Alaskan

by John Smelcer

  There was a great deal of drinking here to forget that there were no jobs, no dreams, and no future. And with the drinking came the violence. It was as rampant as the poverty. Eventually, the police tired of the problem villagers taking up too much of their time—too much paperwork and bother. Instead of hauling the troublemakers to jail, sometimes they simply took them far from the village, already in the middle of nowhere, and left them to freeze and die—their way of dealing with the problem. Merciless, efficient, calculated.

  Villagers often wondered why it was they sometimes found their brothers or sisters, fathers or cousins so far from the village, frozen solid, wearing nothing but a tee-shirt, jeans and sneakers—the only clothes on their backs when they were dragged them from the frosted warmth of their broken homes. Several years before, Seth’s older brother had been found that way—many miles from the village, frozen without his parka or hat or gloves, on a trail no one used.

  The teachers who came from the south, for all the wrong reasons, were like the quick-changing seasons. They came and went every so many months—romantics, evangelists, adventurers—but the cold and lasting night was always too much for them, and they would leave the village and their classrooms full of disillusioned youth with no place else to go. This was, always had been, and always would be, their home, for good or for bad, from beginning to end.

  One recent night, Seth’s cousin, Peter, who was also his best friend, died when the sled he was riding crashed into a speeding snowmobile. It was a common tragedy. Children took turns driving snowmobiles or four-wheelers dragging sleds tied to long ropes. They would race around the village, through the village, and out across the frozen sea. But while the drivers could stop quickly, the sleds with their laughing cargo could not.

  Seth and his cousin were like brothers. They did everything together. They say misery loves company. In such a place, close friendships made life tolerable. Sometimes they spent the night at each other’s drafty, little house whispering their secret fears as they lay close and warm beneath heavy blankets.

  Peter had slept over the night before he was killed.

  “I saw that bear today,” Seth had said, staring straight into his cousin’s dark eyes, his voice full of fear. “It was standing on the hill looking down at me. It watched me walk home from school. Now it knows where I live.”

  Peter saw the fear in his cousin’s eyes. Even in the darkness of the room, it was as bright as the burning wick of a seal oil lamp.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “That bear’s been after you since before you was born. It got your daddy, but he won’t get you.”

  Neither boy said a word after that.

  Seth thought about all of this as he trudged up the hill through thick snowdrifts, his long path winding up from the sea. Even at twelve, he saw his future, saw it as clearly as he saw the raven shaking cold from its wings, its black eyes unblinking, taking in everything around it. That’s how they survived here—how anything survived here—by being aware of everything all at once. But there was no comfort in such awareness, no comfort in knowing the future. Seth knew what future lay ahead of him, dim and unpromising. It was just a matter of time measured by degrees of darkness and light.

  From atop the hill above his small village set against the edge of a frozen sea, the boy stopped to look back at the wide, jagged field of ice pushed up against the land by shifting currents and tides. Far out across the quiet sea, as if carved from ivory, the moon hung on the rim of the earth. Stars filled the night, and nothing moved but the wind blowing dry snow, like tumbling white sheets, across the tundra before him.It was so cold that Seth’s eyelashes froze shut when he blinked, his cheeks burned, and small clouds of his breath billowed and faded, like darting flocks of small white birds. He pulled the drawstring of his fur-lined parka hood tight and turned his back to the trembling village huddled by the sea.

  With the future behind him, Seth began a lonely trek across the long, white silence, walking into the teeth of the wind. Far ahead, a great white bear roused from a restless sleep, crept from its den, smelled the incoming wind, and waited.

  Willie Paniaq’s Secret

  “No, I didn’t see Jimmy yesterday,” said Willie Paniaq, handing two cups of coffee to his visitors. “I heard you found Jimmy’s body out of town,” he continued. “I don’t know why he would be out there. That’s a long ways to walk in the middle of winter. Besides, Jimmy wasn’t into exercise, if you know what I mean.”

  Trooper Andrew Stewart shifted his weight in the chair, slid the tape recorder on the table in front of Willie after he sat down. “Officer Anguyak says you’ve known Jimmy for a long time.”

  “Me and Jimmy been friends since elementary school. I guess you could say I was his best friend. But I stopped drinking years ago, so Jimmy don’t come around like he used to, says I’m no fun anymore.”

  “Did you and Jimmy drink together a lot before you quit?”

  “Hell, we drank all the time. We were almost always drunk. George here put us in the drunk-tank a hundred times to sleep it off. Didn’t you, George? I used to joke that it was my second home.”

  “How long have you been sober?”

  “Going on five years next month.”

  “Why did you quit?”

  Willie looked serious before he spoke. “My wife left me. She took the kids and moved back to her village to stay with her folks. She told me they wouldn’t come back until I was sober. It was the bottle or my family. It wasn’t a hard decision. I quit right then, cold turkey. My wife didn’t believe me at first, but everyone told her it was the truth. A few months later she and the kids came home, and I haven’t touched the drink since then.”

