How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  Anvik and his friends jumped. The whale hit the umiak, shattered it, went under the water, and surfaced belly up. It turned and spouted blood.

  We found Anvik and pulled him in with us. Something had broken inside of him, and his mouth was bloody. I wiped it clean, but the blood came from inside his throat and he coughed and choked. I lifted his head and laid it in my lap. He held my hand, tight. Men in the other umiaks were stabbing the whale again and again.

  “Anvik’s friends are in umiaks and sitting up,” Kendi’s father said. Anvik tried to smile. Father, Kendi, and the other men began rowing, fast, for land and our camp. I just sat in the bottom of the umiak and held Anvik’s head in my lap.

  Anvik said nothing, to me or to anyone, but he kept coughing blood. All the women, children, and old men ran down to the beach when they saw us rowing in alone. Taimyr screamed and screamed when we lifted Anvik over the side. Mother said nothing, but helped carry Anvik into our tent.

  Unalakleet came and held Anvik’s head and chanted. Mother and Taimyr held Anvik’s hands, and Thule and Kendi stood close to me. I wanted to do something, to try to help. “I’ll run for a doctor at the school,” I shouted, and I turned to run, but Father grabbed my shoulders and held me back. “It would do no good,” he said.

  But how did he know? How did he know what doctors could do to save Anvik? “It’s not our way,” he said, and I wanted to shout at him: “What do you mean,‘this is not our way’ — this is Anvik lying here coughing up his blood,” but Father looked at me. “Stay here,” he said.

  Kendi ran from the tent.

  In the evening the other men came with the whale. I heard them grunting and shouting as they pulled it into the shallows by the beach. Anvik opened his eyes and smiled. Suddenly Unalakleet stopped chanting and beating his drum. He left the tent in a hurry, and I did not know why till Mother reached up and closed Anvik’s eyes.

  Father pulled me to my feet. “Get out and help butcher the whale,” he said. He threw back the tent flaps and left. I ran after him.

  But he did not go to the whale. He walked out onto the tundra to dig a grave.

  The women had fires ready to smoke the whale meat, and the men had stripped off their furs and cut the whale open. They were quiet as I walked up. Two men covered with whale blood waded through the water and heaved a slab of meat down in front of me on top of an untanned skin. I tore off my furs, knelt on the skin, took my knife and started hacking the meat into strips to be smoked.

  I hacked at the meat savagely, trying, for all I knew, to hurt the whale. Thule came and stood across from me, and she cried. I would not look up at her. When I had cut a handful of strips, she carried them to the women. I heard her crying as she walked away from me.

  And then the men grew quiet, and all the women, and I looked up at Kendi, Joseph, and a doctor: too late. “We might have saved him,” Joseph said.

  I hated Joseph, then. I suddenly understood what he had done to me. I could never stay here. I would have to go to him when I was sixteen. The women carried Anvik’s body into the firelight, and Unalakleet started chanting. I wanted to hack Unalakleet’s back with my knife, knock him down, cut open his throat, hold his head back while his blood gushed out onto the ground. But I kept hacking the meat. When I’d cut up my slab, the men threw another in front of me and I cut it apart. Thule carried the meat to the women. I said nothing to Joseph. I do not know when he left.

  Late in the night, Thule and I helped our parents and Taimyr carry Anvik out into the tundra. I would not go back with the others. I sat on Anvik’s grave and imagined that the lights above me, on the other side of the world, were stars.

  | Go to Contents |

  NICOJI

  I got out of the shower and dressed while I was still wet so that maybe I’d cool off while I walked down to the company store. It was evening and quiet. The store was quiet.

  But the ship from Earth had come in.

  Vattani was opening a wooden crate with the back of a hammer, and Marcos and Fabio,Vattani’s two little boys, were kicking through piles of white plastic packing around his counter. Vattani smiled at me and motioned proudly at his shelves: filled, some of them; restocked, as much as they would be till the next ship.

