The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (63 page)

It was only because he had lost so often at Lupe Velez and had, as a consequence, slept with the dog so many times, that Joe became aware, even deep in his own poisoned sleep, of an alteration in the usual pattern of Oyster’s breathing.

The change, an absence of the dog’s usual low, steady, grumbling wheeze, disturbed him. He stirred and woke just enough to become aware of an unfamiliar buzzing sound, faint and steady, in the dog tunnel. It droned on comfortingly for some time, and in his groggy state, Joe very nearly fell back into a slumber that undoubtedly would have been final. He sat up, slowly, on one arm. He could not seem to focus his thoughts, as if a gauzy curtain of snow dust hung and floated across the inside of his skull. He could not see very well, either, and he blinked and rubbed his eyes. After a moment it occurred to him that the sudden motion of his sitting up ought to have awakened at least his bedmate,
who was always finely attuned to the least of Joe’s movements; and yet Oyster slept on, silent, the rise and fall of his grizzled flank shallow and slow. That was when Joe realized that the buzz he had been contentedly listening to in the warmth of his sleeping bag for who knew how long was the chilly hum of the electric lights that were strung at intervals along the tunnels. It was a sound he had never heard, not once, in all his nights in Dog-town, because the ordinary wailing and termagancy of the dogs drowned it out. But now Dog-town was completely silent.

He reached out and slapped Oyster, gently, on the back of his head, then poked a finger into the soft flesh where his left foreleg met his body. The dog stirred, and Joe thought he might have whimpered softly, but he did not raise his head. His limbs were slack. Joe, feeling very wobbly, crawled out of the crate and went on his hands and knees across the tunnel to check on Forrestal, Casper’s pure-breed malamute, who had succeeded lost Stengel as Dog King. He saw now why rubbing his eyes had done no good: the tunnel was full of fog, curling and billowing down from the Main Stem. Forrestal did not respond at all when Joe patted him, or poked him, or shook him hard, once. Joe lowered his ear to the animal’s chest. There was no discernible heartbeat.

Quickly, now, Joe unhooked Oyster’s collar from the chain whose other end was bolted into the wooden crate, picked up the dog, and carried him down the tunnel toward the Main Stem. He felt as if he was going to vomit, but he didn’t know whether this was because there was something the matter with him, something that was going to kill him, too, or merely because to get to the end of the tunnel he had to walk past seventeen dogs lying dead in their carved-out niches. He was not thinking very clearly at all.

The Dog-town tunnel ran at right angles to the central tunnel of Kelvinator Station, and directly across from its mouth was the door of the Waldorf. The original plans had called for Dog-town to lie at some distance from the men’s quarters, but they had run out of time here, too, and so been forced to shelter the dogs right at their doorstep, as it were, in a tunnel that had originally been dug for food storage. This door was supposed to be kept closed, to prevent the precious warmth of the stove from escaping the sleeping quarters, but as he approached it, struggling
along with eighty-five pounds of dying dog in his arms, Joe saw that it stood open a few inches, prevented from closing by one of his own socks, which he must have dropped on his way out to Dog-town. He had been folding his clothes on his bunk that evening, as he later reconstructed, and the sock must have clung to his bedroll. A warm, flatulent breath of beer and unwashed woolen underwear came sighing into the tunnel from the Waldorf, melting the ice, filling the tunnel with ghostly clouds of condensation. Joe nudged the door open with his foot and stepped into the room. The air seemed unnaturally stuffy and far too warm, and as he stood there, listening for the usual congested snuffling of the men, his dizziness increased. The weight of the dog in his arms grew intolerable. Oyster fell from his arms and hit the plank floor with a thud. The sound made Joe gag. He stumbled to his left, wildly veering to avoid touching any of the bunks he walked between or the men lying in them, toward the light switch. No one protested or rolled away from the blaze of light.

