Ivory and Paper

by Ray Hudson

  I stepped into what Outsiders call a wind, but, trust me, it was just a breeze. Our real wind is why the Aleutian Islands are blown off so many maps or crimped inside a box like Benjamin Franklin’s poor cartoon snake whacked into eight pieces. With the Bering Sea on the north and the North Pacific Ocean on the south, the islands sit in a long wind tunnel where storms can change exhilaration into terror in a second. The islands stretch a thousand miles from Alaska to Asia. In the summer, they are like an emerald necklace; but in the long winter—I’ve seen photographs taken from space—they glow on the dark water like moonstones. We Unanga are known as “people of the pass or seaside” because we were great kayakers once-upon-a-time, but “people of the wind” would have done just as well. It’s pronounced something like “Oo-náng-axh,” but Outsiders who don’t speak our language call us Aleut. (That has three syllables and rhymes with flute: “Ál-ee-oot.”) Gram calls herself an Aleut even though she speaks our language better than almost anybody in town.

  “I’ve always been an Aleut,” she says defiantly, “when I talk Amirkaanchi.”

  I’m Unanga, but I don’t speak much of the language. Go figure. Gram doesn’t weave baskets or sew sea lion intestines into decorative containers or make bentwood hats. She watches TV, reads O, and keeps suggesting to Dad that we take a trip to Disneyland.

  “I’d like to see one of those movie stars,” she says. “Like Bradley or Kate.”

  My mom had been a real, old-fashioned, genuine Unanga. Hadn’t Gram always referred to her as Old Lady?

  “That Old Lady never wanted me to perm my hair,” Gram told me once after coming back from Eva’s with a head full of tight curls.

  “That Old Lady always wanted to weave baskets. Not me!” And she’d laugh and light up a cigarette.

  “Gram, you shouldn’t do that,” I would scold. “They’re poison.”

  “Ayaqaa!” she’d say and stub the cigarette into a saucer, adding affectionately, “Just like that Old Lady,” and just that easily my mom’s nickname passed to me.

  When Gram was a girl, her family moved here from Makushin, now an abandoned village on the other side of the island. Here is Unalaska, the only town left on the entire island. The island has the same name. I know it’s confusing, but don’t blame me. She was Margaret Galaktionoff then, before she married Bill Petikoff. I love those Russian names that date from over two hundred years ago. Unanga were given Russian names when they were baptized. There aren’t any original Unanga names around anymore, except for maybe nicknames. And my last name? Just my luck to be stuck with Hansen. One of Dad’s grandfathers came from Norway.

  Gram lives in “New Town,” two rows of tiny old houses made from cabanas at the eastern end of the town, not far from the lake and just off the creek that flows out and into it. Out mostly, but in when the tide raises the water level. The U.S. Army had occupied Unalaska during the war, World War II. The Japanese bombed the town and the surrounding military outposts and captured Attu Island, at the very western end of the Chain. All the people in Attu village were taken to Japan where half of them—including my gram’s cousin—died. After that, Unanga in all nine villages along the Chain had been ordered off the islands and sent a thousand miles away to southeast Alaska, supposedly for their own safety, where, of course, a lot of them also died. When the people came home, they found their houses looted and destroyed. The military hauled cabanas down from the hills to replace them. That’s not this story. This story began when I left Gram’s and headed to the store.

  The breeze was stirring the lush plants in her yard. Only one family in New Town ever tried to grow a lawn, and it wasn’t Gram. She was happy with her old friends: wild geraniums with light-blue petals as soft as butterfly wings, and thick stalks of lupine clumped with five-fingered leaves and dark-blue blossoms. Across the creek, fireweed had ignited the hills with a soft blush. A stunted willow zigzagged upward, competing with the tall grass and the thick brutal stalks of putchki, wild celery. I watched an eagle drift overhead, toward cliffs beyond the lake, like a slow-moving cargo plane. Its massive talons gripped a small salmon.

  Nobody gets in my way, it seemed to say.

  “What a way to travel,” I thought.

  A raven shot out like a black fist and swiped at the fish. The eagle just banked sideways.

