Borealis Read online

  “Hey, Mike.”

  “Here,” Mike said, extending him a cigar as black as demitasse. “Try this. Helps you settle down.”

  “Thanks.”

  Mike produced a second cigar for himself and together they bit off the tips and spat them into the water. The trawler was idling down a chasm of banded gray sea, bookended on either side by thin crusts of ice. Off to the north, the silhouette of an iceberg loomed like the spinal column of some giant prehistoric skeleton. Even in the oncoming darkness, Charlie could make out the black specks of seal pups nesting along the rookeries.

  Mike lit Charlie’s cigar for him and Charlie pulled on it a number of times, working up good passage. It was strong like coffee and tasted good. Charlie exhaled a jet of cigar smoke into the air. “Nice,” he said.

  Mike leaned over the ship’s rail. His lucid eyes watched the sun sink down beyond the backbone ridge of the iceberg. “Listen, Charlie,” he said. “I want to thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “I’m not an idiot and I’m not deaf. I know there’s been talk all week. Was starting to prep myself for mutiny.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Nothing ridiculous about it.” Mike squeezed one of Charlie’s shoulders. “You’re a good friend, man. I appreciate you keeping the wolves at bay, giving me a chance.” Mike turned and stared at the glow of the lamps coming through the pilothouse windows. His face partially masked in shadows and outlined in the glow of the sunset, he said, “They’re all good guys, all of ’em. I’m glad today was a good day. We needed a good day.” Mike plucked the cigar from his mouth and examined the glowing ember at its tip. “Anyway, I wanted to thank you for sticking up for me with the guys.”

  “Forget about it,” Charlie said, looking back over the darkened waters. “We been friends for a while, ain’t we? Was nothing.”

  A comfortable silence settled between them. After a while, Mike said, “You hear anything from Gabe? From Johanna?”

  Charlie closed his eyes. “Been a long time.”

  “You ever call that lawyer? The guy from Fairbanks?”

  “Three times.”

  “And?”

  “And there’s nothing I can do. No court’s gonna make her bring him back to Alaska and I sure as shit ain’t gonna get full custody.”

  “Where are they now? Do you even know?”

  He didn’t know, not for sure. The last conversation he’d had with Johanna, she and Gabriel were somewhere outside Omaha, holed up in some flea-infested roadside motel, Johanna angry and yelling at him until she finally started crying. In the background, he had heard Gabriel crying too, and calling for him. Daddy-Daddy-Daddy— He could still hear it, echoing out over the ether. In his hand, he could still feel the telephone receiver, pushing hard against his ear as Johanna’s yelling came through all too clear. All of this: flashes of memory going off like mind grenades, the images so vivid they singed the filaments of his brain.

  But he couldn’t say all of that to Mike Fenty. Instead, he kept his eyes focused on the mottled neon hues of the setting sun spilling over the ice floe and trickling down into the black sea. To Mike he said, “She’s got no family to stay with, Mike. Nobody I could contact. She and Gabe could be anywhere.” The Borealis canted to one side as sheets of ice broke apart beneath its bow, the sound like glass being crushed beneath heavy boots. In the distance, covered now in deepening darkness, the seal pups barked at the moon. “This is my last trip out, Mike. Just wanted you to know that.”

  “Jesus, Charlie, what are you talking about?”

  “I can’t keep doin’ this.”

  “You’re just talkin’ foolish.”

  “Been thinkin’ about tryin’ to find ’em. Go out lookin’ for ’em.”

  “But you said it yourself, Charlie—they could be anywhere in the country. How you gonna find them? Ain’t got a chance in hell.”

  “Better chance than bein’ out here.”

  “And even if you did find them, it won’t change nothing. She still won’t let you see him.”

  “She might. If I took a job nearby, something that kept me grounded without disappearing on the water for weeks or months at a time…”

  “Bah,” Mike groaned, turning away and looking out over the port side. “That’s just happy talk. You know it.”

  “Still gotta try.”

  “And what the hell will you do for a job, anyway? Teach goddamn physics at Harvard? This shit out here—” Mike Fenty opened his arms as if to embrace the world. “This shit is all you know, Charlie. She was wrong to want you to change and you’d be wrong changing.”

  He sucked hard at the cigar and said through a mouthful of smoke, “Nothing wrong about goin’ after my son, Mike. Nothing wrong with that at all.”

