Sucktown, Alaska

by Craig Dirkes

  “Shut it, Bristy,” Hope said. She stood up and gave Finn some money; then they were gone.

  The room went quiet, except for the wind whistling through some wall cracks Finn had yet to cover with duct tape.

  Finn seemed to sense I was uncomfortable about the transaction I’d just witnessed. He stared at the floor and took in a deep breath.

  “I don’t sell a lot,” he said. “Just enough for some extra cash. And I hardly ever smoke.”

  “No worries,” I said. “But aren’t you scared of getting busted?”

  “Not really. I rarely have more than an ounce in my possession; you’re only looking at jail time if you get pinched with more than that. The truth is, my job slinging luggage at the airport doesn’t pay enough for me to survive. I’m just doing what I have to do right now.”

  “What about your future?”

  “I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

  Finn stood up and headed to the bathroom. I needed to get home and finish cleaning the dog yard. And I wanted to get to bed early — my truck was supposed to arrive at the airport at seven a.m.

  I nodded and said, “I gotta get back.”

  I was happy to have made my first friend in Kusko, drug dealer or not.

  CHAPTER 4

  REUNITED!

  Somewhere inside the jumbo cargo plane in front of me, a sharp metal something lacerated the side of my beloved truck. The shrill scratching sound reverberated off the high ceiling beams, rusty steel walls, and oil-stained concrete of the cavernous airplane hangar. Heaters the size of refrigerators were bolted to every corner of the ceiling, but the hot air they blew did little against the frigid air gushing through the monstrous opening to the runway.

  I stood at a customer service counter tucked into one corner of the building. The metal-on-metal noise made me drop the pen I was using to fill out the receiving paperwork.

  “Hey!” I said to the scuzzy warehouse guy across the counter from me. “That’s my truck!”

  He turned around and looked at the cargo plane as workers off-loaded pallets of nonperishable foods, which I assumed were destined for village grocery stores and Kusko Dry Goods.

  “I don’t see a truck,” the guy replied apathetically. “That sound could be anything.”

  “Wrong,” I said. “A father knows.”

  The truck was my baby: a 1982 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40 4x4. The FJ was a rare sight and a classic — a small SUV that resembled a Jeep Wrangler, with two doors and a short wheelbase. Mine was red with a three-inch lift, beefy thirty-three-inch tires, a brush guard in front, and a roof rack up top.

  Seconds later, the FJ rolled down the loading ramp at the rear of the aircraft. One of the cargo workers was at the wheel and looked happy to be there. I jogged to the truck and circled it while it was still in motion. Sure enough, a wavy foot-long scratch scarred the middle of the passenger door.

  The driver got out and joined me on the side of the vehicle. He took off his green mesh trucker hat and scratched his head, seeming unsure of how to console me. “That’ll buff out,” he said.

  “No, it won’t,” I said, thumbing the scratch, recalling the car-detailing expertise of my dad, who’d managed a car wash for twenty-plus years. “If you can feel a scratch with your fingernail, wax won’t do squat. It’ll need paint.”

  Pissed as I was, I let it go. The excitement of being reunited with my truck overpowered my anger. The truck felt like a little piece of home.

  The FJ used to belong to my grandpa, Gustaf, who bought it a decade before I was born. Every summer, he drove the FJ from his country home in Milaca to my house in Zimmerman, with the hardtop off, to take me walleye fishing an hour north on Mille Lacs Lake.

  The FJ finally crapped out when I was in ninth grade. My grandpa sold the rims and tires, hoisted the truck onto some blocks, threw a tarp over it, and retired it to his pole barn.

  Unbeknownst to me, my dad and my brother, Max, had spent the past summer restoring the truck so that they could give it to me as a graduation gift.

  They sprung it on me while I was eating tater tot hotdish on a hot summer night in early August. As I sat with my dad at the dinner table, I heard the rumbling of an unfamiliar vehicle in our driveway. “Put this on over your eyes,” my dad said, pulling a blue bandana from his back pocket.

