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Forever
JUNE 15, 1963
LUKE
—
We used to watch movies in the community center in the summer, sometimes. Th
e ones with Roy Rogers and John
Wayne and all those cowboys. Bunna liked Roy Rogers best, but me, I liked the rodeo. I liked the way those cowboys came shooting out on their bucking broncos, hanging on for dear life and never letting go, no matter what, waving and smiling at the crowd. Th
ose broncos tossed them up and down and
waved them back and forth like fl ags, but they never let go.
Tough, them guys.
In the summers back home, me and Bunna and Isaac used to play along the beach late at night. We always got to go boating, sometimes, with Uncle Joe or one of the others, staying out there all night long, watching the midnight sun circle the sky, slung low on the horizon late and rising up toward the middle near dawn.
Now Isaac’s gone for good, which nobody talks about, and 161
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y
Bunna’s gone for the summer, which I don’t want to think about. So it’s just me and Sonny and Donna, eating dinner all alone in the big, echoing Sacred Heart cafeteria, with the sun making long, dark shadows and me knowing, all of a sudden.
Just knowing.
Some people could know things before they happen without even thinking about them, and I wish to heck I wasn’t one of those people, because what I know right now has to do with the way Sister Mary Kate and Father Flanagan are standing there at the door to the cafeteria, their heads bowed, watching me while they talk. Talking about me and about the news they don’t want to tell me, the news I don’t want to hear. I can feel it. Heck, anybody could feel it, because right now the whole room is heavy as cement with it.
I remember the dream I had, all of a sudden, in one bright fl ash. Was it last night? Last week? Last year? My mind feels like it’s stepped out of time into a place where everything is foggy. Everything except the dream: it’s old Uiñiq, clear as day, making arrows like he always used to when we were kids. Little kid arrows for me and Bunna, and we’re running along the beach, chasing birds late into the summer night. And every time we break an arrow, there’s a new one already made.
In my dream, Uiñiq is giving Bunna one last arrow, but when he sees me, he shakes his head slowly, and there’s a look on his face that chills me right through to the bone. Bunna has his back to me, too, and he won’t turn around. He knows I’m right there, all right, but he won’t turn. It’s like a door 162
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F O R E V E R / L u k e
shutting—Uiñiq with his last arrow and Bunna with his back turned. A door closed forever.
Suddenly I’m aware of Sister, still standing in the doorway to the cafeteria, still watching.
“Th
ere’s been an accident,” Sister’s going to say. Or maybe she doesn’t say it at all. Maybe she doesn’t even have to say it because I already know.
I know already.
Old Uiñiq is long dead, and now Bunna is with him.
I already know this. I know it now like I knew it a second ago, like I knew it last week. All of time—past and present and even future, all of it running together in my head like the gravy on my plate.
Th
at’s what I will remember, I’m thinking, realizing it’s a crazy thought even as I think it: I will remember the gravy on my plate, running into the potatoes and peas with Father Flanagan and Sister Mary Kate standing by that door over there, watching me, and me refusing to even look at them, just like Bunna refused to look at me. And Uiñiq shaking his head and scowling and me staring down at the gravy on my plate like there’s gotta be some meaning there. Knowing there isn’t.
Th
at’s what I’ll remember.
“Th
e plane didn’t make it through the mountains,” Father is saying. Or maybe he isn’t really saying it. Maybe I just know that’s what he’s gonna say as I stand there in the door to the cafeteria not wanting to be there—not wanting to be anywhere.
Th
ere were a lot of other boarding-school kids on board 163
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y
that plane, but only one of them was from Sacred Heart School, and only one of them was my brother.
Father and Sister stand with their shoulders sloped together, almost touching, and I stand right next to them, all alone, my shoulders square as rulers, not touching anything, pushing right past them before they can even reach out, pushing right out of the building, out into the woods. Away.
I have to get away from what I already know, from what I don’t ever want to have to know: my brother Bunna is dead.
Th
ey don’t even have to say it. I can feel it in the slope of their shoulders, in the air itself, in the way my chest gets tight like a cage that won’t let me ever breathe deep again. I can feel Bunna’s absence like you feel a part of you that’s no longer there—a leg amputated, a lung gone.
Bunna is dead.
I’m running through the woods, deep into the trees, where there are no trails. No way in. No way out. It’s getting dark, and I’m running blind. Maybe I’m running backward, watching the past wind away from me like a ruined fi lm of Roy Rogers and John Wayne spilling out of a projector onto a dusty fl oor in a dark, empty room.
Gone.
Or maybe I’m not even running at all, not even moving, just standing there, letting spruce branches slap me in the face, slash my skin raw. It’s a better kind of pain than the one I feel inside right now.
