Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  Claudia faced him, lips clenched. “I—” I, she thought. What can I say? I know the traditions, yes. I should have known. And we did not give the boat a drink. We did not pray to the whale. We did not do this, did not do that. But those are old traditions. What of the old should we use? What should we abandon? Can I say? she asked herself.

  Worse, she thought, I went out on the ice in my period, a clear taboo. Can I tell them that? I dare not; they could not forgive that. Still, perhaps that was all superstition after all. What did she know? What did any of them know? She said that. “I . . . I do not know.”

  “I should have known,” Malgi said. They turned to face the old man. He hobbled into the garage on Puvak’s arm. Natchiq got a chair and the old man quickly fell into it, propping his bad leg up on an empty drum of kerosene—the knee that had been wrenched when the whale yanked him out of the umiaq. “All the blame rests on me, not her, not the Soviet, not Natchiq. Was I not the one agviq lashed out at?”

  “Grandfather, you did no wrong—” Tuttu said.

  “I did wrong.” The old man glared at Tuttu, and the grandson looked down. “We all did wrong. How could any of us know? You are not whalers—I am the only one who ever went out, ever hunted. I am an old man and have forgotten much. I should have known that the lines have to pull free. The aft tub—that was stupid to put one tub behind all of us. The cleats. What do we need cleats on the gunwales for? And the bomb. I watched my own father make his own bombs, measure the powder and make the bombs. I should have remembered.” He tapped his forehead. “And the traditions. You blame the white woman? If not for her, we might have no traditions. We forgot them, did not teach them to our children. If we taught them to her, or the other anthropologists, sometimes we lied.” He smiled. “My own grandfather lied, he told me. He thought it was a joke and that the anthropologist would get it. But that guy—I forget his name—he wrote it all down, jokes and all.” Malgi chuckled.

  Claudia blushed. Yes, that old problem, she thought. How can you trust informants?

  “So,” Malgi said. “Did we ask for a ceremony? None of us did. We were so eager to get the whale. We did not think. And so we did not get the whale. We were not worthy of it. Can we become worthy of it?”

  “Yes,” Tuttu whispered.

  “That was a rhetorical question,” Malgi said. He smiled, and the other whalers laughed at his little joke. “But ‘yes’ might be a good answer. Now”—he reached over to a tray of tools by his chair and picked up a screwdriver, and held it out—“how shall we become worthy?” Malgi looked at them, and they waited for him to answer his own question. “Perhaps we should begin, Natchiq, by taking off those damn cleats.”

  * * *

  The wind still did not shift; it kept blowing steadily from the southwest. Other villages took their failure as a sign that whaling was worthless, a stupid idea. Unable to defend their stubbornness, the whalers waited inside the qaregi, hoping they were right, but fearing they might be wrong.

  Grigor sat in one corner, looking over some transcripts of interviews Claudia had found: old whalers talking about how they made bombs. She should have looked for the reports before; when she thought of it later, she found the reports not in the museum director’s office, but in the Office of History and Culture, in the oral history files. Tons of information. Amaguq sat next to the Soviet, helping him with the difficult words. Numbers, that’s all that counts, she thought. How much powder should be crammed into an eight-gauge shell? How big should the charge be for the bomb?

  The wood stove had been fired up high, and the weather outside had turned mild, so the inside of the qaregi was hot, almost sweat bath hot. A bucket of ice melted on the stove, and over a big tin tub Tammy poured more hot water into the soapy water left by Claudia, Paula, and Masu, who’d bathed before her. All the men and the boy, Puvak, had stripped to jeans, their white bellies and chests contrasting with the deep tans of their faces. Masu had washed, but kept her undershirt off, wearing only long johns.

  Though her face had become lined and her chin had seemed more pronounced, the way chins of old Inupiaq women sometimes did, Masu’s breasts remained firm. She sat at the end of a bench, close to the fire, while Paula—Belinda, Aluaq’s wife—combed Masu’s damp, long hair and braided it into two plaits—French braids. Claudia chuckled at the cultural incongruity, at the tight braids woven into themselves at Masu’s temples and joining at her nape. Masu turned around, facing Paula, and Paula took a pair of scissors and quickly trimmed the little half-moon of bangs across Masu’s forehead. She handed the scissors to Masu, and the old woman reciprocated, trimming the young tanik’s bangs, too. With her dark brown hair, the other tanik woman in the qaregi looked more Inupiaq than her, Claudia thought. Paula turned around and Masu began arranging Paula’s hair in the complex braids.

