Icy Clutches (4 page)

What a difference: Jocelyn the svelte, leggy colt; Shirley the tough and sinewy old mare.

During dinner the evening before, she had wormed her way into sitting beside him and had yammered away endlessly, telling him at least three times how thrilled she was to meet him in person. (Was there another way to meet someone?) But of course Tremaine was used to this kind of cretinous gushing, and long resigned to it, particularly from middle-aged spinsters like Shirley Yount.

He was, however, irked by a side-of-the-mouth archness of manner, as if even her most vapid remarks—of which there were many—were really sly, private digs of wit and substance. Tremaine, who prided himself on his perceptiveness about such things, had been unable to decide whether there really was malice behind that tediously saucy facade. Or whether it was a facade at all. Either way, by now it had gotten well under his skin. (Considering that this was only Monday morning, there was quite a lot about this ill-assorted group that had already gotten under his skin.)

But what could she have to be hostile about? Here she was, an unattractive, unmarried department-store buyer in Cincinnati or Cleveland or some such place. Thanks to Tremaine's doing, she was enjoying the trip of a lifetime: an all-expenses-paid stay at the premier vacation destination of western Alaska. She would be talking about it—and about what M. Audley Tremaine was
really
like (in person)—for years at her mah-jongg meetings, or wherever such people gathered socially nowadays.

She leaned forward to frown through gargantuan, hexagonal glasses. “One thing I've always wondered is—oh, is it all right to ask something about the survey? Is that permitted?” There it was again; that annoying ability to make a seemingly innocuous question sound like a tongue-in-cheek insult. Our Miss Brooks getting ready to slip one to the high-school principal.

"Of course,” Tremaine said.

"Well, I can't help wondering why it was that Dr. Henckel and Dr. Judd weren't out there with everyone else that day at the glacier. I've always wondered about that. Or shouldn't I ask? If I shouldn't, I'll just shut up. I don't mean I wish they
had
been there, I just mean...” She trailed off, as she often did, into a macaw-like squawk. “Ha-HAH!"

Ah, was that what was bothering her? The fact that her sister had been cut off at twenty-five while an uncaring Providence had allowed these two overstuffed, middle-aged people who had played it safe to plod comfortably on with their lives? Fine, that was right with him. It was their problem; let them handle it.

As he expected, it was Walter who crumbled first. As all who knew him came sooner or later to learn, Walter's tugboat of a body; his jolly, chuckly, zesty air of enjoying life to the full; and his ruddy complexion (latently apoplectic, if you asked Tremaine) hid a constitution forged in tapioca.

"Well, now, I wouldn't exactly say I stayed
behind,"
Walter said, chuckling on cue.

Tremaine shifted restlessly. Between Walter's chuckle and Shirley's squawk, it was not going to be an easy week. Almost equally irritating, Walter had become a belly flaunter in the years since Tremaine had last seen him. The way some men thrust out their chests, he joyfully displayed the blimp-like protuberance at his front. He wore his suspenders wide and his pants low, the better to accommodate it. If he wasn't patting it, he was rubbing it. If he wasn't rubbing it, he was tapping it with a rolled-up magazine, or a pen, or even a ring of keys.

"No,” Walter continued, setting his hands on that great belly and dosing his eyes, “the fact of the matter is that I flew out there with the others in the morning, fully intent on executing the commands of our glorious leader.” He opened his eyes. A jocular wiggle of tufted brows was directed toward Tremaine, but Tremaine, keen observer that he was, noted the accompanying tic just above Walter's padded jaw line. He smiled back coolly.

"However,” said Walter, “the Fates intervened.” He chuckled meaninglessly. “Or perhaps the Furies. A medical crisis developed shortly after we deplaned, and I was unable to continue.” He paused for a rumble of throaty, empty laughter. “Down for the count, so to speak. So I had to remain behind at the shore, where the plane would pick us up later."

"Yes, that's the part I'm not too clear on,” Shirley persisted with a smile that revealed rather too much wet, pink gum line. “The medical crisis.” She eyed him coyly, her long, purplish nose honed. “Or isn't it any of my business? I mean, I'm just curious, so tell me to shut up if...well... ha-HAH!"

