by Don Reardon
He’d start with the school, the heart of every village: the sanctuary for kids, the public meeting place, the dance hall, the non-stop basketball court, and the community dining room. If he were to find anything of use, it would be there.
The school, a boxy green building, stood on skinny metal pilings with chain-link fence wrapped around the base to keep kids from playing under it, something he’d learned the villages started doing after losing more than one structure to bored kids playing with matches.
The unbroken windows and the small drift of snow building up at the front door didn’t make sense. He stopped and inspected the grated steel walkway that led into the building. The heavy door wasn’t open wide, broken, or pried—it was closed. He could see no sign of tracks. He listened until the silence made him uneasy. A quick glance at the wide river and at the open tundra behind the school was enough to tell him no one was coming. He looked again closer, for someone wearing all white and staring back at him.
He gave the door a tug, and it opened silently.
He stepped inside and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. He looked for something to prop the door open for light and found a plastic garbage can. He shoved it into the doorway and turned back to the foyer.
He expected a ransacked, vandalized shell of a building. He expected something that looked the way he felt.
As his pupils expanded in the darkness, he put his hand into his pocket and rested it on the pistol.
The hallway was clean. No broken glass. No scattered papers or books. No signs of violence.
He took a deep breath as he read the sign on the entrance wall: WELCOME TO KUIGPAK ELITNAURVIK! HOME OF THE WOLVERINES.
He took another deep breath. The air in his nostrils didn’t smell like death. It smelled like a school.
THE ALASKA COMMERCIAL COMPANY STORE made up the town centre of Bethel, but he only guessed this by the twenty half-wrecked taxis and, oddly, one Hummer stretch limo idling in the pothole-laden parking lot. Anna went for a walk on the tundra with some other teachers, and so he figured he’d get ready for their morning flight into the village. On the advice of several seasoned village teachers, he popped into the city’s main grocery store to stock up on a few fresh vegetables and other necessities just in case it took a week or two for their boxes of canned goods to arrive in the mail.
“It’s always good to have too much food,” a balding, middle-aged principal said when Anna asked, during one of the in-service Q&A sessions, if there had ever been a food shortage. The two supply sources, by barge for only a few months in the summer and by air year-round weather permitting, seemed inadequate, so Anna’s question was fair.
Lucy, also on the panel, said that in Yup’ik history there had been several famines, and in bad fish years, when the salmon didn’t return, bad things had happened and people took extreme measures to survive.
With the session’s dialogue replaying in his mind, he entered the store half expecting a warehouse-style market, a place for people from the surrounding villages to come and load up on bare necessities. Instead, he entered what appeared to be a modern one-stop shopping centre. At first glance, the place looked like a Wal-Mart of sorts, with everything from vegetables to full-size ATVs all stuffed into one building. The first major difference he noticed from any other store he’d ever been in was the prices.
$7.99 for a small bag of potato chips.
$8.99 for a gallon of milk.
$13.99 for a gallon of orange juice.
“Holy shit,” he whispered to himself as he stood in front of small display of semi-fresh fruits and vegetables.
Cucumbers $6.99—each.
He reached out and touched a watermelon as big as a volleyball. The red and white sign beside it read:
AC VALUE PRICES
WATERMELON $12.99 PER LB.
He found himself wondering how anyone could afford to eat.
After ten minutes of idle walking, he grabbed a grocery cart and started meandering through the aisles. He wasn’t shopping for specials. Just the basics. Just enough to get them by until their boxes arrived.
As he shopped he smiled at those who passed him. He couldn’t get over the diversity of the town. For lunch they’d dined at Demitri’s, and he ate one of the best gyros he’d ever eaten, the night before the tastiest Mongolian beef he’d ever had, and by the next night he was going to be one of three white men living in a Yup’ik village in the middle of nowhere with almost nothing other than canned or frozen food to eat.
He stopped at an extensive Asian section and just stood staring at the selection in amazement. The shelves carried cans and jars labelled in Japanese, Chinese, and Thai. Nothing about this place called Bethel made sense. He picked up a bottle of fish sauce and wondered what Yup’ik cuisine tasted like. If it was anything like Thai or Chinese or Indian or Vietnamese, he was going to love it.
“Excuse me. You’re a new teacher?”
He looked up from the bottle and realized he’d been oblivious to the old Yup’ik man standing beside him, the grocery cart nearly shoulder-height to the man. The man wore a green flannel shirt, aviator sunglasses, a faded blue baseball cap with ARCTIC AIR printed in white on it, and jeans tucked into black rubber boots.
“Yeah. I’m John. John Morgan.”
The old man took his hand and gave it a single quick shake.
“Charlie,” he said. “I was at the cultural centre today, same as you.”
“The in-service?” John asked.
The old man raised his eyebrows. A non-verbal, he’d just learned, used as an affirmative answer.
“That woman who asked about famine ever happening here—she your wife?”
“She is. She was just wondering how food gets to villages. She didn’t mean anything by it. She’s just inquisitive.”
