Without knowing he was going to do it, Sonny smiled right at the general and said in a loud, fi rm voice, “It’s okay.
He’s my brother, sir.”
Th
e general turned, surprised, but when he saw who it was— his Indian guide—he smiled real big. Sonny smiled right back at him with what Sister Mary Kate always called his million-dollar smile.
Amiq stood there by the wall, practically gasping. Like a fi sh out of water.
“Th
is one’s no Eskimo, sir. He’s my brother . . . my kid brother,” Sonny added for emphasis, grinning down sweetly at Amiq. Even though they were about the same age, Amiq was still nearly a head shorter than he was.
Amiq was starting to revive now, and Sonny half expected him to get mad about being called a kid—and by Sonny, too—but instead he just grinned up at the general with that big, goofy grin of his.
“Yes, sir,” Amiq said. “Just waiting here for my big brother.”
He gave Sonny a look.
“Father Mullen gave us permission to write home,” Sonny added, because it was the fi rst thing that came into his mind.
“Our mother . . .”
Suddenly Sonny didn’t have the slightest idea what he should say about their mother.
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“Our mother’s not doing so well,” Amiq said quick, starting to rev up like he always did in class discussions. “Her dog team took sick, and it’s going to be a tough winter for them with all the dogs down and all.”
He smiled real big, and Sonny had to turn away quick to keep from laughing. He stole a quick glance at the general.
Th
e general was frowning as though he were starting to catch on. Amiq’s smile died, like he knew he’d gone too far.
“She traps,” Sonny said quickly.
“She has to be able to run a trapline this time of year. It’s critical, sir,” Amiq added.
Critical? Where in the heck did that kid get his words?
Sonny watched the general to see if this word surprised him, but the general just glanced at his watch like he wasn’t even listening anymore.
“All right then, gentlemen,” he said. “Well, it’s nearly lunchtime now, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” they both said brightly.
“Maybe we’ll see you and your brother at lunch,” the general told Sonny. Th
en he bent his head back into his papers
and moved on.
As soon as the he was out of earshot, Amiq slumped back into the wall like all his muscles had melted. Th
en he looked
Sonny square in the eye and smiled. Sonny’d never seen him smile a real smile like that. Not at him, anyhow.
“Let’s split,” Amiq said, and for a moment it seemed like they really were brothers.
Sonny thought briefl y about lunch, lunch with the general.
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en he nodded his head and smiled. “Th
at guy sure gives me
the creeps,” he said.
Amiq smiled, too. “No shit.”
Without hardly thinking about it, Amiq took Sonny to that spot in the woods that looked like a little room made of trees, the one that Luke and Bunna had found. Th
eir hideout.
Sonny had never seen it before.
“How’d you fi nd this place?” Sonny asked, looking around, clearly impressed.
Amiq smiled. “Luke and Bunna found it. Trying to hide from old man Pete.” He thought of old man Pete’s wrinkled-up face and the suspicious way he always looked at the Eskimo kids. “Man, that bugger’s mean,” he said.
Sonny grinned. “Never been mean to me,” he said.
Amiq rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, you tell him about this here Eskimo fort, and I’ll have to kill ya,” he said in his best John Wayne voice. “And if they fi nd out I took you here, I may have to kill you anyhow,” he added. “’Course, I do owe you something, us being brothers and all.”
Sonny laughed. “Yeah. Practically twins.”
Amiq was warming up to being out in the woods, out in their hideout, their Eskimo hideout, out here with an Indian, both of them hiding from the military. Th
is was an adventure,
all right, a real adventure.
“Ah well, you know how it is with these Na-tives,” he said, pinching his voice up a notch. “Th
ey all of them look alike,
and that there’s a fact.”
Now both of them were laughing, laughing about the gen-127
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eral actually mistaking them for brothers. Brothers!
“Kid brother,” Sonny snorted, patting Amiq sweetly on the head.
“No!” Amiq hollered gleefully. “No. Twins, remember?
Twins! ”
Th
ey were laughing really hard now.
“Th
e whole dog team?” Sonny said. “Th
e whole team took
sick? All together?”
“Measles,” Amiq said crisply, “Siberian measles.”
Sonny doubled over. “Stop!” he begged. “My mom doesn’t even have dogs.”
“I am sorry to hear that, very sorry indeed,” Amiq dead-panned. “Well, we just might have to resort to snowshoes this year, son.”
He reached down and picked up a spruce branch, all rusty orange with dead needles.
“We always use snowshoes,” Sonny said.
“Oh, yeah. I forgot.”
Amiq rolled the branch back and forth between his palms, watching the river and thinking how funny it was that things could change all of a sudden, people changing with them.
“What about those tests?” Sonny said. “What were they?”
