A Cold-Blooded Business (17 page)

Peering through the window, Kate saw a snowdrift piled higher than the bus waiting for them that hadn't been there the week before. "Guess it snowed a bit after we left," Toni observed from the next row.

Kate looked around, thinking that on this, the first day of her second week, Slopers had either slowed their speech or her ears had caught up with it. She shuddered to think it was the latter. "Where's Jerry, do you know? I didn't see him at the airport."

Toni yawned and stretched. "He had to go into the office for some medical seminar or training session or something. He'll be up tonight."

The plane rolled out to a halt on the apron and there was a rustle of movement as people folded their newspapers and stood to search the overhead racks for their canyons.

When Kate emerged into the chill arctic air, Toni was waiting at the foot of the air stairs with the tour bus and a bland smile. "You recovered from last week?"

"Am I with you again this week?"

"Uh-huh."

Kate considered saying no, she wasn't recovered. Before she could decide Toni said, "Good, because today's going to be a real challenge."

Kate climbed in the bus, stowed her flight bag beneath her seat and at Toni's instruction drove to the Mark Air terminal, where Toni greeted a German film crew, which was arriving on the same plane with a separate delegation from Nippon Steel, none of whom, it evolved, spoke English.

"Ohio gozaimas" was the extent of Toni's Japanese and she knew more or less how to ask for a room in German so that she could produce a sentence that went something like, "Good afternoon, do you have a bed with a toilet?" which everyone agreed was hilarious but didn't get them any forrader.

One of the Japanese men beamed at her and said loudly, "Bangoon!

Bangoon!"

Toni arrived at what seemed to Kate to be the logical conclusion and led him to the men's room. When he came out he said again, "Bangoon!

Bangoon!"

"You just went, sir." Toni pointed to the door.

The man shook his head. "Bangoon!" he cried. He began waddling across the floor in what looked like an imitation of Charlie Chaplin.

"Bangoon!" There was a spontaneous burst of applause from assorted pipefitters, welders, secretaries and roughnecks standing in line at the ticket counter, and the little man beamed some more and reiterated,

"Bangoon!"

"Oh!" Kate said, a light breaking. "Penguins!" "Hail" he said, nodding vigorously. "Bangoon!"

"He would like to see some penguins," Kate informed Toni in a sternly controlled voice.

"Penguins?"

"Penguins."

"Bangoon!"

Toni didn't miss a beat. "I'm terribly sorry, sir," she said gravely.

"Penguins are found only in the southern hemisphere, in the Antarctic."

The man looked blank and Toni shook her head slowly, from side to side in an exaggerated negative movement. "No ban goon No ban goon at Prudhoe Bay, sir."

The little man looked at Kate for confirmation. She mimicked Toni's solemn head shake. "No ban goon in the Arctic, sir," she repeated when she trusted herself to speak. "Only in the Antarctic."

He was crestfallen, and as she later explained to Kate, Toni felt so guilty she rustled up four caribou wintering, in previously unmolested placidity, beneath Production Center One so the little man's trip wouldn't be a total loss. He used up three rolls of film and departed the North Slope that evening in a happy glow, after having bestowed a lacquered wooden box on Toni and a pair of equally elaborate chopsticks on Kate. His compatriots smiled and bowed a lot, and the German TV crew shot file footage in efficient, businesslike silence.

At dinner Kate found Jerry in the serving line. "Hey, Kate. How was your week off?" "Truthfully?" she said, ladling home fries onto her plate with a lavish hand. "I'm glad to be back on the Slope."

He laughed. "Yeah, I know how that gets." He paused, looking down at her. "You and Jack still ... "

"Yeah."

"Him and Jane still fighting?"

"Yeah."

He laughed again. "Then I really know how that gets. So you're staying with him?"

He was making a salad as he spoke, and Kate regarded his profile thoughtfully. He scooped up a wedge of tomato and looked at her, raising his brows in inquiry. "What?"

"Nothing." Kate shrugged. "Yeah, I'm staying at Jack's. For a while."

Jerry nodded and appeared to dismiss the subject.

As they set their loaded trays down in the dining room, Jerry's beeper went off. Jerry swore. As if on cue, the gravelly voice spoke over the loudspeaker. "Jerry Mcisaac, call the operator. Jerry Mcisaac, call the operator immediately."

