Sucktown, Alaska

by Craig Dirkes

  Dalton smiled. I laughed, to reinforce his lighter mood.

  “What about lately?” I pressed, hoping for a more recent example that proved accidents were common. “What about your last reporter?”

  Dalton stopped smiling. He flipped more pages of his Rolodex. He didn’t want to respond.

  “Well?” I asked.

  Dalton stopped flipping and looked square at me. “I can’t remember. You’re the first reporter I’ve had out here since last summer.”

  My heart sank into my stomach. I’m all he could find, I thought.

  Dalton pretended he didn’t say what he’d just said. “Ready for our meeting?” he asked.

  Internally, I reeled, but I faked a smile and said, “Look, Dalton — ”

  “I know you’re sorry, Eddie,” Dalton said. “You’re not the only one at fault. The mistake was everyone’s.”

  “Thanks,” I said, wheeling my chair to his desk. “I really am trying my best at this job.”

  “I know you are. And you’re doing fine.” Dalton did not smile in return. “We just need to be more careful.”

  “Right,” I said. “More careful.”

  Dalton sighed and said, “Okay then, Eddie. What stories you got for this week?”

  CHAPTER 8

  MY CRIB

  There was a God. Ms. Taylor Sifsof, the hottest girl north, south, east, or west of anywhere, had accepted my invitation to hang out, and now she sat in a tattered yellow armchair in my bedroom. Orange light from the antique oil lamp on my nightstand flickered onto her face.

  She smelled like honey and looked hotter than what I remembered. She wore tight black jeans and a red V-neck sweater that left nothing to the imagination. Her long blond hair spilled down her shoulders and rested on her chest — the amazing bounty of her chest. My brother would’ve called it a real jiggle farm, but he was stupid like that. It looked perfect, though. They looked perfect. I barely noticed Taylor’s wandering eye.

  “Fifteen for two,” Taylor said, smirking.

  We were playing cribbage, which R.J. and I had converted into our favorite drinking game during my semester in Anchorage. With each space Taylor pegged ahead of me, I imagined the swig of cheap beer I’d have been gulping if I’d been playing against R.J. But I couldn’t have that kind of fun in Kusko, certainly not with Taylor.

  The cribbage board, which Dalton had whittled out of driftwood from the riverbank, rested on the nightstand between Taylor and me. I sat on my bed.

  It was eight o’clock at night, and Dalton wasn’t around. He’d agreed to skedaddle for a while. Taylor and I had been playing for more than an hour, caught up in conversation, bullshitting like long-lost friends. With her around, I paid special attention to my special area. My dork was far too unpredictable, just begging to embarrass me. I worried it wasn’t a question of if I’d pop a stiffy, but when.

  We finished laying down our four-card hands. “Last card for one,” I said, advancing one of my two blue pegs. “What you got?”

  “Two aces, a two, and a three,” she said. “That’s a double-run for eight.”

  It was my crib, and she still beat me by fifteen spaces. I had yet to win a game.

  “That’s three wins in a row,” Taylor said. “I thought you said you could play.”

  “I can. I’m just unlucky tonight.”

  “You’re more than that. You’re an embarrassment.”

  “Whatever,” I said, shuffling the cards for another game, loving every insult she could throw at me.

  Taylor sat up straight and stretched her back. I pretended not to notice her honkerburgers.

  “Speaking of embarrassments,” Taylor continued, “what’s your all-time most embarrassing moment?”

  It’s coming up any second now, when I pull wood, I thought, sitting on the edge of my lumpy twin-size mattress. She sat three feet from me. My bed and the armchair took up most of the room. I didn’t have a closet or dresser. I had to fold and fit all my clothes into two semi-rusted metal filing cabinets.

  I heard a beep. “Hold that thought,” Taylor said, checking her phone.

  I pulled out my own phone and sent a text to R.J.: “Dude. Hottest chick ever. In my room. Right now.”

  He responded immediately: “Lies. You’re in Kusko. Unlike the girl in your room, the one in mine is real.”

