Ice Reich
by William Dietrich
About the book
Chapter One
The flying was bad. The corpse made
it worse.
The whore named Ramona was wrapped
in a red Hudson's Bay Company blanket and slung beneath Owen Hart's
bush plane like one of those new-fangled aerial torpedoes. He could
hear her down there as the plane bucked in the rough air, the frayed
ends of the hemp rope that snugged her in place beating an incessant
tattoo against the bottom of his cabin door. Hart was unhappy with
this attachment of his macabre cargo, but when it had become
apparent at Fairbanks Field that he could not fit the body inside
the already-stuffed cargo area - and that he was not about to wedge
her next to himself in the cockpit -- a patiently insistent Elmer
had persuaded the pilot to tie Ramona to the under-carriage struts.
"You won't smell her when she's out here," the Eskimo reasoned,
holding the body in place while Hart cinched her tight. But then
Elmer wasn't flying with her. Hart understood what the old man was
trying to do in sending Ramona back to her birthplace at Anaktuvuk
Pass, but all in all it seemed a bad business. In the pilot's
experience women were generally bad luck, and he presumed dead women
were doubly so.
It was not just the drag, the pilot
knew, but the weight. The single-engine Stinson was so badly
overloaded that the pilot had delayed until late afternoon for the
August air to cool sufficiently to give him the lift necessary to
take off. It was an old bush trick, waiting for thicker air. But now
the light was slowly fading, Barrow had radioed of deteriorating
weather in the north, and the plane rattled tiredly as its propeller
clutched at the broad Alaskan sky. Hart had considered waiting until
the next morning but Ramona had not been embalmed, and as he flew
across the Arctic Circle the transitory heat was giving way to a
cold front, dark cloud building above the Brooks Range. The pilot
did not like the look of the developing storm. In 1938 there were
precious few places in Alaska to seek help if something went wrong.
As usual, he was alone.
Hart flew over an Earth seemingly
untouched by human hand or imagination. The boreal forest of pine
and birch and boggy muskeg rolled north from Fairbanks for two
hundred miles before ending at the talus wall of mountains. The
trees stopped and beyond the Brooks Range was the vast Arctic plain,
the North Slope, its tundra a great shaggy carpet already turning
orange and scarlet at summer's end. And beyond that was the
frozen northern ocean, the ice at this time of year holding offshore
and the waves lapping lonely beaches of gray sand. There wasn't a
damn thing in that awful emptiness that any man could really want,
Hart knew, except perhaps freedom, or the room to hide from past
disappointments and gnawed-over failures. Even the Arctic whalers
had gone after a fleet was lost to crushing ice more than half a
century before. Now it was a wilderness broken only by a few Eskimo
villages, as inconsequential as pebbles in a cold sea.
The bleak, serrated mountains kept
this prehistoric world mostly bottled away from the brisk new one
except when airplanes buzzed across it like tin mosquitoes. And the
corridor through the mountains linking the North Slope and the rest
of Alaska was Anaktuvuk Pass, literally translated as �the place the
caribou come to crap.' A white man had chosen the melodious-sounding
appellation without understanding its meaning, giving it to an
Eskimo hamlet growing up around a bush airfield. "Anaktuvuk." Hart
wished he had never learned the true definition.
Weary, used-up Ramona -- the whores
were called "slot machines" in the bush -- had worked the miners and
trappers and fishermen and clerks in Nome and Fairbanks and
Ketchikan and Juneau. First her beauty and then her income and then
her lungs had given out, tuberculosis killing her at thirty-eight.
Hart, who had never even had her, agreed to carry her back up to
Anaktuvuk for free anyway when Old Elmer asked him to. Elmer was her
uncle or cousin or some kind of relation -- the natives all seemed
kin, when it was convenient for them to tell the white man so -- and
he said her spirit could be free of bad memories if she could come
home. That was reason enough for Hart, who had no home. He was
already carrying canvas and rope and ammunition and nails and honey
and medicines and hard candy, plus three books and two phonograph
records for the village's mission teacher. Owen didn't carry whiskey
to Anaktuvuk like some of the pilots did, who would trade the booze
for furs and leave behind a three-day drunk. That was a profitable
but nasty business, and Hart shunned it. He carried less volatile
things, excepting blanketed Ramona, and maybe even she was just one
more piece of cargo. He hoped.
