“My Dad might want one too.”
“I don’t care who wants them.”
“He likes crafted stuff.”
“Show me some cash. Then we’ll get serious.” Tyson turned back to the grinder.
Lewis glanced around again, spotting nothing of interest. The mechanic might be a grouch but there was none of the evasion expected of a thief. Lewis turned to go, thinking he might try Abby next and worrying she’d be more annoyed than helpful.
He was no investigator. This entire fiasco was a waste of time…
“Tyson!”
Rod Cameron was stalking into the garage toward both of them, looking sleepless and angry.
“Jesus fuck...” The mechanic turned, stiffening. The mechanic’s grip on the blade tightened and Lewis could see the knuckles whitening. He looked at Lewis accusingly, as if he’d led the station manager here, and Lewis shook own head in denial. What the hell was this about?
Cameron strode up and stopped, rocking slightly on his ankles, his mood stormy. “What the hell are you doing out here,” he asked Lewis.
“Talking with Buck while my computer defrags.” He raised his eyebrows, trying to prod Cameron’s memory. The investigation.
“Oh.” He looked at Lewis curiously and Jed shrugged again. Nothing. “Well, go poke around somewhere else, Lewis. I need to have it out with Tyson.” The manager’s eyes darted back to the mechanic. He was gathering himself for a fight.
“Sure.” Lewis took a step back.
“You don’t have to leave, fingie,” Tyson said quietly. “No secrets here.”
Lewis hesitated. He was curious. Cameron glanced at him, waiting for him to go, but Lewis thought Tyson might let something useful slip. “Maybe I can help.”
Cameron blinked. It might help to have a witness. “Okay. No secrets.” He turned to Tyson. “What are you doing, Buck?”
Tyson looked sourly at his boss. “Stuff.”
“You get this Spryte fixed?”
“The machine’s a piece of shit.”
“We need it anyway.”
“It’s fucking dangerous if it breaks down out there.”
“It’s fucking all we’ve got. And I thought you were a good mechanic.”
Tyson looked from Cameron to Lewis, wondering how belligerent he could afford to be, and spat, deliberately, the spittle hitting the floor. “I’m working on it.”
Cameron looked at the big man’s fist. “What’s that then?”
Tyson looked at the metal in his hand with apparent surprise and then held it up, the sharpness glinting in the light. “Piston rod,” he said, deadpan.
Cameron looked at the hoisted knife and then back to Tyson. “I looked at the water budget this morning. Do you know the water budget’s off fifty gallons?”
“Why no, boss, I don’t.”
“It’s because of your damn showers, isn’t it?”
“Beats me.”
“I do. I’ve been timing you.”
“Then you’ve got more time than I do.”
“You’re using as much water as six other people!”
“So melt some more.”
“You know the Rodriguez Well is slow!”
“Two months ago you were complaining I was too dirty.”
“That’s because you stank every time you came to meals! You’d clear an entire table, like some goddamn wino! Are you insane, or what?”
“Don’t you wish you’d sent me home?” Tyson smiled.
“You know I couldn’t find a replacement, you goddamn butthead!”
Tyson pointed after Lewis. “Sparco did. You could, too. There’s still time to get a plane in here, maybe. For an emergency. I feel appendicitis coming on.”
“I’m warning you, Buck...”
“Because I wish you’d sent me home.” The mechanic tossed the knife aside onto the metal wor bench where it rang like a bell. He raised his big hands. “You want to compare hands, Rod?”
“Don’t you threaten me.”
“You want to compare those soft, white, thin-fingered paws of yours, which hardly ever get out of your warm fucking office, with mine, which get so hard I gotta soak ‘em in Vaseline and wear gloves to bed? You want to spend a day under this Spryte or the Cats where the metal’s either so hot from the stinking engine, spewing carbon monoxide, that I burn my hands, or so cold that I burn ‘em again? You want to work on shit so brittle that it shatters like glass, and string extension cords so stiff they snap like a twig?” He was glowering, like a looming thunderhead. “Don’t talk to me about your fucking precious water! It’s the only damn thing keeping me sane!” His volume had grown to a roar.