  Nobody, not even you.

  The raven turned its attack into an aerial somersault and dove toward the creek with a shrieking bark.

  “Jeez, I’d like to swear like that,” I said to myself. I was about to practice when Moses stepped out of his mother’s house. Tall, spindly buttercups beside the porch vibrated when he slammed the door. We called them rain flowers, because if you pick them it rains. Outsiders are always mowing them down with their lawn-mowers and then complaining about the weather.

  “Hi, Good-lookin’,” he said. He was Dad’s friend and drove the road grader and snowplow for the city.

  “How’s your mother, Moses?”

  She had been ill for weeks.

  “Crazy woman is sellin’ everythin’ she owns. She’d sell me if she could.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s her stuff,” he said. “The sicker she gets the quicker stuff is gone. But I’d really like the kids to have a thing or two from the family.”

  “Have you talked to the priest?”

  “He walked off with a fox trap an hour ago.”

  “Jeez.”

  “A model my granddad made. She gave it to him.”

  “But still,” I knew what he felt.

  “He said he’d give it back. That’s where I’m headin’.”

  The young Orthodox priest and his wife had recently moved here from California. Moses turned toward a cluster of small well-kept homes down another street.

  “Good luck,” I said. I think Gram is a lot like his mother, without a sentimental bone in her body. Whatever Gram keeps around has to be usable or out it goes. The only old things in her house, really old things, are a couple of icons on the corner icon shelf in the living room and a framed photo of my mom. She said the icons came from Makushin.

  I walked toward the growling and thumping of a compact bulldozer demolishing the Old Priest’s House. It had been empty for decades. If anybody knew who the old priest had been, they weren’t saying. The new owner was planning to replace it with a restaurant. A café would be nice, but the house had been around so long, crumbling window-by-window and sill-by-sill, that it was a shame to see it shoved out of the picture with one big push. I was used to that kind of reckless demolition at the school and the canneries, but when it happened in the village—even when villagers did it—I didn’t like it. For most of us, this was still a village, a place where everybody that mattered knew everybody else. The town fathers had incorporated as a city during the war to protect their business interests. And now, more than seventy-five years later, we were actually turning into something like a city. Newcomers had to look real close to find the village, but it was still there, getting along just fine.

  I love running errands for Gram, but I hate the store. It embodies everything I detest about the commercial fishing industry, its sludge and fury, its arrogance, and the boomtown mentality that covers us like a thick, mechanical fog. The store caters to Outsiders. I don’t mind that Mrs. Skagit sells alcohol at bargain prices to fishermen to lure them into the store, but it is just greed when she doubles the cost of food needed by villagers. I once asked Gram about her.

  “I want to be nice,” she answered, “but, Ayaqaa! Anybody close to her gets burned.”

  There wasn’t one local product on the shelves, not smoked fish or berries or even the fine grass baskets that collectors prized. Everything was shipped in from Seattle or flown down from Anchorage, including Alaska souvenirs made in China. I hated those cutesy dolls dressed in rabbit fur and the miniature totem poles in a country without trees! There hadn’t been a tree in the Aleutian Islands for ten thousand years.

  Every time I entered the store, I had to bite my
tongue. Gram had let me know, not directly, but gently, in so many words, that Mrs. Skagit had been asking about me.

  “What’s up with your granddaughter, Margaret? She’s downright unfriendly.”

  Not as unfriendly as I could be.

  Just ask the school shrink. Last January the principal had given me a choice: the shrink or suspension for a week. It seems a couple of teachers had taken offense when I called them round eyes and suggested they go back where they came from. Well, they should. The sooner the better. The shrink was famous among us kids for falling asleep while we talked, but he had stayed awake long enough to hear that I was exactly the way I wanted to be.

  “Wait until you’re in high school,” he had said, stifling a yawn. “We’ll talk again.”

  Well, I’d just finished eighth grade. And the shrink and the teacher who had referred me to him were both gone. Our school was a launching pad a lot of teachers used to blast off to glory. Few of them stayed very long, and none of them needed to know if I had or hadn’t changed. It was nobody’s business but mine.

