by Craig Dirkes
I looked through the back window and saw Bronco and the two goons speeding up from behind on four-wheelers, kicking up big clouds of dust.
“The fuck?” I said.
Russ didn’t say anything more. He kept driving, silent, with a straight face.
I looked back again. Bronco and his buddies were right on our tail, speeding along without helmets.
Bronco looked even smaller than I’d remembered. He wore the same ripped jeans and stained white T-shirt. If the dirty little fool hadn’t changed clothes since I last saw him, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
The two goons flanked Bronco. They sped along with long, scraggly black ponytails flapping in the wind. Their sunglasses made them look like Native versions of henchmen from an Italian mob. I’d been wrong about them both being smaller than me — one was undeniably bigger.
“What’s going on?” I asked Russ.
He still didn’t say anything.
“You do realize it’s your job to protect people from this kind of thing, right?” I said.
That struck a chord.
“I’ve known Bronco since birth,” he replied. “You fuck with him; you fuck with all of us.”
“Spare me the brothers from different mothers bullshit,” I replied, rolling my eyes.
Bronco sped up on my side of the truck and bounced along near my door, glaring at me and smiling. His face still hadn’t finished healing from what I’d done to him. His left eyelid was still purple and yellow.
I flicked him off. He threw his head back and laughed. Then he hit the gas and took the lead.
A minute later, Bronco slowed down and hung a right onto what looked like a hunting trail. Russ followed, with the two goons driving behind his truck. The trail was bumpy enough that nobody could drive faster than a few miles per hour. A foul stench, like a rotting animal, grew stronger and stronger.
“Where are you taking me?” I mumbled.
Sweat sprang from my pores, and my eyes burned — fear made physical. I thought that if these guys only knew me, they wouldn’t be doing whatever it was they were about to do. I started pleading as much to Russ.
“Please, seriously, you’ve got this all wrong,” I said. “I never wanted to fight with Bronco. I never wanted to mess with his business. It was a stupid mistake. Total wrong place, wrong time. Whatever you’re going to do, don’t do it.”
Russ kept driving.
“I’m just a kid,” I added, hoping the “kid” card might buy me some sympathy. But it didn’t. Clearly, they’d be trying me as an adult.
I wanted to open the truck door, bolt into the brush, hack my way to the Yukon River, and swim upstream to anywhere. Before I could finish dreaming of my escape, it was out of the question. We had arrived.
By now, the rotten stench practically singed my nose hairs. The whole area smelled like a bucket of shit and rotten eggs.
“Get out of the truck,” Russ commanded, turning off the engine.
Bronco waited ahead of me on his four-wheeler, with the two goons behind. They shut off their vehicles. We stood at the edge of a sandy clearing the size of a hockey rink, surrounded by ten-foot-high brush. In the center of the clearing, a monstrous crater was piled to the sky with garbage — dirty diapers, animal guts, food wrappers, car parts, and other rubbish.
It all made sense. The St. Mary’s and Mountain Village dump was the perfect place for a group of no-good assholes to beat my ass in private.
Bronco didn’t take his eyes off me while he spoke to Russ. “Dumb shit bought the story about the flights being full?”
“Yep,” Russ said, circling the back of the truck. “I found him at the fortune-teller.”
“I guess she didn’t see us in his future, huh?” Bronco said.
The guys all laughed. I was so focused on Bronco that I didn’t notice Russ coming up on me from behind. He got me in a full nelson, throwing his massive arms under my armpits and locking his hands behind my head. I bucked and tried reverse-head-butting him several times, but he was too tall. The back of my head only pounded on his chest. I kicked my legs into the air violently, trying to break free.
“Easy there, little fucker,” Russ muttered, like he was a cowboy and I was a squirming calf.
The two goons got straight to work. Standing on both sides of me to avoid being kicked, they pounded the sides of my face with closed fists and sent the occasional boot to my stomach. Each blow felt like a crowbar slammed against my face. I saw flickers of stars every time the bigger goon connected with a punch. When the stars dissipated, the sight of Bronco standing in front of me, cackling, came into focus.
