Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  Tuttu ejected the round from his rifle, locked the bolt back. “It’s my name,” he said. “Tuttu’s my inua, you know?” He jerked his head left and right. “Natchiq, Kanayuq, cool it. This chick’s not going to hurt anyone.” He pointed with his rifle at the shotgun leveled at his chest. “Okay?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, thinking of all the bodies in the ravine, thinking of how Jim had been at Ataniq. She kept the shotgun on him.

  “We found your boat,” Tuttu said. “Got all your gear. Nice stuff. It should come in handy for us.”

  Damn, she thought. No way back. Barrow—she had to stay in Barrow, no matter what, no matter how. They had her. “Okay,” she said. She lowered the shotgun, ejected the shell, and put the safety on.

  “Damn waste of a round,” Tuttu said. He walked toward her. “We’ve been looking for you. Why didn’t you let us know you were coming?”

  Claudia smiled. “Looking for me? Was that you who passed by Tachinisok—you know, where that tower is?”

  Tuttu nodded. “You were there? Natchiq wanted me to stop there, but the ice was movin’ in. I missed you; you should have signaled.”

  “No radio, Sim—Tuttu. I guess I could have used the pay phone at Nunavak, but I didn’t have a quarter.”

  “Aw, shit, Claudia, that’s not what I—”

  “Lot of dead people in that ravine, Tuttu,” she interrupted. “Maybe you can understand why I was a little jumpy.”

  Tuttu glared at her. “Yeah. Maybe you can understand why we’re a little jumpy.”

  Claudia glared back. Tuttu looked good, she thought, not like Jim and the others from Wainwright: he had all his hair, even a thin little mustache, and there weren’t any sores on his face or lips. “Things been pretty bad, Tuttu? Barrow get some nasty radiation?”

  He nodded, one slow nod: up, down. “Not Barrow—we use the old name now,” he said, “Utqiagvik.” Tuttu shrugged. “Yeah, we got some hard radiation. The war, the damn war . . . You hear?”

  “Rob and I picked up the news on KBRW, right before . . . before it went off the air.”

  “Rob?” He looked around her, down the road. “That kid who was workin’ with you? Where is he?”

  “Dead.” She looked down at her feet. “Fell in the ice.” She looked up. “Kugrua Bay.” Claudia picked up the spent shotgun shell.

  “You crossed Kugrua Bay? Shit.” Tuttu blinked, then shook his head. “You didn’t hike all the way up here?”

  She shook her head. “Hiked to Tachinisok Inlet; found the boat there, at that camp.” Claudia shrugged. “The boat had a little gas. I motored up the rest of the way.”

  Natchiq and Kanayuq came down from their hiding places, stepped up to her side. She glanced over at them. Marvin and Arnold, right, Simon’s old hunting partners. Good names for them, she thought: Marvin—Natchiq, the seal—sleek and at home on the ice; Arnold—Kanayuq, the bullhead fish—stubborn and quick to dart off. Marvin grinned at her, patted his thirty-ought-six rifle, slung it over his shoulder. Claudia grinned back.

  The Three Stooges, she called them when she first met them, because the three cousins had been awkward and fumbling and shy. That was before she had done that subsistence study and found they were the only real hunters left in Barrow, the only ones who even tried to keep the old ways. Brothers, Marvin and Arnold had both worked as heavy-equipment operators, when they could get work; she remembered them as quiet, soft-spoken, but with a subtle sense of humor. Marvin and Arnold’s parents, and Tuttu’s mother, had all been killed in a house fire. They’d been partying and someone left a toaster oven on and the smoke alarm didn’t go off and the drunken parents died. The kids had been at their grandparents, at Malgi and Masu’s. Orphaned together and raised together. Simon’s father, Claudia had heard, had died on the streets in Fairbanks shortly after the fire—passed out cold in below-zero weather.

  Simon grew up and became a good corporate Native who had been a rising star in the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation: she had remembered him as cool and articulate, proud of his ability to work with the white lawyers and engineers of the Native corporation. Claudia had met him the first summer she was in Barrow, back when the North Slope oil still gushed and the money flowed and everyone thought that the new wells in the ANWR would be another Prudhoe Bay. The North Slope Borough Office of History and Culture had hired her to work on a dig at Nuvuk, an old village near the point; Simon had set up the computer program they used to crunch their data. He had a good head for numbers, the kind of mind that could see patterns and put them together, the kind of mind that could remember a lot of tiny little details: lines of machine code, tricky little sub-routines buried deep in a program, the numbers of artifacts and the computer abbreviations for them, stuff like IVOBJ, NID; Ivory object, non-identifiable.