  I looked down at the entryway of our split-level home and saw Max peek his head through the front door. “C’mon, Eddie,” he said. “Take off your bib and put on that blindfold already.”

  I wrapped the bandana around my head. My dad clutched my arm and led me from the kitchen table to the driveway. “What’s going on?” I asked, standing barefoot on the blacktop in front of our yellow cookie-cutter suburban home.

  “Max and I are proud of you,” my dad said. “We hope that chasing your dreams will be more fun driving this.”

  I took off the blindfold, and there was the FJ, looking better than ever. Although it was a cloudy evening, I could have sworn a single ray of sunshine beamed down on her. I sprinted to the truck and started dry-humping a front fender. Dad and Max laughed.

  I stepped back and looked the FJ up and down. “Seriously?” I asked. “Grandpa parted with this? Did you two fix it up? Are you kidding me?”

  “It’s all yours, little squirt,” Max said, patting me on the back. “Super, super-huge pussy or not, we love you.”

  Max was a full-time auto mechanic at Zimmerman Auto Salvage. He told me that he’d worked on the truck an hour or more every weekday for two months, after my dad dropped a couple grand for a used engine and other parts. My dad had been saving the money for almost a year. Thankfully, he didn’t have to pay to have the truck repainted. Hank Gunderson from Hank’s Auto Salon owed him a favor.

  I corralled my dad and Max together for a group hug. “Thanks, guys,” I said. “I love you both.”

  After I let go, Max wound up and slapped the back of my head, hard, like I was a bratty kid about to do something wrong.

  “Dammit, Max!” I yelped.

  “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t ever let this truck out of your sight. Dad and I dumped a lot of time and money into this beast. You hear?”

  “Loud and clear,” I said.

  I turned the key in the truck’s ignition, listened to it rumble, and backed out of the driveway to do some victory laps along Zimmerman’s main drag. Two weeks later, R.J. and I drove it thirty-three hundred miles to Anchorage.

  In December, I told Dalton that backstory about my truck while we were hashing out the details of my employment. I insisted that I couldn’t come to Kusko without the FJ.

  He agreed to ship the truck to and from Anchorage, on two conditions: I had to stay for the entire year I promised, and I had to accept a wage of ten dollars per hour instead of twelve.

  I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I flat-out could not be without my truck.

  And the money thing didn’t bother me. Compared to being a poor college student, I’d be living large on ten bucks an hour.

  * * *

  I hopped into the truck inside the airplane hangar, near the customer service counter. Just as I dropped it into gear, I noticed a pallet of newspapers between the cargo plane and me.

  I rolled down my window. “Hey!” I said to the same scuzzy warehouse guy, pointing at the pallet. “Are those papers the Delta Patriot?”

  “Yep,” he said.

  “Mind if I grab one? I work there.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I got out of the FJ, dashed over, and snatched a copy. Two of my stories decorated the front page — one about a lady who barely survived falling through the ice near the village of Grayling, the other about how local authorities were searching for a suspect who shot out the tires of a four-wheeler driven by a guy en route to the nearby village of Kwethluk.

  I felt damned awesome after seeing my name under the
headlines. I wanted to reinstate my Facebook account and post a selfie, with a cheesy-ass duck face, holding the Patriot.

  I was a real journalist, for a real newspaper. I wished I didn’t have to hide it from my dad. I wished my mom were alive to see.

  I tossed the paper onto the front seat of the FJ, pulled out my phone, and sent this text to my father: “Got an A on my paper.”

  A minute later, he responded: “Proud.”

  CHAPTER 5

  HOT. H-O-T. HOT.

  Dalton stormed into the office in a huff. He was a half hour late in returning from the morning paper route because his truck wouldn’t start in our driveway, even after we tried to jump it. He’d forgotten to plug in the engine block heater the night before. I lent him the FJ and took a cab in.

  “The papers barely fit in the back of your little buggy,” Dalton said, shaking off the cold. He hung his coat on the back of his desk chair and flipped on his computer. Five spitters — three pop cans and two plastic water bottles — littered the top of his desk. I rarely saw him without a fat gob of leaf tobacco in his mouth. He was worse than a baseball player.

