Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  Three whales total did the village get. Tuttu and Malgi’s crew struck the first whale, and then Igaluk got the second, and a crew led by some old guy from Browerville got the third. New ice cellars were dug near the whalers’ houses, and they filled the cellars with fresh meat. Tuttu did some calculations on his laptop and figured the whales might last them through the winter, if they got a few seals.

  * * *

  In June, a month after they had struck the first whale, Tuttu and the other whaling captains hosted Nalukataq, the whaling festival. Claudia conferred with Malgi on the celebration. Luckily, most of the articles they found, most of the pictures, showed the festival and not the actual whaling. That made sense, Claudia thought. Whalers wouldn’t be likely to take photos while whaling, and yet tanik photographers wouldn’t be likely to go out on the ice—they might not have been welcome. But Nalukataq was held on land, in early summer. Besides, she thought, anthropologists always loved festivals.

  First, they had to prepare the festival area. Malgi said that in the past they’d held the festival in many different places in town, but he had always liked the field by the community center, across from the hotel and where the bluffs became lower and met the flat beach between Utqiagvik proper and Browerville. Malgi’s crew dragged his umiaq down to the festival area, and they turned it on its side, back to the wind. They set up the aluminum boats the same way, though Malgi said that those used to get the other whales didn’t look as good as his skin boat.

  “But we’ll make many more umiaqs this summer,” he said.

  All the villagers made it a point to put on clean clothes, their fancy parkas if they had them. In the qaregi they had another bath. The men shaved their tonsures clean, and the women braided their hair again. Claudia had found a can of the foam hair dye Masu had used on Belinda when she became Paula, and she was about to dye her hair jet black when Tuttu stopped her. She wanted black hair, Claudia told him, so she could feel more Inupiaq, look more Inupiaq.

  “Silly woman,” Tuttu said, taking the can from her. “What would you do next? Inject silicon into your eyelids? Grind your molars flat?”

  Claudia looked at him, looked at the can of dye, and for some reason she could not understand, climbed up out of the house and ran down to the beach. Tuttu followed her, caught up with her along the bluffs, below the house that had burned when Edward had shot up the barge.

  “Claudia!” he yelled.

  She turned at her name, saw him, ran away again. He caught her, turned her around, held her firmly but gently by the shoulders. Tuttu had brought a blanket from the house, and he put it over her shoulders; she had not bothered to put on a parka when she ran out.

  “Claudia.” He touched her cheek with his finger, wiped the tear streaking down it. “You cry? Why do you cry? Agviq has blessed us and we have meat in the cellars.”

  “I . . .” she thought of Belinda, Paula, the dark-haired tanik who Masu had taken under her wing and treated like a daughter. She thought of Tammy, Inupiaq in blood but no more Inupiaq than she. “I am not Inupiaq, I do not belong here.”

  “You are here,” Tuttu said. “You know as much about us as we do. You can hunt, have hunted. You helped us get the whale.” Tuttu shook her gently. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “It . . . I don’t know.” She turned her back to him, pulled the blanket tight around her. “I have never understood this land, never understood this place or these people—you. I have spent my whole life trying to understand it. Sometimes I think I do. And then you’ll do something and I just get confused.”

  Tuttu turned her around to face him again. “I get confused. Malgi gets confused. Why do you think he needs you?”

  “Needs me?”

  “Needs you. Confirmation. He is an old man, he forgets. You help him remember. You support him. He needs you. We all need you.” Tuttu looked down at the beach, looked up at her shyly. “I need you.” He reached out, combed his fingers through her damp hair.

  She shivered at his touch, cocked her head back. “You need me?” Claudia smiled. “A tanik?”

  “A real person,” he said. Tuttu ran his hand through her hair again, down her neck.

  She opened up the blanket, pulled it around him, and drew him closer. Claudia held up her neck, and Tuttu kissed it, ran his lips over her skin and down to her breasts. She let her knees collapse, fell under his weight, and they rolled to the sand.

  “Tuttu,” she said.

