A Cold Blooded Business

by Dana Stabenow

  “That’s right.” Toni moved to the attack. “None of you were supposed to come up here without proper orientation as to how you interact with wildlife on the North Slope. Did you not know, Senator, that you were not supposed to approach the animals you encountered during your visit?”

  One quiet voice, not the senator’s, admitted, “We knew. They told us.”

  “Then you know who’s at fault for that fox’s death. Now then. We’ve got a pump station to tour. Get on the bus, please.”

  As they pulled off the Production Center’s gravel pad, a dark shape shot up over the snow berm on the right. It passed directly in front of the bus’s front bumper, and in a purely instinctive reaction Kate slammed on the brakes with both feet.

  The bus plunged violently three times, like a recalcitrant horse, and stalled. The shape scooted across the road, skidded down the snow berm on the left and vanished into the fog. Kate sat where she was, gripping the steering wheel tightly in both hands and trying not to shake, her burgeoning confidence in her ability to drive this monster withered on the vine.

  “What’s the problem?” Toni inquired from the seat behind her.

  Kate swiveled and stared. “What’s the problem? Didn’t you see that snow machine?”

  “So what?”

  “Toni, I almost hit it.”

  “Nah.” Toni shook her head. “That was Cindy Sovalik. She doesn’t run into buses.”

  Kate asked what seemed like a logical question. “What’s she doing out here on a snow machine in the first place?”

  Only apparently it wasn’t. “She’s on her way home, of course,” Toni said impatiently.

  “Home?”

  “Yes. To Ichelik. It’s a village thirty miles east of the Sagavanirktok. It’s her home. She commutes back and forth to work from there.”

  “Commutes?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “On a snow machine?”

  “During the winter, yes. Anything wrong with that?”

  Kate looked out at the blowing snow and fog, through which she could see maybe two feet, and said, “What could possibly be wrong with that? I suppose during the summer she drives a four-wheeler?”

  “Yes.”

  Kate restarted the bus. “Did I see a rifle on her shoulder?”

  “Probably.”

  “I thought no one was allowed to have firearms in the field.”

  “No one is, except for the field manager and Cindy. Polar bears do wander ashore from the ice pack now and then, you know. They must have mentioned something about it during orientation.”

  A voice from the back of the bus added, “Right after they told us about not interacting with the wildlife.”

  Kate looked in the mirror to see Chris Heller’s outthrust jaw and indignant eye, and restarted the bus. The drive to Pump One was accomplished in record time in a cold silence that rivaled the temperature outside. Kate heard the Sierra Club commando pounce on the pump operator who greeted them at the door, the Wilderness Society’s representative close behind. “Slickem?” the operator drawled. “Well now, slickem. That’d be a long-chain polymer, kind of a gooey plastic, reduces the turbulent flow of the oil in the line so that it’ll expend its energy getting down to Valdez instead of tying itself in knots north of the Brooks Range.”

  The short man said, “Well, we heard it greased the inside of the line to make the oil go down faster that way.”

  The operator stared for one incredulous moment, and then threw back his head and laughed. He laughed loud, and he laughed long, and when he was done laughing neither the tall man nor the short man had anything more to say.

  The pump station wasn’t as noisy as the Production Center had been and everyone walked and talked a lot slower and softer. They paid their respects to the three enormous pumps that hied the oil on its way, genuflected before the three Rolls-Royce generators that powered the pumps and from this shrine were ushered outside to make their curtsy to the line itself.

  It looked pretty much the same as it did five hundred miles to the south where it crossed the western border of the Park, Kate decided, a silver snake four feet in diameter, except that this one appeared to be shedding its skin. Large strips of the thin metal outer layer had peeled away, big chunks of the second, foamlike layer were gouged out seemingly at random and a green plastic subderma hung in strips like velvet from a caribou rack, leaving the darker, slowly oxidizing layer of steel pipe exposed to the elements and Kate’s astounded gaze.

  Upon inquiry, the pump station operator shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another and sent Toni an agonized glance, who said smoothly, “Yes, well, insulation restoration and repair is a priority in next year’s budget, have I shown you the cutout where you can feel the heat of the oil flowing down the line?”

