Ice Brothers

by Sloan Wilson

  Paul had hoped that Peomeenie would return within two weeks, but by mid-December there was still no sign of him. Brit kept saying that Eskimos never hurry and that even an additional two weeks of delay would be nothing to worry about, but Paul and Nathan began to wonder what they could do if Peomeenie and his companion just never came back. Maybe the Germans had taken them prisoner or had shot them. It was all very well for an Eskimo hunter to boast that he could walk like a ghost through a wolf pack without being detected, but the Germans were beginning to seem to Paul as though they had magical powers of their own. Nothing was going right. Why should he expect one lone Eskimo and a woman to handle people who had captured all of Europe?

  Nathan looked for more Eskimo men who could start another scouting expedition, but none was interested. They all apparently assumed that Peomeenie would return sooner or later in all probability, and if he did not, there was small enthusiasm for following in his footsteps. Nathan began trying to learn enough about Eskimo methods of travel to undertake the journey himself.

  One night when Nathan came aboard to report the progress of his efforts ashore and to help Flags with any radio traffic, his tall, stooped body was identifiable amongst six Eskimos he brought with him only by its shape and size. He had on the whole native Greenlander outfit: sealskin parka with hood, sealskin blouse with the fur turned in, polar bear pants with a dark slice of fox fur or otter in the crotch, and kamiks, the soft sealskin boots with geometric designs around the top. He even had Eskimo mittens with slits to permit him to poke out two fingers to bait hooks and Eskimo sun glasses—a strip of polished driftwood with two slits instead of lenses.

  “Call me Nathan of the North,” he said as he climbed from the whaleboat to the well deck.

  “How about Lawrence of Greenland?” Paul asked.

  “Hell no. I’m Green of Greenland. Greenberg of Greenland.”

  “You’ll need to leave long diaries. Don’t leave out all your sexual exploits with the natives.”

  There was a look on Nathan’s face then, just a momentary flinch before he said, “I don’t think I’m exactly in Guns’s class yet.” He then began talking seriously about going to Supportup himself with three natives if Peomeenie didn’t show up soon.

  After discussing that and drinking many cups of coffee in his cabin, Paul said, “Where did you get Eskie clothes big enough to fit you, anyway?”

  “Brit had some of the women make them up.”

  So Brit is really taking care of him, Paul thought … dammit, was he always going to be jealous of every woman he knew?

  “They look good,” he said. “Have you got those Eskies so they can shoot yet?”

  Dismissing Nathan as soon as possible, Paul stood watching the boat take him back to the shore. Since Nathan had been spending most of his time working with the natives at the settlement with Brit as his interpreter, a close relationship between them was inevitable. Perhaps it was almost as inevitable that Brit should see nothing wrong in teaching Nathan the native custom of laughing together without guilt. If Nathan became a willing student of Eskimo philosophy, who could blame him?

  I could, Paul thought, and was surprised at his own intensity.

  “Lesson one: don’t take the skipper’s girl,” Mowrey had said to him once long ago at Godhavn. Perhaps it was time to give Nathan a lesson in such elementary seamanship, a more basic kind of philosophy than anything he would learn from Brit or the Eskimos.

  The strange thing was, Paul could not imagine having such a conversation with Nathan. His gaunt face with the deep-set eyes was somehow above or beyond such simplicisms. He would look hurt or give Paul a glance of that smoldering anger he usually kept for the Germans. It would be impossible for Nathan to have a lighthearted affair, even in Greenland with Brit, Paul suspected. Nathan would be torn by guilt over infidelity to a wife he never talked about and who, Paul supposed, was giving him some kind of trouble. He would feel more guilt about taking his skipper’s girl—no, Nathan was not the man for a carefree fling with anyone.

  But was he a man who could turn Brit down on a December night in Greenland? Perhaps. Paul found himself hoping so, but the possibility seemed less and less likely the more he thought about it. A good commanding officer, he reminded himself grimly, never asks a man to do anything he can’t do himself.

