In Cold Pursuit vw-1 Read online

  Joe put a hand on his bald spot in mock affrontery. “I beg your pardon.”

  Something near the food lines caught Matt’s attention. He went on point and let out a series of small beep noises, like a machine that was honing in on a target.

  Wilbur said, “You got your forklift stuck in reverse, Matt?”

  “There is a new one!” said Matt jubilantly. “Check her out! And if that’s what a beaker looks like, sign me up.”

  “Where?” said Steve.

  Joe said, “One o’clock high. Blue jeans, white fleece pullover, and oh, my my.”

  All eyes swung toward the approaching woman.

  “Exotic,” said Steve. “Gorgeous. Strong. And built!”

  “What do you think?” asked Wilbur. “She black? Latino? What?”

  “I see some Asian in there, too,” said Joe.

  “And tell me about those cheekbones!” said Steve. “Native American? Hawaiian?”

  “Carries herself like a dancer,” said Dave, sneaking another look.

  Matt swung his attention to his roommate. “I didn’t know you were a poet,” he said.

  “I mean she moves real purty.”

  “I’ll show her how to move,” said Wilbur.

  The woman stopped about fifteen feet away and turned, scanning the crowd. Dave watched her closely out of the corners of his eyes. There was indeed something marvelous about her, but also something sad, almost haunted. The tension in her shoulders made her look uncertain of herself, almost scared.

  Wilbur began to utter inchoate gurgling sounds.

  Right then, Dave wished that he could shoot Wilbur out of the universe like a watermelon seed. This woman needed comfort, not drooling. He began to rise from his chair. He didn’t have a plan, but perhaps he would speak to her, ask if he might be of assistance. But no, she had made her choice and was moving quickly toward a table up at the far end of the room by the windows, where the computer geeks tended to sit. He lowered himself back into his seat.

  “Sitting with the dweebs,” said Steve. “Must be a new techie. Or yeah, a beaker, even.”

  “You think?” said Joe.

  Wilbur let out a theatrical sigh. “Yeah, hang it up, men, she won’t have no time for the likes of us.”

  Dave mapped the gentle curves of her spine as she settled into a chair. When he returned his attention to his own table, Matt was staring at him, observing him frankly. “What?” said Dave, so that only Matt could hear him.

  Matt raised an eyebrow.

  Dave bowed his head and lifted his fork to his mouth, pretending that he noticed or cared what was on it.

  4

  “MIND IF I SIT DOWN?” VALENA ASKED THE PEOPLE AT THE table by the window.

  “Make yourself at home,” said a man wearing a fleece hat that featured a band of fake fur that stood out like a fright wig. The other denizens of the table—two women and another man—continued their conversation.

  Valena settled into a chair and stuck a fork into her eggs.

  “No Belgian waffle?” the man with the hat asked, even before she got the first bite to her lips.

  “Couldn’t wait.” She stuffed the forkful into her mouth and chewed. Relief surged through her body.

  “I’m Peter,” he said.

  “Valena.”

  “Well, if you don’t go back for a waffle, don’t miss Wednesdays. That’s cookie day around here, and you don’t have to wait in line. Where are you from?”

  “Reno.”

  “Cool. What do you do here?”

  “I’m here to study glaciers. How about you?”

  “I’m an energy conservation specialist.”

  “I see. Where are you from?” she inquired, completing the symmetry of the conversation.

  “My storage locker is in Idaho.”

  Valena blinked. This was the first time she had ever met anyone who didn’t think of himself as being from somewhere.

  The man who was sitting to her right said, to no one in particular, “Well, I’m going to go get in line and buy some hooch,” and got up and left. He was replaced by a tiny woman with high cheekbones on a face so heavily tanned that it evoked the original meaning of the adjective. She put one foot on the chair and squatted on it, letting the other leg dangle. “Who are you?” she demanded, leaning a little closer than Valena quite found comfortable. “You’re new. I’m horny as hell.”

  Valena could smell alcohol on her breath. “Does everybody here drink on Sundays?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

  “Oh, hell no. Usually I spend the day skiing. But today I’m real horny. You’re just a kid, so don’t worry. Yeah. You’re just a kid. Are you any fun? Huh?”

