The Abominable: A Novel

Mr. Perry grinned. “They didn’t. They almost certainly wouldn’t have. Admiral Byrd never asked permission of the Brits. He just sent me there with seven months of my own supplies on two sledges—the guys took the sledges and their dogs back to Byrd’s base the day after they dropped me off—oh, and a crowbar to pry the door and shuttered windows open. I could really have used some of those dogs as company that winter. Truth was, the admiral didn’t want me in his sight. So Byrd sent me as far away as he could where I might still have a chance of surviving the winter. The admiral liked to play at doing science, but in truth he didn’t give a single penguin turd about observing or studying penguins.”

I wrote all this down, not really understanding it but sensing that this might be important for some reason. I had no idea how I could use Shackleton’s hut in my vaguely conceived suspense novel with no title.

“Shackleton and his men built the hut in nineteen oh-six,” continued Mr. Perry. His voice was soft and slightly husky, the rasp due—I learned from him later in the conversation—to the loss of part of his left lung in surgery the previous winter. But even with the rasp his voice was still a pleasant tenor. Before the surgery, I guessed, Mr. Perry would have had an almost perfect voice for storytelling.

“Shackleton’s people abandoned it in nineteen oh-eight…there was still the hulk of a motorcar they’d left behind when I got there,” he was saying. “It’s probably still there, the way things rust and decay so slowly down there. I doubt if the darned thing ever traveled ten feet in the deep snow Shackleton kept encountering, but the Brits did like their gadgets. So did Admiral Byrd, for that matter. Anyway, I was dropped off at the old hut early in the Antarctic autumn. That was March of nineteen thirty-five. I was picked up at the beginning of the Antarctic spring—early October—of the same year. My job was to report on the Adelie penguins in the large rookery at Cape Royds.”

“But that’s the Antarctic winter,” I said, pausing, sure that I was going to say something unutterably stupid. “I thought that the Adelie penguins didn’t…I mean, you know…didn’t winter over. I thought that they arrived sometime in October and left with their chicks—those little ones that survived—in early March. Am I wrong? I must be wrong.”

Jacob Perry was smiling again. “You’re exactly right, Mr. Simmons. I was dropped off there just in time to see the last two or three penguins waddle and then paddle out to sea—the water was just preparing to freeze over again there at Cape Royds in early March, so that open water would soon be dozens of miles from the hut— and I was picked up in spring, October, before any of the Adelie penguins returned again to mate and raise their young there at the rookery. I didn’t get to see any penguin action.”

I shook my head. “I don’t get it. You were ordered there for…my God, more than seven months, almost eight months…to observe the rookeries on the Cape when there were no penguins. And no sunlight much of the time. Are you a biologist or some sort of scientist, Mr. Perry?”

“Nope,” said Mr. Perry with that lopsided smile again. “I’d been an English major at Harvard—eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature with a lot of English Lit thrown in. Henry James was hot stuff when I graduated in nineteen twenty-three. James Joyce had published Ulysses just the year before—’twenty-two—and his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man six years earlier. Already in Europe for a year of skiing and mountain scrambling—I had a small inheritance that came due when I turned twenty-one—in nineteen twenty-four I read a story in Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review and decided I immediately had to leave Switzerland and travel to Paris to meet the young man named Hemingway who’d written such a story and show him some of my own writing.”

“Did you?” I asked.

“Yep,” said Mr. Perry, smiling. “Hemingway was working from time to time as the French-based European correspondent for the Toronto Star then and he had this neat trick to get rid of pains in the ass like me. I met him in his office—a grubby little place—and he immediately asked me downstairs to a cafe for some coffee. Then after a few minutes, with me and so many others, he’d glance at his watch, say he had to get back to work, and leave the would-be writer sitting there alone in the cafe.”

“Did you show him your stories?”

“Sure. He glanced at the first pages of three of them and said that I should stick with my day job. But that’s all a different story, isn’t it? We old men tend to maunder and meander.”

