The Blue (Book 3)

by Joseph Turkot

  Up and down we go, over a new wave, and for just a moment, he’s still there. His back and his butt, sliding away, naked and cold and brave, the last time I’ll ever see him. And the words finally come out, despite the cinch that’s tied my throat shut, and the tears that have swollen my face and started to freeze my cheeks into crusts. “I love you!”

  My heart leaps up into my chest and then my throat, as I wait for his reply. For the words to come back, so that I can save his voice in my head, like I’ve already forgotten it—forgotten that he loves me too, no matter how it ends. But there’s not a sound more, and only bare ice, when his floe reappears. And just like that, I know he’s gone.

  I turn around before the convulsions start, because part of me thinks this is all a trick of my mind, a hallucination, and his leg is fine, and he’s just swimming around to our floe after all, and I have to check to make sure Spots isn’t diving in after him, to intercept him underwater. But Spots is dead and bloating on the ice. And when I turn back, looking out at the slanting rain, Russell’s floe is still empty.

  Chapter 16

  It’s Voley that finally gets me going, but it isn’t his whines that do it, or even his bark.

  It’s like I’ve become extra sensitive to every wave, to every blast of rain, and I can’t peel myself from the bundle of clothes. My finger runs up and down the sweater. I breathe in and smell him. And my mind can’t steer away from what it must have been like in the water. To go down into the freezing knives and stop your breath and know that it’s all over. I play through the feelings, wanting to feel the same feelings he felt, only stopping just in time before I throw up again. And then, just like that, I throw the clothes a couple feet away, dig through the bag and find the knife, and take it into my hand. Then I flop like Spots right onto my back. Face up and soaking wet and being driven right down into the slush itself, too numb to shiver anymore, too useless to care. I look at the steel and ignore Voley’s constant barking. I watch the dull gray blade, waiting for some light to catch it. Come on, I tell it. Catch the light. Show me something. The call goes out—from the deepest part of me, directly to the stars behind the clouds. To whatever it could be that would ever know I’m here. Show me something, I say. And I wait, looking at the sliding drops of water, carrying just a flicker of shine as they roll down the knife and split in every direction upon my hand. Voley keeps barking, almost like something’s wrong, but I can’t stop the daze. I know I could go to the final sleep. That it wouldn’t take long now. Not with my body this cold. This wet and useless and alone. It would just be an hour. Go to sleep, and keep sleeping, and that would be it. Almost as easy as sliding right off the floe and into the ocean. And then, the point of the knife talks to me. The feeling it could bring, life and pain and sharpness from all of this numbness. The last thing in the world I have any control over. And I could do it. Part of my brain tells me it would be the last great feeling I would ever know, to push it down and go away. But it’s Voley that gets me up—not from his barks or his whines, or any of his nervousness about the dwindling safety of our floe—he does it through a different kind of sound. It’s the scraping of his paws.

  When I screw my head around just enough to catch him from the corner of my eye, I see what he’s done—the floes have nearly joined, and he hopped across all on his own, gone to investigate the seal. And he’s right on top of the thing. Dead Spots.

  And that quickly, every thought of suicide vanishes. I know now. Nothing’s coming to show me anything. I’ve got to do it myself. For Russell, I haul myself to my feet, and say Fuck You to everything around me—the pack and the sky and the rain and all of it. I say it loud and I don’t know to what thing or person I’m talking. But it all makes sense as I take each slow and painful step toward the gap between Spots floe and mine—I’m cursing everything that wants to take me now. All of it. For stubbornness I’ll go on as long as I can, until my body quits. And that’s it. Just what everyone’s wanted, so I’m going to give it to them. And I move around the pockets that the rain gnaws into the ice and approach the three feet gap that Voley jumped over to reach Spots’s floe. I’m coming boy, I tell him. And I pause, looking for a runway.

  I take three steps back, get ready to run, and freeze—something locks me up. A memory. Just a few days ago. A joke. Something about crossing the floes with Russell. I push it away. Empty myself of all feelings. Thank my leg that it still hurts. And I run and jump.