  Stewart congratulated Willie and then resumed his questions.

  “Can you tell me about Jimmy? I’ve heard some pretty bad stories about him. A lot of people were afraid of him. Some people even seem glad that he’s dead.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt that,” replied the Eskimo, taking a drink from his coffee. “Most people be glad he’s dead. Jimmy was the meanest bastard I ever knew, but he never did nothing to me.”

  Stewart took a sip of his coffee. It was his fourth cup that day. Everyone he had interviewed offered him tea or coffee, and he knew that it was inconsiderate to refuse.”

  “I hear Jimmy’s father was drunk all the time and that he used to beat Jimmy pretty bad. That must have really affected him growing up.”

  “His father wasn’t the only one to abuse him,” said Paniaq, and then saying nothing for a while. “He was abused by a priest when he was a boy.”

  George Anguyak leaned forward. He knew all the stories people had told so far. Nothing was new. But he had never heard that Jimmy was abused by a priest.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, visibly interested, leaning forward, looking closely at the turning wheels of the tape-recorder, making sure it was recording.

  Willie walked over to the refrigerator, took out a large plastic bowl covered with aluminum.

  “Would you care for a bowl of ice cream?” he asked, pulling the foil from the bowl and setting it on the counter.

  Andrew Stuart knew that Eskimo ice cream was a traditional dish of seal or whale fat mixed with berries. When no whale or seal fat was available, many Natives made it with Crisco shortening instead. He had never acquired a taste for it, ever since he had first had some expecting a different flavor and texture altogether.

  “No thanks,” he said. “I’ll stick to my coffee.”

  But Anguyak loved the dish and asked for a small bowl.

  While Paniaq scooped out the greasy ice cream, Anguyak reiterated his question.

  “What do you mean Jimmy was molested by a priest?” he asked.

  Willie handed a bowl to Anguyak, who thanked him.

  “When Jimmy and I were little, the village priest used to mess with some of the boys, doing bad things to them. You rem
ember Father Hendricks? He was the village priest when you were a boy, George.”

  “I remember him,” George replied astonished at the accusation. “I always liked him. Sometimes Father Hendricks went seal hunting with me and my dad. I remember he even went ice fishing with us one time. He was always so nice to me.”

  “Well, he wasn’t so nice to all the boys,” replied Paniaq, his tone becoming grave. “I know that he used to ask Jimmy and another boy to help him at church. He’d ask them to sweep the floor or mop it or something. Then he’d take them down into the basement where the boiler and furnace was and do bad things to them. He used to pull down his pants and make the boys touch him. Then he made them pull down their pants, too and he’d touch them in the same way.”

  “That can’t be true, said Anguyak, slightly agitated. “I knew the man. I used to be an altar boy. He never tried anything like that with me. Are you sure you’re talking about Father Hendricks?”

  “I’m sure,” replied Willie in between bites of ice cream. “I know that Jimmy was molested for years, until he was fourteen. I remember one time Jimmy went home and told his father about the abuse, and his father beat him badly for saying such a thing. He told him never to say that again to nobody. Jimmy never talked about it again, but that same year the church burned down. Everyone said it was the furnace, but I know it was Jimmy.”

  “I remember the night the church burned down,” said a surprised Anguyak. “I remember everyone standing outside watching it burn. I was there. My mother was crying. And you say Jimmy did it?”

  “Jimmy did do it,” replied Paniaq. “He told me so. Don’t you see how Jimmy and that other boy must have felt? The priest was the most powerful person in the village. He was the religious leader. The men asked his advice on village matters. He was even the spokesperson between the village and the government because he could speak and write English so well. Nobody would believe what he was doing to those two boys. After the fire the priest retired and moved away. They built a new church, the one down the street now. Eventually a new priest came and the abuse stopped.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked Anguyak, finishing the last spoonful of ice cream.

  Paniaq’s eyes welled with tears. He looked at the floor, unable to speak

  “I was the other boy,” he said finally, still staring at the plywood floor. “I never talk about it till now, not to nobody. Some things best left alone, otherwise they eat at you, turn you inside out like it did Jimmy.”

  Solitary Man

  After trudging and stumbling for many hours through the freezing arctic night, Philip Highmountain knew that he was near home. His ears and toes were badly frostbitten and he knew that they would likely be lost. He had known many Indians with a missing finger or toe or a bit of an ear. It was part of the price of living and working on this tortured land. His hands and fingers were in bad shape too, but he kept them warm sometimes by unzipping his parka and holding them under his armpits. But whenever he stumbled in the deep snow he’d pull them out to stop his fall, and they’d get wet and cold again. They burned at first, but now he felt nothing. It was the same for his toes.

  The landscape was a perfect blanket of smooth untouched snow lit by a bright moon. Only his tracks gave evidence of his passage across the wilderness. It would have been beautiful if it wasn’t so dangerous.