  She slid down the side of the gravel pad and crunched across the snow to a spot thirty feet farther on. On any other day the two pit bulls would have sunk their teeth into the insulation story, but the station operator’s laughter rang in their ears and they followed Toni mutely. The rest of the group, who had already learned everything they ever wanted to know about oil production in the frozen north and were still shaken by the fox pup’s death, straggled behind in less than enthusiastic pursuit.

  Kate, following more slowly in the rear, cast a casual upwards glance and halted in her tracks.

  It appeared that two-inch silver duct tape was a primary means of interim insulation maintenance. Strips of it wound around the pipeline, binding the peeling layers of insulation to the line with the grim determination for which duct tape is known as an all-purpose utility fix-all in the Arctic.

  Kate stood there, staring up, hands in her pockets, trying to estimate how many sixty-yard rolls of duct tape it would take to wrap around a forty-eight-inch diameter, eight-hundred-mile-long pipeline. At three dollars a roll at McKay’s Hardware, and with the current price of a barrel of oil at nineteen dollars and falling fast, she was worried RPetCo and Amerex might not be able to afford it. Then she remembered that over half the pipeline was buried, and heaved a sigh of relief. The ingenuity and foresight of the pipeline’s designers had not failed her after all.

  “Kate?” Toni said, coming up behind her. “Did you want to take a look at this?”

  Kate turned to meet Toni’s inquiring brown eyes. “Okay,” she said, “I give up. What’s the deal with the turtles?”

  *

  “It’s not their fault,” Toni said back at the airport, watching the honorable senator from the great state of Illinois and entourage file up the airstairs into their plane. “Every government employee, before he or she is allowed to move up the civic ladder, is required to pass a course entitled ‘How to Be a Prick in Ten Easy Lessons.’” One of the group turned at the bottom of the airstairs and waved enthusiastically. Toni gave a wide and seraphic smile and waved enthusiastically back. “Good-bye, all you little pricks and prickettes, good-bye. Click your heels, close your eyes and say three times, ‘There’s no place like Washington, D.C.’ Thank God.”

  The archaeologists burst into slightly hysterical laughter. Kate decided that if she discovered Toni Hartzler was dealing dope on the Slope, Kate might have to cover up the evidence.

  She negotiated safe passage back to the Base Camp and nosed the bus up to the bull rail with no small sense of triumph. Plugging the bus into the headbolt heater on the rail, she collected the pup’s body from beneath the driver’s seat and followed Toni into camp. They were met at the front door by none other than Cale Yarborough. “What the hell is this I hear about the fox pups on H Pad!” he bellowed, at a decibel level John King might have envied.

  Kate tried to pretend she wasn’t holding the body of the fox in question by the scruff of the neck and waited for Yarborough to ring the charges over Toni’s hapless head for allowing a United States senator to be bitten by a fox on his, Cale’s, shift.

  “I’m sorry, Cale, it was—” Toni began.

  Cale snatched the body from Kate’s hands and cradled it i
n his arms and stroked its dead little head. “Poor little pup,” he crooned, “poor little thing.” He damned both women with an impartial glare. “At least tell me he took a good-size chunk out of the Honorable Levi Poulsboro. At least tell me that!”

  “Sorry, Cale,” Toni said meekly, “he only got in a little nip.”

  Yarborough held forth colorfully for ten minutes on the cranial capacity of the average United States senator. Ending with a blanket curse on all their offspring for generations to come, he stamped off, still cradling the stiffening body of the pup protectively in his arms. Kate followed Toni into her office. The phone was ringing and it kept ringing for the next forty-five minutes, one call after another demanding to know if the horrible news was true. Toni assured one and all it was and at the first breathing space unplugged the phone. Her beeper whined almost immediately. She turned it off.

  “Is it always like this when a fox gets killed?” Kate said.

