Frozen Stiff

by Sherry Shahan

  “You know what?” she asked. “You look like a character in an Indiana Jones movie.”

  “Yeah?” Derek was shaking. Hunger. Fatigue. Low body temperature. “You look like something in a disaster movie—the disaster.”

  Cody laughed, then realized her lips were as swollen as her sunburned hands. She pressed her T-shirt against her mouth so that her lips wouldn’t split open. The skin on her face felt tight too, as if she’d outgrown it. She hated being so fair, knowing she’d peel in a few days. More freckles.

  She tried wiggling her toes. The intense burning in her feet had lessened to a dull ache. The water that had seeped into her boots earlier had now mixed with body heat and created a layer of insulation. “How are your feet?” she asked.

  “What feet?”

  She took one last look at the iceberg as the kayak slipped around a bend. They left the narrow passage with its steep-sided walls and entered a broad stretch with enticing slopes. The iceberg boomed and cracked and split into a dozen smaller bergs as if in farewell.

  “Bergy bits,” she said. “That’s what they call small icebergs. That and growler ice.”

  Not far ahead, a crop of granite boulders crowded together on a long stretch of bank above the waterline. The rocks appeared to have stumbled off the mountain in a landslide, clearing a bus-sized spot in the otherwise dense forest along the way. The clearing looked wide enough for a campfire. There might be room to pitch the tent if they had to.

  “Home sweet home,” she said.

  Cody held the bowline and balanced on the mossy rocks; in the wet climate any bare rock was quickly colonized by mosses and small plants. Shivering, she passed the gear to Derek, who tossed everything into the clearing.

  Neither one of them complained about hunger or aching muscles as they worked mechanically in their heavy, wet clothes.

  After tying the kayak with enough rope to secure a battleship, they gathered bits of dry grass and piled it in the clearing. A stroke of luck had placed the matches in a plastic bag and in the day packs.

  She blew on the stream of smoke rising from the dry grass. “As soon as we get this going we’ll look for something to eat.”

  Warmth first, food second. Anywhere else it might be the other way around. But not this far north in Southeast Alaska, in late summer.

  Derek worked at breaking the outer limbs off a downed tree, pulling out the drier ones underneath. Leaves and parasitic moss had long since died and fallen off.

  She kept fueling the small blaze with twigs. “Need help?”

  He shook his head and grunted, dragging a leafless branch over the rocky ground to the fire. “We can use the push-and-burn method.”

  Working to unload the kayak had warmed Cody’s core temperature. Her toes and fingers had finally thawed out. “We have to dry off.” She shrugged off her wet T-shirt and shorts, leaving on her sports bra and dance tights.

  Derek stripped to paisley surfer shorts, and Cody laughed at how silly he looked, here in the Alaska wilderness in surfer jams. She draped their clothes over the fallen trees. Derek added the tent and the ground cover and squeezed excess water from the sleeping bags before hanging them on the makeshift clothesline.

  The sky above Yakutat was still swollen and bruised, with sudden flashes of jagged light. An electrical storm raged on. No light planes would land in Yakutat as long as it was storming, and no planes would leave Juneau.

  “Hot roast beef sandwiches and thick chocolate malts less than ten miles away,” she said.

  “Do they deliver?” he joked.

  “I wish.”

  Cody pulled a squatty branch up to the fire, sat down, and soaked in the warmth. She hoped it wouldn’t take long for her clothes to dry. Then she’d look for something to eat. “The storm is probably dumping new snow on Hubbard.” Simple math told her that a glacier accumulating more snow and ice than it lost from melting and calving would keep advancing.

  Derek joined her by the fire. “Adding more water to the fjord.”

  She shivered. “Right.”

  “If we can’t paddle back to Yakutat, does that mean we’re going all the way to Hubbard?”

  His words danced lightly over the fire, just missing the flames. No, they couldn’t go back to Yakutat. They’d already tried that. The current wouldn’t let them. Continue forward? If Hubbard was blocking the bay, there wasn’t any way out. Stuck. High on a rocky bluff without food or shelter, and in the face of an oncoming storm.

  Derek shoved another branch in the fire. Something dead, deep inside the wood, made it crackle and spit sparks. “It wasn’t a tree,” he said, scooting closer to the flame.

