Pym (12 page)

When Carlton Damon Carter finally arrived on the scene with his video camera and lights ready, Jeffree prepared to begin the rescue. He made a big deal about going down the hole too; despite the wind blowing as it did, ruffling the fabric in our hoods, further muffling our hearing, it was possible to hear his generous sighs and huffs. Even at the time of his complaints, I knew enough about Jeffree to know that he would be bragging about this later, replaying the clips of it on the computer for us even though we’d been here to see it happen. The man was physically built for this. Even through his parka the thickness of his arms was visible. I had never seen Jeffree lift weight one, and yet there the muscles were.
^§

“Rock and roll, baby. Time to get all action star out here.” Jeffree was smiles before this jump. Captain Booker Jaynes, his hood and hat removed, his dreads so many silver snakes dancing in the wind, tested the suspension line for him, giving it a tug for attention. “No cowboy bullshit. Go down slow, hook the pulley to the frame. Gentle, clean, easy.”

“Don’t worry, it’s going to be easy,” Jeffree responded, looking down at his target. Then to the camera.

“You hit the ledge with your full weight and you’re going to knock the rifler off the shelf and send it in an avalanche another twenty feet down,” I warned.

“I’m like a cat. Let me show you how a real man gets it done,” Jeffree responded, pointing at me with the last sentence. Then with a smile and a salute, not even looking down or over into the crater, he quickly jumped up and flew down. Standing on the opposite lip beside Jaynes, I watched Jeffree slide in a quick, smooth, and effortless glide. Then I watched him hit the drill so damn hard when he landed that he set the whole thing in a secondary avalanche, falling another twenty feet down. Angela screamed.
^‖
Carlton Damon Carter kept the camera on and focused.

“I’m okay, didn’t break anything,” Jeffree yelled, but the weak cracking of his voice betrayed him. “Least I don’t think,” he retracted.

Captain Jaynes had two gloves over two calloused hands over his one face. He was breathing heavily; I could see the mist shoot clouds between his fingers. “Ig’nant ass fools,” he said, which I felt was a bit rude, but Jeffree was so far down he wasn’t hearing anything.

“Yo, Chris, you got some big-ass feet,” Jeffree quickly followed. I could still see him from where I stood, brushing himself off, trying hurriedly to regain his jovial persona. I had small feet. I wasn’t going to yell that down on account of the myth, but I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Before I could respond, Jeffree offered, “I thought you said you didn’t come down here? You got your big-ass boot tracks all over the snow.”

“I didn’t go down there,” I yelled immediately, looking to Captain Jaynes, largely to make sure he knew that Garth and I hadn’t been just goofing off this time. But I hadn’t gone down there. Leaning forward to peer over the edge for a moment, besides Jeffree’s dark form, now covered in powder as he stood by the rifler, I saw footprints as well. They were like little craters, oblong, in a pattern that suggested the gait of a biped.

“Hey, this is wild. You got to come see this. You got to take a look at this, Chris Jaynes. Carlton, you got to get a shot of this.” Jeffree was getting really excited now. You could tell, because for once he didn’t sound as if he was reading lines off of a teleprompter.

I turned to Captain Jaynes, showing too much excitement before the first word, because he knew where I was going.

“Look,” my older cousin interrupted me. “I don’t want to hear none of that snow honky bullshit, you hear? We got reality to worry about. Real issues, real money. I don’t want to hear any of your dead ofay book theories, conspiracies, or anything else.” Captain Jaynes raised his head to address Carlton Damon Carter and the Lathams, who were only now deeming the event worth coming out of their own truck’s heated cab. “And I don’t want anyone else hearing your nonsense either. We’re going to suspend down there, get our drill out of the snowball it’s stuck in, and then we’re done here. Not another word.”

So I didn’t offer one. Not as we attached our own harness gear around our waists and between our thighs. Not as we dangled slowly in the air into the hole and carefully controlled the slack as we drifted down. I didn’t offer to say anything, not even after our feet touched firmly on packed ice, and I looked over at Jeffree, who was standing on top of the drill’s snow-encased carcass where it rested against the wall, staring into the space around us. As I looked around, they did seem to be real footprints—an observation I made quickly and while Captain Jaynes was busy disengaging himself from his line. The spacing of the holes was a bit wide for footprints, but it was consistent.