  “Don’t mind her,” said Peter. “It’s just her way of saying hello. Love me, love my hormones. Take it easy on her, Cupcake, she just got here.”

  “I like in-your-face,” Cupcake said. “It keeps things fresh.”

  Peter said, “Fresh is what you are, love.”

  Cupcake now leaned even closer to Valena and examined her face with frank interest. “You’re a little bit of everything, ain’t ya?”

  “What do you do here?” Valena said evenly, trying to back her off.

  “I drive heavy equipment. Come for a ride?”

  Valena said, “This is an interesting town. Just like college, only more so.”

  Cupcake said, “Yeah. The food sucks, you get no privacy, but instead of ‘What’s your sign and what’s your major?’ everybody asks, ‘Where are you from, and what do you do here?’ Gets real boring, huh?”

  “Oh, I’m finding the food quite tasty,” Valena said.

  The woman eyed her appreciatively. “You’re good.”

  “Thanks. What did you say your name was?”

  “Muffin.”

  “I thought it was Cupcake.”

  “Okay then, Cupcake.” She moved her gaze pointedly to Valena’s left hand. “No wedding ring.”

  Valena shook her head. “No wedding ring and no dice.”

  “Aw, you’re no fun.”

  Valena began to smile. “Yeah, well.”

  The woman seated across from her said, “I’m Doris.”

  “How do you do, Doris?”

  “About as I please today. The rest of the time I gripe a lot.”

  Valena asked, “Is there something I’m not quite understanding about Sundays in McMurdo?”

  Doris said, “We work nine hours a day, six days a week. On Sunday, we kind of get out of hand.”

  Another man came to the table, plopped down in the empty seat to the right of Doris, draped an arm around her, and fixed a grin on Valena. “Who are you?” he inquired.

  Cupcake said, “This is Valena from Reno. Sounds like a song.”

  The man began to make up a tune, and sang, “Va-le-na from Re-no, she really knew her ice, she was so very nice, that Va-le-e-e-na… from… Re-e-e-no!”

  Then he held out a hand. Valena took it. He bent forward and rubbed his cheek to it as if it were a cat. He began to purr.

  Trying to pull her hand away without being too abrupt, Valena reflexively asked one of the two standard questions. “What do you do here?”

  “I do Doris,” he said, giving her a salacious grin. “Life is good.”

  Valena yanked her hand away.

  Doris said, “She needs that hand to eat with, sweetie. And she’s a grantee. Treat her nice. What did you say you did, Valena?”

  “Ice. Stable isotopes.”

  “Whatever,” the man said. “Beakers. Cut ‘em some slack and they talk weird at ya.” His grin moved from salacious to soupy.

  Peter said, “Always remember, were it not for the beakers, none of us would be here.”

  “What’s a beaker?” Valena asked.

  Cupcake said, “Scientist. As in, the glassware. A fingie beaker at that.”

  “And ‘fingie’ means?”

  “F-N-G. The second two letters stand for ‘new guy.’”

  Valena choked on her orange juice, and it came out
her nose. Coughing and laughing, she put a napkin to her face.

  Peter said, “So, Valena, whose project you on, or are you McMurdo’s youngest PI?”

  Valena tensed. Here was her opening. “I’m working with Emmett Vanderzee.”

  “Oooooh…” said Cupcake, letting the sound rise and fall. “Man, you really got hosed!”

  Valena waited, hoping someone would offer information, but all eyes were on her, waiting for the same. Taking a deep breath, she said, “Can anyone tell me what happened? I just got here last night and, well, all I know is he’s been sent north.”

  Cupcake patted Valena on the shoulder. “Eat up,” she said. “I got someone you should meet.”

  5

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, HER BODY LOST UNDER THICK polypropylene underwear, wind pants, wool socks, floppy blue FDX boots, mittens, a fleece hat, and the capacious acreage of her big red parka, Valena found herself hustling to keep up with Cupcake. “Are you certain I need this many layers?” she asked. She was beginning to sweat, and her blue boots flopped like clown’s feet.

