Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  “Tuttu, I—” Claudia turned from him, looked at the elders, at the people seated behind Tuttu. They all stared at her, cold, hard looks on their faces—except for Oscar, who had a silly grin on his face. Belinda squirmed in the arms of the guards, sobbing. “Why?”

  “You don’t know, Claudia!” Tuttu yelled. “You weren’t there! Why, you ask? Why did we do it? You know why. You said so yourself, in that report you wrote. I read it, again and again, in that long wait during the fallout. The whites destroyed our culture, our language—Christ, hardly any of the elders even speak Inupiaq. The taniks brought up alcohol, destroyed subsistence hunting. They wrecked the caribou herds, wrecked the walrus and the seals . . . Finally, they took away the whales. You said that. They told us we couldn’t hunt agviq. You said that. You said they had quote ‘almost completely destroyed anything remotely resembling the Inupiaq culture.’ ”

  Claudia nodded. “Yeah, I did. But such a revenge—”

  He slammed his hand on the table again. “Revenge? No, more than that—madness. We went crazy! God damn us all, we went crazy! I—” He leaned against the table, held his hand to his forehead. “Some of those bullets . . . I probably fired them. I don’t remember, I don’t want to remember. But we’d already gone crazy, our culture changed too fast. In less than two hundred years we went from a stone-age society to—to what? We changed too fast. First you whites destroyed our subsistence way of life, telling us what we could and could not hunt after you’d wiped out anything worth hunting, then you got us hooked on a cash economy, yanking that out from us, too, with promises of oil fields that never worked out. Finally—damn you—you turned us into some welfare culture, livin’ off the BIA and our almost worthless corporation dividends. Any good job the whites got, and any stinking job the Koreans took, and all we got was free cable TV. Fuck.” Tuttu spat.

  “But to kill, still . . .” Claudia waved her hand at Belinda. “To kill her.”

  Tuttu shook his head, took a deep breath. “That’s not how it is now, you don’t get it,” he said softly. “When the killing stopped, when that horrible night ended, the village, Barrow, picked up the pieces and figured out what to do. Man, we knew about the radiation, so a lot of us made shelters—the qaregi, the high school gym, Stuaqpak—and crammed as many in as we could. Some of the taniks left, took the rest of the planes south. Okay; we let them go. And some whites stayed—not a lot, ’cause a lot of the whites just ran and never came back, but a few, mostly the cronies of our dear ex-mayor. You know what, though? A lot of people—Inupiaq, tanik, whatever—didn’t go into the shelters. They just kept drinking, lived like nothing had happened and there wasn’t a cloud of radiation comin’. And they died. They died. Those are most of the bodies you saw: Inupiaq, tanik, Korean, black. So now what we’ve got is maybe two hundred alive, less than a tenth of the population when I was a boy. A lot didn’t even survive in the shelters.” Tuttu pointed at the elders in the jury box. “Man, that’s about all the old folks left. So now, you see how it is? People got to be useful, okay? They got to pull their own weight.”

  Claudia shook her head. “So Belinda isn’t useful, and for that she’ll die?”

  The elder, Oscar, smiled at Claudia, leaned forward. “This woman . . . She is a parasite, see, anthropologist. A parasite. She lived off us. She tried to hide, tried to cover her true coloring with black shoe polish. Hah!” He rubbed his own blue-black hair streaked lightly with gray. “She stole our food. What good is she?”

  “I’ll cook,” Belinda said, sobbing. “Anything, anything. My boyfriend’s the one who smeared this shit in my hair, he snuck me into the shelter. I was going to go on that plane south, but he wanted me to stay. He took care of me, he’ll take care of me now.” She pointed with her bound hands at a man, an Inupiaq in the front row. “Right, James, please—please?”

  James lowered his head, refused to look up at her.

  “She is useless,” the old man said. “There is not enough food for the winter for useless people.” He stared at James, and under his gaze the man, barely out of his teens, looked up. “A woman has to take responsibility for her actions. But a man has to take responsibility, too.”

  The eldest of the women in the jury box said something to Oscar that Claudia couldn’t catch, and Oscar smiled, then nodded. The woman got up, went over to a small girl, whispered something to her. The little girl ran out of the courthouse.

  “Release her,” Oscar said.

  “What?” asked Belinda as her guards untied her hands. She rubbed them, then wiped at her face with the sleeve of her shirt. “What . . . what are you going to do?”