“Help me get this goddamn drill out of here,” Jaynes ordered, and I went over and pulled on it with the others. It had to be flipped, but the impact had packed the snow into its every groove, and the only reachable part was the bumper. If we tried to lift it up from that, chances were the bumper would just rip off it. Forcing myself to focus on the task at hand, I joined my muscle with Jeffree’s, pulling as Jaynes offered direction from off to the side. There was the difficult first lifting, then the teetering, then it fell over with the slightest of bounces on the giving surface. I turned to Jeffree when it was done, but he wasn’t even looking at the thing. Staring back from where the drill had just come, Jeffree was instead focused on the hole of maybe four feet that the machine’s removal had revealed.

“You see that too, don’t you?” he asked. I just saw a hole. Behind me, Captain Jaynes just saw something that was not worth his attention, and he was already fastening the harnesses to the rifler’s frame.

Jeffree pushed past us, went to the little opening in the side of the hollow. I followed. The hole seemed to lead to another chasm. Or rather something more, its depth becoming more apparent as I got closer. It was a room that someone had recently entered; when I approached I saw those massive footprint-looking indentations, obscured as they were by the falling snow and the rifler’s landing, heading directly toward this space.

“What is it, some kind of crevice?” In spite of my belief, or maybe because of it, I felt the first pangs of fear at what might be beyond. Jeffree shook his head at me. Or maybe not at me—his eyes were wide and distant, his thick jaw slackened in a rare moment of self-reflection. I could see Carlton Damon Carter adjusting his zoom to catch the expression as well.

With the sounds of Jaynes’s diligent working still behind me, I crouched to look into the space. No, it was not simply an ordinary crevice. It was long, it was expansive, the footprints going far off into the distance and fading into the rest of the snow. It was tall too, this ceiling; the opening was just a space in the collapse. There are many natural ice caves under the surface of Antarctica. But it was hard to believe that this was one of them. The walls looked chipped away, the space too straight, and if there had been any debris it had been cleared away.

“It’s a cave,” Jeffree managed, beside himself at the sight of it. Even at this depth, the sun shone through the surface, offering illumination. Everywhere glowed a haunting blue that seemed electric from the throb.

“No, it’s not a cave,” said a voice that surprised me before I realized that Captain Booker Jaynes had stopped what he was doing and crept up behind us. Jaynes, to my surprise, now wore an expression much like Jeffree’s, and I realized that I also wore the same foolish, overwhelmed look. Jaynes’s eyes were focused on the things that I dared to think were the tracks of a creature that had walked upright through here only hours before.

“It’s a tunnel,” Captain Jaynes finally managed.

We kneeled silently in the cold, taking in the sight and its repercussions. Far above us, Carlton Damon Carter filmed, and unseen beyond him, Garth and the Lathams sat warm in the trucks that hummed and roared. Finally, as my knees began to numb and my excitement threatened to overpower me, I broke the meditation.

“Captain, what do you want us to do now?” I asked. Booker Jaynes was a man who lived life by either being in control or pretending he was long enough to gain control again. Here was a situation that no one besides myself had ever thought they’d face. Captain Jaynes met it with belligerent, folded arms, but then his attitude just fell away. My cousin turned to me, slapping me several times on the shoulders as if discharging any responsibility for this new discovery.

“Me? Hell, looks like we got a snow honky problem. You’re the expert.”

*
I really, really liked that dog.

†
This he displayed in his office in a way that others took, rightly, as a veiled threat.

‡
Or Jeff-Free, as it said on the website, although I don’t think that was the legal spelling.

§
I’d heard grunting in the area of his and Carlton Damon Carter’s storage unit but didn’t pry.

‖
Or perhaps it was Carlton Damon Carter, who was also a high alto when speaking above a whisper.

OF course, I was
the
expert on the phenomena we seemed to be encountering. Unfortunately, my sole primary source was those few lonely paragraphs in
The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters. Coloured Man. As Written by Himself:

As we go south, the sky darks in a polar dusk and the fog gets thick. The birds, white gulls (or albatross or some such) were not stopping, gray ugly things that kept croaking “Tekeli-li” like we supposed to understand them. Infernal! The Tsalalian had been dying for days, then in a few minutes he dead. I says that we should dump the corpse immediately, for the sake of decency if not good health and stink, but Arthur Pym was looking by the body. Dripping more spit than I thought he still had in his self, he says, “That wouldn’t be prudent.” Alas, the flesh that had been Nu-Nu got saved for then as we were soon up on a strong current that shot us past the broken ice at fast speed. What can I say of what was seen next? Not nothing. So let me just say that we approached an ice shelf too long to be another iceberg, going into the distance of east and west. As we were move forward, a slice of this thing fell into the ocean before us, showing both a crack in the ice and a shrouded figure in white standing within it.
^*

Floating forward, we moved into a cave within the ice itself. There we come to a landing, and they surrounded us. Arthur Pym stepped out of the boat despite me yelling to stay put, so transfixed was he. The group surrounded him. And then I kicked off and made a quick exit out of there.

