Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube

by Blair Braverman

  STAGE TWO IN MISSION: ARCTIC EXPLORER STARTED, auspiciously enough, with a private helicopter ride to the dogsled camp on the glacier. The world shrank away, the roofs of Juneau tiny between mountains, the tremble of the rotors both violent and thrilling. A line of cruise ships on the waterfront below shone bright as a string of pearls, the turquoise of their on-deck swimming pools garish against the dark marbled water of the Gastineau Channel. The pilot shouted to me about his new kit Lamborghini. Sometimes he borrowed a lead dog, he said, who liked to ride in the passenger seat with her head out the window at ninety, a hundred miles an hour. It was epic.

  We flew over stony mountains, dark green and gray, dustings of snow that grew into snowy peaks that in turn stretched down into a great white valley. The icefield was like water, pressed around the islands of mountaintops. Monochromatic and bare. A desert, a moonscape—I found myself groping for a metaphor, trying to make sense of the alien world that extended to the far horizon. I didn’t notice the camp until we were almost directly overhead. The tour trails made five concentric rings just slightly darker than the snow around them. These were the confines of Dog World, a speck of dirt on a vast sea.

  As the helicopter descended, I could make out more of the camp: a cluster of white wall tents alongside a grid of white doghouses, which were arranged into ten kennels. Figures walked between the kennels, dogs paced and rolled, a snowmobile drove along one side. In a moment we landed, a bump on snow, an American flag nearby whipping in the rotor wash. Before the rotors had stopped moving, a bearded man pulled open the helicopter door and waved to me furiously. He took my hand to help me out.

  The man wore bulging reflective sunglasses with leather sides and a black nose flap. He looked like a serial killer. Glacier goggles, to prevent snow blindness—they’d been on Noah’s list of recommended gear, and I’d bought my own, though at the time I couldn’t imagine needing them. Now, squinting, I pulled my goggles from my backpack and put them on. I followed the man past the rows of dogs to the cluster of wall tents at the far end of the kennel. The snow was coarse and soft, and I tripped where my feet punched through, though I tried to catch myself before the man noticed. He stopped at a tent and waited until I caught up. “Here’s yours,” he said. “Jimmy’ll bring your luggage on a snow machine.” The tent had a plywood floor and three army cots, two of which had sleeping bags on them. I dumped my backpack on the third.

  Since it was my first day, the man said, he’d give me an hour or two to get settled. At lunchtime I would meet the other mushers. Then someone would introduce me to my dog team. After that? “Full speed.”

  He stepped out onto the snow, then looked back. “One more thing,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Watch out for glacier snakes.”

  Before I could ask, he was gone.

  The afternoon passed in a blur of instructions and deep snow and twenty new dogs—their names, how fast could I learn their names?—and five helicopters like birds growing over the mountains and whipping us with wind, disgorging stunned and immaculate tourists who blinked as much as I did, the birds sinking back into the distant air to reemerge an hour later with a new supply of blinking humans. There were systems for feeding, for harnessing the dogs, for booties, for greeting the tourists, for heating water, for melting snow, for scooping shit, for pounding the shit into barrels, for the barrels to be slung back to Juneau on long dangling ropes. Figures strode through the snow, purposeful and foreign. My tours would start the next morning—eight per day—and then there was dog care and kennel care and people care, a thousand chores for the thousand tasks needed to keep the camp running. Finally—the last helicopters gone, the dogs fed, and the kennel cleaned—I followed the other begoggled figures toward the dining tent for dinner.

  The dining tent was a taller wall tent with three picnic tables inside. I sank onto a bench, too tired to do anything except eat the meat loaf and gravy that came from the kitchen tent next door. The tent was full of chatter, mushers comparing tours and tip money, managers laying out plans for the next day. There were fifteen of us—ten mushers, two managers, two assistants, and the cook. Everyone had goggle tans; most everyone wore a mix of faded shirts and zinc-smeared wind pants and high-tech gear from sponsors. After eating, the others scattered for evening chores: grooming trails, washing dishes, cleaning outhouses. I could not even imagine standing up. My mind spun from the landscape; my legs were rubbery from trudging through the snow; my arms ached from hauling buckets. And yet the others had been working since six that morning. As I would, tomorrow. I watched them walk out into the white.

