The Longest Night (16 page)

Outside, the street was quiet, without light. He lay awake, feeling the throb and almost-hum of a house full of sleeping people. He pictured the tiny baby turning in Nat's belly like a sweet unblinking shrimp. He thought of this baby growing, growing in his absence, and it didn't seem possible that Nat would swell and bloom and then have that baby all by the time he got back. It made him feel entirely useless, peripheral to the major workings of the world.

He wandered to the back window and remembered their night outside nearly a year ago, after the dinner party at the Richardses'. Nat walking to the fence and tapping it, her sashay back like something Paul would have dreamed of when he was sixteen. His life felt like an alternating cycle of blind luck and kicks in the ass.

He eventually climbed into bed and could tell at once that she was awake. “Hey,” he said, leaning up on one elbow. “Hey, will you at least talk to me?”

She whispered, “What is there to talk about?”

“I don't know,” he stammered.

She turned to look at him. “You are in
charge
of us. You brought us here and said it was a good thing, no deployment, we'd all be together. And then you go and act like a, a fool, and get yourself sent away from us. What are we supposed to do out here by ourselves for half a year? Do you know how long that is? You won't even be here for the birth of the baby!”

“I know,” he said, feeling sick.

“I can't talk right now.” She buried her face in the pillow. “I just don't want to talk about it. I'm sorry.”

“Nat!” he cried, nearly thrashing with frustration. “I leave at eight tomorrow morning! I'll be gone for six months!”

He threw himself out of bed and stalked into the living room. He spent the night drinking himself into a fabulous headache, mentally arguing with his father over which of them was more of an asshole (his father, definitely, hands down), and writing his daughters a sloping, left-handed note for Nat to read them sometime in the middle of his deployment. He set the note on the counter, collapsed onto the couch, and dozed. When daybreak came he wandered back into the kitchen to make coffee and it caught his eye; he'd forgotten about it already. Now the writing looked like something from a horror movie, or the deranged scrawl from above a prison urinal. He imagined reading it in a slurred, lisping voice—“DEAR GIRLZZZ”—winced, and threw it away.

Around six
A.M.
he heard a noise from the back bathroom and went down the hall to listen.

“Nat?” he said, stepping around the door.

Oh, his poor Nat. She was hunched over the toilet in her nightgown. The seat was up and she held her hair back with one hand, staring into the water with wet, animalistic focus. A ribbon of saliva twirled from her mouth, heavied, plopped in.

Paul knelt beside her and put his hand on her back. “It's okay,” he said, which was only a somewhat helpful thing to say if you were the onlooker and not actually doing the vomiting. Beneath his palm her shoulder blades jumped. “My poor baby,” he said. She sat back, panting, and he reached for a towel.

“Thank you,” she said, taking it and leaning against the wall. “Ugh,” she said after a moment. “I hate that.” Her voice was quietly husky. She wiped her mouth and looked up at the ceiling, her chest rising and falling. A greenish sheen glistened on her forehead.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded. “I feel a little better now.”

“Is it from the baby?”

“I guess so. Or just…nerves. It'll pass.”

They sat for several minutes in silence. Then Paul heard thumps and squeaks from down the hall. No looking back: The girls were up.

“I have to be at the airport in an hour,” he said. He glanced at her, wondering what he'd see in her eyes. Sadness? Relief? Mostly she just looked tired.

“I know,” she said.

“I can take a cab if you want. You can stay here with the girls—”

“No,” she said. “We'll bring you. I'll get dressed in a minute.” She wiped her forehead on the towel and wobbled up; he jumped to his feet and helped her. All her skin seemed to recoil from him, even the tendons of her forearm as his fingers closed gently around it, as if her body had decided on its own that he was not welcome. She bumped past him and into the bedroom.

B
Y SEVEN
A.M.
, AGAINST ALL ODDS,
they were dressed and waiting at the airport. Nat had the girls in their Sunday best. Paul knew they had no other plans for the day; they'd be home by eight, bouncing off the walls in their pretty dresses. But he wasn't about to argue with Nat's vision.