After that, Dirk mostly talks about how the current pulls him back, and how he’s really fortunate that he listened to Arthur Pym and didn’t get rid of the body of the late Mr. Nu-Nu, coasting as he did in the monthly return tide back to Tsalal. “You never know what you’ll eat if you [
sic
] hungry enough. I cut up Nu-Nu’s corpse into bite-size pieces, then I used them as bait for the Bich de Mere. Those things taste like horse shite,” was the entirety of Dirk’s recorded reflection on the experience.

So from my research I knew that we should avoid eating
bêche-de-mer
. Beyond that I had no idea what we were supposed to do next.

We lifted ourselves back up to the trucks. Now that I had their complete attention, I replayed in detail what I had seen the first time.

“Come on, Professor, what the hell is it?” Booker Jaynes demanded. “Some kind of monkey? Some kind of Neanderthal? Or just men, the CIA or something?”

“It’s the twelfth tribe of Judah,” Jeffree asserted as he stroked his goatee, nodding to Carlton Damon Carter, who stood behind him in our circle, reviewing his video footage. It was not clear that Jeffree actually believed this, but it was obvious that he liked the sound of it, its biblical and Diasporan overtones. We huddled in a makeshift tent, a tarp pulled between the roofs of two trucks and hung over the sides to keep the wind out.

“It’s definitely government shit,” Garth added, sounding like a weary big man preparing for a fall. “It’s the feds that built that, dog. If not ours, then someone else’s. Believe me, I know: I used to work for the government.”

“You worked as a bus driver, Garth. As a bus driver for the city of Detroit. That hardly qualifies you as an expert witness on the government,” Angela said with a roll of her almond eyes, and it was almost possible to see the air deflate out of the big man, sending him drifting into the corner. He gave me a look of sympathy from over there, but all I could do was marvel at her power.

“No,” I boomed, trying to assert my own. “This is nothing like that. Whoever it was that I first saw, whoever it was that built that tunnel, it’s not something modern, not something that’s been seen recently. No mechanical equipment we know of built that tunnel. It looked almost natural. It looked
old.
” I leaned on the last word, let it hang in the air for a minute. When I saw I had them, I dug in and declaimed.

“Look, folks, as you know, I am not here by complete accident. I am with you, on the crust of the Cape of Good Hope, because that is where I believe the events cited in
Pym
from two centuries past took place. Historical precedent. Whatever it is out there, it has been noted before. We are simply the first to experience this phenomenon since the chasm—”

“Excuse me.” Jeffree, who had been whispering with Carlton Damon Carter, turned around to interrupt. “Before we get any further with this, this cave—since I was the one to discover it, I believe it should be referred to as, um, the Jeffree Tube. Yes. So if you could refer to it as the Jeffree Tube from this moment forward, I would appreciate that.”

“So are you meaning to imply some form of ownership here?” Angela stopped him, pointing her finger in a way that threatened permanent ocular trauma to its target. “You must be, if you’re already invoking naming rights. You don’t even know what this thing is besides a big crack in an ice block and already you’re claiming it as your own property?” There she was. This petite woman, small but centered. Her beauty alone would have made some men
^†
cower, but along with the way she paced the tent, the way she shook her arms violently as she spoke, she erased any questions of stature. The woman at dinner had been less assured and a bit reeling, but already Angela had grown stronger. With Nathaniel. Like a beautiful blossom growing in horse manure.

“Hey, sister! Sister, please!” Jeffree jumped forward, his hand stretched out in suppressing motions, his face giving off his best impression of an individual hurt and affronted by false accusation. “I’m not saying I own it outright. You the one said our contract with ______ Cola says that the Creole collectively owns what we scrounge on our off days. I’m just saying, since I found it, I should be able to name it. That’s all.”

That’s all. That’s all you need to start a fight among a bunch of people sacrificing everything to get rich, to build a legacy. The largely deflated Garth Frierson still had enough air in him to float out the tarp as the conversation grew steadily more heated.
^‡
In the mix of things, amid the accusations and retractions, Captain Jaynes left the space. When he returned, my cousin had his full gear laid out before him: the steel spikes for his hiking boots, his face mask, pick, climbing rope, goggles, all in addition to his normal polar walkabout gear. As he prepared, the room became quieter. Even I, who had just been in the process of mounting a fierce defense of my more elaborate conclusions, joined the growing silence.

“Pardon, Booker, but what are you doing?” Nathaniel Latham asked Jaynes. Nathaniel seemed perplexed that the man appeared to be taking action when an argument was still being waged. Particularly when his wife was winning.