“Hell if I’m going to drink iodine-131,” Amiq said.
“What’s iodine-131?”
Amiq shrugged, running his fi nger along the rough edge of the spruce branch, making the dead needles shoot off like little arrows. “It ain’t sacramental wine, that’s for sure.”
He looked down, thinking about that name. Iodine-131. It 128
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T H E M E A N E S T H E A T H E N S / S o n n y a n d A m i q sounded like a cross between some kind of medicine and some kind of motor oil.
“I grew up with scientists, and I’m sure as heck not going to be somebody’s lab animal,” Amiq said.
“You grew up with scientists?”
“You know, the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory. It’s in Barrow. You never hear about it?”
Sonny shook his head.
“Yeah, well, I spent a lot of time there after my mom and brothers died. After the fi re . . .”
Amiq looked down, bending the dead twig farther and farther back against itself, aware of the fact that Sonny was watching him. Not wanting to look up. Not wanting to say anything. What was there to say? He was surprised to hear himself talking about the fi re like that, and talking about it with Sonny, of all people. He’d never said anything about the fi re to anybody, but here was Sonny, sitting right next to him, nodding his head like he knew all about it—fi res in the dead of winter when the stove is roaring hot and the house dry as tinder. A house so small it had only one tiny window in it.
“My mom. She pushed me out the window just before the roof fell,” Amiq said. “I was the youngest, the only one who fi t.”
It felt like it was somebody else talking, somebody whose voice had become little more than a whisper, a whisper that seemed really loud in the silence that surrounded t
hem. Th ey
sat there, the two of them, all alone in that silence. When the spruce twig in Amiq’s hand snapped in half, it sounded 129
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like gunshot. Amiq took the two splinters of dead wood and stabbed them into the frozen ground.
“My dad died in the war,” Sonny said.
Amiq looked up quick, but he didn’t say a word.
“Left my mom alone with all us kids.”
Amiq had known that Sonny didn’t have a dad, but he’d never really thought about it. Now he realized something surprising: both he and Sonny knew what it felt like to grow up with only one parent—Sonny with his mom and all those brothers and sisters and him with nobody left but his old man.
“My old man was in the war, too. Ever since the fi re, though, he likes his jug,” Amiq said. “Likes his jug a whole lot.”
He mounded up a little pile of dead leaves and needles around the bottom of one of the spruce twigs, wishing, suddenly, that he hadn’t mentioned that part about his dad drinking. Him and his big mouth. He looked up quick, brushing the dirt from his hands and forcing himself to smile.
“Yeah, but you know what? Th
em scientists pay twenty-
fi ve cents apiece for lemmings, and they always have a hot meal. Beef stew and chicken soup, that kind of stuff . And they got a whole library full of books, science books, mostly. Th at’s
where I pretty much grew up, at that library. Th
ey’re the ones
paid to send me here, too. Th
ey fi gure I’m gonna come back
home and be a scientist.”
It felt like he was talking too fast.
“So are you?”
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“Am I what?”
“Going to be a scientist?”
“Heck if I know. All I know for sure is they aren’t going to turn me into some kind of lab animal. I seen what they do to lab animals.”
Sonny fi dgeted. “Least they pay your way home, summers,” he off ered.
Amiq looked at Sonny. “You can’t ever go home sum-
mers?”
He didn’t really have to ask. He knew it was true. But he’d never really thought about it.
“Mom’s got a lot of other mouths to feed,” Sonny said.
“Guess I’m down for the count.”
Sonny looked so sad all of a sudden that Amiq wanted to say something to make him laugh. He pinched his voice up tight again, just like how the general talked, like how generals in movies acted.
“An educated man we shall have,” he said.
And Sonny did laugh. Both of them laughed softly, like two educated men. It was not the kind of laugh you laugh when something’s really funny, though. It was more the kind you laugh when something bad happens and there’s nothing left to do but laugh.
Sonny looked out across the river to where the last of the sun was sinking behind a bald-topped hill. It was glowing like the embers of a dying fi re, and the shadows in Amiq’s hideout had started to get dark and fl ickery. Flickering in a funny way, Sonny thought suddenly, just as the fl ickering began to 131
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sharpen into a small shaft of bright light. Without saying a word, both boys dropped down low on their bellies. Somebody who didn’t know much about walking in the woods was making a lot of noise, cracking dead wood with every step, swinging a bright light every which way. Amiq and Sonny lay still as stones. Sonny could feel his heart pounding hard against the cold ground. He thought maybe he could feel Amiq’s heart pounding just as hard, their two hearts pounding warnings back and forth through the hard, dark earth. Th
at fl ickering
light, searching the woods, made him think of the crazy gleam Father Mullen got in his eyes when he got really mad.