Inside there’s only one thing I know: I have to get away 164
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F O R E V E R / L u k e
from everyone and everything because I’m like a dog with pain and I don’t want nobody talking at me about it. I don’t want nobody being sorry at me or following after me with some crap about the compassion of Christ. I just want to run and keep on running. Let them try to catch me. Th
ey can’t.
Th
ey can’t because my pain’s taking me places no one else can go. Places I gotta go all alone. Without Bunna. Me and Bunna who never in our whole lives have been apart. Not once. Me and Bunna who were spliced together from the day he was born, sliced apart forever now. Forever.
Nieces and nephews too numerous to count. Th at’s what they
always put on peoples’ funeral papers, the ones they make at church. Funerals at the church back home are always packed full of people—nieces and nephews too numerous to count.
But not here at Sacred Heart School, where there’s no one to count family, no one counting me as left behind. No mom, no dad, no aunts, no uncles. No brothers.
I’m not running anymore, but my heart is banging at my ribs like a rabid fox. A fox locked up in a too-tight cage.
No brothers at all.
All of a sudden, anger washes over me in icy waves, making me clench my fi sts again and again, my worthless fi sts. I wanna beat the shit out of Bunna once and for all, but he’s not there. I want to box him up so bad, he’s gonna refuse to ever leave me. Th
en I’m crying, remembering how the last night
we were together, that’s just exactly what I did do. Beat the shit out of him until he stopped me with those words, those stupid words: “I gotta go home,” he said . What in the hell 165
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y
does home mean to him now? To me without a brother? To anybody?
It’s hot and sticky in the middle
of all these Sacred Heart trees, and there isn’t a drop of wind anywhere. I’m itching like crazy from spruce prickles and mosquito bites.
Back home there’s a breeze coming in off the ocean ice, and I wish I could feel its cool breath on my sweaty neck right now. Wish I was sitting in a boat with chunks of ocean ice just sort of hanging there in between the smooth water and the cloudless sky—drifting with their refl ections white and ghost-like against the glassy water.
I’ve got my eyes closed, imagining it, but when I open them, it’s like the terror of a nightmare, looking into the darkness of Sacred Heart, trees blotting out everything.
Gone. Everything’s gone.
Suddenly I realize I’m crying, crying so hard I can hardly breathe.
How can anybody even breathe in a place where there is no wind, no open sky, no ocean, no family? Nothing worth counting?
Ever.
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18/07/2011 8:25 PM
PART IV
The Earth Can’t Shake Us
1963–1964
We
were here.
We were always here,
hanging on where others couldn’t,
marking signs the others wouldn’t,
counting kin our own way. We
survived. Th
e earth
can’t shake
us.
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He’s My Brother
SEPTEMBER 1963
CHICKIE
—
When he came to pick us up in Fairbanks at the end of the summer, Father Flanagan was driving the new bus. But Bunna wasn’t on it. Bunna would never ever sit next to me on the bus again, old or new. I’d spent so much time refusing to believe the truth of this that I felt totally numb inside, all hollowed out like that old, dead piece of military trash of a bus we weren’t going to ride anymore. Only thing was, I wanted to ride it.
I wanted to get on that old bus and let it bounce everything to pieces. Shake things back to normal again. I did not want to have to remember Bunna. But I didn’t want to worry about forgetting him, either.
I was carrying my diary in my lap like an old assignment book with an assignment I couldn’t let go of. I wanted to read and reread every word I’d ever written about Bunna. As I leafed though the book, the fi rst words I ever wrote about him jumped off the page:
BUNNA A IS A DUMB ANIMAL!!
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I was so mad when I wrote it that I pressed really hard and made little ridges on the paper. Now the words stand out on that page like Braille.
How can that be? Th
at’s what I want to know. Th
ose words
are still alive, but Bunna’s dead. How can a dumb old piece of paper with a girl’s silly writing outlive a boy with chocolatey brown eyes and a smile to die for?
It seemed like I was the only one on that whole bus thinking about Bunna. Everyone else was too excited about the new bus. Bunna’s bus! Part of me wanted to scream it out, and part of me wanted to hoard his memory to myself and totally ignore the bus. And another part wanted to blame the bus for everything, which didn’t make any sense at all.
We drove into the school grounds in full glory, Father honking the horn like he was the leader of a one-horned band.
Before we had even properly stopped, Amiq, who had spent the summer working in Fairbanks, jumped off , Eskimo dancing—stomping his foot and waving one arm at that big expanse of shiny new bus like he’d just invented it and had made up a brand-new dance to tell the story.
Th
e whole world could fall apart, and some things, like Amiq, would never ever change. Th
at made me feel better and
worse, both at the same time.