"Christ, she was ugly," he had
observed to Elmer as the old Eskimo heaved her up against the bottom
of the fuselage while Hart tied his slip knots. "How in hell did she
ever make a living?"
"You shouldn't speak so of the
dead," Elmer grunted, who only did this kind of lifting in moose
season. "You should have seen her smile in the old days, before her
husband took her to the camps and died drunk at cards."
"Hard to imagine her young. Before
whiskey and sugar and tobacco and hell's half-dozen worst poxes."
Hart pulled on the rope. "There, she's tight." He backed away,
dubiously studying this modification to his aerodynamics. "Maybe she
was pretty enough once, but the last time I saw her it was damned
sad. She was more unhappy then than she is now."
"That's why she deserves a decent
rest with her ancestors. You're a good man, Owen, for taking her."
"Well, she's got about as much
money as any other passenger I've met in this god-forsaken icebox.
At least I'll have company while I fly myself broke."
Elmer misunderstood. "Yes, you'll
have Ivan." That was the name of his half-blind, half-crippled,
ear-chewed husky. The dog was as pug-ugly as Ramona and smelled
about as bad, yet Hart was taking the mutt to Anaktuvuk anyway:
probably to die as well. The animal was no good on a team anymore.
"Short-wave says the weather's
getting bad up north," Hart noted.
"You'll have an angel on your
shoulder," the Eskimo assured matter-of-factly. Hart knew that Elmer
believed in angels as solemnly as he did the return of the salmon or
the cycle of winter. When the old Eskimo picked up a buck or two by
pushing a broom or changing oil at the Fairbanks airfield you could
sometimes hear a wheezing hum and be told, if you were new, that it
was "Yes, Jesus Loves Me." Some of the pilots laughed at Elmer when
he was downtown and passed out in piss and vomit, but not Hart. He
regarded the old man as good luck, as good as women were bad. Maybe
that would balance Ramona. He sort of wished Elmer had come along.
Except that the janitor smelled too, truth be told.
The Stinson began to buck a bit,
evidence of growing wind, and Hart eyed the weather with unease. He
usually was a safe flier, which meant a cautious one, and of course
that was what cost him his shot at the big-time in 1934 and sent him
like a whipped dog to the North. "I didn't hire you, Owen, to advise
me what I shouldn't do, I hired you to find a way I could," the
millionaire Elliott Farnsworth had told him as Hart had slewed their
plane around to race away from the storms of Antarctica, ruining the
explorer's first great chance to fly across the southern continent.
Farnsworth had lived to come back three years later and try it
again, finally making what should have been a fourteen-hour crossing
in twenty-two days after putting down for periodic storms. And Hart
had been dismissed long before that as the pilot without grit, the
man who hesitated, the exacting, over-cautious cold weather flier
whose heart had chilled at the critical moment. Farnsworth, having
spent so much, had not hesitated to complain bitterly in the press.
So Hart had come about as far away from Antarctica as a man could
get. Now here was bad weather again, clouds rolling down the barren
slopes of the Brooks Range like a mirror reflection of surf hissing
up a steep beach, and once again he had a woman to think about.
"Hang on, lady," the pilot whispered to Ramona. The Stinson hit a
pocket and bounced and there was a bark and a yelp at the back.
"Shut up, Ivan!" he called. "You're the only damn thing in God's
whole Creation uglier than that whore!"
The earlier woman had been named
Audrey. He'd found her in California when preparing with Farnsworth.