  Claudia rolled over on top of him, the blanket over her back, the ends of the blanket enveloping Tuttu like a tent, He reached up, unbuttoned her jeans, and pulled her pants and underwear down to her knees. She reached down, undid his belt, unzipped his pants, and opened them. Tuttu smiled, reached up to her, ran a finger along her nose, down her sternum, down to her crotch. Claudia bowed her head, her wet hair falling into her face and into Tuttu’s face, and in the sand, below the bluff, the two hunters made love.

  * * *

  Later, they sat side by side staring out at the ice and the sea. To their left the hulk of the barge and the ribs of the tugboat, like the ribs of the whale, sat in the shallow water and the rotting ice. Tuttu put an arm around Claudia, the blanket wrapped around both of them. His blue baseball cap had fallen off in their lovemaking, and Claudia ran her fingers up from the nape of his neck through the fringe of his thick black hair, across the bald spot shaved clean on his crown. The afternoon sun shone down on them, and Tuttu’s untanned scalp gleamed white, like fresh bone. She traced the faint white line of a fading scar that cut straight across the top of his head.

  “Malgi cut a little too close with the razor when he gave you a tonsure?” she asked.

  “No,” Tuttu said, smiling shyly. He pushed her hand away and put his cap back on. “Some poor ass shot aimed a little too high with her shotgun.”

  Claudia looked at him, looked over at the barge, looked at his hat. The hat—Edward’s hat. She remembered shooting the red hat off of the guy who had blown up the barge, remembered thinking that Edward’s scalp should have had cuts on it if he’d really been shot at by her, but it hadn’t.

  “You got that cut when I shot at you,” she said. “You blew the barge?”

  He glanced at her out of the corner of his eyes, grinned, then scowled when he saw she didn’t smile back. “I blew the barge, yes,” Tuttu said, nodding.

  “And you killed Edward? Shot him?” He nodded again. “Why? Why did you blow the barge? We could have used that fuel—that food.”

  “I did some figuring,” he said. “On my laptop computer, you know? And I figured out, with the food on the barge, in the store, if we all shared we might last the winter and this summer. But then I thought, what if we don’t share? Many might die. And what would we do after that? There wouldn’t be another barge, Claudia. You knew that. We all knew that. Maybe someone’s alive out there—whoever sends Walter Cronkite, you know?—but they weren’t going to come soon enough to help us. So I had to make it hard. I had to force these people to do what they should do, to become hunters. Kanayuq knew, he was the only one. I blew the barge and wore Edward’s hat and parka so it would look like Edward did it if someone saw me.”

  “You bastard!” she yelled, suddenly standing up. “I almost killed you!”

  Tuttu stood, untangling the blanket, and wrapped it around her again. “I know. I didn’t think about that. As it happened—well, putting that shot over my head made it look like Edward had blown the barge—those holes in his hat.”

  “Shit.” She turned from him, shook her head.

  “You won’t tell anyone?”

  “I could have died. We could have all died.”

  “We didn’t,” he said. Tuttu touched her shoulder, and she turned back to face him. “You didn’t.”

  “No, we didn’t.” Claudia smiled. “Christ, you blew the barge. Jesus.” She shook her head. “Next you’ll probably tell me you’ve been broadcasting Walter Cronkite.”

  “Well . . .”

  “No. You couldn’t have.�
�� Claudia pushed him with both arms, teasing. “Come on? Those broadcasts? You didn’t.”

  “Not me . . . I think I know who did, though. You know that time you saw me go by at Tachinisok Inlet?” Tuttu cocked his head at her.

  “Right. Malgi said you’d come to look for me.”

  “Malgi was spooking you. I went down to Wainwright to see if anyone was still alive. They were alive, all right. I guess you met Jim, huh?”

  Claudia nodded, thinking of the guy in the sea otter cap who’d forced her and Rob away from Ataniq. “Mean as nails Jim. I knew him.”

  “He told us about you and Rob, said he’d kicked you out. Well, he didn’t like me much better. He said Ulguniq didn’t want anything to do with us. When I asked him how we’d know if they were still alive, Jim said that ‘maybe Walter Cronkite would tell it on the news.’”

  “Shit. So they’re alive, too?”

