our lungs.
Powerfully built through the shoulders and arms and well over six feet, Wyatt towered over all of us, but his gait—a tendency to walk along the outer edges of his feet—brought an odd delicacy to how he entered a room. According to Andy, most of the little toes on each foot had been lost to frostbite during an assignment manning a weather station in Antarctica. Still, he wore the ruggedly handsome face of a man who spent most of his six decades outside; he was bearded, black hair salted with white, dark eyes under heavy brows, a strong chin, and a good set of teeth.
“Let me give you the nickel tour so you can settle in,” he said, ushering us past a wall covered with hooks that held axes, knives, rope, and a couple of rifles. We hesitated at the first room on the right, the largest in the building. “This is where I try to get work done.” He gestured at one corner, where a few old Macs as well as a sleek new PC battled for space on a long table strewn with files and papers. Metal cabinets flanked another beat-up wooden table crowded with microscopes, Bunsen burners, and test tubes. The room’s one long picture window looked out over the lapis water of an inlet packed with drift ice as tall as ships.
“And this is where we chill,” he said, half-heartedly picking up some old magazines—Journal of Glaciology, National Geographic, Scientific American—and arranging them in a pile. A chocolate-brown L-shaped couch so pummeled by time it looked almost comfortable took up most of the rest of the room. In the air: onions, sweat, chicken soup, and a sulfuric smell—formaldehyde? I couldn’t place it. Above us, tube-shaped fluorescent lights buzzed and snapped. An ancient television slouched under a well-used dartboard, its rabbit ears broken off. A plastic bowl of Cheez-Its teetered on the TV stand next to a half-eaten vanilla Hostess cupcake and an empty Wild Turkey bottle. So, there was alcohol here: Thank God for that. The floors were covered with cheap rugs, one over the other, the walls a noxious green.
“You’ve been here how long, Wyatt, a year?” Raj asked.
“Closer to two.” He turned toward the hall. “Let’s keep our voices down. The girl is sleeping.”
We all nodded and followed along behind him like ducklings, except for Jeanne, who clomped off to the kitchen, its floor-to-ceiling open shelves crammed with nuts, dried fruits, canned goods, all manner of grains and flours as well as a stunning cornucopia of junk food. Wyatt’s room was first: dark paneling, bed unmade, books, notebooks, papers, and magazines in teetering piles.
He knelt down. Peered at a pure white arctic mouse in a wire cage. “Here’s a guy you all need to meet. This is Odin.”
“Like the Norse god?” Raj said.