The Blue (The Complete Novel) (8 page)

Before he lets it sink in, that we won’t have to face a storm on the pack, and see the ice crash down on our heads and slide us into the sea, he says we have to get moving. Right away, he says, like he’s been mapping out a path already. And hanging onto him, Voley by our feet, we make for the thinnest slit in the pack—a lead of sea separating our floe from the next one in the direction of the blue. Each step I take with my right leg hurts like hell for just an instant—the moment it touches the ground and my weight plants—but then it goes away just as fast, and Russell absorbs the impact for me. I lean into him as the pressure transfers to the bad leg, and then I’m okay. I look down at the tightly wrapped sweater on my leg. It’s soaked with red ice, and the streaks that fall down from my calf run in crisscrossing lines, dried cake, until they reach my boots where the icy slush rides up to wash them away.

Russell tells me it isn’t too bad, like he’s noticed I’m staring at my leg. Just a couple deep scrapes, he says, But we don’t want it to get infected. He adds that like I can do anything to prevent it. But the rest of the pills are gone too. No pain relief and no antibiotics.

            As we walk on, and I get used to the cycle of pain, hunger returns. A gnawing starts to rip around in my stomach. And thirst knocks at me, as if the whole fight with the seal drained way too much energy. Energy we should have been saving—to stay warm, to make our last march. With each swallow, the dryness in my throat hurts and there’s a lump that won’t seem to go down. I ask if we have a cup still, and Russell stops to rummage through the bag on his shoulder while I lean into him. Voley peers up at us like we’re retrieving food, as if we’ve been holding out all this time for no reason. Like we have enough to go around for everyone. With a great deal of effort, like the encounter with the seal drained him too, Russell manages to get the silver cup out and he hands it to me. I kneel down, just using my right arm loosely to cling to his leg so that I don’t spill over, and scoop up some of the top slush. Then I drink it—the burn in my throat subsides, and the aches of my muscles and my self-consuming gut temporarily quiet. The cold slush tastes cleaner and purer than any rain I’ve ever drunk. I refill the cup and offer it to Russell, but he tells me to drink again first. Voley watches me do this, and it’s as if he’s reminded that he has to drink too, because he stoops down and starts to lick the melt around where I draw my scoops. My digging and his licking form a small light blue pocket in the ice. I look for signs of the crack veins but see none. And reassured that we’re not going to fall in from standing still for too long, I fill the cup and hand it to Russell. He drinks it down, one gulp, and just one cup, and then he says we have to keep moving. I see beads of sweat on his forehead, and I wish that we still had the thermometer—that I could check the temperature. Because something tells me it’s getting too warm. And it means we should turn back. That having the floe crack open underneath us as we slept should have been enough of a sign already. That it’s crazy to march toward the blue, the sunshine, the warmth. But I leave it be and stand back up with a small groan. I won’t say a thing. We’re all in, I remind myself. Nothing to go back to. And then, pushing away as best I can the pangs of hunger, we push on.

When we come to the gap, Russell stops as if he has no idea how we’re going to get me across. I tell him I can do it, that my leg’s not that big of a deal. It will hurt, but I can do it, I say. He doesn’t protest, and waits to intervene, watching me test my leg. I put my full weight down on it and feel the searing pain. It jolts up through the nerves of my calf. Then, I let the pain pass through me, telling myself it’s just pain. Nothing more. All in my head. And then I take a few steps and eye up the opening in the ice—a narrow four feet of still brown water between us and the next floe. The ocean softly laps against the underside of the next floe’s shelf, a vertical sheet of ice a couple feet above the water’s surface. When I raise my glance, and tell Russell I know I can do it, he tells me to test run on it.

I take a few steps back, then charge forward for four steps. I scream at first, but then I suck it up, and I do it again, this time with no noise, just to show Russell I can. Jump off the left, he says, Has to be your left. I listen to him and try it out, just a little hop. Then, satisfied I can more than clear the distance, I line myself up. Straight shot, right across the gap, and I sprint. The lightning pain shoots up and through my entire body as I run, and then, on the last step, just when I’m sure I’m going to slip, I lock the left foot in place and launch up. And in the sky, springing up two feet into the air, a sheen of silver flashes, catching my eye. I land and stumble with a blast of pain that coils around the insides of my leg and through my stomach. As I roll, I breathe deeply, trying to suck air back into my lungs and calm myself so I don’t make another scream. The pain turns to a burning and I struggle to catch my breath for what feels like a minute. Russell hollers over at me to see if I’m okay, and then he says I landed on the wrong leg. He says he should have told me—leave and land on the same leg. I tell him it’s fine, but all I can think about is the silver flash I saw and the stabbing rhythm of nerve fire. And I swear that I saw more than just a glint of silver: I saw a shape. And already my mind works it over—the pointed angle rising from the surface of the floe, the long cylindrical body. I want to tell Russell to look, because he still hasn’t noticed, but I rise to make sure I saw it right first. I try to stand back up, carefully, putting all my weight on my left side. I balance myself upright long enough to look again. The silver looks just like a bright spot of light, painful to look at, because it’s reflecting direct sunlight under the patch of blue sky. But then, I shield my eyes, blotting out just enough of the glare. And there it is—I can make out the shape again. A triangle on the end of a rod. Voley crashes and slides along the ice next to me, able to keep himself stable even with three legs. Then Russell jumps, and we’re all one floe closer to the blue. And I tell Russell: it’s a plane.

