by Seth Kantner
Enuk hadn’t been found. Charley Casket found a moose skull in the fall when he was looking for bear dens. The skull had a .30-caliber bullet rattling inside—Enuk’s caliber, and other people’s, too. Charley, who walked creekbeds and cutbanks searching for mammoth ivory, teeth, and artifacts, also found a dog collar—sewed with sinew, that might have been off a dog of Enuk’s—washed up downriver on a sandbar.
In whichever direction Enuk lay, it was a long way from Janet’s shiny warm new HUD house. Abe wandered into my mind; what was he doing at this moment, light-years from this new world of mine, from Takunak, school, and NBC Night at the Movies? Likely he was kneeling naked, knifing kindling for the morning fire, or reading The Iliad or one of my leftover chemistry textbooks in front of a stubby candle. The wax would be running onto a coffee can lid that reflected the light, and, with the sides bent up, collected the wax so Abe could make a baby candle in tribute to his god of the Unwasters.
“Stevie,” Janet said. “Get up. It gonna be eight o’clock.”
“Adii.” Stevie moaned.
“Don’t always holler, Mom. Please.” Dawna’s voice floated out of the darkness.
“Dawna, you shudup!” Melt roared from bed.
The doors were broken out of both bedrooms. The shouting reverberated out to where I lay. Melt was beginning a hangover, and still buzzing too, as the guys called it. “STEV-VIE! You getup and go school.” Melt sat up from where he’d slept fully clothed on top of the covers. Nowadays he was like a bad-toothed brown bear in a wet den. Treason had moved up the hill to Janet’s brother’s, Woodrow Washington Jr.’s, because of Melt. He only came down to use the flush toilet. Woodrow’s grandkids had messed theirs up trying to flush caribou bones. Now it was just a shit basin, stinking up the house.
Melt despised having a naluaġmiu living under his roof. Janet was the only reason he couldn’t boot me out. Melt leaned against a chair. He switched to slurred Iñupiaq, forgetting that I was learning a few words. I’d lived here a month; he was telling Janet something about me going maatnugun. The thing I’d heard around town about Melt Wolfglove, guuq, was Tat was Enuk’s only son. He let him be funny and never try teach him nothing. Enuk was been too much watch any kinda white guy. Which, as far as teaching their kids, described many of the parents in Takunak. Which also translated to, Enuk liked white people. Which was a low thing to say about a dead elder, really.
Janet held a candle. She peered down and gripped my forearm in her fierce and tender grasp. She asked kindly, “You awake, Cutuk?”
“Yeah.”
“Coffee?”
I raised my eyebrows, yes in Iñupiaq, and she padded back with a steaming mug from the Mr. Coffee. My lips found the rim as she remembered the light switch and shattered the friendly darkness. I dressed into the distraction of a school morning, with stomach cramps from gulping Bisquick hot-cakes and Carnation canned milk in bitter coffee, rushed searches through the twisted heaps of clothes behind the stove for a missing one-side glove, missing homework papers—missing Iris and the land where no rules, no clock, only weather and the beautiful sky ruled my days.
Melt stood by the door. He shoved Dawna against the wall. The thin paneling bowed. He crushed her wrists in his hands. “You bring ta paycheck home tis time. Don’t buy ta weed like t’em other girls. Mom and me need money. We raised you up right from our pocket.” He let go of one of her wrists and wiped his mouth. He tilted and yanked himself straight, bruising her arm.
I faced the door, shaking, longing to loop a wolf snare over his head and pull all the slack out. Melt reached under his gut to tug at his hip pocket. “Right from our pocket we raised you up.” Dawna was inscrutable, only her eyes glittering. She tried to back away. A rifle leaning against the wall slid along the paneling and clattered to the floor.
“Aw shuck, you! You think you gonna be something else?”
“No!” Dawna’s lips tightened out of sight. Each exhale shook her. Stevie and I had fists at the ends of our arms and no idea whether we were breathing.
Melt picked up the fallen rifle.
“Go!” Janet said.
The three of us lunged into the qanisaq.
“GODDAMN RAISING YOU ALL, RIGHT FROM MY POCKET!”
Dawna slammed the door. I pulled my gloves on against the pinching cold, swallowed a laugh, picturing the three of us, an inch tall and trapped in Melt’s unwashed pocket. My leader, Plato, and a few of my dogs whined softly but didn’t uncurl from their melted ice circles. They were finally accustomed to me walking past them to school every morning—not coming out to run them.