  “This . . . this anthropologist is right,” Oscar said. “There has been too much killing. Masu”—he motioned at the old woman—“Masu says that if you are so intent on looking like an Inupiaq, then you should act like one, too.”

  The little girl ran back into the courtroom, panting slightly. She handed Masu a purple spray canister and a towel. Masu came out from behind the jury box, stepped up to Belinda. She snapped the cap off the can, an image of a dark-haired woman on the side of it.

  “No shoe polish,” Masu said, “do it right.”

  Masu reached behind Belinda’s head, swept her hair over her face, and pulled it down. Shaking the can, she touched the nozzle, spraying thick globs of brown foam into Belinda’s hair. The old woman massaged the tanik’s hair, spraying more foam in, and then she wound the towel around the woman’s head. She rubbed the towel, then whipped it away. Belinda’s hair fell over her shoulders and face, a tangled mass of jet black. Masu wiped her purple-stained hands on the towel.

  Belinda reached up, rubbed the damp hair, held a lock in front of her. “I . . . I wasn’t really blond anyway.” She blushed.

  “Belinda . . . No, Paula, that’s what we will call you,” Oscar said. “Soot. Hah! Paula, you will stay in Masu’s house, in our house. You will work hard, you will do whatever Masu tells you, do you understand? And James . . .” He pointed at the young man. “You will live with her as her husband, and you will become a hunter, and you will take care of her as she takes care of you.” He waved at the door. “Ai . . . Go. Go before I change my mind.”

  James rose, took Belinda’s—Paula’s hand, and the couple left the room.

  Claudia watched them leave, then stepped up to the elders. “So?” she challenged them. “How will you judge me?” She pushed a hank of blond hair back from her face and glared at Masu, at Oscar, high in his seat. “Will you dye my hair, too, and make me some crone’s slave? Is that what my worth is? Let me know my worth to you, if you think you’re entitled to that.”

  Oscar rose, held out his hands. Raven beaks rattled from the white anorak he wore over a turtleneck shirt. A raven’s head, bound with sinew, swung from his neck, tangled up with a pouch stuffed with some lumpy material. He came out from behind the bench, beaming.

  “I am known as Malgi now,” he said, standing before her. “And I judged you long ago.”

  “The loon?” Claudia asked, translating the Inupiaq word. The arctic loon, the loon with the pale gray head, the piercing red eyes—but “to give birth to twins,” the word meant as a verb base. Her heart seized at the sight of him, at the raven’s head, dried and rotting. An angatkok, she thought. He’s become a shaman. Malgi: the loon, who gives birth to twins. Yes, it fits, it fits.

  Malgi nodded. “The loon.” He waved his right hand, shook it at her. “I saw you coming, saw your long walk up the coast from the house in the ground. It was I who sent Tuttu to look for you, and it was I who heard your boat, like a farting seal.” Kanayuq and Natchiq stepped back from Claudia. She stood, frozen before him, barely able to breathe. The elder stroked her face, ran his fingers down her hair, yanking slightly on it. “You are in good health? You were able to hide from the sick sky?”

  She nodded slowly, whispered, “Yes. Yes—we lived in an old house.”

  “Ah: we,” the elder said. “Your student? That young man who fawned over you? He did not come with you?
He died?” Claudia nodded. “I feel sadness for you, but great joy that your friend’s burden has been relieved.” Malgi smiled. “I imagine he felt guilt that he survived—that he didn’t know how to love you.”

  “Yes,” Claudia said, thinking, It’s true, yes.

  “And now you have come to us, anthropologist, come to Utqiagvik. This pleases me.” He waved his left hand at the other elders, who smiled back at her. “It pleases us. You will be most useful to us, you see? I wanted you to come here, prayed that you would be brought to us. And you have. Once I taught you, told you much of what I knew, but it is obvious now that you are a great teacher yourself. You have learned much of our old ways, know more than even I could know.”

  “I . . . I do not know all that much,” she said, thinking of Pingasagruk, of the mystery she still did not completely understand.

  “It is good to be humble, daughter,” Malgi said. “But now, now you must accept your strength.” He reached down, lifted the carving of the whale around her neck, held it, stroked the whale’s fins, flukes, the incised lines. “Agviq brings you to us. Agviq has guided you here, kept you alive.”