“It’s interesting” was all I murmured, but I was thinking—Jesus, to meet Ernest Hemingway and be told by him that you weren’t a writer. What would that feel like? Or is Perry just bullshitting me?

“So to return to what you’re interested in, Mr. Simmons—Antarctica in ’thirty-three to ’thirty-five—I was hired by Admiral Byrd as a roustabout and because I had experience as a mountain climber. You see, the scientists in the group had plans to do some research on various peaks during that expedition. I didn’t know a damned thing about science or about penguins then and not much more now, despite all the nature documentary channels our cable TV gets here at the home. But it didn’t really matter in nineteen thirty-five because the point was to get me out of Admiral Byrd’s sight until the Antarctic spring, when we’d all be leaving the continent.”

“So you were alone there in the dark and cold for seven months,” I said stupidly. “What did you do that made him dislike you so much?”

Mr. Perry was cutting an apple with a short but very sharp folding knife, and now he offered me a slice. I took it.

“I rescued him,” he said softly, speaking around his own chunk of apple.

“Yeah, Mary said that you were part of the small group that rescued Admiral Byrd from his solo Advance Base in nineteen thirty-four,” I said.

“Correct,” said Mr. Perry.

“So because he was embarrassed having one of his rescuers around, he exiled you to Shackleton’s hut on Cape Royds to experience the same solitude he had?” It made no sense to me.

“Something like that,” said Perry. “Except that I didn’t poison myself with carbon monoxide like the admiral did…or require rescue the way he did. And he had a radio to contact with our base, Little America, every day. I didn’t have a radio. Or any contact with the base.”

“When you were part of the group that rescued Byrd that previous August,” I said, looking at the notes I’d taken from talking to Mary and looking things up in reference books (1991 being pre-Google), “you and three others drove a hundred miles through the South Polar winter—with the few warning flags for the maze of crevasses blown away or covered by snow—a hundred miles in near-absolute darkness on a snow tractor that wasn’t much more than a Model T with a metal roof. Just you and three others from the Little America Base.”

Mr. Perry nodded. “Dr. Poulter and Mr. Waite and my direct boss in charge of the snow tractors, E. J. Demas. It was Demas who insisted that I come along to drive the tractor.”

“That was your job in the expedition? Thanks.” Perry had given me another delicious slice of apple.

“As roustabout, I did a lot of work on those damned tractors and ended up driving them in the summer for the various scientists who had to do things away from Little America,” said the older man. “I guess Mr. Demas thought I had the best chance of keeping us all out of a crevasse, even in the dark. We had to turn back once after we learned that most of the crevasse warning flags were gone, but tried again right away—even though the weather had grown worse.”

“It still sounds as if Admiral Byrd was punishing you,” I said, the taste of apple clean and fresh in my mouth. “Sending you into solitary confinement for seven months.”

Jake Perry shrugged. “The admiral’s ‘rescue’—he hated anyone using that word to describe it—embarrassed him. He couldn’t do anything about Dr. Poulter or Mr. Waite—they were bigwigs in the expedition—but he assigned Demas to jobs where he, Admiral Byrd, would rarely see him. And he sent me out on the summer’s expeditions and then assigned me to Cape Royds for the entire Antarctic winter. In the end, Admiral Byrd didn’t even mention me in the report about his…rescue. My name’s not in most of the history books about Antarctica.”

I was astounded at the meanness and pettiness of such an action on Admiral Byrd’s part. “Being sent to spend the winter alone at Cape Royds was the equivalent of you being put in solitary confinement,” I said, letting my anger come through in my tone. “And no radio? Admiral Byrd went nuts after three months of being alone— and he had daily radio contact with Little America.”

Mr. Perry grinned. “No radio.”

I tried to understand this but could not. “Was there any purpose—any reason at all—for you to spend seven months of isolation and five months of absolute darkness in Shackleton’s hut on Cape Royds?”

Mr. Perry shook his head, but neither his expression nor his voice showed any anger or resentment. “As I