When Jerry came back from the telephone, he said, "Some dumb-ass roughneck out at Rig 21 fell off the platform and managed to break his leg. If these friggin' Slopers had their way I'd never finish a meal."

He looked at her hopefully. "Want to come?"

Kate's plate was barely visible beneath a crisp New York steak and a pile of golden brown steak fries. She sighed deeply. "Okay."

"Try not to overwhelm me with your enthusiasm, Shugak."

"Try not to underwhelm me with yours, Mcisaac."

They grinned at each other.

She was just slipping to sleep that night when she realized that almost every waking moment of her day had been spent with either Toni or Jerry.

The realization brought her fully awake and she shifted beneath the covers. Her assignment to Toni's tour bus, plus her volunteer work with Jerry, were beginning to make her feel restive. Both jobs offered the freedom of the field, and at the same time saddled her with anywhere from one to forty companions, and ferreting out dope dealers was a job best undertaken alone. And especially not in the company of your prime suspects.

She shifted again. The Slope was as crowded as town, more so. On her homestead in the Park, her nearest neighbor was ten miles away. Here, her neighbors were on all sides, around the table at every meal, in the halls, next door, for two floors above. She had to smile. She had to make polite conversation. The week-on, week-off schedule made her feel schizophrenic, a person of multiple personalities, one for home, one for town, one for Prudhoe. There was little privacy; the only time she was alone was when she was in her room, and at that she could hear the person overhead walking back and forth and her suite mate playing his television. She had come to hate the constant sound of the television.

She could hear it now, a distant buzz.

The only television Kate normally saw was the screen

Bernie had at the Roadhouse, eternally tuned in to a basketball game, and Bobby's television, which existed solely to be hooked up to a VCR.

"The world is too much with us already," he had said once, explaining his steadfast refusal to get a satellite dish.

Kate missed Bobby. Not twelve hours apart and she already missed Mutt.

She missed the feel of her home ground beneath the soles of her feet.

And here it was March, and--or was it April? No, it was still March.

It was odd how difficult it was to keep track of time north of the Arctic Circle. Almost as hard as it was keeping track of marriage certificates.

On top of everything else, her jeans were beginning to get uncomfortably tight around the waist. In her life, Kate had never had problems with her weight. She didn't like the feeling.

The television in the next room increased in volume. Kate gave her pillow a savage punch and pulled it down over her ears, and amused herself until she fell asleep by mentally arming a helicopter gunship and taking out every repeater on every mountain peak next to every village in the state of Alaska. Let ' read books.

She thumped her pillow again. Tomorrow she would get some of those foam earplugs Dale Triplett issued visitors at the Production Center.

The next morning Toni and Kate picked up a group of AT & T engineers and took them out to a drill rig, Milepost Zero, a Production Center, and, holiest of holies because they got to visit their equipment in action, the communications center. When asked if AT & T switchboards were not the most powerful, the most reliable, the most efficient, the best built switchboards in the known world, Toni dimpled, accessed a line and held the receiver up so all could hear. "The dial tone's on." The engineers thought that was the greatest thing they'd heard said since the words

"Mr. Watson, come here, I need you" entered the ether, and for a moment Kate was afraid RPetco was going to lose Toni to Ma Bell.

They were done by noon, handing the executives off to the Amerex tour guide at Checkpoint Charlie. Back in camp, Toni told Kate, "Go ask Harris what you should do for the rest of the afternoon. But tell him I'll need you again tomorrow."

Instead, Kate cajoled Gideon out of a box of assorted pastries, liberated Frank Jensen's truck off the bull rail and drove out to the dig on Tode Point. The road paralleled the coast and the clouds held off long enough for her to get her first good look at the Arctic Ocean.

It was a crazy quilt of cracked ice and overlapped edges and broken bergs, extending across the northern horizon as far as she could see.

Kate stopped the truck once where the bank dipped low and climbed down it. There was no lead in the ice, no open water of any kind for her to dip her toe into so she could say she had. She found an oddly shaped piece of driftwood instead, put it in her pocket and, feeling like a tourist, drove on.