  Finally, Mike Fenty sighed. He relit his cigar and, after a few moments of silence between the two of them, said, “Yeah, I guess there ain’t a damn thing in this world wrong with that.”

  They remained topside for several minutes more, burning the life from their cigars at equal speed, until Mike Fenty clapped Charlie and on the back and told him he was freezing his ass off and wanted to get some supper before Walper the greenhorn hit the sack.

  “Don’t stay out here too late, Charlie.”

  But Charlie hardly heard him. Blindly, without taking his eyes off the passing island of ice, he groped for Mike’s coat, catching the captain around the forearm and tugging him back toward the rail.

  “Charlie—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Charlie whispered. The cigar fell from his lips and silently dropped into the sea. “Holy mother of God…”

  “Charlie, what—”

  He jabbed a gloved finger at the ice floe. The trawler had sidled up alongside it in the encroaching night, so close Charlie could see the individual fissures in the ice, the moonlight casting a palette of shadows along the bluish ridge. They’d passed the seal rookeries some time ago, leaving their ghostly barking far off in the distance now. Still, there was movement out on the ice, movement—

  “What the hell are you—” Mike began, peering through the darkness. The sun had fully set and there was nothing more to go on than the moonlight refracting off the snow.

  “You see it?” Charlie said, his voice not rising above a whisper. “Holy fuck, man, you see it?”

  “Can’t be…”

  “Holy—”

  “Can’t—”

  A figure, most definitely human, darted along the nearest ridge of the iceberg. Legs pumping, arms like pistons, the black shape ran along the cusp of the snowy ridge until it climbed to the top, briefly silhouetting itself against the three-quarter moon. A second later the figure descended down the opposite side, vanishing from view. The trawler was close enough and the moonlight bright enough for Charlie to identify with little doubt actual footprints in the snow.

  “Jesus Christ, Charlie, did you see that?” Mike’s voice was no louder than a croak. He was leaning over the ship’s rail, gaping up at the ridge where the mysterious figure, only seconds ago, had been standing.

  “It was a woman,” Charlie said. “Did you see?”

  “Charlie—”

  Snapping from his daze, Charlie grabbed two fistfuls of Mike Fenty’s coat and pried him away from the rail. “Get up behind the wheel and spin this boat around. She went down around the other side of the ridge.”

  Mike’s eyes were as wide as hubcaps. “Christ, Charlie…” A crooked half-grin broke across his face. “How do you suppose…?”

  “Go!” he barked, shoving Mike across the deck. Mike staggered for a couple of feet until he regained authority of his legs and began running for the pilothouse.

  Charlie rushed to the port side of the trawler and nearly became entangled in a coil of line left haphazardly unspoiled on the decking. He kicked the line off his boot and peered over the side of the ship, his heart beating heavy in his chest now. In the pilothouse, Mike Fenty had taken the wheel and was already bringing the Borealis around the side o
f the iceberg. As the ship navigated around a tongue of ice and dipped back close to the iceberg, Charlie was immediately overwhelmed by the enormity of the floe. From this side, beneath the bleeding moonlight, he could see the entire length of the iceberg. It nearly glowed with phosphoresce, the sloping ridges frozen into icefalls that bled directly into the sea. The ocean opened up—a blanket of tar whose surface glittered with jewels—and the Borealis chugged around the perimeter of the floe.

  Charlie looked down. The port side of the trawler was cutting through a crust of ice. Any closer to the ice floe would put the boat at risk. He glanced up at the pilothouse, a triptych of paneled glass illuminated from within by smeary, tallow light. Mike’s slender silhouette was clearly visible through the glass. Charlie held up one hand and Mike prodded the air horn—maaaawh—in acknowledgement.

  The rest of the crew began filing out onto the deck. Joe hurried over to Charlie, still clinging to a half-eaten ham sandwich. “What in the name of holy hell are you two doin’ out here?”

  The trawler passed beneath the lee of a great conical of ice. The moon was wiped out, dousing the ship into darkness greater than a thousand midnights.

  “There’s someone out here,” Charlie said. For whatever reason, he was still whispering. “There’s someone out on the ice.”

