Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

“You coming?”

  “Claudia—Jesus, bitch, quit being so goddamn superior, okay?”

  She turned, stared at him, mouth agape for the moment. “What?”

  “Just cut the damned know-it-all crap, okay, and listen. If we don’t go and get the rubber raft, fine. But let’s not plunge merrily into the darkness, all right? Cool it a moment.”

  She smiled, giggled. He’s got a spine in him, doesn’t he? she thought. Claudia walked back to him on the land, put her arm around him, hugged him tight. “You’re so cute when you’re mad, Rob, you know that?”

  “Oh, fuck off, Claudia.” He tried to pull away, but she held on to him.

  “Look, I’m sorry. It was a good idea, the raft.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “So we’ll be careful, okay?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “What’s your idea?”

  “Rope up, like with crossing glaciers. Keep our packs loose, and go across spread out, one at a time. That way, if the ice breaks and one of us goes through, the other can pull ’em out.”

  “Okay.” She squeezed him, let go, then unbuckled the snap on her hip belt, leaned back, and lowered her pack to the ground.

  Rob took a fifty-foot skein of rope from his pack, looped it around his shoulders, tied it in a knot at his chest, then repeated the procedure with the other end of the rope around Claudia. He took a quarter from his pocket, held it heads-up in his palm.

  “Flip for point, okay? Loser goes first. Call it.”

  “Heads.”

  Rob stared at the coin, positioned on his thumb. “Man, that’s all these are good for now.” He flicked the coin in the air, caught it between his fingers, and opened his hand: tails. Rob smiled. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

  “Give me the unaaq.”

  He handed her the staff. “This ol’ root pick, Claudia? Or is it an ice probe?”

  “Root pick, ice probe, hunk of ivory . . . We create our own artifacts now, don’t we?”

  “Yeah,” said Rob, “we do.”

  She led the way across the ice, rope unwinding behind her. Rob followed, and they walked across Kugrua Bay.

  * * *

  Eluksingiak Point beckoned to them, a fingertip of sanctuary thrusting out into the ice. Claudia kept her eye on the point and a little island slightly to the northeast. Walking in a zigzag route to spread their weight evenly, she marked their passage with jabs of the ice, like a dance diagram: scuffle, scuffle, slide, slide, jab, jab; scuffle, scuffle, slide, slide, jab, jab. From her readings she knew the Inupiaq had developed an art of ice walking, and she wished she had spent more time on the ice with the old guys when she had done ethnographical research years ago. Nelson wrote of a walk some of the hunters had developed, a crablike gait for crossing thin ice, a crouching walk for crossing questionable ice.

  Hell, she thought, an Inupiaq wouldn’t even try to cross bad ice; they’d just wait until it froze, chewing on little bits of blubber to pass the time. But they had to cross; she didn’t want to test Jim’s anger, didn’t want to test her limits of hunger. And, she realized, she wanted to get to Barrow, get to a place she at least knew somewhat well, surround herself with people who had treated her as a friend. If I can get to Barrow, she thought, maybe I can make it.

  The red rubber ball of the post-holocaust sun glared in her eyes and then rose up into the low cover of the ash cloud. The long flat shadow of the point fell away into an even light that made the cracks and crevices of the ice easier to see. Scuffle, slide, jab . . . Claudia worked her way across the ice. She glanced down at the bay, noticed that the ice had turned deep black, jet black, so clear that she could almost see to the bay’s bottom. A clear spot, she thought, trying to figure out why the ice had gone from silty brown to black. A deep spot in the bay, a place where the Kugrua River flowed out to sea, or perhaps a point where the tide surged in . . . ? She jabbed down with the unaaq, a quick, sure thrust, and the ivory point of the staff broke through the ice. As water bubbled up from the little hole, as she fell forward slightly, cold fear rose up her veins, fear like fatty tissue surging through her arteries to clog her brain: a stroke of mischance.

  “Rob!” she screeched, the ice cracking behind her like a cannon shot. Slide, shuffle, jab, crack. Claudia pulled an arm loose from the pack, switched the unaaq to her free hand in a quick pass, shucking the pack off and hurling it in front of her. It skidded across the ice, then stopped. She grasped the ends of the staff with both hands, fell to her knees, spreading her weight across the unaaq held out in front of her. She spun on her right knee, a ninety-degree turn, like she remembered reading a hunter had done once. Turn away from the breaking ice, don’t go forward, can’t go back, go to the side.