  If he had any sense, Paul told himself, he would dismiss his suspicions, or convictions, as a bad joke. What Nathan and Brit did was their own business, wasn’t it? Certainly Brit had gone out of her way to avoid making any promises to him. To let a woman with a kind of free-floating Eskimo heart disrupt his relationship with his executive officer just before attacking the Germans would be ridiculous. Definitely, if he had any sense he would forget the whole thing.

  The trouble was, in this area Paul did not seem to have much sense. Since Nathan was now spending most of his time ashore, Paul’s duty clearly was to remain aboard the ship. Brit never visited him. Perhaps she had felt herself unwanted aboard the trawler, and she had no boat since the Danish launch had been taken for the use of the men guarding the prisoners. Still, if she had wanted to see Paul, she could have sent out a message with the crew of the whaleboat.

  The more Paul brooded about it, the more it seemed that Nathan’s request to train the Eskimos ashore had been rather clever. Now that he was living in Swanson’s house, the sauna and the big feather bed would always be handy. Nathan was probably teaching Brit to shoot all kinds of guns, and her new release of hatred for the Germans was probably mixing with love for her new tutor in her inimitably explosive ways.

  Damn him, Paul thought, god damn him … Which made Paul feel rotten, but it was the sum of his emotions when he woke up late at night in his narrow solitary bunk after dreaming that he only had to move his hand an inch to touch Brit’s smooth warm skin.

  Damn it, he thought, why couldn’t I meet a real Danish girl instead of a goddamn white Eskie? The Eskie philosophy may be fine for them, but it can get white men to killing each other if they don’t watch out …

  Paul spent hours trying to reconcile himself to the probability that Brit of course had included Nathan in her love for all mankind, and then trying to convince himself that Nathan was just “too decent a guy” to do such a thing. He even was able half to convince himself that Brit was “too nice a girl” to take on two American officers from the same ship. Somehow none of this helped much. No matter what she was doing, he was hungry for her. The small icebergs in the fjord and the clouds overhead were beginning to take on the shape of women again. His memories of her love-making kept repeating themselves in his head, making it impossible for him to concentrate on the books about gunnery he was trying to study.

  Finally Paul gave up and decided to send Stevens ashore with a note, asking Brit to come to dinner. Worried that she would bring Nathan, he added, “I’ve learned the Eskimo philosophy from you, but this Eskimo is dying of loneliness. I want to see you alone, if only for a few minutes.”

  When the whaleboat returned to the trawler, she was standing between Stevens and Krater in the stern, laughing with them. Dressed in her Eskimo outfit, she jumped lightly to the well deck. Feeling the eyes of his crew on him, Paul shook her hand with curious formality and said, “Thank you for coming out. There are a lot of communications we ought to work out together.”

  At least she had the good grace not to laugh at that. She followed him toward his cabin. The quartermaster and Guns were standing near the wheel talking about New Orleans again. They left and stood on the port wing of the bridge as Paul opened the starboard door for Brit. As soon as they got into his tiny cabin, he shut the door and kissed her.

  “I thought you didn’t want to make love here,” she said a few minutes later.

  “The hell with it. But keep as quiet as you can.”

  The discipline of trying to maintain silence somehow intensified their passion. He was constantly afraid that someone would knock at the door and hurried. Eskimo-fashion, they did not take off their clothes … When
they’d finished, she lay in the bunk staring up at the sword on its brackets while he rearranged his uniform. “You certainly have some fine ideas about working out communications,” she said.

  He did not want to, but the damn question came out in spite of his better sense … “Have you been working out communications with Nathan?”

  “Don’t ask that,” she said, looking startled. “Paul, for God’s sake don’t make him feel worse than he already feels.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean that he’s so full of guilt and sorrow about his wife that—”

  “What about his wife?”

  “You don’t know? He never told you?”

  “He never talks about her.”

  “That’s hard to believe. He never talks to me about anyone else. I thought you two were friends.”

  “Should I know about her?”

  “Paul, if you care anything about Nathan, you damn well should know. His wife disappeared in Poland. She went back just before the war to try to get her parents out He hopes she’s gone into hiding but he believes she’s probably in a concentration camp, or dead.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Paul said, rubbing his eyes. “I guess I always sensed there was something, but not that.”