  A few years later, when Claudia had updated Helen Hughes’s 1982 whaling subsistence study, she’d come into contact with Simon again. The Slope had changed and Simon had changed. Flying to Kaktovik to set up a computer program, his plane had crashed and the pilot had been killed. The emergency locator transmitter didn’t go on—the pilot had forgotten to check the batteries—and Simon had been stranded on the tundra for a month. He walked a hundred miles back to Barrow; he shed all his fat and dropped his Western ways like an old suit that no longer fit. The trip changed him, turned him all spiritual and mystic, and with his cousins Marvin and Arnold he went back to the old ways, what little their grandfather could remember. He had quit programming computers and started carving ivory: weird, abstract whale figurines that had started to gain some attention back East. Simon—Tuttu. Alive. It figured.

  “Anybody at that camp?” Natchiq asked. He stared at her parka, at her mukluks.

  She sighed. “Yeah.” She ran her hand over the parka, scuffed the top of one mukluk with the toe of another. “A man. A woman. I, uh, borrowed these. They’re dead. That tower there, you know? I think a Soviet missile homed in on it.”

  “A nuker?” Tuttu asked. The three men shifted slightly back.

  “No—yes.” She shook her head. “Well, we got lucky. It was a dud. Nuke didn’t go, and I think it self-destructed on impact. I couldn’t detect any radiation.” Claudia pulled the scintillator out from its chain around her neck, waved it. “The uranium or whatever’s pretty well shielded, I guess. There was a big crater and anything radioactive could have survived the impact and been slammed down into the earth.”

  “So how’d they die?” Natchiq asked.

  Raking a hand across her face, scratching her cheek, Claudia remembered the woman. The smell of their death came back to her, came back from the parka and the boots. “Air blast, I guess. The missile made a big hole in the ground, like a meteorite, and it knocked most of the tower down, shredding it. The man was outside. He got a piece of steel in his head. The woman . . . the woman was standing by a window. The glass . . .”

  “Ai,” Natchiq whispered.

  Claudia shivered, imagining the death. Ai. A thought occurred to her, explaining why Natchiq was so curious. “You . . . Natchiq, you knew them?”

  He nodded. “My sister . . . those mukluks. She made the parky, too, for my brother-in-law.”

  “I’m sorry.” The smell of the parka suddenly repulsed her. She began to pull it up. “Do you want—”

  “No,” he said. “No, it’s okay.”

  “The rifle—in the boat,” she said to Tuttu, “I found a rifle in one of the cabins there. If you want it . . . ?”

  “Yes,” said Natchiq, nodding. “Yes, I would like it very much.”

  Tuttu stared at her, then shook his head. “You walked,” he said. “You walked across Kugrua Bay. You took a boat up through new ice. Huh. Well, that might count for something with the elders. Malgi really wants to see you. Come on—we got to take you to see ’em.”

  “What we got to see the elders for, Tuttu?” she asked.

  “To see if you live,” he said, as if he were talking about a driver’s license exam. Natchiq and Kanayuq came up to
the left and right of her and Natchiq took her shotgun away. “To see if we don’t put you in that ravine,” Tuttu continued.

  The ravine, Claudia thought, Oh: the ravine.

  Chapter 5

  TUTTU walked Claudia down Apayauk Street, the gravel road that paralleled the coast, heading northeast toward the main part of town. Low mounds dotted an open field along the bluffs to the east, diagonal from the Cash ’n’ Carry. Snow whirled around the mounds, settling into the lee sides. White arches of whale jaws stuck up from a few small hills; great lumpy whale skulls looking like mutant boulders clung to the bluff edge. Claudia smiled at the complex of mounds, the small area ringed by weather-beaten houses to the north, south, and east, with an electrical line running down one edge.

  “ ‘The High Place,’ ” she said, “old Utqiagvik.” She stopped, paused to look at the archaeological site.

  Natchiq and Kanayuq, following them, stopped behind Claudia. Tuttu turned to her, waved at the mounds. “You ever dig that, arky? Seems like every damn archaeologist who’s been through here dug that at some time.”

