by Craig Dirkes
Russ swung through a turn and drove up a hill steeper than seemed safe, and at the top, we hung a right and parked near a small brown house.
“Here we are,” he said.
Junk littered the front of the home, including an old dented refrigerator with the door ripped off, two rusty bicycles with deflated tires, and a beat-up four-wheeler.
Could this be the four-wheeler? I wondered, getting out of the truck. What could the story be here?
“You good then?” Russ asked.
I nodded as I gazed at the rest of the village below us. Five tiers of dirt roads, each lined with houses, rested on the side of the foothill, like steps in a diamond mine.
“If you need a ride back to the airport, I’ll be right there,” Russ offered, pointing to a shabby yellow house several doors down.
“Thanks, I guess I’ll need one,” I said. “Oh, one other thing. Do you know where Linetta Wassily lives? My neighbor knows her.”
“Way down there, with the red tin roof.” Russ pointed to a bright blue house at the very bottom of the foothill, near the Andreafsky shoreline.
* * *
I spent a couple hours inside the little brown house, scrambling to keep up with my note-taking, listening to one of the most impressive stories I’d ever heard. I interviewed two sixteen-year-old Native kids named Sam and Owen. The house belonged to Sam’s family.
“We didn’t know if we’d make it out alive,” Sam said. “We counted six brownies in the area.”
His mom sat in a rocking chair, sewing a kuspuk. She never did say a word to me, other than hello when I’d first walked through the door.
The guys and I sat below her, cross-legged on the yellow linoleum floor. Brownish-black globs stained the floor in some places, quite possibly from the dried blood of a caribou that Sam or his dad — whom I never did meet — had gutted on a particularly cold winter day. (No kidding: during winter, one hotel in Kusko put up signs outside its rooms that read: no gutting animals.)
Owen added, “We saw two males that were both ten-footers. And we saw a sow with two cubs. And we —”
“How close?” I asked, riveted.
“Too close,” Sam said. “A young bear that looked way too thin circled around us for an hour, fifty yards away. If you can see a bear’s ribcage, watch the fuck out.”
Kusko wasn’t bear country, but St. Mary’s was. In the YK Delta, bears live north of the Yukon River, but rarely south of it.
The story was like this: A week before, without telling anybody, the two boys drove that old four-wheeler I’d seen out front more than twenty miles north of town, where the kings were running heavy. While crossing what they thought was a shallow slough, the four-wheeler sank all the way up to the handlebars. The guys spent four hours tugging it onto dry land. Although they came prepared with tools for a breakdown, a waterlogged four-wheeler had never made their list of potential problems. Rather than spend two days trudging through the brush on foot, with bears everywhere, never knowing what was around the next corner, they spent forty-eight hours dismantling the four-wheeler and drying the parts over a fire, piece by piece. They reassembled the rig and drove it most of the way back to St. Mary’s.
“We heard lots of metal-on-metal,” Owen said, “so we knew the thing would take a shit at some point. Luckily, it got us pretty close to home.”
Dudes were a year or two younger than me, yet I felt like a boy among men.
I couldn’t wait to spring the story on Dalton.
* * *
Interviewing Sam and Owen was so intriguing that I lost all track of time. It was already three o’clock and my return flight would be leaving in under an hour. I had to find Linetta, and fast. I snapped a quick photo of Sam and Owen on the four-wheeler, strapped on my backpack, and made for Linetta’s house.
Her home stood far below, past all the tiers of dirt roads. Walking there, I cut through some backyards. One of the homeowners — a Native man who looked older than Charles Sampson — glared at me as though I were trespassing, which I suppose I was.
When I got to Linetta’s place, I looked up the foothill toward Russ’s house and figured that, given my fat backpack, I’d need about ten minutes to walk there for a ride to catch my flight. I set the alarm on my phone for twenty minutes to remind myself of when I needed to leave.