She still felt awful. He could see it. She swayed next to him in her blue cardigan, her arms around her waist. There were dark bags under her eyes and her face was pinched and colorless. No stranger would have taken her for pregnant, but now that he knew, Paul could see the gentle puff of her belly. It gave him a bleak sort of pride, a heart-twisting happiness that somehow just felt like pain.

The small group of passengers—some alone, some with families—gathered in the corrugated metal hangar watching the plane lower its stairs just outside the door. Paul tried to think of something encouraging and memorable to say, something wise and useful enough that it would heal the whole situation in one swoop, but Sam was hopping up and down and trying to get into his arms while prattling excitedly about a woman at the far end of the building who was very fat.

Nat tapped her shoulder. “Hush, Sam, that isn't polite.”

Paul tried to hold Sam gently still, left-handed, by the top of her bobbing head. A bubble of desperation filled his stomach: He'd been waiting for an eleventh-hour conversion, a sudden lifting of Nat's blockade, but it might not come. He might actually get on that plane and fly off to the end of the world with her still upset with him, which meant, really, that she would be angry for six months. The last time they'd been together, his stupid drunken misstep two nights before, would sit between them like a placeholder. It carried extra weight and gravitas now, as if it represented the way they always were even though it had been an aberration, and half a year would pass before he could prove it wrong—make any kind of amends.

Liddie, standing at Nat's knees, watched the other people in the airport with her dark, curious eyes. The thought of not seeing his girls for such a long time was a punishment. They were still young enough to change by the month. When he got back, they'd have thinner limbs and narrower faces. They'd talk differently.

“I can't wait to see the baby,” Paul tried, and this seemed such an impotent and ineffectual sentiment, so little in the face of what would transpire, that he wished he hadn't said anything. Nat's eyes glinted at him and then away.

The radio sputtered into a voice: It was time to board. The other passengers shuffled forward with the quiet, anxious determination of any people in an airport. Paul knelt to hug Sam and kissed Liddie's soft cheeks. He reached for Nat. Goddamnit, he needed to hug her or
some
thing. He was just about to lose his mind.

“I smell awful,” she said, stepping back. “I smell like throw-up.”

“That's fine,” he said, “it'll keep the other guys away.” He tried to smile.

“
What
other guys?”

“Exactly.”

She turned from him, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

“I'm sorry,” he said, finally getting his arms around her. He squeezed her barbed shoulders, beginning to panic. “Forgive me. I didn't mean for this to happen. I did a stupid thing and now we're all being punished for it. But it was a mistake.”

“I know it was,” she finally said.

“I'm so happy about the baby.”

“Really?”

“I am. I'm really happy, Nat.”

“Okay,” she said, finally looking at him. “Then me, too.” She was a forgiving person. That was what he could count on; every day was a new dawn with her. She never fell into a black hole of resentment or bitterness. It seemed the finest quality a human being could have.

He pressed his forehead to hers, smelling the overfresh detergent of her sweater and a faint, acrid tang on her breath, and whispered a few moments of embarrassing, spineless sweet nothings that were thankfully drowned out by the blare of the intercom: “Final boarding for Flight 23 to Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland.” The announcement sent them into a second round of panic and suddenly they were plastered to each other like high schoolers, Nat gripping his shoulders, petting his face, as if she were somehow trying to climb up into his arms, and for his part he was kissing her like a madman, completely ignoring the people around them and his own children stepping on his boots. He was so dizzied with simultaneous relief and dread that he nearly cried, himself; hugged her, held her hair, buried his face in her neck and felt the lovely swallow of her throat.

“Last call, Flight 23 to Andrews Air Force Base. The doors are closing.”

