Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  “It’s over, Rob. Over. Tampa . . . shit.” She thought of her hometown, of old friends. “Over.” She pushed away from him, whirled around, and looked northwest to the setting sun. August second, she thought, the day the sun first sets after the endless summer. She ran across the dune, across the sod burying the old village of Pingasagruk, down the sedges creeping in on the ocean edge, over the sand speckled with coal, and to the shore of the Chukchi Sea. She waded in, cold water rising over the tops of her felt-lined shoe-pac boots, raised her hand to throw the whale back in the ocean, to the walrus from which it had come—then stopped.

  She had imagined the world ending a million times, had seen the holocaust of unleashed nuclear weaponry play over and over in her mind. Nuclear war had been an article of faith for her, a certainty Claudia had endured from childhood: this is the way the world ends. Arm cocked back to throw the ivory artifact to the walruses, Claudia paused as she saw a mushroom cloud rise up like a mirage from the ocean, a ghost of a cloud flickering against the sun.

  Against the horizon, against the line of white icebergs pushing their way to shore, against the harsh glow of the sun setting into the first summer night, the cloud rose up, a fountain of mist. The mist rose up from the water, droplets making a faint rainbow. A second mushroom cloud, a second fountain rose next to it. She grabbed for the binoculars in her parka pocket, pulled the Nikons over her head, turning the foggy lenses and focusing on the spray.

  A dark shape materialized in the binoculars; two dark shapes. Clouds; spray. More spray. A nuclear submarine—a boomer?—she thought, blowing itself up? The mushroom clouds faded away, and the dark shapes slid under. Claudia counted to herself, one thousand one, one thousand two, on and on, up to thirty. The dark shape rose, booming again, blotting out the sun, breaching, huge bomber head taking up most of its body, long fins curving back, flukes spread out like wings. She focused the binoculars again, then smiled to herself. Not nukes, not submarines, not an explosion. As the dark shape hit the sea, a great spray rising up from under it, a flash of light rippled across the ocean, across the sky.

  “Agviq,” Claudia whispered. She let the binoculars dangle from the strop around her neck, felt the effigy still clutched in her left palm, opened her hand, traced the figure. “The whale.” Running her tongue over her lips, she tasted the brine of tears around her mouth, remembered the taste of the old muktuk she’d catch in Barrow years ago, before they’d stopped whaling. Agviq, she thought, watching the two whales play in the ocean. Agviq lives, agviq will go on. She turned and walked back to shore.

  Rob stood at the edge of the water, sea lapping the bottoms of his leather-and-rubber boots. “Claudia?” The radio crackled in his hand, the announcer screeching something about Prudhoe Bay.

  She smiled, stroking the whale object. “It’s not over, Rob. It’s not over.” She turned, looked back at the breaching whales. “It’s just begun.”

  * * *

  Claudia and Rob sat before the fire. Chunks of coal scavenged from the beach smoldered in the flames, her boots drying soles-up on sticks jabbed into the sand by the fire. Behind them the blue tarp on the driftwood frame flapped in the wind, and little eddies of smoke rose up at them. A piece of plywood with a map of Alaska pinned to it lay across her lap. A new emptiness burned within her, a hard coal of despair ready to be fanned into flames, and Claudia kept wanting to wade back into the ocean and let the chilling water wash over her and suck her under. She rubbed the carving of agviq—looped through a nylon cord now around her neck—and the old ivory gave her strength. There will be time, there will be time, Eliot’s lines from Prufrock reminded her, and she slowly convinced herself that it was too soon to die.

  “Anchorage,” she said, drawing a teardrop shape looping northeast from a dot on the southern edge of the map. She winced at the name; she had friends there. “Fairbanks.” Another loop in the center of the state. The university, the museum—Froelich Rainey had done his early work there, the Ipiutak stuff. And Larsen’s and Giddings’s stuff, a lot of it in the museum. Gone. All gone. “Galena.” A loop west of Fairbanks.

  “The radio didn’t say anything about Galena,” Rob said. “Why do you think the Russkies would hit Galena?”

  Claudia looked up. Rob bit his lip, glared at her. “It has a forward fighter squadron out of Elemendorf in Anchorage,” she said. “If the Soviets followed up with bombers . . .”