  For a moment Cody thought he was talking about the firewood. Then she knew: the shadow. She rocked slowly with the gentle afternoon breeze. She hadn’t stopped thinking about it either. Him. All at once she was thinking of “it” as “him.”

  A poacher after illegal bearskins or otter hides? The outfitters talked about men who lived in the wilderness. Most of them were social dropouts or hiding from something. The shadow could be a poacher, or worse. No one else would be out here so late in the summer.

  Someone was up to no good.

  Cody slipped back into her T-shirt and shorts, then slapped her socks against a rock. Shavings of dried mud fell to the dirt. She picked off the smaller pieces of mud before putting her socks back on. The bear horn took its place on her waistband.

  Derek wore “socks” ripped from the sleeves of an extra T-shirt, which looked more like the booties worn by sled dogs. An oversized sweatshirt hung on him like a skirt. His wet jeans still sagged by the fire.

  They worked feverishly to pitch the tent, now that it was dry. They secured it against the storm rumbling down the fjord by dragging it against the “wall” of fallen trees. That way it had some protection from wind. Derek pulled the fly extra tight to make sure it didn’t touch the tent itself. Anywhere the two materials touched would leak when the rain hit.

  Their only pot had been filled with fresh water from a nearby stream. Cody didn’t know how long water needed to boil before it was rid of microscopic parasites. Maybe a rolling boil was enough. Then the pot could cool and double as a drinking cup.

  At least water will fill our bellies until we find something to eat, she thought.

  Derek dumped an armful of twigs inside the tent so that they’d have dry starter wood when it began raining, then took off again, disappearing in the tangles of underbrush.

  Adrenaline, Cody thought. If he stops moving he’ll probably collapse.

  Cody made her way down the slippery boulders near the kayak and scanned the brush for berry vines. The water level had risen another foot: a good twenty feet below their camp. A gull squawked and dive-bombed her.

  It must have a nest around here, she thought. A nest with eggs.

  Eggs. Her mouth watered. Scrambled, poached, in an omelet. Cody could almost smell them, sizzling in melted butter with sprinkles of bacon bits. She abandoned her search for huckleberries and salmonberries and focused on crevices between the rocks.

  The gull dived at her again and she dropped to her hands and knees. Gulls didn’t nest in trees like most birds, she knew. Their nests were on the ground.

  Mosquitoes swam up from the rocks, a swarm of bloodsuckers with an appetite as fierce as her own. She batted at them, trying to sweep them away from her face.

  There, in a slight indentation in the dirt, lay three splotchy brownish gray eggs. Food. She quickly snatched them up and stowed them inside her shirt, all the time fighting the mosquitoes. The eggs were warm and somehow soothing against her skin. She pretended they came from an egg carton in the fridge.

  “Derek?” Cody called at the firepit, where smoke kept the mosquitoes away. She slid the eggs one at a time down the side of the pot and used a stick to keep them from hitting the bottom too quickly. “Derek?”

  Soft-boiled won’t take long. Two, three minutes. Only eat one, she told herself. Save one for Derek. The third for later. Maybe tomor
row’s breakfast.

  “One one-hundred,” she counted, stoking the fire. “Two one-hundred.”

  Cody tilted the pan and used the stick to slide out a single egg. I won’t look at it. I’ll peel it with my eyes closed. I’ll hold my breath while I chew and swallow.

  Then it’ll be over.

  But after she swallowed she threw up—a deep wrenching that turned her guts inside out. Then dry heaves. Until not a single drop of water was left in her stomach. She heaved until her body shook and her throat burned.

  Keeping her eyes tightly shut, she swept dirt and debris with her hands, then stood up and kicked more dirt. When she opened her eyes all she saw was dirt. No feathers or feet. No boiled beak. The idea of eating a baby bird had made her sick. But it was just an egg. And she’d wasted it. What she’d give for a toothbrush.

  Derek stumbled into the clearing, red-faced and out of breath. He looked ridiculous in his surfer jams. “I found a cabin,” he said.

  “Cabin?” she repeated. “With walls and a roof?”

  He turned and started back. “Come on.”