We strolled up the hill toward school. Moose tracks crossed the hard-packed trail—a cow and calf had braved town. Dawna lagged farther and farther behind, heading to her morning job at the school office. Halfway up the ridge a big pretty husky lay frozen to the snow.
“Jus’ like one of Newt’s,” Stevie said, interested. “Nippy an’ them fellas feeling high musta been shoot it.” He kicked the rock-hard dog, twice, to break it loose. The way his leg moved reminded me of Melt kicking boots behind the stove. Dogs, in Takunak, had the rights and privileges of damp firewood—and little use now that snowgos had come. Stevie flipped the dog over. It squeaked and sawed the snow. The legs stuck out stiff and straight. The bottom was perfectly flat, still a little soft, and white around the edges with frost. We saw a bloody bullet hole in the chest, and a dark hole melted down into the snow. Behind my eyes lay the big silver wolf on Enuk’s sled, long ago.
“Stevie, what did you fellas do with that silver wolf Enuk got?”
“Which one? He get lots. I dunno. Could be Mom sew it. Or mice wreck it up.”
“How about all his stuff?”
“He never been have much. Melt pakik everything. Mom use lotta skins to sew gifts for all the people who help search and cook.”
Our breath rose in white clouds. The brilliant new streetlight at the top of the ridge splintered the snow into shards of shadow and light. I looked toward the hidden Shield Mountains. Across the tundra, far out of the fling of electric light and its confusion, curled in comfortable uninterrupted morning blackness lay the world that would always be real to me. Foxes and wolves, mice, the cold trees and buried sedges, all ancient vital members of the land.
I shook my head to clear the Abe-ism.
Whack. Whack. Stevie twirled Lumpy’s homemade broom handle numchuks, smacking the back of his nylon jacket. “I’m almost gonna be Bruce Lee!”
“You dream.” We laughed.
I glanced back at Dawna. Waited until she caught up, and shuffled beside her with my head down. “Alappaa, huh?” I pretended to warm my face with my hand, pressing my nose, trying to train it to flatten down and be wider. “He hurt you?” In the frozen morning air I bent close. “Dawna?”
“No.” Her smile bent. She pressed her face on my shoulder and walked leaning against me.
I moved slow across the snow, shocked to be touched, and not wanting to get anywhere nearer to school where she would not do this. In the distance a group of kids threw iceballs at crippled Timmy Feathers, warming up his day. Since Iris left, the summer before this last one, I’d longed for a woman to talk to. Young guys talked about snowgos, fights, girls, getting drunk; they imitated rifle discharges, bragged of caribou they’d “nailed.” The talk was intoxicating, but what remained was the race to be tougher, no tranquil thoughts to get warm around.
Dawna’s bare fingers sank into the side of my neck. She seldom wore gloves; she held her sleeves shut, as if she were simply waiting to leave this place of mittens and gloves.
“Cutuk, you know the nurse who came when I was nine? Alicia McBride?
“She was twenty-three. So pretty. Fellas all thought they were gonna make something about it. But she wasn’t like that. She wouldn’t smoke weed with my aunts. Alicia knew medicine, and good poems even. She never try let me eat porcupine shits like Melt does if I get stomachache. When I had hiccups she let me stare in her eyes and they go away. She asked me what
I liked best. I said ‘pictures.’”
Dawna stopped walking. “I think she liked herself the right amount. Like your dad, maybe.”
I stared across the darkness, at the school generator shack throbbing under a cone of yellow light. “Abe?” Dawna had never talked about way-inside feelings—I didn’t think anyone in Takunak even had them—and she never said Abe’s name.
She leapt a few steps sideways. “Look at me!” She giggled. “Pretend I’m just a picture and say what you see?”
Dawna stood still. The morning night and streetlight shared shadows on her face, glinting her eyes, laying dusk caves under her chin. Frost jeweled the black silk of her hair. She stood with her knees close, slightly bent in the cold, her stiff hard tennis shoes pressed together. A smile lifted the top line of her lip, folding it back provocatively. Behind her the school waited, for me a terribly cold heated place, for Dawna a pasture of popularity. My chest was full of air and empty. I loved her. I wanted to hold her. The magazines and TV didn’t know; beauty was Eskimo and brown and named Dawna Wolfglove.
“The prettiest girl ever,” I breathed.
Her smile vanished. “I want to go away where people are not messed up. Don’t try let it be tough.”
“You’re—” The words that came to me I could see were useless as lazy dogs and I let them go.
“You’re the only one I can talk to, and you can’t listen. My brothers, my aunts, my cousins. They’re being losers.”
I stared, dismayed.
