Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  Claudia set the butt of the shotgun against her armpit, barrel pointing down, ready to fire the gun as she came around the building. She checked that the safety was off, rested her finger against the trigger. Breathing in slowly, calming herself, she took one long breath, held it, stepped around the corner of the building, and raised the shotgun.

  The fuel bladder exploded. Pock-pock-pock, she heard another burst. An expanding cloud of flaming gas rose up from the barge, a man backlit by the explosion. Warm air washed over her, the stench of unexploded fuel pushed toward her. Claudia lined up the gun sights, the man—yes, it was a man—two hundred feet away. Take him, she thought, pull the trigger. No, she thought again, the damage is done, why kill him? The man turned to her, turning from the blast, a skinny rifle dangling from a strap wrapped around his arm. A red hat pulled low over his forehead concealed his eyes, but for a brief moment she could see the lower half of his face: clean-shaven cheeks and chin, a thin little mustache over his lip. Then he saw her and raised the assault rifle, the quick movement pushing the hat back as the stock of the gun came up to his shoulder.

  She pulled the trigger. As her finger pulled back, as her fingertip folded back to her palm, a barrel of fuel exploded on the Mercury. The sound startled her, and she jerked back, the tip of the shotgun rising up as she fired. The man pitched forward, crouching, and the buckshot screamed over his head. Something red fell to the earth, the man rolled, and Claudia ducked back behind the building. She jacked another shell in. Bullets hit against the side of the house, one bullet tearing through the thin wall at the corner two feet above her head. Claudia scurried back along the side of the house. Somebody moved behind her, footsteps crunching in the snow, and she whirled, shotgun ready, then relaxed. It was Natchiq, Tuttu’s cousin.

  “Natchiq,” she said, lowering the Winchester.

  “Where is he?” Natchiq held up the thirty-ought-six she had given him days ago, loading a shell. Claudia waved down toward the side of the house. Inside the house, something caught on fire.

  Natchiq ran along the west wall of the house, crouched, rolled, and disappeared around the corner. Claudia swallowed her fear, followed him. She ducked down, peered around the edge. Natchiq looked along the bluff, fanning his rifle out in front of him, toward a building on the other side of Stevenson Street.

  “Where’d he go?” he asked her.

  Claudia shrugged. “I don’t know.” She looked down at the ground, at a red hat in the snow, pointed.

  Natchiq picked up the hat, held it out to her. The crown of the hat had been shredded, opened up. BLACKROCK CONSTRUCTION, it said across the brim of the hat, and below that, CMFIC. “Edward’s hat,” Natchiq said, “‘Chief Mother Fucker in Charge.’ Sonofabitch.”

  She took the hat on the end of her shotgun barrel, let the hat slide down the gun through the hole in the crown. Lucky bastard, she thought. Another inch and she’d have shredded his face. “Edward?” she asked, remembering the guy who had harassed her. “The mayor?”

  “Ex-mayor,” Natchiq said. He looked out at the burning barge. “Anaq. Shit. We were going to try to off-load that fuel tomorrow, get those barrels of food out of there.”

  Tuttu ran up with Tammy and Kanayuq; the two men had their rifles. Claudia let the hat slide off the barrel, locked the safety. She picked the hat up and handed it to Tuttu. He took it, pushed his fist through the hole, looked at Claudia, at her shotgun, at the brim of the hat.

  “You could have shot a little lower,” he said. She shrugged. “This is our old mayor’s hat, isn’t it?” he asked. Natchiq nodded. “Mayor Ed got this hat from one of the companies that, uh, charged the Borough rates somewhat in excess of the market price,” he explained to Claudia. “The guy you and Tammy saw shoot up the barge, the guy you shot at, he was wearin’ this hat?”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Tammy said. She looked at Claudia. “Just heard the rifle firing. What’d the rifle look like?”

  “He wore the hat,” Claudia said. “Uh, it was a skinny rifle, a long thing—a magazine—coming out of the stock.” She glanced over at the burning barge, the house burning on the bluff. No one tried to put the fires out; they just stood there arguing hats and guns.