  Gray ice, brown ice loomed before her. She scuttled to it, feeling the ice crack, running like a mad crab. The line around her waist pulled taut, and she hoped that Rob had kept up with her, that he was still in firm ice. Claudia stopped, unable to pull the rope, and caught her breath. The ice was gray beneath her, the warmth of her breath melting a little window in the frost on the ice’s surface. Gray ice, gray with bubbles that had risen up from the bottom: hard ice. She shifted the unaaq to her right hand, stuck the point down, and stood. She jabbed, one quick thrust; the unaaq did not break through. Claudia turned, pulling on the rope, and looked back.

  Like a long, straight pole the yellow plastic rope stretched across the ice. There, to the right of the rigid rope, was the small hole where her unaaq had broken through the ice. Spreading from the hole two cracks radiated north and south, one toward firm ice, the other back along the direction of the rope. The crack ended in a hole, a man-size hole, a Rob-size hole, Claudia noted. The rope like a pole went down into the hole, held underwater by some oppressive weight.

  “Rob!” she yelled. Claudia pulled, digging her heels into the gray ice, leaning back into the rope, its end looped to her, another section looped around her right arm. She fell into the rope, pulled into the rope. “Rob,” she whispered, willing the end dipping into the ice hole to rise up, to come over the edge. “Please, Rob, Rob, please.”

  Hand over hand she pulled on the yellow plastic rope, wrapping inches gained around her wrist. A foot of damp rope came out of the water. Another foot. Something bright blue rose to the top of the circle of water. Another foot. A head rose up, then a limp arm, two limp arms, his back. She pulled, scrambling onto firmer ice, dragging him out of the deep, dark water.

  The ice bent before him, and she slid him across the breaking black ice, pulling him to firmer ice before he fell through again. His dark hair hung over his eyes, his hat gone. Claudia jabbed with the unaaq to keep from sliding, watching the ice crack away, pulling and pulling until he was on firm ice. She stopped, caught her breath, yanked one last time until she was sure he was safe. Reeling in the rope, she carefully walked back to him, took his pack off, turned him over, then grabbed him underneath his shoulders and dragged him to shore.

  Fifty yards to shore; they had been fifty yards to shore. They’d almost made it.

  Claudia set Rob on the bare gravel of a beach, looked down at his calm face, his eyes staring up, an ugly purple-green bruise on his forehead. She tilted his head back, listened for the hiss of his breath, watched for the steam in the air. Nothing. Tearing her gloves off, she felt his carotid artery, cool to the touch. Nothing. She opened his mouth, blew four quick breaths through his cold lips, then placed the heel of her hand four fingers up his sternum, other hand laced on top, and pushed down. His body arched up with each relaxation of a stroke, then fell down with the violence of the cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. Down, up, down, up, fifteen times, breathe, breathe. Again. She felt his artery. Nothing. Again, again. She pushed air into his mouth, gasping, shoved his heart against his spine, feeling the firm muscle compress and expand. She could almost see the blood flow through his arteries, could see the warmth spread into his cheeks. Hold on, she thought, hold on, Rob, help is coming.

  Claudia looked out at the ice of Kugrua Bay, at the f
lat tundra, nothing and no one for miles and miles. What could she do? she thought. Call up search and rescue, frequency 123.45 on the ground-to-air radio in her pack? Dial 911 from the handy phone booth conveniently located at Eluksingiak Point? Push, push, push, breathe, breathe . . . “They’re not dead until they’re warm and dead,” she remembered an EMT instructor saying long ago, but that presumed hospitals to warm the bodies, machines to pump blood and air into him, people to spell her until help came. Sure, maybe the mammalian diving reflex had kicked in, and maybe like a torpid seal life still hovered in Rob’s brain. Maybe. How long can I do this? she thought, and she pushed and breathed and pushed and breathed until her arms and lungs could pump and breathe no more.

  The snow and ice and the loneliness fell upon her, and she slowed down, quit pumping. She breathed one last breath into him, his lips warm from her lips, and then pulled her mouth away. Claudia felt his carotid artery, hoping for even a slight pulse, felt nothing, and then let him go.

