Sucktown, Alaska

by Craig Dirkes

  That was not the news I wanted to hear.

  “I guess child labor laws don’t apply to eighteen-year-olds,” I said. It was a joke, kind of. The blank look on Dalton’s face told me he wasn’t sure whether I was serious.

  “No, they don’t,” he said.

  Suddenly, the mood felt serious.

  “I’m just goofing,” I said, trying to diffuse the tension. “I mean, I won’t lie. I’m gassed after the last few days, but I can soldier on.”

  “Correct answer,” Dalton said. “Welcome to the real world.”

  CHAPTER 3

  HIGH THERE, FINN

  I put on my boots in the entryway of Dalton’s house while he got to work cooking moose stew in the kitchen. I had just finished a ten-hour day at the office. My watch said six o’clock now, and outside the sky was pitch black.

  “Food should be ready after you finish outside,” Dalton said.

  I flipped a switch that turned on floodlights for the dog yards. While slipping on my mittens, I stepped outside the front door and grabbed a black garbage bag from a box on the top step and a spade that rested against the house.

  After little more than a week of living in Kusko, this was my fifth time cleaning the dog yard. Dalton’s fifteen mutts were shit factories, dropping two or three loads per day. Scooping up their turds required a solid hour of work every forty-eight hours. The work was nasty at best, but made worse because some dogs apparently liked to take dumps in their food dishes. One upside: the cold diluted the odor.

  I started in the back. Joanie had shat on the flat roof of her house, and the frozen poop was rock solid. I chipped away but couldn’t dislodge it all. Joanie sat on her haunches watching me, wagging her tail, and smiling.

  I never imagined that cleaning the dog yard would be so much work. When Dalton first contacted me about working at the Patriot, I had glossed over the part of his email that talked about the dogs. He wrote:

  Hello, Eddie,

  I’m Dalton Pace, owner and publisher of the Delta Patriot newspaper in Kusko. Thanks for emailing the stories you wrote for your hometown and college newspapers. I see promise in your work. You could have what it takes to be a real journalist. Would you consider moving out here to be a reporter? The work experience would be invaluable.

  Invaluable, and adventurous. You’d get to fly to Native villages to cover stories.

  Although I couldn’t pay you much, you could live with me for free. I’d ask that you stay at least a year and also help take care of my sled dogs.

  Please give me a call so I can explain in detail.

  Sincerely,

  Dalton

  It took me more than a half hour to clean the backyard, shivering in the cold with a neck-warmer pulled up over my mouth. Best I could tell, Kusko was slightly colder than Minnesota, and noticeably colder than Anchorage, where the ocean air kept things in check.

  As I lumbered through the snow to the side yard, I noticed that all three houses across the street had snow machines and four-wheelers, but no cars or trucks, parked in their driveways. Five minutes later a taxi stopped in front of the dilapidated log cabin next door, and from the cab emerged a young guy in a red down jacket, high-tops, and black athletic pants with two white stripes down the sides. He looked like he’d just finished playing basketball.

  I stopped working and eyed him from the side yard. I assumed the guy was a neighbor Dalton had told me about, a kid named Finn Wassily. If I’d seen Finn’s house back in Minnesota, I would’ve assumed it was a hunting shack — and not much of one.

  “What’s up, dude?” he hollered, waving from near his front door.

  After pulling the neck warmer down from my mouth, I said, “Not much. Just cleaning dog shit and being cold.”

  Finn only nodded, so I added, “I’m Eddie, your new neighbor.”

  “Cool, brother,” he replied.

  He turned to head inside, then stopped and glanced back at me, as I stood there with a red nose and a bag of dog shit in my hand. He smirked, shook his head slightly, and said, “Why not stop over when you’re done?”

  “Sure, man,” I said. I was relieved to talk to somebody my own age. Other than Dalton and old Misty at the courthouse, the only people I’d interacted with during the past week were at Kusko City Hall. On Monday Dalton introduced me to some city council members so that I’d feel more comfortable covering their meetings. I’d never written that kind of story before and felt stupid, like I had something to hide. If pressed, I still couldn’t explain what the word “ordinance” meant.