  “I—” What could she say? Claudia thought. This horrid, great fear tore through her, not the cold fear she’d felt coming into Barrow, but the fear of the unknown, the fear one feels upon coming up to a high cliff, before descending down a winding trail into the darkness of a canyon below.

  “You will teach us!” Malgi yelled. His right hand gripped the carving of agviq, twisted it tighter and tighter around her neck, until the thong bit into her skin. “That is your value! You, anthropologist, will teach us how to regain our pride, to once again become Real People!” She felt the blood rush from her head, the air die in her mouth, the world grow black before her. Malgi let go, pushed her back into the arms of Natchiq and Kanayuq.

  “Or you will die,” the elder said. He looked down. “Or we will all die.”

  Chapter 6

  LIKE a child bursting into the world, Claudia climbed up through the katak and out of the entrance tunnel into the qaregi. Natchiq and Kanayuq followed behind her, carrying her gun and her gear from the boat. The tunnel floor rose slightly toward the dancehouse, and as she walked up into the main room, passing small anterooms off the entrance tunnel, the air grew warmer. When Tuttu slid back the trapdoor to the room, a cloud of steaming chicken stew washed over her. The back of her pack scraped against the katak, the hatch door, so that she had to lean forward slightly to enter.

  The early afternoon light barely shone through the skylight high up on the room of the underground sod dancehouse. Claudia smiled at the gut skin stretched across the inside of the light; plastic skylight on the outside, gut on the inside: she liked the authentic touch. One big room, the dancehouse measured twenty by twenty-five feet, with four timber posts in a small square in the center. Planed cedar boards had been laid out for a floor, and rough-hewn wall planks angled up slightly from the floors. But the qaregi’s design had been changed from that of a ceremonial meeting house, its purpose in the nineteenth century. Essentially a large iglugruaq—a sod house—Tuttu and his cousins had remodeled the qaregi into a communal home for their extended family: smaller chambers had been partitioned off on the sides, but the main area had been left open. Benches were arranged around a wood stove that hissed and crackled at one end of the central area. A pipe rose up from the iron stove to the ceiling, a few feet away from the skylight.

  Standing over the stove, a young woman about Claudia’s age stirred a big pot of chicken stew; her long black hair was cut into short spikes at her crown, and she had stripped to mukluks, jeans, and a black T-shirt that said ROAD KILLS on the back in dripping blood lettering.

  “Tammy!” Claudia shouted.

  Tammy turned, fishing lure earrings jangling in her left ear, squinted at Claudia, then broke out into a huge smile. “Goddamn,” she said. “Goddamnit . . . Claud-ya.”

  Tuttu glanced over at Claudia, his eyes wide. “The woman-who-loves-women knows you?”

  “Tammy!” she shouted again. “You made it!”

  Tammy made it, she thought. Why should she be surprised that Tammy had survived? The tough Inupiaq had come to Barrow from Oregon, where she’d been raised by white parents—they’d adopted her as a child, in a celebrated case that had tested the Indian Child Welfare Act. Tammy. Claudia had met her that summer, amused by her quaint, slightly archaic tough-dyke punk act. At first she’d made the mistake of thinking Tammy had been raised in Barrow; she asked her if she spoke any Inupiaq and Tammy replied that she spoke a little French. They used to joke that Claudia was Eskimo on the inside and Tammy was white and between the two of them they might make a real Inupiaq. Tammy. Bitchin’, as she might say, Claudia thought. Bitchin’.

  Tammy put the spoon back in the pot and came over to Claudia, hugged her. Claudia pulled back, cocked her neck. “Damn Mepps earrings.” She unhooked an earring from her hair, looked at Tammy.

  “You made it,” Tammy said. “Man, I thought—”

  “I made it,” Claudia broke in. She glanced over at Tuttu, Kanayuq and Natchiq snickering behind him. “I met Tammy early in the summer,” she explained to them. “She was working at Stuaqpak and we used to get high together. You got any of that killer dope left, Tammy?”

  She jerked her head at Tuttu. “The federales confiscated it. No drugs, he says.”

  “Makes you crazy,” Tuttu explained. “Though with the lesbian, how can you tell?” He rubbed the thin mustache on his lip, pointed a finger at Tammy. “What corner you sleeping in? You mind if Claudia shares your space?”