No, he corrected, she'd found him: walking with bold grace up to the
pilot on a Long Beach float, both the tethered seaplane and her halo
of hair afire from a golden dusk. She was a kind of woman Hart had
never known, exhibiting the poise that comes with effortless beauty
and drawn to the dock not so much by the money as by the sense of
limitless adventure that millionaires like Farnsworth exuded. She
glowed from the electric atmosphere of pre-expedition camaraderie
and fed on its energy, funny and fascinated. And in the ensuing
weeks he had lost his heart and maybe something else�because when
the critical moment came at the bottom of the world he had finally
been afraid. Not at the risk of losing himself so much as losing
her, of never coming back to all she represented: the perfume of
her, the soft caress of her hair, her implicit promise that life was
not just grim struggle but sweetness as well. And in not risking he
had lost her ever more completely, of course, lost her in a rush of
shame and hurt pride and devastating regret so that he had come to
regard all women with a tight wariness. Because wasn't it then --
when she first smiled at him on the gently rocking float and asked
if the sky was just as honey-colored up there in the cockpit, closer
to the sun -- wasn't that when his luck had begun to leave
him?
The Alaskan light was wan, the sun
down somewhere behind the mountains, and only lingering chinks of
silver glimmered through. Unconsciously adopting the half-grin his
mouth locked into when he was worried, Hart leaned forward as he
calculated his chances. He had the lean build of the rangy Montanan
he was, not so much muscled as wiry -- a cowboy body, she'd called
it. It was not a frame built for cold climates but it adapted well
anyway, handling nasty weather with a burning, restless energy. The
pilot was handsome in a rugged way, dark hair falling toward
smoke-gray eyes and the symmetry of features pleasantly ruined where
his nose bent just slightly from being cracked on the cockpit rim of
a flipped-over barnstormer. His cheekbones and chin were as hard as
the country he was flying through but his grin conveyed reassurance.
Only when he was caught alone, lost in thought, did his mouth and
eyes carry the shadow of loneliness, perhaps, or of some promise
irrevocably lost. And then if someone approached and spoke he would
smile again. If he wished it a woman would return his look, before
glancing uncertainly away.
Hart didn't want to turn back, not
with a corpse on board that needed to freeze into the permafrost. If
he found the mouth of the pass in time he might be able to fly under
the weather to Ramona's home. He'd hit the range a bit east of the
opening and now skirted the foothills to search, storm clouds
stacking above him like dark towers. The plane lurched in the rising
wind and Elmer's Husky let out a low howl.
It had been this way in 1934 when
Farnsworth tried to become the first man to fly 3,400 miles across
Antarctica. The expedition was dogged by ill fortune. First the
Northrop monoplane Polar Star had wrecked its undercarriage
when the ice shelf being used as a makeshift runway prematurely
broke up: only the wings, caught by ice floes as the plane dropped
toward the water, prevented the plane from disappearing into the sea
completely. The millionaire steamed back to the United States to
make repairs -- Hart seeing Audrey again, sinking helplessly into
the pool of her green eyes -- and then returned dangerously late in
the season, toward the end of the Antarctic summer. This time
weather was the enemy, week after week of storm and overcast. The
millionaire's mood turned as foul as the climate and he finally
ordered his men to pack for home. Of course it was then that a bowl
of blue sky opened up like a doorway to heaven. "We're going!"
Farnsworth roared excitedly. The crew heaved supplies on board the
plane as Hart and his employer crouched over the maps a final time.
In little more than an hour they'd lifted off, sprinting south.
Then, three hours into the flight, a wall of cloud loomed over the
polar plateau and Hart swung away.
"Damn it, man, what are you doing?"
Farnsworth cried, looking up from his chart.
"That's suicide weather, Elliott."
The featureless white of the Antarctic plateau had dissolved into
the rushing fog of an approaching storm. "You didn't pay me to let
you go down in that. We're going back."
Farnsworth protested that the front
looked weak. Or that they might fly through it, or over it, or
around it. That they were turning their back on history. He'd
sputtered and raged and finally just seethed on the long painful
retreat home, as the weather first chased them and then hung back
over the white horizon, a taunting ghost. Back on Snow Hill Island
the financier muttered "damned yellow" within hearing of the crew.
