South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  As she walked in, The Smithereens’ “A Girl Like You” was playing at max volume. Cooper took in the foosball table, a disco ball, and the stripper pole. Twinkling fairy lights hung from the ceiling, along with at least twenty purple Crown Royal sacks, below which ashy clouds of cigarette smoke created a small weather system. The bar itself was a piece of plywood on crates, behind which a man in a George W. Bush mask was dispensing drinks from a series of mini-fridges lined up against the wall. Everyone bought their own liquor at the station store, or shipped their own booze down to Pole before the season started. Cooper had settled for the cheap New Zealand beer that came in cases on every flight in, but her supply was down at 90 South with the rest of the Fingys’.

  Cooper spotted Tucker at a table with some galley workers and assorted Wastees—the people who handled garbage and sewage—and she and Sal silently parted ways.

  “I know a guy whose credit card was stolen,” a guy without a chair was telling the table. “The thief ordered a really expensive cell phone and also sent him a Lobstergram. Guy cancels the card, and Lobstergram didn’t want the lobster back. The guy was allergic to shellfish so he gave it to a friend.” This raised no response, and no one offered him a chair.

  “Anyway,” a tall man with Cher-like hair and a sparse, preadolescent-style mustache said. “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted: you play the Antarctica card off the ice, you’re laid ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”

  “Doesn’t work for women,” a dark-haired woman said, her feet on his lap. Cooper recognized her as Pearl’s boss, Bonnie, the head cook.

  “Why?” her cloak-wearing companion asked.

  “No man sitting at a bar is gonna get his dick hard if a woman tells him she’s just back from the ice chip, except maybe another Polie. And in that case, it’s just a reflex.”

  Tucker took Cooper’s arm and simultaneously pulled out a chair from another table. “Congratulations on gaining entry,” he whispered. Then to the group, he said: “This is my friend, Cooper.” Cooper cringed. The first thing she’d understood when she’d arrived was that introductions were for the desperate; the fewer you required, the stronger you appeared. Pole was a place where people simply became known.

  “You tell us you don’t have friends, Tucker,” Bonnie said, “that you’re a lone wolf.”

  “Well, Bonnie, I’m starting fresh,” Tucker said. Cher then introduced himself as Dwight, “the wizard-god of Logistics and Comms.” Too late, Cooper realized Tucker had slipped away.

  “Judging by your attire,” Dwight said, “you are neither Beaker nor manager, neither galley slave nor Wastee. Reasonably attractive, yet with no obvious male companion.” He paused and looked over at Bonnie. “Wow, this is exactly like cosplay.”

  “No, I recognize her. You were in the kitchen the other day,” Bonnie said, scrutinizing Cooper’s face. “I think you’re a VIDS psychologist, trying to blend in with the population.”

  “I’m a painter,” Cooper replied.

  “They sent people down to paint the walls?” Dwight asked, incredulous.

  “Artist,” Cooper clarified. “The NSF sends artists down each year to do … whatever.”

  Bonnie reached across the table and offered Cooper her hand. “Well, let me formally introduce myself—I’m Bonnie, the head cook.” Cooper took Bonnie’s chapped hand for a shake, but Bonnie grasped Cooper’s and pulled it toward her, caressing it. “Dwight, honey, feel her skin.” Dwight ran a bored finger over the top of Cooper’s hand and withdrew it, nodding.

  “So pink and soft,” Bonnie cooed.

  “That’s how we find the Fingys when there’s a blackout and we need fresh meat,” Dwight said in a monotone. “Their soft, infant-like skin.”

  Cooper excused herself to beg a beer off George W. Bush. She cursed softly when she noticed, again too late, that the man sitting to her left was Floyd. “Who’s more heroic,” he asked his companion, brandishing a glass of whiskey, “a woman doc who got a common disease, but who was also trained to deal with it, or the pilot who successfully landed a Herc in the middle of a polar winter to evac her?” He paused here, letting his rage build. “You tell me which demands more bravery. You tell me who risked their life. Do you even know the pilot’s name?”

  “Dude, I’m just trying to have a drink,” the guy said wearily, pushing his fingers in and out of a plastic jack-o’-lantern’s mouth.