It didn’t take long for the goons to knock the strength out of me. When I stopped kicking, Russ let me go. I fell to the ground in a pile, gasping. My stomach ached, my head felt like it’d been run over by a tank, and my jaw felt like I’d been curb stomped.
Bronco knelt down next to me. “That was only a warm-up,” he said. “Before we get to the real fun, I’ll need that money.”
“Please,” I said, sliding my hand inside my overalls and pulling a fat wad of twenties from my jock, “just take this and leave me alone. I get the message. I’m sorry. Honest, I am. I never meant — ”
Bronco rose and kicked me in the face to shut me up. The tip of his steel-toe boot felt like a hammer to my mouth. I writhed on the ground, spitting out sand, while Bronco counted the cash. “Okay then,” he said to the goons. “Carry on.”
Russ hoisted me up and reapplied his wrestling hold, and the goons moved in. I didn’t know how long this round would last or how much of it I could take. After the first few punches, my face was so numb I couldn’t feel the blows connecting anymore. I could only hear them.
Then I heard something else. Everyone heard it. The sound stopped Russ, Bronco, and the goons cold. Russ let me go. I fell down into the sand, rolling over next to the passenger side of the truck. All five of us waited in silence, looking in all directions, listening for… whatever that was.
There was the sound again — a whiny, squealing noise. I pinpointed it to where the thick brush met the clearing, twenty yards from the other side of the truck. I was still on the ground and could see, looking underneath the vehicle, the exact area from where the noise was coming.
I saw branches moving low to the ground. I squinted and made out the image of a bear cub peeking his head out. He let out another cry. The cub was the size of Joanie, my favorite dog. Russ, Bronco, and the goons still hadn’t seen him and remained fixated on locating the origin of his cries. I inched myself backward, toward the goons’ four-wheelers.
Everybody else stood frozen, petrified. We all knew that encountering a brown bear cub in the Alaska wilderness was about the most dangerous situation anybody, anywhere on Earth, could possibly be in. Where there is a cub, a pissed-off mother is close behind.
In the brush forty yards away from us, the forest came alive with the sound of crunching branches and crashing trees, as though a runaway earthmover were plowing through at a hundred miles per hour. In the blink of an eye, the sow burst out of the brush like a football team breaking through a paper banner. She was in full stride, her thick chocolate coat heaving up and down, up and down, with every blazing step.
She went straight for the first thing she could see — Bronco and the goons, only about fifteen feet from me. The three of them quickly huddled together, threw their arms up into the air, and began shouting, “YA BEAR! YA BEAR!”
The sow skidded to a halt right in front of them. She popped her jaws and pounded her front paws on the ground. Her teeth looked bigger than elephant tusks. Her stench was so putrid, it made the village dump smell like lavender potpourri. She must have been eight hundred pounds — an average size for an adult brownie in this region of Alaska, but still big enough to break a man’s neck with one swipe of her paw.
I glanced under the truck and watched as the c
ub began to scamper toward his mom. I did a backward army crawl to the four-wheelers, never taking my eyes off the big bear and the guys. Russ stood against the front of his truck, paralyzed. He could’ve shot the bear if VPSOs weren’t prohibited from carrying firearms.
Russ’s eyes moved from the bear to me. He must’ve known I was making a break for it, but there was nothing he could do. Any sudden movement toward me, and the bear would instinctively chase him down.
I crouched behind one of the four-wheelers, using it as a shield to block the sow’s view. I inched my head up and saw that the cub had trekked behind his mother and was making his way back into the brush. The sow shuffled a few steps backward, keeping a steady growl. Bronco and the goons kept shouting at her. If the sow hadn’t attacked them by now, the chances were slim that she would. She had protected her cub.
I stayed low and hit the electric start, praying that the engine wouldn’t spook the bear into charging me. She looked in my direction, then turned her attention back to Bronco and the goons. They kept yelling, “YA BEAR! YA BEAR!”
I lunged onto the four-wheeler, knowing at that point I had two choices: 1) Peel away as fast as I could and hope to outrun the bear if she gave chase, and 2) Wait for the bear to leave and hope that being ready aboard the four-wheeler would give me a big enough head start to outrun the others.
