South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  Cooper found the Dome silent, all the machines asleep while the Nailheads ate lunch, and as she walked down the entrance tunnel, she had to work to focus her eyes and steady her steps. She could see her breath, but felt warm. After what felt like days, she finally reached the bottom of the entrance tunnel, and looked out at the drifts surrounding the station. The cornices atop them loomed nearly twenty feet high. This was the moat of death, the deep, circular crevasse that formed around the Dome as winter progressed, but now it seemed bottomless. She glanced down and saw whales. Hallucinations, she thought, and congratulated herself for being able to tell. She blinked once and the whales obligingly disappeared. A hooded figure appeared at the top of the entrance tunnel, and then disappeared, too. Cooper’s body was pulsing but her limbs felt stiff. She heard her name coming at her from all directions.

  Across the plateau, she could see the caution flags that marked the sinking old station now buried beneath thirty feet of snow, its bones slowly being masticated by the polar ice. A hooded figure appeared again, this time running. Cooper gasped, and a mouthful of thirty-below-zero air scalded her lungs until she thought she’d collapse from the pain. At the same time, though, she felt uncomfortably hot. The person was still running toward her, and it struck Cooper that for some reason he knew what she was about. Perhaps he was coming to stop her. She couldn’t let that happen.

  She fell to her knees and began clawing at the snow with her left hand, holding the vial in the remaining fingers of her right.

  Suddenly, her pursuer was next to her. He stopped and removed his parka. Before she could get a good look at him, the wind changed directions all at once. The snow was rising off the plateau, as if it were alive. A burst of wind knocked her off her knees, but she struggled to her feet. No, this wasn’t the right place, this polar vehicle superhighway. No, she knew the right place for this. Beyond the Pole marker and the flags of all nations, at the place where Scott spoke from beyond the grave. That’s where David belonged.

  A high-pitched scream sounded in her ear. She could see boots just in front of her, and thought she could hear a voice. The boots moved away. Cooper dropped her chin to her chest and lay still once more.

  Climb in the trench, kick out the roof, and go to sleep. Doesn’t get any easier.

  It was as if all of her muscles relaxed at once, like a building settling onto its foundation in a single movement. Cooper found she was standing alone in a clearing. Before her, a forest, pines and oaks twining together, meeting the edge of the snow. She walked toward it cautiously. All was silent. But life wasn’t silent, Cooper knew—not even here, so this couldn’t be life. Then, all at once, another clearing, and the sun trembling atop the ice like a gazing ball. Cooper closed her eyes against it. When she looked up again, the sun was gone, and in its place, a sparrow.

  DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY

  U.S. TOTAL ARMY PERSONNEL COMMAND

  ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA 22332-0400

  ORDER NO: 41-5

  The President of the United States has reposed special trust and confidence in the patriotism, valor, fidelity, and abilities of CARROLL F. BOZER. In view of these qualities and his demonstrated potential for increased responsibility, he is therefore promoted in the Army of the United States from Staff Sergeant General to Sergeant First Class. Promotion is effective 1 May 1991 with date of rank 1 May 1991. The authority for this promotion is Section 601, Title 10, United States Code.

  Format 307

  BY ORDER OF THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY:

  MICHAEL K. VEASEY

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL, GS

  CHIEF, PROMOTIONS BRANCH

  DISTRIBUTION:

  EACH PSC (1)

  EACH MAJOR COMMAND (1)

  SFC BOZER (1)

  ASSISTANT TO THE CHAIRMAN (OJCS)

  WASHINGTON, DC 20310

  man without country

  I see her standing at the end of the tunnel. I let her go that far. I know the impulse, and I respect it. You don’t survive here without putting your hands on it sometimes, but you have to know how to kill it before it kills you. This one doesn’t know how to do that. That’s why she got into this fix in the first place, why she came back from the Divide minus a fork.

  She’s not wearing a parka, and she’s shaking like a hog on butchering day—but it’s like she don’t notice. She just keeps walking, and I see that I have to go after her. My radio crackles, and I consider calling Floyd, but Floyd’s got a big mouth, so I figure this one’s on me.