Owen had stalked away in his own bottled anger, neither man really
knowing if a path could have been found or if a break in the clouds
would have proved a sucker hole leading them to whiteout and death.
And in making his call Hart had committed a kind of suicide,
of course, giving up a sliver of Lindbergh-like fame for doubt, for
whispers, for airfield second-guessing. No one would talk about it
directly, of course. Especially not the woman. Audrey was incapable
of knowing what to say because Hart didn't know himself, incapable
of staying in love with a man who'd become frozen from failure. They
drifted apart as if Antarctica had marooned them on a rifting shelf
of ice. Which one had stopped calling? Which one had decided that
the lead of black, unfathomable water had become too broad to cross?
So Hart finally came to Alaska
where he didn't have to face anyone not talking about it. Where the
country was as fierce and empty as his heart. Where the almosts and
what-ifs and do-overs wouldn't haunt him quite as badly. Maybe.
Where he could wonder all by himself if the arrogant millionaire was
secretly right -- that he'd looked out over a frozen wasteland and
allowed it to swallow his senses, squeeze his heart. And then turned
away.
*******
"Snow." He grimaced, watching the flakes whip past his windshield.
Late August and the termination dust was already spitting at him. It
wasn't unheard of but frustratingly bad luck. The clouds were
lowering on him like a shrinking room in a horror movie. He drifted
down closer to the forest, the trees themselves stunted and
shriveled this far north. Alaska was wrapped in gauze, the view
losing definition, and Hart knew his chance of finding Anaktuvuk
Pass was blurring with it. Still, the Alaska wilderness offered a
shred of familiarity: the dark black-green of the trees, the dull
pewter of taiga lakes, a familiar scale of height and distance. In
Antarctica, by contrast, there had been a glorious clarity of
atmosphere that destroyed depth perception: a seemingly airless
infinity above sterile whiteness without a hint of life. The
continent, bigger than the United States, boasted an emptiness as
intimidating as a cell, its clouds boiling down from the high polar
plateau. Alien, primeval, Creation before the fire. Hart had been
lured by it, hypnotized by it, sucked into it and finally frightened
by it: this Antarctica that became a frozen mirror of the recesses
of his soul. And so he'd run, and run, and run, and now here he was
in his new refuge flying for his life, bucking the descending storm
like the first loose leaf of autumn. The engine roared and then
groaned as he skipped from pocket to pocket of air, wings flapping
as they picked up a rime of ice.
Only the toes of the Brooks Range
were visible now and they had turned white. He skittered west,
looking for the John River that rose near Anaktuvuk and hoping he
wouldn't overshoot and pick up the Alana, a river that dead-ended in
the mountains. He cursed himself for being so anxious to lift away
from Fairbanks and cursed Elmer for saddling him with a decomposing
corpse. The cockpit windows were frosting, so he cursed the
Stinson's balky heater as well. It was hard to believe the warmth of
Fairbanks had given way to this, but that was Alaska. Where was
Elmer's angel?
"Ramona, my sweet, you're a hard
luck case even when you're dead," Hart muttered. "Why did you ever
leave Anaktuvuk?"
There! A ribbon colored white and
lead gray, leading into a knot of storm. Hart banked and began
following the river. It led to a gap in the foothills and he pressed
on, five hundred feet above the John. The water was unfrozen and low
at this time of year. Its exposed bars had turned white with snow
flurries.
The air had stabilized since he'd
crossed the edge of the storm but light and visibility continued to
fade, leaving Hart in a box of cotton. He dipped lower toward the
broad gravel channel, snaking the plane and sensing more than seeing
the squeeze of enclosing hills. Still no Anaktuvuk. Ivan was
whimpering, his toenails skittering as he scraped for purchase in
the bucking plane. "Dog," said Hart, "I think we'd better put down."