  The window on the door leading into the Merc had a swath of silver duct tape holding it together. “Why replace it when you can duct-tape it?” was Fred’s motto. He was Mrs. Skagit’s son and not a bad guy on his own. Mr. Skagit had been pushing up daisies for a long time—if we had daisies at the cemetery, which we don’t. Pushing up putchkis, maybe. I wove through the herd of three-wheelers Fred had brought in through the delivery door in the back and tethered just inside the entrance. He was behind the checkout counter, and I nodded as I made my way through the aisles. The Merc had grown with a randomness that suggested merchandise had washed ashore, one storm after another, the newer items pushing the older ones deeper into the shelves or further back into the room. I crossed to the ramp that led into the grocery store addition, the part of the store called “New-Store” as in, “Where’d you get that candy?”

  “At New-Store.”

  You could sometimes find the same candy in the old store where it was usually cheaper. I hoped Mrs. Skagit was in the jug store, an annex attached to the Merc but entered through a separate outside door. Full cartons of food, in quantities purchased by fishing boats, were stacked up front, along with racks of candy and white bread, magazines and paperbacks, rain gear and rubber boots. But the food ordinary people needed in the quantities they could afford was kept in the rear, where a few low-watt light bulbs dangled from the ceiling.

  I had just stretched my arm to the back of the shelf holding the condensed milk, where cans stamped with last month’s prices sometimes lingered, when sibilant hissing swept the room like a snare drum.

  “That’s twice the price we had fixed on.” Mrs. Skagit was built like a bull sea lion. The muscles in her arms had terrified entire fishing crews into submission.

  I recognized the growled response.

  “The island’s damned impossible to anchor off.”

  Albert Hennig was massive: tall, smelly, and meaner than crabs. He had more hair on his face and paws than the average grizzly bear. The story was that one of his great- or great-great-grandfathers had been in the Aleutians right after the Russians sold Alaska in 1867. But that Hennig and all the other Hennigs in-between him and this one had lived elsewhere: Kodiak, Seattle, San Francisco. Once they had filled their pockets here, they had left the “rock,” as they called the island, the place where, as the stale joke went, “If it’s not the end of the world, you can see it from here.”

  “Besides, it’s worth triple what I’m askin’.”

  “You send it up,” she said. She could match him blow for blow. “I’ll let you know if I want it. No promises.”

  “It’s two somethings. I’ll bring one of ’em up, but then I’m takin’ some birders out to the Baby Islands. That’ll give you a couple of days to decide. Where’s the pilot bread?”

  Hennig’s shadow floated into my aisle, so I slipped into the next one. I heard him remove a few boxes of the round, hard crackers that were supposed to be good for seasickness.

  “We’ll talk after that. You’ll be happy to pay whatever I ask.”

  Hennig’s King Eider was a sturdy vessel he tied at a corner of the Pac-Pearl cannery dock, just off the town creek. He used it for fishing, running errands, and the occasional charter. I was surprised he could still get customers after the owner of a West Highland terrier reported him for using her dog as halibut bait. The deputy at the cop shop figured Hennig and his mate Torgey were capable of almost anything, but the other crewman, Old Man Sanders, wouldn’t have let anything like that happen. The more the woman shouted, the more the deputy found something else to investigate.

  Hennig was rumored to loot ancient gravesites and abandoned villages for artifacts—clearly illegal, but remarkably profitable. It was strange how stone and ivory objects made by our ancestors now brought prices few of us could afford. The villages in the Chain are few and far between, and law enforcement officers are fewer and even farther between. We have a cop shop, a couple of old WWII cabanas that had been dragged into town and wedged together. The good-natured cop and his deputy vacate the building on Thursdays when the public assistance officer takes over the desk. The prisoners, when there are any, look forward to the change. It’s always nice to have company.

  “Anything else, dear?” Mrs. Skagit’s voice cascaded back to normal. For a moment I thought she had a thing for Hennig, but then Angelina Resoff placed a couple of jars on the counter.

  I didn’t hear Angelina’s answer. She probably just shook her head. She didn’t talk more than once a week except to her TV set.