  When I get there—and I run to get there—she’s standing by the moat, her body seizing with the cold. She’s looking into the ditch like she wants to jump in, and she’s shaking so hard she might end up at the bottom even if she don’t mean to. She sees me, and next thing I know she’s on her knees, and not in a good way—she’s digging, like she’s set to bury something. When she sees me coming with my parka, she gets to her feet and takes off. It takes me a minute to catch her, and when I do, she fights me. I’m careful—she’s ain’t got her bandage on, goddamn it, but I end up catching her and wrapping her in my parka. I have to throw her over my shoulder, but it’s done. We’re going back inside. Christ, the cold, though. It’s straight from hell.

  Once we’re inside, I take the bandanna off my head, snap it square, and wrap it around her hand. It’s ugly because it’s a fresh cut, but the fingerless don’t scare me. In my line of work, they’re a dime a dozen.

  “What were you doing out there alone?” I say, once I’ve got her hand wrapped.

  She says, “I’m not alone.”

  “Not anymore you ain’t,” I say, and when I put my arm around her shoulder, she sinks into it like it’s a warm bed.

  I steer her to El Dorm and try to get her to my room without running into any admins, but we run straight into Tucker. It’s okay—Tucker understands how I work. I let him know with my eyes that I got this under control, but this girl’s his favorite, so he watches me close as I walk her past.

  Once we’re in my room, I sit her down on my bed and look into her face. Her eyes are streaming tears from the negative fifty-degree wind, and her pupils look like pinpoints. I could take her to Hard Truth, but I ain’t done that to anyone yet. The quickest way to get NPQ stamped on your dossier is a trip to Doc Carla. No one, not even the weak ones, wants that. But she looks only half here. Lucky for her, I’m all here. This is my quarter. I can bring them back. Done it a million times. Only sane one left on the mortuary team after we cleaned up the crash at Erebus in ’79. Tourist flight from New Zealand—TE-901. They’d been running them over Antarctica for years—cocktails-and-cameras type of thing. The plane crashed in sector whiteout conditions. Two hundred fifty-seven on board, all dead on impact. They called us in from Fort Lee to help the Kiwis’ recovery mission, the only army unit in a navy operation, and we spent a week camped in tents at the crash site. Body parts everywhere, no telling how the legs got separated, and sometimes even the feet, cut clean away. The human grease turned our parkas black. It soaked through wool gloves. I was eighteen, just enlisted, practically still a blue-head. First place they sent me was Antarctica. Figures. It was my first time on the ice. I didn’t want to leave.

  I can smell the alcohol on her breath. “You take any scratch with that booze?” I ask.

  “I took all three pills, but don’t take me to Doc Carla,” she says. “She’ll be mad. And I don’t want to go home.” Her wound is leaking—my bandanna is done for—so I pull out my supply kit. Pole docs get supplied like they was going on a Girl Scout trip, so I bring my own shit. I have hydrogen peroxide, two irrigation syringes, dental filling mixture, glucose paste, hydrocodone, antibiotic ointment, gauze, and four three-inch elastic bandages with hook and loop strips. I keep my own hospital, because someone’s always getting scratched up at the site.

  I crouch in front of her and unwrap my bandanna from her hand. She winces, but doesn’t say anything. The wound’s opened up. Looks like it’s breathing. I see the finger’s been cut off down to the proximal phalanx—a
little beyond, because the joint’s gone. There’s lint and shit stuck to it, so I tell her I’m gonna wash the wound site, that it’s gonna sting, and before she can say no, I pour the hydrogen peroxide over it in a good steady stream. It soaks my pants leg, but I don’t mind. Cupcake, though, she’s almost levitating. I tell her to stop moving. “Makes it worse.” I want to tell her that after the deep frost of the burn will come a kind of clean feeling, but I don’t know how to explain it right so I keep my mouth shut. As I work, I see she’s looking at me, as if she’s seeing me for the first time. Her eyes touch on every part of my face—mouth, nose, eyebrows.

  I smear about a pound of ointment on the gauze, and wrap her back up. I ask her what she was doing out there. She doesn’t say anything at first, so I ask her again, and she says, “You ever feel like pulling a Titus?”

