Dark Winter

by William Dietrich

  The warning over the galley public address system penetrated a haze of post-sauna alcohol and set off an explosion of consternation and laughter. Pulaski had arranged for an entire pig to be flown down for a mid-winter luau, planning it to occur at the June 21 winter solstice, the darkest time at the Pole. But by general consensus the darkest time was now, with Rod’s death and Tyson’s flight, and so he’d decided the group needed the pig to recover its equilibrium and fraternity. He’d constructed a crude barbecue out of scrap sheet metal and concrete block in the archway near the gym, fed it with propane, and lit it up soon after the disappearance of Tyson, putting the pig to roast before the Three Hundred Degree Club even met. As the animal turned, their cook deputized assistant pit chefs to check it occasionally after ritually donning a Hawaiian shirt. Now Hiro, with his heavy Japanese accent, was delivering an apocalyptic message in his scientific monotone, informing them that their luau was in danger of turning into a cremation.

  Laughing and hooting, several of the men spilled out of the galley with fire extinguishers and flame blankets to rescue their meal. Pulaski, sprinting after them, just barely managed to deflect an enthusiastic but ill-thought-out blast of halon before it contaminated the meat. He smothered the flames in a blanket instead. “This is our dinner, you morons!” Then he examined the blackened hide with a jeweler’s squint. “No harm done.” The pig was elevated above the gas flames to keep it above the flash point and the rescuers trooped back to the galley with mission accomplished, Lewis among them, the pungent smell of cooked pork making the men salivate in anticipation.

  “The pig has been extinguished!” Pulaski announced, the women dutifully applauding this act of male prowess.

  It had taken Lewis a full half hour in the sauna to unthaw himself from the brutal run, coughing uncontrollably for several minutes from the bronchial rape of raw polar air. Then fifteen minutes more to convince himself that none of his parts, public and private, were seriously frost-bitten. He was the last to limp out from the cedar box, dehydrated and exhausted, and was ready to collapse into bed when others seized him, gave him water, pushed him into the shower, and then told him to join the survival party in the station galley. It was a camaraderie he was unaccustomed to. Now he savored it. He saluted the cook along with everyone else, hoisting a cup of dome-brewed beer.

  The Three Hundred Degree Club had purged the group of tension. The participants were pink and relieved, the veterans welcoming and inclusive, and the suspicions and speculation had been erased. “Tyson fled for our sins,” Geller belched. A shadow had passed and the polar night had, for this evening at least, been symbolically rolled back. The survivors desperately needed psychic relief and couldn’t go anywhere but inside themselves to get it. A rock anthem was playing, haunting and accumulative as it built in volume, a fossilized pulse from planet Led Zeppelin, a world back across the edge. Cliiiimbing a staiiiirway to...

  “Hey, all the way to the Pole, man!” Geller, gleeful and drunk, slapped Lewis on the back. “You’re lucky your dick didn’t fall off!”

  “Heaaavennnn...”

  Lewis grinned modestly. “I’m not sure it didn’t. I got so cold I’m still looking for the damn thing.”

  Geller laughed. “Check out Gabriella, dude. She’ll help you find it.”

  Their Gal Friday had put on a skirt, short and tight, a garment more extraordinary at the Pole than a bathing suit or sarong. She wore a tank top, its straps tangled with those of the lacy bra underneath like a DNA helix. The outfit revealed an upper arm tattooed with a ringlet of flowers. Her dark hair had been released to cascade down to her shoulders, its color matching her black, liquid eyes. She was beginning to sway by herself in time with the music, her hips hypnotic as she did so, her look demurely downward but her entire being intensely aware of the attention she was drawing to herself. She had a smoky intensity, as if she too could burst into flame.

  “That’s almost scary,” Lewis confessed.

  “Not after a couple margaritas, man. Carl is mixing up a batch in honor of Cinco de Mayo. You’ll be ready for her then.”

  “It’s not even May yet.”

  “It’s any day you want it to be, former fingie. It’s luau night, Mexican Independence Day, the Lord’s birthday and Halloween rolled into one. We’re alive, my friend, the North Dakota boogeyman is gone, and we’re all so thoroughly toasted that tonight might as well be the first insane night of the rest of your life. Cheers, brother! Heeeee-haw!”