  I slide and ride my butt along a layer of slush, and when I come to a halt, the first thing I realize is that I’m pain free. And when the pain comes in finally, I tell myself that at least I didn’t make anything worse. My legs raise me up, giving me a wide view of the horizon. In front of me, Voley is already testing the seal—licking its face and neck. Wondering if he will be able to sink his teeth into its muscle. It snaps into my head—Russell’s instructions—to cut up the seal, to find fuel in the plane, and then my head swings up. I take it all in—the last high-ridged floe that separates us from the monster floe of the plane. And the plane itself.

  It glistens darkly, and even from here, I trick myself into thinking I can hear the metallic patter, different from the ice patter. The rain pelting off the wing. My eyes rake over the surrounding floes, but they all seem too scattered to trust. Just the high-ridged one—the only path to the plane. And for how long—Russell said the wind had changed. And as I hear his words, I feel the wind push into me, just as I face directly the plane. It wants to drive us away. Put the pack in pieces again. As soon as it can.

  We’ll come back for it, I tell Voley. But he doesn’t listen to me. Come on, boy, I say again, trying to drive him off with my words. But Voley knows better, and that somehow he can feed on the corpse. And he’s much too interested to leave this floe, even with all the slush pockets forming and the rain beating down in every crevice, working to tear us apart from each other all over again.

  “Now!” I yell. I yell it like we don’t have a second to waste—like Russell’s words about the wind weren’t just to help me to accept what he had to do. They were the truth. We have to get to the plane, I tell him. And when Voley still won’t listen to me, taking his first nibbling bites on Spots, I limp over to him and loop my fingers under his collar. Without a word I tug him. He digs his paws in, like there’s no way he’ll leave food. I see his starving face, his desperate eyes that don’t seem to understand my insanity. It’s like he’s asking me why I’d starve him further. I try to explain: We’re coming right back, boy. And in my head, I don’t even know if it’s true—if the ice will still be close, or if we’ll lose our last chance to eat.

  It runs through my mind that I could eat the seal raw. We could do it now, together. Let Voley start into it, and once the flesh is exposed, the loose and bloody insides, start to tear away my own pieces. To sit and keep an eye on the lead between us and the high-ridge floe, making sure it doesn’t widen too quickly, and eat the seal. For a moment I keep pulling on Voley’s collar as he tries to dig in and back away from me, shaking his head from side to side as if he can wiggle right out of it. For a moment I think he will—it slips up and snags again just under his jaw. And right then, he yelps. I know I’m hurting him. I let go. He backs up, and before I can scold him again, he’s back on the seal. I tell him he has a few minutes. And with that, I gather up all the clothes and stuff them in the bag. Once I have everything, with the knife still in my hand, I go back to Voley. He’s barely breaking the seal’s rubbery skin. And seeing that the whole process has become useless, or maybe because I look so pathetic, Voley comes this time when I call him. I don’t even touch his collar. And together we walk to the edge to see if it’s even possible to reach the high-ridged floe.

  When we reach the rim, the waves bounce between the bergs, pushing them close and then far away with more speed than I’ve seen yet. It’s like we’re riding the end of the waves, and each descent into the trough is giving us just a brief window of a four foot jump. My nerves slip through me as I realize I can do nothing
for Voley’s jumps anymore. I have to hope he makes it. Times it right. Or that he comes after me at all. I’ve gotten him to the edge of the ice, but there’s nothing else I can do but get myself across.

  I toss the bag and it slides along the slippery melting ice of the next floe. And then, pulling back again, blank minded, I race up and push off with my left leg. And in the air I know I’ve made it. I remind myself which foot to land on, and without more than a small stumble, I’m down and safe. When I look back, Voley’s gone. But then, I hear the plunking of his paws and butt, and I look to my side—he’s already across, right behind me, no hesitation at all. And he cleared it by more than I did. I can’t help but grab his ears and shake his face and lean into him and drive my lips into him. I squeeze his head and tell him I love him and that he’s doing great, and that we’ll be back to eat the seal soon. He just licks me and looks away, like he wonders where we’re going. So I release him and grab the pack, and then we start. The slow, slippery trek up the ridge at the heart of the floe, directly toward Plane Floe.