  “My brother’s in that squadron,” Rob said softly.

  Right, Claudia thought. “Okay; Galena’s a question mark.” She erased the teardrop. Give him hope? Sure, stupid as it was: Rob’s squadron could have been rotated back to Anchorage. But give him that, anyway. Hope’s all that’s left. “Attu, Shemya, the sub base at Adak, the PAVEPAWS radar at Clear, the backscatter radar at Tok . . .” More teardrops. “Anyplace else?” She barked the questions at him.

  “Prudhoe. Kaktovik.”

  “Right.” Two more teardrops. The old oil fields at Prudhoe, the DEW line—North Warning System—station and the newer oil fields around Kaktovik in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that had never amounted to much. “What about . . . Barrow?” she asked, thinking of the DEW line site at Barrow—except that should have been hit first, before any of the lower-48 cities.

  Rob shook his head. “We’d have seen it.”

  “Yeah,” she said. Fifty air miles south of Barrow, they would have felt a nuke. “So Barrow made it. But if they got Prudhoe . . . What are the prevailing winds now?” she asked.

  Rob tapped the two locations west of Barrow, the point at the top of the state. “Southwest—away from us.” He traced a finger down the map, and she drew in two more teardrops.

  Claudia held the map away from her, looked at the long ellipses, the worst edges of radiation. Damn, she thought, the state’s huge. The nukes might not get everything right off. “Okay, southwest,” she said. “What about stuff from Canada, Siberia?”

  Rob shook his head. “Too far east, too far south. There’s a sub base at Petropavlosk on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Soviet Union—we’d hit that for sure. Some stuff in Central Siberia, but nothing to worry about.”

  “Yet.”

  Rob nodded. “Right—yet. So what do we do?”

  Claudia tried to smile. The edge in his voice prevailed. Rob sat close to the fire, shoulders shivering, his face pale. Not from the cold, she thought, not from the cold of the air.

  Their relationship had flipped back. Over the last week he’d worked his way through his shyness, begun to overcome his insecurities. Rob had begun to forget about the rank academia subtly imposed: he, the undergraduate, helping the all-but-dissertation graduate student complete her thesis. She’d begun to let him get close, had even been tempted to violate her pact of not having sex on a remote site. But then . . . They were back to the old relationship: she was boss, she had to make the decisions. And why? Not because she was a woman—she had to laugh at that, the old stereotype of women being the secret rulers of the world—but because she had the knowledge, she was the one almost done with her Ph.D., because it was her site, damn it.

  “Wait,” she answered. “Wait at Pingasagruk.”

  “Maybe we should go to Wainwright,” he said, “Walk down the coast.” His voice began to rise. “It’s only thirty miles. Those hunters we saw two days ago, maybe they’ll be back from Point Franklin and can take us back to Wainwright. There’d be people there.”

  She shook her head. “No. We can’t go there—not yet.”

  “But why?” he said. “They could help us. How long can we stay here? Wainwright would be just as safe—the fallout won’t hit us. What are we going to do here to survive—hunt eider ducks?”

  “When the time comes, yes. But no place on this coast is going to be safe, not for the next few weeks.”

  “But—?”

  “You remember Chernobyl? No, maybe not—I was only fourteen, you would have been eight. I did a report in high school on it. The way the weather works, the Arctic gets it up the ass from ra
diation. Northern Europe, the East Coast, Moscow . . . all that’s going to hit us pretty soon. Now, do you think Wainwright’s going to have fallout shelters?”

  “We could build one there . . .”

  “Right. And we’d take at least three days hiking to Wainwright, it might take us another day or two to build it, and then we’d probably have to share everything with half the village.”

  “So what do you want to do—build one here?”

  “Christ, yes, Rob.” She stood up, moved around from the windbreak behind her, into the swirling smoke of the fire. The rising sun—still a short night—cast long ruddy shadows on the smooth sand. “We’ve got at least three weeks of food here, plenty of water, fuel. We’d have to build a hole or something for a shelter, I don’t know—”

  Rob jerked his head up, smiled at Claudia, then stood and gazed up the dune toward the site. “A hole,” he mumbled. “A pit. We need a pit.” He turned to her. “We have a hole, Claudia. What the hell have we spent the last five weeks doing?”