  She shook her head, thinking. Ancient Utqiagvik, the Arctic archaeologist’s dream, an entire town of mounds, enough mounds for a decade of digging . . . She ran through the list of people who had dug there: Ford, Stanford, Dekin, Chang, and, of course, Reinhardt, before he’d done his study of Pingasagruk. “A professor of mine did,” she said, remembering, too, that her adviser, Cassell, had dulled his first trowel there. “But I never got the chance. Too many other projects.” Ford dug in, what, 1936? she thought. And Dekin in 1981, ’82? “That site will outlive us all, Tuttu, but the sea will take it someday.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Claudia pointed at two men who pounded away at a roofless shack with ax and maul, dismantling the old house into neat piles of wood. “What’re they doing?”

  “Firewood,” Tuttu said. “Takin’ it down for firewood.” He jerked his head to his left, toward a big log chalet, an old corporation officer’s house, Claudia remembered, half its walls torn away. “’Bout all a house like that is good for. Too big to heat. Happens a lot these days.” He took her elbow, nudged her forward.

  They moved up the street, past the rows of houses that always reminded Claudia of Cape Cod, the neat saltbox houses with whitewashed sides, red trim, gables at either end. But the usual Barrow junk cluttered the lawns: fifty-five-gallon drums, old snowmachines, old trucks, scraps of sheet metal, packing crates, dead dogs . . . Apayauk turned into Stevenson Street, and they went past the old Polar Bear Day Care Center, by the community center, past the dancehouse. Claudia whirled, looked back at the dancehouse.

  “You finished it,” she said. “You got the qaregi built.” When she had left for Pingasagruk, Tuttu, Natchiq, and Kanayuq were just getting the frame in, and had begun to lay the sod walls. The North Slope Borough Office of History and Culture had given them a grant to build a traditional dancehouse; the qaregi was going to be a real dancehouse, a showplace for tourists, but also a center for teaching young children the old ways.

  Tuttu shrugged. “It saved our ass, arky. You did a good job with the plans. We crammed nearly twenty people in that during the . . . after the attack. Me, Natchiq, Kanayuq, our families, some elders. Those things make damn good fallout shelters, you know?”

  “I know,” she said. Claudia looked at the sod-covered dancehouse, at the double-glazed skylights, the door thirty feet away leading down like a cellar entrance to the entrance tunnel. The qaregi—yeah, it made a damn good fallout shelter, she thought, just like the house at Pingasagruk. A puff of smoke curled out from a pipe in the ceiling. It made a damn good house, too. Twenty people in that little room. Amazing.

  They continued beyond the dancehouse, up the street by the Top of the World Hotel, and then took a left past the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation offices and Stuaqpak— “the big store,” its Inupiaq name meant. Trucks and cars were parked along the street, in the lots by the hotel, next to little clusters of four-wheel ATVs; some of the headlights and windows of the vehicles were broken. But no one was on the streets, though on a normal day, Claudia thought, there would be dozens of people hanging out at the store, kids smoking cigarettes at the bus stop in front, a relic of wealthier days when the village could afford bus service.

  A man with a little goatee and a red baseball hat stumbled out of the covered walkway by Stuaqpak, wobbled over to them. BLACKROCK CONSTRUCTION had been printed across the brim of the hat, and below that the acronym CMFIC. The man pushed the hat back, squinted at Claudia, and stumbled back. He burped, and she could smell the cheap whiskey even at three paces. She shook her head; some things were still the same.

  “Hey, Simon,” the man said, “hey, how ya doin’?”

  “You’re drunk, Edward.”

  “Yah, I am.” He straightened up, stared at Claudia again. “It’s a tanik. A blond bitch. Hey, Marvin, Arnold, where’d you find a tanik? You gonna fuck her?”

  “Go away, Edward,” Tuttu said. He kicked at the freezing gravel road, reached down, scraped up a handful of pebbles and threw it at Edward’s feet. “Suck up your booze, Edward. Drink it all, you hear? Drink it all.”

  Natchiq and Kanayuq grabbed more stones, threw them at Edward’s chest. “Get out of here, drunk!” they yelled.

  Edward scuttled away, back to the shelter. “I’m th’ mayor,” he screamed. “Chief Mother Fucker in Charge! I’ll arrest you! You jus’ watch.”

  Claudia shook her head. “Some things don’t change, eh Simon?”