  As we begin, and before the curve of the ridge takes my view away from Plane Floe, I look at the plane. And the ice it’s on. The shelf is high and the entire berg looks as big and sturdy as Resilience floe was. I ignore the thought and concentrate on my left leg. Each step has to be planned perfectly, and even as I struggle up the ridge, trying to stick to what looks like the firmest parts of the slush, I slip down along the rivulets of rain. The first slip I manage to catch myself, but the second one sends me reeling. My left foot goes out from under me, just when I thought I had my limp matched perfectly to the incline. It rides right off to the side, as if it caught a lead of melt, and I start to tumble. Just like that the bag flies off my shoulder, all the way back down the ridge. I slide fast, watching helplessly as Voley scrambles back down after me. I dig in to slow down but it’s all too loose. It comes into my head that with the speed I’m sliding, I might go all the way down and over the flat lip and right into the ocean. Each time I try to dig harder, pressing with my gloves and my heels, but I can’t catch anything but running slush. Finally, my own body weight stops me dead all on its own. But Voley charges right past me. And when I shake off enough to sit upright, rubbing the ice and water out of my eyes, he’s coming up from the bottom of the slope. The bag’s in his mouth.

  I try to take the bag from him, but he holds it tight and skip-limps up the ridge past me, only to get five easy steps higher and turn his head. He looks back at me from my sitting position and waits. Okay, I tell him. You can carry it. And then I rise and battle. One after the next, for the millionth time. As many footsteps as raindrops. And I go slower, more carefully, but I still slip. Each time I catch myself, and I don’t tumble like before. When I think I’m going to die, and I want to throw it in because my muscles are all broken and without any kind of food to keep them going, I see Voley stop and look back at me. The bag dangling down almost into the icy slush from his mouth. And he’s just paused. Quiet and waiting and full of strange patience for me that I cannot understand. It pushes me on.

  Once we crest the ridge, I finally see what the pack really looks like. And I know. Russell was right.

  In every direction, except for Plane Floe, the pack is separating again. And there are nothing but wide open leads of brown sea. Even behind us, I see the line of darkness widening between our floe and Spots’s. We have to move fast or he’ll drift away too. But in front, the Plane Floe is connected to the bottom of the ridge. There’s not even another lead of ocean to jump over—just a thin neck of ice, like a very narrow bridge, that connects the landing of the ridge to the large and high shelf of Plane Floe.

  I turn back for a moment. For maybe the last moment I’ll ever have this view. The rain beats sideways and into my eyes, trying to strip them of clarity, to prevent me from knowing the truth. But I wipe it away as fast as it comes and look back, on the spreading pack behind us. The once great measure of the Ice Pancake. I look over every fragment and shard of ice. One giant waste of frost and sea. I search each floe, small and large, and look for a body. A form. It’s a trick. I know it is—he’s gone. Maybe bobbing, hitting up underneath a shelf now, over and over, riding in with the waves and being battered. And with that, I’m done. I want to see no more of the beautiful expanse.

  Voley waits until I start first, but when I do, he tears into the downward slope, charging ahead so fast I have to call out to him to slow down. And with a little effort, I manage to drop onto my butt and slide most of the way down the higher half of the ridge. My heels kick in, and then, in another minute, I’m up, right behind Voley, and following him single file across the thin strip of ice that’s raised like a bridge between us and the plane. At each step I feel like I’ll slip. When I start to go so slow that Voley even stops, looking back again, I try to pick up the pace. At first, all I can see is the water—white and slapping up on either side—nowhere to go if I slip but in. The waves hit and send up their vapor. And the shelf is too high to climb if I fall in. I saw the bridge’s sides from the top of the ridge—four feet at least. But then, when I catch sight of the windows of the plane, and what’s inside them, I lose all thought of the taunting sea raging on both sides of me. Each step becomes quick and perfect, my feet in unison, without even having to transfer weight for a limp. As if my body turned off its wound somehow. And then, when the strip begins to widen out, and I know for sure I’m safely across, I ask Voley if I really see what I think I see.