Th
ey waited, without hardly breathing, until the light faded off into a distant pinpoint, then went out altogether, like a snuff ed candle. Slowly they eased themselves back up, still afraid to even breathe.
“We better fi gure out a way to get back into the school or they gonna send the dogs out after us,” Amiq whispered, fi nally.
Dogs? “What dogs?”
Amiq grinned. “Your mother’s dead dogs.”
Sonny punched him on the shoulder, hard, but that crazy Eskimo just kept on grinning that dumb old grin of his, the one that made you want to laugh out loud. Th
at grin that
made you think about making your own law, rather than following somebody else’s.
“What the heck you get us into, Amundson?” Sonny
said.
“What we got here, son, is a real honest ad-ven-shur.”
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“Yeah, well, we better come up with a way to get back in without getting caught, there, cowboy, ” Sonny said.
“Piece of cake,” Amiq said. “Piece of cake.”
Amiq was not the best stepladder—his shoulders were bony, and he swayed a bit under Sonny’s weight. But even with all that weight on his shoulders, he was still acting like everything was easy, like everything would always be easy. He was going to push Sonny right up into the dorm window, and then Sonny was supposed ro lean down and yank him up.
“It’ll be a piece of cake,” Amiq says.
Sonny doesn’t think this is what you would call a brilliant plan, but he doesn’t have a better one, and time is running out. He gazes down the length of the shadowy gray wall from his uncertain perch, his eyes wary.
“See,” Amiq whispers, “all the windows are all dark. Everyone’s at dinner.”
“And why aren’t we at dinner, again?” Sonny asks.
“Th
e dogs,” Amiq says. “Th
e dead dogs.”
Sonny grins at the thought of the dogs with their Siberian measles. “Somebody’s gotta bury them,” he says with a little laugh. But he knows what Amiq’s really thinking. Amiq thinks they’ll tell Father that they lost track of time doing homework. Now that one’s really funny.
Amiq hangs on hard to Sonny’s sharp ankles while Sonny tries to pull himself up and wiggle into the partially opened window. In the fi nal moments, Amiq has to push up on Sonny’s feet because Sonny is just too darn long to fold up easily 133
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into a space like that. But fi nally his feet fl ap into the window, fi shlike.
Sonny glances sideways at the darkened hallway, and seeing no one, he pokes his head back out the window to give Amiq the all-clear sign. “Come on, hurry,” he says, reaching down.
Amiq’s arms are skinny but hard as birch saplings. His hands clamp onto Sonny’s wrists, and he pulls harder and harder, walking his legs up the wall.
Now they’re standing in the darkened space, the two of them together, feeling pretty proud of themselves, their laughter hushed but triumphant. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad plan after all.
Th
at’s when they hear the voice hissing in the shadows.
Th
e sound of it makes their blood run cold .
“You boys think you’re pretty smart, don’t you.”
Father Mullen.
Smart is not at what they feel, following Mullen down the dimly lit halls, knowing they managed to pick the wrong time and the wrong window. Knowing it’s a mistake that’s going to cost them. Big-time.
&
nbsp; And now Father is standing there in his offi
ce, telling them
that evil has consumed them, spawns of Satan. His words seem to vibrate in the air around them, like a deadly swarm of black mosquitoes. Father is so angry that whole sentences are rattling in his throat, just waiting to get out. Like wasps.
Th
e sound is so terrible, all they can do is stand there, in the middle of it, watching the way Father fondles that two-by-134
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“Spare the rod . . .” Father rattles, swinging hard.
It stings like hell, that two-by-four, swinging back and forth, fi rst to Amiq, then to Sonny, burning hot with every crack. Neither of them makes a sound, though—even when it feels like it’s crushing bone—because it’s the words Father says that sting worse than the blows. It’s the sound of Father Mullen’s voice, rasping like bees as he tells them both that they’re nothing more than dirty little savages and there’s no way in Hell either one of them could ever— ever—get into Heaven.
Nobody cares what happens to them except for Father, he hisses, because their people, their Native People, are as loose as rabbits with their kids.
Father is swinging that two-by-four back and forth like it’s a hammer, and the pain bites harder with each swing as he sinks his words—sharp as nails—right into them. All of them are doomed to Hell, he says, nearly out of breath— all of them: Sonny and his uneducated heathen mother along with Amiq and his no-good, drunken dad.
Amiq’s got a hard look on his face, and you can tell he’s shut Father out and gone someplace else, someplace mean and angry. You can tell he’s decided he wouldn’t go to Heaven even if they gave him a gold pass for the place.
Sonny’s thinking about his mom, who wouldn’t be at all proud to see him now. His mother, sewing slippers for the general’s wife, slippers with those tiny designs that make her eyes sting in the smoky light of the kerosene lamp. Sewing 135
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