Cameron instinctively stepped backward. The big man was at the barest edge of control. The station manager was sputtering. “I’ve about had it with you.”
“No you haven’t, you ineffectual snot!” The mechanic seemed to expand with frustrated rage, like an inflating balloon. He filled the room, dark and hairy, and even at a distance Lewis found himself chilled. Tyson was losing it. “You haven’t had it with me for another eight, fucked-up, gloriously boring months. You can’t get away from me, and I can’t get away from you, and so you can take your lunatic work calendar and cram it up your soft supervisory ass!” The mechanic waited for a response and there was none, Cameron momentarily speechless at this outright defiance. The station manager had turned rigid. Then Tyson turned arrogantly back to the workbench, picking up the knife.
“That’s outright insubordination!” Cameron finally managed.
“You need me, I’ll be in the shower.”
Cameron looked at the defiant mechanic’s back with a mixture of disbelief and hatred. “This time you’ve gone too far,” he choked, trembling with outrage.
“So fire me.”
“I’m writing you up in my e-mail report.”
Tyson laughed. Cameron looked bitterly at Lewis, who was embarrassed at this exchange. The manager knew he couldn’t let this one go. Couldn’t risk losing control. Couldn’t bear the humiliation.
“This time, Buck Tyson, you’re toast.”
WE DECIDE AS A GROUP
Kids come out of their childhood thinking they’ll be taken care of. Kids came to me with this sorry-ass misapprehension of helplessness glued between their ears like slow-setting concrete, as hapless as clams, as dim as donkeys. Fix me. Be fair.
Fat Boy had been carried his whole life, I’m sure of it. Instead of being forced to get fit to survive, Fat Boy always found a place on the team, always convinced the others to wait up, always whined his way into some kind of second-class acceptance. Fat Boy always got bailed out. And now he needed to be bailed out by me.
Who knows why the hell he unroped himself? To rest, to pee, to make the rest of us wait - what does it matter? He’d insisted on joining the group and was now slowing the group he’d joined, defining our chain by its weakest link. The end of his rope lay trailing on the snow like a foolish scribble. Somewhere he’d unleashed himself and was gone.
I looked at the summit, pink and swollen in the dawn light. I looked at the clouds to the west, which were beginning to mound into a grayish wall. If he cost us too many minutes he’d cost all of us the climb. For that, I’d never forgive him.
I wanted to take my team and Kressler’s team up to the top. Let Fleming find him. He’d lost him. But Kressler sided with his friend and they insisted the entire class stay together. So down the tracks we went, the other kids grumbling and cursing, looking for the point where our chubby little moron had decided to wander off by himself, and myself so eruptive with contempt and anger that I knew better than to say anything. I half-hoped Fat Boy had already found a crevasse and was gone for the next ten thousand years, frozen like the dense brick he was until a glacier spat him out. Then maybe then we could still make the top.
I should be so lucky.
It turned out that the idiot Fleming had lost him a full quarter mile back, never having turned to check on the end of his string. That weak-lunged half-wit
! Couldn’t say that, but Fleming was a lousy climber, truth be told. Piss-poor instructor. He was too nice, which made me too uneasy. So back we went, a quarter mile backtrack, and sure enough footprints led off the main trail we’d beaten in a meandering wander down one side of the saddle. What was Fat Boy thinking? We hadn’t followed his trail for fifty yards when there was a break in the snow like a bite in a sandwich. The kid had obviously triggered a slide and been carried him over the edge with it. Well, good riddance. I frankly looked at the evidence with a certain feeling of satisfaction. Life was just. Finis. Can we go to the top now? But I bit my tongue.