“Alicia said I could follow her and go to college. But Melt threw her letters. Now she’s somewhere and I don’t know where even.” Dawna glared. She shoved my shoulders like the welcome to a fight. She was lithe, strong muscled like Enuk, quick-tempered. On New Year’s Eve she gave Elvis Jr. two black eyes. “He was drunk and tried to be funny to me,” she’d said. Which meant he’d tried to pants and rape her. She shrugged when she told me, and stuck out her tongue and laughed.
“So what, I’m pretty? Just like everybody only wants in my pants. Is that all you want, Cutuk? You want to nulik?”
“Dawna! That’s not what I meant.” My face felt red, my voice thick with disgust. I laid an arm across her shoulders, clumsy with uncertainty.
“I need to leave around here!” She shrugged away. “This is some kinda no-place place to be from.”
I trudged for the school. My safe smile on. “Where you think you’ll maybe go?”
“Cutuk!” Now Dawna sounded like she cared. None of it made sense—didn’t the whole town love her and think I was dogshit? Lower than dogshit. Dogshit was everywhere. Dogshit was normal. “I’ll go Anchorage,” she said, pronouncing it the way the religious ladies pronounced heaven. A twinge tightened my stomach. I heard Iris’s same unhesitating tone, First boat after Breakup. And now she was down in Fairbanks, deep in her college lectures, scribbling notes. Her letters were scribbled notes, happy rushed things cluttered with friends. Meanness flowered inside; suddenly I hated Dawna, and the cities because they were coming, and already claiming the best of everything we had. I felt the pull to go, too. Abe had mentioned there used to be bars in Anchorage and Fairbanks with signs out front that said NO NATIVES. I didn’t quite believe that he hadn’t gotten confused as usual and really meant NO WHITES. I knew exactly how that sign would make me feel; the other I couldn’t say. Probably just as mad. Hopefully not gleeful. Maybe it was true, and Dawna would feel what I felt whenever people aimed their eyes my way.
Suddenly I felt cheap. Had to spit, and shake my face. Dawna better never have to feel the kind of crushed stuff inside my skin. We walked on in the silent movies of our thoughts, our eyes flitting along the parallel grooves left by snowgo skis on snow compressed hard and white as porcelain.
THE BASKETBALL BOUNCES OFF MY FACE.
“How come you always never can’t catch nothing?” Nippy Skuq Jr. had a gash across his forehead and a brand-new shiner. He stank sour. Booze sweat. I thought about telling him I didn’t grow up with balls, but it didn’t seem like the thing to say. His brother Elvis Jr. rushed across the snow court. I thought about telling Elvis that his mom had named him Junior, too—not after his wife-beating bumpy-eyed dad, but a fat-chinned singing white drunk, in a movie.
Elvis and Nippy weren’t even in school anymore; they had dropped out and now their lives balanced between the bottle and the basketball rim. They’d joined the National Guard. For a month. Then returned with cropped hair and word of how they’d served in the Marines and been taught kung fu.
I started laughing. I couldn’t control it. It happened when things were completely unfunny. My palm unconsciously wandered up, to flatten my nose.
Nippy shoved my shoulder. “’Cause you’re naluaġmiu. Ha!”
“Don’t be mean,” Dollie Feathers cried. She was Dawna’s cousin. Treason and her were “going out,” guuq.
My nose watered. I backstepped, hands like flippers protecting my eyes. Kids gathered in the familiar loose circle. Elvis moved forward for the kick, the face kick we all delivered in our karate daydreams. Suddenly he was my size, no longer the giant he’d been all my life. I’d grown up hauling logs, holding back huskies. I grabbed his foot and threw him on the ground. My fists were square clubs that swung themselves. That face that leered at everything I had ever been—I hit it down.
I expected the usual boots, brothers, and cousins on my back, but Lumpy dragged me off, his thick forearm clamping my throat in a fancy headlock he’d brought us home from Nome’s Anvil Mountain Correctional Center.
“Enough,” he growled in my ear.
The ring of faces were sharp. Elvis came into focus, puffy and the corners of his eyes sticky with blood. The circle stared. “What you try to prove?” Elvis’s sister screamed. “Nobody wants honkies around here. Go back to Dallas or someplace.” She spat and threw an open 7UP can at my head.
I dodged it. “I’m not from Dallas.” My voice sounded wet.
“Aiy!”Girls jeered and stepped away, like nervous herd animals, but acting nauseated. Nervous caribou, at least, had never been nauseated by me.
Little kids raced up to see what was going on. They skidded to stops, spitting and patting snowballs. There wasn’t anything grosser than me to throw at on the playground. I didn’t know which way to look, if I should blink more or less. If I should run, and which way not to catch a beating. I slumped there—only I could win a fight this badly.