  Me: “Bite shit. You partying?”

  Him: “Gong show.”

  Taylor put away her phone, as did I. “Most embarrassing moment?” I began. “Gym class my sophomore year, every day at one o’clock.”

  “Really?” Taylor said.

  Crap, I thought. I’d opened my mouth without thinking. Time to backpedal.

  “Yeah, that was… um… not gym. I mean… it was speech class. I hate giving speeches, and I had to do a five-minute informational speech on the causes and effects of chlamydia —”

  “Bullshit!” Taylor said. I had hesitated too long, and she knew it. “Tell the truth.”

  I explained how when gym class ended, all the guys were required to hit the showers. It was mandatory. No getting around it. And I still hadn’t finished puberty. It became a ritual for those a-holes to point at my you-know-what and call it the name of a famous bald man. They came up with a new name every day.

  Taylor laughed and said, “Like what?”

  “Kobe Bryant. Vin Diesel. Dwayne Johnson. And I’ll never forget George Foreman, because that name eventually morphed to George Foreskin. It was so humiliating.”

  She laughed so hard she couldn’t say what she wanted to say. Finally, she pointed toward my crotch. “What about Daddy Warbucks?”

  “Whatever!” I replied.

  Taylor laughed at her own joke until she finally sighed, shook her head, and collected herself.

  “Making fun of you is fun,” she said. “Besides your sucking at cribbage and being a late bloomer, how else can I rip on you?”

  She looked at the caribou hide hanging on my wall and cocked her head. The beige walls of my room were mostly bare, other than the hide pinned above my bed and a University of Anchorage hockey poster on the door. Finn gave me the hide as a gift, saying I had to have something in my room to make it look Alaskan. Taylor did not look impressed.

  “That bull wasn’t even three hundred pounds,” Taylor said. “That’s puny. Caribou around here are the biggest in Alaska; bulls from the Mulchatna herd can hit five hundred pounds.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t a female?” I countered. “Caribou cows are way smaller than the bulls.”

  She stepped up onto my bed, peeled part of the caribou from the wall, and grabbed a strip of hide near what would have been the animal’s belly.

  “Because of this,” she said. “It’s the penis sheath. And unlike you, it looks like he actually had some hair down there.”

  Another well-executed cheap shot. Taylor balanced shit-talking and femininity with grace. I loved it.

  I did the same kind of thing, but in the opposite direction. I’d been dialing things back considerably. If I talked to her like I did Finn or R.J. or even Dalton, or most other guys I knew, there was a chance I could scare her off. Every time I said something coarse, I strategically offset it with something sweet. I internally pre-screened every question I asked and every response I gave with the scrutiny of a politician. I couldn’t afford to slip up. Not with how hot she was.

  Taylor sat back down on the armchair. “So, I still don’t understand how you ended up in Kusko.”

  I’d been dreading that topic. Given Taylor’s smarts, I felt inferior. I’d feel even more inadequate once she knew I flunked out of college. But I dodged it by showing her one of the two stories I’d written in the Puffin Press. I thought the story might counteract the dumbassery of my college fail.

  “I’ll tell you in a second,” I said, setting the cards aside to retrieve a copy of th
e Puffin Press from under my nightstand. “But first, check this out.”

  She opened the paper and read the story, which opened like this:

  Physics Prof Parades Penis in Public

  By Eddie Ashford

  Staff Writer / Puffin Press

  ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A local physics professor has debunked a popular scientific theory by proving that what goes up doesn’t necessarily come down.

  Alaska Technical College professor Matt Filipenko was convicted of misdemeanor indecent exposure Friday following an Oct. 25 incident in which the 47-year-old paraded around a downtown block party flashing his penis.

  The story also included a photo of the guy smiling ear-to-ear, holding his dong like it was a winning Powerball ticket. I’d used my phone to shoot the photo from his waist up, but it was clear where his hands were.

  Hysterical laughter from Taylor. “Oh my!” she said. “How on earth did you come up with this?”

