Page 48 of The Most Dangerous Games

Patrick Arrasmith

34.

Dinner is served before long and finally the mood in the room lightens, and people are telling of the adventures they’ve experienced so far, about whales and sharks and spiders and all the rest of it.

Somehow the evening swings back to being about the camaraderie most, if not all, of them are feeling. They don’t know about the adventures to come, or stories yet to be told. But on this night, even with the short amount of time they have been together, that camaraderie matters, even without Luca Tommasi.

They are here, even if Luca is not.

“Hey, at least none of you got attacked by leopard seals,” Marcelo Oliveira, the jiujitsu man, says at one point.

He’s sitting across the table from Jimmy.

Jimmy says, “Leopard seals are mostly solitary. But they can be dangerous, seriously dangerous.”

Hannah’s eyes light up. “Sometimes they smile. And they sing underwater. So what happened, Mr. Oliveira?”

Marcelo recounts how the ice field on which he’d been walking cracked open like an egg, just as it had for Alek. But he was, he says, quick enough and agile enough to jump away in the nick of time; was carefully backing away from the edge when a leopard seal lurking underneath the surface had risen up out of the water and tried to bite through the thick ski pants he was wearing.

“I guess that leopard seal wasn’t smiling. Then what?” Hannah asks. It’s clear that she’s caught up in the story. They all are.

“I managed to spin around and roundhouse kick him right in the teeth,” Marcelo says, “before I ran like hell back to my snowcat with my pant leg flapping in the breeze.”

Jack thinks: It’s like we’re telling war stories. Except that his father, the ex-Marine, always said that you didn’t tell stories like that until the war was over.

Jack doesn’t like to tell them, period.

“Why don’t you two blokes compare your wounds?”

Tipton.

Jack hadn’t gone looking for him on the ship taking them back to the airport at Punta Arenas. Then he had stayed away from him on the plane, not sure if he could control himself if he confronted him, and worried about making a scene in front of everybody else.

He frankly didn’t know if he might get sent back home for doing what he wanted to do with Tipton—shove him up against a wall, just for starters.

But tonight, Jack immediately feels the same searing heat in the back of his neck he’d felt in his leg on the trail that day.

Jack looks him dead in the eye.

“You left me on that trail.”

“I went to get help,” Tipton says. “Which eventually arrived.”

“That’s your version,” Jack says.

“It’s the truth,” Tipton says.

There is one empty chair at Jimmy’s table, between Marcelo and Reg Drummond, maybe the most famous person here with the exception of Jimmy. Tipton, dressed all in black, as always, starts to sit down with them.

“Seat’s taken,” Jack says.

“That seat’s been empty all night,” Tipton says. “And it’s not even your table.”

No voices have been raised. Still: There is a hush over this part of the ballroom. All eyes on them.

Jack’s eyes don’t leave Tipton.

“We all decided to keep it open in honor of Luca,” Jack says.