  “The fuck does that mean?”

  “The guy in the Scott expedition. The one who walked out without his shoes on to save the others. Do you ever feel like walking out into a blizzard and never coming back?”

  “Impossible,” I tell her. “It don’t snow at Pole.” The snow here comes in on the wind from the coasts. To a Fingy it might look like a blizzard but it ain’t. It’s just snow on the wind.

  Possible, she tells me. Been done.

  “Not here it ain’t.” You can die a million ways here, but not by “pulling a Titus,” the fuck that means. She looks at me like she wants a medal for not walking into a blizzard. She doesn’t know about life. Example: It would mean nothing to her to learn that a soldier could win a Bronze Star without stepping foot on the battlefield, that all you had to do was bring coffee to a four-star general sitting in a cool underground bunker in the desert, where the air is filtered and smells sweet as spring hay. You would not win shit for a search-and-rescue mission for an F-16 pilot who’d been hit by Iraqi gunfire and who put the plane nose-first into the sand at 130 knots. If you were honorably discharged because you were an old fuck like me, you would, however, get a job with the defense contractor responsible for cleaning up the shit left behind by the three thousand Abrams main battle tanks, the Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and whatever crackerjack bullshit Ali Baba used during Operation Desert Storm. That’s what I did. I’m no good at serving coffee, but I am damn fine at cleaning up. Example: Kuwait City. The sky was dark at noon with smoke from the oil fires. The power grids were shot—Hussein had destroyed the transmission lines and distribution centers. Floyd, who’d been moved off a secret project laying DEW lines in Canada, was working at Shuwaikh, trying to get the grids back online. I’d met him at the Defense Reconstruction Assistance Office, where he’d been pitching a fit over a newbie Corps engineer assigned to his team. All his bluster told me was that he was tender as a newborn babe and had no business being in a war zone. He was a mess for the first few weeks, and the suits almost sent him home. I took him under my wing, and though he acts like he don’t need me, he’s followed me to every godforsaken outpost I’ve been assigned ever since.

  One day, about a week after the U.S. military sent Hussein packing, I get the call to escort some Kuwaiti sheik from the Plaza Hotel to the airport so he could catch a flight to Ta’if, where all the other sheiks were running the country out of a Sheraton ballroom. I get to the eighteenth floor and see the door’s open already. He’s standing on the balcony, smoking. When he sees me, he tells me to come in. So I do, but he wants me on the balcony. As soon as I step next to him, the hair on the back of my neck is up. This guy ain’t happy.

  “Look at this,” he says, pointing his cigarette at the city below us. It’s sooty and dark. I see the same abandoned vehicles I saw on my way in, the same Iraqi tanks lying on their sides, the same sea of broken glass I’d walked across to get here, and the same Jawas standing guard at the door, except now there’s a shavetail with them, pointing at something beyond the smoldering skyscraper across the street. In the distance, the oil fires glow.

  The sheik starts talking, and I’m only half-listening, but I perk up when he tells me he’s the city’s engineer. I don’t know why it hits me like it does, that even here, in this backward-ass country where men hold hands like schoolgirls and women dress like ghosts, there’s a man with the kind of brain it takes to build bridges—to build entire cities.

  I’m still turning this over in my mind as he tells me how the Emir single-handedly turned a collection of mud huts into a city of the world. “And see what they’ve done,” he says, sweeping his hand in front of him. The wind catches the sleeve of his dishdasha, fills it like a balloon. I can’t tell if he’s talking about Saddam’s army or ours. I don’t reply—I never do when these guys jabber on—but he turns to look at me, his eyes wide, brown, as pretty as a girl’s. “Look!” he shouts. Then he’s grabbing me. “I want you to look, soldier!” My standard course of action when anyone lays hands on me is to pull my gun, but I don’t need a genius to tell me this guy is just another lost soul.

  “The airport’s done for, and your wells are a mess,” I tell him. “But the rest ain’t too bad. Four years and you’re back in business.”