  As she watched the women, Claudia remembered when she had been a young girl and such braids had been popular, how she and her friends would sit for hours arranging each other’s hair. Masu’s gnarled fingers flashed in the light streaming down through the gut-skin skylight, Paula’s damp hair gleaming in the old woman’s hands as she finished the last braid. The tanik stood, smiled at the old woman, and got up. Masu caught Claudia looking at her, nodded, and pointed at Claudia’s head, then patted the bench next to her.

  Claudia walked over to the old woman and took Paula’s place. She pulled a T-shirt over her bare breasts, hesitating for a moment as she came toward the men. Should she remain shirtless like them, her fellow crew? No, she thought, she would not bare her breasts to these men. Tuttu looked up at Claudia, grinned as she pulled the shirt down. Well, Claudia thought as she tucked her shirt into her pants, well, maybe she’d bare her breasts for some of these men. She sat down before Masu, who began running a comb through her hair.

  The comb snagged and she winced as Masu pulled it through her hair. Standing in the big tin tub Tammy scrubbed her bare body and washed her long black hair. A cleansing. Masu had bathed and then Paula and Claudia and now Tammy. Then they’d change the water and the men would bathe, even Malgi as well as he could around his cast, even the boy. Malgi had thought it might be a good idea to be clean, and discussed the idea with Claudia. “Would it please agviq?” he had asked her, and she thought, Forget the whale, it will please me. None of them had had a real bath since Puvak had killed his first seal; they couldn’t spare the water, or the fuel to make water.

  “Yes,” she’d said though, with a growing smile, “yes, it would please agviq if we became clean.”

  Their white atigi snowshirts hung on a line outside, bleaching and airing in the sun. Their mittens lay in a pile by Masu to be patched. Puvak wiped his hide mukluks with grease, oiling them. Maintenance, Claudia thought, things that should have been done that in their haste they neglected. While they waited for the wind to shift, for the whale to come, if the whale came, they cleaned and patched and repaired all their gear, because “it would please agviq,” as Malgi had said, but also because it was right.

  Masu ran the end of the comb across the top of Claudia’s forehead to one ear, then the other, parting the bangs from her crown, and then she ran the comb to her nape. The comb’s teeth scraped her scalp, and Claudia could feel the hair parting down the back of her head, straight and even. Masu pushed Claudia’s head forward, and her scraggly bangs dangled before her eyes and onto her nose. She felt Masu pull the hair on the right side of her head in and out, yanking each strand tight, felt the hair being woven into a braid like the leaves on a cactus palm, down over her ear and to the nape. Again she thought of being young, and the memory merged with the moment; the bond she had felt with her long-ago friends—adolescent girls on the cusp of womanhood—became the bond she began to feel with these women.

  A hand, Tammy’s hand, Claudia saw, came up to her face, lifting her bangs between thumb and forefinger. As Tammy pulled the bangs up, Masu pulled the hair at her neck down. The women rocked her head with their movements. Tammy smiled and held up a pair of scissors. Claudia g
rinned, then nodded, the brief motion causing Masu to jerk her hair tighter.

  Tammy took her own comb and ran it down Claudia’s bangs, pulling the hair straight over her forehead. The lesbian brought the open tips of the scissors up to the space between her eyebrows.

  “Not too”—the scissors rose, settled against the middle set of wrinkles in her brow, an inch below the hairline— “short,” Claudia said. She sighed as Tammy closed the scissor blades.

  The hairs fell down to the bare wood on the bench before her, between Claudia’s legs straddling the bench. Tammy clipped the bangs from the middle, first to the left, then to the right, and through the disappearing curtain of blond fringe, she saw Tammy, grinning as she leaned back, squinting at her. She set the scissors down, combed out the short bangs.

  “Now you can see the whale,” Tammy said.

