Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  The guns of Oscar’s army burped into the night, like firecrackers, yes, Tuttu’s Vietnam vet uncle had it right. Like firecrackers, pop-pop-pop, a brief silence, and then pop-pop pop-pop again as two guns fired at the same time. Mick’s group returned the fire, and Claudia counted muzzle flashes, six, Amaguq had been right, six flashes in the night. She kept on her target, aiming low, like Tuttu had said, to scare or wound, not kill. The attackers retreated back into the shadows under the hotel, and then Amaguq whispered into the CB again.

  Puvak fired from below, not under the hotel, where he would have been firing flat on, but up, at a little white blob toward the back end of the building. Claudia had lent him her shotgun, showed him the spread and how to change the choke, and the boy had figured out the Winchester well. He hit the white blob on the first shot, hit it with number-six duck shot, and the white piece of plywood burst into splinters. The square of wood had been nailed to the roof, two ropes tied to it through holes drilled in either end. The ropes went slack and fell away from each other, and in the short silence they could hear the scrap two-by-fours thudding down the side of the hotel and hitting the snow.

  Claudia couldn’t see the stuff the wood was attached to, but that was the idea: neither could the attackers. At Tuttu’s signal, they fired another volley, driving Mick’s squad out from under the hotel and toward the netting Puvak’s shot had released. The brigands ran into the black fishnet, and as they twisted and turned, she bit her lip to keep from finishing them. That hadn’t been the idea, but Claudia felt the urge. Finish them off.

  “Cease fire,” Tuttu said, in voice loud enough to carry across the street between the qaregi and the hotel.

  Their guns clattered as they laid them down. One raider squeezed under the netting and ran toward Puvak’s post at the dancehouse entrance. Puvak had poked his head up, glancing back at his father. Amaguq tried to yell, but then Aluaq burst up from behind the sandbags, Mini-14 at his waist. Paula’s husband swung the automatic rifle around, and the sound of bullets spitting out in one torrent told Claudia he’d put the rifle on full automatic.

  Through the slit she saw Puvak turn at his father’s cry, and then Puvak ducked down, shotgun raised like a spear. The attacker ran toward the boy, took a leap, and Aluaq’s burst caught the man as he arced toward the entrance. The man jerked around, Puvak aimed at the sound and fired, and the boy’s shot spun the man backward, three forces opposing and meeting, reaction canceling reaction. The hug of the earth conquered all, and when momentum failed the body came to the hard snow. Later, when Amaguq ran out to get the dead man’s ammunition, he identified the body: a fat, fleshy man.

  Siqpan.

  * * *

  The final attack came a night later, on a moonless night. Having figured out the trap under the hotel, the raiders worked their way around to a clump of buildings to the west. Up in the guard post with Tuttu, Claudia happened to glance over at him as he spotted Mick’s brigands. Looking to the west, he raised his eyebrows, then smiled, tapped the alarm button, and reached for the CB.

  “Elephant pot,” Tuttu said, clicking the mike.

  Elephant pot, Claudia thought. That had been their code: “elephant pot” meant east, in the direction of Elephant Pot Sewage Haulers, a big warehouse behind the qaregi, on the other side of an old frame house. “Pepe’s” meant northwest, toward the Mexican restaurant adjoining the hotel. “Polar Bear” was south, for the daycare center, and “NARL” meant north. Elephant pot: an attack from the east.

  Natchiq came up with Amaguq and Malgi; Puvak and Aluaq had gone back to the entrance to guard the dogs. “How many?” Natchiq asked as he came up.

  Tuttu shrugged. “Three, maybe four.”

  Tammy followed the men up, and she and Amaguq moved to the west side, in case the movement on the east was only a diversion. The only thing Tuttu worried about was that Mick had gotten into the National Guard armory and liberated grenade launchers or mortars; they could hold off anything less. It had been a good sign the night before that all the raiders had was rifles, but Tuttu didn’t trust that. “Might be testing our defenses,” he said. So Amaguq and Tammy were to watch the west, and keep anyone from moving in close. Puvak’s father didn’t say it, but Claudia guessed that after the night before, he wanted to watch his boy, too.