  “No handle at the top?” Tammy asked; Claudia shook her head. “That’d be a Mini-fourteen then. Incendiary bullets. Where’d he get incendiary bullets?”

  “Same place Edward got a Mini-fourteen,” Natchiq said.

  “Scouts,” Tuttu said. “Alaska National Guard, Eskimo scouts. We used to do maneuvers together, ’til he got drunk and they yanked his commission.”

  Groups of villagers came down the road from town, down from Browerville. The flames on the Mercury were dying down, though some had spread to the tug moored alongside; the flames of the house leapt up the roof, and they had to move away from the heat. Natchiq jerked his chin at the approaching people.

  “We’d better take care of Edward quick and easy,” Tuttu said.

  “Ought to clear it with the elders—” Natchiq protested.

  Tuttu stared at Natchiq, smiled at Kanayuq. “You want to go pay our respects to the mayor?” he asked. Natchiq shook his head.

  “Right on,” said Kanayuq. “Let’s do it.” They both looked at Natchiq, he looked at Claudia, and then, sighing, he slowly nodded. The three men turned, laid their rifles across their arms like they were hunting, and walked off.

  A few minutes later, Claudia heard the shots echoing across the town—crack, crack, crack—and she knew that they had found their game.

  * * *

  Later, she checked Edward’s body in the ravine, counted the bullet holes, and felt the top of his head. She thought that there should be some cuts in his scalp, at his crown, but found nothing. He’d shaved recently, she saw, using a bad razor; cuts sliced his jaw, his chin, his upper lip. She stared at the smooth face, tried to match it with the face she saw shooting in the dusk, but something seemed wrong. Edward’s face was too wide, his eyes too narrow, his hair or something like that was wrong. She shrugged, stared at the hat, and after a while convinced herself that it had been Edward, yes, Edward had fired those shots, he’d been the one to blow the barge.

  I guess, she thought. I guess.

  * * *

  A few days later, long after the barge had burned out, and the house on the bluff burned to the ground, Tuttu called the heads of the various families together and met at Stuaqpak. About twenty people stood around at the front of the store, by the checkout counters, by the magazine racks and the paperback book displays and the empty trays that had held candy and bubble gum and cigarettes. The rows of canned goods and over-the-counter drugs and toothpaste and camping supplies filled the main part of the store, boxes of older equipment set on the racks next to new camp stoves in plastic shrink wrap, or faded yellow coils of rope hanging next to new spools of shiny polystyrene cord. Tacked to the shelves were little yellow inventory lists, a strict accounting of every item.

  Tuttu held a wad of such lists in his hand, the food lists, the fuel lists, the lists of essentials. Stuaqpak had row upon row of cosmetics—home perm kits and more cans of hair dye like Belinda had used—but no one cared about that; you couldn’t eat eyeshadow and lipstick. Representatives from the various houses hung together in groups, whispering among themselves. Claudia didn’t recognize half of them, but some of the families looked familiar. One group consisted of mostly taniks, a couple of guys and a chubby woman in her late forties with frosted blond hair. They looked vaguely familiar, and then she recognized Mick, the bush pilot, again. Karl sat on a counter, a big hideous gold nugget watch on his beefy wrist, talking to the woman. She wondered how they had survived the little massacre and then remembered seeing Mick and Karl with Edward; right, they must have been in his family’s house.

  “We got a problem,” Tuttu said. He held up the lists, as if that explained everything. “The problem is, we’re runnin’ out of food.”

  “Got lots of food,” a short, stocky guy sitting on one of the checkou
t counters yelled. He waved at the store shelves.

  Tuttu shook his head. “Had lots of food, Uugaq,” he said. “Would have had, if the ex-mayor hadn’t shot up the barge.”

  “He didn’t shoot it up, Toot-Toot,” Karl yelled. “I was with him. Drinking.” He squinted his eyes at Tuttu. “You know that.”

  “Yeah, we found him drunk,” Natchiq said. “You’re right about that.”

  “Fuck off,” Karl said. “Eddie was an asshole but he couldn’t have shot that barge. He was so smashed he’d be lucky to find the right end of a gun.”