  As the tent emptied, one man stood from a nearby table and joined me on my bench. He was strong looking, with a friendly face and a streak of sunscreen down one cheek. He was from British Columbia. His name was Dan. He shook my hand and smiled.

  I smiled back.

  Dan wanted to know all about me, and I answered readily, relieved to put my mind somewhere more familiar. I told him about the folk school, that I’d just arrived from Norway. “We always got into problems with reindeer,” I told him. “They don’t know how to get out of the way. They’ll just, like, run between the lead dogs. And then they get eaten.” Dan was laughing, which gave me confidence. “That’s one good thing about the glacier. No reindeer.”

  “Nope,” he said. “Nothing alive here but two hundred crazy dogs and some even crazier people. Then there’s the tourists.” He pronounced it funny: tur-ist. “And if you stick around long enough, we get two ravens in July.” When he saw my face, he leaned close. “Aw. Gary told you about glacier snakes, didn’t he?”

  I shrugged.

  Dan pursed his lips. “People get weird on the ice. You can’t take them all seriously.” He nodded his head toward the door. “And as you might have gathered, we don’t get a lot of girls up here. How old are you, anyway?”

  “I just turned nineteen.” Already it seemed so long ago—my birthday at the folk school, two weeks before. Had I really just been there?

  “Wow,” said Dan. “You look older.”

  There was a rumble outside. The trail groomers were back from their chore. Some guy came into the dining tent and started smearing peanut butter on a slice of bread. Dan and I both stood. It was late, but I reached for my goggles again; everything was so bright.

  “Hey,” he said, as we turned toward our respective tents. “The first day is exhausting. You’ll catch up fast.”

  “I hope so.”

  “If anyone gives you trouble, come to me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” said Dan. “I try to help people out.”

  “EXCUSE ME, SIR,” ARILD TOLD RUNE when he walked in. “You passed it. First aisle by the door, second shelf from the bottom. Let me know if you have any questions.”

  “Huh?” said Rune.

  “Yes,” said Arild. “We sell soap.”

  Rune stood frozen, then started to giggle. “You,” he said, and sat down at the table. It was true: He reeked. He the Rich One scooted his chair back.

  It was early still, and the cars outside glistened with frozen dew. I took a sugar cube from the box on the table and tucked it behind my teeth, sucked coffee through it. Sweet.

  Nils spoke up. “You know, she Blair and I are getting married.”

  So he remembered.

  “Yeah so?” said He the Rich One.

  “Yeah,” said Nils. “Then she’ll move to Malangen. To the richest country in the world.”

  Rune glanced at me.

  My sugar cube was gone, and I felt with my tongue for any last grains. No. It was gone. “Then I can get citizenship,” I said. “But the deal was that after five years, Nils will hit me, right? Since then we can get divorced and I’ll get to keep living here. So we can get married, and then five years later he’ll be a real gentleman, just hit me once, maybe not that hard, of course, but maybe he’ll leave a bruise—enough that I can complain about it—”

  “She pia’s getting cheeky,” He the Rich On
e said, pleased.

  I felt strange, suddenly antsy. Rune was flipping through yesterday’s Northern Light and Arild leaned back with his hands on his stomach and Nils was grinning into his coffee, but it seemed they were all looking at me. I stood up and went to the back hallway, where the day’s breads were done baking, and I slid each loaf into a plastic bag. The crusts were hot and flaky and felt good to grip. I brought out all five loaves at once, cradled like babies in my arms, and by the time I got back to the table Nils had left and Rune was out having a smoke.

  That was better. I sat back down.