  Most of the house behind them had been stripped for firewood down to floor and frame, but even with the open walls Claudia had a hard time watching the attackers climb up the timbers to the roof. She raised her rifle to force one guy back—he was moving into position higher than them, and she thought it might be possible for him to shoot down into the guard post—but Tuttu stayed her hand, and only smiled at her inquisitive look.

  The new moon hadn’t yet risen, but the auroras flared in the heavens, green glowing filaments swirling to the east. The light from solar flares crashing into the ionosphere made the frame of the house stand out against the night, and as her eyes adjusted Claudia could see dark figures moving around the house, no more than four people.

  “You got your shotgun?” Tuttu whispered to her.

  She reached down, exchanged the Mini-14 for the Winchester, then showed it to Tuttu. “Yeah.”

  “Good.” He smiled, the light from the auroras making his teeth almost glow. “Put some double-ought buck in it, and on my signal, shoot at the southwest corner post”—he pointed—“there, about a foot up.”

  “Uh, sure,” she said. “Why?”

  Tuttu grinned. “Just do it.”

  Another raider moved up into the house. Claudia thought Mick was being foolish—did he think the defenders hadn’t seen them yet? And what would they use for cover once they got up there? Mick’s strategy made no sense, except . . . She saw it now. The five attackers climbed up on the roof of the house, the plywood still intact. Someone on the second floor passed up a long, shiny thing to the raiders on the roof: a ladder. Ah, she thought. They were going to climb onto the qaregi, come down over the side of the guardhouse, down the hatch. Clever. The whispered voices of Mick’s men could be heard, hardly fifty feet away. One man passed the ladder up to two men on the roof, and they slid it over toward the qaregi.

  “Now,” Tuttu said loudly.

  Like Tuttu told her to, Claudia fired at the base of the post, the shot spreading out in a narrow choke. Malgi’s shotgun fired a few feet down from her target, and Natchiq and Tuttu fired at full automatic at the center posts. The wood splintered away, the two-by-fours snapping at the base, and the house began to crumble.

  Ah, Claudia thought, watching the near wall fall away from the qaregi, in on itself. Ah, that explains Tuttu’s smile. The house. He’d booby-trapped the house, whittled away its frame so that a shotgun blast or two at the corners would cause it to collapse.

  The house imploded, the west wall going first, tearing down the second floor and the roof as it fell, the side and back walls following. Up on the roof, the raiders slid off the smooth plywood, the ladder falling away. One man pushed free just before a wall fell, but two more were caught in the shower of snapping timbers. The sharp, easy cracks, the smooth breaks as entire walls fell in one piece told Claudia that Tuttu had notched every corner, every stress point. It amazed her that the raiders could have climbed on the house at all.

  Four raiders made it to the snow, two rolling to safety, one crumbling as he hit, one bouncing on his head. They held their fire, let the two still alive help the wounded away. From Amaguq’s side came several bursts of fire, one reply from a little rifle, and then silence. A cloud of dust rose from the fallen building, the wind blowing it away quickly. In less than a minute the night had grown silent again, and then the auroras flared up in a dance for them.

  “All right,” said Tuttu. “All right.” He grabbed two more magazines from the ammo box in the center of the guardpost. “Natchiq, Amaguq—let’s follow ’em home and finish ’em off.” Claudia looked at Tuttu and he must have interpreted her glance as a request to come along. He shook his head. “You guard the qaregi with the re
st,” he said.

  She nodded and did not argue. Crawl around in the night and commit butchery? No, she thought. For once she would not dispute Tuttu’s sexism. The three men climbed down inside, picking up Aluaq as they left the qaregi, and she watched them disappear into the night.

  * * *

  Several hours later Tuttu and his partners came back to the qaregi, whooping and hollering, and he told them to forget about guarding, there was no need to guard, get some sleep. But Claudia couldn’t get any sleep, because she kept hearing the little popping sounds throughout the night, and she kept seeing the glow on the northern horizon from burning buildings. In the morning, in the brief day, Tuttu took them out to show them his handiwork.

