The door closed again. She was alone.
She realized that she was perspiring.
VALENA MANAGED TO CORNER SHEILA IN THE STORE-room while everyone else was outside lashing down the return load. “I need more information,” she said.
“I don’t know what I can add,” Sheila replied, appearing to focus her attention on which can of tomatoes to remove from the shelves.
“Anything. Any arguments you overheard. Anything that suggests that anyone other than Emmett had a gripe with the man who died.”
Sheila rubbed a corner of her apron around the top of the can she had selected to remove a nonexistent coating of dust. “Well, I heard one…” she said, concentrating on a number 10 can of applesauce.
“Come on! Any moment, Edith’s going to step through the doorway and tell me it’s time to go.”
“I only heard one side of the discussion. Though it appeared to have but the one side.”
“Who’s side? What was said?”
“It was the journalist. He kept his voice low, but I could tell that he was very, very angry.”
“At who?”
“It was outside the tent the first day he was there. I was inside, cooking. So I don’t know which of the men he was talking to, but he said, ‘We meet at last,’ and then, ‘Yeah, you,’ or words to that effect, and then, ‘I’ve come a long way to find you, asshole,’ and then I couldn’t hear any more, because there were footsteps—you know how they squeak in that cold, dry snow—and Mr. Sweeny was following the other bloke away, nattering at him. At the time I didn’t think much of it.”
“Wow. Did you tell the feds about this?”
“Nay. They didn’t ask, now, did they?”
The airlock door opened, and Edith stepped inside. “Valena!” she called. “Come on! We’re waiting on you!”
BY LATE MORNING, THEY HAD SET ANOTHER SEVEN MILES of flags along the route, picking up where they had started setting them the day before and progressing back toward McMurdo. Valena fell again into the rhythm of the work, engrossing herself this time in the art of pitching flags off the top of the load while Hilario drove the Delta. The task required that she closely monitor the bundles of poles. There was an abstract pleasure to pitching the poles just right so that they stabbed into the snow but hung at a slightly drunken angle, so that Dave and Willy, who were again riding the snow machines, would know which ones had been rammed into the snow at the proper depth and which ones still awaited their attentions.
As she watched the two men work, she noticed that Willy kept to odd numbered holes and left the evens to Dave, regardless of whether or not Dave was delayed drilling with the augur. In places where the wind had eroded the snow down to the ice, it was necessary to use the auger to get a hole deep enough to hold up the flag. This was harder work and took two to three times as long per flag as using the pike on soft snow, but while Dave moved from an even to an odd when Willy was delayed rather than moving ahead of him, Willy did not return the favor. At one point, Dave hit a long cluster of icy positions and fell far behind. Seeing this, Hilario stopped the Delta and waited for him to catch up. Wee Willy pulled his snow machine up beside the Delta and waited for his next flag.
Hilario leaned out of the cab. “Hey, Willy! Where you get off letting Dave do more than half the work?”
Willy stared at him, letting the blankness of his goggles speak for his mood.
Hilario growled, “I’ll bet you were the pendejo that turned off the dish last night! Yeah, I saw the little wheels turning in your brain when the techs showed us which buttons to push on that computer!”
Wee Willy fussed with his neck gaiter, clumsily letting it slip low enough to reveal his smirk.
I’ll be damned, thought Valena. He’s smarter than he looks. Either that, or a whole lot stupider.
Half an hour later, they stopped for lunch. As they stood around in the lee of the Delta, they discussed the weather, the ice, and their position on the trail. Willy stood with them this time, closer to Valena than she liked.
“This is my point farthest south,” said Edith. “We’re at the southernmost point of this traverse. Seventy-eight degrees, eighteen minutes south. Not as good as Shackleton, but I ride in relative comfort.”
“Yeah,” said Hilario. “They didn’t have ChapStick in his day.”
Edith said, “So, Valena, how do you like driving the equipment?”
“I love it.”