  “Hey,” Toni replied with an airy wave of her hand, “those pups were the adopted children of most of the west side of the field. The production operators go out every shift change to check and make sure one of them hasn’t wandered into the flare pit by mistake. Belly dumpers getting paid by the yard have been known to detour through the pad just to pay their respects. I myself have been requested to put the PR van at the disposal of various departmental delegations who want to go out and take pictures to send to relatives Outside. They’re so little and round and fuzzy and cute, you see. There isn’t a lot that’s little and round and fuzzy and cute on the Slope, and these are the first ones to den in so close to the Base Camp.”

  “Why’s Yarborough so pissed?” Kate said plaintively.

  “He drives out there himself, two or three times a week, with bologna sandwiches.” Toni grinned at Kate, feet up on her desk and hands linked behind her head. “He hates bologna. I’ve heard him say so.”

  “But,” Kate said feebly, “but they told us in orientation we weren’t supposed to feed the wildlife.”

  “We’re not,” Toni said.

  “It makes the wildlife dependent on us, they told us. Makes them forget how to hunt their own food.”

  “It does.” Toni looked at her watch. “It’s seven o’clock, end of shift. Didn’t you say you were meeting Dale for dinner?”

  Dumbly, Kate followed her down the hall to the dining room, to find Dale already in line.

  Tonight, the serving line was presided over by a swarthy man with a luxuriant mustache clad in an immaculate white jacket that buttoned down one side and a towering chef’s hat that tilted rakishly over one bushy black eyebrow. “Kate Shugak, Gideon Trocchiano,” Dale introduced them.

  Gideon beamed at Kate. “Rare, medium or well done?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Kate stared past him at the immense grill, where rows of New York steaks sizzled merrily.

  “How do you like your steak?” Gideon repeated.

  “Steak?”

  His smile faded a bit. “Yes. It’s Tuesday.”

  “So?” Kate said warily.

  “So Tuesday and Thursday are steak nights,” Dale said impatiently, “how do you want yours cooked?”

  Lunch had been rushed and nothing out of the ordinary: a choice of cold fried chicken, make-your-own sandwiches and a small salad bar. Dinner evidently was going to be different. For dinner, there was not only steak. There was deep-fried halibut in case she didn’t like steak. There were steak fries, long and thick and perfectly browned and with the peel still on, a sight that nearly made Kate moan with delight. There were green beans sauteed in bacon and onions. There was a salad bar as big as the first floor of Kate’s cabin, heaped with lettuce and tomatoes and mushrooms and green peppers and sprouts and a bunch of other vegetables Kate couldn’t have identified at gunpoint, and no turtles (she checked). There was a cart piled high with desserts, apple pie and lemon meringue pie and cherry pie and chocolate pudding and pound cake, all of which Dale turned up her nose at, saying they could make hot fudge sundaes in the break room after dinner, if Kate wanted.

  “If I want?” Kate said. “If?”

  Holiest of holies, there was a dispenser armed with two spouts that gave forth an inexhaustible supply of fresh milk. Kate filled four glasses; by then her tray was heavier than Belle’s bag. She staggered from the serving line into the dining room with the growing conviction that working for an oil company had its advantages.

  The first person she saw in the dining room was Jerry McIsaac.

  Four

  HE LOOKED UP FROM a table groaning beneath the weight of an equally well-laden tray and saw her at the same time. He surged to his feet. “Kate? Kate! What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Jerry!” She put her tray down on his table and returned his hug with extra.

  With a final thump on her shoulders he pulled back to look at her. “How long has it been, two, three years?”

  “Too long,” she said, sitting. “What are you doing up here?”

  “The same thing I did in Anchorage, for a lot more money. Anyway, I asked you first.” He eyed her. “You aren’t—working, are you?”

  She smiled at him, a vague, unfocussed smile that should have warned him.

  She remembered the first time she had seen Jerry McIsaac. It had been in an apartment in Mountain View where a baby-sitter had arrived to find the parents had already left. Her charge, an eighteen-month-old boy, had been beaten unconscious in his crib and the baby-sitter, a frightened fourteen-year-old who couldn’t stop shaking, had nonetheless retained the presence of mind to dial 911. Jerry, lead paramedic on call out of the Airport Heights fire station that evening, had been first on the scene, two minutes from the time the call came in. Even so, he was too late. The baby was pronounced DOA at the hospital.