  “What?” Joe cawed, incredulous. He perched himself along the rail and peered through the darkness at the looming iceberg. “Are you insane? And we’re too close to this thing.” Joe turned around and started waving his arms at the pilothouse. “Asshole’s gonna pull a Titanic!”

  “We’re fine, we’re fine,” Charlie said, his breath coming in excited gasps now. He was staring through the dark, his eyes cutting through the undulating depths of the mountain of ice. The shadows appeared to be alive. If he looked at any particular place for too long, the landscape appeared to shift. He blinked and pressed the heels of his rubber gloves into his eye sockets.

  Billy McEwan materialized beside Charlie. One of McEwan’s large white hands closed around Charlie’s left wrist. “The hell’s going on, Charlie?”

  “I saw someone on the ice. A woman.”

  “We can’t be cutting this close to the ice, man. You know that.” McEwan still had his wrist.

  “Mike knows what he’s doing.” He yanked his wrist free and locked McEwan in a heavy stare. Billy McEwan stared back, his too-white face framed in a black, rubberized hood, the loose threads of his knitted cap spiraling down over his forehead. McEwan had spent a good chunk of his career as a pilot with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service out of Alaska until he got caught doing overflights for poachers in his private Cessna. As a deckhand, McEwan was a strong and silent worker…but Charlie always got the feeling that the man resented his current lot in life and thought of the rest of the crew as no better than a mob of uneducated roughnecks.

  McEwan’s eyes pulled away, cutting out across the flank of ice. Charlie let his gaze linger just a bit longer, nothing more than a childish exercise in superiority of course, until he watched McEwan’s eyes widen and his lips purse. A waft of cloudy vapor rose from between McEwan’s lips and vaporized in the freezing air. Charlie swung back around and stared over the ice just as McEwan mumbled something unintelligible under his breath.

  The figure reappeared down the opposite side of the ridge—just a black blur among a density of deep shadows.

  “There’s someone out there,” Billy McEwan breathed.

  “There!” Charlie yelled, waving again at Mike inside the pilothouse. He began pointing vigorously at the ridge. “There! There!”

  The rest of the crew, including Dynamo Joe Darling, turned and stared at him as if he’d lost his mind.

  Just then the trawler cleared the shadow of the icy spire and the three-quarter moon reappeared in the sky. Moonlight washed down the frozen slopes of the iceberg and spilled down to the frozen shores. The figure was illuminated coming down the ridge—white, glistening skin, athletic build, undeniably female. Smallish breasts capped in dark areolas were quite visible, as was the narrow thatch of dark pubic hair nestled between the V of her thighs.

  “She’s fucking naked,” McEwan uttered. The incredulity of his statement would have been a cause for good laughter had the situation not been so absurd.

  The young woman—for Charlie already decided she was somewhere in her early twenties—whipped her head around at the sight of the boat just as Mike turned on the floodlights. The entire wall of ice lit up like a dance floor, the mysterious young woman suddenly at center stage. She had long, dark hair, wet and plastered down against her shoulders, her skin glowing in a freezing sheen of icy water. Eyes large and black, she stared directly at the trawler’s floodlights without wincing, frozen as if in spectacle without movement, her narrow little breasts quivering, her mouth opened in a partial snarl through which the vague gleam of teeth glowed.

  Joe, Bryan Falmouth and Sammy Walper dashed to the portside in unison, causing the 200-foot trawler to list to one side. All of them speechless, the only sound that could be heard above the chugging of the trawler’s diesel engine was a commingling of raspy, exhausted breathing.

  The young woman turned away from the floodlights, her hair whipping in a single frozen fantail from one shoulder to the other, and stared down the length of the ice floe. Then she turned back and stared at the men. By inches, the trawler crept closer to the edge of the ice floe. A second later, Mike cut the engine, and the ship, following a heavy growl, went silent.

  The girl collapsed into the snow, seemingly unconscious.

  “Jesus,” Joe gasped.

  Charlie spun around and grabbed the coil of line that he’d nearly tripped over moments ago. He found the end and slipped it around his waist, tying a halfway decent lasso. Kicking out the length of line to relieve the tension, he was about to make sure the other end was firmly fastened to the hydraulic arm when Joe grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.

  “The hell you doing, Charlie?”

  “Going out there.”

  Joe blinked twice, shaking his head. “You’ve lost your mind or something?”

