Boys kept diving off the bridge. The girls were dressing and undressing on their side. When they came out they shivered.
At ten or eleven at night, when dusk rose out of the island like fog, the river beneath the bridge darkened until it resembled the purple altar-hanging with its polar bear and stars, its two igloos, and its man and woman entering the yellow-windowed church. I had felt rejected by the Anglican god until the second Sunday, when the white-gowned priest shook my hand, and they sang one hymn in English; I realized that that was for me. On the third Sunday a man loaned me his battered hymnal, and the priest preached part of the sermon in my language. I loved that church. The youngest children were screaming, crying, talking, giggling, going in and out to their hearts' content, leaping into the arms of their parents and kissing them. People smiled at me at the church door. I was happy to be with them. That was how it was swimming, too. Entering the cool rocky water, trying not to stub my toe or be knocked backward when kids jumped onto my shoulders, I agreed to underwater contests with all comers, especially with the nine-year-old boy who chewed snuff and with the fat boy whose glistening black pants upturned as he stood on his head underwater, bringing up a rock, spouting through his mouth.
It was just before nine. The sky was pale blue, with a cold evening wind. The sun was somewhat low in the sky. The boys hunched over, pulling their caps lower against the mosquitoes. They kept asking questions about my Indian girl. They'd seen a nude I'd painted of her. Was she Inuk? Was she mine? What color were her pubic hairs? What color were her nipples? Was her hole thick? Did I lick her hole?
But I could handle them. One of them, the kindest ugliest one, had already confided to me: In this town, we answer a question only by I don't know and probably. — He was the plump shaggy one in coveralls who'd taught me that in the dialect of this town hello was kujalu, which actually meant let's have sex; he'd taught me that goodbye was iti-pau, which really meant your ass is full of coal. I'd said kujalu to a serious man on a four-wheeler; the man stopped, gazed at me, and inquired politely: Are you a prostitute? — The shaggy boy and his friends laughed so hard they fell down onto the tussocks frosted with pale green lichens. After that I saw the shaggy boy every day. He'd drive up in his Fourtrax, pink-brimmed cap pulled low and backward, stand on a rock, and ask all the shivering kids if the water was hot. No matter what they replied, he'd lean over, squinting at the water, blink, and drive off to get his bathing suit and towel. On that very first night when he'd teased me, he taught me about I don't know and probably.
So come on, aye? How deep was her hole?
I don't know, I said, poker-faced like him.
Did you get her pregnant?
Probably.
Yes or no?
I don't know.
Then they slowly grinned. I was one of them.
Maybe I'm gonna get one tonight, too, said a twelve-year-old.
I got fifty girlfriends and they're all pregnant from me! a nine-year-old cried proudly. (I'd met him on a hot day of grey dust and white dust when a wedding cavalcade set out for Fossil Creek. He was the one whose big brother had seen a polar bear that day about six miles out, just swimming.)
You gonna dive? said the shaggy boy.
Half a moment later, creamy white splashes formed around the reddish bodies. I flitted with them through the exquisitely cold water. I watched those kids throwing stones, crawling into shallows, calling: le's go, aye? back and forth between the two grassy gravelly shores under a chilly purple-colored wind.
Coral Harbour, Southhampton Island,
Northwest Territories, Canada (1993)
It was a gray chilly evening and everyone was at the bridge. The girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid crouched on the railing, shouting: All right, you motherfuckers!
Come on, Lydia, jump! they shouted up from the water. Five, four, three, two, one!
If you talk like that I'll never fuckin' jump!
As I approached, she shouted at me: Get out of my fuckin' way!
She looked like a boy as she stood here on the bridge with her wet hair gray against the skull—very different from when she'd been in my tent, lounging so sexually, swearing and smoking cigarettes. — By now, practically everybody who swam had come to see me. The boys would visit my tent three or four at a time, burping and farting, drinking from my canteen and spitting jawbreakers into it when they talked, then sucking them out, trying on my hat and glasses, shouting with laughter at how stupid each one became in them, joking about fucking dead seals, telling me that if when I shat I wiped my ass with a rock then any seal I shot would sink, making hangman's nooses in the ceiling—good company, in short. The shaggy boy loaned me his favorite thing, his electronic keyboard, for a night and a day without my dreaming of asking for it, and I listened to it play "Ave Maria" over and over, the dogs pleading and cursing across the water. The ten- and twelve-year-old boys were always giving me snuff. A boy brought me a dried hunk of the caribou his brother had shot two weeks before in Arviat; another brought me a piece of his mother's fresh-baked bannock. He was the boy who collected the offerings in a vessel of sealskin, then held them high above the altar until the congregation had finished singing the hymn. — When you come back, we'll go out there to the place of birds with sharp tails and get their eggs! he promised me.
Beaks, not tails! said his friend.
No, tails. A beak is a tail. A bird got two tails.