I could see Donna, Sonny, and the nuns standing by the door to the school, watching Amiq dance his bus dance. By this time Sister Mary Kate was so excited, she was practically dancing herself. I could hear her yelling right through the 170
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H E ’ S M Y B R O T H E R / C h i c k i e window of the bus. “Will you just look at that! It’s a miracle, a complete miracle!”
You probably could have heard her yelling all the way to Fairbanks. Th
at’s how excited she was. She turned to Sister
Sarah and hollered even louder, on account of Sister’s hearing,
“IT IS A MIRACLE, ISN’T IT, SISTER?”
Sister Sarah just scowled. She didn’t like all the racket any more than I did, but Father Flanagan kept right on honking, and the kids kept leaping off the bus with big smiles like they were rock stars on tour or something. I guess I should have been glad about the fact that Father Mullen wasn’t there to spread doom and gloom, like he always did. But I wasn’t. I didn’t care about any of it.
By the time it was my turn to climb down those new stairs, it felt like the din had turned my insides to mush and made my knees get as wobbly as day-old noodles. All I wanted to do was disappear.
Th
at’s when I saw Luke. He was standing way off to the side, like he wanted to disappear, too. When I looked at him, it felt like everyone else just melted away, and it was just us two, all alone, missing Bunna, together. I could tell, right then and there, that he knew about me and Bunna and how we’d kissed on the edge of the endless woods. I don’t know how he knew, but he did. I guess that’s how brothers are sometimes.
I don’t know if I imagined it or not, the sudden silence that came right then. My ears rang with it.
Luke took one little step toward me. It was a tentative 171
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y
sort of step, like he was trying to remember how to walk.
And before I could even think about what I was doing, I dropped my duffl
e and started running toward him, sobbing
and sobbing until there weren’t any tears left inside me. Luke was crying, too, only you wouldn’t have hardly been able to tell it. He just stood there, as rooted as a tree, tears running down his cheeks like they’d always been there. Like he’d been born in tears. Th
en he wiped his face with the sleeve of
his shirt, grabbed my duffl
e, and we walked into the school
together.
We didn’t try to make our steps match, but they did match, perfectly. When we reached the door and I turned around to look back at the bus, I realized that all the others were just standing there, watching us. Most of the girls were crying, too, and Sister Mary Kate held her hand to her chest.
Th
at big bus just sat there behind us all, shiny as shit.
“Damn bus,” I muttered.
It was the fi rst time in my life I ever swore out loud.
Luke took me to his secret place, his and Bunna’s, and he made a big deal about how nobody was supposed to know about it, so I never told him that I already knew. I’d seen the two of them sneaking off and had followed them to see if I could get some ammunition to use against Bunna. I’d gotten so sick of Bunna teasing me, calling me Snowbird—I got my ammunition, too, all right. It came in the form of Bunna’s toy gun, hidden in a box in their secret hideout. Bunna was too 172
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H E ’ S M Y B R O T H E R / C h i c k i e big to play with toy guns, and when I started calling him Roy Rogers, he quit calling me Snowbird. Th
at’s how ten-year-olds
deal with stuff . Righ
t before they turn into teenagers and learn how to kiss instead.
Sister Mary Kate kept telling us that God had called Bunna home early for a special reason. So when Luke took me to their secret hideout, I asked him about it.
“Do you believe that God called Bunna home for a special reason?”
“No,” Luke said.
Th
ere was no way I could hide how bad it made me feel to hear him say that.
“I believe like Iñupiaqs believe,” he said real quick, watching me.
I didn’t say anything. I was afraid I’d start crying all over again.
“After a person dies, you gotta name a baby after them,”
he said. “Th
e baby is the spirit of that person coming back.
Th
at’s how you bring them back alive. With the name.”
“Do you believe that?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“With Bunna? You believe it with Bunna?” I had to know.
Luke stared out at the river like he never even heard me.
His face was hard and dark and still, like a stone in the bottom of a moving river.
“I never seen it yet with Bunna, but that’s how it works,”
he said fi nally. “People say that, you know? Th
ey tell us how
we’re just like the ones we’re named for. Like me. My aaka says 173
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I walk the same way the one I was named after used to walk.
Exact same way.”
I looked at him, trying to imagine something about his walk a person might identify as someone else’s. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “Guess I don’t have that kind of name.”
Luke smiled all of a sudden. “Yeah, but you know what they say about snowbirds, right?”
“You aren’t supposed to mess with them?” I gave Luke a don’t-mess-with-me kind of look.
Aaka Mae used to chase after boys who tried to hunt snowbirds, chase them with a broom, and if you were one of those boys you better hope she didn’t catch you.
My Name Is Not Easy Page 15
