by John Yunker
Coach Gibbs was a mean old man who laughed as he forced his young players to run hills on hundred-degree days. But Robert discovered something out there on those sweltering afternoons, when Gibbs would dole out only ice cubes during water breaks—he learned that on the playing field, all men were equal. It didn’t matter if Nick’s dad drove a BMW or that Rodney spent a summer in France. An open-field tackling drill was all Robert had needed to prove that he was as good as all the rest. There’d been nothing like laying out one of the richer kids to put a smile on his face, to make him feel as if his life wasn’t the mess it was. Robert had been aware even then that this newfound happiness wasn’t healthy, but it was something to get him through the days.
The coaches had given him rules, and the game, which he excelled at, had given him respect. Over the years, that sport kept him within bounds. His grades crept back up, the fighting stayed confined to the field, and he enjoyed having an excuse to stay away from the sad little apartment and a mother who would still get drunk and sometimes threaten suicide. Football got Robert a scholarship to a small college in Peoria, Illinois. Looking back, the FBI had been a fitting sequel—another fraternity of sorts, with rules of its own, the occasional bloodletting. He’d still needed rules and regulations to keep his life from getting away from him, and the Bureau gave him that, along with an I.D. and a handgun. And it should have been good enough. His colleagues, many of them also former football players, were content in their lives—but for Robert, since Noa, the pieces of his life never seemed to fit together the way he wished they would.
He was not one who usually suffered from moral ambiguity, but now he wondered if he should have set the bar higher. He used to think he was on the right side of the law. Now, in a part of the world where laws and borders were abstract concepts, he could not escape the nagging feeling that he was on the wrong side. The way the Roca had ended up on the wrong side of the iceberg. Perhaps it was nature’s way. That’s what Noa would have told him. He smiled as he remembered her in the bar in Los Angeles. Mother Nature will fight back if man pushes her too far, she’d said. And that day is coming.
A man in a mechanic’s uniform handed him a beer, and Robert downed it quickly. He got up to get another and noticed the iceberg towering over the deck, only a few feet away, the iceberg that had nearly tipped a five-hundred ton ship on its side, now peaceful again, sleeping.
“You hiding from me?”
Robert turned to see Lynda. “Trying to.”
“And drinking?”
“Brilliant deduction, Agent Madigan.” Robert extended a can of Quilmes and was surprised when she accepted it. When he sat back down, she sat next to him. Yet she was mercifully quiet, and for once he didn’t feel defensive as he usually did around her. Maybe it was that he was starting on his third beer, or maybe it was the realization that he was now past the point of caring what she knew, what anyone knew.
“You ever fallen for one of your suspects?” he asked.
“Fallen?”
“You know.”
“Oh. Well, I was tempted once. I was working undercover as a dealer in this Boston club on Lansdowne Street. I’d never been so popular. I had male model types, even a few celebrities you’d know, hanging all over me. But it was a fantasy life, you know? They didn’t want me; they just wanted to get high. Around that time, I went on a blind date with this guy from my old neighborhood, and I was all full of myself, an ego the size of the Green Monster. I’d gotten used to being around all this money, and I suggested we go to this fancy seafood place. I could tell he was uncomfortable there—wrong clothes, nervous as hell. And then when I made fun of him for ordering a beer instead of something off the wine list, he called me an asshole and walked out.”
“So what’d you do?” Robert asked.
“I married him.” Lynda smiled. “So when were you planning on telling me about Noa?” she asked.
“I wasn’t. She’s dead, so there’s nothing to talk about.”
“Humor me. We’ve got time.”
Robert paused and looked around the ship, at the men who spoke no English, at the mesas made of ice that surrounded them. If he were going to pick a place to spill his secrets, this was the place to do it. So he told Lynda everything, from the first time he’d met Noa all the way through to the ice fields. As he spoke, he finished his beer, feeling his shoulders loosening, the pressure within easing.
The deck began to shudder, like a car with wheels out of balance. Then Robert noticed movement. As the ship accelerated, the shuddering eased, though not fully.
“Sounds like those propellers are going to fall off,” Lynda said.
“They just might.”
“Looks like the chase is on again.”
Robert stood and helped Lynda to her feet. “This is just between us,” he said.
“Yes, Bobby, of course. But let me ask you this. How can you be so sure Noa is dead?”
“I’m sure.”
“Are you telling me you never once considered the possibility that Aeneas rescued her?”
“I had her name on a watch list for years. If she survived, she sure as hell did a good job of playing dead.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You’re not going to let go of this, are you?”
“Suppose, for argument’s sake, that she got off that ice,” Lynda said. “Where would she go?”
“I don’t know. Off the grid.”
“Exactly. She’s not stupid, and Aeneas isn’t either. He wouldn’t keep her around. She’s a liability.”
“Aeneas is the liability.”
