As for Jacob Perry—I couldn’t believe the man was eighty-nine years old.
Age and gravity had taken their tolclass="underline" some curvature and compression of the spine over nine decades had robbed the man of an inch or two of height, but he was still over 6 feet tall; he was wearing a short-sleeved denim shirt, and I could see where his biceps had withered some with age, but his muscles were still sculpted, his forearms especially formidable; the upper part of his body was, even after time’s robberies, triangular with power and shaped from a lifetime of exertion.
It was several minutes before I noticed that two fingers of his left hand, the smallest finger and the one next to it, were missing. It seemed to be an old wound—the flesh over the stubs of bone just above the knuckles was brown and as weathered as the rest of the skin on his hands and forearms. And the missing fingers didn’t seem to bother his dexterity. Later, while we were talking, Mr. Perry fiddled with two thin pieces of leather shoestring, each about eighteen inches long, and I was amazed to see that he could tie complicated knots, one with each hand, using both hands to tie the knots at the same time. The knots must have been nautical or technical climbing knots, because I couldn’t have tied any of them using both of my hands and the assistance of a Boy Scout troop. Mr. Perry, without looking, idly tied such knots, each hand working individually, and then absentmindedly untied them, with only the two fingers and thumb of his left hand. It seemed to be an old habit—perhaps one to calm him—and he paid little attention to either the finished knots or the process.
When we shook hands I felt my fingers disappear in his larger and still more powerful grip. But he was making no small-town-bully effort to squeeze; the strength was simply still there. Mr. Perry’s face showed too many years in the sunlight—in high-altitude and thin-air sunlight, where UV had had its way with his epidermal cells—and between the permanent brown patches there were scars where he’d had small surgeries for possible melanomas.
The old man still had hair and kept it cut quite short. I could see browned scalp through the thinning gray. When he smiled, he showed his own teeth save perhaps for two or three missing on the lower sides and back.
It was Mr. Perry’s blue eyes which I’ve remembered the most clearly. They were startlingly blue and, it seemed to me, ageless. These were not the rheumy, distracted eyes of a man in his late eighties. Perry’s bright blue gaze was curious, attentive, bold, almost…childlike. When I work with beginning writers of any age, I warn them against describing their characters by comparing them with movie stars or famous people; it’s lazy, it’s time-bound, and it’s a cliché. Still, fifteen years later my wife Karen and I were watching the movie Casino Royale, the first of the new James Bond films with Daniel Craig as James Bond, and I whispered excitedly, “There! Those are the kind of bluer-than-blue blue eyes that Mr. Perry had. In fact, Daniel Craig looks a lot like a young version of my late Mr. Perry.”
Karen looked at me a moment in the darkened theater and then said, “Shush.”
Back in 1991 at the assisted living home in Delta and somewhat at a loss for words, I’d spent a few minutes admiring the handful of artifacts on Perry’s shelves and desk top—the tall, wooden-staffed ice axe propped in a corner, some examples of stone which he later told me were taken from the summits of various peaks, and black-and-white photographs gone sepia with age. The small camera on the shelf—a Kodak of the kind one unfolded before snapping a picture—was ancient but unrusted, and it looked well maintained.
“It has film in it from…quite a few years ago,” said Mr. Perry. “Never developed.”
I touched the small camera and turned toward the older man. “Aren’t you curious to see how your snaps turned out?”
Mr. Perry shook his head. “I didn’t take the pictures. In fact, the camera’s not mine. But the druggist here in Delta told me that the film would probably still develop. Someday I’ll see if the pictures turned out.” He waved me to a chair next to the built-in desk. Scattered around the desk I could see careful drawings of plants, rocks, trees.
“It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been interviewed,” said Mr. Perry with what might have been an ironic smile. “And even then, many decades ago, I had almost nothing to say to the press.”
I assumed that he was talking about the 1934 Byrd Expedition. I was stupidly wrong on that and also too stupid to clarify it at the time. My life, and this book, would have been quite different if I’d had even the most basic journalist’s instinct to follow up on such an answer.
Instead, I brought the conversation back to myself and said modestly (for an egoist), “I’ve rarely interviewed anyone. Most of the research I do for my books is in libraries, including research libraries. Do you mind if I take notes?”
“Not at all,” said Mr. Perry. “So it’s just my time with Byrd’s ’thirty-three to ’thirty-five Antarctic expeditions that you’re interested in?”
“I think so,” I said. “You see, I have a kernel of an idea of writing a suspense thriller set in Antarctica. Anything you tell me about South Polar expeditions would be helpful. Especially if it’s scary.”
“Scary?” Perry smiled again. “A thriller? Would there be some evil entity other than the cold and dark and isolation trying to do in your characters?”
I returned his smile but realized I was a little embarrassed. Book plots often sound silly when removed from their wordy context. Let’s face it; sometimes they’re silly in context. And, indeed, I had been thinking of some giant scary thing to chase and kill and eat my characters. I just had no idea at the time what it might be.
“Sort of,” I admitted. “Something really big and threatening trying to get at our heroes—something out in the dark and cold. Something clawing to get in their Antarctic hut or frozen-in ship or whatever. Something not human and very hungry.”
“A killer penguin?” suggested Mr. Perry.
I managed to laugh with him even though my wife, agent, and editor had asked the same thing each and every time I’d suggested an Antarctic thriller—So, what, Dan? Is this monster of yours going to be some sort of giant mutant killer penguin? Wry minds work alike. (And I’ve never admitted until now that I had considered a giant mutant killer penguin as my Antarctic threat.)
“Actually,” said Perry, probably seeing my blush, “penguins can kill just from the guano stench of their rookeries.”
“So you’ve actually visited some rookeries?” I asked, pen poised over the skinny notebook I used for my research notes. I felt like Jimmy Olsen.
Mr. Perry nodded and smiled again, but this time that bright blue gaze seemed to be turned inward to some memory. “I spent my third and last winter and spring there at the Cape Royds hut…supposedly to be studying the nearby rookery and penguin behavior there.”
“Cape Royds hut…,” I said, amazed. “Shackleton’s hut?”
“Yes.”
“I thought that Ernest Shackleton’s hut was a museum—closed to all visitors,” I said. My voice was tentative. I’d been too surprised to write anything down.
“It is…,” said Mr. Perry. “Now.”
I felt like an idiot and hid my new blush by bending my head to write.
Jacob Perry spoke quickly, as if to relieve me of any embarrassment I might be feeling. “Shackleton was such a national hero to the Brits that the hut was already a museum of sorts when Admiral Byrd sent me there to observe the rookeries in the Antarctic winter of nineteen thirty-five. The British used the hut from time to time, occasionally sending ornithologists there to observe the rookery, and there were provisions stored there all the time so that Americans from the nearby base or others in trouble could use the hut in an emergency. But at the time I was ordered there, no one had wintered over in the hut for many years.”