  He was looking at her with a quizzical expression; she said, “I was remembering Petey Washington.”

  Jerry was a tall, plump, rubicund man with big blue eyes and a wide-open smile that faded at her words. Like her, his memory was good, far too good. He cut a bite of steak and chewed it thoughtfully. “Yeah.” He swallowed. “Your first call, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded. Arrested on duty at Fort Richardson, both parents had worked hard at blaming the other for their son’s death, but Kate’s meticulous recording of the detail of the bruising found on the child’s body and the physical evidence surrounding the scene, plus patient, painstaking interviews with neighbors above and below stairs had resulted in time for both. Hard time. In fact—she made a quick mental count—Petey Washington’s father shouldn’t be eligible for parole for at least five more years.

  None of it had brought Petey Washington back from the dead, though.

  Their eyes met. “First time’s always the worst,” he said.

  Her smile was involuntary and fleeting and more than a little sad. He had said that to her that awful night in Mountain View. He had said it to her while he was holding her head, as she vomited up the remains of the Lucky Wishbone jumbo cheeseburger and fries she’d had for dinner. Jerry was intimately acquainted with her previous job, as well as with the circumstances surrounding her departure. Jack had kept her more recent activities from public notice, and she was fairly certain in this instance that Jack would qualify Jerry as “the public.” “Yeah,” she said, and busied herself with her food.

  She could feel his eyes on her bent head. “So what brings you up to the frozen north?”

  “Work. I got myself hired on as a roustabout. Just came up this morning.” She gestured at her laden tray and met his eyes with a twinkle in her own. “I may never leave.”

  He laughed and, it seemed to her, relaxed a little. “I know. It does sort of give new meaning to the horn of plenty, doesn’t it?”

  Dale sat down between them. “Hi, Jerry. You two know each other?”

  Kate filled her mouth with steak to avoid a reply. It was perfectly done, a moist, steaming pink on the inside and a thin crust of black on the outside.

  “Yeah, we both used to w
ork in town,” Jerry said easily, and Kate thanked him with a glance. Swallowing, reluctantly, she wiped her mouth and said, “Why’d you quit?”

  His wide shoulders moved in a small shrug. “Burnout.”

  “Bad?”

  He grimaced. “Bad enough for me to make the move up here.”

  “Here is better?” Kate asked, thinking of the drug overdoses, Chuck Cass’s death.

  “Up here only grown-ups get hurt, and usually they’re only hurting themselves.”

  Kate saw his point.

  “Anyway, I went back to school and got my physician’s assistant degree—”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks, and Lil Rogstad—remember her?—was already up here and put in a good word for me, and the rest is history.”

  “Lil’s here, too?”

  “Yeah, she’s my better half on this shift.”

  “Hi.”

  Toni’s voice sounded next to Kate, and a note in it made her swivel around to look. The other woman’s eyes were fixed on Jerry’s face with what could only be described as a languishing expression in them. A half smile curled her mouth. “Looks like old home week. Mind if I join you?”

  The table shook and slopped Kate’s milks into her tray as Jerry leapt to his feet. “Hi.”

  “Hi. Didn’t I already say that?” she asked Kate.

  “At least once,” Dale said, tucking into her salad.

  Jerry pulled out a chair and Toni settled into it gradually, taking her time, snuggling back into it like a kitten curling up on a pillow. “You can sit down now,” she told Jerry softly.

  His face flushed. Dale giggled. Kate hid a grin. Toni looked from Kate to Jerry. “You two know each other?”

  Before either of them could answer a beeper went off. A rustle went over the dining room as all 145 people in it checked their pockets. Over the tinny speaker on Jerry’s beeper Sue Jordan’s gravelly voice said, “Jerry, medical emergency, call the operator, call the operator immediately.” The last word was barely out before the same voice came over the loudspeaker. “Jerry McIsaac, call the operator immediately, Jerry McIsaac, call the operator immediately.”