“True. But he’s smart. He knew that if you assumed she was dead and he confirmed it by radio silence, then he’d be free to live another day, which is exactly what happened. How many times has he slipped away from us? Aeneas is a survivor. I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume the same of Noa, do you?”
As much as he wanted to believe it, at the same time Robert did not want to exhume the past any further. In a sad, strange way, it had helped to assume Noa was dead because his life with her, however fraudulent and fleeting, had also died back there on the ice. When he left her behind, he’d left Jake behind as well—and he’d thought for a long time that Jake had been the better part of himself, the part he wished he could be in his real life.
And now Lynda was putting ideas in his head. He was imagining Noa’s face again. She would be forty-two now, three years his senior. Would there be lines around her lips, her forehead? Would her hair still be in dreadlocks? Would she still be wearing madras skirts and tank tops? The tattoos would still be there. Infinity on her wrist, perhaps faded by the sun and the years. And where would she be now, if she wasn’t chasing whalers? She was passionate about so many species—the endangered Kudu of southern Africa, the dolphins slaughtered annually off the coast of northern Japan, the Cape fur seals of Namibia. Only Aeneas would know these things.
“Bobby, you’re getting all quiet on me again. What are you thinking?”
“That she wouldn’t take me back anyway.”
“Perhaps. But how much of Jake was acting, and how much of him was you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, who do you think Noa was really in love with? Jake? Or you?”
Robert watched her return to the bridge. He thought back to his last night with Noa, in her bed. He had closed his eyes and leaned into her. She’d covered his head in her arms and pulled him close. Sleep came easily, without sex or alcohol, the gentle embrace under covers, the warmth of her breath on his neck. He felt wanted, such a simple feeling, but a feeling he hadn’t encountered often in his life, and now he wondered now if he would ever get that feeling back.
Angela
Angela stood on the fore deck and braced herself against a biting headwind. The sting of the cold air on her face reminded her of where she was, whipping her skin, as if to wake h
er up—to rouse her from the dream world she’d succumbed to when she first decided to follow Aeneas onto his ship.
Their relationship was nothing more than an illusion, she realized: When Aeneas had landed on her shore, drenched and helpless, she’d projected onto him the vision of the man she wanted, someone dependable and safe. He was none of these things, yet she told herself that maybe be could be—that maybe her gentle voice would help him sleep, instead of the liquor he turned to every night. That her body would make him forget about all other bodies, past present and future. That her dreams would become his dreams. It was all selfish, of course, and naive. Illusions always were.
Now the illusion was gone, and she faced an interminable trip with a man she recognized less and less with each passing day. She loved him, and probably always would—but she used to hope that once the whales were safe, once the Japanese and the Norwegians and the Inuit turned their boats around and returned home, Aeneas would turn his boundless energy toward her. But now she knew he would simply move on. To albatross in the Falklands. To sharks off the coast of Ecuador. He wanted to wage war with every fishing vessel in every ocean, and if he had enough time and money, he would. If Angela wanted to be with him, she would have to sail with him through all of these oceans. Ports of call would offer moments of stability, but only moments. And the only penguins she would count would be those that porpoised alongside his ship.
She made her way down to the storage room. Ethan was not there, and she wondered fleetingly where he was before turning her attention to the penguin. Still in his enclosure, he watched her approach. His wings were nearly clean of oil, but frayed from all the scrubbing. The laceration above his wing was no longer bleeding yet he still walked with a pronounced limp, and seemed to favor resting on his belly rather than standing. If he appeared injured, the females would avoid him, thinking him unreliable as a mate and provider for their chicks. Angela believed in natural selection—to disagree with the premise was to implicitly embrace some God holding all the strings—but at times like these, she took issue with the lack of flexibility of such a theory. She wanted to believe that even an injured bird could find a mate.
The penguin allowed Angela to apply a damp towel to his feathers, working out a few remaining spots of oil that had worked to the surface. Her mind wandered toward her camp at Punta Verde. She thought of the penguins she’d tried to rescue last season, the two-dozen birds caught in an oil spill who tried to continue raising their chicks despite being covered in muck. They had such a tragic air to them. They did everything right. They filled their bellies with food; they made it back to their nests despite the oil sheathing that weighed on them like suits of armor. They’d survived so much, only to watch their children die, not realizing that the food they were giving their children bore the poison that killed them. The parents looked so confused, so helpless. Nudging the carcasses with their beaks. Trying to force open the chicks’ beaks to ask for more food. Like their human counterparts, they wanted to be needed.
She heard a noise and turned, expecting to see Ethan at the door. It was Aeneas.
“I thought I might find you here,” he said. She turned away and continued to bathe the penguin. He approached and took a seat where he could watch. “I think this is one breed of penguin that hasn’t bitten me yet,” he said.
“Better keep your distance, then.”
He chuckled.
“Where’s Ethan?” she asked. “You haven’t tossed him over, have you?”