I knocked on Linetta’s door — a rotting wafer board, on a house that looked like a tree fort built with scrap wood by an ambitious group of eight-year-olds.
How’s she going to afford this weed? I thought. And how the hell does she afford heating oil during winter?
Linetta opened the door and grinned at me with all three of her teeth. She was skinny and reeked like piss. Her medium-length, oily blond hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks.
I couldn’t tell her age. Either she was in her forties and partied way too hard, or she was just a dirty old lady in her fifties. She stood barefoot, wearing gray sweatpants and a bright pink T-shirt with sweat stains in the armpits.
“Got my smoke?” she grunted, bypassing introductions.
I glanced around before whispering, “I have it.”
“Then come on in.”
I looked around again, saw nobody out and about nearby, and stepped inside. The transaction wouldn’t take long. It’s not like we had a lot to talk about.
Linetta sat down on a musty green couch. A warped wooden coffee table rested in front of it.
“Let’s see,” she said.
I dropped my overalls right in front of her. I turned around and shuffled backward, signifying I needed her to strip off the duct tape. Without warning, she slapped my ass like Finn had done, laughing. I snickered too. Life couldn’t have gotten much weirder.
Linetta dislodged the package and slit it open with a pocketknife, not bothering to wash it off. She reached on top of the coffee table for a pipe made of antler. She packed a bowl, grabbed her Bic, and sucked three long hits.
“Good shit,” she muttered, exhaling a rich cloud of smoke. She handed me a wad of cash.
“How are you and Finn related?” I asked, attempting to forge an actual conversation as I counted the cash. It was all there, and I was that much closer to my goal of three grand.
She didn’t answer my question. She took the bag of weed from the table and tucked it into the drawer of her side table. Then she leaned back into the sofa and closed her eyes.
“Run along now,” she said.
Before I could move, someone banged on the front door, which Linetta had “locked” by blocking it with a cement block on the floor. The thin board shuddered with each thump from outside.
“I smell weed in there!” a man bellowed. He had the voice of a giant, an angry giant.
I freaked. I was afraid Russ the VPSO had come to bust me. The voice didn’t sound like his, though. It sounded as if it belonged to someone I’d like to see even less than the local cop.
“Get out of here, Bronco!” Linetta screamed.
I backed away and watched the door. The man banged on it three more times, and it seemed about to fly off its hinges.
“I said leave!” Linetta barked.
The man — Bronco, apparently — kicked open the door. Terrified as I was, I couldn’t help but think he didn’t look like a Bronco. He was a bald little Native guy in his early twenties, scrawny, and six inches shorter than me. He had a goatee and wore dirty blue jeans. He held a brown paper bag in one hand as he stormed over to Linetta.
“Smoke all you want, but you better have money for this!” he said, pulling a bottle of vodka from the bag.
“I asked for that two days ago,” Linetta spat back. “You didn’t deliver, so I got weed instead.”
Bronco looked me up and down. “From this little dick-suck?”
I told him I didn’t want any trouble.
“Well you got trouble,” he taunte
d, taking a step toward me. I backed up. “You think you can come into my village and sell weed? You fuckin’ crazy?”
I kept backpedaling until I was against the wall.
“Leave, Bronco!” Linetta shouted. “I’ll pay for the vodka later!”
For the first time, I felt like a real drug dealer — dirty and disgusting. There I was, feuding with a bootlegger over the money of a sad old junkie, like two vultures fighting over a carcass. This lady should have been using the money she just gave me to buy decent food, or warm clothes, or a nicer sofa to sit on. Don’t look now, but you’re adding to the problems of the YK Delta, I thought, recalling my conversation with Nicolai.
Bronco wouldn’t take his eyes off me. “Give me that money!”
My body shook, as did my voice when I said, “This is between you two. I have a plane to catch.”
Bronco got between me and the door. “You’re not going anywhere until you give me that money, you fuckin’ pussy.”
“Fuck that,” I countered, hoping I’d sound sure and tough.