  “Not unless I’m the only guy who sees a naked girl lying facedown on the ice.”

  “How—”

  “Listen up,” he said, stepping away from Joe and addressing the rest of the crew. Mike was already hurrying down the pilothouse steps, pulling his coat tighter around his waist. “I’m gonna go down there and grab her. Bryan and Sammy, you guys lower me out over the ice with the hydro arm then pull me back up when I give you the okay.”

  Bryan and Sammy just stared at him, equally dumbstruck.

  “Whoa, whoa,” McEwan said, raising both hands. “Calm down, hero. We ain’t sending a man overboard tied to a goddamn piece of cable—”

  “Is there a better idea?” Charlie returned.

  “We’ve got grappling hooks down below,” McEwan said. “Ain’t nobody’s life on the line. We yank her up and over with the hooks the way they used to yank people off stage in the old vaudeville days.”

  “Sure,” Joe countered, “and we stab her full of holes in the process. Nice thinking.”

  “Neither one of you assholes is the captain,” McEwan said, suddenly leveling his gaze on Mike Fenty. “What say you, Cap?”

  Mike glanced over the side and down at the broken white form crumpled in the snow. Her skin had started to crystallize and turn blue. “Much as I don’t like it,” he said, “we’ll send Charlie down. Dynamo’s right—those grapping hooks’ll turn her into a spaghetti strainer.”

  Charlie tightened the knot at his waist. “All right, then. Clock’s ticking.”

  4

  In hardly no time at all, the hydraulic arm began to whir. Joe and Mike, positioned on either side of Charlie, steadied him as he stepped one foot up onto the narrow railing. As the hydraulic arm positioned itself at the proper angle, it began to raise Charlie up off the railing. Mike’s fingers trailed down the length of Charlie’s left leg while Joe took a step back, feeding the cable
out over the side of the boat.

  “Keep steady,” Mike called up to him. “Try not to swing.”

  Thankfully, there was very little wind. Still, Charlie could feel the cold air seeping into every open pocket; he tried to hug himself against the chill, his teeth already beginning to rattle in his skull, as the hydro arm rotated out over the water. He looked down and saw his mirrored self in the glassy surface of the night waters. The hydro arm began to hiss as it extended itself out over the water and toward the floating island of ice. He could smell the gears burning. It seemed to go impossibly slow.

  On deck, Mike raced back up to the control booth and manually swiveled the spotlight toward Charlie, catching him suspended in midair like a yoyo having run out of string. Slowly Charlie rotated in the beam of light, shielding his eyes with one gloved hand as he wheeled around to face the spotlight.

  The arm jerked to a stop, causing Charlie to swing gently from side to side: a hypnotist’s watch on a chain. “What happened?” he yelled. His eyes, which had been trained on the slight, pale form of the young woman sprawled on the ice, turned now to Sammy and Bryan back on deck. “The hell’s going on?”

  “It’s fully extended!” Bryan called back, his hands cupped around his mouth.

  Charlie looked down. The ice below was thin and gray, sloping gradually up toward the snowcapped mounds of ice that made up the first ridge of the massive floe. The boat, he knew, would be unable to get any closer.

  He called back to Bryan, “Lower the arm!”

  Bryan was clearly shaking his head. “No way! Ice is too thin! You’ll go right through!”

  “It’ll hold!” he shouted back. Glancing down a second time, however, he had serious doubts…

  “Bullshit!” Bryan returned. “We’ll try to get closer!”

  “Impossible,” he called back. Mike was outside on the deck now, shaking his head as well. “Just lower me down.” Charlie added, “Slowly.”

  Bryan and Sammy exchanged a look. A second later, the gears above Charlie’s head once again started to whir. He felt himself slowly descending, keeping his eyes locked on his all-weather boots. Water dripped from his boots and struck the ice below as frozen pellets. In his head, he was already doing the math: he was a two hundred twenty-nine– pound man with approximately forty pounds of gear on; below, the tongue of ice was maybe four inches thick…if he was lucky. He could have taken one of the grappling hooks, prodded the ice to test its strength, but he didn’t want to make his fear a reality as the ice broke apart under the weight of the hook. He would just go ahead and do it the same way he’d done everything else in his thirty-nine years, including his relationship with Johanna all those years ago: he’d simply close his eyes and take a single step toward the abyss.