  Claudia’s forehead felt cold, exposed, the way skin always felt when covering hair had been removed away from it. She rubbed the wrinkles on her forehead, felt the clean edges of the shorn hair. Tammy held up a hand mirror, and she looked at herself.

  Young, Claudia thought, forgetting how young she really was, compared to Masu, compared to Malgi. The shorter bangs made her look younger, the neat blond fringe square across her eyebrows. And the hair wasn’t in her eyes, like Tammy said. Her mother would be proud, Claudia thought.

  Masu tapped her on the back, finished with the braids. Reaching back, Claudia felt the cool surface of the plaits, the way the strands wound around each other in valleys and ridges. She stood, switching places with Tammy, and Tammy sat in front of the old woman and the old woman began combing out the young Inupiaq’s black hair. Tammy handed Claudia the comb and the scissors, then ran a hand through the black brush at the top of her head.

  “Clean it up,” Tammy said. “Pull it up about an inch with your fingers and cut across the top of your hand, all one length.”

  Claudia did as Tammy asked, snipping a clump and moving her hand back through the hair like a mower. The stiff black hairs fell on the bench between them, mingling with her blond hair, with Masu’s gray hair, with Paula’s dark brown hair. They had shared the same house, the same air, the same food, even the same bathwater.

  We are unrelated, Claudia thought, two Inupiaq women, two taniks, and yet we are sisters. Trust and sharing. We put our souls in each other’s hands, and we must trust each other. The men surrounded them, their brothers, yes, but we are sisters. Sisters, she thought, as Masu pulled the braids tighter on Tammy’s head, and the bonds grew tighter.

  Chapter 19

  “TIME for Walter Cronkite,” Tuttu said.

  He sat straight on the bench before Malgi as the old man drew a razor across the crown of Tuttu’s head. Tuttu had been looking through Murdoch’s book, and seen pictures of nineteenth-century Inupiaq men with shaven patches at the crown of their heads—Eskimo tonsures. So all the Inupiaq men in the qaregi, even the boy, Puvak, decided they should shave the crowns of their heads, leaving fringes around the edges. When Tuttu had told her of this, Claudia had hoped to herself that he didn’t get to the chapter on tattoos and labrets.

  Malgi mumbled something, and wiped away the lather from around the pale, stubbly white circle on Tuttu’s scalp. The younger man rubbed his head, the way Claudia remembered an old boyfriend had rubbed his newly shaven head the morning before he had the brain surgery that killed him on the operating table. Tuttu stood up, patted Malgi’s own bald spot, and they both chuckled.

  “Cronkite’s coming on?” Malgi asked.

  Tuttu nodded. “Time for Cronkite, yah.”

  She couldn’t figure out how he did it, Claudia thought, but ever since that first Cronkite broadcast had come in, Tuttu knew when the next would be coming. There was no predictable pattern, no way to know—it wasn’t like they had TV Guide mailed to them each week—but, bang, Tuttu would get a funny buzzing in his teeth. Sure enough, they’d check with whomever had TV duty that day, and Cronkite would be coming on. The little black and white monitor—plugged into the village cable network, 12-volt DC battery powering the tube—would go from no-signal snow to the big CBS eye. Everyone would go over to the gym to the big color TV, and fifteen minutes later Cronkite would come on.

  Natchiq damped down the stove and the people of Malgi’s qaregi pulled on boots and pants and shirts and trooped down the katak, out the entrance tunnel, and to the gym. As they passed by other houses, Puvak or maybe Amaguq would pop his head into the door and yell “Cronkite.” Soon, they led a procession of villagers, old men and women and children and the other surviving taniks, down Nachik Street and over to Momegana Street and to the old school gym.

  Up on the roof the long blades of a wind generator whirled in the steady southwesterly breeze, beating like the wings of a condor. A wave of cold air rolled over them as they entered the short hallway to the gym; they didn’t keep it warm inside because no one spent enough time in there to bother. Tuttu lit a candle lantern hanging by the door and went up to the stage, where they’d set up a huge Mitsubishi television screen. He fiddled with some switches, the set warmed up, and soon the CBS eye looked down at them, the unblinking black and white eye.