“I put him to work.”
“You what?”
“He volunteered. He’s a deckhand now. Seems to have taken to it.”
“He didn’t have much of a choice.”
“Angela, he approached me. What more can I do besides say I’m sorry?”
“I don’t know.”
“Now I have to figure out a way to get you out of this room.” He reached for her shoulder, but she pulled back. “What’s the matter now?” he asked.
“You have no plans to return to Argentina, do you?”
“What?”
“That line you fed me, about creating some sort of penguin protection sanctuary? When would that have happened? Before or after you went to prison in Buenos Aires?”
“This is not the best time to talk about this.”
Angela let the penguin go and climbed out of his enclosure. “I’m getting the feeling that there will never be a good time to talk about this.”
“I meant every word. But it’s not very practical for me to return to those waters now, given my reputation there.”
“I don’t expect you to return now, or ever. But it might have been nice for you to tell me that before I sacrificed everything to join you.”
“I didn’t force you to come along.”
“Is that what you told Annie before she died?”
Aeneas didn’t answer, but Angela could tell by his pained expression that she’d struck a nerve, and she regretted it. She could have let it go right then. Spared him any more anguish. But she wanted him to hurt, especially now.
“You’re the captain of this ship. She was a young, idealistic girl. You could have prevented it. You could have stopped her.”
“I let her on that Zodiac because that’s where she wanted to be. Everyone on this vessel is here by choice, including you. The risks, though acute, are accepted. She may have been young, yes, even idealistic. But she knew very well what she was doing.”
Angela didn’t respond. She suddenly pictured Diesel, standing outside her office door waiting to be let him. She remembered how Aeneas once said that penguins were clumsy creatures. They’re just out of their element, she responded. Now, on this boat, Angela was out of her element; she was the clumsy one. Aeneas was pelagic by nature, having grown up on the sea. But she was not. She grew up in a river town. She spent her life watching boats glide past. People on the coasts are used to people coming to them, but people on river towns get used to watching other people pass them by.
She knew Aeneas couldn’t take all the blame for her misgivings. They were two different species, neither more important than the other. She’d heard what she wanted to hear. She had been running from something—herself, most likely—and it had taken her this long to realize that she could not escape.
“Angela, what do you want from me?” Aeneas asked. “My life is this boat. This mission. Everything else is secondary. I thought you knew that.”
“I did. And I understand it. Penguins come first with me. Or at least they did once.”
“You’ll get back to them. I promise.”
“I hear we’re going to be passing Palmer soon.”
“Yes.”
She looked down at the bird in front of her. “I’m going to take him there so I can release him.”
“And how do you expect to do that?”
“You’re going to drop me off.”
“I can’t afford to slow down, let alone stop.”
“You will slow down. You’ll stop. And you’ll let me take him off the ship.”
“Only the bird, right?”
Angela said nothing. She wanted to punish him with her silence, let him feel some of the uncertainty she had been feeling.
Aeneas waited a few moments, then got up and left, closing the door behind him.
* * *
Angela returned to the cabin and unzipped her backpack. She removed her log book, caliper, hand-held scale, and nylon strap and placed them on her bed. Relics of a previous life, they seemed foreign to her now. At the bottom of the backpack she found the satellite transmitter. Brand new, it had not yet been activated. She was supposed to have attached it to a penguin in the south end of the colony the morning that Aeneas returned to her, the morning she ran away. And now it served only to remind her of her dereliction of duties, of those she left behind.
She could feel tears welling, but she resisted them.
She could feel the boat’s engine begin to slow. She looked out the window and saw Palmer Station in the distance. For anyone who wasn’t a scientist, there was nothing attractive about Palmer Station; it looked like an industrial park, with corrugated metal structures scattered about, containing dorms and labs, mostly painted blue. But to her it looked like the closest thing to home.
Angela returned everything to her backpack. She had nothing new to add to it but her white crew t-shirt. She located her passport, something she might need as she began to reenter civilization.
She paused and removed the satellite transmitter once again and looked over at the bed, where Aeneas’s yellow jacket lay. Then she activated the device.
* * *
There was no berth for large ships at Palmer Station, so the Tern docked offshore, and a Zodiac was lowered. Angela found Ethan on the rear deck, learning how to operate the crane. He was intent and focused, and he smiled at her when she waved him over.
“You can leave with me if you’d like,” she told him.
“Thanks,” he said. “But I think I’ll stay.”
Angela leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and he grabbed her in a tight hug. She noticed Aeneas standing off to the side, looking irritated. “Any day now,” he said.
Angela slung the backpack over her shoulder and picked up the penguin in a carrier Hedley had fashioned from a wooden crate.
“What’s with the backpack?” Aeneas asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Are you leaving for good?”
“I’m going home.”
Aeneas studied her face. “And I can’t change your mind?” he asked.
