Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  “And have babies?”

  “Yeah—they’re getting around to that, too. See, the cooking gear . . . Well, that’s yours, but it’s camping gear, so some of the men—hunters—will want that. If you had a husband . . . you don’t have any old flames here, do you?” Claudia shook her head. “Okay, so this stuff belongs to our qaregi, and someone like Tuttu will use it.” Tammy picked up the camping gear and put it in the other box.

  She shrugged. “That’s okay, long as I can use it when I go out.”

  Tammy snorted. “You ain’t goin’ out. Men hunt; women cook and sew.” She rubbed her cheek, and Claudia noticed a fading bruise, still an ugly greenish yellow. “Least, that’s the way I had it explained to me.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Claudia thought about what Malgi had told her. Teach them? How could she teach them if she had to stay in the house, tending the lamps, scraping hides, and sewing mukluks?

  “Whatever.” Tammy moved on to the packing crates. “You carried this stuff down from that site, too?”

  Claudia shook her head. “Found it at Tachinisok Inlet—uh, at a camp there. Same with this parka and the mukluks.” She explained about the tower and the boat and the dead people and the nuke.

  “A dud then? I remember seein’ something to the south that day.” Tammy pulled out the boxes of crackers, canned goods, tossed them into the cardboard boxes. The wooden crates were deep and narrow, four feet high, six inches wide, two feet deep. From the side of the crate Tammy slid out the rifle. She picked it up by the stock, slid the bolt back, opened up the chamber, and nodded. “Empty—nobody home.” She sighted down the barrel. “Oooh—nice piece.” Tammy hefted the Ruger. “For damn sure you won’t get to keep this.”

  Claudia grabbed it back. “I don’t want it, but Natchiq’s got my shotgun. I told him I’d give this to him—I found it in one of those cabins down there, I think it’s his brother-in-law’s. Maybe we can trade, huh?”

  “Maybe.” Tammy snorted. “Don’t count on it. I know these guys, they’ll keep your shotgun and the rifle.”

  “Fuck that,” she said. “It’s my shotgun, like my boots and my sewing kit—I get to keep the sewing kit, don’t I?”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s cool, Claudia . . .”

  “That Winchester’s my dad’s gun. I didn’t have any brothers. I was the oldest. When my father died, I got the gun, see? It’s not the greatest gun, it’s no damn over-and-under Weatherby, but it’s my dad’s. He taught me to hunt, taught me to shoot. Are we clear on that?” She raised the barrel of the rifle up, pointing it at the ceiling.

  Tammy held her hands up, waved Claudia back. “Hey, hey, chill out, bitch. That’s fine by me, but I don’t make the rules. Talk to Tuttu, or Malgi.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Fine.” She glared at Claudia, shook her head, and then began poking through her other things: her clothes, her books, her notes, the artifacts. “I guess the rest of this is yours. I’ll have to tell Tuttu about the rifle, though.” She rubbed her cheek again. “Sorry.”

  “He knows about the rifle. I’ll remind him.”

  “Okay.” Tammy rose, grabbed her atigi, a sheepskin pullover covered with floral-print cloth. “Let’s take this stuff over to Stuaqpak. Uh”—she pointed at Claudia’s parka, wrinkled her nose—“I can show you the bathhouse. Water’s a little scarce, but I think with the stuff you’ve brought in, they’ll let you clean up. Okay?” Tammy put an arm around her, squeezed her shoulder. Claudia stiffened, pulled away. “Okay?” She squeezed Claudia’s shoulder harder.

  Claudia relaxed, smiled, put an arm around Tammy, and squeezed back. “Okay.”

  * * *

  Tammy and Claudia walked past Stuaqpak down Stevenson Street, to where it followed the coast into Browerville. The bluff fell sharply to the beach just north of town, and the road ran between the beach and a lagoon north of Utqiagvik proper. Claudia remembered that the ancient village of Utqiagvik and the system of mounds ended with the bluffs, though there were a couple more old villages farther up the coast: Pigniq near the old Naval Arctic Research Lab, Nuvuk at the point.

  Smoke rose from a few buildings in Browerville, the neighborhood of Barrow on the other side of the lagoon. One white building, an old New England saltbox design, stood out above the others: Brower’s Café, the old signal station.