"No, no, my dear lady—my dear Shirley, if I may—that's all right. As a matter of fact it was...” He leaned forward and paused theatrically, then finished in a stage whisper: “...a mosquito bite!"

The words appeared to penetrate Gerald Pratt's lethargy.
"A mosquito bite,
did he say?” The murmured question floated out of a haze of turgid brown smoke. “Is that right?"

"An
infected
mosquito bite,” Walter said, “despite which I was heroically bent on continuing my mission.” A pause for another forced chuckle. “But our glorious leader, in his greater wisdom, forbade it. I ask you: What could I do but submit as gracefully as I could?” He concluded this annoying performance with an exasperating tattoo played out on his abdomen.

How inexplicable were human emotions! Tremaine almost shook his head with wonderment. For almost three decades, it appeared, Walter had maintained this foolish resentment against him because—well, why? Because Tremaine had almost certainly kept him from being killed in the avalanche, wasn't that what it amounted to? Was that what the man would have preferred? Not that it wouldn't have been what he deserved, inasmuch as it was his fault they had to be out there in the first place.

In any case, Tremaine's insistence that he remain behind had surely been correct. The infected bite had been ugly, with long streaks of brilliant red radiating from the wrist almost to the armpit. Walter had been on penicillin for ten days afterward. With a condition like that, one remained quiet; one did not stimulate blood circulation by scrambling up and down glacial flows. Even if he had survived the avalanche, he would probably have come away with gangrene. Was that what he wanted?

And yet Tremaine sympathized to some extent. There was something undeniably absurd about being kept from a rendezvous with destiny by a mosquito bite. But then that was the sort of person Walter was; a man of limited scope and inconsequential vision, fated by a feeble character to be stymied by minor obstacles. He had hardly protested very vigorously that morning when Tremaine “forbade” him from continuing. What could Tremaine have done if this whale of a man had insisted on going with them? Clamped him in irons? But of course he hadn't insisted at all. He'd merely whined and submitted, as the manuscript made quite clear—one of several things poor Walter was not going to be very happy about.

Tremaine wondered how happy he was with his life as a whole. Probably not very. A few years after the survey, when Walter failed—deservedly—to gain tenure, he had moved to Alaska, first to take an undemanding teaching position at a community college in Barrow, a school whose chief (only?) distinction was that of being the northernmost institution of “higher” learning on the North American continent. From there he had found his way into state government and a lackluster career in the Department of the Environment. Now it was rumored that the governor, apparently no judge of competence, was about to appoint him head of the department, a highly visible, cabinet-level post. Well, good luck to the Alaskan environment, was all Tremaine had to say.

Anna barely waited for Walter to finish before she got in her two cents’ worth. “As for me,” she announced in that contentious way of hers, “I
did
remain behind in Gustavus on the day of the avalanche. We were correcting some errors in the mapping and distribution analyses."

She flicked a glance at the shiny-faced Walter but didn't bother to explain that it was his bungling and incompetence she was talking about. Well, no surprise there, Tremaine thought; it was
him,
Tremaine, she was saving her ammunition for.

Turning, she stared at Shirley with stolid condescension. “Is this satisfactory to you?"

Just like Anna, Tremaine thought. Never pass up an opportunity to make waves.

Shirley smiled glassily. “Well, if it's all right with you, it's certainly all right with me, dear."

Now there. That was an example. Had that been a gossamer-cloaked jab of some kind? Had some electric current imperceptible to the masculine nervous system passed between them? Had Anna—unthinkable idea—been bested in some mysterious female clash of personalities? Anna herself seemed to think so. With a sulky shrug she fished in her bag for her pack of cigarillos.

Tremaine almost chuckled himself. This wasn't something that happened to the formidable Dr. Henckel very often.

And on this pleasant note their breakfast meeting came to an end. Arthur Tibbett, the assistant superintendent who was to accompany them to the glacier, made his appearance.

"Tibbett, Tibbett,” Tremaine mused aloud. “Do I know you?"

"I don't think so,” the administrator said.

"We haven't met?"

"Not to my knowledge."

Rather a stuffy sort, Tibbett; every inch the minor functionary. Well, well, no matter. Tremaine was not about to let the puffy manner of a petty bureaucrat affect his sunny mood. On to Tirku Glacier.