“Out,” Captain Jaynes responded. Tying up his dreads behind his head in a bun, he looked up at us and saw that further explanation was demanded. “I’m going down that tunnel, going to see what’s in there.”

Nathaniel opened his mouth to respond, but Angela interrupted him before he started. “With all due respect, sir, you don’t know what is down there. You don’t know that it’s safe.” Her tone was definitive, the hand on her hip conclusive, but the captain kept tying and zipping, working to get his boots back on over his thicker layers of socks. Frustrated by his lack of response, Angela continued louder. “What about the naming rights, Jaynes? That’s real intellectual property. If there is something down there, something huge, something with major social or scientific implications, whose ownership claim is that going to be?”

“Well hell, I guess it’s going to belong to whoever else comes to explore the thing with me,” Booker Jaynes declared and shrugged, pulling his bootlaces tight. Within moments, the others began preparing too.

There were seven of us standing before the chasm, ready to plunge below. Some of us felt like there was fortune waiting just beneath our feet, unseen. Garth came not because he believed that there was anything worth the effort but because he didn’t want to be left alone in an empty truck. “Dog, that shit is creepy,” he told me. As he struggled to be lowered into the chasm, the big man forced his eyes closed and clung to the two climbing cables supporting him. I took his box of Little Debbie Banana Twins cakes from the glove compartment and threw it to the bottom of the chasm so at least he had something to look forward to.

It was among the requirements of employment by the Creole Mining Company that all personnel should be skilled in rock surface climbing, with specific training in ice climbing. It was the captain’s belief that anybody who lived on the ice should at least have it in his or her power to climb that ice. Unfortunately, like many job requirements, this one was fulfilled more in the letter than in spirit in our little squad. My own wilderness training, for instance, consisted of an intensive two-day course on the climbing wall at the Reebok Sports Club/NY at Sixty-sixth Street to refresh my indoor, plastic wall climbing skills. The polar qualification of the certification came from the fact that, even though I took this course indoors, it was in January. I felt a bit guilty about that until I found out that Garth believed he had fulfilled his requirements by walking to his bus station once the day after a seven-inch snowstorm. “Don’t look at me that way. It was real slippery and shit,” Garth, catching my glance as he signed his waiver, told me. Although they presented a much better face on the subject, Nathaniel’s and Angela’s training wasn’t much better. While Nathaniel made a big fuss about their having gone glacial hiking in Seward, Alaska, in the early days of her separation, further anecdotes revealed that they’d flown to the flat glaciers in a prop plane and walked around for a few minutes before setting up a foldout table and having a picnic. Nathaniel had showed me pictures of the outing soon after we first met: the two sat in their matching snowsuits on metal chairs before a table covered in red checkered cloth. They toasted the camera with champagne flutes, their snow picks dangling loosely from their wrists as they smiled. “The pilot was a licensed masseuse too. It was sweet,” Nathaniel recalled. I don’t know what Angela had told him, but he seemed to have no concept of the fact that I despised him, or why.

This is not to say that no one of the Creole Mining Company had any training for the environment we found ourselves in. Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter put us all to shame, and Jeffree clearly took great joy in this. It was their thing, the climbing, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing—whatever was the fringe sport of the moment. They were Afrocentrics who loved the adventure. It was an eccentricity that they (or rather Jeffree, as Carlton Damon Carter never bragged at all) were very proud of. Theirs was a type of pride peculiar to our ethnic group. It said, “Look, I’m black and I’m taking pleasure in something I’m not expected to.” I don’t know if it was the snow itself or the act of defiance they found more enjoyable.

After returning to our opening in the white wall, the entryway I did not then or will ever refer to as the Jeffree Tube, I was shocked to see the footprints still there, moving off into the expanse. Like dreams or haunts, in part I expected them to dissolve back into imagination and mythology. In fact, as we moved as a group, tentative and hushed by the cathedral-like quality of the tunnel, it became clear that the footprints had not only remained in our absence but multiplied.

“There’s another set, look. There is one set walking off, and then there’s a set that comes back, and then walks off,” Jaynes told us. He pointed them out with his flashlight. Looking back toward the entrance, we saw that we weren’t more than twenty yards into the journey.

“These weren’t here before,” I said, but it seemed the others had already deduced as much from Jaynes’s tone. In response, Jeffree bent down on one knee, snapped a bit of the packed snow in the track with his fingers, and took it to his nose for a heavy snort before declaring, “It’s fresh.”

“What does stale ice smell like, Jeffree?” I asked, but if there was an answer I didn’t hear it as the marching continued.