  “What’s in there, boy?” I ask. I tell him what I think it is, seeing if he’ll give me a clue. But he doesn’t. He just drops the bag from his mouth and sits down, like all of the sudden, after being invincible and tireless, he needs a rest. I say it again, but it’s no longer a question, and I stop dead in my tracks. Someone’s in there.

  Chapter 17

  A mix of panic and relief spreads through me at the same time until I can sort them out. Neither of them hold, and instead they turn into a strange awe. It washes over me as my eyes follow the lines of the face, smushed right into the glass, mixed into a mess of hair, all pressed with frost against the porthole. The head of a man slumped over, sleeping with his head against the side of the window. As if he took a nap and never woke up.

  Or he is taking a nap. Staying alive somehow inside the plane.

  The notion that anyone could live out here—even on Plane Floe where I don’t feel the swells anymore—for any amount of time seems impossible. But you’re still alive, I tell myself, and my hand squeezes tightly around the handle of the knife. I move as close as I can to Voley and kneel down next to him, squatting in a pool of ice melt. My eyes catch a bit of my exposed arm and I look away—it looks too rubbery, like fake skin. Pale and ready to slide off. Abused and beyond its expiration date. And I know that’s what all of me must look like now. But with the sudden rage of the wind, and the loud pelting of the slamming drops against the metal wing, hanging out like an alien canopy over the barren floe, I block out any more thoughts of myself. I have to talk to Voley.

  “We’re going to sneak around. I don’t want you to bark. Don’t do anything until it’s time,” I say. And then, with my eyes on the burnt charcoal metal and the single window with a head in it, we start to move along the flat mush toward the edge of the plane.

  Up close, I can see how mangled and broken the metal shell is. But with each step, and as close as we get, the body in the window doesn’t move. I start to know that he has to be dead. Whoever it is in there. Dead on impact.

  Along the ice are smears of deep gray soot, and black, that look like they’ve been tattooed deep into the ice along crack lines. Charred so bad even the rain isn’t wiping them away. And in another couple minutes, we’re directly under the upturned wing. The steady tin drum of the wing porch beats above us, and I see the bolts and siding of the plane. I try to find a label, or anything to read, but there’s nothing. Just nubs that have been painted silver, all trailing around the barrel of the plane’s body, higher than my head, until it curves und
er where its belly is stripped of paint. The belly slants on an angle, even past my feet, and there, the entire thing opens up, a smashed and gnarled shell. Splinters of metal lay stuck in the ice, some long and high like pikes, and others that look like they’re still intact pieces from the plane—square and rectangular objects and pipes and wire. Some are half-buried in the ice, or floating in pools of water. And then I see the other wing. It’s on the other side of the plane, and from under the belly, as I squat down, holding Voley close, I see the torn sheet like a lost arm, flat on the ice. A beater, sounding loudly the quick rhythm of medium rain. Everything about the wreck runs through me like a vision—the crash and the explosion and the fire and the deaths of everyone inside. He must be dead. And how many would have been on it? I lean out and start to count the windows. Five that I see—and right by the last window, a long scar breaks the plane, flattening the nose into the floe. Where the cockpit should be. Pulverized.

  I look at Voley, wondering if we should go inside now. And then, before I make a decision, my hand smacks right into the side of the plane. The knife clanks loudly, metal on metal, and I freeze up. Loud enough to send a rattle through the whole inside of the plane. I glance back at the tail, pointed on an angle like a hill into the sky. I look right up where the blue should be. There’s nothing but gray. And right where I think it should be, there are swirling clouds, moving faster than any I’ve ever seen. I step in tighter against the belly of the plane, tugging Voley along with me, and wait to see if I’ve woken up a dead man.