Great surprise and consternation of course. Wails, tears, and so much phony emotion I thought the sheer weight of the pathos would trigger another avalanche. As if anybody really liked the dumb kid! But of course we had to do the right thing, and the right thing was to clamber up and around, risking us all, and getting so close to the edge of Wallace Wall that we all might soon join Fat Boy in Paradise. I kept looking for a place to plant my ice ax once the class started the slide over. Except we didn’t and then, wonder of wonders, we heard a frightened scream.
Fat Boy wasn’t done with us.
As the one instructor who really knew what I was doing, I had the other two belay me and edged downslope for a look over the cliff where he’d fallen, leaning so far that the rope was taut as piano wire. At first I couldn’t see a damn thing in the dim pre-dawn light but then I made out movement on a ledge about four hundred feet below. The kid had slid down a chute, bounced off into space, and then by a miracle had somehow fetched up about three thousand feet shy of the real bottom. He saw my silhouette and started screaming to beat hell. The smart thing to do would have been to leave him right then and go get help.
Except that the storm was coming.
Kressler and then Fleming had to take their turns edging down to see, minutes ticking by, our window closing. It was a mess, all right. A right royal snafu.
The triumverate met. My advice was to get the rest of the kids off the mountain. Better to lose one than fifteen. Lower a bag down to Fat Boy and come back with a chopper and a medic unit when the weather allowed. Let’s not be heroes now.
Kressler didn’t like it, and I knew why. It was his class, really. We were assisting. A rescue would get in the newspapers and questions would be asked about why our dumb blubber buffalo had been allowed to wander off into an avalanche chute. Kressler was up for department chair and the competition was vicious, as it always is in the ivied halls of academia, where so many fight so relentlessly for so little. He’d really rather just bundle the kid down the mountain ourselves, if it was all the same to us. Come back a hero, smelling roses. It was the political thing to do.
No way, Jose.
But then Fleming, willing to brown nose an up and coming department chair with the best of them - in order to grease his own skids toward tenure - sided with the ambitious idiot. The pair was convinced they could pull this bit of derring-do off. Kressler was actually pretty good, technically, but Fleming was in over his head and didn’t have the judgment of a flea. He trusted, always a mistake. And he trusted Kressler to be able to somehow snatch Fat Boy off that wall and save us all from an awkward morning after of questions.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Except those clouds were coming. That was their trump card. I’d actually heard a little about the approaching storm but decided not to share it with the doomsayers the evening before because it might have cramped our try for the summit. In hindsight maybe that wasn’t the smartest thing to do but I wanted the top, dammit. That was the whole point. Now they used the weather to justify our immediate rescue of Fat Boy. Left alone, the bozo might actually die. And then what was now mere bad luck becomes major fuck-up. So here’s the plan. We climb down to Fat Boy - all of us - and then continue down an “easy” route that Kressler knew on Wallace Wall. We all get down off the mountain pronto. Disaster turns into rescue. Fat Boy becomes a trophy save.
Jesus.
The voice of reason, being me, gently pointed out that the pack of amateurs we were leading didn’t have the skills to do this kind of Matterhorn macho shit. I told Kressler that he could go down there while Fleming and I took everyone else back down the glacier. But Kressler said he needed Fleming, and Fleming said Fat Boy was so heavy they really needed two more young studs to help, and no one wanted to break up the party, and so in the spirit of eternal togetherness the decision was made, over my quiet objections, to take fourteen kids down the hard way in hopes of saving one and erasing any embarrassment.
I’m sure they’d tell you it made sense at the time.
The kids were frightened. “We need your help on this one,” the other two instructors told me. And so, with more camaraderie than sense, I put on a happy face, announced we were all making a brief detour, and agreed to take Kressler’s dubious route, picking up our overweight blubber baggage along the way. We’d look so smart when we reached the bottom!
Ah, togetherness.
A couple of the girls were weeping. A couple of the guys looked whiter than the snow. The sun was just cracking the eastern range.
We started down.
CHAPTER NINE
“I think I need some help.”
