Frozen Stiff (8 page)

“It’s only eight o’clock,” Derek said.

For an instant she wondered if he meant eight in the morning or eight at night. She was so tired, disoriented. Either way she would have already eaten, breakfast or dinner.

Eight at night in the tavern, and her mom would be brushing butter on fish fillets, grilling them for the visiting fishermen. Pan-fried potatoes. Tossed green salad. Homemade rolls. But, no, her mom was in Juneau, picking up supplies.

Food
. The outfitters always packed first-class meals for their clients, rich people from the Lower Forty-eight who wanted a wilderness experience without eating it. Cody rolled onto her stomach to muffle its growls and waited for sleep to sneak up on her.

Sometime deep in the lost hours of night a chilling scream shattered the silence. It sounded like an animal
crying out. Cody remembered a jackrabbit that had been hit by a car in the desert near Bishop, California. That was back in the days when her family had spent vacations together. The rabbit had screamed in agony until it died.

This animal—whatever it was—was suffering terribly.

It sounded as if it was right outside the tent.
A fresh kill
, she thought.
And something is eating it alive
. The cries of torment went on and on.
Just kill it!
she willed.
Stop the suffering!

She bolted upright in her sleeping bag. Another scream. More piercing than the others.

The whole world was screaming.

It took a few seconds before she understood that the screams, this time, were coming from her. She pressed her palms into her eyes. Her eyes were on fire. Burning as if someone were stabbing them with redhot pokers.

Derek was shaking her. “Wake up!”

Cody wasn’t asleep. This wasn’t a dream. She screamed again in terror and pain. The burning was intense. Unbearable. She opened her eyes. White. Everything was white. Impossible. It was still night.

In utter panic she felt for her flashlight and flipped it on. She still couldn’t see anything. “Blind,” she screamed. “I’m blind!”

Cody thrashed wildly in her sleeping bag, her eyes two blazing furnaces.
Burning, burning
. She bit her lip and tasted blood. “My eyes,” she cried, the salt making them sting even more. “I can’t see.”

All the hours kayaking on the water and no sunglasses. The intense glare off the glacier. Water, ice, and sun, a conspiracy against her. Burned. Her eyes were seriously sunburned. She shook uncontrollably as the shock of it sank in.

I’m blind!

Cody didn’t know why Derek had left the tent; she couldn’t know that he’d figured out why she was shaking her head violently, slapping at her eyes. He returned with a cold, damp cloth and placed it gently over her face. “Is that better?”

Cody half nodded and pressed the cloth against her eyes. She trembled as Derek stuffed his extra clothes on one side of her. He shoved his sleeping bag up against her on the other side and crawled in for added warmth. Slowly she relaxed a little. She gave way to semiconsciousness, and finally to restless sleep.

• • •

Hours must have ticked off while she floated in and out of consciousness, barely aware of the washcloth being removed, resoaked to make it cold again, then replaced. Or of her fever. She kicked in her sleeping bag, desperate to escape the heat.

Cody opened her eyes a few times to lightness or darkness. Shadows without shapes. “I can’t see!” she cried out.

She thought it was Patterson who answered her. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Patterson?” Then his voice turned deep like her father’s. “Daddy?”

She dropped off again.

The thin line between reality and dreams disappeared; they became welded together by the fever. And thoughts of food: Sometimes she dreamed of eating, even chewing meat of some kind. She gobbled it up, swallowing some of it whole.

Someone wiped her chin.

And Derek’s voice filtering through. “Don’t die on me, Cody. You can’t die.”

It seemed as if she laughed. No one died of sunburn. In the desert, maybe. Not in Alaska.

Shock—now, that could be a killer. And pain sometimes killed.

Dreams pelted her from all sides.

Her father boxing up his
World’s Greatest Dad
mug, a Father’s Day gift. Even in her dream she wanted to throw it, smash it until the ceramic was nothing but powder.

• • •

The night and the following day slipped away, broken by nightmares and pain. She wanted to rip her eyes from their sockets. Drop them into a bucket of ice water.

If she dared open her swollen lids she saw only white. She’d always thought people who couldn’t see lived in a world of darkness!

Derek dipped the cloth in water and bathed her eyes. Another cloth. This one on her forehead. Mopping sweat. Was he reading to her? Impossible. Somehow she figured it out: He was writing in his head and reciting aloud everything that had happened since they’d left Yakutat.

Finally the fever broke and she awakened to the sound of rain splattering the tent. She tried opening her eyes, slowly. Her lids were still puffy, but the intense burning had died to a dull sting.

She turned toward the soft snoring. Even in the early-morning light Derek had a shape, although she couldn’t pick out his features.

I can see!
she exclaimed to herself.

Then she whispered to the sun gods, “Thank you.”

A thank-you for letting her off the hook. They could have kept her sight forever.

She felt around for the damp cloth and pressed it against her eyelids. Her face felt as tight as if it were ready to split open like a barbecued sausage.

How long was I out?
she wondered. It couldn’t have been too long because she wasn’t hungry. She should
have been ravenous, near starvation. Except for the egg she’d thrown up, she didn’t think she’d eaten since their macaroni and cheese casserole—whenever that was.

“You’re back,” Derek said from his bag. “Are you okay?”