I went with option one, hopping on the rig and slamming on the gas. I whipped a shitty to get myself turned in the opposite direction, buzzed past the truck so I could snatch my backpack from the bed, then hauled ass down the bumpy, uneven road. I pressed my thumb on the throttle so hard, my right thumb felt like it might snap.
After a couple seconds, I swiveled around and saw the bear coming in my direction, but she halted a few steps later. I never looked back again.
In two minutes I’d arrived at the main road. I stopped and turned off the four-wheeler. I couldn’t hear any sound of other vehicles following. All I heard was beautiful silence. My only hope then was to bolt back to Mountain Village, ditch the vehicle, and catch the next plane headed to Suckville.
CHAPTER 15
DRY-LAND THERAPY
The dog team stomped toward the cloudy horizon on green tundra — extra mushy from the morning dew. The army-green hip boots I wore over my jeans kept my legs warm enough, but my yellow insulated flannel didn’t quite cut it on top. Just wait until winter, I thought. Fifty degrees in Alaska will feel like T-shirt weather.
I liked running the dogs on dry land more than on snow. Dry-land mushing was more relaxing. The dogs couldn’t run as fast because the tundra was more abrasive to the bottom of the sled. When I took a header, reclaiming the team was easier.
Just like snow mushing, dry-land mushing had become my therapy. And given what had happened with Bronco and the bear and getting my butt whooped and all that, I needed a fat dose of doggy medicine. Two weeks had passed since the incident and I still hadn’t gotten a grip. The beating left me aching and weary, but the outward signs of it hadn’t been too bad. At first my face was swollen and red, but soon the only obvious signs were a cut on my eyebrow, a faint black eye, and a gash on my lip. When anybody asked, I’d told them that I dumped the dogsled or flipped a four-wheeler.
Mostly I just wanted to avoid people. I’d been out mushing almost every day.
This time the dogs and I must have been a mile outside of Suckport. I turned toward town but couldn’t see the city limits. I wasn’t concerned about going anyplace in particular, so I let Joanie decide. She led the team west. We bounced up and down on the uneven ground, kicking up ptarmigan every couple hundred yards. Without snow, mushing trails no longer existed on the tundra.
As the team strode along, I thought about how otherworldly insane my life had become. In less than a year, I’d gone from normal suburban kid to bush-living, marijuana-dealing, murderer-dodging, broke-ass fool.
The whole caper was a vicious circle. I wanted to leave town more than ever, yet the only way I could get out was to keep doing the very thing that made my life so miserable — selling weed. It was the ultimate catch-twenty-two. I was like an alcoholic, getting drunk to forget about my drinking problem.
To compound matters, since Bronco stole the money I earned during my third delivery, I needed to sell two ounces during my fourth transaction to stay on track financially. If I got busted with two ounces, the cops could nail me for intent to distribute.
I wondered whether Bronco had anything more in store for me. He was still out there. The bear hadn’t mauled him and the others. If she had, word would have gotten out and Dalton would have made me write a front-page story about it.
But was the beat-down Bronco and his goons gave me enough to satisfy him? Even if it wasn’t, what else could he do to me? Not much, I figured. I was probably safe in Suckonia. I could make my final marijuana deals in villages as far away from St. Mary’s and Mountain Village as humanly possible.
Six more weeks. If I stayed the course and played things smart, I could probably be out of town in only six… more… weeks. For as crappy as I felt, that thought made me happy.
* * *
A hundred yards south of us, I noticed a small lake packed with tundra swans. “Haw!” I commanded Joanie and Biff, instructing them to veer left.
Surprisingly, the swans didn’t fly away when we approached the lake. They simply paddled themselves, slowly, in the opposite direction. There were dozens of them. I saw the reflection of the clouds in the stillness of the water. The swans looked like they were swimming in the sky.
“Whoa,” I said in a hushed voice, to keep from spooking the majestic white birds. I halted the team near the edge of the lake and anchored the sled. I jogged to Joanie and let her off the gangline; she was the only dog I trusted to go free.