  “That’s what those broadcasts tell us. No one knows, though. After the first one came on, I almost told Malgi, but then I thought about it further. It should remain a mystery. Not every little string has to be tied up, you know? If no one knows where those broadcasts came from, they might think there’s a world still alive there—a world beyond even Wainwright, Ulguniq. It gives us hope. You saw that: those broadcasts gave us hope. If I’d said they came from Wainwright . . . it wouldn’t have been the same.” Tuttu shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

  “No.” Claudia smiled. “Let’s keep it a secret, all of it.” She put her index finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

  Tuttu ran his finger up her chin to her mouth, and she closed her lips over his finger and licked his bare skin. It tasted like maktak, she thought, like agviq, like her tears.

  “My lips are sealed,” he said.

  Tuttu pulled his finger from her lips, traced four lines up and down her chin. “You’re a woman, Claudia,” he said. “Maybe we should give you a tattoo.”

  Claudia smiled. “You been reading Murdoch again? Maybe we should give you a labret.” She poked his cheeks, once, twice.

  They put their arms around each other, she wrapped him in the blanket, and they walked back to the qaregi. On the roof of the house, just before they went in, Tuttu smiled at her, touched her chin again.

  “Hey, Claudia,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you: what does Claudia mean?”

  “Wise,” she lied. Claudus, lame, she thought. Not the best Latin name.

  “Like the snowy owl?” he asked.

  “Like the owl.”

  * * *

  Out to the festival grounds the villagers went. From a staff behind each whaling boat flew flags: an American flag over Malgi’s umiaq, a Soviet flag over the boat to the left, and an Alaskan flag over the boat to the right. The whalers placed hunks of flipper and maktak and slabs of meat on pieces of plywood before each boat. Much meat already had been eaten, and much more would be distributed over the year, but Tuttu and Malgi—with Claudia’s help, of course—decided that for the ceremony they should distribute a sizable portion. Puvak organized some of the older boys into a wood-gathering expedition, and they built a huge fire beyond the shares of meat. Masu and Paula stirred several pots of boiling whale steaks. No one knew quite how to prepare the meat, but Masu said that “we have the whole winter to learn,” when someone pointed this out.

  In an open area beyond the fire the mapkuq, the blanket toss skin, lay on the ground. Masu had stitched a new edge for the skin, and had put a new loop of rope around it. When all the villagers had come and the old ladies and old men were made comfortable in the shelter of the boats, Malgi organized the blanket toss.

  Claudia looked at the skin, remembering the tradition. The idea had been that hunters would toss someone up in the skin to scout the horizon. This explanation had always seemed suspect to her, some old guy pulling a honkey’s leg. How well could anyone see when leaping in the air? She thought people did the blanket toss because it was fun. Even Inupiaq, she knew, had to do things for the pure joy of it. Anthropologists always thought people did things for reasons—they never could think that people did things just for the pure hell of it, the fun of it.

  The villagers grabbed the edge of the skin while Malgi stood back and shouted directions. Grab the edge with both hands. Tilt forward, move back. Forward, back. Malgi threw a basketball onto the mapkuq, and the hunters and whalers and men and women bounced the ball up and down, pulling in and out. Then Malgi stopped them, got onto the skin. Knee’s better, Claudia thought, but if that old fool breaks another arm . . .

  Malgi jumped up and down, bouncing with the skin, and the villagers laughed at him flying up into the air. Around the edge of the tossers little children squealed as the old man flew higher and higher. Malgi reached into the folds of his sling, and threw out candy and bubble gum—hidden all these months, the sneak, she thought—and the kids ran around gathering up the treats. She remembered, then, Kutchuq and his gum and what Tuttu had told him, and she saw the boy pick up a piece of bubble gum, start to unwrap it, then hand it to a little girl.

  Now that Malgi had shown him how, Tuttu got up on the skin. He should have had first toss, Claudia thought, because he got the first whale, but then she smiled to herself. Malgi was out there on the second trip as surely as he had been on the first. Tuttu bounced up and down, stumbling at first, but soon getting the knack of it. She watched him, learning from him. Keep the knees straight. Let the blanket toss you. Tuttu got fancy, scissoring his legs back and forth, even doing a flip at the top of a high bounce. He, too, tossed out goodies to the crowd: shotgun shells and rifle cartridges, cigarettes, bags of tea, packets of fishing hooks, even—the women giggled—tampons.