Willy stopped chewing and stared at her. “But you don’t have to do this stuff,” he said. “You’re not even getting paid for it.”
Valena realized that he had just given her an opening from which to ask questions while in the protection of the group. Starting with pleasant chitchat, she said, “You love it, don’t you?” knowing that he didn’t. Love and Willy were two things that didn’t seem to connect.
Willy drew his eyebrows together in confusion. “It’s work.”
“Well then, let’s put it this way: what brought you here?”
“I was looking for a job.”
“Where?” she asked.
“On the computer.”
“I mean, where were you when you logged onto the computer? In Kansas, New York…”
“Oh. Massachusetts. I was looking on the Internet for a job, and they said they had this job.”
Dave said, “You didn’t like it much last year, as I recall. So why did you come back?”
Willy shrugged his shoulders. “Dunno. It’s a job.”
Edith rolled her eyes.
Hilario said, “Well, let’s get it moving, muchachos. We got miles to cover. Valena, you want another turn at the wheel?”
They continued setting flags through the first part of the afternoon. Finally, they saw the KOA ahead of them, a tiny box of cover in a wilderness of ice. Edith made her check-in call to Mac Ops and then announced over the intercom, “We’ll pull up at the KOA and make a final shuffling of the vehicles, then head for the barn.”
Hilario climbed down off the back of the Delta. “Edith says you’re gonna ride with Dave this last pitch,” he said. “He’ll teach you good. That’s the Cadillac of all Antarctic treads, and Dave’s got a hand like velvet on those controls.” He gave her a wink. “He don’t bite.”
Valena tried to force a casual smile but failed miserably.
Hilario threw back his head and laughed. “O cariño!” He chortled. “Dave is as gentle as a dove!”
So that was it, she was going to ride for two hours or more in that tiny cab with this man who made her that nervous. This man who might be a killer. And somehow, the nervousness and the possibility that he was a killer were two separate things. She pulled the Delta up next to the Challenger and climbed out. She walked across the open snow that separated the two vehicles. She climbed the steps up the fender.
Dave was waiting for her with the door open.
Edith roared past on a snow machine, gunning it for a fast return to town. Willy followed in hot pursuit. Hilario had moved into the driver’s seat of the Delta. He lifted one hand from the steering wheel and made a little scoot-scoot-scoot gesture, urging her into the cab.
Infor a penny, in for a pound, Valena told herself, and she stepped inside.
Dave moved to the jump seat and showed Valena how to adjust the driver’s seat to her size. He reached in front of her to put his hand on the first of two levers to the right of the wheel. “Now, here’s the transmission,” he said. “You’ve got ten forward gears and two in reverse.” He moved his hand to the second lever. “This one’s the throttle.” He pointed next to the floor. “The pedal on the left is the clutch. You can take off and shift through the gears without using it, but you’d need it for things like hooking up the goose, where you have to ease it back slowly and stop when the hole in the tongue is in line with the hole in the drawbar so you can drop in the pull pin. The next pedal is the brake, no different than a car. The third pedal is the decelerator, not the accelerator. It works just the opposite of the accelerator on a car. Pushing
down on that pedal slows the engine.”
“That’s going to be a little hard to remember.”
He laughed. “Then this is going to be an interesting ride. Now these levers are the hydraulics to lift and lower the blade. Keep it gentle. Okay, put it in gear, set it in eighth, and give it 2100 rpm’s.”
Valena set the throttle to a more conservative 1400 rpm. The Challenger eased forward. The big steering wheel moved like silk after the awkward swing of the Delta’s. “Power steering,” she said.
“Oh, you’d best believe it. Okay now, give it some gas; we don’t want to miss dinner.”
She ran the throttle up to 2100 and they began to accelerate.
“Keep an eye on this rearview mirror,” said Dave. “You can watch how the goose is doing. If it gets too much snow building up, pull it up a little. No snow at all, let it down. Go ahead, try it.”