I’d barely finished the sentence when Bronco unleashed a roundhouse right. I tilted my head back just enough that he whiffed. He’d put everything he had into the punch, hoping to take me out in one shot. As we circled around each other then, I wondered what would go wrong next, how I could get the hell away from him.
Just then, the alarm on my phone went off. It confused Bronco for a split second. Without thinking, I lunged forward and shoved him. He toppled over the coffee table and smacked his head against the corner of the end table, which fell over with him, emptying the contents of the drawer.
Now I was really scared.
Blood spurted from a gash on Bronco’s head. He rolled onto his side, groaning, trying to get up.
Linetta sat on the couch, dazed, like it was all a hallucination.
“I have to go,” I said to Linetta, my voice trembling again. “Sorry!”
I stepped over Bronco to get my backpack, then made for the door.
“Get back here,” Bronco said, grabbing at my pant leg.
“Let me go!” I yelled, but he had a good grip. I didn’t want to hit him again, but I had no choice. I spun and kicked wildly, catching him square on the nose. My boot sounded like a meat tenderizer smacking a slab of sirloin. He groaned and covered his face with his hands.
“Shit!” I said. I hadn’t meant to get him in the face. I looked at Linetta and again said, “Sorry!”
Then I bolted from the house, praying that Bronco couldn’t get up and give chase. I darted uphill toward Russ’s house as fast as I could, my backpack bouncing like it was filled with bowling balls. I arrived at Russ’s house in no time and pounded on his door ferociously. I checked behind me. No Bronco. Russ opened the door right away.
“I lost track of time,” I gasped.
“How much time we got?” He wore only a white T-shirt, his uniform pants, and white socks.
“About five minutes.”
He didn’t even bother with shoes. We just jumped into his truck and tore away.
As we drove the winding dirt road, I rolled down my window and heard an airplane buzzing in the distance. No way that plane is beating us to the runway, I thought. I’ll make this.
I wondered if Russ would find out that Bronco was hurt, and what lies Bronco might spin to explain why his face looked like a gut pile. But I wasn’t worried about getting caught for what I’d done to him. I knew that he and Linetta weren’t going to say anything. They had their own crimes to hide. Not to mention, Bronco didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d readily admit to getting his ass handed to him by an eighteen-year-old.
Russ slowed the truck as we approached the runway. The plane had just landed. Before I got out, he said, “Hey, just one thing: How’d that four-wheeler story go?”
“Better than I could have hoped,” I replied.
CHAPTER 14
A GRISLY ENCOUNTER
Heavy gray clouds rolled in from the west as I drove the FJ home to Dalton’s place, where I dropped my backpack at the edge of the back dog yard and headed straight for Joanie’s house. As I moped toward her, I noticed a blood stain on the front pocket of my overalls. It’s from Bronco, I thought.
Joanie and I began playing a silly game we’d invented a few weeks before. I hid behind her house, popped up my head, and asked in a stupid voice, “Who eats poop?” When she spotted me, her face burst into a smile.
The dogs took my mind off everything that had gone wrong in St. Mary’s as I waited for Finn to come home from work. I could hardly wait to bitch him out for setting me up on such a shady deal. During the flight back to Kusko, I’d been on the verge of hyperventilating the whole way, with the sound of Bronco’s skull hitting the table playing over and over in my head, monotonously, like Chinese water torture.
I hid behind Joanie’s house again. I crouched down behind her doghouse and sprang up. “Who eats… Joanie?” She wasn’t there.
Then I felt a nip on my butt. I turned around and, sure enough, there was Joanie. She looked up at me, grinning, as if to say, Joke’s on you this time.
Finn’s cab finally arrived. I ran to his house and got up in his grill before he could give the cabbie a five spot. I was so angry that I started laughing like a lunatic.
“Awesome buyer you gave me!” I roared, all wide-eyed and smiling.