  “Peanut butter!” I said. I grabbed a can of it from the display on the end of the counter. The can was bulged. The peanut butter had frozen in the unheated hold on the way out. But the can felt full. “I’ll take it,” I said, not asking or caring about the price. Vattani looked at me doubtfully but put down his hammer and keyed in my purchase. I thought of — Morgan, was it? — who said if you had to ask the price you couldn’t afford it. Well, I couldn’t afford the peanut butter and I knew it so I didn’t bother with the price. Besides, they had me. The company had me. What was another twenty or thirty dollars on my bill?

  I put the can on the counter and went after the staples Sam and I needed. That’s when I saw the company “boy” sitting in the shadows by an open window next to the racks of boots and underneath the hanging rows of inflatable rafts nobody bought because they’d get punctured and the three butterfly nets nobody wanted after the company quit bringing up naturalists. He tapped his gun against his leg and watched me pick up a five-pound sack of rice and a two-and-a-half-pound sack of beans. He moved his chair so he could look at me when I went down another aisle to get a loaf of bread and a jar of vinegar that had an expiration date Vattani hadn’t changed. He chuckled when I grabbed a bag of raisins Vattani’s wife had dried from the native gagga fruit.

  I held out the bag. “Want some?”

  He laughed. “We’ve got apples and bananas in the company house, Jake.”

  I shoved some raisins in my mouth. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “I tried ’em, once.”

  I thought of different replies to that, communicative things like shoving fistfuls of gagga raisins down his throat.

  “How’s the college application?” he asked.

  My best friend and I had come up, one year out of high school, to earn money for college. I turned and walked back to the counter. “Trouble with shoplifting,Vattani?”

  “Less of it. You got your nicoji frozen?”Vattani keyed in the prices of the food I’d picked up.

  “Just got in. Sam and I’ll eat first.”

  “Ship leaves in the morning — early. You’ll work all night?”

  “Sure, work all night.”

  Vattani stuffed my food in a plastic bag. “You’d better, you and Sam. You missed the last ship, and the price has gone down since then — five cents less per package, now.”

  “It’s the only ship we missed this year. It came early.”

  “But you missed it, so I had to extend your credit, again. How are you going to pay me back?”

  I just looked at him.

  “You eat fast and get to work.”

  I put my right hand on the counter and stared at him. Marcos and Fabio quit kicking the shredded plastic and looked up at us. Vattani waved back the company boy and finally lit the tile under my hand to add forty-six dollars and twenty-three cents to my bill of credit. Then he handed me the groceries. I walked out and let the door slam, listened to the bells over it jangle while I walked down the dirt street.

  But I had a can of peanut butter from home, from Earth.

  And the sky ahead of me was red on the horizon where the sun was.

  Manoel stopped me just down the street from the store. “Dente,” he said in Portuguese, pointing to his teeth. He’d never learned much English. “Raimundo.”

  “Anda já,” I said. He took off down the alley that led to Raimundo’s house. I followed.

  The company had let Raimundo’s teeth rot. Raimundo had asked Sam and me to come help him with his teeth just after we’d gotten in — he thought two Americans would know more about dentistry than the Brazi guys he’d come up with. We didn’t. But he was in so much pain I took a pair of electrician’s pliers and pulled out the incisor he pointed to. Since then, he’d
asked only me to pull his teeth.

  Raimundo was sitting on the one step up to his door, holding the right side of his swollen face. He had a pair of pliers tucked between his knees, and he’d stacked alcohol, aspirin, a scrap of clean cotton, and a knife at his side. I put my sack of groceries on the step and looked at him. He handed me the pliers and pointed at the third bicuspid behind his upper canine: black, rotted out in the middle. It must have hurt for weeks. “How can you stand waiting so long?” I asked. But I knew. The company kept promising to bring out a dentist, and a dentist could save Raimundo’s teeth if they were still in his mouth.

  “Pull it, Jake,” he said, his speech thick. He tried to talk out of only the left side of his mouth.

  “Let me wash my hands and these pliers.”

  He grabbed my arm. “Just pull it. Now.”

  I knelt in front of him. “You take any aspirin?” I asked.

  “Six,” he said.

  Which meant he was hurting bad. He’d generally throw up if he took more than four aspirin — his stomach couldn’t handle it. But the company didn’t stock any other kind of over-the-counter painkiller. I opened the thinnest blade on the pocketknife, stuck it in the alcohol, and laid it on the cotton. “That’s all the cotton you’ve got?” I asked.

