Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  “I’ll give the final warning,” Tuttu said, “and then we can start.” He took a step behind the podium, leaned forward, and spoke in a slightly louder voice. “This is the last call. We’ve met for the third time this week, and I know we’re all getting a little hungry.” He patted his stomach, and there was a nervous giggle through the room. “I’m going to ask you to bring up anything else you’ve found since yesterday, and we’ll add that to the supplies.” Tuttu waved at the boxes on the stage. “Meanwhile, Natchiq and Amaguq will be going around the village checking out the houses and any standing buildings they can get into. If they find any supplies beyond the lists you’ve given me and we all agreed would be allowed”—he waved a bundle of papers—“well, we all know the penalty.”

  “Confiscation and banishment,” Igaluk yelled from the back.

  “Right,” said Tuttu. “Confiscation and banishment. Now, has anyone forgotten anything?” He glared at the villagers, his gaze going back and forth, up and down. “Are you sure?” Claudia gulped, thinking of the candy bars she and Tammy had turned in the day before. Tuttu was dead serious about this. “Okay, let’s start.”

  Natchiq and Amaguq went out, and the sound of the chains being wrapped on the outside doors rang clear through the quiet room. Their footsteps thumped down the outside hallway of the school, and a few seconds later the exterior door creaked open, then slammed shut.

  While the “peanut butter police”—Tammy’s name for the two men—went around town, the rest of the village lined up to deliver the last of the supplies (Claudia hoped) they’d guiltily admitted to. Malgi had come up with a slight incentive for turning in things: for every tenth pound of food turned in, a house would get a pound added to their allotment. Tuttu argued that that was like encouraging cheating, but Malgi made a good point: a lot of the food out there didn’t belong to anyone. It was old stuff left in abandoned houses, or supplies and caches long forgotten. The bonus would encourage people to search through old houses, to remember emergency stores they had left up at duck camp or out on the tundra.

  Claudia and Tammy helped Tuttu with the record keeping, weighing the donations on a big meat scale salvaged from Stuaqpak’s ruins. She also did a little anthropology and census taking as the heads of the houses spoke for their extended families. Using the borough records—downloaded into Tuttu’s little PC, she marveled, from a disk not destroyed by EMP or cold or fire—she would cross-check her interviews later.

  “Family?” she asked as the man who had spoken up earlier came to the stage.

  “Igaluk’s,” he said.

  Claudia looked up at him, a man barely Rob’s age, a few years younger than Aluaq. His wife—no, a sister-in-law, Claudia thought, he said his wife was with auntie—stood next to him, a pretty woman with the tight curls of a fading perm just touching her shoulders. She wrote down “Igaluk” at the top of a page.

  “What’s your tanik name?” He gave it to her, and she wrote down the family name and the Christian name. She didn’t care about the Christian name, but the last name would help her figure out lineage. “And your wife’s maiden name, the tanik name?” That would be the sister’s old family name, too, she thought.

  “We’re Umiaqpaks,” the sister-in-law said. “‘Big boat, ship,’ that’s what the name means.” She brushed a curly hair out of her eyes, smiled with some pride. “My great-grandfather was an orphan, his village got wiped out by flu in that epidemic, you know?” Claudia nodded; the big one in 1914. “He and his sister, my auntie, survived. He came on that ship, the Bear, so they called him Umiaqpak. My Christian name’s Martha, my Inupiaq name is ‘Masik.’”

  Gill, thought Claudia, and then she saw Masik glance at Igaluk, saw a smile flash across his lips. Gill and Fish, she thought. She looked at the couple, nodded, then wrote Masik’s name down. Masik continued to recite her lineage, the auntie’s names, the children’s names—her niece in her arms, a toddler clutching her atigi—and the whole details of the extended family: Igaluk, the two sisters, the niece and nephew, a brother to the sisters, the old aunt, and—Igaluk’s sister-in-law admitted—another boy playing in the back of the gym, her son, age eight.

  “Father?” Claudia asked. She felt cold and scientific and intrusive with the question.

  The sister-in-law blushed, looked down. “I don’t know.”

