Frozen Stiff (2 page)

“My underwear is none of your business,” he shot back.

Cody hadn’t said anything about his jeans, which would be totally useless. Much too heavy. Once they got wet they never dried out. But no socks? Stupid! She was just as mad at herself for not packing an extra pair.

Something deep in her gut told her to turn back, to forget the whole thing. She’d been camping, with the outfitters, many times, and she’d go with them many more. A trip that started out badly would only get worse. She knew that for a fact.

Why not spend the next two days in the lodge, watching videos and munching microwave popcorn? If they got bored, they could count drunk fishermen on holiday from the Lower Forty-eight as they staggered out of the tavern.

Derek finally caught up. He helped pull her boot out of the boggy hole. It made a sound like a sink draining.

“Tell me again what a glacier looks like up close,” he said.

“Not now.” Cody hated being such a grouch but nothing made her as miserable as wet socks. “We’re leaving this load here. Then we’re going down to the beach to collect the rest of our gear. We’re heading back to the lodge.”

“What do you mean? This is the last of the stuff
and the truck is half a mile back.
Uphill
.” The sun went behind some heavy clouds, and the scream of mosquitoes rose from the trees. Derek swiped at the air several times. “If these suckers are going to follow us they could at least carry something.”

Cody laughed at that one. “Some people think they should be named the state bird.”

It was as if the mosquitoes had invited all their friends for the human feast. Cody batted wildly to keep them out of her eyes. “Get away!” she shouted. “Now I know what nose hairs are for … to filter out bugs.”

Derek’s forehead was already a mass of bites. “I think I swallowed one.”

“The mosquito nets for our hats are in the duffel on the beach,” she hollered, and stumbled downhill toward the strand of coarse sand. “And I packed DEET.”

On the beach, Cody tore into the duffel bag. Without even removing her pack she dug frantically for the nets. Then the sun broke through and the mosquitoes disappeared. Derek was scratching like crazy, making the bites bleed even more. She decided not to warn him about infection. “Grab another pack,” she said instead. “We’re heading back.”

Derek stopped scratching. “I’m not going.”

Cody stared at him. “You can’t stay here alone. You don’t even know how to put up the tent.”

“I’ll sleep on the ground. The sleeping bag will be warm enough,” he said, then turned abruptly and
stomped down the beach. His words clung to the heavy air.

Cody wondered how long she should wait before chasing after him. “Stubborn,” she whispered angrily. “Just like Patterson.” Thinking about her brother felt like an added weight in her pack. She dropped onto the drab green mound of duffels and let the pack slip from her shoulders.

Since her parents’ divorce three years before, Cody had only seen Patterson one or two weekends a month and on some holidays. The judge had let them each decide who they wanted to live with. Patterson had picked Dad. Cody didn’t understand it. Wasn’t the divorce bad enough?
Divorce
, as in to dissolve or cut off. She’d looked it up in the dictionary. Her mother never used the word
divorce
. She always said, “We split up.” Cody thought that sounded just as bad, like a chicken being split in two.

Cody felt as if she’d been divorced from her brother too. Brief chats on the phone weren’t the same as invading his bedroom and talking for hours. But she couldn’t live with her father. She wouldn’t even
see
him much, after what he’d done. Mostly only through the sheer curtains in the living room when he dropped off Patterson. Telephone conversations were short and to the point. She just answered his questions, which were mostly about school.

Poor Mom, Cody thought miserably, she’d never had a job outside their home. Never cashed a paycheck or balanced a checkbook.

Cody wondered how
wife and mother
looked on a job application. It must have looked all right to the owners of Yakutat Tavern, where her mother was hired. Mostly Mrs. Lewis fixed sandwiches for the visiting fishermen and poured beer. Whipped up supper in the evenings, and listened. Sometimes, she said, she felt more like a psychiatrist than a tavern manager.

Cody jumped, startled by the sound of leaves rustling behind her. “Derek?” She tried looking beyond the trees into the dense forest. Nothing.
Don’t freak out
, she told herself. “Derek?”

