Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  Okay, she thought, but dreading another burial. Okay, I owe you that.

  She dragged the man’s body to the seaward shack, the one with the dead woman in it. The man hadn’t been hit by flying glass—he had been outside the house. Nothing pierced his pullover parka, but when she rolled him over to drag him on his back, she noticed a hole in his forehead, a little sliver of shiny steel sticking out of the hole. Shrapnel from the tower, Claudia thought. Dumb luck. The nuke hadn’t been a total dud.

  Laying the man inside the shack with the dead woman, Claudia looked around. Slim pickings. The Coleman stove looked shot, and the pot on it was a charred mess of burned stew. From the shack’s pantry she took a few cans, but that was it. Claudia looked at the man’s parka—trimmed with wolverine around the hood and waist and lined with sheepskin—and at her own grungy down parka. The woman had on a pair of caribou hide mukluks, bottoms made of ugruk skin. She felt like a grave robber, but Claudia pulled the parka off the man and took the woman’s shoes. They smelled a little, but if she aired them, she figured, it wouldn’t be too bad.

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  With a little grunting and levering with an oar, Claudia tipped the aluminum skiff over on its keel. She dragged it down the bluff and to the beach, then put all the scavenged gear in the bottom of the boat. The outboard motor was too heavy to carry, but she managed to drag it down to the boat and set it in the stern. Fuel lines, gas tank, all looked okay. She topped off the tank, found another tank by a piling under the dead woman’s shack, and transferred the remaining gas into the spare tank.

  A gust of wind blew through Claudia’s hair. She glanced up, took a glove off, and licked her finger. Wind from the north. Shit, she thought. The ice pack will move in. She tossed the man’s parka, the woman’s mukluks, and her pack on top of the other gear in the boat and covered it with the tarp. Her shotgun she wrapped in a plastic trash bag and set next to the stern seat. Got to hustle. She pushed the boat down the beach, then looked up at the shack with the two bodies.

  “Okay,” she said, “all right, all right.”

  Bury them? No, not so the siksriks can dig them up. The lady had had enough of that. Hustling the can of Blazo back up the bluff, she dragged it into the shack. She sloshed kerosene on the bodies, on the walls of the shack. With a scrap of ripped curtain, she made a torch, wrapping the cloth around a stick from the beach, soaking the cloth in kerosene. She tipped the drum of kerosene over in the doorway and watched the gas pool on the floor.

  Claudia walked down to the beach, stopped below the bluff. She lit the torch, gauged the distance to the shack, then hurled the flaming torch at the doorway of the shack. Just before the torch hit, she ducked down, the low bluff shielding her; a cloud of hot gas roared overhead, a satisfying whoosh erupting from the house. She poked her head over the edge. Flames licked from the doorway of the shack, thick black smoke belching out from the broken windows.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “Thank you. Rest in peace.”

  Pushing the skiff out in the water, the bitter cold water lapped at the bottom of her shoe pacs. The boat bent and cracked new ice, slush ice as she pushed it out to sea. Waves and wind kept nudging the boat back to shore, and Claudia had to dig in with the oar, until the boat was in water deep enough to lower the outboard. She set the choke, opened the gas line, and pulled back on the starter cord. The engine kicked, spitting out black smoke. She yanked the cord again. More smoke. Again. On the third try, the motor roared into life.

  “All right!” Claudia yelled, twisting the throttle on the motor and steering into the waves. “All right.”

  The bow of the boat rose above the waves, spray rising up in her face, the boat slamming up and down in a monotonous drone, the sound boats made in the open sea, a sound you could hear for miles. Wind in her face, water sliding by her . . . Claudia smiled, glad to not have to walk. Watching the water for ice, she gained the feel of the boat, figured out the proper throttle speed to keep the boat riding the waves smoothly. The land and the burning shack slipped away behind her, and she made her way north to Barrow.

  * * *

  It took her the rest of that day and all of the next to get to Barrow. At Nulawik, about twenty-five miles up from Tachinisok Inlet, the ice pack creeping south forced her to camp; the light had dimmed and it became too risky to dodge icebergs. But the next day the wind had shifted, the pack had blown back out, taking with it the young slushy ice and opening up a wide lead along the shore. She made a quick run up the coast, the water almost smooth, hardly enough ’bergs to make her even get nervous.