  “Digging”—she grinned—“digging a pit! Rob, you’re a genius.”

  “Digging a pit!” His voice rose, and he almost squealed in delight. “We’ve exposed almost sixteen square meters, and we’re nearly down to sterile. Dig a pit! The house!” He waved up at the supply tent, pitched in the wind on top of the site, next to the house mound. “It’s a classic Inupiaq semi-subterranean house, complete with entrance tunnel, katak, and floorboards. Damn it, Claudia, those old guys didn’t know it, but they were building perfect fallout shelters.”

  His voice settled, became calm, and in that calm, she saw him go from hysteria to hope. Good, she thought. He’ll need that.

  “—except for one thing,” Rob went on. “And we’ve got that. Toilet paper.”

  “Toilet paper?” Claudia stared at Rob like he’d just leapt over the edge into insanity buck naked and without a parachute. “Toilet paper?”

  Rob walked over to their tent, began rummaging through his gear. “Toilet paper,” he called back. “Toilet paper.”

  * * *

  They had laid the last of the floorboards back in the house pit when they heard the whine of an all-terrain vehicle coming down from the Point. Claudia stood, scanned the beach to the northeast with the Nikons, handed the binoculars to Rob. Three four-wheelers kicked out dusty plumes against the early-morning sun.

  “Those the guys who came by before?” Rob asked.

  Claudia grunted. “Yeah.” She glared at him. “Maybe they didn’t hear about the . . . bombs,” she said to Rob. “We’ll see if they know, but don’t tell them if they don’t.” He scowled back at her, nodded. The men on the ATVs turned inland, rode up over the sand dunes encroaching on the ocean side, and drove over to them.

  Claudia shook her head, pissed that they’d ridden on her site. No, not her site now, she thought. Their land. She looked at the three men on the Hondas, jet black hair whipping out from under their caps, dark brown eyes half-hidden behind the fatty folds of their eyelids. Their land, it had always been their land. The blood of the people who’d built Pingasagruk, who’d named it, flowed in these men.

  “Jim,” she said to the man with the sea otter fur cap.

  He killed the engine of the motorcyclelike vehicle, swung his leg over the seat, stood up, stretched. Jim nodded, glanced at Rob, then Claudia. The other two men—Horace with the glasses, skinny Oliver, she remembered—leaned back in their seats. Their parkas were patched, dirty, scraggly wolverine ruffs around the edge of their hoods. Horace had a long-barreled .22 revolver strapped to his side, and Jim had a rifle stashed in a plastic scabbard on the ATV. She shuddered, recalling her initial unease a few days ago when the three Eskimo men had stopped by the site. With their guns, their big ATVs, their dark eyes, they had intimidated her, almost scared her. They were hunters, sure and powerful and in control. But once she had made it clear why they were there, Jim and Horace and Oliver had opened up, as if they had come to an informal and unspoken understanding with her, with Rob: this is our land and you’re just visitors. Now, she thought, now we aren’t visitors; Rob and I are refugees. She didn’t want to find out what that meant—not yet.

  Jim lit a cigarette, walked to the edge of the pit, leaned down. “You finishing up?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Claudia said. “Backfilling.”

  “I thought you guys weren’t leaving for another week?”

  Claudia glanced at Rob, shook her head slightly. “We aren’t. We still have some mapping to do, but the backfilling has to be done first.” She smiled at Jim. “So we don’t forget, you know? Got to be good to the land, right?”

  Jim nodded. “Right.”

  Claudia stepped out of the pit. “You guys want some coffee? Some Pilot bread?”

  Jim shook his head. “Nah, we’ve got to get back to Wainwright.” He jerked his chin down the coast, sucked on the cigarette. “Horace has to work tomorrow.”

  Work? Claudia relaxed. They didn’t know.

  “Your family still at the Point?” Rob asked Horace, the guy with the thick glasses on the orange ATV. Claudia jerked around to face Rob, stared down at him, suddenly remembering: Horace’s family had a boat, they had seen them cruise by earlier in the summer.

  Horace smiled. “They’ve gone to pick up some gear at fish camp, over at Kugrua River. Left yesterday.”