  The pig was deemed ready by Hiro’s watchdog replacement, Alexi. A group of men went outside again and brought it back slung on a pole, chanting as Pika kept time to their march by knocking together two pieces of wood. The pig’s head was still attached, mahogany brown, shiny and squinting, a red rubber ball stuck in its snout in lieu of apples long since eaten. The preposterous animal filled half a galley table. There was hot fresh bread, canned fruit salad, yams with brown sugar and pecans, mashed potatoes, olives, baked beans, peas and onions, cheeses, Jello, chips. The other tables had cloths and lit candles and coupled bottles of red and white wine.

  A memorial to the dead had been pinned up near the galley tray table. Pulaski had posted pictures of Mickey Moss, Harrison Adams and Rod Cameron. “They live on in our memories,” a small banner read.

  Norse was looking at the pictures as if they might reveal something that had eluded him.

  “It makes me want to cry,” said Lena Jindrova, who unconsciously carried with her the perfumed scent of the tomato plants she tended in their greenhouse. She’d come up beside Norse.

  “But you’re not crying, are you?” the psychologist replied a little coldly.

  She took it as a criticism. “Well, I have accepted them not being here. Does that sound mean?”

  “It sounds human,” Norse conceded, his manner softer. “Do you know what I was told in college?”

  She shook her head.

  “That society does nothing better than close ranks and move on after the death of its members. That that’s what society is all about.”

  “That is awful! Don’t you think?”

  “Or ruthlessly realistic.” He turned and regarded the others. “Everyone here will be gone someday and the world will go on. What will give their lives meaning?”

  “What they are. Were.” She pointed. “Like these three.”

  “What they learned,” Norse corrected. “Or rather, what the world learned from them.”

  They feasted and Lewis felt as if his own body was on fire, electric from survival of murder and cold. He shuddered uncontrollably a couple of times as he continued to warm, his skin prickling, his senses taut even as he felt a deep, purging exhaustion. His brain was effervescent with its own chemicals. He felt high, as if Hodge had sprinkled some kind of Pixie dust drug from BioMed on all their food. He could hear everything, see every color, smell every scent. The women were all beautiful, the men his comrades. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, he loved them all.

  I’ve had too much to drink, he scolded himself. He poured another glass of wine.

  After the eating they cleared the food and plates, some helping with the washing, and moved the tables aside. The dancing began. Carl Mendoza brought out a slush tub of ice, lime, tequila and triple sec, putting on a CD of salsa music. The celebrants yipped and sang. Dancers bumped and swirled, some clumsy, some sinuous. Gabriella writhed. Abby stood against one wall, sipping a drink. Lewis hadn’t talked to her since their kiss at Clean Air.

  He made his way to her with some difficulty. Geller stumbled against him, badly drunk, and Linda Brown, who’d skipped the Three Hundred Degree Club because she’d joined the year before, clipped him with her ample hip. “Oops! And shake it all about!”

  Abby smiled stiffly at Lewis’s approach. The exhibitionism of the Three Hundred Degree Club had slightly embarrassed her and she’d been one of the first to turn around during the run. It had been a ritual to get through, not an experience to be savored.

  “Did you like the run?” He had to half-sho
ut above the music.

  She looked at him over the rim of her glass, holding it like a mask. “It reminded me of what they say about jogging. It feels so good when it stops.”

  “I thought I was going to freeze out there!”

  “I didn’t notice the cold until the end. It was so beautiful. Then it hurt.”

  “I wish I’d stopped with you.” It was odd to have burst outside naked with this woman. He couldn’t remember what she looked like. He couldn’t remember having really even seen her. They’d shared it without really sharing it at all.

  “You looked half-dead when you got back to the sauna. I think Bob saved your life.”

  He hadn’t quite thought of it that way but it was true, the man had pulled him in. “Sort of.” He’d never heard her call Norse just ‘Bob’ before.

  “He’s holding us together.”

  “I suppose he is.”

  “Now you’re not the fingie anymore. You’re in the club.”