  “We’re still in the wind shadow of the buildings and these hills. Why do you think they put this armpit of a station where it is?”

  They emerged from the cover of the buildings and headed away down a trail in the volcanic rock that formed the island.

  Valena pulled off her fleece hat and stuffed it into a pocket. The gravel of the trail moved oddly under her feet, and she looked down to study it. It was formed of bashed-up scoria, a volcanic rock filled with little air bubbles because it had flowed out of the ground frothing with rapidly expanding gasses. It was odd to think that in this world of ice, the island had been born of fire. She had been to Hawaii, where volcanic rock weathered quickly under invasive vegetation and other organisms, but this scoria was so cold and perennially bound in ice and snow that nothing could grow on it or live in it, nothing to break it down into soil. She glanced around, confirming to her still disbelieving eyes that there was not a single nonhuman organism anywhere in sight: no trees, no grass, no moss, no lichens, not even a bird in the air. The great blue-white landscape of ice and distant mountains was punctuated only by the line of aircraft parked on the ice, the few ski-mounted small structures that attended them, and this odd gathering of humans.

  They kept moving. Cupcake led the way down the long, shallow slope toward a point of land that jutted from the end of the peninsula on which McMurdo Station had been built. Valena was having trouble walking in the big, soft boots. “Who are we going to see?” she asked, trying to get Cupcake to talk more so that she would have to slow down. She threw open her parka, which was so warm that she had not, in the twenty-four hours she had been using it, ever actually zipped it up; she had used it instead as a wrap.

  “You are about to have the honor of meeting the master blaster.”

  “Master… what?”

  “Blaster. Didn’t you—oh, right, you just got here, so you don’t know. They’re blasting the road that leads towards Castle Rock, trying to straighten it, for some goddamned reason. He’ll be out at the hut today. He goes out there every time they open it up and let us wackos in. I think he likes to photograph ghosts or something. Anyways, you can corner him there and ask your questions.”

  “And I want to ask him questions because…?”

  “He was out in your dude’s field camp last year.”

  “I see.”

  “Gotta go right to the source around here. Otherwise, all you hear is rumors. That, and suppositions. It’s like this place is a halfway house for paranoiacs.”

  Valena asked, “What’s this hut he’s photographing?”

  “Discovery Hut. Actually, it was a warehouse. I guess they lived aboard the ship, which of course got stuck in the ice. Those boys were good at getting things stuck. You’re lucky; they don’t open it to visitation very often.”

  “They lived aboard the ship? Who built it? When?”

  “Scott, 1902. His first expedition. Got his butt to eighty-two south, had to turn back. Not the 1911 expedition where he froze to death.”

  Sir Robert Falcon Scott! Valena drew in her breath with surprise. Scott’s first attempt to reach the South Pole was mounted just two years into the twentieth century. He had arrived aboard a ship named Discovery. And this is the hut named for that expedition! She thought. I am walking on ground on which he walked!

  As she continued down the trail, her heart now racing with excitement, they came out from the lee of the hills that surrounded McMurdo and were caught by an exhalation of frozen air off the ice sheet. Valena was instantly cold, so cold that her muscles began to contract. She hurriedly put her hat back on, pulled up the hood, and tried to get the slide of her big red parka’s zipper engaged. As she fumbled with chilling fingers, the wind found its way down her neck. The zipper was jammed. She tried it again and again, reseating it, pulling at it, cursing it.

  Twenty strides down the trail, Cupcake turned around to see why Valena had dropped behind her. “Oh, hell, hasn’t anyone given you the short course on how to work the zipper on your big red yet?” She strode back toward Valena and grabbed the two sides of the track, yanked the one on Valena’s left down sharply, slapped the slide from the other side onto it, and whipped it up to her chin, all in the space of three seconds. “You gotta let it know who’s boss,” she said. She opened it again. Showed Valena how to hold the pieces properly, tugging the left side down sharply and holding it taut while she worked the right. “Now you try it. Yeah, that’s it. You’d think they’d make it idiot proof, considering that your life depends on it, but there it is.” As she turned around to resume her march, she said, “It’s like just about everything else down here: it’s essential, you need a short course to know how to do it, and that course doesn’t exist.”