Houk was dead; Mitchell was dead; Gedman was dead. That was as far as Joe got in his investigations before a sudden desperate understanding drove him to the ladder that led up through the hatch in the roof of the Waldorf and out onto the ice. Coatless, bareheaded, feet clad only in socks, he stumbled topside across the jagged skin of the snow. The cold jerked at his chest like a wire snare. It fell on him like a safe. It lapped eagerly at his unprotected feet and licked at his kneecaps. He took great breaths of that clean and wicked coldness, thanking it with every cell in his body. He heard his exhalations rustle like taffeta as they froze solid in the air around him. His blood filled with oxygen, quickening the nerves of his eyes, and the dark dull sky over his head seemed to thicken suddenly with stars. He reached an instant of bodily equipoise, during which the rapture of his survival to breathe and be burned by the wind perfectly balanced the agony of his exposure to it. Then the shivering took hold, in a single crippling shudder that racked his whole body, and he cried out, and fell to his knees on the ice.

Just before he pitched forward, he experienced a strange vision. He saw his old magic teacher, Bernard Kornblum, coming toward him through the blue darkness, his beard tied up in a hair net, carrying the
bright glowing camp brazier that Joe and Thomas had once borrowed from a friend who went in for mountaineering. Kornblum knelt, rolled Joe over onto his back, and gazed down at him, his expression critical and amused.

“Escapistry,”
he said, with his usual scorn.

J
OE WOKE IN THE
H
ANGAR
to the smell of a burning cheroot and found himself gazing up at the oft-patched wing of the Condor.

“Lucky you,” said Shannenhouse. He snapped shut his lighter and exhaled. He was sitting on a canvas folding stool beside Joe, legs spread wide in best cowboy manner. Shannenhouse was from a raw town called Tustin in California and cultivated cowboy habits that sat unlikely on his slight frame, with his professorial mien. He had fair thinning hair and rimless spectacles and hands that, while horny and scarred, remained delicate. He tried to be taciturn but was given to lecturing. He tried to be stern and friendless but was an inveterate kibitzer. He was the old man of Kelvinator Station, an eight-kills ace from the first war who had spent the twenties flying in the Sierras and in the Alaskan bush. He had enlisted after Pearl and was as disappointed as any of them by his assignment to Kelvinator. He had not seriously hoped to fight again, but he had been doing interesting work all his life and was looking for more. Since their arrival at Kelvinator—the official, classified name was Naval Station SD-A2(R)—the weather had been so bad that he had been up in the air only twice, once on a recon mission that was aborted after twenty minutes in the teeth of a blizzard, and once on an unauthorized, failed jaunt to try to find the base of the first Byrd expedition, or of the last Scott expedition, or of the first Amundsen expedition, or the site of
something
that had happened in this waste for which the adjective “godforsaken” appeared to have been coined. He was nominally a first lieutenant, but nobody stood on ceremony or rank at Kelvinator Station. They were all obedient to the dictates of survival, and no further discipline was really necessary. Joe
himself was a radioman second-class, but nobody ever called him anything but Sparks, Dit, or, most often, Dopey.

The smoke of the cigar smelled very good to Joe. It had an unantarctic flavor of autumn and fire and dirt. There was something lurking inside him that the smell of the burning cheroot seemed to keep at bay. He reached for Shannenhouse’s hand, raising an eyebrow. Shannenhouse passed the cheroot to Joe, and Joe sat up to take it in his teeth. He saw that he was tucked into a sleeping bag on the floor of the Hangar, his upper body propped on a pile of blankets. He leaned back on one elbow and took a long drag, inhaling the strong black stuff into his lungs. This was a mistake. His coughing spasm was long and racking, and the pain in his chest and head reminded him abruptly of the dead men and the dogs in the tunnels with their lungs full of some kind of agent or germ. He lay back down again, forehead stitched with sweat.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

“Indeed,” Shannenhouse said.

“Johnny, you can’t go down in there, okay, you promise? They all—”

“Now you tell me.”

Joe tried to sit up, scattering ash down the blankets. “You didn’t go down in there?”

“You were not awake to warn me, remember?” Shannenhouse reclaimed his cigar as if in reproach, and shoved Joe back down to the floor. He gave his head a shake, trying to clear away a memory that clung. “Jesus. That.” Normally his voice was fluting and animated by a scholarly verve, but now it came out cowboy flat, dry and flat as Joe imagined Tustin, California, to be. “That is the worst thing I have ever seen.”