He straightened up and his eyes moved over his family—pale, squeamish Nat, doe-eyed Liddie, Sam wriggling like a crayfish—trying to memorize his little tribe, these three people that he loved so incautiously, past all reason and beyond his wildest predictions.

“Be careful,” he blurted, holding Nat by the shoulders.

She looked at him, startled.

“If anything goes wrong, just get out of town. All right? Just drive till you get somewhere safe.”

She laughed nervously. “What in the world would go wrong?”

“I don't know.” He fidgeted, feeling half-sunk with dread, anxious enough to pop out of his skin. “At the testing station. With one of the reactors. Or, I don't know, a natural disaster, anything. I don't know! Just promise me you'll get out of town.”

“Of course. Whatever you say.”

“All right.”

“We love you,” she said. “I love you.”

“Love you, too. Write to me,” he said.

“We will!” Sam cried.

“I mean it, Nat,” Paul said. “You're all I've got.”

She smiled at him quizzically. “Okay.”

“You think I'm joking,” he said. He swung his densely packed duffel bag up onto his shoulder, so long and heavy that he felt as if he were lugging another man by the arm; kissed his wife and daughters each one more time, and walked out through the beautiful spring air to his waiting plane.

CAMP TUTO, GREENLAND

I
t was the wind that woke Paul up. It blew endlessly across the ice cap, sometimes in a whistle like a teakettle, sometimes in a scream like the engines of distant jets coming in for landing.

Paul could not see the other men in the Quonset hut, as they were all sleeping in the dark, but they were there on bunks all around him. The hut smelled of musty wool and a sharp, pickle-relish body odor. He worked his arms free from the thin standard-issue blankets he'd burrowed under the night before. They were scratchy and familiar, still in circulation from Korea and probably the Second World War. Beneath the blankets he was wearing three pairs of long underwear. Each layer shifted in a slightly different direction so that the seams crossed his body like longitude and latitude lines, running weirdly under his armpits and over his swaddled crotch.

He'd been having a bad dream, and it lingered with him, queasing his stomach and flitting across his back. He squeezed his shoulder blades, trying to shake it off. The last image had awoken him with its creepiness: Nat, reaching into the oven to pull out a tray and then retracting with a shriek, her arms burned to the elbows, hands pink and shiny as skinned animals. But it was just a nightmare; none of it was real.

He reminded himself that everything back at home was fine. First thing each morning at breakfast he'd ask Rodgers, the signals officer, if he'd heard any big news from the States, and for a moment his heart would clench until Rodgers said, “Not really, no,” or mentioned a grim account that had occurred someplace other than Idaho Falls. Then Paul would feel himself settle a little, breathe a small sigh of relief, for a moment escaping the knowledge that if something happened in Idaho Falls it wouldn't matter whether he knew anyway, because he'd be of no help. He'd left his family in one remote corner of the world while he was stuck in another, and if they needed him he would not be there.

W
HEN
P
AUL FIRST ARRIVED
in Greenland the reactor at Camp Century was not fully assembled, so he and fifteen other men were being held for a few weeks at Camp TUTO, about a hundred miles south. Everything he could see was white and brown like some sort of visual trick: dirt, and snow, and dirty snow, and snowy dirt, and snowy air, and sometimes blowing dirt. The men had kept themselves busy by shoveling snow (mixed with dirt); cleaning out the “honey buckets” (urinals); and pouring sixty-gallon cans of beef stew out onto the ice in the hopes of taming an Arctic fox and keeping it for a pet. They'd just been told that the reactor at Camp Century was now finished and about to go on line, so whenever the weather let up they would be headed north.

Someone's alarm went off in the dark, and Paul clambered out of bed to pull the chain on the ceiling that lit their one bare bulb. Ten men sat around on their double-stacked bunks, scratching their heads and rubbing their eyes.

“Do you hear that wind?” Specialist Benson marveled.