The Albanian cabbie looked at Finn like I was psycho. Finn motioned for him to drive away. “Eaaasy, dude! The hell is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong? I’ll tell you what’s wrong! You gave me a damned junkie to sell to, then some bootlegger broke into her house and took a swing at me!”
Finn stood in his button-down work shirt, silent, processing what I’d told him. Say something already, I thought. Every second that passed was more aggravating than the last.
“Two things,” Finn finally said. “No, three things. One, you’re not selling gumballs and lollipops. You’re a marijuana dealer now. Not every buyer is going to be a happy-go-lucky, good-times stoner like Casey. It’s just the way it works. So get used to it.
“Two, how was I supposed to know a crazy bootlegger would show up? You’re free to be pissed, but you can’t be pissed at me for that.”
I sighed and shook my head.
“Three,” he said, “suck it, nerd.”
The kid had some points. I had to concede that.
“Yeah?” I said. “Well, eat it, geek.”
I followed Finn toward the front steps of his house. A clap of thunder sounded in the distance, just before I asked, “What’s the story with Linetta?”
“She’s my ex-aunt, you spaz,” Finn said. “I figured that selling to her was safe enough because she used to be family. But the more important question is, do you know who the bootlegger was?”
“Linetta called him Bronco,” I said. “I wound up kicking his ass.”
Finn’s eyes got huge. “You did what?”
“He came after me,” I said. “It was self-defense.”
I explained how I’d pushed Bronco and kicked him in the face and how it’d been kind of an accident — and how it was him or us.
“Bad move, Eddie,” Finn said. “Really bad move.”
Apparently, Bronco was the wrong guy to mess with. Finn said if you crossed him, you became bear bait. He launched into a story about how, a few years back, Bronco chained a guy by his ankle to a stake and left him to the bears.
“This was five miles up the Andreafsky River in spring, right when the bears woke up from hibernating, all hungry and pissed off,” Finn said. “All they ever found of the guy was half his leg connected to the chain. Bronco never got caught, but everyone knows it was him.”
Wow. Just, wow.
“Whatever you do, stay the hell away from Bronco,” Finn continued. “He may be small, but he’s got an Alaska-si
ze case of little-dick syndrome. He’s an angry, slippery little bastard who knows how to get out of trouble. He knows everybody. He’s got connections.”
Dalton drove up and cut our conversation short. He parked his blue truck in our driveway, jumped out, and, looking super excited, jogged over with a big cardboard package under his arm.
“Eddie, check this baby out!” he said, handing over the box.
“What is it?” I asked, weighing the box with my hands.
“Just open it.”
Finn helped me strip away the packaging. I pulled out a white camera lens the size of a bazooka.
“It’s not just any lens, Eddie. It’s a two-hundred-millimeter zoom with image stabilization.”
I inspected the lens, marveling at its weight.
“Eddie my boy, do you know what this means?”
“What?”
“It means you can capture action shots from much farther away, and in lower light. This lens is good for portraits, too. Your photography is going to improve overnight. Better photos means a better newspaper. A better newspaper means more ads. More ads mean more money.”
“Sweet titties!” I said. “More money means I get a raise!”
“Very funny, Eddie.” Dalton didn’t even smile, though. He just went on admiring the lens.
I felt a raindrop land on my forearm and placed the lens back into the package so it wouldn’t get wet.
“And Eddie,” Dalton said, “I’ve got just the assignment for you to give this puppy a test drive.”
Before I could ask, he continued, “Quyana Fest in Mountain Village, on the Fourth of July. Photo ops up the wazoo. You can shoot a photo essay and we’ll get a two-page spread out of it.”
“Giddyup,” I said.
“Quyana” was one of the only Yup’ik words I knew. It means “thank you.”
Dalton headed inside as a light rain began to sprinkle. Despite the rain, Finn hadn’t moved. He stood next to me with a grave look on his face. “Watch your ass in Mountain Village,” he said. “It’s connected to St. Mary’s by a road.”