  I explained how I was at the block party and watched the whole thing go down.

  “That’s so gross,” Taylor said. “But how come you’re not still in college?”

  She wasn’t going to let it slide.

  “I got kicked out,” I said.

  Taylor’s face went grim. “I don’t understand. You’re such a good writer.”

  “Thanks, but I’m not even sure about that anymore,” I said, recalling my headline gaffe. “Did you see this week’s Patriot?”

  Taylor cracked a smile. “I didn’t want to bring it up.”

  “I’ve heard enough about it this week,” I said. “All I really know is that I never meant to flunk out of college. It just happened. I got caught up in having too much fun.”

  “But how did you end up here?”

  I explained everything about working at the Patriot for a year to prove to the university’s admissions officials that I was ready to be a college student again.

  “I’m doing what I need to do to make things right,” I said. “No more partying for this guy.”

  “Good,” Taylor said. “I mean, good for you.”

  I doubted Taylor partied, but I asked anyway.

  “Nope,” she said. “I have too much going for me.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, feeling like a blue-ribbon dipshit for being a poster child of teenage irresponsibility.

  “Plus,” she continued, “both my parents are teachers in Kusko. If I got into trouble, that would reflect poorly on them and what they’re trying to accomplish. Lots of their students come to class exhausted because their parents were up all night getting fucked up. It’s so sad.”

  The mood had grown too sullen. I needed to switch it back to happy. Before the gloomy talk started, I’d even contemplated going in for a kiss. I wasn’t so sure anymore.

  “I’m excited to get back into school,” I said. “I’m the first Ashford to attend college. I can’t blow it this time.”

  “I’m sure you’ll do great,” Taylor said.

  I couldn’t tell if she was just humoring me. Had I blown it? Or did she like me? It seemed like Taylor and I shared a periodic table’s worth of chemistry. Or was I wrong? It could go either way, I thought.

  Taylor’s phone beeped again. She pulled it from her pocket and looked at the screen.

  “My friends are on their way to pick me up,” she said, typing a message.

  Slowly, I rose from my bed. “Yeah, I suppose,” I said, like an old-timer getting ready to leave a family reunion.

  She’d taken a cab over. Whomever she was texting, it wouldn’t take them more than a few minutes to arrive, even if they were on the far side of town. This was Kusko, after all.

  Taylor finished texting and bent over to slip on her black leather shoes. In doing so, the top of her shirt opened up enough to give me a glimpse down her sweater, where her monstrous and heroic set of guns stressed her pink lace bra.

  Boner. A big one. I doubled over to mask it.

  “You okay?” Taylor asked, standing up again.

  “Yeah, just a cramp,” I groaned, grabbing at my hamstring. “I think I’ve been sitting too long.”

  If I stood up, I’d have looked like I was trying to shoplift summer sausage.

  “I’m okay, really,” I assured her, still doubled over, now pretending to stretch. “This happens all the time.”

  She looked at her phone and said, “In that case, I’m going to use the restroom before my friends get here.”

  “Cool.”

  While Taylor did her business, someone knocked on the front door. My dink deflated faster than the time my brother walked in on me with the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated open to a pic of Brooklyn Decker.

  I opened the front door and there, outside and up to their ankles in snow with a rusty old Suburban idling behind them, stood Bristy and Hope.

  When they saw me, their mouths dropped in perfect surprise. Bristy pulled the hood of her parka off her head, astonished. “Eddie? You live next door to Finn?”

  I didn’t understand why they were freaking. “Um, yeah,” I said happily. “What’s up, ladies?”

  Hope looked almost frantic. “Holy shit, Eddie. You haven’t met us yet.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because you saw us at Finn’s house. Taylor will know why we were over there,” Bristy said. “And she can’t know we smoke weed.”

  “Because of her parents?” I asked.

  When I heard Taylor coming up behind me, I stepped toward Bristy, shook her hand, and said, “I’m Eddie.”

  “Hi, I’m Bristy. This is my friend Hope.”