The doughnuts, crullers and sugar cookies were received with rapture and Kate herself made royally welcome, or as royally welcome as a person could be made in a trailer perched on cement blocks that left itself open to the chill draft of every passing breeze, and that seemed to have only one light, a twenty-five-watt bulb hanging from a cord in the middle of the ceiling. It was enough to make out the dim outlines of the six bunks fastened to the walls, all of which were piled high with tools and packs and rolled sleeping bags and other equipment of less recognizable provenance. The bathroom was shoved into one tiny corner behind a door that refused to latch, and the rest of the floor space crowded with tables jammed in edge to edge. The place smelted like a zoo, Kate thought, and said so.

"Eau d'ages, Kate," Chris Heller said cheerfully. "We love the smell of hundred-year-old muktuk in the morning, don't we, troops?"

"You bet!" they chorused on cue.

Kate laughed. "Okay, okay. Show me what you got."

"Whampftifoozeeuvefundestedee," Karen said.

"I beg your pardon?"

Karen swallowed the rest of the cruller and, licking chocolate off her fingers, repeated, "Wait till you see what we found yesterday."

An expectant hush fell as they huddled around a table with a cloth draped over it. Conscious of an audience, Karen whipped the cloth back with all the panache of Harry Houdini.

Kate regarded the object on the table in silence. Karen, impatient, said, "Well? What do you think?"

Kate looked up. "What is it?"

All four faces registered first incredulity, then disappointment. Too late, Kate realized she wasn't keeping up her end as honorary resident descendant of the Tode Point hunters.

"You mean you don't know?" Rebecca said, her voice forlorn.

"Nope," Kate said, trying not to sound defensive. "I'm an Aleut, remember, not an Eskimo."

They brightened at this. "That's true," Kevin said with a forgiving smile. "Well, go ahead, pick it up, take a closer look. See if you can guess what it's for."

Kate picked the object up and held it closer to the one window and the pale arctic sun. "It looks like a bone, maybe even a human bone.

Bones, I should say. Maybe the radius and ulna from the forearm?"

There were smothered titterings and covert nudgings around the circle.

"Or maybe the bones from the foreleg of a caribou." An approving nod from Chris told her her second guess was right. "The claws are bird claws. Not eagle. Raven? And they're bound on the end here with some kind of sinew. Caribou? Walrus?" She grasped the bone handle in one hand, claws on the end of it poised to scratch. "Tell me this isn't a back scratcher."

There were wide grins. "Close, but no cigar," Chris said. "It is a scratcher, but not for your back."

"What for, then?"

"For the ice." Kate looked blank and Chris took the scratcher and demonstrated on the tabletop. The claws made a squeaky ripping sound.

"The Eskimo hunter would be out on the ice, see? Hunting seal. He'd find an open lead and take the scratcher and scratch a couple times on the ice next to it. Turns out the seal is a real curious animal; like a cat, it lives in fear that something might happen somewhere and it might miss it. So, when the seal heard the scratcher he'd poke his head up for a look, and wham!" Chris beamed at her. "Supper time."

"I'll be damned." Kate raised a finger and touched it to one of the claws. "You've got to hand it to the old ones. They really did know how to affect their environment, didn't they?" "That's nothing," Chris said,

"wait'll you see this." They dragged her outside and fifty feet beyond the trailer to the dig, the outside of which resembled the dugout shelter

Kate and Jack had found on Anua. Chris held out a cautionary hand in front of Kate. "No, don't go in, we've got everything sectioned off.

You might step on Karen's latest potsherd and then we'd have to kill you."

Karen made a rude reply. Stooping to peer in the doorway, Kate saw square sections of earthen floor at varying stages of excavation neatly cordoned off with staked lengths of string.

"Around here, Kate," Chris called from beyond the dugout. He indicated what looked to Kate like a pile of rocks as tall as she was. She stared from it to him and back again. "So? It's just a pile of rocks." Ten feet beyond, an up thrusting pipe and valve assembly reared its unsuitable head out of a small, square patch of snow. It was enclosed by a small square fence built of what looked like plumbing pipe, each corner fitted with elbows, T-connectors joining the two railings every foot or so.

"Yes, it is, but not just any pile of rocks," Karen said. Kate figured she probably couldn't even see the wellhead for the cairn.