Chapter Seventeen - Cody
I didn’t take much with me except some clothes and razors and such, stuffed in an old duffel bag left over from my high school rodeo days.
“Don’t lose yourself while you’re up there, son. Come back whole,” was the last thing Mama said to me before I left, and at the time I nodded, even though I didn’t really understand what she was talking about.
Lisa cried, and that upset me, too, but all I could do was hold her for a while and promise her it wouldn’t be as long as it seemed. I hoped that was true.
But soon enough I was in the air, and even though the flight was a long one it really didn’t seem like very much time at all before we landed in Anchorage, and then Prudhoe Bay. Troy met me at the airport and helped me get settled in or I would have been completely lost, but still, even with him there I felt cold and small and awfully far from home.
I got used to Alaska soon enough, though, or at least as much as anybody ever gets used to a place like that who wasn’t born and raised there. It’s always cold, always windy, and always lonesome, and I would have added always boring to the list, too. I had nothing to do except work, eat, and sleep, for the most part. I was on the six am to six pm shift, day in and day out with not the slightest variation. No days off, no changes in the schedule, nothing. It was monotonous to say the least.
I had maybe an hour’s worth of daylight left after work, and if I wasn’t too tired I usually went jogging for a few miles down the Dalton Highway toward Fairbanks. It kept me in shape, and it was more productive than sitting in my room watching television. I knew I’d get my fill of that soon enough anyway, as the days got shorter and colder when winter moved in.
But in the meantime, I kind of enjoyed the solitude out on the tundra. It was already chilly even in late August, but running kept me fairly warm. Now and then I saw a reindeer or a fox, and once in a long while even a vehicle of some kind. But for the most part, I had the road all to myself. The sound of the wind blowing across all those hundreds of miles of emptiness is soothing, in a strange and lonesome kind of way. The land is flatter than western Kansas as far as the eye can see, with not a single tree or even a bush or a rock to break the monotony. Nothing grows except a little bit of brown mossy stuff on the ground, and it’s always wet and soggy when it’s not frozen.
It’s better than town, though. Almost all the buildings in Prudhoe Bay are prefab trailers built on cinderblocks to keep them up off the ground so the heat won’t melt the permafrost. There’s exactly one store, with prices three or four times what I was used to paying for similar stuff in Texas, a post office, and the living quarters for the workers which now and then moonlighted as motels for the occasional tourist during the summertime. I had my own private room at a place called the Arctic Caribou Inn, which on the inside looked more or less like any other motel room, maybe a little small. But at least I didn’t have to share it with anybody. I was one of the lucky ones when it came to my room assignment; a good number of the guys I worked with had to share space with a roommate.
Troy took me up to the coast not long after I got there, to see the Arctic Ocean and do the traditional Polar Bear Plunge, as they call it. I had to strip down to my underwear and go swimming in the ocean for at least ten minutes. I’m game to try most anything at least once, so I gave it a shot. Even though it was still summer, the water was so icy cold it stung like red hot needles and snatched my breath away. I could literally feel it sucking the life out of my body the whole time I was in there. I hurt in all the places where I wasn’t numb, and when I came running back out onto the gravelly beach even the wintry air felt warm. I threw a towel around my shoulders as soon as I could grab one, shivering violently and feeling ten times more alive than I ever had before. I relished the feeling, and I could see how people might get to like it; sort of in the same way as the man who kept hitting himself over the head with a hammer because it felt so good when he stopped, I suppose.
Troy took a picture of me when I first came out of the water, freezing and blue and a newbie member of the Polar Bear Club, and I told him he better save it because that was the last time I was ever setting foot in that water ever again. He only laughed and said he knew exactly how I felt.
I usually called Lisa and Mama every night for a few minutes and sometimes Marcus or Cyrus and even Brandon, partly to check on things back home and partly for lack of anything else to do. It got lonely after a while with nobody to talk to, and I was more than a little homesick, if the truth be told. Troy had his own job to do, and since his schedule wasn’t the same as mine that meant we didn’t see each other near as much as you might think.
About two weeks after I got there, I ran into Layla Martin during my evening run.
Encountering a woman of any kind in Prudhoe Bay is unusual enough; I soon discovered that men outnumbered women by at least ten to one or more. But Layla wasn’t just female, she was young and beautiful, too. That’s a combination which is almost unheard of on the North Slope.
It was chillier than usual that evening, even for northern Alaska. There was a dusting of snow across the tundra, turning everything cold and white. But the girl was jogging in nothing but a set of gray sweats. She looked vaguely familiar for some reason, but I couldn’t think where I might have seen her before. Prudhoe Bay is a small enough place that I might have caught a glimpse of her a dozen times and never paid attention, I suppose. I couldn’t help gaping at her a little bit in spite of myself, and I guess she must have noticed. She stopped running when she came even with me, breathing hard and taking a drink from the water bottle she carried.
“A little cold for sweats, don’t you think?” I asked, for lack of anything better to say.
“A little late in the day to be headed south, don’t you think?” she asked right back, with a smile.
“Yeah, probably. I was just fixing to turn around in a minute, though,” I shrugged.
“Yeah? Do you run much? I think you’re the only person besides me that I ever saw out here. I’m Layla, by the way,” she said.
“Cody,” I said.
“Nice to meet you, Cody. You work here, or are you only a tourist?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m a roughneck,” I said.