  With hardly any experience running boats, Claudia had no idea how long the gas would last, but when she passed Walakpa, eighteen miles south of Barrow, with fuel still remaining in the first tank, she relaxed. No problem. She recognized Walakpa by the narrow pyramid on the bluff, the memorial to Will Rogers and Wiley Post—that had been where their plane had crashed. Ford had dug there, too, a few years after the crash.

  Just south of Barrow, something shiny glinting from the bluff in the late afternoon light caught her eye. She pulled into shore, beaching the skiff at the mouth of a little gully. Hundreds of fifty-five-gallon drums spilled down the gully and onto the beach. The light snow that had dusted her tent the night before partially covered the rusty, orange-red barrels. The sides and tops of some of the drums had corroded away, so that the drums looked like the vertebrae of some enormous snake. A gust of wind blew, and the shiny object on the bluff glinted again. Claudia grabbed her unaaq, her hiking staff, and walked up the beach to the gully.

  Working her way up the ravine, she climbed over the fifty-five-gallon drums and over pieces of junked machines. The wind blew the snow away from the hollows of rotted barrels, and pale white objects remained. She reached down, picked up one such object, turned it over in her palm: a squat, dense bone, with a little knob at one end, a narrow shaft, an oblong hole just above the distal end—a seal humerus. She noticed more bones in the trash heap: the dog-faced vertebrae of caribou necks, the mashed and misshapen leg bones of walruses and seals, the thin arches of ribs, great bleached racks of more caribou. The butchered bits of hunted animals had wound up in the ravine, tossed among the steel barrels flaking away into oxidized chips. More recent bones had bits of fur stuck to them, long strings of cartilage, sometimes hunks of skin. Claudia searched for that shiny thing, saw it again as the wind blew.

  Red strands blew back from in front of the shiny thing, two pieces of teardrop-shaped glass, mirrored sunglass lenses. A crack split the left lens in half. The wind gusted again, and the red strands fanned across the glasses again. Claudia reached up, grasped the red hair, and the glasses skittered down the side of an upturned half-barrel. Two hollow sockets, like black marbles, stared back at her, lips stretched back over white teeth grinning at her.

  “Oh, shit,” Claudia said. She dropped the head, watched it flop back down. Long red hair whisked over the head, hiding the dead face. Inch-wide holes, the edges of the nylon fabric curled back in scorched and melted strands, dotted the back of the woman’s parka. Standing, she gazed beyond the woman, at a jumble of rusting red drums piling up onto the tundra, and the litter of bones and bodies and dead human beings.

  MNI—minimum number of individuals—was the term faunal analysts used for the calculation of body counts. Count the number of femurs, of humeri, of crania, of atlases and axes, and divide by the number of such bones an animal was known to have. Skulls worked best, because every animal only had one skull. Claudia counted human skulls, human heads lying like spilled billiard balls—chance again—on the felt of the tundra. Thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred—she quit counting after a hundred, didn’t want to count after a hundred. She guessed that there had to be at least a hundred skulls: big skulls, little skulls, medium skulls. Hair and flesh still clung to the skulls, skin stretched tight across the faces, hair hanging in hanks from crown or nape or chin. Skulls with flat foreheads were women, she remembered, skulls with rounded foreheads were
men. Men, women, children, all dead, dead from the radiation, she thought, though some still had their hair; dead, maybe, from starvation, from disease. Dead, maybe—she looked at the body of the red-haired woman with the mirror shades again—from violence.

  As Claudia stared at the skulls, at the bodies thrown randomly among the junk, some buried in the bottom of the ravine, others hanging over the edge, she thought of Rob, of the Soviet flier, of the man and woman struck dead by the dud nuke, of her sisters and parents and family caught in the fury of a war that should not have been. Dead. All dead. She looked at the faces of the bodies, skin stretched tight over skulls like someone had grabbed their hair from behind and yanked. With her unaaq she gently poked the bodies, turning them faceup to see if she recognized anyone. One skull had pale blond hair like her sister, cut in the same pageboy style.