  “Manoel packed up the rest,” Raimundo mumbled.

  That surprised me. Evidently they had their raft packed and ready to go again, though they’d gotten in only a day before Sam and me. No sticking around town for them. “Lean back,” I said. Raimundo leaned back against the door frame so he’d have something to push against when I started pulling. “Hold open his mouth,” I told Manoel, mimicking what I wanted him to do. He stood left of Raimundo, stuck his fingers between Raimundo’s teeth, and held the jaws wide apart. Raimundo grabbed the step with both hands and closed his eyes. I grabbed the tooth with the pliers and pulled hard and fast, to get it over with for Raimundo.

  The tooth shattered. Raimundo tried to stand up, but I shoved him back down. Manoel growled Portuguese words I didn’t understand — he’d gotten his fingers bitten — but he held on and opened up Raimundo’s mouth again. I pulled out the parts of tooth. Only one root came. “I’ve got to get the other root,” I said, and I used the knife to work the root loose enough to grab with the pliers. I pulled it out and laid it on the step with the other pieces of tooth. Blood spattered my arms. Manoel let go of Raimundo’s mouth, and Raimundo started spitting blood. I tore off a chunk of cotton, shoved it up where the tooth had been, and had Raimundo bite down.

  His hands were white, he’d held on to the step so hard. “You hurt me,” he mumbled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I did the best I could.”

  He looked at me. Manoel wiped his knife clean on the hem of his shirt.

  * * *

  I set the can of peanut butter on the table Sam had hammered together from crates Vattani threw away behind his store and listened to Sam whistle while he showered. I was shaking. I’ll never pull another tooth, I told myself.

  I opened the bathroom door and walked in. Sam stopped whistling. “That you, Jake?” he asked from behind the shower curtain.

  “Yes,” I said. He started whistling again.

  I wiped steam off part of the broken mirror Sam and I had salvaged from the trash heap north of town and looked at all my teeth. They were fine, no cavities.

  It was my turn to cook. I went back to the kitchen, dumped three handfuls of beans in a jar, washed them in tepid water from our distiller, and set them to soak on the counter for supper the next night. Then I dumped water and a handful of gagga raisins in a pan and let the raisins plump up while I took a clay bowl and walked out to the freeze-shack for some of the nicoji.

  The freeze-shack smelled musty, sweet, like the nicoji. “Light on,” I said. I heard a rustling in the shadows and flipped on the light. The help had all scurried under boxes or stacks of burlap sacks. Three help peeked out at me.

  “Sorry, guys,” I said. The help hate light, even the dim light Sam and I had strung in our freeze-shack.

  “It’s Jake,” some of them whispered. “Jake.”

  I walked to the far wall where we hung our sacks of nicoji and lifted one down from its hook. It was wet and heavy. I set it carefully on the dirt floor and untied it. Nicoji were still crawling around inside. I put my hand in the sack, and a nicoji wrapped its eight spindly legs around my little finger. I lifted it up. It hung there, its beady eyes looking at me. I flicked it in the pan and picked out eight more nicoji that were still moving, since they’d be the freshest, set the pan on the floor and started to tie up the sack, thinking we shouldn’t eat too many ourselves, not now, but then I thought why not? We’d had a good catch. Even Vattani would be proud of Sam and me.

  Not that it mattered how well Sam and I did.

  So I put four more nicoji in the pan, threw one or two nicoji in each corner of the freeze-shack, and hung the sack back on its hook. The help waited till I switched off the light to scramble out after the nicoji.

  Sam was still in the shower. I banged on the door. “Supper, Sam!” I yelled. Whenever we first got back in town, he’d stay in the shower just letting the water run over him, trying to feel clean; then, after he’d taken all the water in the rooftop storage tank, if it didn’t rain, we had to go to the well half a mile away for cooking water and to the company bathhouse if we wanted a bath — five dollars each.