Joanie joined me as I slogged my way to the edge of the lake, high-stepping through spongy green tundra. I leaned over and looked at my reflection in the water. My right cheek was still swollen, and flakes of dried blood surrounded my left eye.
Who are you? I asked myself, staring at my reflection.
I didn’t like the person I saw. I was a good person, with a good heart, who was doing bad things. That was my first thought, anyway. Because maybe I wasn’t so good after all. I remembered what Nicolai told me in the steam bath. Was I the kind of person who knew what was right but did wrong nonetheless? Or was I getting tricked into thinking that what is wrong is what is right?
I got real with myself. You’re an irresponsible little pussy, I concluded. That’s all you are. It’s all you’ve ever been.
I’d always had a major pussy complex. It all started when I was little, watching my dad and Max do guy stuff that I wasn’t mentally or physically capable of doing. They fixed cars, landscaped, finished basements — you name it. Growing up in Zimmerman never did my complex any favors, because every guy was a hard-ass. They knocked my dick in the dirt every time a story of mine was printed in the junior high school newspaper. Writing was art, and art was for pussies.
My life sucked right up through most of my sophomore year of high school. My voice still hadn’t changed and hair still didn’t grow on my balls. The George Foreskin incident I’d explained to Taylor basically sums up most of that year. Late that spring, though, I rounded a corner. My voice lowered an octave. My pubes sprouted. My face grew into my nose. I shot up four inches. My muscles nearly doubled in size during summer vacation.
Around that time I began writing sports stories through an internship at the local newspaper, the Zimmerman Post. The guys on the baseball and lacrosse teams liked the stories I wrote about them and dialed back on giving me hell all the time. Gradually it seemed people started thinking, Hey, maybe Eddie isn’t such a pussy after all.
Soon after Christmas break of my junior year, I started pumping iron in the high school weight room after school. Weight lifting, I discovered, was an athletic endeavor that didn’t require me to play a sport
and made me look like less of a pussy. Through weight lifting and the guy chatter that goes with it, I honed my cussing skills. The bigger I talked, the less of a pussy I seemed. From then on, I took a keen interest in anything manly that didn’t involve playing sports and didn’t require any type of mechanical knowledge.
By the time fall of my senior year rolled around, I had been transformed. My single-rep bench-press max topped two hundred forty-five pounds. I cussed like a sailor. Gina Gunderson, the consensus fourth-hottest chick in my grade — some guys ranked her third — let me play with her boobs. After seventeen long years, I had finally arrived at the towering, stately gates of the kingdom of Non-Pussydom.
That’s where Alaska came in. When R.J. told me he’d scored a hockey scholarship at the University of Anchorage, my ears pricked up. I had been wanting to go to college someplace rugged and badass like Montana. It quickly dawned on me that Alaska could crap Montana. Alaska would be the most badass place I could possibly go for college. It’s the most fertile ground on the planet for growing balls.
And here I was, dry-land mushing with a kick-ass team of dogs. I snapped out of my daydreaming, glanced at my reflection again, and saw Joanie staring back at me in the water, grinning. Her awesomeness never ceased to amaze.
I led Joanie back to the team, harnessed her, and jumped back on the sled.
“Joanie, home!”
* * *
Dalton sauntered into the office wearing his tan overalls, carrying a thick bundle of newspapers wrapped in a white zip tie. This week’s edition had bumped up to twenty pages, up from sixteen pages the week before. With the dividend approaching in two months, the “feeding frenzy” of ad sales had begun.
Dalton dropped the stack of papers on my desk. “Good-looking issue,” he said.
“Thanks,” I replied.
My front-page photo was money: an older Native husband and wife on the shore of the Kuskokwim, at their fish camp near the village of Kwethluk, showcasing a skiff filled with dozens of sockeyes flipping about. The story: wildlife officials predicted the second run of reds would be coming fast and furious until the end of the week. I had hitched a boat ride to Kwethluk, a twenty-minute jaunt up the Kuskokwim.