  “Damn drunk,” Tuttu muttered. “I didn’t think anyone had any booze left. I’d thought we’d got it all.” He jerked his head at a three-story white building next to the hotel, with a bank in front, and a neat little sign set in the gravel that said NORTH SLOPE DISTRICT COURTHOUSE. “In here,” he said, taking her elbow.

  Inside the courthouse a woman screamed.

  Claudia pulled away from Natchiq and burst into the courthouse. Tuttu and his partners followed her, crowding behind her in the doorway. She ran down the halls of the building, to an open courtroom.

  As she came in, all the heads in the room turned toward her. Several dozen people sat in the public chambers, and three older men and four women sat in the jury box. Another elder, a thin, deeply tanned man with a jutting chin, sat behind the judge’s bench; Claudia recognized him as Tuttu’s grandfather, Oscar. Oscar smiled at her as she came in, a strange, knowing smile. Two younger men held the arms of a white woman squirming before the bench, some sort of black stuff dripping from her wet, blond hair onto her face. The woman leaned forward, hanging from the men, and let out a horrid yell, the scream rising up from her chest in a banshee howl.

  Claudia recognized the woman; she had been one of the ticket clerks at the airport, a thin, stylish woman with bleached blond hair named Barbara or Belinda or Betty. Claudia remembered asking her why she had come up to Barrow, and her reply had been quick and to the point: “Big bucks, hot fucks,” she’d said.

  Belinda whirled around, broke loose from the guards, rushed toward Claudia. The two men grabbed her, held her. She struggled, her hands tied behind her back. “Help me!” she screamed at Claudia. “You’ve got to help me! They want to kill me. Tell them to let me go, just let me go!”

  Claudia turned to Tuttu, jerked her head at the woman. “What is this, Simon?” she asked.

  “Tuttu,” he reminded her.

  “Yeah, Tut-tu. What the hell’s going on?”

  He shrugged. “Elders meet now and then to decide how . . .” He paused, bit his lip. “To decide how someone’s talents can best be, well, used.”

  Claudia felt that chill she’d felt at the ravine, at the edge of town. “Go on.”

  “If someone’s talents are not particularly . . . useful, particularly if they’re, uh, not Native, they, uh, might go see nanuq.” He glanced at Belinda, looked away quickly.

  “Go see nanuq?” Go see the polar bear? she thought.

  “You know, Claudia. Like in the book
s. The old ways. They take a walk on the ice.”

  Shit, she thought. The long walk . . . No Inupiaq had done that for decades. “How many Inupiaq have gone to see nanuq?”

  Tuttu glanced at his hunting buddies, at the elders, at the small crowd. “Uh, a few, it’s been mostly—”

  “Mostly whites.” She thought of the bodies in the ravines. “Taniks.”

  “No, not just taniks . . . Blacks, some Koreans, but not that many.”

  Claudia loosed the straps on her daypack, set it down, stepped up close to Tuttu, shoved him in the chest with her fingers. “Not many? Not many? I counted at least a hundred bodies in that ravine. Two hundred! Three hundred, maybe!”

  Tuttu pushed her back, shoving her into Natchiq and Kanayuq. “You weren’t here, tanik! You didn’t have to go through what we did!” He rubbed his shoulders, let his arms fall to his side, clenching and unclenching his fists. “When the war came, when that bomb hit Prudhoe Bay—you could see the flash!—the whole town went nuts. Lots of people, a lot of the pilots, just took off. A seven-thirty-seven of tourleys had just loaded up and it . . . it got out, quick. Then the madness started.

  “At first, it was like one big party, almost everyone got drunk. And you know how we are when we get drunk. We never could hold our booze, right? Edward—you saw Edward. Imagine two hundred people like that, half the town. Whites drunk, Inupiaq drunk, blacks drunk, Koreans drunk, little children drunk. And every other person’s got a gun, a pistol—even Uzis, someone had an M-sixteen—and all those years, all that hatred that had been building up . . . It just came out.” Tuttu slammed his hand on a table to the right of the jury box. “Bam! You ever hear a firefight? My uncle, he was in Vietnam, he had a good description. ‘Firecrackers,’ he said. Like firecrackers, dozens and dozens of firecrackers, popping and popping in an orgy of explosions and you think they’ll go on forever, a century of Fourth of Julys. And then it stops, it stopped. Silence, and so many dead, most of the village—a hundred, two hundred dead. We didn’t count, we didn’t want to count. So many dead!”