  “What do they call Browerville now?” she asked Tammy. Claudia recalled a linguistic dispute that always arose when identifying Barrow. Utqiagvik, she had been told, translated roughly as “the high place” and technically referred to the main part of Barrow—the bluffs, the mounds. But some called the whole area, including Browerville, Ukpiagvik, “where they hunt snowy owls,” and her informants said that meant the general area. She imagined a Venn diagram where Utqiagvik could be part of Ukpiagvik but Browerville couldn’t be Utqiagvik, and thought that simple enough. But it didn’t help that the old explorers called the area Utkiavik or Utkiavie or Utkiavwin.

  Tammy shrugged. “Some of the old guys call it ‘Ukpiagvik,’ I guess, but it’s still Browerville, though, if you know what I mean.” She held the tips of her fingers to her lips and lightly kissed them. “Bunch of umialiks, you know?”

  “Yeah.” Umialiks, Claudia thought, meaning “rich,” not in the old sense of “a whaling captain.” Even when she had first come to Barrow, Browerville had been a little snobbier, a little higher status. It had grown up around the rescue station and expanded into the Cape Smythe Whaling and Trading Company, an operation established in the late nineteenth century by Charles Brower, namesake of the neighborhood. Sometimes considered a separate village, sometimes not, Browerville had a different character from Barrow; the houses were newer, more modern, fancier. Claudia often thought of Browerville as something separate from Barrow; the real Barrow, the real Utqiagvik, was the village built over the old mounds, the old houses—the village on the bluffs.

  “What’s Browerville like now?” she asked.

  Tammy stared off at the houses on pilings perched between the beach and the great tundra. “Scared,” she said. “Desperate—like us. Lot of whites live there, what’s left of taniks.” She moved down toward the beach. “Let’s get some water.”

  The icy wind blew hard from the west. Claudia shivered in her light down parka, pulled the neck of her jacket tighter—she had washed the sheepskin parka and already missed its warmth. The great black clouds still covered the sky from horizon to horizon, the same clouds that had hung over the sky since she and Rob had crawled out of the shelter. Sliding below the clouds, the setting sun shone in their faces, a purple red globe. Yet another glorious sunset, she thought.

  A line of larger ice moved in from the northwest, still about a mile out from shore. The new sea ice Claudia had worried about a few days before had come back in, closing the brief lead of yesterday. Interspersed among the new ice were small icebergs, old ice, deep blue or smoky green. That’s it, she thought, it’s freezing up now. Another few weeks or a month and we can walk on that, the newer ice freezing the older ice solid, and the pack ice rammed hard against the shallow sea bottom.

  She helped Tammy roll a large chunk of blue ice from the ocean shallows and onto the beach. Using a small hatchet hung from her belt, Tammy broke the blue ice into smaller chunks and then piled them in two white plastic buckets. Piqaluyak, it was called, Claudia remembered: blue ice, frozen saltwater compressed so hard the salt had percolated out and the water had become pure. The ice would sit in a pan on the back of the wood stove and melt. Drinking water. The two women hefted the buckets of ice and headed back along the beach to the qaregi.

  Rounding a bluff below the Polar Bear Daycare Center, Claudia and Tammy saw three men walking down the beach from Browerville toward them. In the low light of the setting sun, it was hard to distinguish figures, but in the alpenglow one man’s red baseball cap stood out. The three men came closer and Claudia’s guess was confirmed: the man in the red hat was Edward.

  A trail up to Stevenson Street and the qar
egi snaked around a burnt-out apartment building on their right. They moved toward it, but the three men angled toward the trail, blocking their way. Tammy put her bucket down, ran a gloved hand through her hair, cocked a hip at the men—her tough dyke pose, Claudia thought. The plastic handle of the bucket dug into her palm, and Claudia had built up momentum moving up the low slope. She glanced back at Tammy, kept moving, letting the weight of the bucket pull her forward and through the men. It was an old trick she’d picked up in New York City: move ahead, eyes front, ignore any human obstacle before you.

  “Where you goin’?” Edward asked.

  He stuck out an arm, pushed her right shoulder, and she spun around clockwise, the bucket swinging around and into him. He pushed her harder, falling back a step, and she had to set the bucket down. The other two men cut her off from Tammy, and Tammy, Claudia noticed, had straightened up, chest slightly forward, hunkering down in a slight crouch.

  “Goin’ to see your little Toot-Toot, tanik?” Edward asked again.