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Tirku Glacier is hardly one of Glacier Bay's great attractions. The cruise ships that ply the waters so majestically do not stop near its foot to view it. It is not one of the famous tidewater glaciers fronted by a vertical, spired facade of blue-white ice from which skyscraper-sized chunks split off and crash slow-motion into the bay with booming, spectacular explosions of water. Its receding, grimy snout is now half a mile inland on a gritty plain of its own making, and it is not a gloriously photogenic wall of ice at all, but a squat, humped protrusion one hundred and fifty feet thick, black with dirt and boulders, and shaped something like an enormous bear's paw laid flat on the ground.

On a low, rocky moraine at the northeastern edge of this ugly, imposing paw, seven people stood shivering in a freezing miasma that oozed from the glacial face like carbon dioxide from a lump of dry ice. They had walked, speaking little, from the catamaran beached on the barren gray shoreline. Tremaine had expected some emotion from them, but there seemed to be only a bored restlessness. Now they began to wander off individually, poking spiritlessly at rocks and chunks of gray ice that had fallen from the glacier face. Anna, who affected a six-foot ebony staff, like some ancient Watusi queen, was using it to prod the glacier itself.

"Well,” Tremaine said, perhaps a little too heartily, “I suppose we'd better go ahead and pick a spot for the plaque. That's what we're here for.” No one replied. Silence, awkward and uncomfortable, hung over the little group. The raw fog—not quite the “mist” Tremaine had had in mind—was sharp in their nostrils, smelling like cold iron.

Gerald Pratt, lighting his pipe, presently looked out from behind hands cupped to protect the flame from the dank wind. A blue woolen guard cap jammed down over his ears made his skeletal face look like a death mask. “So this is where it happened,” he said conversationally.

"Not quite,” Tremaine said, for once glad to hear even from Pratt. “We were on the glacier itself when the avalanche struck. We were crossing this tongue of it, oh, a few hundred yards back. Over there somewhere. It's difficult to say. The snout's moved back quite a bit since then."

Pratt followed his gesture and nodded slowly. “There, you say."

"Of course I don't know about these things,” Shirley Yount said in that maddeningly arch way, as if implying that of course she knew everything there was to know about them. “But if that's where it happened, why don't they put the plaque there?"

"I'm afraid that wouldn't work,” Arthur Tibbett told her. “Glaciers move, you see. In ten years nobody would know where it was."

"And where would you suggest?” Tremaine asked.

The assistant superintendent started. “Me? Well, it's up to you, of course. I wouldn't want to say.” He had been that way all morning.

"Nevertheless,” Tremaine said, “we would value your opinion enormously."

"My opinion? What about here on this ridge, right on that big boulder with the notch? That's going to be here for a while."

"Fine, then just
do
it,” Elliott Fisk said disagreeably, “before we all freeze to death. What's the difference? Who comes here, one person every ten years? Who's going to see a plaque, a bunch of polar bears?"

"Just like a dentist,” Pratt mumbled inscrutably to no one.

Fisk's pale eyes fixed him. “And what is that supposed to mean, if anything?"

"Just say the word ‘plaque’ and he comes unglued,” Pratt said amiably.

Tremaine looked at him, surprised. Did a dormant sense of humor actually lurk somewhere in that gaunt and dour frame?

"I am not unglued,” Fisk replied pettishly, “I just want to get on with the damn thing."

Tremaine wanted to get on with it too. “Well, I'd say that wherever Mr. Tibbett—"

He was interrupted by a cry from Walter, who had been wandering aimlessly, shoulders hunched and hands in his pockets, kicking without point at chunks of gray, decaying ice. “Good
God!"
he shouted. “What in the world..."

The others turned to him to find him staring at the ground at his feet. On the wet gravel, lying among the softening pieces of ice that had fallen away from the glacier, lay a glistening ivory shaft of bone, six or eight inches long, broken roughly off at one end.

The thought leaped among them like a spark, almost visible in the whitish air. Once before, a few years after the tragedy, the glacier had disgorged some grisly shreds of the dead expedition members. Had it happened again? They stared, fascinated and appalled. Were they looking at a piece of James Pratt? Of Jocelyn Yount? Steven—