  “Doesn’t take much skill to shoot up a barge,” Tuttu said. “Claudia shot his hat off him and we found him with a Mini-fourteen, the barrel hot and a half-empty magazine.”

  Karl squinted, shook his head. “All he did was go out and take a pee. I didn’t see him take the rifle.”

  “Lot of things you never saw, Karl,” Tuttu said quietly. “Edward blew the barge and he blew a lot of fuel and some food. We could have used the fuel to go down to Atqasuk and check the store there.” Tuttu looked at Karl and Mick, then sighed. “I crunched some numbers, man. Looked over the old Stuaqpak records, and did a new inventory. Lot of stuff got looted after the war. Counting what should be in town, what probably is gone—well, I powered up my old laptop PC and did some calculations. It’s going to be close, and I’m not sure we’ll make it.”

  “Make it to when?” the white woman asked.

  “Yeah,” Mick said. “How long we got to last? The war might have ended and help could be coming any day now.”

  Tuttu shook his head. “Get real, fucker. We’ve been monitoring the radio, and there’s nothing out there. Tell ’em, Natchiq.”

  Natchiq rose up from next to the magazine rack, where he had been leaning against the wall. “Nobody’s home,” he said. “We’ve been listening at the cable station, monitoring three times a day. Nothin’ coming in, UHF, VHF, AM, FM, shortwave, you name it. No Russkies, no Japs, no lower-48, it’s just one long hissing.”

  “And even if there is someone alive,” Tuttu added, “you think they got time to come take care of us? What you want, tanik, a goddamn seven-four-seven to swoop down and take you back to Houston? Come on.”

  They argued on like that, back and forth, and Claudia listened to the discussion, analyzing, intellectualizing. Basic shock, she thought, death ’n’ dying on a big scale. Denial, bargaining, acceptance, death, that’s what they were going through on the village scale, over and over, little stages, little deaths. The death of civilization, the death of a country, the death of a town, and now maybe the death of humanity itself. They were bargaining, trying to cut deals, not coming to the acceptance that their way of life was over. It shocked her, because it seemed so obvious.

  She’d hit acceptance almost automatically, it had come to her when she’d seen the whales breach that first day at Pingasagruk. She’d figured it out, all right. Her world had ended, she knew that, it had seemed so obvious, but here some still hadn’t made that connection. It didn’t make sense, since Barrow had to have seen more death than she could possibly have seen. Wouldn’t that have made it all so obvious? Or had the village become numb to death, and now they were waiting for rescue like Santa Claus?

  “It’s over, asshole,” Tuttu was yelling, and Mick—his voice gruff and stubborn—was yelling back, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” and they weren’t getting to where they should be, which Claudia knew because Tuttu had told her was the pooling and confiscation of every supply, and rationing, and acceptance of his plan. Then Malgi got up, and the room went quiet, because he talked in a whisper and when an elder talked in a whisper, you shut up.

  “I think,” Malgi said, “I think that it does not matter.” He waved his hands left and right and smiled at Tuttu, at Mick. “It does not matter if we are all alone or if help will come, not now, because there is no help now, is there?” He looked at Mick.

  “Well, no,” he admitted.

  “And even if help comes, will we want it?” Malgi asked.

  Mick frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “What if the Russians won the war?” he asked. The angatkok grinned. “What if someone else won the war? We might not want their help. Think of those long years before the white man came, all those years we waited for their help, not knowing we really wanted it. Think of the great help we got: measles—”

  “—penicillin,” Mick said.

  “—alcohol,” Malgi said.

  “—cable TV—”

  “—BIA homes—”

  “—freezers—”

  “—pollution—”

  “—cigarettes—”

  “—lung cancer—”

  “—rifles—”

  “Okay, rifles,” Malgi admitted. “And outboard motors and sno-gos and computers and four-wheelers and pickup trucks and VCRs and planes and a bunch of other shit that’s really great but which we can’t use—”

  “—because Edward blew up the barge,” Natchiq said.

  “Yes,” said Malgi, “because Edward blew up the barge, and because someday all that fuel would have run out anyway, all the bullets will have been used up, all the metal will have rusted, and then where will we be? Where will we be?”