Is that girl your girlfriend? a boy asked me. He was one of the ones I knew from backfloating and glistening, heads and bodies sparkling with windy light.
Probably.
Is she always naked?
Probably.
Is she pregnant from you?
No.
Why? he cried in surprise.
Sometimes girls came to visit, too. I lived in a fine spot that summer, in a place between two lakes where my friend was a chalk-yellow flower with the lemon-yellow center, and another friend was the long woolly sausage of a willow bud. Brown birds danced through the moss. When my guests got close I'd hear them exclaim at all the birds. — One girl said: My grandmother saw a big black bird in the morning when she was young. Bigger than this little house. It tried to catch kids. — I'd hear the girls unzipping my back doors since my front door was broken; I'd hear them unlacing their boots as they knelt upon the giving, prickly-brittle mound of lichens. I knew them; I'd seen them on Sundays listening to the the little white-robed trio at the altar; I knew those girls' slender arms and the way their shirts worked up to flash their bikini-breasts in the water. They called each other sluts and talked about the boys whom they wanted to fuck. They shot my pistol. They asked for liquor, which I didn't have. Sometimes boys and girls would come together. When my tent was crowded, a boy would just pull his coat over his shoulders and his girl's shoulders so that they could kiss in private. That reminded me of the bridge, too, where the women tented inside towels or quilts as they changed. Everything had begun to remind me of the bridge by then. It was as if this island where water pulsed around me between long blue windblown pond-fingers were inside a paperweight. There was nothing but this. Alone in my tent at night, chilly from my day's swim at the bridge, I dreamed of grabby willow-islands and also good flat stones to cross, but grassy mossy bogs on either side. The world went chill and grey as more clouds thrust their elbows across the sky. And in the morning when I heard my friends coming, I knew that we would go together to the bridge. I felt interested in their loves, being but a spinning camera eye which could not and must not love them because I would never come back. — The girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid and the boy who always got into trouble loved each other, I think, but they never visited me at the same time. My best Polaroid was of him, and that was why she stole it.
Do you swear? she'd said.
No.
Why? she said contemptuously. Do you use drugs?
Sometimes.
Why not all the time?
When at last she jumped, unannounced, long after everyone had given up
on her, I saw the dance of her white breasts through her wet T-shirt, the fierce downward point of the running shoes she'd swiped from one of the younger kids and then she was in the air but still very far away and then with the ripping-cloth noise of a gyrfalcon swooping to protect its nest she plunged into the cold brown water with a roar and a splash, bobbing back up immediately among the other orange faces rising and falling in the dark water which was occasionally stained orange by the bridge's reflection.
The boy she loved, the one in the Polaroid, was the boy who'd slit his wrists because he was caught breaking into the mayor's office, "just to see what was there," and his mother (he was adopted) said that none of her real offspring would have done that, so he said: I'm gonna die, Mom.
He sat in my tent, playing with my scare pistol. — I think my uncle saw I slit my wrists, he beamed. I told my cousin if my Dad don't change, I'm gonna go all the way!
Minutes later he was swimming and laughing.
After the girl who loved him jumped, he clambered up the chickenwire-lined gravel wall of the bridge, passing the small girl who clung peering at a baby bird, until he stood beside me in the spot where his admirer had stood, and in lordly summer silence the two of us surveyed the black turtles' backs of rocks under the greenness and brownness, and kids' skinny phosphorescent bodies making waves like obsidian arrowheads.
Dive in, Jobie! cried she who loved him. Splash me good or I'm gonna quit!
He pretended to look away from her upturned face. Then, smiling, he dove. The river exploded with his splash (the lake where the river came from was a swollen gray cloud with orange bloodstains on it).
Oh, my toe hurts! cried a water-spouting girl.
What about my balls? he shouted, and they all laughed.
The girl who loved him stood where the water was only knee-deep, her wrists clasped across her breasts, watching him and shivering. — Let's go to the other side an' dive! she said. Then she crept all the way into the cold water.
The boy in the Polaroid's cousins were clinging to him and he was shouting: Get the hell off! and they were all laughing. He was so strong and perfect; he fought the strange current inch by inch with girls hanging on him and shouting: A world record! and when by dint of great shoulder-flashes and whirling arms, spray shooting from his rich black hair, he succeeded in touching the rock where the bird's nest was, he only smiled modestly and said: Clear water, anyway. — But the girl who loved him stood shyly on the other side where he had not come to dive, and she was alone.
The shaggy boy's little sister, kneeling in a wet blue shirt, was not alone although nobody kept her company down at the river's mouth where she could still see three figures poling very slowly out in an aluminum canoe, the bow tipping down almost to water level with every stroke of the tall figure, and then they vanished behind a sailing ship in the middle of the harbor. The shaggy boy's little sister was wringing out her swimming clothes in the brown water, tossing and turning them quietly as if she were cooking strips of bacon She was the ten-year-old who'd burned her nose smoking a cigarette. Water ran down her pouting lips.
