Читать книгу pH: A Novel - Nancy Lord - Страница 10

CHAPTER FOUR

On Friday, when they were back in port, they unloaded most of their gear and crates of samples into the warehouse and the vans, and then the whole group walked uptown to the Poopdeck, a notorious fishermen’s bar. They swayed up the street like drunken sailors, their weeklong sea legs stumbling over the unmoving earth, the concrete sidewalk. Their newly awakened phones held to their ears, they shouted to friends and family. “I’m back!” “It was great!” “Tomorrow!” “He said what?” They may or may not have noticed the sun lowering behind the mountains, the colors—the vegetative greens, the roses and golds of summer’s late flowers—popping. Emboldened crows loitered along the roadside. Other people—other people!—passed them, pushing baby strollers, walking a dog the size of a small moose, in rattling pickups with open windows and music blasting.

At the Poopdeck, they leaned on the bar, tipsy even before the first pitchers were poured, and crowded around a couple of tables to wolf burgers and fries. Aurora waved breadsticks.

The bar was famous for its sawdust floor smelling of sour beer, its low ceilings, and the probably-thousands of dollar bills tacked all over the walls and signed with names and hometowns. There were, in addition, decorative flourishes consisting of women’s underwear.

There was the inevitable explanation. “Dude, it has nothing to do with poop,” Tina bellowed. “It’s the back part of the ship, the deck over the cabins in the back. It’s from some French word.”

Ray went right for a double whiskey, his purification over. He started with the good Jameson and was quickly softening into a soporific repose. The barmaid had just shouted at a very drunk person lighting a cigarette, and Ray observed to Colin beside him, “Only in Alaska. They can serve you ’til you’re falling down drunk, but you betcha we’re gonna keep the air all fresh and healthy for you.” Only in Alaska, too, were you encouraged to bring guns, concealed and otherwise, into bars—because you never knew when you might need to defend your fellow tavern-mates from a mass murderer.

Ray watched his crew with benign amusement. There was pool playing and music, and then there was dancing. There was drinking and more drinking, beer and tequila shots and some fancy flavored vodkas. The students had worked hard and earned their revelry. They would be hungover tomorrow, but it was a long drive back to Fairbanks and Ray already knew who would share the driving. The others could sleep. They could stop for coffee as often as anyone wanted, at any roadhouse or wilderness espresso stand, and they could stop for roadside barfing. Aurora was the only one he needed to supervise tonight, and he didn’t even care if she, for once, filled up on junk food.

In most respects, the cruise had been a success. The calm weather had made it all easy. They’d reached all the stations and got what they needed—another CTD data set, the prod, the nutrients, his beloved zooplankton, the OA samples. He’d taken umpteen zooplankton photos, some of which were very good indeed and all of which would occupy him for weeks of early mornings as he reviewed and sorted them. No one had been hurt, or even gotten seriously seasick. There’d been no real drama, not after Mr. Acidification had left. That Annabel woman, he could have done without her. The stuff with the ice and the mashed-up paper she called sculpture—he wouldn’t need to think of it again, beyond putting some bullshit statement in his reports. He had made it through Seahab and met his reward.

Still, all was not well with the ocean. The surface temperatures had been alarmingly hot—more than a degree warmer than they’d ever found in September, in places up to five degrees above the average. In sixty-degree water, phytoplankton had been spurred to a late bloom. Even with that extra food, zooplankton numbers were low, the usual species seeking deeper, cooler water. The tows were sometimes jammed with jellyfish. Of course, as he was always impressing upon the students, considerable fluctuation in the abundance of different species was expected year to year.

Some results they’d have to wait for. All those samples to be tested for alkalinity and carbon. Then they’d learn more of the acidification story. He hadn’t seen any obvious damage, but that didn’t mean that the animals weren’t working harder to build their calcium carbonate structures.

Ray ordered another drink and leaned back against the wall. Compared to the Earth’s destruction and the many mysteries it was his obligation to confront, his personal issues should feel like bug bites on a bear. Still, it was his life. When he’d checked his phone, there was nothing from his wife except a businesslike reminder that she’d be away for the weekend and he should make sure that Sam had what he needed for a school project. He vaguely remembered something about a triathlon Nelda had been training for—this might have been the weekend. There’d also been three increasingly hostile calls from someone in the vast university bureaucracy demanding that he immediately print, sign, scan, and e-mail something called an effort certification statement. There was a garbled message from someone wanting a pteropod photograph. Everyone always wanted to use his photos; no one was ever interested in paying for them.