  I didn’t feel any more intelligent about the other stories I was writing, either. Kusko was a different world. Every other story was about somebody dying, getting hurt, or trying to survive some mishap. If not those things, then the story had something to do with wildlife.

  The two stories I’d written earlier that day were: 1) Vehicle travel prohibited on the Kuskokwim between the villages of Aniak and Chuathbaluk due to dangerous ice conditions, and 2) A decline in the musk ox population on Nunivak Island, located a hundred miles west of Kusko.

  Before Finn disappeared inside, I called out, “Actually, can I come over now? I need a break.”

  He waved for me to follow, so I left the dog yard, tailed Finn inside, and took off my coat. The interior of his little house looked less ramshackle than the outside, but not by much. In the living room, I counted six strands of duct tape covering cracks in the logs, which to me seemed like a pretty weak effort to keep out the cold. Finn’s oversized box TV and the lava lamp next to it were plugged into an electrical outlet that dangled by its wires out of the wall. His kitchen appliances looked ancient — like they were about to blow — and the pots and pans hanging above the stove were caked with brown and black perma-grease. The furniture seemed nice enough, though. A huge black sectional sofa faced the TV and occupied much of the floor space. In front of the couch rested an antique wooden chest.

  Finn looked full-blooded Native, as far as I could guess. He was a bit shorter than me, with a slim build and black hair clipped too short to style. His brown eyes looked like they’d seen a lot.

  We both sat down at the kitchen table, looked at each other, and endured some awkward silence before I deployed my standard Alaska ice-breaker. “Did you grow up here?” I asked.

  “St. Mary’s,” he said. “Hundred twenty miles north on the Yukon River.”

  “Nice,” I said, though I had no idea whether St. Mary’s was nice or a complete shithole.

  Finn explained he was eighteen and had moved to Kusko the previous June, right after graduating from high school. He said he was related to half the people in St. Mary’s and needed to get out.

  “Plus,” he added, “there are no jobs in St. Mary’s whatsoever. In Kusko, at least there’s some work.”

  He continued, “So, what’s your deal? What’s a young gussuk like you doing out here?”

  “What’s a gussuk?” I asked.

  “That’s Yup’ik for white boy.”

  “What’s Yup’ik?”

  Finn explained that Yup’ik was the Native tribe that occupied southwest Alaska. He broke down all the other big tribes — the Inupiats, who lived north of the Arctic Circle; the Aleuts, who lived in the extreme southwest in that long string of islands that look like a mastodon tusk; and more. It seemed like most of my conversations turned into Kusko tutorials.

  “There are some other big tribes,” Finn said. “But us in the YK Delta, we’re Yup’ik.”

  Finn grabbed us two Mountain Dews from the fridge, and I had to tell him my story. I kept it short, but I told the truth — how I’d moved to Alaska for college, bombed out of school, and moved to Kusko to redeem myself.

  “That sucks,” he said. “What happened with school?”

  “All my classes started at eight or nine a.m., but the parties didn’t end until four a.m.,” I said. “I couldn
’t get used to going on less than five hours of sleep.”

  “Too much fun in Anchorage, eh?” Finn said.

  “Beyond awesome,” I said.

  “Really?” he said. “Do tell.”

  I gave him the longer story, which started with my friend R.J., a hockey player who was on scholarship in Anchorage. I’d tagged along with him in coming to Alaska, and through a wealthy husband and wife who were hockey boosters, R.J. and I ended up with what had to be the sickest college pad in Alaska. For next to nothing, the couple rented us a two-bedroom apartment in the basement of one of their homes, basically a giant log palace in the wilderness. The structure was stupefying. It was a towering A-frame flanked by two additions that were large enough to be decent homes themselves. Although our apartment wasn’t extravagant, the rest of the home was a rich person’s idea of rustic glory — moose-antler chandelier, flannel couches, antique gun racks, twenty-foot-tall stone fireplace, and a full-body mount of a thousand-pound grizzly bear in the center of the main room.

  “No shit?” Finn asked when I mentioned the stuffed grizzly.