  Taylor was pulling on her coat as she stopped beside me. “I see you’ve met my two best friends,” Taylor said, smiling. “I’d love for us to sit around and talk, but if Bristy opens her mouth, we could be here for another couple hours.”

  “No worries,” I said. “All good.”

  Taylor hugged me and said, “Thanks, Eddie. I had a lot of fun.”

  Instead of concentrating on Taylor and her honey smell and her big squishy chest pressing against mine, I glanced at Bristy and Hope and bulged my eyes. Hope pretended to wipe sweat from her brow.

  “I had fun too,” I told Taylor, releasing her. “Maybe we could all hang out sometime?”

  “Totally,” Taylor said. “I’ve got a busy few weeks ahead, but maybe after that.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  Of course, that wasn’t cool. Taylor wanting to hang out in a few days would have been cool. A few weeks? Who says that? Who’s that busy?

  CHAPTER 9

  LITTLE PEOPLE

  The ptarmigan had no clue they were being stalked.

  Finn and I army-crawled up the side of a knoll half covered with snow. Wet, spongy tundra canvased the rest of the landscape.

  The miles of tundra we’d traversed with the dog team was flat, but this particular area looked something like an arctic golf course, with rolling mounds of earth flowing across an area the size of several soccer fields. The mixture of white snow and brown tundra looked like an ocean of rocky road ice cream.

  Clouds hung overhead, locking in the warmth of the unseasonably mild April day.

  “Where there’s one bird, there’s more,” Finn whispered, crawling to my right, clutching a semiautomatic .22 rifle with a black synthetic stock. He had spotted the bird near some waist-high bushes while sitting in the dogsled as I drove.

  The dog team waited forty yards behind us, anchored by an ice hook. The knoll blocked the ptarmigans’ view of the dogs, who were lying down and resting quietly.

  My elbows and knees, soaking wet, sank into the mushy earth as I slithered along next to Finn. He stopped us just before we reached the top of the little hill and handed me his rifle.

  Finn tapped my shoulder. “After you shoot the first one, keep blazing,” he whispered. “If the birds are clu
mped together, you should be able to tag two more before the rest fly away.”

  I crawled four feet forward to the crest of the mound. Thirty yards in front of me, a flock of about ten ptarmigan strutted about, pecking at the ground, weaving in and out of the bushes. Enough snow had melted that the white birds stuck out like sore thumbs anywhere the brown tundra was exposed. Finn had told me the birds’ feathers would turn that same color in a few weeks, meaning this was a good time to be hunting.

  I clicked off the safety and aimed through the iron sight. I bore down on the bird closest to us; three more birds stood just behind it, near the bushes.

  “Give ’er hell,” Finn said.

  I pulled the trigger. The gun made a sound like a firecracker exploding in a pop can.

  Direct hit on the first bird. I knew it was a clean shot through its chest, because it keeled over faster than a fat man having a heart attack.

  The other birds didn’t fly away. I took aim again, capitalizing on their slow reaction time. I shot twice and missed. The next shot connected. Second bird down. On the fifth shot, the gun jammed.

  “Shit,” I said, handing the gun to Finn.

  He pulled the action open and shut, open and shut, trying to dislodge a bullet stuck in the receiver. I turned my attention to the flock and noticed the birds still hadn’t flown away. A couple of them hovered around the two I’d just killed, and were like, “What happened to John and Martha?”

  “What the hell?” I whispered. “Check it out. All the other birds are still hanging around.”

  Finn squinted at the flock. “Dude!” he said, cracking a smile. “They’re drunk!”

  “What?”

  Finn continued, “Like, hammered. They must have eaten fermented berries. I’ve seen this before. Those birds aren’t flying anywhere.” Finn finished with the gun, adding bullets to the ten-round clip. “Watch this.”

  He locked the clip back into place and proceeded to dust four more birds, uttering his favorite insult after every kill: BANG! Suck it, nerd. BANG! Suck it, nerd. BANG! Suck it, nerd. BANG! Suck it, nerd.