  “Yes.” She was looking past him at someone, which annoyed him. “Look, do you want to dance?”

  It brought her back to him. “All right.” She put her glass down.

  They moved out into the swaying thicket of bodies. The fluorescent lights had been turned off and incandescents warmed the dancers with their yellow glow. The bulbs were usually discouraged because their heat could cause a fire, so feared at the Pole because all water was frozen and all wood was tinder dry. Acquisition of a regular light bulb was a sign of station rank and moxie: the “bulbed” and “bulbless.” More high school, as Tyson would say. The table candles, also allowed tonight because the crowd would keep an eye on them, danced in the hum of warm ventilation.

  Pika Taylor was passing a magazine back and forth in front of a lamp in one corner, creating a primitive kind of strobe effect. He seemed perfectly content to be their mute automaton. It was hot like the sauna, musky again, animalistic. Abby began to move, her hips undulating, turning a slow, careful circle. She’d acquired a new gravity since the deaths of the others and her movements were still too tentative to be entirely silky. She seemed lost in thought, remote and unobtainable.

  “I heard you defended me in front of the others after Rod’s body was found,” he tried. “I want to thank you for that.”

  “Just from Dana.” The two women weren’t fond of each other, he knew.

  “I liked what happened between us at Clear Air. Now that the trouble’s over I hope we can be friends. Good friends.”

  “Now that it’s over.” There was doubt in her voice and a strange detachment. Lewis wanted to be Enzyme again, agent of change, but he suspected she was still focused on that mysterious photograph. Less persuaded than any of them that Tyson was the easy answer to it all: Why had Mickey died with her picture near his breast? Lewis had to break through to her. Calm her fear.

  “Everyone’s come together. This is the real start of the winter,” he told her.

  “I hope so,” she murmured.

  “I’m glad the group wanted me back.”

  She looked at him then, the old mischief in her eyes. “Just so we could keep an eye on you.”

  The jibe made him feel he was getting somewhere. “That’s okay. It’s a relief, fitting in.”

  “What are you fitting into?”

  Before he could reply a muscular arm landed on his shoulder. “How you doing, sport?” Norse shouted it into his ear.

  “Warmin’ up.”

  “That was some run, wasn’t it?”

  “Nothing like it.”

  “What a rush!”

  The squeeze of the arm had stopped Lewis’s modest attempts at dancing. “It was. Hey, thanks for pulling me through there.”

  Norse laughed. “Naked as jay birds! Don’t tell that to my Freudian friends!”

  Abby was eyeing the psychologist shyly.

  “At least we had shoes,” Lewis said.

  “Yes, and I’m even growing back my hair!” The psychologist smiled, his teeth big and perfect, running his hand across what was now a crewcut. “I can almost feel it coming back. My strength, like Samson.” He hammered his chest with his fist.

  “You’re doing good with our group,” Lewis congratulated. “You’ve held things together.”

  “But you’ve got the prettiest partner.” Norse smiled at Abby, making no move to leave.

  Lewis felt dominated by the help he’d had to receive. The older man had established a hold over him somehow, like a big brother. He had to counter with his own help. “Cut in, if you’d like.”

  “Never give an opening as easily as that.” But the psychologist took Abby’s arm and lifted it, tugging at her wrist and letting her twirl underneath. She shrugged at Lewis. Norse moved with cat-like grace, interposing himself, maneuvering her backward. “I want to talk to you,” he whispered at her. Involuntarily, Lewis had to step back.

  Abby was looking up at her new partner with a mixture of expectation and fear, a fly to a spider.

  Lewis stood, momentarily at a loss, looking at them dance. Abby avoided his eye.

  Then someone bumped him from behind. “You can dance with me.”

  He turned. Gabriella had her arms up, wrists together, her tank top lifting to show a slice of belly as she shimmied, laughing. Her arms squeezed and lifted her breasts, revealing her cleavage, making her look more naked than when she’d been nude.

  “We’ve already sweated together,” he joked evasively, glancing around at Abby.

  “Yes.” Gabriella twirled, her hair flying. “Let’s do it again.”