  “It gets better,” I explained.

  The south-facing cabin was built on the side of a mountain, at the edge of a rock-ribbed, ninety-foot cliff. Our apartment door led to a cobblestone patio the size of a tennis court, a space that doubled as the official launching pad for members of the Anchorage Hang Gliding Club. Mountains towered all around, and our closest neighbor was a full half mile away. The nearest town was Eagle River, ten miles from the UA campus. We called the place Chateau Eagle River.

  “The owners were never around,” I said. “We threw parties four or five nights a week. One time, some honeys from the gymnastics team did balance beam exercises on the back of the stuffed bear. They were up there with beers in hand and didn’t spill a drop.”

  “Damn!” said Finn, wide-eyed.

  I thought about R.J. then and wondered what he was up to back at the Chateau. He was kind of a strange-looking guy, with shoulder-length hockey hair that was feathered down the middle, a chipped front tooth, and a body shaped like a beer keg. But he was a kick-ass hockey player, and despite his appearance, he’d fiddled ten times the beans I ever did.

  Finn grabbed a glass from his cupboard, opened his freezer, and pulled out a liter of cheap-looking vodka.

  “Want any?” he asked, pouring the vodka and some Mountain Dew into his glass.

  I thought about Dalton next door, my new boss and landlord. He was probably wondering where I’d disappeared to.

  “No, but have at it,” I said. “Drinking would kind of defeat the purpose of why I moved to Kusko. I need to take it easy until I get my shit together.”

  “Out of curiosity,” I added, “how’d you get the booze?”

  Finn pulled out his cell phone, tapped on it, and handed it to me. “Check it out,” he said.

  I saw five or six phone numbers organized into a category called “Sauce.”

  “Those guys are all bootleggers,” he said. “Each number connects me to —”

  “Bootleggers?” I asked, astonished.

  I was in for another Kusko tutorial. Finn explained how the local liquor market worked. He said Kusko was a “damp” community, meaning it was legal to have alcohol in town, but illegal to sell it. Even the mouthwash and vanilla extract at Kusko Dry Goods were kept behind the counter. The airport had a special kiosk for alcohol shipments from Anchorage. The local authorities allowed people to purchase a certain amount of liquor per month. If you wanted more but ran out, or forgot to place an order, or exceeded your monthly limit, or were underage, you called one of the numbers on Finn’s phone.

  “Before ten p.m., a liter of vodka costs seventy-five bucks,” Finn said. “After that, it goes up by seventy-five every two hours. The drunker people get, the more they’re willing to pay. And that’s just in Kusko. Village prices are fifty percent higher, sometimes double.”

  Finn said alcohol was flat-out illegal in villages, which blew my mind. I thought liquor bans existed only in history books in America.

  “That’s why Kusko is such a shit show every weekend,” Finn said. “All the villagers come here to get drunk.”

  I was standing up to leave when someone rapped on Finn’s door. My first thought was that Dalton had finally gone out looking for me, but when Finn glanced out the window next to the door, he laughed a little and whispered, “These two again.”

  He opened the door, and with a whoosh of cold air entered two girls about my age. Maybe still in high school, I guessed. Maybe not.

  Finn took their coats. One of the girls had blond hair, a stud in her nose, and a hoop through the right side of her lower lip. The other had long, straight black hair and perfect skin, definitely the better looking of the two. Both wore skinny jeans with bulky, earth-toned hippie sweaters.

  “What’s up, girls?” Finn asked. He plopped himself down on the black couch and motioned for the ladies to join him. I stood near the table with a dumb grin on my face.

  As the girls made their way to the couch, the cuter one stopped and pointed at me. “Who do we have here?” she asked.

  Finn told them my name and introduced them as Bristy, the dark-haired one, and her friend, Hope.

  The girls sat down on either side of Finn, and eyeing me, Hope said, “So, like, is Eddie cool?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” Finn answered.

  “Good,” Hope said. “Let’s get down to business.”

  Finn opened the top of the wooden chest and pulled out an electronic scale and a freezer bag filled with a pretty significant volume of pot.