  Cody shoved a burning limb farther into the fire, then trailed him through the forest, climbing over dead trees. She tried to keep the limbs from hitting her in the face, her bare arms taking the scratches instead.

  The sky had turned mottled gray, like the boulders and the eggshells. Rain! she willed to the storm, stumbling over knotted vines rooting on decayed trees. Just rain! And get it over with! The clouds looked like a big fat pillow ready to smother them at any moment.

  The cabin itself was nearly strangled by the old-growth forest. Three walls of scrap lumber had been pieced together like a wooden quilt. The fourth wall had long since fallen into the cabin, covering the floor with huge splinters. No door. Probably in the fourth wall. One window covered with heavy plastic, now sickly yellow and curled around the edges. The roof was in the best shape, nailed strips of corrugated metal.

  “An old fishing cabin.” She stepped carefully over the rubble; dust billowed up. It smelled wet and foul, with a hint of dried blood. Something had died in here. “Maybe there’s some old gear lying around. Cooking stuff. We could use another pot. To replace the one we lost in my kayak. Or—” She didn’t dare say it. Food. She swallowed hard. Her throat still burned.

  Derek ended the sentence. “Something to eat.” He stretched the words out. “What I’d give for a can of peaches.”

  “We have eggs.” Cody knew she had to tell him. “Back at camp. They’re probably hard-boiled by now.”

  “Eggs?” His dark eyes widened. He looked as if he had the beginning of a beard, but it was just dirt. “Where’d you get them?”

  “I found a nest.”

  Derek must have drooled because he wiped at his chin. “Eggs.”

  Cody saw a piece of fur sticking out from beneath an old board. She moved closer, seeing a half dozen skins stacked against the wall. A mound of bones was standing in the corner. “No wonder it stinks in here. Darn poachers!”

  She followed Derek back to the clearing and sat on a rock, listening to him crack and eat the first egg. She closed her eyes and waited for the sound of retching. It never came.

  “Eat the other one,” she said, eyes still closed.

  “You don’t want it?” he asked.

  “Huh-uh.”

  “Maybe we should save it,” he said, hesitation in his voice. “You know, in case we’re here for a while.”

  “It’ll just spoil.”

  Cody rubbed her eyes—making them burn, then tear—and listened to him cracking the second egg. It sounded like Patterson cracking his knuckles. Patterson. Dad. Divorce. Tonya. It all seemed so distant, as if it had happened to someone else.

  “Rain,” she said when the first drop hit her. The fire sputtered and spit streams of black smoke. “Get in the tent.”

  She hurried to the clothesline and grabbed the sleeping bags; both had dried with the help of the fire. Everything except Derek’s worthless jeans was already inside the tent.

  Out on the fjord, the water was so calm that it didn’t appear to be breathing. Lifeless. Not a single ripple on its watery chest. Thunder cracked overhead like a charge of dynamite. The next sound was sharp and piercing; electricity charged the sky with white light. More thunder. Lightning.

  Cody counted the seconds between thunder and lightning and pulled the sleeping bags inside the tent. The dome tent had metal stakes. Not good. They were surrounded by tall trees. It wasn’t at all good. Lightning was attracted to metal things, tall things. But there wasn’t anyplace else to go. The cabin would offer little protection against biting rain.

  Trapped between a rock and a hard place. That was what the outfitters would say.

  Cody crawled inside her bag. “It’s five miles away,” she said, listening intently. “That’s not very far for a storm, maybe only minutes.”

  Suddenly the tent lit up as though it were powered by a hundred stadium lights. The orange dome glowed a blinding, translucent white. Just as quickly it turned midnight black. Thunder roared like artillery fire down the fjord.

  Derek scrambled inside his bag as if it could save him. “Is it coming this way?”

  Cody stared, eyes wide, listening. “Yeah.”

  When she was a kid she’d scamper into Patterson’s room during an electrical storm. She’d snuggle under his comforter and cling to the wall next to his bed. Patterson would rub her back. “Don’t worry, Cody,” he’d whisper. “It’s going to be okay.”

  The next lightning bolt struck farther away. Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance.

  Derek counted the seconds between the flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder. “It’s going away, huh?”

  “I think so.”

  “Are you scared?” he asked.