  I dumped the water off the raisins, poured in a cup of vinegar, sprinkled sugar and a dash of salt over that, and turned on the heat underneath the pan. When the raisins started bubbling, I washed the thirteen nicoji, chopped off their heads and stiff little legs and tails, gutted them, rinsed the blood off the bodies, dumped them in with the raisins and vinegar, and set them to simmer. The photograph of Loryn, my girlfriend back home, had fallen out of the windowsill onto the stove. I dusted it off and stuck it back in the window.

  Sam padded out from the shower, still wet, toweling his hair dry. When he saw the can of peanut butter he just sat down and held it.

  “It’s been two years,” I said.

  We ate our nicoji over rice and, though the nicoji had made me a slave, I still loved the taste. “They never get ’em like this back home,” I said, “fresh.”

  Sam nodded. We finished the nicoji and carried the peanut butter and bread to the veranda and sat on the steps. The gravitational wind was blowing, and it felt cool, off the sea. We sat facing into it. The moon was so big, it didn’t pull in just tides: it pulled the atmosphere along with it, and we could count on relief from the heat at least twice a day. I tore the bread into thin pieces. Sam pushed up the tab on top of the can, broke the seal, and carefully peeled back the lid. I wiped the peanut butter stuck to it onto a piece of bread, tore the piece in two, gave Sam half, and we ate without a word.

  One of the help wandered out, dragging the garbage sack from the kitchen. The help were famous for scrounging through garbage sacks and trash heaps. This help had on someone’s greasy old shirt that hung in tatters, open. Whoever had thrown it away had cut off and saved all the buttons.

  The help dumped out the garbage and rummaged through it looking for the heads, legs, and tails I’d cut from the nicoji we’d had for supper. Little eight-legged “ants” had swarmed all over the nicoji hard parts. The help let a few ants crawl on his fingers, and he watched the ants run up and down his hand. He ate the ones that started up his arm. Eventually he settled back to eat the nicoji, ants and all, watching Sam and me. Suddenly he stuck his fingers in the peanut butter. “Hey!” I yelled. I swatted his hand away, but he lifted it up with a look of horror on his face. He sniffed the peanut butter on his fingers, wrinkled his nose, and looked at Sam and me eating peanut butter on our bread. He tried to shake the peanut butter off and finally ran to the street and rubbed his fingers in the dirt till they were clean. He came back for the nicoji and walked away, disgusted, leaving the garbage scattered. Sam and I shoved the garbage in the sack and sat back down.

 
; The night had cooled off. There were clouds around us, and lightning, and when it rained it wouldn’t matter that Sam had taken all the water. The moon was rising. It filled a third of the sky, shining red through the clouds.

  “You boys still eating?”

  It was Vattani walking home with his two sons, holding their hands. “Go help your mother home from the bayou,” he told them. The boys ran off. Senhora Vattani washed other teams’ clothes in the bayou. Sam and I washed our own clothes, to save money, and Senhora Vattani used to hate us for cheating her out of work, at least till we started bringing her new plants from the pântano for her garden.

  Vattani marched up to our veranda.

  “You let my friend vagabundo buy a can of your peanut butter,” Sam said. “Muito obrigado.”

  “Vagabundos — both of you,” Vattani said. “The ship will leave in three hours. Other teams have already taken their nicoji to the company house.”

  “You told me the ship would leave in the morning,” I said.

  Vattani shrugged. “I was wrong. Ships keep their own time.”

  Ships keep the company’s time, I thought.

  “Thanks for the warning,” Sam said.

  I wrapped the peanut butter in a towel to keep off the ants and grabbed our butcher knife to cut the nicoji with. Sam used his pocketknife. I got our two buckets, one to fill with disinfected water to rinse the nicoji in after we’d gutted them, the other to throw the guts in. We went out to the freeze-shack, pulled down our sacks of nicoji, and set them by the freezer. The freezer was a rectangular machine that misted the nicoji with water and packed them in square, five-pound blocks that were wrapped in plastic and lowered into liquid nitrogen which, at minus 195 degrees Fahrenheit, flash-froze the nicoji, forming ice crystals too small to rupture the cells, preserving the color, nutritive value, and taste. The company shipped the nicoji to a station above Earth where they were graded, UNDA-inspected, given a final packaging, and shipped down to market as one of the most sought after luxuries.