  Hanging from the charred whale ribs in front of the church ruins were the bodies of two men, one with a droopy walrus mustache and hound-dog eyes, the other a fat pig of a man whose weight almost collapsed the rib. Because she had to know, Claudia inspected the wounds in their chests. Malgi wiggled a finger in the holes the size of a man’s fist, and turned to her and smiled.

  “Forty-four magnum,” he said. “Yai.” And he kicked Mick’s body, then Karl’s.

  A woman’s body hung between the two men, a frosted blonde, Pat—the woman Mick had flirted with that day at Stuaqpak. Her boots had been removed and the soles of each foot were pierced with little holes, holes that blood had dried around. Like Kanayuq, there wasn’t much left of her chest, either, not much left of her groin, too.

  “Two twenty-threes will do that,” Tammy said. “Little tumblers, they give up their energy as they roll through flesh.” She stared at the bodies, her lower lip clenched between her teeth, then turned away.

  A few more bodies had been laid on the ground, some with their throats cut, others with horrid bruises on their heads or longbones bent at unnatural angles. Nine men, one woman, the entire count of Mick’s army, Tuttu said. He’d described the final raid in vivid detail, but it had all been a blur to Claudia: following the wounded back to Browerville, picking off the stragglers, running down Karl in a leisurely chase, catching Mick in his own stronghold, burning it down . . . She didn’t want to know the details, didn’t care; she only wanted to know that the bloodletting was over.

  “Take the bodies down,” Malgi said. The old man had come to see what his army had done. He walked among the grisly display, prodding the bodies with his foot, tilting a face up with the tip of his unaaq. “Take them down, all of them. We will lay them out on the tundra and treat them with respect.”

  Tuttu looked up at the old man, his expression changing from the joy of battle to remorse and then—like that! Claudia thought—to shame. Good, she thought, good: it may have been necessary what was done, but we need not find pleasure in it. Kanayuq’s cousin looked down, shuffled his feet, then nodded.

  “As you wish, Grandfather,” he said.

  “It is not as I wish,” Malgi said. “It is what’s right. Remember that others have died, too—Kanayuq, for instance. We should bury them. Bury them all.”

  And so they took the bodies down, every last one, and carted them through Utqiagvik, stacked like feed sacks in the back of a pickup truck. Meanwhile, Claudia volunteered to sift through the ruins of Stuaqpak to find Kanayuq’s bones. Near where he had fallen she found part of a skull, some teeth, and a few longbones. She laid what was left of Natchiq’s brother in a wooden ammunition box and carried it out to the ravine south of town.

  Beyond the Inupiaq bodies, by the ravine that held the other dead, the remains of Karl’s army had been laid on warehouse pallets. Someone had found Edward’s body and laid it next to his compatriots. Karl, Edward, Mick, Siqpan, Pat . . . all had been laid out, head to head, faces to the sky. Claudia looked at the recent bodies, stared from them over to the older bodies nearby.

  “If you lay these out properly”—she waved a hand at the new bodies—“you should treat the other remains similarly.”

  “That’s a lot of bodies, Claudia,” Tuttu said.

  She stared at him, nodded. “I know. If it’s so easy to kill, it should be hard to bury.”

  Tuttu glanced at Malgi, and he nodded. “The anthropologist speaks correctly, Grandson.” Tuttu sighed.

  So the villagers went down into the ravine, and dragged the hundred bodies or more onto the mound at the top of the ravine, out of the trash and animal bones. As well they could, they lined the bodies out, laid out the bones, the bags of skin stretched over the bones. It took them nearly two hours of work, of horrid, disgusting labor. Good, Claudia thought. This should be hard, it should be disgusting.

  When they were done, when the bodies had been placed in neat rows, all the walking villagers assembled by the bodies. The living smelled of the dead, a stench covering them: the stench of rotting flesh and the stench of their sweat and their filth. A couple of people had thrown up, but Claudia could not vomit. Her gut felt hard and her heart felt hard. She felt cold, cold from the coming winter, and cold from all the killing. The wind shifted to the south, blowing the smell away from them.

  Tuttu and Natchiq and a few others walked around the bodies, splashing liberal amounts of diesel fuel on the dead. . . . The thick, nasty smell of the fuel rose up, drifted away. The villagers moved back into a semicircle. Malgi stood before them, raised his hands.