“Elvis, you got what you been asking him for, how many years now,” Stevie said scornfully. He leaned out a window of the school. His fingers were on the sill. His words were electric. I lifted my head, eager to beat up anybody else available, basking in the lee of scorn, for one time aimed the other way. And no matter where the years might haul us, I promised I would not forget what I owed Stevie Wolfglove for standing up for Cutuk Hawcly on the packed snow, gum wrappers, and spit ice of the Takunak school playground.
NINE
BEHIND WOODROW WASHINGTON JR.´S new government house the Arctic Cat snowgo gleamed on the snow. Woody flicked a cigarette stub away. “It got only”—he peered at the speedometer—“only four thousand mile. Not bad, huh?”
“The radius of the earth,” I murmured. A ways to travel on a snowgo.
Woody grinned and shrugged. He had a slow smile that the women liked. “Maybe not that far I guess.”
“Thousand dollars? How come you’re selling it?”
Charley Casket walked up. He spat. We talked about the weather for a minute. He held out his hand, cupping a jade arrowhead. “Fifty bucks. You could sell it five hunnert, I guess. Could be more.”
Woody ignored him and nodded toward his other snowgo. “I got new Panther. When I go Prudhoe everybody always borrow. Goddamn, when I come home all my good stuffs jus’ be junks. My clothes even, ready for dumps.” Woody wore an expensive leather jacket. A gold watch hung loose and cool on his brown wrist. He was a good-looking man and dressed like a catalog.
I knelt down, admiring the thick springs and shocks under the tracks
. Charley gripped the throttle, wide open.
“Let that be,” Woody said coldly.
Charley’s hand dropped. “I gonna get new Indy six-fifty. Next month, alright. For sure.”
Woody didn’t respond.
I looked at pictures in my mind—riding up to the school Monday morning. Searching valleys for Enuk. Impulsively, I handed Woody my rumpled thousand-dollar Alaska Permanent Fund check. The state had started giving a yearly oil-money bonus to every man, woman, and child. This year, the second, had been three hundred and eighty-six dollars. Charley’s eyes followed the check. I didn’t bargain with Woody. Bargaining was white, uncomfortable. Regular people said, I’ll pay you when my check comes, and if by then they arbitrarily decided the price was too high, they just didn’t pay.
He ran his thumbnail along the zeros. “How I’m gonna cash this before I—Yuay, Cutuk! You never spent your last year’s Permanent Fund?” Woodrow grinned. Only a white person was crazy enough to save a thousand-dollar check. For a year.
“I didn’t have anything to buy. Abe wanted me to buy a wind generator. Or solar panels, but they’re made by ARCO, too.” I trailed off; Abe’s fossil-fuel philosophy was meaningless here. I felt anxious to drive away. I had just turned eighteen but still glanced about, as if there was a hurry, before Abe stepped around the corner of the house, reminding: “What about your dogs? And the petroleum just to manufacture the seat on that machine . . .”
Woody stepped up on his porch and placed the check in his Eddie Bauer leather wallet. Charley pushed his gloves in his pocket and wandered west watching the ground go under him. I yanked the starter. The snowgo sparked to life with a throaty roar, full of its own dangerous power. My body seemed to expand with the vibrating machine. I felt young and lunging with strength, not only from the engine, but also the potency of buying. This was why people lusted after money. Why villagers seldom walked unless they had to.
I was still floating when I located Nelta Skuq, the gas pump attendant. She had slipped home from work and was with her parents, eating caribou soup, the bowl right up close to her lips. Her mom had a tremendous necklace of bruises across her throat. Nelta had equally tremendous hickeys. Her youngest brothers—or her kids; I didn’t know which—ate strawberry Pop-Tarts out of a box. They all hunkered around a glowing hot plate. A Jesus hologram hung over the kitchen counter. The floor was unfurnished to the walls, the linoleum gouged and worn through to plywood. Around the worn holes, the linoleum had been stapled down with hundreds of staples. An empty whiskey bottle lay in the doorway to the toilet. Skuqs’ toilet was clogged. With dog chain. Folks in town knew these things, whose flush toilet worked and who was back to crapping in a kerosene can. A whitefronted goose—what people called a luck-a-luck—lay on the floor as if he’d been shot that morning. A luck-a-luck was all about the open air of spring, and bewildering to see in February. It took effort to remember that this house and all the other HUD houses that replaced people’s cabins had been sparkling new American store-bought houses three years ago.