Valena immediately dropped the blade too far into the snow, kicking up a spray that flew right over the top of the blade.
Dave laughed. “That’s a little more than you need. Little movements. Try it again.”
They kept on going, now moving a little faster, and, bit by bit, mile by mile, Valena gained confidence in both the tractor and in the instructor that came with it. By the time they came around the bend that opened up their view toward the sea ice, Valena was getting cocky and cut the curve a little too tightly.
“You want to try that third pedal on the floor when you feel it getting out of control like that,” said Dave.
“I wasn’t out of control,” Valena answered tartly.
Dave grinned. “Oh, yeah? Ask that flag you clipped. It’s spinning out across the back forty.”
“I clipped a flag? You’re kidding.”
“Your secret is safe with me. But I got to tell you, you hit too many and Edith will give you a ticket.”
“What for? Flag endangerment? Destroying government property?”
“No. Maybe for the same thing I got ticketed for once.”
“And what was that?”
“Oh, I got pulled over in a little town for doing about double the speed limit. The old guy who wrote me up said it was for being ‘careless and imprudent.’” The grin flashed again.
“Careless and imprudent,” said Valena, trying on the words.
They rode in amiable silence for a while, then Dave asked, “I hear you’re here to study the ice.”
“That’s right.” She let it hang.
“I like to talk to the scientists, learn what they’re learning.”
“That’s smart. Quicker than taking a degree, and cheaper, too.” She immediately wished that she hadn’t said that.
Dave’s smile seemed a touch more abstract than it had been a moment earlier.
“I meant that as a compliment,” she said.
He gave her a friendly smile. She received it like a flower.
He said, “So there’s all that stuff about global warming. Are we going to be able to keep this place from melting?”
Now Valena’s smile faded. “I don’t know if we’ll figure out what we need to know fast enough, or get people to change the way they do things at all.” She shook her head. “And you know what? I love studying these glaciers, but if I was to do something more essentially to the point, I’d be working to help people have fewer babies. Thirty years ago, zero population growth was the clarion call, but now we seem to have forgotten all that and are just trying to figure out how to live high without fouling our nest. The bottom line is that there are just too many humans on this planet.”
Dave’s eyes softened. “I don’t think you could have persuaded your parents that you shouldn’t have been born.”
She turned and looked him in the eye. “I have no idea how either of them felt about that, or if my biological father even knew I’d been conceived. I never met my birth mother. But the mother who raised me liked me well enough.”
He was quiet a while, thinking through what she’d said. “Then I can’t ask the question that’s right here on my tongue. You must have been asked a thousand times, anyway. Where your folks come from.”
“I have no idea of my ethnic background.”
He smiled softly, looking at her with the eyes of a lover. “I think you’re part everything. The first time I saw you, I thought, ‘Dave, here’s what we all will come to look like when we get over this foolish idea of race and just marry the people we love. And what a glorious result it is.’”
Valena felt her heart crash outward through her ribcage. She forced her gaze back toward the trail ahead of them and gripped the wheel more tightly. They continued in silence for many more miles.
“YOU TURN LEFT UP HERE,” ÖAVE SAID, AS THE ROUTE widened from one lane to two and then met an intersection. “Make sure to swing wide, out into the far lane, otherwise your treads will chew up the hardpack where the rubber tire vehicles need to run.”
“Big ten-four on that.” They careened around the bend, the goose slewing wildly to one side.
Dave laughed. “I said slow down a little when you make a turn!”
Valena grinned. “Careless and imprudent!” she sang. “My new motto!”
“Okay, we’re on the interstate now. Lift the goose, push her on up into tenth, and take us on home.”
Valena slapped it up to the top gear and gave it the gas. The great machine hurtled forward. “How fast are we going?”
“Flat out with a tail wind, nineteen miles per hour.”
“Oh, feel the acceleration!”
Again Dave laughed. It was a wonderful sound.
Valena wanted him to laugh again. “So where was that little town?”