  Natchiq took his turn and then Amaguq and Puvak. Finally, Tuttu pushed Claudia out onto the skin. He thrust something into her hand to throw, and she looked down at the shiny yellow objects. Ivory, small pieces of carved ivory, whales and seals and polar bears that Tuttu had carved. She nodded at him, mixed them in with the artifacts she and Rob had found at Pingasagruk. Old ivory and new ivory, talismans of luck. They would carve many more such talismans, many more tools: harpoon points with steel blades, arrows and darts, old tools and new tools out of whatever the land and the old civilization could give them. A new culture, she thought, not like the ancient, not like before the war. Something else, Claudia thought, like the vision she had seen on the beach at Pingasagruk on the day her world ended.

  The villagers pulled back at the skin, and she bounced up a few feet, up and up, remembering trampoline lessons from when she had been in grade school in Florida, a Florida that no longer was. Up she flew, and when she got the swing of it, Claudia whirled around, her braids flying out from her head, the carving of agviq flying out from the thong around her neck. She leapt and spun, leapt and spun, and the world swirled around her: tundra, village, ice, tundra, village, ice.

  Holding the edge of the mapkuq, Tuttu laughed up at her. “Ukpik,” he yelled, giving Claudia her name. The snowy owl. “You are Inupiaq now.”

  “Real People!” she shouted down at him as she flung the amulets out at her village. She stopped, and Tuttu helped her down. Tammy climbed onto the skin, and the villagers tried their best to upset the lesbian, but she only bounced higher and higher.

  “We are all Inupiaq now!” Ukpik yelled up at Qavvik. She brushed a blond hair out of her face, and wiped a slight tear off her cheek as she thought of her old world that would never be and the new world that was becoming. “Only the Real People live here!”

  GLOSSARY

  WHERE known, Inupiaq words in Agviq have been spelled using the orthography of Edna Ahgeak MacLean in her Abridged Inupiaq and English Dictionary (Fairbanks, Alaska: Alaska Native Language Center, 1980)—an excellent source for readers who would like to learn more about the Inupiaq language. Jana Harcharek of the North Slope Borough Inupiat History, Language, and Culture Commission also made corrections to this glossary. Place names have been spelled using the U.S. Geological Survey official spellings, but corr
ected to the proper Inupiaq orthography if known. Some additional non-English words have also been included.

  General Terms

  Aaglu—killer or orca whale (grampus rectipinna).

  Aluaq—coal; name for James, Belinda’s husband.

  Amaguq—wolf (canis lupus); name of Puvak’s father.

  Angatkuq—Eskimo shaman.

  Anorak—(from Greenland Eskimo anoraq); pullover jacket with a hood.

  Agviq—bowhead whale (balaena mysticus).

  Agviqluaq—gray whale (eschrichtius glaucus).

  Atigi—parka.

  Iqaluk—fish; brother-in-law to Masik.

  Iglu—house.

  Iglugruaq—Point Barrow type semi-subterranean sod house.

  Inua—Yu’pik (southwest Eskimo) word for “spirit,” especially an animal spirit.

  Inupiaq—literally, “the real people”; North Alaskan Eskimo, generally living in the area from Unalakleet, Alaska north to the Canadian border; the language of the Inupiaq people.

  Kamik—boot.

  Kamotiq or kamotiqiluuiak—Greenland-style sled.

  Kanayuq—four-horn sculpin fish, or bullhead; Inupiaq name of Arnold, Marvin’s (Natchiq’s) brother and Simon’s (Tuttu’s) cousin.

  Katak—literally, “to fall.” The hole in the floor of an iglugruaq in which one enters the house.

  Kuspuk—Yu’pik name for a woman’s dress.

  Kutchuq—gum; Samuel, son of Masik.

  Maktak—skin of whale; black, chewy, sometimes called “Eskimo bubble gum.”

  Malgi—arctic loon (gavia arctica); name for Tuttu’s grandfather. Also, a twin.

  Manaq—retrieving hook; thrown out in water to pull in seals.

  Mapkuq—sewn together seal skins used in blanket toss.

  Masik—gill; Kutchuq’s mother.