Nevada Barr: Winter Study

Trying not to look obvious, Anna headed for the nearest bathroom, shedding her parka as she went. The door was closed, and she knocked softly before pushing it open. A blast of icy air met her. The window over the commode was open six inches, and the toilet, shower and sink area were filled with milk, orange juice, potatoes, cheese, onions, butter and a dozen other perishable food items.

No electrical power; this was the Winter Study team’s refrigerator. She turned and started toward the bathroom in the mirror-image apartment on the other side. Halfway there, she could see three large, round plastic containers with spigots on the sink counter.

“Our well,” Jonah had said of the hole chopped in the lake ice. There was no running water.

No flush toilets.

“It’s by the woodstove,” a soft voice said, and Anna realized she was not alone. Hunched in front of a computer was a small woman in gray sweater and cargo pants, on her feet the indoor version of Mrs. Steger’s moose-hide mukluks, available only in Ely and only from the store owned by übermusher Will Steger’s wife. The woman’s bland face was pleasant enough, and the brown eyes, small behind the thick glasses of the truly nearsighted, moderately welcoming. “There.” She pointed toward the stove.

Anna looked where she indicated. Beside the woodstove, half hidden behind a rack of worn dish towels and industrial-strength winter boots, a toilet seat leaned against the wall. It had been lovingly decorated with bright red kissing lips and holly, WINTER STUDY painted on it in what looked like crimson nail polish.

“Thanks,” Anna said, trying to look as if she’d not been foolish enough to hope for indoor plumbing.

“The outhouse is through the kitchen door a ways,” the woman said helpfully.

Anna caught up the ring of porcelain – or, more likely, plastic – on her way toward the northernmost kitchen, the one the study used. The toilet seat was warm from the stove. Evidently even the hardiest of souls required some few comforts.

JONAH FIRED UP THE GENERATOR and informed Anna they would have power each evening till lights out at ten. Anna bunked with Robin on the refrigerator side. She divested herself of her layers and dressed in Levi’s and one of Paul’s old sweatshirts. On her feet was the one luxury she permitted herself to stuff into the two small-to-medium soft-sided duffels she was allowed to bring, fuzzy slippers, a sedate black but frosted with yellow-and-white cat hair. She joined the others in the working kitchen.

Bob Menechinn was enthroned at the Formica-topped table in the chair nearest the wall, a glass of the boxed red wine, ISRO’s vin ordinaire, in his hand. Robin sat opposite him, quiet and smiling. The woman who had shown Anna where the bathroom facilities were hovered between Bob and the door to the outhouse as if, at any minute, she would make good an escape.

Menechinn smiled at Anna appreciatively. “You clean up nice, Miss Pigeon.” The woman behind him shot him a look of alarm, quickly quelled, and Anna wondered if the woman stood where she did to be ready to protect her turf, in the person of Bob Menechinn.

“Have you met my able assistant, Doctor Kathy Huff?” Bob said, affecting a drawl that made his words seem to linger in the air after he’d spoken. Smiling with a bonhomie that wrinkled his bulldog cheeks, he winked. Dr. Huff looked at her feet.

Maybe Menechinn was proud of his helper’s doctorate. Maybe she was shy. Maybe he mocked her and she was hurt. Maybe they were lovers. The undercurrents were lost on Anna. She was too hungry to care.

“What can I do to help?” she asked the kitchen in general.

Adam peeled and chopped. Ridley cooked. Robin was allowed to make a salad, but only after begging for the honor. Over five decades of tradition was squeezed into the small kitchen: jobs were not up for grabs; one had to be grandfathered in for every task. Realizing the study’s dinner rituals were as full of social land mines for the uninitiated as the kitchen of a kosher chef on the eve of Hanukkah, Anna sat down out of the way and watched.

It was the first time she’d seen her housemates divested of layers and hoods, gloves and down pants. Ridley was as she had envisioned him: a smallish man with wiry muscles and surprisingly broad shoulders. His hands and feet were small and would have suited a dancer, had he gone in a different direction. At thirty, he was a full professor at Michigan Tech, married and now the lead researcher on one of the country’s most prestigious studies. His hair was fine as a baby’s and curled down between his shoulder blades in a loose ponytail held by a rubber band. Ridley would have been beautiful but was saved by crooked teeth and a mouth too wide for his face. Had he gotten early orthodonture, he would have been a pedophile’s dream as a kid and a students’ heartthrob when he grew up.

Except for Robin, Ridley was the youngest member of the team, but his authority wasn’t questioned – at least not by the Winter Study people. On the ice, he and Bob had swayed what passed in Homo sapiens for antlers at each other. Neither seemed intimidated. Bob might have Homeland Security’s ax, but Ridley was at home on the island as Bob Menechinn was not. Like Anna, he seemed to suffer from the cold, and she got the feeling he was more comfortable with women than men.

Adam struck Anna as the natural alpha of the group, but he apparently didn’t mind taking orders from Ridley. He was younger than she’d first thought, in his late thirties. Like Ridley, he wore his hair long, keeping it in a braid. Silver was beginning to weave through the dark brown plait. Anna loved men with long hair, a hangover from her college days. It suggested a wildness that appealed to her. Adam’s suited him. His scarecrow body was ridged with muscle and his hands scarred from work. The nineteenth-century mustache gave his gaunt face a dramatic appeal, the hero of a western saga or a soldier making a last charge into the valley of death.

Adam maintained the machinery and the physical plants. From the talk, Anna guessed he was a perennial seasonal; one of the men and women who worked a northern park in summer and a southern park in winter. They had little in the way of material things, living with long-distance and commonly broken relationships, no children, no savings, no house. The lifestyle seemed glamorous till one hit forty; then, by the alchemy of age, it was touched with failure and sadness.

During the course of the meal, Anna began to be initiated into the rules and regulations of Winter Study. Rules written nowhere except in stone. She learned the red rag was for dishes, the gray for wiping countertops. One did not wash with the wiping cloth nor wipe with the washing cloth. It had “just evolved” that way, Jonah told her, and she understood that it had calcified into law and would remain thus until one or the other of the rags – or the team – disintegrated with age.

No one but the pilot could remove the cozy from the bowl containing brown sugar and then only with much discussion of “Mrs. Brown’s” disrobing and how that might or might not affect those attempting it.

She learned that the researchers had two modes of dinner conversation: mocking the Park Service, most particularly the law enforcement end of it, and talking nonsense, the ringleader of the nonsense being Jonah, the audience Ridley and Adam.

By the end of the meal, which was excellent – that or the calories one had to burn just to stay warm leant savor to it – Anna realized that this style of communication, or, more to the point, noncommunication, allowed them to live together in greater harmony than meaningful exchanges would have; an American backwoods version of the privacy once maintained in the Orient by elaborate ritual courtesy.