  “Susanne,” Claudia whispered.

  She set the unaaq down, reached for the body and dragged it away from the edge of the ravine, laid it out on the hard ground. Susanne, she thought, No, not Susanne, but like her, it could be her. Claudia ran back to the boat, dug through her gear, and pulled out the E-tool. Her shotgun, wrapped in plastic by the stern seat, clattered to the deck. She reached for it to put it away, then thought better of it, and took it with her, back up to the bluff and to the blond body.

  “Got to bury them,” she said. “All dead, nobody gave Susanne a decent burial. Got to bury them.”

  Striking the frozen ground, chipping away little hard divots, Claudia whaled with the E-tool at the snow, at the dirt. Flakes of cold dirt flew up into her face, into her eyes. Sweat beaded on her forehead, and she took off her cap, shed her wind parka and pile jacket. She dug again, panting. The catch between the blade and the handle slid loose, and the blade bent back. Claudia sat down, E-tool in her hand, staring at the foot-wide hole, barely an inch deep, at the blond woman’s body, at the bodies in the ravine.

  “So many bodies,” she said. “So many.”

  She allowed herself tears then, the salty brine coming down her cheeks, mixing with sweat and flakes of icy dirt. She cried for Rob, cried for the Soviet flier, cried for her lost dissertation, cried for her thesis committee, cried for her university, her home, her family, her nation. She cried for the world and the people who would never be buried, who would never be mourned. She cried for herself. Then, breathing hard, sobs coming between pants, Claudia laid the E-tool down, bent the blade into the shaft, and collapsed the handle. She took a bandanna from her pants pocket and wiped her face. Then she stood and faced Barrow, the bodies behind her.

  A mile or so to the north, Claudia could make out the outline of Barrow against the horizon. The airport runway stretched to the south of town, to the east; a small group of buildings clustered at the western end of the runway. About halfway between the airport and the ravine a group of satellite dishes ringed a small rectangular-shaped building, the dishes angled almost even with the horizon and pointed due south. Some taller buildings, the highest just four stories, gave relief to the Barrow skyline; otherwise it was a series of squat, one-story structures. A half dozen plumes of smoke rose from the village.

  So, thought Claudia, someone still lives there. She looked up the coast, at the sun falling below the dust clouds, ready to make its brief bright appearance for the afternoon. She looked at the bodies in the ravine, some—like the red-haired woman—with bullet holes. Maybe Barrow won’t be so welcoming, she thought, Or maybe it will be welcoming, like the welcome Jim and Oliver would give.

  She went down to her boat. An end of the tarp flapped in the wind, an evening breeze blowing up. The wind would cover her tracks in the snow. She smiled. Can’t hide the boat if someone heard me and comes to investigate, but I can hide me.

  From her gear in the boat she pulled out her daypack, stuffed her sleeping bag in that, along with a flask of water, a few candy bars, and a box of shells. She sniffed the dead woman’s mukluks; not too bad, she thought. The man’s parka—with a white cover over the sheepskin hide—was no worse. Off with the shoepacs, on with the dead people’s clothes. They’re dead, maybe I’m dead, maybe we’re all dead soon, she thought strangely. Push the boat high above the water, tie the tarp down good. She laid her unaaq back down in the boat, next to the E-tool, and slung the shotgun over her shoulder.

  Claudia Kendall, ABD, girl guerrilla, she thought, and hiked up above the bluff, toward Barrow.

  * * *

  She walked toward town along the road from the lake where Barrow got their water, south of the edge of the airport runway, just past the cluster of satellite dishes. She remembered the road from a hike earlier in the summer, remembered finding a snowy owl’s nest on a high mound, remembered also finding a more ancient human burial, two skulls and crossed leg bones laid out on the ground. Thaw ponds dotted the land, little frozen skating rinks on either side of the gravel road. As she walked by the satellite dishes she came upon more bodies.

  “No,” she said.

  These bodies had been placed on wooden racks, one or two to a rack, laid out in corduroy parkas, with tools and guns and cooking pots leaning against the rack posts or hanging from nails. These bodies all had chestnut skin and black hair, though some of the women wore their hair in curly little caps. Well, perms aren’t diagnostic, Claudia thought, but looking from body to body she could still hazard a guess: Inupiaq. She thought back to the bodies in the ravine, the archaeologist in her pondering the mystery: why were some dead laid out here with such care, while others had been tossed into the ravine with animal bones?