  Igaluk looked away, seeming not to hear the question, and Claudia figured it out. Right, a little spouse sharing, okay. Masik gave Igaluk life, the gill giving breath to the fish; did they consciously choose those names? Claudia wondered. She shrugged, wrote down “nid,” old cataloging shorthand for “non-identifiable.” One more question, though she could guess the answer. “Any hunting, fishing partners?” That could indicate ties she hadn’t thought of, usually some sort of relation, but often just ties through friendship.

  Igaluk beamed at the question. “I fish with Aluaq,” he said.

  “Hunt?” she asked.

  Igaluk looked up at Tuttu, tapping in figures on the laptop computer. “I’ll learn,” he said.

  “Right.” Tammy weighed their donations and wrote them out a receipt. Tuttu punched in the numbers, and Claudia turned over a new sheet to interview the next family.

  It went on like that, a slow process, but the peanut butter police had even slower work. All told, Claudia recorded statistics and lineages for thirty-two nuclear families crammed into twenty-five houses. One-hundred ninety-six in the room, eleven more outside too sick or old to come into the gym, or caring for the sick. Ten of the extended families lived in Browerville, none in the newer BIA houses. Tuttu’s was the only traditional sod house, but about half the houses had been partially insulated with sod walls before the ground froze solid.

  About half an hour after all the latest food had been turned in, the outer doors creaked open, and every villager fell silent as the chains clanked. All eyes watched Natchiq and Amaguq come into the gym. Claudia felt a collective sigh as the peanut butter police came in, neither lugging a box or sack. The relief was intensified by the way the two men strode carefree into the room, big smiles on their faces.

  “Did you find anything?” Tuttu asked them.

  Natchiq looked at Amaguq, grinned, shrugged, and then pulled out a small clear-plastic bag. He held it up, and the chatter that had broken out upon their return stopped again. Then Igaluk, who had been seated by the front, laughed at what Natchiq had in his hand, and he whispered a word to his sister-in-law, and the word spread and the room broke up.

  Bubble gum. Natchiq held up a bag of bubble gum.

  Tuttu reached down, snatched the bag from Natchiq, and he slammed the podium. The villagers quickly shut up. Tuttu shook the bag, condemning the people.

  “Whose is this?” he yelled. “Whose house does this come from?”

  Natchiq rocked back and forth on his heels, a smile still on his face. “I don’t know, Cousin. We found it under a drum behind Igaluk’s house.”

  All eyes turned to Igaluk. He shrugged. “Not mine,” he said, grinning, large gaps in his mouth. Igaluk tapped at the spots where canines and incisors once had been.

  “Whose is this?” Tuttu repeated. He looked around the room, staring from old man to crone to man to boy to woman to girl. “Whose?”

  A small boy, Igaluk’s nephew, looked up from the hardwood floor, faced Tuttu, and stood. “Mine,” he said.

  “Yours?” Igaluk asked. “Samuel, you know the penalty.”

  “Ai, Uncle,” the boy said quietly. “I found it that night after the first raid on Stuaqpak—I think one of those bad guys dropped it, or threw it away. It’s not food, Uncle.”

  Tuttu looked at the kid, nodded. “It’s not food, boy. But it is something far more precious, because there may be no more bubble gum. Ever.”

  “I was going to share it with my friends,” Samuel said.

  Malgi turned to Claudia. “Anthropologist,” he asked. “What should we do?”

  Shit, she thought, here it comes again. Do I have to decide this boy’s fa
te? They will send him out on the tundra if they think that’s what the tradition should be. And they should, if they are to learn sharing. But it’s bubble gum, and he’s only a boy. She sighed, answered.

  “You must learn to share,” she said, hoping that Tuttu caught the spin on the word “you”—second person, plural. “We”—her heart caught at the plural again—“must all learn to share, if we are to survive.” There, she thought, let Tuttu do with that as he will. He looked at her, at Malgi—who nodded—and back at the boy.

  “The anthropologist is right,” Tuttu announced. “You must learn to share, boy.” He glared at him. “You will share this bubble gum,” he said firmly, but gently.

  “Yes, sir.” The boy looked up, the tone of Tuttu’s words hitting him. “You aren’t going to banish me?”