A good deal of Shannenhouse’s talk over the months had been of awful things he had seen, tales rife with burning men, arterial fountains of blood spraying from the armless shoulders of fellows who strayed into the whirl of propellers, hunters half-devoured by bears dragging their stumps into camp in the morning.

“Oh, shit,” Joe said again.

Shannenhouse nodded. “The worst thing I have ever seen.”

“Johnny, I beg you not to say this again.”

“Sorry, Joe.”

“Where were
you
, anyway? Why didn’t you …”

“I was out here.” The Hangar, though buried in the snow of Marie Byrd Land like all the other buildings of Kelvinator Station, was not connected to the rest by tunnel, again because of the heavy weather that had come so viciously and early this year. “I had the watch, I came out here just to have a look at her.” He jerked a thumb toward the aging Condor. “I do not know what Kelly thought he was doing, but the wire—”

“We have to raise Gitmo, we have to tell them.”

“I tried to raise them,” Shannenhouse said. “The radio is out. Could not raise shit.”

Joe felt panic lurch up inside him now, as it had on the day he fell through the haycock, in a clatter of skis and bindings, the wind knocked from his lungs, mouth packed with snow, a cold blade of ice jabbing for his heart.

“The radio is out? Johnny, why is the radio out?” In his panic, the melodramatic notion, worthy of one of Sammy’s plots, that Shannenhouse was a German spy and had killed them all streaked through his thoughts.
“What is going on?”

“Relax, Dopey, all right? Please do not lose your shit.” He passed the cheroot back to Joe.

“Johnny,” Joe said, as calmly as he could, letting out smoke, “I feel that I am going to lose my shit.”

“Look here, the fellows are dead and the radio is out, but there is no connection between the two. One has nothing to do with the other, like everything else in life. It was not some Nazi superweapon. Jesus Christ. It was the fucking stove.”

“The stove?”

“It was carbon monoxide from Wayne.” The Antarctic Waldorf was heated by a gasoline stove, affectionately known as Wayne because of the legend
FT. WAYNE IRON WORKS INDIANA USA
stamped on its side. The naming madness that came over men when they arrived here in the unmapped blankness seeped quickly into every corner of their lives. They named the radios, the latrine, they named their hangovers and cuts on their fingers. “I went up and checked the ventilators in the roof. Packed with snow. Same thing with Dog-town. I told Captain they were poorly
made. Maybe I did not. The thought did occur to me at the time we were laying them in.”

“They all died,” Joe said, the statement rising at the end with just the faintest hopeful intimation of a doubt.

Shannenhouse nodded. “Everyone but you and your boyfriend, maybe I guess because you were lying at the very end of the tunnel from the door. Now, as far as the radio goes, who the fuck knows. Magnetism. Sunspots. It will come back.”

“What do you mean, my boyfriend?”

“The mutt. Mussels.”

“Oyster?”

Shannenhouse nodded again. “He is all right. I tied him up in the Mess Hall for the night.”

“What?” Joe started to his feet, but Shannenhouse reached out and forced him back, not gently.

“Lie down, Dopey. I shut down the damn stove, I dug out the ventilators. Your dog will be all right.”

So Joe lay down, and Shannenhouse leaned back against the wall of the Hangar and looked up at his airplane. They passed the cigar back and forth. In a little while, it was going to be time for them to discuss their chances, and plan for their survival until they could be rescued. They had food to last two dozen men two years, plenty of fuel for the generators. The Mess Hall would provide sleeping quarters suitably free of the spectacle of frozen corpses. Compared to the early heroes of the continent, starving and dying in their caribou-skin tents, gnawing a raw hunk of frozen seal, they were in clover. Even if the navy couldn’t get a ship or a plane in until spring, they would have more than enough of what they needed to make it through. But somehow the idea that death had reached down through all that snow and ice into their tunnels and cozy rooms and in a single night—in an hour—killed all of their fellows and all but one of the dogs, made their survival, for all their ample provisions and matériel, seem less than assured.