  “We should pray,” he said.

  They bowed their heads. Claudia looked up at Malgi, caught his eye, then lowered her head. Right, she thought. Malgi had been a deacon in the Presbyterian Church. Of course.

  “Dear Father,” Malgi said, “we ask forgiveness of these souls. We ask forgiveness of ourselves. Out of violence and ignorance and fear these people have left this world. May they find rest in life after life, and may we find rest in our own lives.

  “We send their souls to the Lord, and their bodies back to the earth and the sky and the sea that created them. In fire we cleanse them, and in cleansing them we hope to clean our own bodies, our own souls, so that we may become worthy of more life to come, of the richness of this earth.”

  Right, Claudia thought. Appeal for redemption, appeal to the God-that-is-the-Land. Make a bequest for that which will allow us to live on. Good, she thought. Good, Malgi, good.

  “Amen,” he said, and he lit a torch and threw it at the dead.

  The flames burst up and the bodies began to burn in a thick, black cloud. Claudia stared at the flames, at the quick oxidation of the shells that once had held lives. Innocents, some of them, she thought. Ignorant or unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their bodies burned, as so many bodies had probably burned elsewhere in the war. It did not matter; all bodies burned, either in quick fire or the slow rotting of dirt.

  “Did you find Kanayuq’s body?” Natchiq asked her.

  Claudia looked up, nodded. She handed the box containing Kanayuq’s bones to Natchiq. He took the box and they followed him to the other burial area, where the Inupiaq bodies had been laid out on driftwood platforms. Natchiq opened the box and laid an ivory carving inside with the bones—the carving that had been on a thong around Kanayuq’s neck, the one Natchiq had recovered at the battle. Claudia caught a glance of the carving before Natchiq closed the box. A fish, Kanayuq’s namesake. Next to the body of an old woman, Natchiq laid the box containing his brother’s remains. Malgi said some words, and then the villagers headed back into town.

  Claudia stayed behind, walked over to the bluff at the southern edge of the old archaeological site. She looked down the coast at the thick black clouds rising up from the ravine, then turned away, into the wind. The cold salt air bit at her eyes, and though the horror of the cremation and the death should have made the tears come, only the wind made the tears come. And so she went down to the beach and cried, let the wind make her cry, and hoped that someday she could find her way back to being human.

  Or something.

  Chapter 10

  TUTTU stood at a podium on the stage in the back of the high school gym, cross-checking items from a series of lists against his laptop
computer. Almost everyone in Utqiagvik milled around on the floor of the gym, clutching satchels or small boxes. Three small piles of food and supplies lay behind Tuttu. Tammy and Claudia counted the villagers, once and twice, and then compared censuses.

  “One hundred ninety-five,” Tammy said.

  “One hundred ninety-six.” She pointed at Tammy— “Ninety-five”—and then at herself—“ninety-six.”

  “Oh: right.”

  “One ninety-six,” Claudia reported to Tuttu—the sum population of walking and breathing Barrow.

  Tuttu nodded, looked out at the villagers. Some leaned against the walls of the gym, legs straight out, babes in their laps. The two rows of bleachers had been pushed back against the side walls, and maybe fifteen elders sat in the one row of seats that hadn’t been folded up. A dozen light bulbs hung from the ceiling, barely lighting the place. One huge wood stove, section after section of shiny metal-asbestos pipe shooting up to the ceiling, kept the room slightly above freezing. Natchiq and Amaguq stood at the ends of the stage, one by an American flag, another by the Alaskan flag, Mini-14s butt down on the floor and barrels leaning against their legs.

  “Everybody who can walk here?” he asked the crowd.

  A hand rose up in the back. “My wife’s with auntie,” a skinny man said.

  Tuttu nodded. “Okay, Igaluk.” He looked around the room at the little knots of people. “Anyone missing you can report when I call your houses up here. Is there anyone not here who isn’t taking care of an elder or someone sick?” No more hands shot up. “All right: good.”

  He nodded at Natchiq and Amaguq, and they went to two doors by the front of the room, wrapped chains around the push bars, and closed the chains together with big key locks. They then went to two doors at the front of the gym, took chains from around the inside push bars, and stood waiting.