  “It’s not a buggy,” I said. “It’s the sweetest ride this side of — ”

  Dalton cut me off. “Eight days,” he said and sighed while staring at his computer screen. “I haven’t sold a new ad in eight damn business days. I gotta get cranking.”

  Dalton spent five or more hours a day making sales calls to businesses in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and sometimes Seattle. He targeted gun and outdoors companies, bulk grocery suppliers, and other businesses that sold stuff rural Alaskans needed. Although Kusko Dry Goods’ weekly two-page ad made Dalton enough money to cover the paper’s expenses, he needed to sell many more ads to earn a living. And lately, he wasn’t getting the job done.

  “Maybe you should try selling ads to more businesses in Kusko,” I suggested.

  “Pointless,” Dalton replied. “They all say the same thing: ‘I don’t need to advertise. Everyone in town knows where I am and what I sell.’”

  Dalton’s financial issues were starting to bug me. After three weeks of living in Kusko, I still hadn’t traveled to a village to cover a news story. I thought one upside to the job would be getting out to the villages. But it wasn’t until after I’d arrived in Kusko that Dalton said January through May is his slowest time of year, when he’s too poor to pay for village flights. I felt cheated.

  I sipped the last of my morning coffee. I stood up from my desk and shitty computer to pour more from the antique-looking coffee percolator plugged in next to the fax machine. Dalton’s favorite mug sat on the little table. Black letters on the white mug read: coffee makes me poop.

  “Can I pour you some?” I asked, holding up his mug. “Our meeting is about to start.”

  “You just wait, Eddie,” Dalton said, peeking over his computer at me but ignoring my question. “This summer, I’ll sell so many ads that the Patriot will be twenty-four pages instead of twelve. They say this year’s dividend might break two thousand. That’s enough money for folks to put thirty percent down on a new four-wheeler or sixty-horse outboard. Every power-sports dealer in Anchorage and Fairbanks is going to advertise with us.”

  I’d heard about the “dividend” from a guy I knew back in Anchorage, a UA hockey player born and raised in Alaska, but it sounded too good to be true.

  “People really do get money just for living here?” I asked.

  “Every fall,” Dalton began, snatching the cup of coffee that I had poured for him, “Alaska residents get a fat check from the state’s oil fund. The amount is different each year, but can hit two thousand per person. Come late summer, businesses across the state will ramp up their marketing efforts to get people excited about buying their products when the dividend checks get cut in the fall. It’s a feeding frenzy for selling ads.”

  “Will I get a check?” I asked, sitting back down at my desk.

  “You haven’t lived in Alaska long enough,” Dalton said. “You’ll get your first one a year from now, in 2011.”

  “That blows,” I said.

  I wanted a dividend check now. I could already tell my paychecks wouldn’t go far in Kusko. Walk into Kusko Dry Goods with fifty bucks, and you’d walk out with nothing more than eggs, bread, milk, a dozen packs of ramen noodles, and some wilted produce. Not to mention, gas cost almost seven dollars a gallon. When I saw the prices in Kusko, I worried I’d be just as cash-strapped as I was in college.

  “Ready to meet?” Dalton asked.

  We were scheduled for our weekly editorial meeting. Every Wednesday, after Dalton returned from delivering the paper, we’d discuss story ideas for the next edition of the Patriot.

  “Let’s talk at my desk,” I requested, wanting to avoid a front-row seat to Dalton’s tobacco-spit mess.

  Dalton wheeled his chair over the tattered brown carpet and sat down across from me. “What stories you got for this week?” he asked.

  “So far, nothing too juicy. One is about a proposal for a new walking path in Kusko, another about changes to the spring hunting regulations, and drunk-guy-does-stupid-shit in Hooper Bay. That’s it so far.”

  Dalton thought for a second. “I have one more for you. A senior girl at Kusko High School just won an academic award for a special spelling bee she started up. Go interview her.”