  No sense lying. “Yeah.”

  “I’m not.” He said it simply.

  Cody stared at him. He looked different in a way she couldn’t pinpoint. Older, maybe—on the inside, where it didn’t show. “How come?”

  He hesitated slightly. “Promise you won’t laugh.”

  She nodded. “Promise.”

  Derek rubbed at his forehead, trying to scratch around the mosquito bites. The blood had dried to the color of clay soil, cracked and reddish brown. “I want to write down what’s happened since we left Yakutat.”

  Cody didn’t say anything so that he’d go on.

  “Josh has the brains in the family,” he said. “Marc’s the jock and Kevin is the troublemaker. I’m going to be a writer.”

  Cody thought about Derek’s brothers and how different they were from each other. She let the idea of Derek being a writer sink in for a minute. It seemed to fit. “Author Derek Jenson. Sure, why not?”

  “No, I don’t want to be an author. They make up stuff. I want to write about things that really happen. Like a journalist.”

  Derek settled in on his back—long and flat like an exclamation point at the end of his sentence.

  Cody breathed deeply, letting the quiet sink in. She felt every muscle and tendon in her body. Muscles she hadn’t even known she had were throbbing.

  She closed her eyes, listening for the distant thunder. But she didn’t hear it. So she focused on the silence. Back in California she’d thought of quiet as the lack of sounds: no cars, no neighbors’ TVs, no barking dogs. Silence in Alaska was so complete that it grew into a sound itself.

  “It’s only eight o’clock,” Derek said.

  For an instant she wondered if he meant eight in the morning or eight at night. She was so tired, disoriented. Either way she would have already eaten, breakfast or dinner.

  Eight at night in the tavern, and her mom would be brushing butter on fish fillets, grilling them for the visiting fishermen. Pan-fried potatoes. Tossed green salad. Homemade rolls. But, no, her mom was in Juneau, picking up supplies.

  Food. The outfitters always packed first-class meals for their clients, rich people from the Lower Forty-eight who wanted a wilderness experien
ce without eating it. Cody rolled onto her stomach to muffle its growls and waited for sleep to sneak up on her.

  Sometime deep in the lost hours of night a chilling scream shattered the silence. It sounded like an animal crying out. Cody remembered a jackrabbit that had been hit by a car in the desert near Bishop, California. That was back in the days when her family had spent vacations together. The rabbit had screamed in agony until it died.

  This animal—whatever it was—was suffering terribly.

  It sounded as if it was right outside the tent. A fresh kill, she thought. And something is eating it alive. The cries of torment went on and on. Just kill it! she willed. Stop the suffering!

  She bolted upright in her sleeping bag. Another scream. More piercing than the others.

  The whole world was screaming.

  It took a few seconds before she understood that the screams, this time, were coming from her. She pressed her palms into her eyes. Her eyes were on fire. Burning as if someone were stabbing them with redhot pokers.

  Derek was shaking her. “Wake up!”

  Cody wasn’t asleep. This wasn’t a dream. She screamed again in terror and pain. The burning was intense. Unbearable. She opened her eyes. White. Everything was white. Impossible. It was still night.

  In utter panic she felt for her flashlight and flipped it on. She still couldn’t see anything. “Blind,” she screamed. “I’m blind!”

  Cody thrashed wildly in her sleeping bag, her eyes two blazing furnaces. Burning, burning. She bit her lip and tasted blood. “My eyes,” she cried, the salt making them sting even more. “I can’t see.”

  All the hours kayaking on the water and no sunglasses. The intense glare off the glacier. Water, ice, and sun, a conspiracy against her. Burned. Her eyes were seriously sunburned. She shook uncontrollably as the shock of it sank in.

  I’m blind!

  Cody didn’t know why Derek had left the tent; she couldn’t know that he’d figured out why she was shaking her head violently, slapping at her eyes. He returned with a cold, damp cloth and placed it gently over her face. “Is that better?”

  Cody half nodded and pressed the cloth against her eyes. She trembled as Derek stuffed his extra clothes on one side of her. He shoved his sleeping bag up against her on the other side and crawled in for added warmth. Slowly she relaxed a little. She gave way to semiconsciousness, and finally to restless sleep.