  That Saturday we opened the Old Store. I hung a poster on the side of the barn: OLD STORE MUSEUM, OPEN TODAY 12–4. WAFFLES INCLUDED WITH TICKET. Arild had put an ad in the paper. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

  Arild was nervous all morning, though he wouldn’t say why. He was quiet over coffee, and kept glancing out the window at the cars that slowed or pulled into his lot. When he mixed the waffle batter, he added an extra tub of sour cream in his distraction. I cooked the waffles in the storage room with an iron that imprinted the words NEAR-STORE onto each one. “If nobody comes,” Arild suggested, “you and I can have a waffle party.”

  By the time I’d used up the sour batter, it was almost noon, and I carried the platter to the museum, propped open the door, and tried to think inviting thoughts. For a while nothing happened. Then one car pulled up, and another, and by the time I greeted each arrival, three or four more had crowded in. They came from the mountain village, from Tromsø, from Storsteinnes, from farther east. I tried to corral the crowd to give the tour that I’d prepared—a lecture on Mortenhals, on the old ways, including a series of facts and dates that I’d jotted on my wrist—and to show off my favorite artifacts, like the little brass bloodletter, which with the flick of a switch cut eighteen slices in a patient’s arm; or the corpse chairs, which were said to creak when a new body was on its way to the church to be buried. But no sooner did I try to raise my voice than it was drowned out by some new exclamation: “I bet this is worth a lot,” or “Heavens me, buttons! Look, Solveig! Buttons!” A little boy ran around the edge of the room, reaching into the syrup barrel and the jar of shoe nails, and I winced as he started winding the gramophone with greasy waffle fingers; but the worst touchers, by far, were the old folks, who had clumped into groups of two or three and turned over the shoes and chocolates and hairpins that they remembered from their youth. How could I tell them not to touch? A woman had tears in her eyes. “We had these,” she kept saying, and I was struck with the absurdity of the thought that I could ever imagine this museum as more mine than hers.

  “We didn’t know Arild took care of all this,” people kept telling me. “All this history.” But the Old Store had never been a secret. He’d opened it once before, sixteen years ago, for the shop’s one-hundred-year anniversary. He’d set up a dance floor, hayrides, hot dogs for everyone. Hundreds of people traveled from all over; a wedding party at the church had come down the hill to join the festivities; his youngest daughter, Emma, had dressed up in his aunt Aud Unn’s purple dress. Arild had been particularly impressed by the willingness of a certain neighbor to plan and manage the celebration. With his help, the whole community came together.

  Not long after, Arild’s wife left him for the neighbor. That was the worst part: that the whole community had already known.

  After a few hours, the crowd in the Old Store thinned. The lambs bawled outside the window. I walked along the shelves, straightening, and fitted a board back over the broken window. When I turned around, a new woman had come in. I’d never seen her before. She stood in the middle of the shop with a camera, taking pictures of every wall.

  “Hi!” I said. “Welcome to the Old Store. Admission is fifty kroner.”

  “I don’t want to come in,” she said. “I was just taking pictures.”

  She was already in, but I didn’t feel like arguing. Now she looked at me strangely. “Who are you? Where are you from?”

  I straightened my posture. “I’m the museum director. From America.”

  “The museum director? I see. You’re Martha’s daughter.”

  “No.” Now I didn’t like her.

  The woman took one more picture, then slipped her camera into her purse and left.

  I didn’t think much about the encounter. It was only later, when I recounted the day to Arild and he asked if I’d had any problems, that I remembered the woman. When I told him what had happened, his face grew slack. How old was she? he asked. Did I get her name? What car did she drive? I shook my head. She was maybe in her sixties. I hadn’t noticed anything else.

  “Really, it’s okay,” I said. “She didn’t bother me. We don’t even want her fifty kroner!”

  Arild turned away. “The lambs are hungry,” he said. “Can you find them on your own? They’re medium size, dark faces, say ‘baa’?”

  It was custom to stop feeding nursing lambs once they were big enough to survive on their own, but Arild’s feeding schedule showed no signs of waning, and the job fell mostly to me. “If they die, she dies,” I had overheard him telling customers at least twice. I tracked down the fat things behind the barn.