“Which town?”
“The town where you got that ticket?”
“Oh, upstate a bit from where I grew up.”
“Where was that?”
“Another little town. Whoa! There’s your right! Hit that decelerator pedal!”
Valena hesitated a fraction too long, and the Challenger slewed around the bend. “Did I clip any more flags?” she asked. Nineteen miles per hour this high off the ice felt like flying. “You get to do this all day long? You lucky dog!”
“That’s me, ol’ lucky dog.”
Valena asked, “Don’t you get lonely?”
“Not much. I listen to the radio, and there’s the view…”
She could see the aircraft parked by the sea ice runway now. The C-17 had returned, waiting to take her back to New Zealand, en route to the States. They were almost to McMurdo. It was time to question him about Emmett’s camp or there would be no time. It’s safe now, she rationalized. I can walk from here if I have to, and it’s broad daylight from now until March. “Dave, last year…” Her words stalled in her mouth. How could she ask this of him?
Dave turned his soft brown eyes in her direction. “You got troubles down here, I hear.”
The broad, white roadway kept hurtling past them. The end of their trail was coming. Now they were crossing the fuel line, heading for the transition onto the land. She could see the Delta up ahead. Edith had finished parking her snow machine and was climbing into the cab of the Delta with Hilario. Now the communications radio squawked into life as Edith made her arrival announcement. “Mac Ops, Mac Ops…”
Dave said, “I’m sorry to ask.”
“It’s okay.”
She hit the decelerator, cutting their speed in half. She wanted him to talk to her, to say most anything. Two other men—Jim Skehan and Cal Hart—were waiting in McMurdo and wanted to talk to her immediately, and for all she knew she would be hauled into George Bellamy’s office for a good dressing down—You’ve been where? he’d ask her, And under whose authority?—and then she’d be marched straight up the hill to have her duffels loaded onto the C-17 for an early morning departure.
She took a breath to speak, only to find her lungs jammed against tensed stomach muscles. “It’s just… well, I got here and things sort of got all snarled up,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened at Emm
ett Vanderzee’s camp last year. And you were there, right?”
Dave’s face went blank. He opened his mouth to say something, but in the next instant they both heard her name spoken in the middle of Edith’s check-in conversation. The woman at Mac Ops was saying: “Is Valena Walker with you?”
Valena and Dave both stared at the radio.
“Affirmative,” said Edith.
“I have a message for her. Can you get it to her? Over.”
“I’m sure she is listening to this call, but I will double-check, over.”
Dave grabbed the microphone and handed it to Valena. “Just press this key to talk,” he said.
Valena slowed the tractor to a stop and pressed the key. Was this the bad news she had been bracing against? “This is Valena,” she said, and managed to add, “Over.”
The radio operator said, “Message reads: ‘Meet Jim at Crary if back by eighteen hundred hours. If not, phone number will be on his door.’ Do you copy? Over.”
“I copy. Over.”
“Thanks for your help, over and out,” said Edith.
“Mac Ops over and out.”
Dave gave her one of his smiles. “You look like your pet dog just died.”
Valena hung her head in misery. “I’m afraid they’re going to send me home tomorrow.”
Dave put a hand on her shoulder.
She looked his way.
He smiled softly. Used one finger to slide a stray lock of her hair away from her eyes. He said, “Come on, things are always bound to get better.” He pointed toward the line of snow machines. “Just park it right over there and I’ll drop the goose.”
She longed to drive up through the main street of McMurdo Station in this towering tractor with this handsome man at her side, smiling his smile, but she pulled up at the end of the line near the Delta and stopped.
Dave opened the door and stepped out onto the fender.
“We’ll ride up in the Delta with the others,” he said, then hurried down the steps. The cab door swung shut behind him.
The constant daylight of Antarctica shone all around her, but Valena felt darkness closing in. Once again, she was alone.
In Cold Pursuit vw-1 Page 25