“You must be new, then,” she commented, and I couldn’t help thinking that was an odd thing to say. Prudhoe Bay isn’t the biggest town on earth, to be sure, but there are still thousands of people who work in those oil fields. There was no way she’d met all of them. But then again, maybe she only meant she hadn’t seen me on the highway before; that would make more sense.
“I just got here two weeks ago,” I agreed.
“Well, listen. Why don’t you come have supper with me? I always like to meet all the new guys that come in, and I think it’s steak night at the cafeteria,” she said.
“Are you like a welcome committee or something?” I asked, but she only laughed.
“No, honey, I just like to talk, that’s all. And I don’t meet too many runners, so when I do I’m always hoping it’s somebody worth talking to. It can be awful dull out here, you know,” she said.
I thought to myself that truer words had never been spoken.
“Sure, why not?” I agreed.
So we did, and I have to admit the sirloin steak was at least as good as anything I’ve ever had in Texas. Whatever shortcomings it might have as a place to live, Prudhoe Bay definitely has the best food I’ve ever tasted, bar none. But I guess if you want to run an oil rig hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle, then probably the least you can do is to make sure you feed your workers well.
Layla was really nice, and I think I smiled more often that evening than I’d done ever since I first got to Alaska.
“So listen. I’ve been looking for a running partner for a long time and I never could find one. Want to go jogging with me after work? It sure does make things a lot nicer if you’ve got a buddy, I promise,” she asked.
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bsp; I thought about it for a while, and decided it might do me good.
“Absolutely. That’d be great,” I agreed.
“Cool. I’ll meet you at six fifteen out there by the mileage sign on the highway. How about that?” she asked.
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
So that’s what we did, and I can’t deny having a partner made my jog a lot more fun. Layla always had something interesting to talk about, and she was the kind of bubbly, happy person that makes you smile to hang out with. When the days got too cold and too short for running (which happened within weeks), we moved indoors to the gym and used the exercise equipment instead.
Things were fine for several weeks, but after a while I couldn’t help noticing that Layla was gradually getting a lot friendlier than I liked. She was always touching my arm or patting my back or things like that. Once in a while at the gym she’d make comments about how handsome I was or how nice my muscles looked. It made me a little uneasy, but at the same time I didn’t really take it all that seriously, either. Some people are just flirty like that, and nine times out of ten they don’t really mean it. And even if she did mean it, there was zero chance it was going anywhere. So I smiled and nodded, not giving her any encouragement but tolerating it in the meantime till she caught the drift that I wasn’t interested and gave up.
Everything came to a head one day when I went to the washateria to get some laundry done. I usually did laundry on weekday evenings, when the place was deserted. There’s just something about looking at a complete stranger’s dirty underwear which is kind of disturbing, you know? So I went when I wasn’t likely to have company, and sometimes I took a pen and paper with me to jot down some musical notations to help pass the time while the clothes washed and dried.
I hadn’t done much songwriting since I got to Alaska, but that particular day I happened to overhear one of the guys at work humming an old Buck Owens tune. That got me to thinking about home and red-dirt music again, and after work I went to the store to have them order me a cheap guitar. I hadn’t wanted to bring Grandpa Tommy’s Martin up there, but I didn’t want to get out of practice, either.
So I sat there on the hard plastic seat, scribbling some chords and looking forward to when the guitar would arrive in a few days. I’d barely put my second load of clothes in and shut the lid on the washer when Layla walked in, carrying a laundry basket under her arm, with a bottle of liquid detergent balanced on top.
She was dressed for wash day; old t-shirt and sweat pants. Just about the most unglamorous outfit you could possibly imagine, but she was pretty enough to look nice no matter what she had on.
“Hey, Cody,” she said, waving at me when she came in.
“Hey, Layla,” I said absently, barely looking up from my notebook.
She got her clothes going, and then came to sit down a couple of chairs away from me. She smelled like soap and dryer sheets, but then so did everything else in the place. We chatted about this and that for a while, and eventually I happened to mention Lisa for some reason. Layla got a faraway look in her eyes, and when she spoke again her tone was different.
“Cody, I was thinking about something today,” she finally said.
“Yeah? What’s that?” I asked.
“Well, you said you wouldn’t be going home till next August, right? That’s a pretty long time, you know,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, I know,” I agreed neutrally, not sure I liked this.
“I guess what I’m saying is, you’re a real nice man. There’s a lot of girls who’d love to get to know you a little better, if you’d give them a chance,” she said.
I’m not stupid. I knew what she was hinting at, and I decided it was time to lay down some firm rules about the way things had to be.
“Layla, I know what you’re trying to say, here, and I’m flattered, but I’m not looking for anything like that right now. Let’s be friends and leave it at that,” I said.
“You mean you wouldn’t even think about it? Not even just to grab a Coke and talk for a while?” she pressed.
“Nope, ‘fraid not,” I said, trying to be kind about it.
Then, before I knew it, she was kissing me. A deep, passionate kiss that tasted like warm vanilla. For a split second I was too startled even to think, and then I gently but firmly pushed her away. I was tempted to say something downright nasty at that point since kindness hadn’t seemed to cut the mustard, but the harsh words died when I saw the ashen look on her face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked instead. She looked like she might faint from terror at any second. I glanced over my shoulder to see if I had a vampire creeping up on me or something else that might explain her weird reaction, but there was nothing there.
And soon as my face was turned, she jumped up and ran from the washateria like it was an Egyptian snake pit.