  She glared at him, studying him like she would a bad piece of sculpture or an ugly mound of dung: slowly, contemptuously, deliberately. Her gaze moved up from his worn-out shoe-pac boots, rubber glopped with Shoe-goo, to his greasy black jeans, to the oversize North Slope parka half-zipped, to the mangy wolf ruff around the hood, to Edward’s dirty face with its scraggly Ho Chi Minh beard. Claudia stood two feet back from him, rocking on her feet. “Fuck off,” she wanted to say, but she knew that to say nothing would be best.

  “Gonna go screw your little Toot-Toot?” Edward asked. “Gonna be his little honkey bitch? Or you gonna maybe dig up some dead Eskimo bones, like a good little archaeologist?”

  Claudia glanced back at Tammy, at the two men between her. Taniks. She didn’t recognize them at first, but when the shorter man turned to her, she recognized him almost instantly by his droopy eyes, the weak chin, and the walrus mustache: Mick, the bush pilot who’d flown her to Pingasagruk the first summer of her fieldwork.

  The fat guy next to him she guessed was Karl, Mick’s boss, the head of Naataq Airlines; he’d been involved in some kickback scheme with Edward a few years back and there’d been a big stink in the Anchorage papers, Karl’s fat face immortalized in one classic photo of him coming out of the Anchorage federal courthouse with the hood of an Eskimo parka half-lowered over his eyes. Damn war did him a favor, Claudia thought.

  “She’s gonna dig up your dead bones, motherfucker,” a voice said from up on the road, “if you don’t watch your goddamn mouth.”

  Tuttu stood up at the top of the little trail, a Winchester Ranger shotgun—her shotgun—in his hand. He slid the receiver back for emphasis, but Claudia didn’t doubt he already had a shell in the chamber; a shell popped out, which struck her as somewhat curious. Had he ejected buck for a slugger? she thought.

  “Hey, Simon,” Mick said. “Chill out, man. It’s cool. We were jes sayin’ hello to the little ladies.” Karl turned to Tuttu, his fat little hands waving in front of him.

  “Sure,” Tuttu said. He snorted. “Well, since you’re being so polite and all, why don’t you help the little ladies with the buckets?” He pointed at the buckets with the shotgun.

  “Ah . . .” Edward said, then sighed. He picked up Claudia’s bucket and carted it up the little rise. Tuttu nodded, jerked the gun at Tammy’s bucket. Mick looked at Karl, Karl shook his head, and Mick took her bucket up.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” Tuttu said, stopping them at the top of the path. “You’re so kind.” They set the buckets down.

  Edward turned to Tuttu, looked at him, started to open his mouth.

  “Save it,” said Tuttu.

  Mick and Edward went back down the path, joining Karl. Claudia and Tammy watched them go by, standing where they had been. When the men got to the bottom of the beach, Tuttu called out after them.

  “Hey, Edward, big shortage of blond pussy, huh?”

  Edward ignored him, and the three men walked off, south down the beach, toward the beached barge.

  “Blond pussy?” Claudia whispered to Tammy.

  “Edward has a thing for blond taniks,” Tammy explained. She looked up at Tuttu. “I guess it’s catching, huh?”

  Claudia shook her head. When they joined Tuttu, he had reloaded the shells and slung the shotgun over his shoulder—my shotgun, she thought. He stood by the buckets, motioned down at them when they came up.

  “Thanks,” Claudia said, a bit sarcastically. “Why didn’t you kill those assholes before in that big firefight?” She wanted to bite back the words as soon as she said them. Idiot, she thought.

  Tuttu scowled at her. “All I could do to keep them from killing me,” he said. He shook his head. “Edward won’t bother you again.”

  “ ’Preciate it,” Tammy said.

  Tuttu nodded. “I was getting hungry. Wondered what was taking you so long to get water.” He turned, patted his stomach. “Shouldn’t you be makin’ supper tonight?”

  “Eat shit,” Tammy mumbled as they walked back to the qaregi.

  My shotgun, Claudia thought, staring at the Winchester slung over Tuttu’s shoulder. My shotgun.

  Chapter 7

  MOVING in and out like bashful suitors, the slush ice had come in and gone out six times from the shore. One day a thin sheen would cover the open water from the beach to the pack ice a few miles out, and then a westerly wind would blow the pack ice to the horizon and fracture the slush into little pans. But each time the pack ice moved back in, it had grown thicker, higher, whiter.