  Claudia undid the rope from Rob’s body, walked out one last time on the ice, and lassoed and retrieved her pack and then Rob’s. She sat down on the hard sand beach of the point next to him, and cried until her tears turned to ice.

  And then, like the Soviet flier, she buried him.

  Chapter 4

  CLAUDIA buried Rob in a shallow hole chopped into the sand, buried him like the Soviet flier and the gear they had left behind in their fallout shelter: beach timbers his casket, ice his headstone. She promised herself that someday she would come back and bury him properly, if the siksriks left anything behind, if the wolverines hadn’t gnawed his bones into dust.

  She buried him with his pack, with the things he had brought with him she could not use: a collection of keys, ratty underwear, a broken trowel, his journal scribbled on write-in-the-rain paper. She took his sleeping bag, took some socks, took his knife and the food he had carried. And when she was done she covered him as best she could, turned her back on him, and walked north with the slightly heavier pack to Barrow, never looking back, never thinking of why he had died and not her, because she knew why: luck.

  Luck. The world ran on luck now, on fate, on the fickleness of ice that took one and not the other, on a plunge into cold swift water that knocked you senseless, on accidents of chance that put you in the middle of a nowhere where no one bothered to send bombs. Luck, fate, it was all chance, except for what you could steal, except for what little you could do to beat the inevitable: death and more death, like the footsteps she took to Barrow, like their paces across the ice, each day a step, and if one day the ice took you, well, that was it, you could walk the long journey but one day the journey ended.

  One day’s hike north of Nalimiut Point, where the Seahorse Islands circled around the east end of Peard Bay, Claudia came across a fishing camp—“Tachinisok Inlet,” it said on the USGS map. A gravel road ran due south from the inlet, and ended, she remembered from her flight over earlier in the summer, at a steel tower by an airfield. An aluminum boat had been dragged up on the beach by the road, next to a plywood shack with blown-out windows; a loose door flapped against the side of the house in the wind.

  Claudia shrugged off her pack by the boat, pulled out her shotgun, and entered the shack. Midday light fell through two small windows into the shack, the panes jagged and hanging from shredded visqueen plastic stretched over the window frames. She let her eyes adjust to the light, and as the details became clearer, she quickly inspected the room. A smell like old walrus blubber pervaded the place, and for a moment she worried about bears. Something skittered on the floor, then stopped.

  She jacked a shell into the chamber, clicked off the safety; the orange warning paint of the safety button glowed almost phosphorescent in the low light. Her eyes adjusted further, revealing the scene: leaning against the wall, hand clutching a wooden spoon, was a woman, her dark brown hair hanging over one side of her head. Little slivers of glass stuck out of the right side of her face, the side toward the window, and brown-red blood had dried on the yellow-and-green flower print of her kuspuk, her dress. More shattered glass littered a green Coleman stove on a table before the woman, a black charred pot on top of the stove.

  Something chittered from the woman’s throat.

  In one quick move Claudia raised the shotgun to her shoulder, sighted down the barrel, and fired at the thing gnawing at the woman’s chest. A small brown creature about the size of a squirrel, but with a short tail and black spotted fur, flipped back from the woman, chittered again, then fell silent. Chik-chunk, Claudia ejected the shell. Bare patches of pink skin dotted the ground squirrel’s coat, and its bared teeth gleamed white against bloody gums. Fucking siksrik, she thought. She set the safety, laid her shotgun down.

  A curtain, its flowered print the same pattern as the woman’s kuspuk, flapped next to the window. Claudia yanked the curtain down, rolled the dead woman onto her side, and covered her head with the curtain. Looking out the south window, Claudia stared down the road to the steel tower; some force had snapped off the top two-thirds of the tower, twisting and bending the steel struts of the base into hunks of spaghetti.

  “Shit,” Claudia said.

  She grabbed her shotgun, ran out of the shack, up the road a mile to the tower. She passed two more shacks, their windows blown out, too. A body lay next to one shack, but she passed it by, running toward the tower. Some sort of harsh warmth passed over her—from exertion, she hoped. Panting, she stopped at the tower, looked up at its apex.