Coral Harbour, Southhampton Island,
Northwest Territories, Canada (1993)
Coming back from the river with the white crosses of the graveyard ahead of me, I found the sun more rubicund, fractured with splinters of dark cloud. I took the high road, the only road, already seeing the hemisphere of my tent across that lakey plain which was interrupted by half-sunken rocks, clumps of grass, tussocks shared by mossy lichens and flowers, and the occasional dwarf willow colony creeping across the flatness like sturdy wire unraveling leafily in any direction. Summer was rushing in tune with the yellow rhapsody of wind-dancing buttercups. The darkness was oozing back. I inhaled the reddish sun-jelly, the sweets of evening seemingly comprised of melted berries.
When I stepped on one gray slab it grated down upon another rock with a terrifying snarling laugh.
After half a dozen hours of being tentbound by a windy rain, I heard birds sing again and came out to find one of the strangest and most beautiful skies that I had ever seen: pale beams of light descending like spider-legs from a gray cloud's body, and then other patches and pools of the same light, more and more fantastic in shape, strings of flying pillars like leads in pack ice. Scarcely an exhalation of air. The birds called, the grasses did not flinch, and then a gust came after all.
I walked through town. The boy from Arviat had a brown bird in his hand, a little brown baby. He let it go. He said: Maybe if I keep it the mother is sad. And maybe in just a few minutes it will starve.
One time I was playing with a baby bird and it died so quickly from starving. — I went through that low flat town of small houses and passed the nursing station, the well-fenced reservoir (which still had chunks of ice inside), and came back to the open road, the bay on my right, a long low snowsquiggled purple cape on the horizon, and then clouds and wind.
They said that the girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid liked to talk about suicide. They said that her parents were always drunk. They said that her parents didn't want her. (Sure, I know her Mom and Dad, said a white guy in town who always fed me on beef stew and pie because he pitied my tenty existence. He was a good and great and generous man who hated the notion that someone might see that he was good. He gave aw3y money and time left and right and flew into a rage when people thanked him. He sat in his coveralls of wrinkled water-metal, resting on his laurels, a veteran of forest fires, mining accidents, bar fights and bad acid trips, bored and weary in the overheated hotel, worried about his blood pressure, watching adventure videos, keeping count of the number of N.E.'s. — What are N.E.'s? I said. — Nipple erections, son, he explained. You must be a tenderfoot not to know that. Have some more pie. Yeah, I know her Mum and Dad. I know them, all right. Can't take care of their own children. They both work in my crew, when they work. I don't want to lay anybody off, 'cause they need the work. I hope I don't have to lay them off. But I hate these two lazy bastards. They should have their tubes tied. I hate this place. Soon as my contract's up, I'm out of here. I hate those fucking Inuktituks. They think this hellhole's the best place in the world and no one can tell 'em any different. Well, everyone shits on the Newfies, but one thing you gotta say for 'em: they don't got an Indian problem. Took care of that first thing.*) So that was the story of the girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid. Her life was like some cold wide shallow pond rushing straight at her with fan-shaped waves, the wind picking up now, not yet strong enough to throw more than foam in her face.
That was all I learned, and I didn't see every twist her courtship took, because it wasn't my business and after all I had my own swimming to attend to. (One sign of spiritual development, Buddhists and Christians agree, is drinking more water and enjoying it more, so swimming must be good for you, too.) I swam until my hands went numb and red. They were fiery when I got out and started walking home, the sun low over heaps of rock. I had no towel, so the shaggy boy loaned me his. He was one of the many souls who seemed to be looking only into your eyes but who'd suddenly point off toward Hudson Bay and cry: Look, Bill, a weasel, weasel! There, there! — They could all see things which I couldn't. Sometimes they seemed uncanny to me. They lived on their island amidst the ruins of a race of giants. The boy from Arviat rode me on his four-wheeler out to Kirchoffer Falls, where the water was sea-green and seemingly gelid: transparent, swirly, filled with bubbles like bath gel. The mosquitoes did not find us right away. He showed me where to walk up and down the poppied stairs of cliff. I scanned the inukshuks* on the opposite bank, which was also a long cliff comprised of slabs of reddish rock, here and there a paler gravelfall; and then he showed me the Tuniit house, a rock-rimmed pit in the moss.
The Tuniit were strong, said the boy from Arviat. So strong they could lift a big rock or a polar bear with one hand.
What happened to them?
The Inuit killed them, I think, he said. A Tuniit man had sex with an Inuk woman, and an Inuk man got so mad he killed m
any, and the rest ran away.
When I asked the shaggy boy, he said: Some sailors came, and then they got sick. All their wives died, so they couldn't make new people.
So they're all dead?
All dead, except maybe one or two. They don't know they're Tuniit, 'cause they got adopted.
What would you do if you found out you were one of them?
I don't know. Nobody would touch me then because I'd be too strong.
The Atlas Page 18