  “Major George R. McAllister,” Floyd said. “You remember that name.” He glanced over at Cooper. “You, too—George R. McAllister. Oh, hey, I know you. You’re the McMurtry apologist. Who the hell let you in?”

  Luckily, death metal began blaring through the speakers at that moment and Floyd skipped over to the stripper pole and started gyrating. While everyone guffawed at this, Cooper noticed Sal was watching her, but he quickly looked away. She watched Floyd for a while—he was surprisingly agile—and finished the Canterbury ale Bush had loaned her, but it gave her a headache. She was about to leave when Birdie walked in, his thick glasses reflecting the lights from the revolving disco ball. He carried a bottle of Dewar’s bearing his name on a piece of masking tape and two highball glasses pinched between his thumb and fingers. He took a seat next to Cooper.

  “Who told you?” she asked.

  “Told me what?”

  “About this place—who let you in?”

  Birdie smiled and opened the bottle. He poured out two measures, then handed a glass over to Cooper. “She did.” He nodded toward Pearl, who was throwing darts with a couple of dining assistants.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “This strains your credulity? I’m not offended. It strains mine. Look at her. She’s gorgeous.” Cooper looked over at Pearl. For the first time, the pink bandanna was off, and Cooper saw that both sides of her delicately shaped head were shaved to the skin, leaving only a thatch of blond hair, which had been pulled up into a ponytail. She was wearing a black headband with glittery cat ears, and when she laughed, Cooper could see what Birdie meant.

  Cooper clinked her glass to Birdie’s. “Cheers.”

  “How’s it going, then?” Birdie asked. “The painting, I mean.”

  “Mittens,” Cooper said. “All I’ve got is mittens. And there’s no way to justify that as art.” Not that she hadn’t tried. The mitten is a talisman, an image of worship in a place where god is dead. It’s a study of both the humility of the simple garment and the hubris of our belief that it protects us from this savage continent.

  “You?” Cooper asked.

  “I’m having a hard time pulling things together myself. Now that I’m here, Bowers grows elusive.” Cooper could feel Sal’s eyes on her again, but didn’t risk a look in his direction this time.

  “I can’t imagine caring enough about a person I’ve never met to spend years researching his life and writing about him,” she said. “You’d have to be obsessed.”

  Birdie nodded. “Biography is not a genre for the lukewarm. Bowers was just a sledger, like me, head down, strap over his shoulder, the only one on the Scott expedition without skis. He was optimistic to the point of being demented. Cherry said there was nothing subtle about him. He wasn’t complex like Cherry, who was a head case. He’s not intrinsically interesting like Scott either, nor a hero like Titus, and thank god he wasn’t a narcissistic ass like Teddy Evans. There are no scandals to unearth on this fellow, no dark side. I suppose I’ll need to find a dark side. I’m told we all have them.”

  “Except me,” Pearl chirped as she passed. She leaned down between Cooper’s and Birdie’s chairs and slung an arm around them both. “Dark sides are for moons, not people.”

  Birdie nearly snapped his neck watching Pearl continue on to the bar top. Cooper told Birdie she had to hit the john. She passed Sal’s table on the way to the restroom, and he reached out as she walked by and hooked his fingers through one of the belt loops on her Carhartts. He was leaning back, his chair resting precariously against the wall—sodden, and more attractive for it, a
feat Cooper had never seen achieved before. Next to him, his Russian cohort, Alek, looked up at her with bleary eyes.

  “Where you going, strange person?” Sal said.

  “To the bathroom.”

  “I come with?” Alek said thickly.

  “Sure, that’s going to happen.”

  Alek fist-pumped toward the sky. “She says this will happen.”

  Sal squeezed Alek’s shoulder with his free hand. “Alek’s drunk on moonshine.”

  “Samogon,” Alek growled.

  “Sorry—samogon. It’s a moonshine they make in the Urals. NSF thought it was isopropyl alcohol and let it pass. You met Alek, right? You can call him Rasputin.”

  Alek frowned. “Always Rasputin. Why not Gorky or Pushkin?”

  “Because you’re an evil monk, not a literary genius,” Sal replied.

  Alek extended his middle finger and thrust it skyward. “Why do I allow you?” he bellowed.

  “What do you actually do, Alek?” Cooper asked.

