Part 34 (1/2)

Then, in et into the storehouse had been lost in the first great blizzard of the winter Joe pitched in to help find it He went on skis, for only the third time in his life, and soon was separated fro for the lost ton of food A sudden wind blew up, suspending hiauze of snow dust Blind and frantic, he had skied into a haycock and fallen, with a sound of chih the ice It was Oyster, driven by ancestral Bernardine impulses, who had found hiular bedaries of Lupe Velez Even when he slept in his bunk, Joe visited Oyster every day, bringing him hunks of bacon and ha was partial Apart fros as a coach viewed his linehilev his corps, as Satan his devils, Joe was the only denizen of Kelvinator Station who did not find the ani, loud, and perpetual source of annoyance

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, gruh to beco sound, faint and steady, in the dog tunnel It droned on coy state, Joe very nearly fell back into a slumber that undoubtedly would have been final He sat up, slowly, on one arauzy 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 mo up ought to have awakened at least his bedmate, as 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 hen Joe realized that the buzz he had been contentedly listening to in the war was the chilly hu the tunnels It was a sound he had never heard, not once, in all his nights in Dog-town, because the ordinary wailing and ter-toas coently, on the back of his head, then poked a finger into the soft flesh where his left foreleg ht have whimpered softly, but he did not raise his head His li very wobbly, crawled out of the crate and went on his hands and knees across the tunnel to check on Forrestal, Casper's pure-breedHe sahy 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 hioing to vomit, but he didn't knohether this was because there was so to kill hiet 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 froinal plans had called for Dog-town to lie at some distance from the men's quarters, but they had run out of tiht 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 war 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 fro by one of his own socks, which he -town He had been folding his clothes on his bunk that evening, as he later reconstructed, and the sockto his bedroll A warm, flatulent breath of beer and unwashed woolen underwear ca 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 warested snuffling of thein his arrew intolerable Oyster fell from his ar He stu any of the bunks he walked between or the ht switch No one protested or rolled away froht

Houk was dead; Mitchell was dead; Gedations before a sudden desperate understanding drove hih the hatch in the roof of the Waldorf and out onto the ice Coatless, bareheaded, feet clad only in socks, he stued skin of the snow The cold jerked at his chest like a wire snare It fell on hierly 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 hi 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 shi+vering 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 h the blue darkness, his beard tied up in a hair net, carrying the bright glowing camp brazier that Joe and Thomas had once borrowed fro Kornbluazed down at him, his expression critical and amused

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

2

Joe woke in the Hangar to the s 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 ran called Tustin in California and cultivated cowboy habits that sat unlikely on his slight fra hair and rimless spectacles and hands that, while horny and scarred, reiven to lecturing He tried to be stern and friendless but was an inveterate kibitzer He was the old ht-kills ace fro in the Sierras and in the Alaskan bush He had enlisted after Pearl and was as disappointed as any of thenain, 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 A 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 radio but Sparks, Dit, or, most often, Dopey 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 radio but Sparks, Dit, or, ood to Joe It had an unantarctic flavor of autu inside hi 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 , and the pain in his chest and head res in the tunnels with their lungs full of soain, forehead stitched with sweat

”Oh, shi+t,” he said

”Indeed,” Shannenhouse said

”Johnny, you can't go down in there, okay, you promise? They all-”

”Now you tellash down the blankets ”You didn't go down in there?”

”You were not awake to warn ar as if in reproach, and shoved Joe back down to the floor He gave his head a shake, trying to clear away a”Jesus That” Nor and animated by a scholarly verve, but now it cained Tustin, California, to be ”That is the worst thing I have ever seen”

A good deal of Shannenhouse's talk over the s he had seen, tales rife with burningfrom the armless shoulders of felloho strayed into the whirl of propellers, hunters half-devoured by bears dragging their stu

”Oh, shi+t,” 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, you, anyway? Why didn't 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 thuht 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 shi+t”

Joe felt panic lurch up inside hih the haycock, in a clatter of skis and bindings, the wind knocked fros,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 Gerhts ”What is going on?” ”What is going on?”

”Relax, Dopey, all right? Please do not lose your shi+t” He passed the cheroot back to Joe

”Johnny,” Joe said, as cal to lose my shi+t”

”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 so stove”

”The stove?”

”It was carbon asoline stove, affectionately known as Wayne because of the legend ft WAYNE iron works Indiana usa sta madness that came over men when they arrived here in the unmapped blankness seeped quickly into every corner of their lives They naovers and cuts on their fingers ”I went up and checked the ventilators in the roof Packed with snow Sa-town I told Captain they were poorly ht did occur tothe at the end with just the faintest hopeful intimation of a doubt

Shannenhouse nodded ”Everyone but you and your boyfriend,at the very end of the tunnel frooes, who the fuck knows Magnetism Sunspots It will come back”

”What do you mean, my boyfriend?”

”The ain ”He is all right I tied hiht”

”What?” Joe started to his feet, but Shannenhouse reached out and forced hiently

”Lie down, Dopey I shut down the daht”