  Tuttu shook his head. “Give one piece to every child in this room, and then return what you have left to me. We will save this for the spring. Do you understand?” He stooped, looked eye to eye with the boy, and laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Ai,” he said, turning to distribute the gum.

  Tuttu held a grip on the boy’s shoulder. “Samuel. Is that a good Inupiaq name?”

  Samuel glanced over at his uncle, back to Tuttu. “Uncle says that when I find my—inua?—my animal spirit, I will have a real name.”

  “Ah.” Tuttu turned to Malgi. “Anthropologist, Grandfather, can this boy take another name until he finds his inua?” Claudia shrugged, and Malgi nodded. “Good. Then we will call you ‘Kutchuq,’ to remind you of your generosity.”

  “Kutchuq?” the boy asked. He looked at Igaluk. “Uncle?”

  Igaluk smiled. “‘Gum,’” he said. “It’s a good name.”

  The boy blushed. “Kutchuq. Az-ah.” Tuttu let him go, and Kutchuq began giving out pieces of bubble gum to the children.

  Kutchuq, Claudia thought. Okay, shame the boy a little. Yes, that was an old Inupiaq strategy, an old classic behavioral strategy. Make light of a transgression, but give it a name, make it long lasting, make it hard to live down. The boy would be reminded of his greed every time someone called his name, and yet he might work that much harder to prove his generosity. She knew he would work that much harder to get a real name, to prove himself as a hunter or as a fisherman, to find the spirit animal that would be special to him and dwell in his soul. Tuttu had handled it right, what did they need her for?

  As Kutchuq handed out the bubble gum, Tuttu finished calculating the rations. Working from Claudia’s census, he punched the names and ages of each family member, then figured out how many pounds of each supply they could take. As he input the data, as the little laptop did its thinking, a small dot matrix printer plugged into the laptop spat out sheet after sheet of decisions.

  Precious equipment, Claudia thought, powered by precious batteries charged by precious fuel. Precious food. She looked over at the rations Tuttu had calculated, gasped at the numbers: each family had maybe a month’s supply of food. One month.

  Natchiq tore off sheets as they came out, and read out the names of the houses. The families lined up one by one, and took boxes and plastic bags. Claudia helped Tammy and Kanayuq distribute the food, avoiding the questioning stares of the villagers as they saw their bags not being filled, at what little they were granted.

  “Any trading is allowed,” Tuttu announced, “you can do what you will with the food.” The villagers moved forward slowly, no pushing, no shoving, Claudia was glad to see. “And when you are done”—he let the words hang heavy in the air—“that will be it. Anything else we eat, or need, will have to come from the land, or what we can salvage.” He slammed a fist on the podium, waved a hand at the boxes of food. “This is it!” The villagers stopped from their collecting, looked up at him. And then he whispered, almost as if he really meant it, Claudia thought, Tuttu whispered what could have been praise: “Thanks to Mick and Karl and Edward.”

  * * *

  The wind howled from the northwest, a fall storm out of the North Pole, Odin’s hand, Claudia thought, pushing dark and cold and ice upon them. That’s how it would have seemed in Scandinavia, but in Utqiagvik the ice was the ice, not God or gods, just a great and horrible force howling in the night.

  False winter’s dark clouds hovered over the northern hemisphere still: the encompassing and covering clouds of dust and smoke, the microscopic remnants of cities and forests. They could still see the clouds in the brief twilight that passed for day, the sun rising low in the south, the black hood covering the sky. The sun never rose into the false winter, never rose above the clouds, but the cold that the clouds sent down chilled the Arctic that much faster.

  Earlier that morning Malgi had walked along the beach with Claudia, asking her seemingly naive questions, but pumping her for knowledge as she pumped him. A chill wind blew down from the north, and to Claudia it felt like any other wind, but Malgi stopped her, and sniffed the air.

  “Ai,” he said. “Smell that?”

  She made a show of breathing in the air deeply, then shook her head. Honor him, make him feel important, she thought, but she truly smelled nothing unusual. “What should I smell?”

  Malgi smiled, tapped his right nostril. “Storm smell,” he said, “the smell in the calm. An electrical smell, do you not know it? The smell televisions used to give off?”