What? he says, confused, like I must not be seeing things right. Then I tell him to look where I point, and he sees the silver again. Use your hands to block the glare, I tell him. I wait, anxiously, leaning on his shoulder while he tries. It’s almost like I’ve forgotten my hunger entirely as I wait, a hopeful wait for the sign of dawning comprehension on his face, the noise of recognition from his lips.

            My mind begins to work over the possibility—that we’re heading toward a plane. That maybe it’s the same plane we saw fly over us. And it crashed, right on top of the ice pack. Tried to land on the biggest floe it could find. But even still, crashed or not—there’ll be supplies. There will have to be something. Maybe even some kind of radio. And I think of Dusty, and how he’d probably know how to get the radio on a plane working again. But in either case, there’ll be something. Maybe even—and I try not to think of it, because it antagonizes my stomach to the point of fury—maybe even
food
. There would have to be some kind of food.
Unless
—I try to stop my mind from spinning into madness, into painful cravings, but I can’t—
unless
there are survivors. And they left the wreck only after taking everything there was in it. And now it’s just a useless shell of metal, waiting for the floe underneath to break apart so that it can travel down to the murky grave that’s been its ultimate destination since it was first built. But before my imagination runs further, into hallucinations of the specific kinds of food we’ll find there, Russell’s face catches my attention. He smiles first, and then he looks at me, eyes widening, his skeletal face contorting into something like happiness, and then he says it: You’re right—a plane!

And it’s as if Russell takes over my mind, saying out loud all the same things I was thinking. We start to walk across the slushy floe toward the next break and he voices each and every fantasy that I only dared to imagine: There will be an inflatable raft in it, he says, And there will be food. He says there will be fuel too, and maybe even another map. Something that will tell us where they were going. Where we have to go next. He doesn’t say a word about survivors, or what they may have taken from the plane. I want to ask him if this changes our plan—or if we’re still walking just to die under the blue. But I’m afraid to ask, like it might ruin some kind of strange luck. As if the words themselves will strip the plane of any intact supplies. Rejuvenated by the sight of the wings, and carrying my leaning weight with the strength of a man who hasn’t been starving for days, Russell starts to talk about the plane, like my own first impressions, as if it will be our savior. Yet with each new unbelievable fortune he says it will bring us, I can’t help  but start to work my mind back into some dark recess, in just the opposite direction he’s heading. I start to imagine the ice floe under the weight of the plane. How the floe is most likely already breaking apart, because where the plane is, there is sunlight. And all its weight under that sun means it won’t last much longer. We’ll wake up tomorrow morning and it will just be gone. Or we’ll see it happen while we walk: watch the thing sink right down into the sea with every last bit of anything that could save us. A final mock from civilization. Or it will be worse, and the survivors are still there. Living in the plane. And they’ll kill us as soon as let us on their floe. But part of me knows it’s all not worth thinking about anyway, because just getting to the plane seems unrealistic. I watch the silver constantly as we walk, and try to measure out with guesses how far it really is. I guess in time: minutes, hours and days. Russell’s voice fades away against the chatter of my own thoughts.

It’s too far, I finally decide. We don’t need to worry about the plane at all, because it’s simply too far. And so is the blue. There are too many miles between us and the wreck. And the sea gaps will eventually be too wide between the floes, and we won’t even be able to get across anyway. We’ll be stuck. We’ll die in the gloom. On a floe under gray light instead of sunlight. Even if we could make it, we’d starve to death first.

The day wears on with incessant projections coursing through my head, as Russell talks, prophesying about the plane and its contents, while I brood in silence, focused on the pain in my stomach and my leg and the black thoughts that continue to swell. Voley seems to sense my despair because he keeps looking at me, licking up into the air, but then I realize, it’s just that he’s hungry. And he wants us to stop and eat, but we can’t. Finally I say it: There’s nothing boy, sorry. I look around the floe between steps. Hoping that the seal has reappeared, because we have to kill it now to eat. So that I can feed Voley. But it’s nowhere. Probably starved to death and sunk. Used up the last of its strength on the final attack. And I know that even if it did come at us, we only have one small knife now. Starved or not, something tells me a hundred stabs wouldn’t take that thing down.