Lewis had found Abby in the hydroponic greenhouse. It was little more than a closet with burbling tanks and the smell of tomato vines, but it was brightly lit by grow lights and a refuge of steamy warmth. Lettuce, tomato, parsley, kale and other greens struggled to maturity there, adding meager scraps of fresh chlorophyll to meals dominated by canned and frozen foods. While the greenhouse was more hobby than experiment, NASA scientists had visited twice to take notes on the facility as a model for future spaceships. Abby came regularly to help Lena tend the plants and get an injection of artificial sunlight.
“I’m kind of busy, Jed,” she told him. She was snipping dead leaves.
As he’d feared, his investigation was turning people cool. No one waned a snoop. Lewis suspected Nancy Hodge had put the others on notice about his investigative efforts. Was the doctor the thief, trying to sabotage any inquiry? Or the enforcer of propriety? Last night he’d sat in the galley and conversation had become muted. And this morning...
“Abby, I’m in a kind of fix here and I don’t know what to do.”
She didn’t look at him. “Why come to me?”
“Because you’ve been here longer than I have.”
She took another snip. “So has everyone.”
“Okay, because we’re friends.”
“A friend you said blabbed about the meteorite. That may have started this whole mess. That’s what I heard.”
Jesus. Ice Cream had turned hard again. “We wee just discussing who knew about it. You pumped me.”
She didn’t reply
“And I didn’t come to ask you about the meteorite.”
“I’m disappointed I didn’t make your list.”
He stopped, exasperated. He’d crossed some unseen line at the station. Some unseen line with her.
At his silence, she finally stopped trimming and turned to look at him, allowing some reluctant sympathy. “Maybe that wasn’t fair,” she allowed. “But I don’t know about the meteorite, Jed.”
“I came to ask you about something else.”
“I don’t have any suspects.”
“No. Something else.”
She let the shears drop by her side. “What then?”
“Someone slipped this under my door this morning.” He took a piece of thick paper from a pocket and handed it to her.
Abby unfolded a five-pointed star cut from yellow construction paper. On it was printed the words, ‘Deputy Dawg.’
She frowned.
“I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean,” Lewis said.
She crumpled the star up and threw it in a recycling basket. The shorting of trash was a basic ground rule at the Pole. “It means to back off.”
“Back off what?”
She looked at him im
patiently. “Are you dense? You’re the fingie, Jed. No one knows you yet. No one trusts you yet. But you’re going around asking questions about Mickey’s rock and implying that the rest of us are a bunch of crooks. Worse, you’re doing Mickey’s dirty work for him. Nobody likes him either, not really. It’s the worst kind of way to try to fit in here, and somebody’s trying to tell you politely to cut it out before you’re toast for the rest of the winter. Why do you even care who took the meteorite?”
“Because he thinks I might have taken it.”
She looked at him with sad sympathy. “And what do you care what he thinks? He’s not the person you have to eat with, we are.”
“He’s Sparco’s friend and Sparco hired me and...I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
“Well this is a great community of good-hearted people and you’re doing exactly the wrong thing if you want to fit in. Mickey can be a bully and Cameron always feels pressured but those guys aren’t the group. We are. And we’re not a bunch of thieves.”
He looked depressed. “So what do I do now?”
“Do your job, keep your mouth shut, and watch. Learn. Listen. There’s a society here and your winter will be miserable if you don’t fit into it.”
“Tyson doesn’t fit into it.”
“And is he happy?”
Lewis didn’t have to answer.
“In fact, Tyson is an example of the risk you run. I ran into Rod and he’s so hot about something he’s got steam coming out of his ears. I think he and Tyson had some kind of run-in.”
“They did. I saw it.”
She looked at him in surprise. She was instantly interested, unable to mask her curiosity. When?”
“I was in the garage when he told Rod to essentially go screw himself. That mechanic is unbelievable. He’s nuts.”
“He’s got so much anger it’s scary. It’s not the Pole. There’s something wrong with him. Some basic resentment of other people, or frustration with his own life.”
“They should never have let him come down here.”
Dark Winter Page 11