  “Done,” I confirmed. “Am I allowed to use the word ‘dork’ in the headline?”

  “No.” Dalton smiled. “Be nice, and get a photo.”

  * * *

  The next afternoon, I drove the FJ to Kusko High to interview the spelling bee girl.

  A blizzard had dumped on the city the night before. Sheets of slippery, compressed snow covered the dirt roads. I counted two cabs in the ditch.

  Kusko, I had learned, was the unofficial taxicab capital of America, with one cab for every seventy or so people. Each ride cost a flat five dollars per person. Between high fuel prices and the cost of shipping a car or truck from Anchorage, owning a vehicle was a luxury few people could afford. It made more sense to pay for cab rides than to own your own vehicle.

  Now that my truck had arrived, I was learning that fact the hard way. I could already tell that keeping it going would burn a big chunk of my paychecks. Worse, I couldn’t drive the thing anywhere special in the first place — just one stretch of asphalt to and from the airport and a maze of dirt roads snaking through the neighborhoods. All told, having the FJ in Kusko was like owning a Porsche but never driving it outside of a cul-de-sac.

  I pulled up to the high school and parked in a visitor space. The building had green metal siding and looked slightly larger than the Zimmerman Rec Center back home. A billboard-sized mural of a sockeye salmon covered the exterior of the gymnasium. Parked below the mural were about two dozen snow machines and four-wheelers that students had driven to school.

  I dug into my jacket pocket for my phone to check the time. I had missed a text my dad sent over an hour ago. It read: “Why did you delete your Fbook account?”

  About time he asked, I thought.

  I’d suspended the account almost two months ago. I responded to my dad with a bullshit line I’d been waiting to use ever since: “I was wasting too much time on it. Need to focus on classes/studies.”

  I slung my backpack over my shoulder and headed inside. A moment later, the sound of my snow-covered boots squeaking on the floor echoed through the main hallway. Brightly colored murals of hallmark Alaskan scenes plastered the concrete walls — bears catching jumping salmon at the top of a waterfall, a breaching humpback whale, a mama moose and her calf wading in a lake below a mountain.

  I entered the principal’s office and encountered a receptionist with bad teeth and a polyester pantsuit straight out of the seventies. I asked her about the girl who won the award for starting a spelling bee.

  “You go see Taylor Sifsof. Hold on,” she said
from behind the counter. Kusko was full of Albanian immigrants, many of whom drove the cabs in town. Why they all chose to move to Kusko, I did not know. I’d thought they were Russians when I first arrived, but Dalton had straightened me out.

  The woman dialed the classroom, spoke two sentences, hung up, and spoke to me again. “Taylor in classroom studying while rest of students at lunch. You go to classroom. Room 107, just around corner.”

  Part of me was anxious to find out what a rural Alaskan nerd looked like. I doubted she’d have many zits, since eating salmon was supposed to be good for the skin. Her other Poindexterian features were anybody’s guess. I left the office, walked past empty classrooms, and tapped on the door to Room 107. The door opened.

  Ho. Lee. Shit.

  Standing there might have been the hottest girl I’d seen. Ever. Anywhere. On TV, in person, in a magazine, in a movie, on a billboard. My ding dong went from zero to boner faster than a car’s airbag can deploy. I untucked my red flannel shirt to hide it.

  The girl looked exotic. I couldn’t pinpoint her lineage. Whatever she was, it amounted to a luscious mishmash of every female physical characteristic I held dear. Tall? Check. Long, straight blond hair? Check. Olive skin? Check. Pouty lips? Check. Hint of a buttchin? Check. Big bombs? Che — actually, I couldn’t tell. The light-blue sweater she wore was too bulky. But with how perfect the rest of her was, it was fair to assume she was hiding a nice rack of sleeper boobs under there.

  “Hello,” she said with a smile. Her voice was raspy. I loved raspy.

  I looked into her cornflower-blue eyes and paused. She didn’t have a lazy eye or a sleepy eye, but something was off. It almost seemed like she was looking at someone behind me.

  “I’m Eddie,” I said nervously.