  He hears this, but says nothing. He only drops the cigarette on the cement balcony and snuffs it out with one of his thousand-dollar shoes. He grinds it for too long, as if he thinks he can make it disappear. I find the oil fires again; I can’t stop looking, the way you can’t stop staring at a campfire. I’m still looking when, beside me, I feel the sheik walk to the other end of the balcony. I consider telling him that a river of money, courtesy of the United States taxpayers, is about to flood his city, that it’ll get fixed up good, even better than what it was. But you can’t talk to these guys. They’re too sentimental.

  I turn in time to see the edge of his dishdasha as it fills up with wind. I hear him land on the broken glass on the street below, and then I hear people shouting. What I notice is his cigarette flattened against the concrete of the balcony—a little bit of smoke still floats up from it. I walk to the edge and look over. The Jawas and the recruits are hovering over the body, and the shavetail is on his way back into the hotel to make a call. The engineer is dead, kissing the street. I curse him. I must shout it out loud, because the boys on the ground look up, trying to figure out where the sound came from so I have to step back. There will be questions and paperwork and then more questions. I won’t be on the line for this. I ain’t a suicide hotline, and this wasn’t a mission fail. But the paperwork and the shrink—I’d rather pull my teeth out with pliers than deal with that shit again. I didn’t need their help after Erebus, and I won’t need it now.

  I carefully set my supplies back in the tackle box and snap it shut. The girl’s eyes are big—scared-big—and I ask her what’s up. She says she left something out there, but she won’t tell me what it is.

  “Old Bozer’ll get it for you,” I say, like she’s a baby. “Just say what I gotta look for.” She shakes her head at me. Even though she still looks like someone killed her puppy, her eyes can focus on my face now. She’s coming back. I see the shame is getting to her. She’s too embarrassed to talk much. Good. What happened to her on the Divide ain’t her fault, but this silly shit—going outside without ECW and playing in the snow—that is.

  I got something to show her, so I take my old Palmer parka from the hook and help her into it. “Where are we going?” she asks while I pull her bandaged hand through the cuff.

  “Just follow old Bozer.”

  * * *

  It’s colder in the Utilidors than it is under the Dome. No one comes to this door besides me. I drop my shoulder and lean it; it’s ice-encrusted and gets harder and harder to open each year. I got the flashlight in my armpit, and once I break the door open, I have to crouch down and sort of shuffle through. She’s not following me, though. She’s watching me from the Utilidor tunnel, like she’s scared of me. Denise wasn’t scared. She walked in like a champ, no hesitation. She went right up to where me and Floyd had him laid out, went right up to him and told me to take the plastic off his face. But then it was me
hesitating. My brains told me that the Man Without Country would look as pretty as he did the day he died—hell, this continent’s got a whole baseball team of frozen explorers sleeping in the ice—but I wasn’t keen on it. Denise was, though—she was real keen. And by this time, I woulda done just about anything for the woman, so I did it. I blew on the plastic to get it to loosen a little, and after that it was easy enough. Denise held his head while I unwound the sheeting like I was taking off an Ace bandage. First to show was his beard. Next, his mouth, his white lips frosty. When I checked on Denise, making sure she wasn’t too upset, I seen something that surprised me. A smile. First one I’d seen since she’d come down. Something was happening here. Didn’t know what it was, but I wasn’t gonna try to stop it. Not if it’d help her. And it did. It did help her.

  I’d gotten the call right after Halloween 1999, from the U.S. Coast Guard, asking if I had any interest in visiting Newport, Rhode Island. A Boeing 767 had gone deep-sea diving shortly after takeoff from JFK, and the head of the recovery team—one of the boys from the Erebus crash site, Gluck, now a twenty-year navy veteran—had asked for me specifically.

  I was a month into the season at Pole but VIDS put me on a plane the next day, and I was on board the USS Grapple within forty-eight hours. I hadn’t done water rescue before, but I wasn’t there to rescue. I was there to recover. Gluck told me the Atlantic Strike Team was young—half of them were raw. He wanted me there to show the youngsters how a man handles himself when the bodies begin to appear, how to lay out the remains on the deck, how to catalog limbs, how to see without seeing.