“I think it's died down since yesterday,” said Specialist Mayberry, already lighting a cigarette. Mayberry was a tall man with roosterish black hair, and he was neither a construction worker nor a nuclear operator, but a geologist on his fourth tour in Greenland. He worked mostly in a cave, he said, built below Camp Century and filled with long core samples that had been drilled out of the ice and stored in what looked like poster tubes. He said Camp Century was a dream compared to his old Greenland station, which was called Fistclench.

There was a hum of either agreement or disagreement and some wild speculation about future weather. They had just finished lacing up their boots when Mayberry paused and asked, “Do you hear that?”

They all froze. Off in the distance, incredibly, they could hear a faint chutting sound, a motor. “It's the mail plane!” Benson shouted, and everyone scrambled. The light outside was blinding; the cold seized their chests. But there was the plane, tilting from side to side in the wind as it descended toward the camp's short airstrip. Everyone cheered and a few men waved their arms slowly back and forth over their heads, as if this were a search party that might have no idea where they were.

Paul's heart lifted. Mail! He hadn't yet received a letter from Nat. He didn't know for sure that she'd written to him—after all, it had been less than a month—but it seemed that a letter should be arriving soon. And as the seconds ticked by, watching the plane waver and struggle, the more convinced he became that there was something on it for him. Surely she'd have dashed off a note shortly after he'd left. Surely she missed him.

The plane came in over the runway; they could even see the pilot wave. But strong wind buffeted the craft, and it tipped in wild diagonals for a moment before revving and ascending again. Paul stood with his hands in his pockets, flicking his thumbnail, too superstitious to say anything.

“We don't want the pilot to kill himself,” someone pointed out, graciously.

“Can't he just drop the mail?” Benson asked.

“No, they don't do that here.”

“He's coming in again,” said someone else. “He's almost got it.”

This time, the soldiers waited in silence as the plane's wings tilted up and down, faster and faster. It bucked like a paper airplane in front of a fan. The engine strained. But at the last moment it whipped up yet again, its engine whirring, and this time it headed away from them without turning back, in the direction of the sea.

Paul felt his shoulders droop.
It's nothing,
it's nothing.

“There he goes, back to the States. He'll try again next week, probably.” Mayberry tossed his arm over the devastated Benson's shoulders and said cheerfully, “Do we need to call for the chaplain, gents? Or are we all going to be okay?”

They shuffled back down the walkway toward the mess hall, another small hut where they would crouch elbow to elbow and eat. “Mayberry,” one of the soldiers asked, “how do you stay in such a good mood all the time?”

“I work in an underground ice cave,” Mayberry said. “This is like summer camp for me. This is my social hour.”

“You poor bastard,” the soldier said, holding the door open.

Paul took one glance back at Baffin Bay, where the cargo plane, with Nat's words to him on it or not, was now just a speck in the sky.

T
HEIR PLATES WERE FORKED CLEAN
on the cafeteria-style table and the soldiers sat smoking, trying to relax before heading off to whatever chores were in store for them. Every task at Camp Century had to do with fighting a climate hell-bent on discouraging them. They scraped ice off vehicles, whacked it with brooms from the wooden overhangs, clanged chunks of it out from underneath the boxcars that giant tractors towed on skis from one base to another. The ice crept up on them as if it had been plotting ages for just this, the opportunity to seal them over.

The other common task was latrine duty, which Paul knew he'd be up for soon, and which involved pulling buckets out from beneath holes in the floor and emptying them a quarter mile away. “Just wait till you get latrine duty at Camp Century,” Mayberry chuckled in perverse delight: Because there was no dirt on the ice cap, they dumped all the waste onto a section of ice they called “the Shitberg.” He claimed that in one hundred years or so the Shitberg would detach from its glacier and land in Scandinavia like a grotesque tall ship from the days of the explorers.

Mayberry passed around sections of a few
Washington Post
s that a pilot from Andrews AFB had left them. These were more valuable than cigarettes or chocolate, and the men examined them until they were tattered, poring over every word as if they were documents from a fascinating and faraway time. Paul, thumbing through the car section, held up an ad for a 1937 Horch in outstanding condition. “Fellas, look at this,” he said.