  The bell on the door jingled. That’s another thing I hate about New-Store. At least you can come and go from the old store without being announced. I heard a familiar voice, rasped by too many years of smoking, ask, “Afternoon, Mrs. Skagit, any new paperbacks arrive?”

  “Over there, Sanders,” she said. “You know where to look.”

  “That I do, ma’am.”

  I stepped to the end of the aisle and shuffled two cereal boxes together to suggest I’d just walked over from the old store and was looking for something. Hennig was still shopping when I carried the condensed milk to the counter and paid. I didn’t once look up even after Mrs. Skagit put my change on the counter and covered a quarter with a broad forefinger. I didn’t want her piggy eyes wiggling out from under those heavy eyelids and ogling me.

  I picked up the other coins and just waited. I hated looking at that finger. I started seeing all kinds of unpleasant things.

  “Say hello to your gram for me, Sophie,” she said. I had been named Anna Sophia, and for years I had been Sophie to everyone, but recently, for reasons of my own, I’d switched to Anna.

  A sigh slipped between her teeth as she razor-bladed each syllable with her tongue. “Yes, Miss-es Skaa-jet. And thank you, Miss-es Skaa-jet.”

  She freed the quarter, poor thing.

  I swept it into my palm and nodded at the souvenirs behind the counter. “Why are you still selling those fat white women dressed like rabbits?”

  Her head jerked toward the shelf as I scooped up the cans and walked out.

  Hennig’s pickup was parked at the corner of the store. I stood beside it until Sanders lumbered out carrying a cardboard box.

  “Hey, Sophie,” he asked, “how’s it hanging?”

  “You are so old-fashioned, Sanders,” I answered. “Haven’t seen you much. Keeping busy?”

  He placed the box in the cluttered bed and adjusted his glasses back onto his nose. I liked the old fisherman. He’d been around the village for years. He’d worked in crab fishing and halibut and salmon up in Bristol Bay, but he was old now and not many boats would hire him. I figured Hennig took him on because he could get him cheap.

  “Ah, you know, this and that. Just came in from out west.”

  “Out to Nikolski?” This was a tiny village at the southern tip of the next island.

  “Nikolski and a bit further. Four Mountains.”

  “The
Islands of Four Mountains? What were you doing there?”

  “Just lookin’ around. I stayed on the ship. The captain and Torgey wanted to check something out on shore a couple of times. It was a good trip. Got a couple of halibut for the freezer.”

  Clueless, I thought. The guy’s completely clueless.

  “You’re getting taller, girl. It’s about time.”

  “I’m almost fifteen, Sanders,” I said. “I’m tall enough. And I’m going by Anna now.”

  “I see you still got that smart mouth! Best keep it. You’ll need it one of these days.”

  I saw Hennig leave New-Store and turn into the jug store. I wondered what he’d dug up this time. The Islands of Four Mountains. Five islands with four towering volcanoes, soft blue against a blue-gray sky. Nobody had lived on them for two hundred years. I remembered Dad’s copy of Aleut Art, a book that was top-heavy with words but packed full of photos. I had read how the people on those islands had been whalers with all sorts of secret practices.

  “My gram has some fresh alaadika, Sanders, if you’re going to be around.”

  Maybe if I got him alone long enough I could pump him for more information.

  “Your gram’s fried bread is the best,” he said, “but I’ll have to take a rain check.”

  I was surprised at how dusty the roof and the walls of the Old Priest’s House were when pushed into heaps. The broken door frames and erupted floors. The guy operating the bulldozer had taken a break, so I stepped up to a pile of debris and picked up a chalky stick that had been part of a wall.

  Plaster, I guess.

  It crumbled in my fingers. A wide board that must have come from an interior wall had broken in two, and the wound showed a light-reddish interior. Bits of old newspapers adhered where the original builder had glued them for insulation. I peeled off a strip and read where Cheyenne Indians had been raiding farms around northern Kansas in 1880. I wondered what the old-time Unanga had thought about that when they were building their new American-style houses. I started to remove another piece when the man returned and waved at me. I backed out of the wreckage. A few fine drops of rain had started falling.