Ray didn’t need praise or monetary reward, but he wouldn’t have minded some acknowledgment, from someone, somewhere, of the essential work his team had just performed. Even a simple voice mail or text along the way: thinking of you, hope it’s all going well. He imagined Jackson Oakley wishing him well, apologizing for his absence. That would never happen.

Annabel, in slingback shoes and a low-cut, thigh-high dress, had found her groove swing dancing. She danced with Tina and Cinda and then with Alex, Robert, and Marybeth in turn, and then back to Robert. Robert turned out to be an excellent swing dancer, capable of lifting, spinning, and flipping her, and the two of them flew around the floor with abandon, only sometimes clobbering someone with an elbow or a heel.

When they took a break, Robert launched into a long and nostalgic story about a former dance partner in California, a married Latina with two small children. He’d met her at a dance club, and they’d danced so perfectly together, so completely in sync. All the other dancers admired them. They won contests. “Totally innocent,” Robert said. “It was all about the dance.”

The hot-blooded Latino husband, in any case, had busted Robert’s car’s headlights, and Robert had never gone back to the dance club or attempted to see the woman again. Then he’d moved to Fairbanks.

Annabel listened to the great unwinding of details about the woman’s body, her outfits, and the gold teeth that glittered when she laughed, and she partially revised her assumption about Robert’s gayness. It seemed to her that Robert had either loved the woman or wanted to be her.

They danced again, and Annabel shouted above the music, “I’m a cuckoo coccolithophore!” She imagined herself covered in shifting calcium plates, and with extra swings of her hips, she willed crunchy good health toward the Gulf, to all the precious coccolithophores and their brethren.

Aurora had wanted to come to the bar, of course. She could have stayed on the ship, watching a movie or texting her friends. She had felt in exile during the long week on the ship. She had thought it would be more exciting. Her father had oversold it. There was a lot of water out there, a lot of nothing.

She hadn’t complained, though, because it was better than school and all she had to do now was write a report about what she learned, which would be half a page. She had learned that even women snore, and a little bit about playing the guitar, and how to operate the can crusher in the galley. She was kidding about half a page. Her father would help her, and they would put in things about the ocean and looking in the microscope, birds’ names, and the size of a whale’s eye equaling an orange. The porpoises were cool, the way they swam around the ship. The artist was cool. And she had gotten to watch movies she was not allowed to see at home, with sexy parts and bad language.

She was also having a secret crush on Alex, who had very long eyelashes you could appreciate when he took off his glasses. He was always doing that—taking off his glasses to clean them with a handkerchief. She had spent much of the week thinking about him in non-boat circumstances as a way of entertaining herself.

At the table they were all clowning around, saying things like “That was a flaming good time” and “He is a flaming idiot” and “I am so flaming thirsty.” This was because she was there and they were not supposed to swear in her presence, as though when they said “flaming” or “frigging” or “effing” it wasn’t just the same as saying “fucking,” which is what she heard. But that was only part of it. “Flaming” was the new word because they weren’t supposed to talk about setting stuff on fire when they were on the ship, so it was a kind of joke.

Her father was singing along now, words about setting the night on fire. It was some old song from the hippie times. At home, her father liked to play records and sing when he was having drinks. Sometimes then he liked to have long, serious talks with her or her brother, but they were always depressing, about how terrible everything was and how there was no real point in life except propagation and evolution-shit. She usually stopped listening when he got to the pointlessness part.

Aurora saw her father exchange glances with the artist, who was dancing with Cinda or maybe just by herself and came now to the table to peel her father’s hand away from his glass. She practically dragged him onto the dance floor, where he looked sheepish and then stupid as he danced a stupid dance like a washing machine, sliding his feet and twisting his arms back and forth. She loved her father, but he was a science nerd and was never going to be as cool as he wanted to be.

Helen sat with her glass of wine at the table with the others, who hopped up and down for dancing or lining up quarters at the pool and foosball tables. For some time she’d been half-watching an older Native woman who was hunched on a stool at the end of the bar. The woman was small and thin and her feet didn’t reach the footrest part of the stool. She was by herself, just sitting and, now and then tipping back a beer bottle.

Helen did not frequent bars on a regular basis. She knew all too well the role that alcohol played in the destruction of so many Native families. In Igalik, ostensibly a “dry” village, she’d seen men she knew to be kind get blind-drunk on bootleg and beat their wives and children. Boys she’d known had killed themselves after drinking. Her own aunt, her mother’s youngest sister, had fallen from a boat and was never found; the boyfriend had been so drunk he couldn’t remember when she’d fallen out or where the boat had been or much of anything about that summer day, now years ago. Later, he put a bullet in his head.

She felt sorry for the woman at the bar, and was embarrassed by her, too.