  Used to give off? she asked herself. Ah. “Ozone?” At the word a memory from high school came to her: slipping a glowing stick into a bottle, a long piece of wood with an ember at the end, and inside the bottle sulfuric acid bubbling away zinc. The classic chemistry experiment, making hydrogen. The air popped as hydrogen exploded, and left behind was ozone and water. She remembered that faint smell of ozone, a burnt smell, almost. Claudia sniffed again, and the smell of the arctic air meshed with the smell of her childhood.

  “Yes, that’s it,” said Malgi. “Ozone. It is the smell of a storm.” He sniffed again. “A big storm.”

  A big storm, Claudia thought later as she crawled down the entrance tunnel to the outside door. Snow snuck through cracks around the edges of the door, and the wind puffed in and out, threatening to take the door off its hinges. Like a freight train, she thought. That’s how tornado survivors always described the sound of twisters: like a freight train. This wind, though, was more like a night of freight trains, like the hurricane she remembered from early childhood, wind that kept on and on and would seem to never end.

  She imagined the wind sweeping around the side of the qaregi, imagined it sloping over its curved walls. The roof of their guard tower might not be there in the morning, she thought, but that would be okay: no need for such protection anymore. Many things might not be there in the morning. Through the cracks in the door the wind whistled, a high-pitched screech that seemed to sneak around the limits of her eardrums. She could feel the pressure on her skin, on the subtler membranes of her body, felt the crackle in the air, and smelled that ozone again, yes, like charred electronics.

  Snow piled up on the edges of the drafty door, down the steps into the tunnel. Claudia had crawled down the tunnel in a big sweater, leaving her atigi behind, and regretted it instantly. With bare hands she cleared fine snow from between the cracks of the doorway, then wrapped a short length of rope around the handle, and pulled it shut tighter, cinching the end on a hook by the door. Wind still snuck through, would sneak through any crack it could find, no matter how small, she thought, but it wouldn’t be enough to tear the door away. But if more storms like this one were the norm, she thought, they’d have to build a stronger door. Still the qaregi inside kept warm, the wind and cold fading in the trap at the end of the entrance tunnel.

  As she turned to go back inside, she heard a groan coming from beneath the screech of the wind, a dull, insistent groan. Like boats. She remembered sleeping on a ship in a harbor once, and that had been like the sound she now heard: the groans of ships in their moorings rubbing against the dock. And yet this sound persisted, moaned underneath the high squeal of the wind. It felt like tw
o giants crashing against each other, two steel giants’ bodies grinding body into body. Claudia cocked an ear at the sound as she tried to imagine its source.

  Her nerves shivered as the realization came to her. The ivu. A storm surge pushed great rafts of ice—old ice, sea ice—up over the new ice, the ice merging, growing, grounding on the sea bottom, and being shoved inland. Utqiagvik’s great bluffs might keep the ice from climbing higher than the beach, might prevent the ivu from shearing the village surface like a galloping glacier. And then Claudia remembered the Frozen Family.

  Mound 44, she recalled, Old Man Dekin’s greatest triumph, an intact house found frozen—bodies and all—in the permafrost. Unlike other tombs, the house hadn’t been abandoned, the bodies hadn’t been buried; the house had collapsed on mother and children, the roof sealing them in the soil, the soil preserving them for centuries until a pothunter had found a foot, a human foot with skin and toenails, sticking out of the bluff. Reinhardt’s memoirs had told how as crew chief he and the rest of Dekin’s staff had worked around the clock to get the bodies out “until we felt as dead tired as the people we unearthed,” he wrote. The general conclusion had been that an ivu, a raft of ice, had been pushed over the bluff edge and down on the house. They hadn’t had a chance. The mother had grabbed a caribou skin, and put an arm around her child. They found her barely a meter from the katak, her chest crushed; she had never made it.

  Well, Claudia thought, well, if the ice came, it came, and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing she could do about it. She hoped the qaregi was inland enough from the bluff edge, that no great cube of ice would come skidding across the snow and onto their house. She hoped that if the ivu did come, it would kill them quickly. Maybe then the gnawing hunger inside her would end. Maybe then the great mystery of their survival would be over.