  “Back where we were,” said Tuttu.

  Malgi smiled. “That was a rhetorical question,” he said, and Claudia remembered suddenly that Malgi had been a deacon in the church, he’d even delivered a few sermons, and he’d been in the Toastmaster club, so he could throw out phrases like that. A rhetorical question, she thought, but that was the answer, yes, that was the one she had seen.

  Back where they were. Back to a time where infants were lucky to live to adulthood, where being an elder meant you’d lived to forty and if you were a woman your teeth had been ground to nubs from chewing hides, where people starved regularly and where a child born in winter sometimes got left out on the ice. She’d read the nineteenth century accounts and she wasn’t going to glorify it one damn bit: the life of a pre-contact Inupiaq had been rough as hell.

  But, she thought, but they had lived totally off the resources of the Arctic, and you couldn’t take that from them. They lived. Damn it if they hadn’t survived in a place most taniks thought impossible to survive in, and damned if they hadn’t done it for nearly seven thousand years.

  “So that’s what we’re going to do?” asked Mick. “You’re going to go back to being savages?”

  “No,” Claudia whispered, her quiet voice filling in the silence. “No, no going back. Not to that which the Inupiaq were or had become. Something else . . . something better.” She saw it in her mind, then, saw the great thing they could do: Utqiagvik held great riches, metal that wouldn’t rust for centuries, ideas that could be used and adapted. She saw the thing they had almost become in the mid-twentieth century, a synthesis of old culture and new technology, before they had blown it in the nineties.

  “Yeah, anthropologist?” Mick asked. “You some kind of romantic, are you? Is this all that noble savage crap I used to read about?”

  “Listen to her,” Malgi shouted. “The anthropologist knows.” The elder nodded at her, prodding. “Go on.”

  She shook her head, not sure how to explain. “The Inupiaq are—are becoming,” she said. “And I don’t know what.” But she could taste it, taste the flesh of the whale, of agviq. That was the taste of the future, she knew, the taste of the sea and the brine and the blood. “Or how,” she added.

  Tuttu stepped forward, arms crossed on his chest, defiant. “She’s right. We’re becoming . . . something.” He lowered his arms, shook the yellow list. “But for now, we can’t think of that. Yet. For now, we have to think about . . . about how we’re going to feed two hundred people for the next two months.”

  The people in Stuaqpak grew a little silent, and then started talking among themselves. She could feel the idea taking hold, Tuttu’s romantic vision, her vision, Malgi’s vision. They’d seen what she had seen, and what they had seen was hope. Denial, bar
gaining, acceptance . . . Claudia knew there was one thing wrong with that scenario, though: sometimes you didn’t die.

  Back in college a friend of hers, Phil, an old lover, had gotten testicular cancer. It used to be fatal but they had come up with a new treatment and Phil had told everyone that “fuck if I’m going to die, I’ll beat the damn cancer.” After they had cut off one of his balls and pumped him full of cancer-killing drugs, she’d visited Phil with a touchy-feely friend of hers, Ellen, and Phil had sat there in his hospital johnnies making jokes about how “they can’t say ol’ Phil has balls now.” In the elevator going out Ellen had whispered to Claudia one word: denial. And a year later Phil flashed a slip of paper in Ellen’s face (because Claudia had told him the story) with NERD spelled out on his lab results. No Evidence of Recurrent Disease.

  Sometimes you didn’t die, Claudia thought, and she kind of had a hunch that not dying sometimes meant believing that you wouldn’t die, even if you really ought to. Hope. Utqiagvik had to have hope, because if they had hope, then they might make it. She watched them argue and chew on the idea, and then she saw something else flash across their faces, something ugly.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Mick. “What do you want us to do?” It was a challenge, Claudia saw, not really a question.

  “Put everything in Stuaqpak,” Tuttu said. “I know a lot of the houses have supplies of your own, that you haven’t put everything here.” He paused. “That you haven’t put everything back.”

  “We’ve put a little in,” Uugaq said. “Didn’t I bring in that case of toothpaste?”