“Long time ago we had no food. Me, I was just barely old enough to walk, but I remember my stomach burning real bad. I remember we had only old dry berries and rotten old salmon with mould on it. The elders said it was punishment, that we were starving because we left the old ways behind.”
He waved his arm around at the store and then hefted the red plastic AC Value basket in his hand. In it, a blue box of Sailor Boy Pilot Bread, a can of hickory-smoked Spam, and a Weekly World News.
“Nowadays,” he continued, “maybe I’m almost an elder and maybe I think this way’s leaving us behind. They teach you what the word Yup’ik used to means?”
John shook his head. “No, not yet,” he said.
“Maybe they’ll learn you someday. Good luck out there, John.”
The old man gave a slight nod of goodbye and disappeared down the aisle, his red plastic basket swinging at his side.
SINCE HE’D DISCOVERED the girl his dreams were unlike any he’d ever had before. Not the normal dreams of daily life, of interactions with other teachers and students, not scenes from his youth, and not of Anna.
Instead, his dreams contained the atmosphere and darkness of a world without light. A combination of some horrific vision of what might be happening to the outside world, filled with the creatures and images from the girl’s stories of the ancient Yup’ik world.
He would find himself enveloped in a stark, bleak, lifeless void. He would walk down empty black streets in desolate and dingy towns. Sometimes towns he’d travelled to, sometimes just generic towns from books he’d read or films he’d watched. In all the dreams he walked. Just looking, listening, searching for life, sometimes looking for a letter from his grandfather that would explain everything.
And sometimes there were signs of struggle. Blood. Smeared tracks and tiny handprints. A small creature, half-human, crawled about in the shadows, devouring survivors before he could find anything more than a crimson trace.
Not in a single dream did he walk down along one of the frozen paths between the village houses, carrying his rifle, afraid of the life he might find. The dreams seemed to have nothing to do with him now, except for the desolation and that heavy feeling that the world was
as empty and soulless as those small towns. He expected to encounter any one of her monsters or the blue-eyed gunslinger he’d dreamt of before, but perhaps even they were dead.
The dreams differed only in how they ended—with each dream stopping so abruptly it would rip him from his sleep. Heart contracting in his chest. Fists clenched. The grit of freshly ground bits of molars and incisors sticking to his dry tongue. And each time the girl would whisper, “It’s okay. Don’t cry. It’s okay, John.”
9
He pulled the pistol out and held it out in front of him as he moved along the hall, past the display cases full of basketball and wrestling trophies. No broken glass.
The building, aside from having no lights or heat, looked as though school let out for the day, the janitors vacuumed the blue hallway carpet and shut the doors. Of all the burned and wasted buildings he’d been in, he’d seen nothing so normal. He hadn’t been in a school building, village store, house, or fish camp that hadn’t been picked clean.
He peeked into the main office area. Also clean. A phone, off the hook. From the soft winter light coming in through the window he spotted a yellow plastic flashlight, standing at the edge of a bookshelf. He tested it. The light snapped on, and he stared at the glowing bulb for several seconds before he shut it off. A working flashlight! He opened a few desk drawers and found more batteries. A pack of gum. Some Aspirin. He pocketed it all.
He would check all the drawers more carefully, but first he had to look through the kitchen and storage rooms. If no one had cleaned the office out, there still might be food somewhere.
He stuffed the flashlight in his pocket with the gum and Aspirin and started toward the gym. He held the pistol out in front of him, still not sure what to think about the untouched school.
The kitchen would be off the side of the gym, which, as in all the village schools he’d been to, would also serve as the cafeteria, the largest, darkest part of the building, the last place, really, he wanted to enter, but the possibility of shelves loaded with canned fruits, vegetables, and even a canned chicken or two made his stomach tighten. He stopped at the heavy double doors to the gym and turned on the flashlight.
He pushed the latch to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. He tried again. He looked around for something to pry the door with, but the empty hall offered no ideas. As he walked back to the office he poked his head into the classrooms. They too were in order. A locked gym almost made sense.
Back in the office he opened drawers, looking for keys. All he could find was a Phillips screwdriver, not enough to break the lock on the door. In a small room off the side of the main office, he sat down at what he figured was the principal’s desk, rummaged through the drawers, and then tried to think where someone might hide a master key for the school. He felt around under the desk, imagining he might find a key taped underneath. Nothing.
He sat, resting for a moment. Thinking. Then he saw the legal notepad. The black pen that had written the scrawled message sat, with the cap off, to the side of the three words:
For the children.
THE MORNING OF THEIR FLIGHT the rain came shooting sideways from the west with gale-force winds that shook the mud-covered school district Suburban delivering them to Gary Air. The vehicle pulled up to an oblong office building attached to a hangar on a road with half a dozen other small airline companies.
“Don’t suspect you’ll be flying out today,” the driver said through a full blond and grey beard that John guessed he’d been cultivating for the last decade. The driver pulled up to the door of the airline and stopped. He turned the wipers off and slipped the vehicle into Park. “If you get stuck, tell ’em to call Ross—they got his number. He’ll find you a place to stay tonight.”
“Thanks,” John said.
“Stuck?” Anna asked.
