The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (66 page)

“Shannenhouse,” he said. He had gone barreling down the steps without giving the pilot any warning and, as it turned out, had caught him during one of his rare periods of sleep. “Wake up, it’s daytime! It’s spring! Come on!”

Shannenhouse stumbled out of the plane, which glistened eerily in its tight glossy sheath of seal hides. “The sun?” he said. “Are you sure?”

“You just missed it, but it will be back in twenty hours.”

A softness appeared in Shannenhouse’s eyes that Joe recognized from their first days on the Ice long ago. “The sun,” he said. Then, “What do you want?”

“I want to go kill Jerry.”

Shannenhouse pursed his lips. His beard was a foot long now, his smell excoriating, probing, nearly sentient. “All right,” he said.

“Can that plane fly or not?”

Joe started around the tail, over to the starboard side of the plane, where he noticed that the hides covering the front part of the fuselage were of a much lighter color and a different texture than those on the port side.

Stacked in a neat pyramid beside the plane, like cargo waiting to be loaded on board, sat the skulls of seventeen dogs.

W
AHOO
F
LEER
, their dead CO, had been at Little America with Richard Byrd in ’33 and again in ’40. When they went through his files, they found detailed plans and orders for transmontane Antarctic flights. In 1940 Captain Fleer himself had flown over part of the territory they would be crossing to kill the Geologist, over the Rockefeller Mountains, over the Edsel Fords, toward the shattered magnificent vacancy of Queen Maud Land. He had made carefully typed lists of the things a man ought to carry with him.

The great anxiety of such a flight was the possibility of a forced landing. If they crashed, they would be alone and without hope of rescue at the magnetic center of nothingness itself. They would have to fight their way back to Kelvinator Station on foot, or press on ahead to Jotunheim. Captain Fleer had typed up lists of the emergency gear they would need in such an instance: tents, Primus stove, knives, saws, ax, rope, crampons. Sledges that they would have to drag themselves. Everything had to be considered for the weight it would add to the payload.

The precision and order of Captain Fleer’s instructions had a settling effect on their minds, as did the return of the sun, and the idea of killing
one of the enemy. They resumed each other’s company. Shannenhouse came in from the Hangar, and Joe moved his bedroll into the Mess Hall. They said nothing about their descent over the past three months into some ancient mammalian despair. Together they ransacked Wahoo Fleer’s desk. They found a decoded tidbit from Command, received the previous autumn, passing along an unconfirmed report that there might or might not be a German installation on the Ice, code-named Jotunheim. They found a copy of the Book of Mormon, and a letter marked “In the Event of My Death,” which they felt entitled, but could not bring themselves, to open.

Shannenhouse took a shower. This necessitated the melting of forty-five two-pound blocks of snow, which Joe, grunting and cursing in three languages, cut and shoveled, one by one, into the melter on the Mess Hall’s roof, whose zinc maw, like the bell of a gramophone, broadcast the thin reedy voice of the pilot singing “Nearer My God to Thee.” They spoke little, but their exchanges were amiable, and over the course of a week they resumed the air of comradely put-uponness that had been universal among the men before the Wayne disaster. It was as if they had forgotten that flying unsupported and alone across one thousand miles of storm-tossed pack and glacier to shoot a lonely German scientist had been their own idea.

“How would you feel about a nice ten- or twelve-hour stretch of, oh, say
shoveling snow
?” they would call to each other from their bunks in the morning, after they had spent the previous five days doing only that, as if some unfeeling superior had put them on shovel duty and they were just the unlucky stiffs who had to obey the order to dig out the Hangar and the tractor garage. In the evening, when they came aching, faces and fingers seared with cold, back into the tunnels, they filled the Mess Hall with cries of “Whiskey rations!” and “Steaks for the men!”

Once they had the snow tractor dug out, it required a full day of tinkering and heating various parts of its balky Kaiser engine to get it running again. They lost an entire day driving it thirty yards across level snow from the garage to the Hangar. They lost another day when the winch on the tractor failed, and the Condor, which they had managed to tow halfway up the snow ramp they’d crafted, snapped loose and went sledding back down into the Hangar, shearing off the tip of its left
lower wing. This required another three days of repair, and then Shannenhouse came into the Mess Hall, where Joe had a Royal Canadian Mounted Police manual for 1912 open to the chapter entitled “Some Particulars of Sledge Maintenance,” and was struggling to make sure the man-sledges were properly lashed.
MAKE SURE SLEDGES PROPERLY LASHED
was item 14 on Captain Fleer’s Pre-Flight Checklist. Three languages did not suffice for his cursing needs.

“I’m out of dogs,” Shannenhouse said. The new tip he had grafted on the Condor’s wing needed to be covered and doped to the rest of the sheathing, otherwise the plane would not take off.

Joe looked at him, blinking, trying to take in his meaning. It was the twelfth of September. In another few days, perhaps, if it could break through the melting pack, a ship bringing soldiers and planes would be returning to Jotunheim, and if they had not managed to get aloft by then, their mission might have to be called off. That was part of Shannenhouse’s meaning.