  When I got back to the shop, there were two forked sticks on the steps. They were labeled with Post-its: Water Finder (Large) and Water Finder (Small). I had just lifted the small one when Arild came out the side door and picked up the other himself. He seemed brisk, as if intent on distracting himself.

  “You know I don’t believe in most of that foolishness,” he said, “but blood stopping and water finding, I have jo trust in those. I haven’t done it myself in many years. We’ll see if I remember.”

  He led me out by the diesel pump and pointed to a crack in the asphalt. The crack had a water pipe underneath it, he said. The stick would find the pipe. It was just a matter of gripping the forked ends of the water finder and bending them outward, so that the point wobbled in the air. When you passed over water, the point would swing down. Arild backed up a few paces, then walked forward over the crack. Sure enough, his water finder tipped down.

  “Now you try,” he said. “And in case it’s not clear, I didn’t do anything. It does that jo by itself.” He held out his palms to show where the stick’s movement had scratched his skin. A pearl of blood had formed on one of the scratches.

  I gripped the water finder and crossed the asphalt, stepping over the crack. But the stick didn’t move.

  “Walk more slowly,” Arild suggested.

  So I did. I walked as slowly as I could. I walked with my eyes closed. I walked backward. I walked over a puddle by the leaking garden hose, in case my water finder needed a more obvious hint. I even tried to cheat, and swing the stick down myself, and then I traded with Arild and tried his. But the water finders would not find for me.

  It was late at night, the sun small, the air still. Somewhere on the fjord the quick gasp of a porpoise carried over the water. Used to be that men sat out on the dock with guns, waiting for a porpoise to breach so they could shoot it for dinner. The trick was to shoot on the second breach, after the porpoise had air in its lungs. Otherwise it would just sink. I knew. Of course I knew. I had heard the stories.

  We both turned to look, but the surface was glassy, a trapdoor to the sky.

  “Arild,” I said. “Who was the woman with the camera?”

  He held his water finder carefully. “I am afraid,” he said, “that it was my sister.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS THE DAY BEFORE MIDSUMMER and the shop was already out of milk, which was almost as bad as being out of butter on Christmas. How would the customers make rice porridge? Arild called Anne Lill to ask for help, but she was away at her second job, mopping floors in Mestervik. “You should have thought of that earlier,” she told him, and he sank down at the table in despair. The Sand Shop’s refrigerators had been out ever since the lightning strike, so Egil’s customers had turned to him. He hadn’t anticipated the double demand. How could he have
known?

  He the Rich One leaned forward. “I’ll tell you what,” he told Arild. “You stay here, I’ll drive pia to the dairy and we’ll get as many cartons as you want.”

  Arild gazed out the window. How He the Rich One tested him. He had recently acquired a box of grocery bags from He the Rich One’s bankrupt shop, and took great satisfaction in using them when bagging the man’s purchases. When He the Rich One objected, Arild feigned innocence—“Surely you’ve noticed that I use these these days? They’re cheaper.” Thrift was something that He the Rich One, who grew more careful with money the more of it he had, could begrudge no one.

  “It’s St. Hans,” said He the Rich One. “Your customers need milk. And besides, pia and I can get some quality time together.” He winked at me.

  Over the past few weeks, He the Rich One and I had developed an exaggerated game of flirt and duck. He brought me gifts of cognac-smoked herring. “I missed you, darling. Comfort me?” he’d say, extending a leathery cheek for a kiss, and I’d pat it with my hand and dart away. He the Rich One was gifted with great subtlety of expression, and was particularly adept at looking wounded in such moments. I liked the games, which allowed me to express my lack of interest to the same degree that he expressed his interest. It felt like everything was on the table.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go along to get milk.”

  Arild started to hum.

  “Come on, Egil,” said He the Rich One, invoking Arild’s rival shopkeeper.

  “Yeah, Egil,” I said. “Come on.”

  Arild lifted the thermos and shook it, checking for coffee. He glanced at the clock. A car slowed outside, then drove on by. “Blair,” said Arild, “it’s not that you must, but it would be greatly useful to me if you would watch the shop.”

  I nodded.