He'd been foolish not to do so
earlier, he realized. The fog of snow had cost him the ability to
judge exactly how close he was to the ground, increasing the
possibility he would slam into it when he tried to land. He needed a
dark log to serve as reference point but had left all trees behind.
He was in a developing whiteout, the same effective blindness he'd
feared in Antarctica. "A sane man would have fled to Brazil," he
observed to himself, not for the first time.
If he could drop a reference marker
from the plane he could judge his approach to the ground. Something
big, something colorful, something.....red.
Ramona's blanket was red.
Hart debated it for only a moment.
Crashing would do her no better good -- she'd be chewed up if the
undercarriage broke and the plane skidded down on top of her -- and
the snow might cushion her fall. She was beyond caring, wasn't she?
The only danger seemed to be the possibility of angry relatives if
she was busted up too much. Right now they seemed less threatening
than the unyielding flank of a mountain.
Banking as steeply as he could he
turned downriver, anxiously watching a snow slope solidify off his
wing tip. Then he continued turning until he was pointing north
again, satisfied he could maintain that orbit. There was a gravel
bar below, far superior to boggy tundra for a landing. He unlatched
the plane door and pushed it open against a shriek of wind and cold,
holding it with his leg. Leaning out, one hand on the stick as he
circled, he began tugging at the slip knots that held Ramona in
place. Ivan kept up a low, rumbling moan.
Hart clung to a fistful of blanket.
At the point where the John's channels joined, he let go. Ramona
slumped, the wind caught her, and she was gone.
The Stinson bounced upward and
circled. There! The red blanket was bright as a cherry against the
snow, closer than he'd imagined: nervously, the pilot pulled up a
few feet. Then he aimed for her cigar-shaped form, wanting his
undercarriage to touch just past her. Flaps down, power reduced, he
glided down, fighting small gusts. The heavily laden plane was
sluggish. He aimed as if to ram her and then hopped over Ramona at
the last minute, striking the bar beyond. The plane bounced once,
twice, set down, stumbled over a rock, began to slow. He'd made it!
Then it all went wrong. The right
wheel banged into a snow-hidden hole and shattered, a wing tip
caught, and the plane jerked sideways, pivoting out of control. The
propeller chewed into gravel and disintegrated, one piece cracking
the windshield. The engine screamed, coughed, died. And then it
should have been quiet except that Ivan was barking excitedly. Hart
blinked. He'd been thrown onto the control panel. Cargo had lurched
forward to occupy the space where his head had been and he reached
up to shove it back.
The plane was awkwardly tilted. The
pilot popped open the door on the elevated side, pushed clear, and
dropped to the wet, snow-dusted ground, sweating. He sat a minute on
the hard gravel and then stood unsteadily and backed off to survey
the damage. His propeller had become two wooden stumps. One wing was
crumpled. The wheels and struts were gone and if Ramona had still
been strapped on she'd have been crushed. His plane was finished,
and so was he. He had no money to repair the damage, and, after
this, precious little reputation to get a loan.
"Damn, damn, damn." The world was a
white blur of gusting snow. He assumed he was near Anaktuvuk but had
no idea how far. There was no real danger, he thought: the storm
would soon blow over this time of year. He'd just have to wait. But
caution had cost him his chance at fame in Antarctica and now
impatience had cost him his livelihood in Alaska. These are the
kinds of things losers do, he told himself.
Hart dug out his parka and some
jerky, throwing a bit to the dog. Then he sat in the cockpit.
Damnation! Well, he could still probably find a flying job in the
Lower 48, running a mail route and going crazy from boredom. Or he
could chuck the whole business and stay up here and fish. To hell
with it. To hell with everything.
His thoughts drifted, and as
darkness thickened the whiteness of Alaska melded with that other
white place and she stole into his weary dreams like a ghost,
beautiful and sad, her great green eyes searching and her lips
silently mouthing the last question she had ever asked him: "Why?"
Copyright
� 1998 William
Dietrich |