  “I am here to help Sal win Nobel.”

  Cooper was intrigued enough to hold her pee. “This is important research season for our team,” Alek continued. “For world.” He lifted his glass of clear liquid. “I drink to it.”

  Sal looked embarrassed. “Samogon makes Alek sentimental,” he said. “Ignore him.” He gestured to a chair. “Sit down. I want to talk to you about something.” Cooper took the chair, and Sal leaned over the table. “I hear you’re getting cozy with Frank Pavano.”

  “Cozy? He visited me at my studio the other day.” Sal leaned his chair back again, resting his knees against the edge of the table. “Does this have something to do with your petition?” Cooper asked.

  “I can’t hear of this man anymore,” Alek said, and took his samogon to the table where Birdie was sitting with Pearl.

  “His work must be legit if the NSF funded his research,” Cooper said.

  Sal made a guttural sound in the back of his throat. “Look, last year, a couple of Republicans in Congress got letters from their constituents saying that they couldn’t get the literature on alternate explanations for climate change in the schools, they couldn’t get federal funding, they couldn’t ‘teach the controversy.’ Then one of these morons—guy named Bayless, out of Kansas—realizes that serious science is done at Pole and not one scientist is down here trying to prove climate change is a hoax. He gets constituents to flood the NSF with letters, joins forces with another Bible-thumping congressman, Calhoun, goes on Fox & Friends, they do their thing, open inquiry, whatever. Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Bayless and his own personal Lennie Small are up for reelection next fall.”

  “So the NSF caved to political pressure?”

  Sal shook his head. “Officially there was no ‘political pressure.’ In fact, NSF rejected Pavano’s application initially. Then all of a sudden he’s funded and NSF releases a statement that says they support the general principle of academic freedom and inquiry and are sending Pavano down here to disprove climate change.”

  “Is there anything there? What’s his science?”

  “Let’s not use science and Pavano in the same sentence, okay?” Sal said. “Pavano is collecting ice-core data from the Divide that he’ll use to dispute the models that indicate Earth is going to become a giant Bunsen burner. At the same site, I might add, where the real climatologists are extracting and analyzing ice cores that will prove that it is. His presence on the ice means that somewhere a real climate scientist did not get his grant approved.” He raised his glass. “And so, my darling painter person, the fact that Frank Pavano is at South Pole Station is officially a sign of the end times.”

  “You’re not a climate scientist. Why do you care so much?”

  “If you were a scientist, you wouldn’t ask that question.”

  All around them, people were starting to leave to get dressed for the Halloween party. “You coming?” Sal asked. “Everyone comes. It’s a polar spectacle.”

  Cooper looked over at Birdie—his face was rosy and tears were streaming from his eyes. Pearl rubbed his shoulders as Alek held an empty glass of samogon above his head triumphantly.

  “I guess so.”

  Tucker appeared at their table, his hands clasped in front of his body. “Frosty Boy’s back,” he said. Sal threw his head back and punched the sky with both fists. Tucker turned to Cooper. “Frosty Boy is a soft-serve machine that delivers flaccid ice cream in a continuous stream.”

  “He’s probably spent more time under the loving, quasi-sexual ministrations of the maintenance specialists than he has actually dispensing soft serve,” Sal said.

  “Why keep it around if it doesn’t work?” Cooper asked.

  “You can’t just come in here and replace things like Frosty Boy with something that works better. We grow attached to these temperamental pieces of crap. They’re rejects, just like us.”

  * * *

  A half hour and scavenged costume later, Cooper found herself standing in the darkened gym wearing a Freddy Krueger mask and surgical scrubs while a five-piece band calling themselves Coq au Balls covered an Avril Lavigne song as a joke. No one was laughing. On the booze table beside her, a jack-o’-lantern vomited seeds and pith. Cooper watched as the VIDS and NSF administrative staff jogged onto the dance floor, singing along to “Sk8er Boi.” She worked her straw through a slit in the Krueger mask and drained her screwdriver. A ghost-memory flickered in Cooper’s mind of Billie, at fourteen, advising her that liquor before beer, you’re in the clear and beer before liquor gets you there quicker. Or was it never been sicker? Whatever. Next to her, Dwight groomed his Chewbacca mask with a small comb. When he noticed Cooper watching, he trilled at her.