  The tower looked to be a twin to the steel tower near Pingasagruk. One weekend she and Rob had done a survey of the north end of the site, walked well beyond the site edge. They’d come across the keel section of an old whaling ship, found a Yankee grave next to the wooden signal tower north of the site. Beyond an open stretch of sand with no dunes they had come to the steel tower, the tower barely visible from camp. It wasn’t a radio tower, like she had figured, but some sort of radar reflecting tower, with steel four-by-eight-foot mesh panels at the peak. Something to do with the DEW-line station at Barrow, she thought. This tower at Tachinisok Inlet must have been the same kind—she couldn’t remember what it looked like the first time they flew over—except that all but the base had been sheared off.

  South of the tower a low crater had been blown in the tundra, and a little frozen pond—the blast excavating down to permafrost—gleamed from the bottom. Claudia looked up at the tower, at the way the top had been shredded but the base still held, then looked down at the crater. Little pieces of metal stuck out of the crater’s edge. She picked a piece up, turned it over, the fabric of her gloves catching on the sharp edge. Arabic numbers and Cyrillic lettering had been etched into one side.

  Slowly, carefully, as if the steel could still bite, she set the metal down. Patting her pockets for the scintillator, she pulled it out of the inside pocket of her down jacket, and with shaking hands squinted through it and looked at the pit. A few stray flashes flickered through the crystal—cosmic rays—but it otherwise remained blank.

  A dud, she thought. This was a dud. A missile had hit the earth without exploding, a big bullet pounding down from the heavens and blowing only kinetic energy. She remembered the light disappearing over Pingasagruk’s steel tower, the glowing red light she had seen the day of the war. A nuke. This had been a nuke—Barrow’s nuke, she was sure of it—that had failed to fire.

  What was that nuclear strategy—the decapitation attack? She had read of it once, some esoteric discussion of hypothetical nuclear attack plans. First thing you do, you take out the other side’s command, control, communications, and intelligence systems—you take out their early warning system. Barrow. Barrow had a DEW-line station, Kaktovik had a DEW-line station. Boom, boom. Kaktovik had to have been hit, Barrow should have been hit.

  But why would the Soviets hit Barrow after they’d already gotten the lower-48? she thought. That’s what the radio had said: all those cities attacked. Unless . . .

  An engine whined out from sea. Cl
audia whirled, ran to a rise in the road, a slight hill where she could see the ocean. Rounding Point Franklin and the Seahorse Islands to the northwest, an aluminum boat droned its way up the coast. She waved her arms at the boat, and it turned toward the inlet. Smiling, Claudia ran to meet the boat.

  Almost a mile out, the boat picked its way through small icebergs floating near shore. Just on the edge of the horizon, the larger ice pack loomed; over the last week the pack had moved in, then out, as if the sea were breathing. Claudia grabbed her binoculars from her pack and stood on the low bluff above the beach, watching the boat come toward her. A man piloted the boat, a tarp-covered pile of gear in the bow of the skiff. He wore a white anorak, a dark ruff pulled up around his collar, and a blue cap snugged tight on his ears. She waved at the man, but he didn’t seem to notice her. Then the boat turned, following the coast north. The bow of the skiff slammed into the low waves, making a harsh din: the whine of the outboard motor, the slapping of the boat on the sea.

  Claudia raised her shotgun, thinking to fire it, but then lowered it. He wouldn’t hear me, she thought. No need to waste a shell. Her eyes wandered to the aluminum boat pulled up onto the slight bluff above the beach. She smiled. Why signal him anyway?

  Peering under the boat, she discovered an almost-new seventy-five horsepower Evinrude motor under a tarp, a red twenty-five-gallon gas tank laid next to it. Claudia reached under the boat, rocked the gas tank. She heard the reassuring slosh of liquid—gas, she hoped—inside.

  “All right,” she said to the disappearing boat, “no more walkin’—I’ll follow you.”

  Up the road, inside the shack by the other body, she found a five-gallon blue-and-white drum of Blazo kerosene, another five-gallon can of gasoline next to it. Luck’s holding out, she thought. Hanging from a rack on the wall was a Ruger 30.06 rifle with a scope. She ransacked the house next to it, too, piling into wood crates a box of shotgun shells, another box of rifle cartridges, some cans of beef stew, half a box of Pilot bread, matches, a pouch of rolled-up tools, a life vest, a tarp . . . It took her three trips to get all the stuff down to the shore. On the last trip she looked at the man, the only other body there, seeming almost to be asleep in the snow.