  “I’ve got survival training tomorrow.”

  “Happy Camp. Have a party. They’ll put a five-gallon plastic bucket on your head to simulate a whiteout, like that’s going to really learn you.” She shook her head. “It’s not their fault. There’s just entirely too much to absorb. I’ve been down here seven seasons, and some days I feel like I’m only just getting the hang of it.”

  Five minutes’ additional brisk hike brought them to the end of the point. There, the ground dropped off precipitously on three sides, plunging fifty feet to the frozen sea below. The ice met the land in a jumble of heaved-up slabs where the winds and tides had worked it, like puckered waves stilled by a snapshot in the act of slapping the shore.

  Someone had erected a cross at the summit of a small rise at the very end of the point, and just below it, Valena could see a gently sloping roof made of wood and built in the shape of a shallow pyramid. It was supported by posts. Valena assumed that this must be a protective canopy erected to preserve the original structure, which must exist as ruins underneath; after all, she reckoned, more than one hundred years of fierce Antarctic weather had thrashed it since Scott’s men had built it.

  One hundred years, thought Valena. Not much more than the average human lifetime. In all the lifetimes of the human species, great civilizations had arisen and fallen and been built again on all six other continents, but here in Antarctica, the touch of humanity was this new, a tiny foothold on an unimaginably large expanse of ice. This had been the last continent to be located, the hardest to reach, and by far the most difficult on which to maintain even this fragile encampment. Less than two hundred years ago, there was no southern continent on world maps. In the 1770s, Cook sailed around a southern sea choked with ice but could only hypothesize that land lay beyond it. So obscuring was its veil of ice that land wasn’t sighted until 1820, tantalizing yet unapproachable through a ship captain’s spyglass.

  Valena moved closer to the cliff to look off toward the Transantarctic Mountains, drawn simultaneously by emptiness and fulfillment and the fear that she would not make it to the continent itself but instead be sent home in an agony of frustration.

  “Don’t wander too close to the edge,” said Cupc
ake. “That cross there? It’s for this guy Vince somebody, who was the first man to die in McMurdo Sound. He fell off this cliff in the middle of a blizzard. They never found his body.”

  “I shall proceed with respect, then.”

  Cupcake pointed at the hut. “When you’re done ogling the scenery, join me in there.”

  The sun was high in the northern sky, throwing shadows to the south, the reverse of what she had grown to consider normal back home in North America. She shook her head. Her world was turned upside down and inside out or, more accurately, outside in. As a particularly strong gust of frozen wind bowled in off the ice, Valena turned and followed Cupcake to the low, square structure.

  Two women stood underneath the overhanging roof by a door that led into the hut. “Please brush all the snow off your boots,” one instructed, as she welcomed them in out of the wind.

  Valena scraped her enormous blue boots. “Where does the original hut begin?” she inquired.

  “This is the hut.”

  “But the wood looks almost new!”

  “Things don’t rot out here.”

  The windows were small, sparse, and recessed under the veranda, so the interior was dim, its darkness exaggerated by a thick accumulation of soot on the walls and ceiling. Two pairs of antique outer pants hung on a clothesline. Heaps of strange substances were stacked near one wall.

  Catching her inquiring gaze, a man who was standing there wrestling the legs of a camera tripod said, “Hundred-year-old seal blubber. Want to try some? It’s good with garlic.”

  Valena gave him a smile. He was a moderate-sized man of husky build and was endowed with pendulous mustaches that bristled with gray. He wore a blue watch cap, and instead of the blaze-red Valena wore, the shell of his parka was made of light brown canvas. A pair of faux tortoiseshell half-glasses gave him an oddly professorial air, and he gazed through them now at the leg-extension catches on his unruly tripod. With a final tweak, the last of the legs slid down into place. He jiggled it around, getting it into position, and then, apparently satisfied, he opened the top of his parka and produced an old Nikon F2 camera, which he clipped onto the top of the tripod.