“You can’t use the men,” Joe said.

“I wasn’t suggesting that,” Shannenhouse said. “Though I would be lying, Dopey, if I said the thought hadn’t occurred to me.”

He stroked at his whiskers, looking at Joe; he still hadn’t shaved his bearish red beard. His eyes rolled toward Joe’s bunk, where Oyster lay sleeping.

“There’s Mussels,” he said.

They shot Oyster. Shannenhouse lured the not wholly unsuspecting dog topside with a slab of frozen porterhouse and then put a bullet point-blank between the good eye and the pearl. Joe couldn’t bear to watch; he lay on his bunk fully dressed, zipped into his parka, and cried. All of Shannenhouse’s former loutishness was gone; he respected Joe’s grief at the sacrifice of the dog, and handled the grisly work of skinning and flensing and tanning himself. The next day Joe tried to forget about Oyster and to lose himself in vengeful thoughts and the stupendous tedium of adventure. He checked and rechecked their gear against Captain Fleer’s lists. He found and removed the ice-hammer that had somehow fallen into the gearbox of the tractor’s winch. He waxed the skis and checked the bindings. He dragged the sledges back in from the tunnels, undid them, and lashed them again the Mountie
way. He cooked steak and eggs for himself and Shannenhouse. He plucked the steaks from the salted pan, set them steaming on two big metal plates, and deglazed the pan with whiskey. He set the whiskey on fire and then blew the fire out. Shannenhouse came in stinking of processed flesh. He took the plate gratefully from Joe, his expression solemn.

“Just big enough,” he said.

Joe took his plate, sat down at the captain’s desk, and, hoping to absorb from the instrument some of the captain’s thoroughness, typed the following statement:

Here Joe stopped typing and sat chewing for a minute on a piece of steak. The situation was far from clear. The man they were going to kill had done nothing to harm either of them. He was not a soldier. It was unlikely that he had been involved in any but the most tangential, metaphysical of ways with the building of the witch’s house in Terezin. He had had nothing to do with the storm that blew up out of the Azores or the torpedo that had blown a hole in the hull of the
Ark of Miriam
. But these things had, nonetheless, made Joe want to kill someone, and he did not know who else to kill.

He stopped typing again.

“Johnny,” he said. “Why are you doing this?”

Shannenhouse looked up from a nine-month-old copy of
All Doll
. Cleaned up and bearded, he looked like one of the faces that had lined the main hall of Joe’s old gymnasium, the portraits of past headmasters, stern and moral men untroubled by doubt.

“I came here to fly airplanes,” he said.

He pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, then rolled it in again, and left it like that. Shannenhouse came over to read it, nodded once, and then went back out to the Hangar to see to the plane.

Joe lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes, but the sense of conclusiveness, of putting his affairs in order, which he had sought in typing up a final statement, eluded him. He lit a cigarette and took a deep draft of it, and tried to clear his mind and conscience so that he could face the next day and its duties untroubled by any scruple or distraction. When he had finished his smoke, he rolled over and tried to sleep, but the memory of Oyster’s single trusting blue eye would not leave his mind. He turned, and tossed, and tried to lull himself to sleep, as Rosa had once instructed him to do, by imagining that he lay floating on a black raft, on a warm black lagoon, in the blackness of a moonless tropical night. There was nothing inside or outside of him but soft warm blackness. Presently he felt himself slipping toward sleep, pouring into it like sand racing toward the neck of an hourglass. In this twilit hypnogogic state he began to imagine—but it was stronger than a mere imagining, it was as if he were remembering the fact, believing it—that Oyster had been capable of speech, had possessed a sweet, calm, plaintive voice capable of expressing reason and passion and concern, and that he could not now get the dead dog’s voice out of his ears. We had so much to say to each other, he thought. What a shame that I only realized
it now. Then in the instant before he went under, a sharp barking sounded in his inner ear and he sat bolt upright, his heart pounding. He realized that it was not the betrayed love of Oyster, but of someone far dearer and more lost to him, that haunted him now and prevented him from making peace with the possibility of his own death.

He crawled down to the foot of the bunk and opened his footlocker, and took out the thick sheaf of letters that he had received from Rosa after his enlistment at the end of 1941. The letters had followed him, irregularly but steadily, from basic training at Newport, Rhode Island, to the navy’s polar training station at Thule, Greenland, to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he had spent the fall of 1943 as the Kelvinator mission was assembled. After that, as no reply from their addressee was ever forthcoming, there had been no more letters. Her correspondence had been like the pumping of a heart into a severed artery, wild and incessant at first, then slowing with a kind of muscular reluctance to a stream that became a trickle and finally ceased; the heart had stopped.

Now he took out the penknife that had been a gift from Thomas, and that had once saved the life of Salvador Dalí, and slit open the first of the letters.