  “Maybe he was afraid to talk about it. He kind of broke down when he told me.”

  “It makes me feel strange—all this time I thought I knew him so well and I didn’t know the main thing—”

  “He’s all right now. There’s nothing weak about him.”

  “That’s for sure. Funny how little you can really know about somebody even when you’re all locked up aboard a little ship …”

  “Maybe it’s just that men don’t usually talk about their wives much, even with their best friends. Did you ever discuss yours with him?”

  “No. I don’t have all that much to discuss.”

  There was a short silence.

  “How do I stand with you?” he asked finally. “I mean, are you really tied up with Nathan? I don’t blame him and I don’t blame you, but I should know.”

  “Paul, you have me when you have me. We’re all blind people here, stumbling around trying to help each other in the dark. No rules apply here. Now, didn’t you ask me out for dinner? I can’t wait to see what that cook of yours is going to give us.”

  Cookie had prepared roast lamb with appropriate fixings. It was good, but Paul didn’t feel at all hungry. He thought of Nathan wrapped up with worry about his wife while old Mowrey was hounding him and he was seasick all the time. No wonder his gaunt face had that look of tragedy, even when he smiled.

  “There’s one more thing I want to tell you,” Brit said when the dishes had been cleared from his cabin. “Nathan said he’d talk to you about it, but it would be better if I did.”

  “What?”

  “I want to get out of here and get my father out. Nathan says planes go to the States from the west coast every day, and if I could get the proper authorization …”

  “We can radio for permission. I don’t know what they’ll say.”

  “We still have an embassy. If you could get in touch with the right people—it was Nathan’s idea.”

  “We’ll do what we can. I should have thought of it myself.”

  “I didn’t really level with you. I’m going crazy here and my father’s already crazy. Paul, we have to get out.”

  Soon she asked to go ashore and he had the whaleboat take her in. When it came back, he saw Nathan standing in the stern. The tall, gaunt man in the Eskimo furs stepped awkwardly to the deck.

  “Could you come up to my cabin for a minute?” Paul called from the bridge.

  Nathan came up the steps. Paul met him in the pilothouse.

  “Nathan, Brit told me about your wife,” he said, and to his own astonishment, found himself hugging his executive officer. He had never before hugged a man in his life, not even his brother or father. Embarrassed, he stepped back.

  “Thanks,” Nathan said. “You know … well, we’ve always understood each other anyway. You know … we don’t have to talk.”

  “Not about that. But send a message to GreenPat and see if we can find a way to get Brit and her father to the States. I wish I’d thought of that myself.”

  “I’ll take care of it, you’ve been busy.”

  Turning, Nathan almost ran out of the pilothouse. Paul climbed wearily to the flying bridge. It was a bitterly cold night, but a half moon was breaking through the windswept clouds as though it were fighting for life.

  CHAPTER 48

  As the ninth of December wore on, the days became shorter and shorter until finally sunrise merged with sunset and there was only a few minutes of ruddy red glare on the icy mountains to mark high noon. That would be time enough to allow the bombers to do their work and on clear nights the stars and the moon made that white world surprisingly light without the sun. The trouble was, there were few clear nights. One blizzard was quickly followed by another, and what the Eskimos called good weather was any wind less than fifty miles an hour and any temperature above fifty below. Still the fjord, with its swift-running currents and great tidal rise and fall, did not freeze, and the ice pack off shore was so driven by winter gales that it formed a less formidable barrier along the coast than it did in summer.