Farther down the beach, the shiny white bark on a band of dead trees stood as a vivid contrast to an un-derstory of dwarf dogwood and bog orchids. It was hard to remember that this inlet was filled with water from the Pacific Ocean until she spotted a pile of mussel and barnacle shells. Probably an otter’s dinner … though sometimes bears picked at shellfish during low tide.

Cody shuddered, wondering for a moment if that sound in the trees might be a fifteen-hundred-pound grizzly with razor-sharp claws. But she knew they preferred salmon to people. On trips with the outfitters she’d never seen a bear. Not one. In fact, the only bear she’d ever seen had been raiding the Dumpster behind the tavern.

Still, she snatched the bear horn from the duffel, all set to trigger the siren at the first glimpse of fur. “Derek? If this is a joke I’m not laughing. I’m going to put the kayaks together. Come on, I need help.” She decided to let him paddle around for a couple of
hours; then he’d wear himself out and want to go back to the lodge. Without socks his feet would be frozen in no time.

She studied the shore for signs of Derek. Still nothing.

Cody pushed a tangle of copper hair off her face. Mosquitoes had attacked her through the dense dance tights. She kicked off her rubber boots and peeled down her muddy socks. The drizzle for which Southeast Alaska was famous would eventually rinse her feet.

“I’m not mad,” she hollered, using a new strategy. And she wasn’t, either. She just sat on the lumpy canvas, scratched her mosquito bites, and worried about her cousin.

Thirty minutes had passed since she’d seen him. Where was the little varmint? “Derek!”

She suddenly felt guilty, remembering her aunt’s words that morning when she had pulled Cody aside: “I know you’ll take good care of Derek.” Derek was the youngest of four boys and his mother was overprotective. “Don’t tell him I said anything, okay?” Aunt Jessie had said, adding a conspiratorial wink.

Nothing has happened to him
, Cody finally decided. If a bear had attacked, she would have heard his screams. Ditto for a moose attack. People still talked about the 1985 Iditarod when Susan Butcher’s sled dogs had been ambushed by a pregnant moose. One of her dogs had been stamped to death. Another had died of internal injuries after being kicked up against a tree.

No
, she thought,
he’s just being stubborn
.

Cody pulled the bag of trail mix from a small zippered pouch marked
SNACKS
. She picked out the almonds and left the dried peas. She’d just started on the dried coconut when Derek appeared down the beach. He was dragging a long piece of driftwood.
“Where have you been?” she called. “What are you doing with that?”

“I’m going to build a raft.”

Cody figured he hadn’t heard her hollering earlier. “That’s ridiculous,” she said, laughing.

“No one in my school has ever seen a glacier.” Blood from Derek’s mosquito bites had soaked through his T-shirt and mixed with sweat and drizzle, making huge bright pink splotches. He looked as if he’d just returned from a war zone. “I’m going to be the first if it kills me.”

Cody remembered the first time she’d seen Hubbard Glacier, a 350-foot-high wall of jagged blue ice rising out of the water. A chunk the size of a skyscraper had broken off and crashed into the water, making waves high enough to surf on. She’d stopped paddling, just bobbing on the rolling surf and staring wide-eyed. Tears had run down her cheeks and she hadn’t bothered to wipe them away.

She wasn’t about to tell Derek about Hubbard. Then he’d want to paddle all the way down the length of the fjord to get to it. Which was more than a week’s journey if the weather held.

Cody tossed him a mosquito net. “I’ll get the DEET,” she said. “Sometimes I think the little suckers like it.” She handed him the trail mix and dug around for the insect repellent. “Tell you what, we can still go to some of the smaller glaciers. We’ll camp one night instead of two. Okay?” The compromise sounded reasonable, though she still felt uneasy. Maybe the rustling in the trees had bothered her more
than she thought. With the outfitters, she never worried about bears. But they always packed a bear horn
and
a rifle.