  She grinned, shook her head at Rob. The boat . . . if they were coming down the coast, he might have asked to get a ride with them back to Wainwright. But the Kugrua River was inland, on the other side of Peard Bay.

  “You”—Rob looked at Claudia, nodded back—“you guys have a good trip back.”

  “Yeah.” Jim flicked his cigarette at the tundra, got back on his ATV and kicked the engine over. The ATVs spat out blue smoke, and the three men gunned their engines. Horace nodded at them, and they drove back to the beach and down the coast, back to Wainwright, back to the village.

  “We could have gone with them,” Rob said.

  “Yeah, maybe,” she said. “They’re nice guys, you know? But think about it, Rob. You want to tell them that their world’s ended, too? Maybe they’ve gotten used to some of the stuff we honkeys brought them—four-wheelers, guns, cigarettes. Maybe they like being part of that universal, homogeneous culture: everybody speaking English, everybody swilling Coke, everybody smoking Camels, everybody wearing jeans. Maybe they like leaving that shit you find in the top levels of every site you see in the world: rifle cartridges, aluminum cans, cigarette butts, plastic tampon inserters.

  “You want to be the one to tell them they can’t get that stuff anymore? You want to be the one to tell Jim there won’t be anymore smokes, anymore shotgun shells? You want to tell his wife she’s going to have to cram tundra grass inside her every full moon ’til she’s an old crone? Maybe they won’t want that. Maybe they’d get mad. Maybe they’d shoot us. Not Jim, or Horace, or Oliver maybe. But someone.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Dig, Rob,” she said, jumping down into the pit. “Let’s get this thing built before our hair falls out, okay?”

  * * *

  With the floorboards back in place, the house appeared as it had a month ago when Claudia had scraped back the last bit of dirt and exposed the structure. Smooth planks—salvaged, she guessed, from the wrecks of nineteenth-century whaling ships—covered an area about eight by ten feet. At the south end of the house a hole about two-and-a-half feet in diameter had been cut in the floor. Vertical planks, their ends snapped off when the house collapsed on itself, rose up perpendicular to the floorboards. Claudia had wanted to excavate the sidewalls, to dig beyond them and determine the house edge, but then . . . She sighed to herself as she looked at the exposed house. No time. No time.

  When Rob and Claudia had first exposed the house, the edges of their meter squares had not come down precisely on the rectangle of the floor plan. Some units overlapped the house in narrow triangles, with side wall planks left standing in the middle of the squares. They shoveled dirt on
the outside of the house, into these excavated triangles, and tossed bright pennies in the bottom of the pit so if they ever—ever?—wanted to re-excavate the house, they would know where they had stopped.

  Something in Claudia kept her from destroying her precise digging, from ruining what science had already ruined. I have to build this shelter to survive, she thought, but I’ll do it so I don’t wipe out the past.

  The ancient house, what Arctic archaeologists called a “Point Barrow-type house,” had originally been covered with sod, top and sides; with driftwood scavenged from the beach and bay, they would rebuild the house, new sod protecting them not from the cold, but from the radiation. Sidewalls would hold back the loose dirt of the pit; six posts would support the sod roof to go on overhead.

  Working through the twilight of the new night, Claudia helped Rob dig down into the hole in the floor—the katak—and excavate the entrance tunnel. As they dug, an arctic ground squirrel, what the Inupiaq called a siksrik, for the sound it made, dug his own house on the mound next to them. The siksrik built a warren of tunnels, little entrances popping up all over the site. Claudia watched him scurry across the dune, clutching in his mouth a tangle of her fine blond hair stolen from her hairbrush. Tan with black spots, a white chest, the siksrik had built up a good summer’s worth of fat; his coat was glossy, and his hips wobbled as he ran down into his tunnel. Run little siksrik, run, she thought. Hope you survive too.

  The old entrance tunnel of the house had been exposed in their archaeological excavation, a six-foot section of tunnel, mostly filled with yellow ice that reeked of piss and seal oil. Point Barrow-type houses melted in the brief summer, filling with water that froze in the fall; as the Inupiaq inhabitants would have done if they’d come back to this house, Rob whaled away with an ax, chopping out the old ice. He sloped the tunnel down from the house, then up to the surface, making a cold trap.