“Sorry,” said Mayberry without glancing up, “but this ad for a box of used silk ties is distracting me right now.”

Paul chuckled. He leaned over Mayberry's shoulder to read Miscellaneous. “Hey,” he said, joining the game, “a gray ottoman, good condition. Original chair not included.”

“A wedding dress,” countered Mayberry. “Never been worn. Includes garter!”

“Complete set of dental instruments,” said Specialist Benson from behind his own paper.

“A whelping box.”

“Here's a woman scaling back her ‘extensive wig collection,' ” Mayberry said.

They all read awhile, growing lazy since their sergeant had not yet come along and told them to get moving.

“Say, there's something I've been meaning to ask you,” Paul said to Mayberry.

Mayberry flapped his paper and looked at Paul. “Yes?”

“What's the deal with Camp Century? Couple guys just back from there said now that the work crews have finished the reactor, they're just digging off in another direction, making more tunnels.”

His friend smirked. “Yeah?”

“Camp Century is a research institution,” spoke up Benson in a newsman's clipped, formal diction. He adjusted pretend glasses on his nose. “Please note the lack of any visible weapons. We have only one rifle for fending off the occasional polar bear.”

Mayberry chuckled.

“I've heard all these theories—” Paul said.

“We are studying the polar ice sheet,” Benson continued. “The army is fascinated by the ice sheet. It's in love with the goddamn ice sheet.”

“While studying the ice sheet
is
the noblest work of mankind,” said Mayberry, the geologist, “it's not the reason they built Camp Century.”

“Well, why then?” Paul asked. “I've heard they have plans for a lot more bases up here, not just Century. And a guy back at CR-1 told me about some test tracks he'd seen up at Camp Century, like railroad tracks beneath the ice, but with nothing on them yet.”

“All right.” Mayberry lowered his voice, though Paul did not know if this were in a joking fashion, or out of real prudence. Mayberry held his hands a short distance apart, slightly cupped, as if explaining a tricky football play. “They say that Century is only the first of a whole line of bases across the Arctic, like you said. These bases will all be built under the ice like Century, connected by underground ice tunnels. The tunnels'll have train tracks in 'em so that we can transport weapons—missiles, nuclear warheads—back and forth under the ice, to whichever base they're needed. If we get intel that the Soviets are attacking from above, we can move into position quickly and counterattack. Just sailing along under the ice. No one would ever see us.”

“Sounds like the DEW Line on steroids,” Benson said. Everyone groaned at the mention of one of the Army's greatest debacles, the “Distant Early Warning Line” of radar stations across Alaska, Canada, and Greenland that had cost a billion dollars and boosted American military confidence for only nine weeks in 1957, from the time of its celebrated completion until the Russians launched
Sputnik
and in one moment rendered the new technology obsolete.

“It would take forever to build such a thing,” said Paul.

“Maybe not. Century was built in only seventy-odd days.”

“It would take a ton of weapons.”

“We have weapons. What do you think we're doing with all that shit from the war?” Mayberry asked cheerfully.

Paul shook his head. “How do you know so much, anyway?” he asked Mayberry.

Mayberry smiled. “Being the camp geologist is kind of like being the chaplain. You get this, this aura of virtue,” he said, waving his hand, “like you're somehow outside of the real world. Everybody talks to the chaplain. Everybody talks to the geologist.”

A
FEW DAYS LATER
the wind died down and they were allowed to head north to Camp Century. The three-hundred-mile trip took a week. They inched across the ice in a long line of heavy vehicles, swathed in plumes of exhaust. The transport crew was a man short, so Paul filled in on a giant tractor called a Polecat, driving six hours on and six off while towing a fuel canister behind him. He spent the entire time fretfully smoking and praying that he would not go up in a spectacular ball of flame.