“But I want to see Hubbard Glacier.” Derek sounded more like a two-year-old than a twelve-year-old. “It’s the largest tidewater glacier in North America. Did you know that?”

Cody came up with the first-aid kit. Of course she knew it. “It’s too far, Derek, even if we had enough food and supplies. Our parents are only in Juneau for the weekend, remember. One night, that’s the deal.” Her tone made it clear that this was a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.

Derek stared down at his pitiful piece of driftwood. “Okay.”

Working together, they quickly snapped the wooden frames of the kayaks in place. Heavy sky-blue canvas covers fit tightly over the shells. “We’ll load the gear after the kayaks are in the water,” Cody said. She pulled her wild curls through the back of her No Fear baseball cap—a gift from Patterson—to keep her hair out of her eyes. Then she lifted the bow of her kayak and scooted the long body over the coarse sand.

Even though the kayaks were made for two people, Cody and Derek each had their own. It was still a trick to pack all the gear and leave enough room for feet. Cody unrolled her sleeping bag and tucked it over the wooden seat to cushion her behind. Derek did the same.

Getting in without tipping wasn’t easy, but they managed with little water seeping over the sides.
When they had their paddles in hand, it was time to take off. Out on the fjord the wind whipped salt water into whitecaps and the mosquitoes vanished.

“Guess what?” Derek took off his green net, stuffed it in his pocket, then put on his sunglasses. “I can breathe without swallowing a winged snack.”

Cody smiled. “Pure protein.” She touched her pocket and realized she’d left her shades in the cabin.
Darn
. She rubbed sunscreen on her fair skin then turned to Derek, who slapped at the water as if he were killing flies. “Use the skinny side to cut the water, not the flat side. Or you’ll wear yourself out.”

Derek wasn’t listening. He was taking in the surrounding landscape. “I thought these were the highest mountains in the world.”

“The highest
coastal
mountain range in the world,” she reminded him. “It’s called the Saint Elias Range.”

From where Cody was paddling, the fjord looked more like a lake than like part of the mighty Pacific Ocean. She slipped into an easy rhythm, using her upper body. Pushing one arm, pulling the other. Push, pull. Push, pull. No effort. She picked up speed when she glided into an eddy not far from shore.

The water was icy cold, because of the hundreds of glaciers melting and running into the fjord. It was a bone-chilling cold she didn’t remember from earlier trips. Of course it was late summer now. The air already whispered a hint of a fall that would pass quickly, just an introduction to breath-stealing winter.

Click, click, click
. The water played a tune on the
thousands of mussels and barnacles clinging to the rocks along the shoreline. And to think, she and her brother used to order steamed mussels in restaurants! It was hard to believe she’d actually eaten them, sucking the rubbery blobs out of the shells.

She smiled, wondering what Patterson would think if he saw her now, paddling a kayak in the Alaskan wilderness with their city-slicker cousin. Patterson, who snipped the plastic windows out of bills before putting the envelopes in the paper-recycling bin. Patterson, who dried the kitchen sponge in the toaster. Patterson, who shelved his books alphabetically by the main character’s last name.

Cody pushed into the middle of the fjord, grasped the paddle, and stared at the patch of blue sky—much bluer than a California sky. Tilting her head back, she let the sun wash over her. Without socks her toes were half numb, but she didn’t care. She was happy she’d decided to stay overnight. Derek would never forget this.

Her kayak hit a series of ripples in the water and she paddled faster, putting her back into each stroke. The faster she paddled, the more invigorated she felt. A slight breeze had sprung up and whitecaps crashed on the bow, sprinkling her with salt.

A seagull dropped a mussel on the rocks, then swooped down and gobbled the meat from the broken shell. Another gull squawked and circled Cody’s kayak. It must have had a nest somewhere onshore, with late-season chicks.

Cody paddled even faster now. Each breath kept time with the rhythm of her strokes. She was high on the adrenaline pulsing through her veins.