  The tall Indian pushed on through snow, towards his village. He was close now. The trees around him were slim and ragged, but they were many and he could not see far through them. He listened for the familiar sound of the river, but there was nothing but his own labored breathing and his heart pounding. Behind him was his forced path through the forest and a thin, sporadic rabbit trail which he could see in the bright moonlight.

  In the distance, not too far away, Philip could see the bluffs above the river. He knew his village was just beneath those bluffs cut over eons by the river’s sharp blade, and he began to walk towards them through the extreme of the great white north.

  He had been walking through the long harsh hours of the night ever since his snowmobile broke down about eight or nine miles away on a little-traveled backcountry trail. Now, close to morning, a soft dark blue glow on the far edge of the horizon reminded the world of the light and warmth that would soon return. Birds and other small animals sat patiently in the dark, trembling, waiting on the light.

  “Nothing in my life ever works out right,” he thought, stepping over a deadfall half buried in the snow.

  “Why should this time be any different?” he asked himself.

  Philip’s feet were frozen. Really frozen. As he slowly moved across the arctic landscape towards an uncertain future, snow had packed into the boots, around and beneath his feet, turning them into blocks of ice. The pain had been excruciating at first, but the unbearableness soon disappeared with all feeling. Highmountain knew they were in bad shape, and he stopped once to feel them. They were hard, and the flesh around his exposed ankles was discolored.

  He couldn’t move individual fingers, and his ears were so cold that Philip imagined they might shatter into pieces like a robin’s egg if he brushed them too hard against a spruce branch as he walked through the forest towards the frozen river.

  He had stopped shaking a long time ago. His body had given up trying to warm itself. It is an amazing thing, the body. It has so many defenses against freezing, but eventually it gives up and begins to shut down all functions save those which ensure that the brain continues to send faint signals to the heart, reminding it to beat until the very end.

  As the Indian shuffled over a small rise, he could suddenly see lights below.

  It was his village.

  It was too steep to descend, so he stood on the ridge among trees and wind watching for a long time. A lone raven was squatting on a branch nearby, hunkering close to the tree and sulking as though he too were thinking about warmer days. It was so cold, that it seemed even the scraggly spruce trees huddled together for warmth.

  From this high place, Philip could see the feeble light of a snowmobile bouncing as it raced along the wide river’s edge towards a neat row of BIA houses which all looked the same. All across the nation, the government built such homes which would be rented to Indians cheaply. No matter where you traveled, they always looked the same. Reservation and village life held many similarities—the perfect rows of too-quickly built houses being one of them.

  Highmountain recognized his home and he tried to smile, but his face was too cold to move.

  He watched a truck turn from the one main street and pull up beside an old log house. Two people stepped out of the truck and went inside. It was so cold that the smoke from all the houses in the village did not rise into the sky. Instead, the weight of cold air pushed it down, held it close to the ground in the valley.

  For a moment Philip thought about the cabin. He could almost hear the popping and hissing wood as it burned in the rattling, black stove’s belly. He imagined the pictures of the crucified Christ hanging on the walls of most Indian homes. No doubt, a dreamcatcher hung in the tiny window, but the Indian could not see it from this distance.

  At the end of the row of matching houses, someone was carrying a handful of firewood into their home. Philip knew the place well. Only a few years before, another cousin and his child died for no reason when they were killed by a friend.

  Several young men had been gone downriver to another village for a day of drinking and bingo. His cousin, Vincent Lame Deer, was with them. When they returned home late that night, his friend Jake Tony, drunken and angry, raced his snowmobile up to the tiny cabin and screamed at Vincent and their other friends for having left him out of the fun that night. He threatened that he was going to kill them all. But they shrugged it off as only drunken talk. Truth be said, Vince and their friends had stopped by Jake’s place earlier that day to invite him, but he was not home or he was too drunk to answer the door, so they lef
t without him. Left alone with only a full bottle of cheap whiskey and country music for company, Jake had grown bitter and murderous.

  By the next day, everyone in the group of friends would wish that they had either taken him along with them, or that they had never gone at all.

  Early the next morning, while it was still dark outside, Vincent awoke from the sound of a snowmobile engine outside. A moment later, Jake walked into the small cabin at the end of the row of houses which all looked the same and started yelling for Vince to come out of his bedroom. The baby started crying. When Vince Lame Deer opened the door, holding his still-crying child in his arms, his best friend since childhood fired a high-powered rifle four times, killing the young Indian man and his son.

  They died for less than a reason, a stupid waste of lives.

  Highmountain looked away from the row of houses and the quiet road below. He was tired, so he decided to rest before making his way the half mile or so down the hill to the village. He sat with his back against a tree and held his arms close across his chest while he watched the moon above the village. Philip closed his eyes and thought of Sue and Mikey. He thought about the brother he would never know, lost forever in the eternal currents of the seaward river. He thought about his cousins, Charlie and Kenny, and of his beloved uncle and Joseph. He thought about his childhood in this place at the river’s edge. He thought of many things until there was nothing left to think and a lasting and dull numbness fell through him like a prayer.

  For a moment he must have lost consciousness or fallen asleep.