  Tammy nodded. “Shit no. All right. Let me show you.” She shoved the pot of stew to the back of the stove, licked her fingers.

  “Good,” said Tuttu. “Little Nuna, you tell her how things work now, okay?” He patted Claudia’s pack. “She’ll tell you what you can keep and what goes into the village stores.”

  Claudia frowned. “You’re appropriating stuff?” Inside, she smiled. It’d be the right way under the circumstances.

  “Ai,” he said. “Well, I’d like to. I’m trying to get the other families to pool their resources, put everything at Stuaqpak, but right now it’s voluntary. ‘Communism,’ my old Eskimo scout buddies call it, but it’s the only fair way I know. We pull together. Maybe when we’re better off . . . if agviq’s willing.” He waved at a corner of the dancehouse. “Nuna will tell you. She’ll let you know what women are expected to do, what you can keep and not keep.”

  “What about my shotgun?” Claudia asked. She glared at Natchiq. “You going to give me my Winchester back?”

  Tuttu looked at his hunting partner. Natchiq gripped the gun stock, shook his head slightly, then shrugged. “We’ll talk about that later, okay?” Tuttu said. “Nuna will explain things.” Natchiq and Kanayuq set down the crates of supplies, and the three men went back outside.

  Tammy put an arm around Claudia, helped her with her pack. “He calls me that: ‘Nuna,’” she said after Tuttu had gone. “Dirt.”

  “Earth,” Claudia corrected.

  “Dirt,” Tammy insisted. “Doesn’t matter. I’m still good ol’ Tammy to you. Here.” She pointed at a three-by-five area in the corner to the right of the stove. “Shove this shit over; this is the single girls’ dormitory.” She waved at the wall to the right.

  Claudia squinted, got her bearings. The east wall. The katak was to the south, the stove to the north. The men were to the west, wives to the south, old people by the stove. Was that the old way? she asked herself. She tried to remember what Reinhardt wrote on that. Did they even have huge houses back then? Claudia couldn’t remember.

  “How’d you hook up with Tuttu’s family?” she asked.

  “Got me,” Tammy said. “I think because my parents—my natural ones, not my adopted parents—are supposed to be from Kotzebue, and Tuttu’s got a second cousin from there or something. He took me in after the . . . you know.” She helped Claudia drag the wooden crates over to her area. Tammy rummaged amo
ng some junk against the wall, pulled out two cardboard boxes, and set them on the floor. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Setting her pack down, Claudia undid the straps and knelt next to it; she started emptying pockets. Tammy sat next to her in a yoga squat, and pulled out the two sleeping bags and their sleeping pads.

  “We’ll keep those,” she said. “Anything extra’s supposed to go to Stuaqpak, but let’s just get this stuff hidden away real fast . . . You mind? Why do you have two bags? Get a little chilly?”

  “That kid I went down to Pingasagruk with? Rob? It’s his.”

  “Why’d he give it to you? He stay there?”

  “Yeah. He died.”

  “Oh.” Tammy pushed the bag toward her, touched her arm. “Oh, I’m sorry. You want the bag?”

  “No, no, take it. And the pad.”

  “You sure?” Claudia nodded. “Okay. My bag’s a little shot. We can lay it out beneath us, and I’ll use Rob’s.” She patted the plywood, laid a hand on Claudia’s knee. “You don’t mind sleeping next to me?” She jerked her chin over at Masu sewing next to them. “Some of the women get a little nervous around me—they think I’ll fondle them or something. Although . . .” She grinned.

  Claudia shook her head. “The body warmth will be welcome on cold nights. But if you want to fondle me . . . just don’t wake me up, got it?”

  Tammy sighed. “Yeah.” She began poking through Claudia’s supplies. “All right, let’s see what else you got . . . Oooh.” She slid Claudia’s last two bars of Cadbury chocolate under her pillow. “I never saw those. Did you see those?” Claudia shook her head, grinning. “Good. The rest of the stuff”—she threw the canned and freeze-dried food into one of the boxes—“is Stuaqpak’s.”

  “What about the camping gear?” Claudia pointed at a pile of backpack pots and pans, a small stove, the flask of remaining fuel.

  “Our supplies.” Tammy shook her head. “Tuttu and the old man have some weird ideas about sexual equality,” she said. “See, it’s kind of like the bad ol’ days: men hunt, women cook and sew.”