  Claudia had hiked down to the beach to dispose of the contents of the qaregi’s honey buckets. Tuttu had never gotten the qaregi hooked up to the city sewage system—just as well, since Tammy said it broke down the first day after the war, and the engineer who could have fixed it had been killed—and so they had to poop in a little bucket in a little room off the entrance tunnel. The poop got dumped in a drum on the beach, and when the ice got thick enough to walk on, the drums would be dragged out on the ice and left to float away in the spring.

  She’d heard that was how the villages took care of sewage after the previous world war. In one of his articles Reinhardt had written of the legacy of such waste management: “And as we flew up the coast to Kaktovik, we saw thousands of little orange rusty fifty-five-gallon barrels littering the beach like so many seashells.” So many seashells full of shit, she thought he might have added.

  After Claudia emptied the honey bucket, she wiped out the tin pail with snow, dumped the snow in the barrel, and then set the little bucket down; she would pick it up on her way back. Claudia walked up the bluff to the old archaeological site. She often went there when she needed to get out of the qaregi, went there to “meditate on the mounds,” as Tammy called it.

  The newer village had expanded on the remains of the old, but a five-acre parcel at the south end of the town had been kept open, leaving the twenty or so mounds undisturbed. In the summer tourleys had come down to the site, tripping over whale skulls, and gazed out to sea, so that they could go home and say to their grandchildren: “I saw the Arctic Ocean.” Periodically some squad of archaeologists would dig up a mound or two in the search for an ever elusive Ph.D. The Holy Grail of that hunk of Utqiagvik had been to prove continuous occupation back to the time of the Arctic Small Tool Tradition, circa 4,500 years before the present, but no one had ever done it.

  She’d never spent a winter in Utqiagvik, but everyone said that the postwar winter seemed to be living up to their worst nightmares. A thickening cover of snow, that rarity in the Arctic desert, blanketed the mounds, so that they looked like a plain of giant melted marshmallows. Sloppy, giant melted marshmallows, she thought, noting the drifts building up on the leeward side of the mounds.

  She liked the mounds at sunset, because from them the view south was relatively unobstructed. The big log house that had always blocked the south edge of the site had been carved down to pilings, and an equipment yard she remembered from a few years back had disappeared, a chain
link fence and a flattened construction shack the only remaining ruins. On one high mound—Mound 16, according to one of Dekin’s reports—Claudia tried an experiment.

  Lining up sticks with the point where the sun set, each day she came down to watch the sunset and mark its passage across the southwest horizon. Tammy would come down in the morning to catch the sunrise, and each day the two sticks—sunrise to the southeast, sunset to the southwest—moved closer and closer. Claudia had figured it out, time of sunrise and sunset, and one day, she knew, she and Tammy would come down together and mark the last day, when the sticks would be almost touching and the moments of sunrise and sunset would be barely fifteen minutes apart.

  A man came walking up the bluff from the beached barge, and as he got closer Claudia recognized Tuttu’s white canvas atigi, the sunlight sparkling silver off the little tips of the wolverine ruff around his hood. Tuttu walked in long, smooth strides. He tended to slide his feet, too, pushing out, like skating. As he came closer she tried to hear his footsteps, but his feet made soft padding sounds in the snow, calculated, almost, as if he pulled up with one foot just before the other touched, the crunch of hide against snow barely a whisper. As he came up to her the orange ball of the sun fell below the horizon, and she marked its passage with another stick, six inches closer to Tammy’s sunrise sticks.

  “You shouldn’t be out alone,” Tuttu said.

  She shrugged, then stood. “I can handle myself. Edward hasn’t bothered me in a while.”

  “You shouldn’t be out alone,” he repeated. He walked off, stopped, looked back at her.

  “Right,” she said, following him.

  She fell into step to his right, trying to match his walk, but his legs were longer than hers. His footsteps sounded like the crushing of butterfly wings and hers like the death throes of crackers being pounded into bread crumbs. They skidded down the face of the bluff to the beach, and as they got to sea level the wind hit them straight on. The cold found all the little gaps in her down parka where the feathers had clumped up or the nylon had torn. For the tenth time that day she wished that the sheepskin atigi she had salvaged off the dead woman would hurry up and dry—the fourth washing and it still smelled.