  The beginnings of a more sinister thought occurred to her, confirming her suspicions, but Claudia did not want to consider it, did not dare explore the idea. But something did change in her, a curtain falling down, a relay clicking. No tears now; she felt no tears, she had no tears left. Something hard and cold and mean streamed through her, not anger, not fear, exactly, but something more basic. She stopped, the downy hairs on her body puffing out, her heart beating faster. Fight or flight, she intellectualized, that old dread reflex surging through her soul; only it was something more, she thought, something almost rational. Revenge, perhaps. Anger. Okay, she thought, something’s wrong . . . Snick, she slid the receiver back on the Winchester Ranger and chambered a round. Gripping the pump of the shotgun in her right hand, she held the shotgun in the crook of her elbow, forefinger on the safety ready to click it off.

  Claudia walked around the west side of the runway, alongside the pond road into town. Another road cut off to the west, down through an old gravel pit and to the beach. Two tugboats had rammed a barge up onto the beach—the same barge that passed by Pingasagruk? she wondered. Broken packing crates littered the beach and road, and one of the tugs had been run aground, while the other tug bobbed in the slush ice at the barge’s stern.

  A cluster of buildings was to her left, on the sea side of the road, and to her right a jumble of empty wood packing crates the size of refrigerators had been stacked behind a big blue steel building, the old Arctic Cash ’n’ Carry store. SKI-DOO was printed in big faded red letters on the sides of the crates, a treasure trove of snowmachines: SKI-DOO, SKI-DOO, SKI-DOO. SKI-DOO, Claudia thought, skedaddle, ski-doo, skedaddle. Working her way along the side of the building, she crept around the edges of the snowmachine crates. The sun set behind a building across the road to her left, blinding her for a second as she came around the corner.

  “Maybe you should stop,” a man said from in front of her.

  Shading her eyes with her left hand, Claudia looked for the man. She heard the snick of a rifle bolt, smiled to herself—one rifle against her shotgun—bent her knees, and twirled around to her left, leaping toward a broken crate, an old snowmachine inside the box. A shot cracked and a bullet whizzed to her right. Duck, twirl again; she cowered down behind the snowmachine, hidden behind the remaining panel of the crate, and looked for the man. He stood about fifty feet away, a handsome Inupiaq in his thirties, dressed in a white atigi, dark brown wolverine ruff around the hood, a b
lue baseball cap pulled low over his eyes—the same man she’d seen in that passing boat at Tachinisok Inlet, Claudia realized. She raised her shotgun.

  A chest shot, she thought, easy, line the sights up, pull, blow him away from fifteen yards. She held the gun steady, moved it quickly to her right, and fired a shot to the man’s left, trying to remember how narrow the choke was on her Winchester.

  “Sonofabitch!” the man yelled, hitting the dirt and scrambling for the cover of a pile of lumber.

  Good, thought Claudia, got him pinned down. “Don’t shoot at me!” she yelled. “I don’t want to hurt you!” She pumped another shell into the chamber, rose up from behind the snowmachine crate, and raised the shotgun at the man.

  “Goddamnit,” he yelled, “give me cover!”

  Oh, shit, she thought. She heard another snick of a rifle from the building to her left, caught the glimpse of a shape blotting out the sun from the roof. Claudia bit her lip, kept the shotgun aimed at the man; he looked pitiful as he tried to slowly crouch behind the small stack of old gray boards.

  “I’m covering you,” she said. “They can cover me, but I’m covering you.”

  The man looked up at her, pushed his cap back from his face and the hair out of his eyes. He smiled at her, stood, holding his rifle barrel down. “Claudia?” he asked.

  Claudia squinted at the man, tried to ignore the other two men she knew had to be to her right and left. “Simon?”

  “Tuttu,” he said. “It’s Tuttu now.”

  What’s that mean? she asked herself. “Caribou?” Claudia giggled nervously. “That because you’re good to eat? Or because you’re fast?”