  Holy balls, I thought, trying to keep a straight face. Is this happening?

  I’d been around plenty of weed in my day. I almost never smoked the stuff, but lots of my high school friends did, often roasting fatties while they went ice fishing. Zimmerman was on the northern-most fringes of the Twin Cities suburbs. The place was borderline rural, which meant every guy in my high school was a hard-ass who lived on a farm, played football, played hockey, fixed pickup trucks, hunted, fished, or did all of the above. And when they did those things, they liked to do some of them with a buzz. Between bongs, bowls, dugouts, red hairs, and skunky smells, I knew how everything worked.

  Still, I couldn’t believe how open Finn was being about selling drugs a half hour after we’d just met — and knowing that I worked at the paper and that the publisher of the paper lived right next door.

  Play it cool, I told myself.

  Finn reached into the sack of weed and pulled out a couple of nugs. “You lovely ladies want an eighth this time, right?”

  “Yep,” Bristy said. Next to her, Hope checked her phone. I’d been told Kusko was the only place in the YK Delta with cell phone service. Villagers had to use landlines.

  Bristy added, “This stuff better be better than the last bag you sold us.”

  “Suck it, nerd,” Finn said. “That stuff was fine. You only think it was bunk because you two smoke too much. You’ve built a tolerance.”

  Finn put the buds on the scale and sprinkled some loose stuff on top, like a deli worker adding a few more shells of pasta. He lifted up the scale and dumped the smoke into a sandwich baggie. “One eighth, right on the nuts,” he said, handing the baggie to Bristy.

  Finn’s weed was the first I’d spotted in Alaska. Nobody ever had any at the parties R.J. and I threw because almost all of the people at them were athletes on scholarship. They stuck to booze.

  Bristy snatched the baggie, walked past me, and sat down at the kitchen table. She was even cuter up close. “Wanna smoke up?” she asked.

  “Nah, I’m good,” I said. “But can I smell it?”

  “Whatever’s clever,” she said, then handed me the bag.

  I lifted it to my nose and inhaled a whiff. It smelled like bubble gum lodged up a skunk’s butt. I figured it had to be way more po
tent than the ditch weed my friends used to burn back home. Way more.

  “Wow,” I said. “If I smoked even one hit of this, I’d be higher than a giraffe’s ass.”

  The girls laughed.

  “What’s your story, Eddie?” Bristy asked.

  “Yeah,” Hope said. “Who the hell are you?”

  The girls laughed again.

  I told them everything I’d just told Finn about why I was in Kusko, how I planned to go back to school, and how I wanted to party but shouldn’t.

  “I bet you miss your parents,” Bristy said. “Being so far away, I mean.”

  “I miss my dad and brother.” I paused. “If my mom were still alive, I’d want to call her all the time too.”

  Everyone got quiet.

  It’d been years since my mom died, yet I still hadn’t discovered a way to say so without making people feel awkward. “Don’t worry, guys. It happened a long time ago.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Bristy said. “We know a girl who lost her mom in a plane crash last summer. Her dad survived but he’s in a wheelchair now.”

  “That’s rough,” I said.

  She continued, “And this other guy we know in school — he’s a junior, but we still have gym class with him because our school’s juniors and seniors have gym together — his dad just died of something, but I can’t remember what. Hope and I used to rip on the kid because he has a lisp. We’d always tell him to say ‘sophisticated sausages.’ But we don’t rip on him anymore because we feel so sorry for him.”

  “I can definitely relate,” I said.

  “We know this other girl — well, she graduated last year and moved to Seattle for college, and I don’t know if she’ll be coming back to Kusko, so I don’t know if we can still say we know her anymore. So I guess it’s more like we knew this one other girl. But anyway, her mom died of — ”

  “Stop, Bristy. Just stop,” Hope said. “We gotta go.”

  “Hope’s parents are away,” Bristy said. “We’re gonna go to her place and spark up. Nice meeting you, Eddie. It’s a small town, so I’m sure we’ll bump into you again. I bet we’ll end up seeing you an average of five or six times per month at the grocery store, or maybe over here at Finn’s place, or maybe at — ”