The driver turned to the back seat, where Anna sat, tightening the knot on her raincoat hood. “You can expect to be stuck or delayed at least every other time you fly around here, if’n you’re lucky. I hope you get out. But if you don’t, well, that’s how it goes. You’re stuck.”
“Thanks again,” John said, and he stepped out into the torrent.
Inside they stood at the counter, a chipped Formica construction that looked as if it had been taken from an old kitchen and slapped on a plywood frame. A Yup’ik boy, fourteen or fifteen, sat behind the counter playing a hand-held video game. He wore a black knit AND1 stocking cap pulled down tightly around his head.
“We’re flying out to Nunacuak today,” Anna said.
The boy didn’t look up from his game. “Maybe not today,” he said.
“Do you work here?”
He paused his game and looked up at them. “Not today, if the weather’s staying like this.”
“We’re supposed to leave at nine, I think?”
“I’ll get a weather update at ten. There’s coffee.”
He pointed to a coffee pot with a stack of white plastic cups sitting beside it. The phone rang. He went back to his game and picked it up on the fifth ring.
“Gary Air,” he said curtly. “Weather delay. Maybe we’re not flying. We’ll know more at ten or eleven.”
He hung up the phone and went back to his game. John shrugged, leaned his pack against the wall, and started for the coffee pot. He stopped at the small table that held the pot, cups, creamer, and sugar packs.
“Did we send any coffee filters?”
“I don’t remember,” Anna said. “Coffee is your ball of wax.”
“Crap. I don’t remember either. You think they sell coffee filters out there?”
“You could use an old sock.”
He poured himself a cup, took a sip, and grimaced.
“Tastes like his sock,” he whispered, thumbing toward the kid behind the desk.
And so they sat all day, drinking coffee, listening to the kid play video games and tell callers to check back in another hour to see if the planes were flying. The two of them knew they weren’t going anywhere.
The wind splattered the rain in sheets against the finger-marked window that looked out to the soaked black tarmac. A fleet of planes, mostly Cessnas, spanned a quarter mile of asphalt-covered tundra.
“I’m kind of scared to fly in one of those,” she said.
“I don’t think you’ll be flying in one today.”
“Why aren’t you ever afraid of dying?” she asked.
“Who said I’m not?”
“Well, those little planes look spooky. I wish there was another way to get out there.”
“We could find someone to take us in a boat.”
“No, thanks. Not in this weather. Where are we going to sleep tonight? Here?” she asked.
“At this point, I don’t really care. I just want to get there already.”
He took what must have been his hundredth sip of coffee. She reached over and took his hand.
“Can you believe we’re doing this?”
“Waiting for our first Alaskan storm to go away?” he asked.
“No, this. This move. It’s crazy, isn’t it? Are we crazy?” she asked, running her hand through her hair and pausing to look for split ends.
Anna always second-guessed herself. Sometimes it annoyed the hell out of him, but on this day, as he stared out past the planes, past the runways, and out to where the impossibly flat tundra just blurred into a wall of wind and rain, he tried to think of something reassuring. He took another sip of coffee, and bit at the plastic foam. “Yeah,” he said, “pretty crazy.”
“You think so? I mean—are we making a mistake? Should we have taken normal jobs?”
“Only crazy people want normal jobs,” he said. “We wanted something different in our lives anyway, right? Get away from the mortgage, two point five kids and a flat-screen, right? Figure out if a quarter of me belongs here. I’m getting hungry. You?”
“Don’t change the subject,” she said. She traced a finger around a small greasy handprint on the window. “I’m excited,” she whispered
, “but I’m also scared. I mean, what if the kids hate me? What if they can’t understand me, or I can’t understand them? What kind of teaching materials am I going to have? Christ—there are a million questions slamming around my skull.”
“I’m wondering if we can order up some of that Chinese food, like the kid there did.”
“Don’t be a jerk. Everything can’t just always be so simple for you. So cut and dried. Food. Sex. You must wonder what it’s going to be like.”
“Sure I wonder,” he said. “But I can imagine and wonder and worry all I want and it’s not going to do me any good, us any good. What’s that saying about wishing in one hand and shitting in the other?” He paused and smiled. “Did you say sex?”
She punched him in the shoulder. “Tell me one thing you wonder about—then you can ask the kid about ordering some food. We might as well enjoy dining out while we can, but I’m sure it’s going to cost a small fortune.”
“Well, I wonder about friends,” he said. “Will people like us? Will they want to hang out with us? And I guess I wonder if anyone will take me hunting.”
“I should have known it would come down to hunting. Why do you wonder if we’ll have friends? Why wouldn’t we make friends?”
“Would you quit worrying? You’re going to be fine. You’ll be the life of the village. We’ll have to do what that one old bag said and make a signal that lets people know when it’s okay to visit because we’ll be so popular.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Tell me one thing you worry about, too,” she said.
He scratched his chin as he tried to unravel his thoughts. “I guess I’m worried I won’t be brave enough to step outside of my comfort zone, but part of me is really excited to maybe learn about where I might have come from. There’s a whole new world that I could be a part of, and that’s exciting and worrisome all at the same time.”