We stop to drink a few more times, and make a couple more jumps over the open water. Each one seems to hurt my leg more than the last, but I never make a sound. The ice floes sink down at their edges, like they’re becoming less and less stable in the water. Even though I still can’t feel the swells too much under the ice, our feet sink further into the floe than they ever have before. Each step along the floe goes down six inches, and then, slides up and out, leaving a tiny pocket of clear water. Russell drinks and tells me that we’re lucky—there are many places in the world that we could be lost where water would be as difficult to get as food, and then we’d be dying a lot faster. He says it like it should make me feel better.

            He tells me all about death by thirst, as if it takes his mind off of the fact that we’re dying more slowly from hunger. Your eyes become scabs, he tells me. Because there’s no water to keep them wet any longer. And you can’t swallow. The throat cracks. The tongue swells, and you feel like you can’t swallow. And the blood—it turns to sludge. And that’s what kills you—the blood gets too thick. It can’t carry any heat away from your insides. And you burn up, starting in your chest. It’s death from the inside out.

Strangely enough, the story helps. For a moment, I feel grateful for the slush pools I see all around us. That we can drink whenever we want. And when we stop to drink again, I dig with my hands and get a chunk of ice. Something to chew on and feel going down my throat. To trick myself into thinking I have food. Russell does the same thing. I carve out a piece for Voley, but he doesn’t want it. He just licks it and lets it be, and then takes a few more sips from the pocket of water I’ve created. And then we shove off again, our last bit of light to march on before our first night on the open ice without shelter.

When the light fades enough, we stop on a small floe and walk to its center, away from any signs of blue fissures, to lie down and spend the night exposed. Russell revives his exaggerations of our luck. As if there’s nothing but hope all of the sudden. And that with the plane and the opening sky, it’s only a matter of time until we’re back at some place like Blue City. I don’t care what the people are like, he tells me, We’ll learn to live with them—Okay Tanner?

            He starts to talk about the snow and the rain, saying they stopped just in time. Just in time for us to lose our tent. And we’d be a lot worse off, just like without the water, if it was still snowing or raining. I know it’s something else just to take our minds off of the hunger, but he’s right. I buy into it and start to think that maybe things are working in our favor.  

As the night wears on and soft wind blows constantly over my body, cutting right through my ragged clothes, and the feeling fades again from my feet and hands, I realize we might not make it through the night. Not exposed like we are. Seal or the wind. Whichever one kills us. And all at once, as I’m lying, I want to tell Russell to shut up. Like he’s going to screw things up, and start the rain all by himself if he keeps on talking like he is. But I know he’s talking more for himself, to keep sane, so I let him babble on: The plane again, the pack movement, the warming weather. Then, when he’s satisfied himself, he says he’ll do the first watch tonight, since I need to let my leg rest. Voley curls in closer to my stomach, conforming to my body, and we inch down into the driest patch of powder we can find. As we move, our weight sinks us three inches into the snow, much better than soaking in the freezing ice melt. I glance up at Russell, and as he sits quietly, and the night fades into darkness, he starts to shiver. I watch him and he just keeps on shaking. He wraps his arms around his body, but the shaking doesn’t stop. His teeth chatter and then stop, and I wait, and it happens again. Each time it’s like he catches himself before I’ll be able to hear. Without looking back at me, while he’s shaking, he asks me: How’s the leg? And I think he’s asking just to see if I’m still awake. I lie and tell him it’s fine. And then, just like that, like it makes perfect sense, I quietly unwrap his crusty sweater from my leg. Blood stiff and cracking, he notices what I’m doing and tells me to stop. I tell him he needs to wear something, or he won’t survive the night. I know you won’t, I tell him, You can’t stop shivering. I tell him we need to use the stove too, even if it is the last of the fuel. He doesn’t argue with me about conserving it any longer. So I crack off the dried, stiff blood and ice from the shirt, and then sit up enough to dig through the bag and get the stove out. But there’s no lighter. I look through twice, and then again, a third time, and I can’t find it. Russell stands up to put the sweater on, and then he asks me what’s wrong. But then, before I tell him, he catches on—no way to get the fire going. He lifts the bag up into the air and turns it over, dumping everything onto the ground. In the last bits of daylight, we find the last of our gear. Just the knife, the cup, and the dumb fishing pole. That’s it.