  They danced, she expertly steering him away from the other two and losing them in the shadows, pushing suggestively up against him as Pika’s makeshift strobe provided a peek-a-boo privacy. He felt himself flushing, growing hard, and he turned slightly so that she might not see or feel it. Geller’s prediction had been right.

  She laughed at him, slithering away, then coming back, her body quivering as she shook it. “I feel the power at this point, where all the lines of magic converge!” He almost stopped dancing as he watched, astonished at her suppleness. She laughed again and stopped, taking his hand, her point made. “I’m thirsty from all this sweat. Buy me a margarita?”

  The drinks, of course, were free.

  “To Mexico and freedom,” Mendoza slurred as he scooped them two glasses.

  “Carl, you were raised in Fresno,” Gabriella said. “What do you know about Mexico?”

  “I lost my virginity in Puerto Vallarta.” He leered. “Or was it Modesto?”

  She took Lewis’ hand again and led him to a corner where they sipped and watched. Abby was still dancing with Norse, moving more easily now as she’d been cajoled out of her moodiness. So Jed and Gabriella returned to dance more and then drink more, the music and the movement and the talk blurring. His partner was losing all inhibition, writhing like a snake, flashing her thighs and the white of her panties as she moved. The music had given her the fluidity of honey.

  Lewis glanced desperately about, feeling himself shunted to the wrong track. He wanted to talk to Abby, but she and Norse had disappeared. He was alone with temptation.

  “Life is good, isn’t it?” Gabriella asked over the music.

  “What?”

  “Being alive, and not dead!”

  He nodded, hypnotized by her body. She was grinning at him.

  “I feel more alive at the Pole,” he slurred. “But more dead, too.”

  She ground against him, mocking him. “Not that dead.”

  Lewis felt embarrassed. “I’m getting too drunk. I’ve got to sit down.” His reentry into the group was going too fast. He hadn’t sorted out his feelings for everyone.

  “Sure.” She took his hand again, both their palms moist. “But not here.”

  He thought again about Abby. She was with Norse! The man who’d had to save him! Pictures flickered though his mind of the two dancing, talking, whispering. He felt humiliated by the psychologist. Dominated. Irritated. Somehow he’d barged into Lewis’s life. “
Okay.”

  They slipped out of the galley module, getting a quick blast of cold air under the icicles of the dome. It sobered him. Was she taking him to her room? Would he regret it if she did? No, they ran into the heat of the communications building. She led him up the steel stairs to the library and glanced inside. “All clear.” She pulled him in.

  It was dark, the air musty with that faint paper and paste smell of books. There was a couch they bumped against and he jerked to a stop, dizzy. She kissed him, quickly and hard.

  He broke away. “In the library?”

  “There’s no one here. They’re all at the party.” She kissed him again. “I like it in places like this.”

  He glanced around. What the hell? He kissed her back this time, letting his tongue glance off her lips, her teeth, her tongue. He could feel the sting of alcohol there. His head reeled with the smell of perfume and perspiration and musk. “Jesus.”

  “It’s not good to hold your feelings in. It backs up on you.” Her hands were running from his chest to the back of his thighs. “Then it explodes, like Tyson.”

  “Gabriella, I like you, but I’m not sure this is a good idea yet...”

  “I want you, Jed. I want you to want me.”

  He wanted it too, even though he felt nothing for this woman. It was just that she was a woman. Her beauty enflamed him. She crossed her arms and lifted off her top in an instant and then, with a twist of her wrist, dropped her skirt. The lace of her underwear revealed shadows, of her nipples and delta of hair. Lewis groaned. She was pulling at his own long-sleeved thermal shirt and he helped pull it off. They kissed again and he unfastened her bra. It slipped away, her nipples like tarnished coins, the tips engorged and hard. He was just as hard and she pushed against him excitedly. Then she broke free and turned, looking back at him coyly, and slowly wiggled her panties down. It was dark but he could see light reflected off the curve of her hips. A topography of shadow led to the darker mysteries beyond.

  “Take me on the couch,” she whispered, crawling over the arm of it.

  He thought of Abby as he swayed unsteadily. She was the one he really liked, wasn’t she? “I’m not ready for this,” he tried, slurring his words.