  Driven by the knowledge that they must soon attack the Germans, the crew of the Arluk worked as it had never worked before. Every man who was not needed to guard the prisoners and the ship unloaded the heavy depth charges from the hold and carried them in the whaleboat and in the Danes’ launch to the settlement. Because a dog sled could carry only one of the great charges at a time, Nathan and Brit decided that the Danish launch could carry a load of them to a point just short of Supportup, where they could be landed on the coast and dragged up low cliffs there with ropes. This operation awaited only the return of Peomeenie. Paul should not be surprised by his long absence, Brit still kept on saying. In every blizzard Peo undoubtedly would build an igloo out on the ice shelf that extended from the shore for thousands of yards into the sea. The proximity of relatively warm ocean currents there cut the cold in the shelter of an igloo, and by hacking a hole in the ice Peo could catch enough fish to last out the winter if necessary. With his whale oil lamp glowing in his crystal dome, he and Ninoo, his companion, could laugh together until the sun came back to stay.

  “I should have told him I wouldn’t pay him unless he got back here fast,” Paul said.

  “When you come right down to it, what’s the hurry?” Brit asked.

  “While your friend Peomeenie and his damn Ninoo are laughing together, the goddamn Krauts are sending out weather reports, and with those their planes are bombing the bejesus out of every city from Moscow to London,” Paul said. “We’re supposed to break that up. That’s what the hurry is.”

  “But not even an Eskimo can go far in a blizzard,” Brit said. “And Peo is very thorough. You kept telling him you want to know where every gun emplacement is. That means he has to cover both sides of the fjord. He’ll have to go inland for miles before he can cross it. I’m sure he’s doing his best and no one in this world could do better.”

  Paul was not convinced. His fear that Peomeenie might have been captured or killed was growing. The moaning of the wind and the ruddy glare of the sun during its brief appearances on the horizon seemed to be setting a scene only for disaster. While everyone else worked to maintain the ship, guarded prisoners or drilled with the Eskimos ashore, Paul actually had very little to do, and the long hours he spent idly in his bunk made him feel obscurely guilty. Flags reported that radio signals in a variety of frequencies were pouring from some place nearby to the south, presumably Supportup. Obviously the Germans were carrying out their mission. Perhaps it had been only cowardice that had caused Paul to make these elaborate preparations, instead of sailing into their fjord and just attacking as best he could. Each day Paul checked off on his calendar in the nautical almanac seemed a personal defeat.

  There wa
s not a book aboard the ship he’d not read and his memories of the past did not offer much comfort in introspection. For a long while he had avoided thinking about his wife. Sometimes Sylvia came to him in dreams, voluptuous, golden-haired and more eager for love than she had usually been, but such visions just made him wake up hornier than ever and when he was in that mood, he had to be careful not to get furious at Brit and Nathan. He felt peculiar now every time Nathan knew he was alone with Brit and every time he knew she was alone with him. Damn it, they weren’t Eskimos, no matter how much they all respected and needed each other and so forth …

  The more Paul thought about his situation, the more ridiculous he appeared to himself. He was an unfaithful husband who brooded about both his wife and mistress being unfaithful. He admired the Eskimos’ freedom from jealousy and possessiveness, but needed at least the ideal of one man and one woman pledging themselves to each other forever and meaning it. Temporary love affairs in time of war were probably inevitable, maybe even necessary to stay alive sometimes, but in the future he wanted at least to hope for something more. He could accept Nathan’s need for Brit and her desire to comfort him, but he found that he did not want to daydream anymore of coming back to her after the war. He didn’t want to ask her to sail around the world with him. Perhaps it was only a white man’s craziness, but if he took a woman on such a voyage he would not want to worry about her running off with any man who needed her, or who offered a jolly hour of laughing together without jealousy or a sense of betrayal. It seemed, in short, that he was hopelessly himself …

  Suddenly he began to dream of Sylvia again. Forgetting his hard times with her, her disappointing letters, and his worries about her as a USO hostess, he remembered the day she had dived from the top of the old yawl’s mast. A girl who had done that certainly could grow up to sail a small boat around the world. He remembered the flamboyant way she danced, the vitality of her face, and wondered how he had ever been interested in anyone else. After the war was over she would have outgrown her few disturbing ways and they would sail the South Seas together. Sometimes he would realize that this was an unlikely dream, but he felt that it was one he needed … men in the Arctic tended to create their own women, weaving memories into fantasies. Almost no man on the Greenland Patrol remembered an ugly or nagging wife.