  In the glow of the set and the ruddy glow of the sunlight barely shining through grimy skylights, the villagers assembled. No one talked, Claudia noted again, not at first. The big eye on the screen and the dim gym—their eyes slowly adjusting—and the strangeness of a television broadcast from decades ago and no one knew where created the feel of a religious occasion. Seeing Cronkite was like going to Mass and taking the wafer and having God transmuted within you. Well, not quite, she thought. But close.

  Tuttu fiddled some more with the TV set, just the way her father would fiddle with the TV set when she had been very young, Claudia remembered. Men always did that, even if the signal came in perfectly, probably to assert their control over technology or something. The CBS eye blinked out and the purple-gray of the faded tube stared in its place. A sigh, a wave of exhaled breaths, rolled over the villagers, disappointed shock at even this brief loss of the modern world. Some began to whisper. Tuttu held the lantern high, looking down at something behind the set. He displayed a loose wire, did something to the connector at the end of it, then touched it, Claudia surmised, to the bank of batteries behind the television.

  The screen came back on just as Walter Cronkite’s head filled the frame. He jumped right into his broadcast, the lead story having something to do with the Vietnam War, some battle for a strategic rice paddy or piddly-ass hill. That led into a piece on Nixon, a younger Nixon, just into his presidency, no bags under his eyes and his really serious lies a few years away. Claudia paid no attention to the words, the words meant nothing. She watched the images, the flickering phosphenes of not only a time she knew was gone, but also a place.

  Richard Nixon with his baggy suit, his heavy eyebrows, his wife with her prim smile and neatly coiffed hair, their daughters looking like princesses, pink and tidy . . . The soldiers in the Vietnam piece looking so young, so vulnerable. One moment they would be heading out to battle in clean fatigues, clean-shaven and waving peace signs at the camera, and the next frame would show them bloodied and filthy and sweaty, and dead.

  But it was the images of the commercials that amazed her, the world depicted. Medicine ads up the wazoo, over-the-counter cures for cold sores and colds, hemorrhoids, menstrual cramps, constipation. There was a Clairol ad showing white, joyful blond women romping on the beach and running through the surf, their hair teased into respectable bouffants that never rustled in the ocean breeze. “Is it true blondes have more fun?” the announcer asked, and several of the villagers turned to look at Claudia, tittering. Tammy nudged her, pointing with her chin at Tuttu. He grinned at Claudia and she blushed.

  Claudia looked at the Clairol blondes running in the waves and thought they looked like seagulls, the ends of their hairdos flipping up like wings. She tried to imagine Tammy and Masu, even Paula, running in the Chukchi Sea with hair like that. She shook h
er head. Another world.

  Cronkite moved into the lighter segments, some piece about hippie homesteaders getting back to the land in Oregon. That seemed realer, somehow: about the tribes of long-haired men and women building yurts and domes in the coastal rain forest. She’d seen people like that farther south in Alaska, even a few years ago. “Bush hippies,” the old-timers called them—the sons and daughters of those ’60s flower children, people her age, living in cabins and running dogs in Talkeetna and Trapper Creek and Homer.

  Another aspirin commercial and then Cronkite let Charles Kuralt close with an “On the Road” piece from Twin Snakes, Florida, something about an old codger who collected cypress knees he thought looked like Jesus Christ that Claudia thought looked like cypress knees.

  “And that’s the way it is,” Cronkite ended, “May seventeenth, nineteen sixty-seven. For CBS News, this is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”

  Good night. The date stuck with her, today’s date, but a different year from previous broadcasts. When they’d first seen the Cronkite tape it had been 1967, but the right date, and then the broadcasts skipped around: ’66, ’68, ’65, ’68, ’68, even a ’70. No one knew why. Claudia figured whoever had the tapes couldn’t find a tape for every day in one year. They jumped around, the only common thread that they all had something to do with Vietnam. There was always a Vietnam piece. But wasn’t that the way it was? she thought. Hadn’t her father told her that, her uncles? Vietnam up the wazoo, too, just like the medicine ads. A national obsession for at least ten long years.

  The credits rolled, the image of Cronkite faded, and the TV screen jumped to the big eye again. Then the CBS logo blinked out, the snow came on, and the set hissed static, the static of the only other broadcast around, the hum of the unaltered electromagnetic spectrum. The villagers rose and began to leave the gym, onward to an uncertain future.