“Better, much better.” She kept her eyes closed, bathing them with the cloth. “It must have been that glare off the water and ice. Without shades. Thank God for No Fear. It could have been so much worse if I didn’t have a cap.”

“You could have worn my shades,” he said, handing her a pot of water.

“Then I’d be taking care of you.” Cody drank slowly, rinsing away the rotten taste in her mouth. “You fed me, huh?”

“Yeah. For two days.”

“I was out of it for two days?” Suddenly she had to pee. She got up and went outside. When she returned she said, “Did I eat something?”

“Some kind of jerky,” he said. “Salmon, I think. I ripped it into small pieces and soaked it in water to soften it up. That and crushed pine nuts.”

Derek handed her a strip of jerky, watching her tear off a tough bite. After swallowing she felt bloated, as if she’d just eaten a Thanksgiving dinner. Had her stomach shrunk? Then a more important question came to mind.

Salmon jerky in the tent?
She felt for the bear horn, relaxing when she located the handle next to her
boots. For a moment she tried to wonder where the food had come from. The cabin, maybe?

Then she lay back down, exhausted, and slept.

The next time she woke up it was night. Moonlight filtered ever so faintly through the tent. It was still raining. Now she needed to
see
the rain. She wanted to
taste
it and dance around in it, rejoicing,
I can see!

Cody crawled across the floor and unzipped the tent. She stuck her hand out, disappointed not to feel raindrops. Below their camp, granite boulders glistened under a cloudless moonlit sky. Although everything was a blur, she could still make out edges. She waited while her eyes focused on the fjord; a mass of icebergs clogged the inlet.

The sound she had thought to be pelting rain was air being released from melting ice; air that could have been trapped inside a glacier for thousands of years. It sounded like a bowl of rice cereal.
Snap. Crackle. Pop
.

“Wow,” she whispered.

Derek scooted next to her and gave her a pouch of pine nuts. She fingered the deerskin. The leather wasn’t scarred or rotten as she’d expect from something found in the old cabin. The drawstring was coarse braided hair.

She might have been weakened by fever, but her mind was working. “How come we didn’t see this and the jerky before?”

Derek didn’t answer. He was under the spell of the parading icebergs.

She followed his gaze. Even in the moonlight
some of the bergs sparkled. And they were so unbelievably blue. They had probably come off the glacier Cody and Derek had watched calving days before. The bergs were so tightly packed it looked as if someone could ice-walk to the other side of the fjord.

The air seemed surprisingly mild for a clear night this late in summer. Thirty-five or forty degrees. Or maybe she’d just gotten used to the cold.

She wondered if it was clear in Yakutat too.

Had their mothers returned to the empty cabin and found her note on the milk carton? She checked her watch, her eyes slow to focus on the numbers: 3:00. She pictured a group of volunteers in the tavern getting last-minute instructions for the rescue operation. She’d seen lots of search-and-rescue teams on the news out of Juneau. Hikers, mountain climbers, sometimes bush planes. Most of those missing were found in a few days.

Three
A.M
. At first light they’d be on their way. Bush planes with pontoons for a water landing, packed with survival kits. And food.

“He left it,” Derek finally said.

“Who? Left what?”

“You know, Bigfoot. But he’s really just this big guy.”

She looked at him, still puzzled.

“He left the food, Cody, and I saw him.” His next words sliced through the air. “I even talked to him.”

Suddenly she knew who he meant. The shadow. It. Him. The up-to-no-good man. “You talked to him? What did he say?”

Cody crawled back inside the tent, snatched the damp cloth, and pressed it against her swollen eyes. She must have stared too long at the parade of icebergs. Even without any glare, she could feel the strain. Daylight would be utter torture.

He must be making it up
. “You want to be a writer. And this is a story, right?”

Derek rezipped the tent flap. “I don’t think he wanted me to see him. I just did, at the cabin.”

She pressed the cloth harder against her eyes; the pressure caused a play of colors behind her lids. She remembered the stack of skins under the boards. The pile of bones. “Were those his skins we found?”

The outfitters had talked a lot about poachers, about men who killed animals for their hides and sold them to other countries. Animals hunted without permits, slaughtered out of season. Even animals on the endangered lists. The thought of poachers made her sick.

“Maybe he followed us,” she said, considering another possibility.

“I think he was already here. He just saw us, that’s all. Knew we were in trouble, knew we needed help.”

The same person could have scared off the bear at the waterfall. Maybe the bear had ruined his plans of sneaking up on her. Cody didn’t want to think about that.

That had been days and miles behind them. There weren’t any roads or trails out here. Except for the maze of trampled brush made by bears. Unless someone else had been on the water. Surely she would have seen a kayak or canoe. Then she remembered Derek spotting a shadow on the far side of the fjord. Maybe the shadow was on this side now.

All at once it was as if the pages of “Hansel and Gretel” were unfolding. Two kids lost in the woods, following bread crumbs to the wicked witch’s house. “He’s a poacher, Derek. I’d bet anything.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

Cody dropped the cloth, waiting for her eyes to focus. She could see that some of the scabs from Derek’s mosquito bites had been picked off. There were small white spots on his forehead, a stark contrast to the dark circles under his eyes. The blisters on his nose had dried. Now half peeling, the skin underneath was raw and pink.

“Why else would he be out here this late in summer?” she asked.