  Halfway through her third screwdriver, everything in Cooper’s line of vision began to take on the soft edges of a high school senior portrait. She scanned the crowd. There was Bozer, dressed as a hobo, a play on Tucker’s widely adopted moniker for him, hobosexual, a man who was the opposite of a metrosexual, a man who gave not two shits about his appearance. (“Like Michael Moore,” Tucker had said helpfully.) Holding a woman’s purse on the end of a stick, and wearing torn culottes, Bozer was showing off a handmade birdhouse to a Fingy meteorology tech, who apparently believed his story about the rare “glacier sparrow” that nested at South Pole. Across the gym, the interpretive dancer was sporting a rainbow clown’s wig and enormous novelty sunglasses in the shape of hearts, and Electric Sliding with the historical novelist, who really was just shuffling.

  Cooper turned away from the stage in time to see a woman from McMurdo walk purposefully toward Sal and grab his hand, pulling him back toward the dance floor. Through the eyes of Freddy Krueger, Cooper considered the woman: so that’s what Sal liked, she thought. Women who wore oversize football jerseys, hot pants, and slightly off-kilter trucker’s hats and called it a costume.

  “This is the annual start-of-the-season hook-up,” Tucker said, stepping next to Cooper. “Whoever you hook up with becomes your ice-wife or ice-husband for the season.” He looked out over the crowd of bearded Britney Spears and wobbly space cowboys. “Choose wisely.”

  “I’m trapped in a bad remake of Meatballs,” she said.

  “One wonders if a Meatballs remake could be good?”

  “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Cooper replied.

  “I know it seems like a frat party, but it won’t last. The beginning is always like rutting season on the Great Plains.”

  “What about you? Do you have an ice … person here?” Cooper asked.

  “As Calvin Coolidge once said, ‘I have found out in the course of a long public life that the things I did not say never hurt me.’” With this, Tucker wandered away, and Cooper finished off her screwdriver. Now she was sufficiently drunk. She pulled off the Krueger mask and threw it high into the air, not bothering to watch it fall in the middle of the makeshift mosh pit by the stage. She spotted her parka hanging on the NordicTrack that had been shoved into a c
orner of the gym. On her way over, she passed Birdie and Pearl, who were deep in conversation. “And they have these things called ‘meat raffles,’” Birdie said, his face still flushed from Alek’s samogon. “Meat raffles!”

  As Cooper made her way to the door, the lights suddenly dimmed—everywhere she looked, jack-o’-lanterns leered at her, their crooked mouths illuminated by battery-powered votive candles. By the door, she had to force her way through a knot of Beakers dressed as approximations of Christ’s apostles (bedsheets and beards). “Finally, the waiter leaves,” one of them was saying. “And that’s when she leans over and whispers, ‘I don’t believe in carbon dating.’ So I said, ‘I don’t believe we’ll be dating.’”

  As soon as she stepped outside the gym trailer, the icy air wrapped itself around Cooper’s midsection, and she realized she hadn’t zipped up her parka. When she tried to join the zipper parts together, the world tilted and she felt certain she could feel the speedy rotation of the earth on its axis. She leaned against the tire of a forklift and steadied herself. Below her boots, though, the ground circulated like a frothy whirlpool. She raised her head and stared in wonder at the sunlight pouring into the long entrance tunnel; she knew it had to be well after midnight, but it was as bright as a Folgers morning. The thought of fresh air pulled her forward.

  Halfway down the tunnel, she took a deep breath—the cold air rinsed through her lungs and the world stopped spinning for a moment. Then she saw the row of metal folding chairs blocking the entrance. A large handwritten sign had been taped to a chair. It read: NO, YOU CANNOT GET SOBER BY GOING OUTSIDE! RETURN TO PARTY YOU DUMBSHIT.

  Cooper remembered her studio—it was technically under the Dome. Maybe she’d be a better painter drunk than sober. They said Hemingway was. Hemingway wasn’t a painter, Cooper reminded herself. And who was “they”? Hemingway wasn’t a painter. Hemingway wasn’t a painter. She chanted this line out loud as she circled back to the artists’ annex. A couple making out in the cab of a Caterpillar stopped to stare at her.