by T. C. Boyle
He didn’t feel hungry, or not yet, though he must’ve burned through ten thousand calories with all that bailing and the rest of the frantic activity around the house, so he just made the rounds, not only in the gymnasium but the classrooms too, looking for his friends and wondering where Cherry was, if her family had even come here or if they were waiting it out at home—they had a two-story house, which meant they could all just go upstairs. Her father, Mr. Pollard, was one of the four white teachers at school, along with Mrs. Cato, Mr. Nordstrom and Miss Rumery, who taught the elementary school classes, and if he was pretty clueless about hunting and even fishing he was all science and math and maybe the single smartest person on the island, which meant that he was ahead of everybody else when it came to emergency preparation because everybody else was like his mother with all those generations of wait-and-see in their blood. So maybe Cherry wasn’t there, that was what he was thinking, and he was depressed all over again. But then a wave came up and slapped the window of Mrs. Koonook’s classroom, which was impossible, and the wind raised its voice till it was the only thing he could hear, and he knew she had to be there somewhere.
When he found her—Jimmy Norton said he thought he’d seen her go into the library, and that was where she was, way in back, though he’d already looked twice—she was sitting with his cousin Charlotte Swan and the other A.J., the one that made his stomach turn. The other A.J., first of all, didn’t have a name that stood for anything—it was just initials (he himself was Arthur James, after his father). The second thing was that this A.J., who’d only been at McQueen for six months, was black, African American, whatever you wanted to call it, and not only did that make him special right off as the only one in the whole Northwest Arctic Borough School District, but it gave him instant basketball cred even though he couldn’t hit a three-pointer to save his life and his father was a crazy man who’d come to the island to go native and kill beluga and bowfin and caribou and live off the fat of the land, none of which he did at all—he just lived off his army pension and drank alcohol in his shack all day even though alcohol was banned in the village. The third thing, the worst thing, was that this A.J. had a crush on Cherry, or he was coming on to her anyway, and Cherry was his girl. Period. And nobody was going to tell him different.
So he came up to them and made as if it was no big thing, them sitting there together like that, and said Hi at just the very instant the lights began to flicker. The other A.J. rolled his eyes and waved a hand at the lights and said, All we need, and Cherry said Hi and scooted over one chair and then, in a lower voice, We saved a place for you.
Pretty crazy, huh? he said. I mean, last year was bad—but you weren’t here, were you? he said, looking the other A.J. dead in the eye. Remember? They thought those HESCOs were going to hold and they wound up all smashed and scattered in like the first hour?
This is worse, Cherry said.
Yeah, Charlotte put in, and was she wearing eye makeup? She never wore eye makeup because her mother wouldn’t let her, and here she was wearing eye makeup on a night they might all have to evacuate the island? They say it’s a supertide, she said.
What’s a hesco? the other A.J. asked, but everybody just ignored him.
They were a stupid idea in the first place, HESCOs, these wire mesh things like supersized crab traps with a white fabric lining and filled with dirt, as if that was going to withstand a sea as angry as this. Now, at a cost, his father said, of over a million dollars, they had a rock revetment built by the Army Corps of Engineers, which the other A.J.’s father used to be a part of.
The lights went out then, a sudden switch from seeing to not seeing, from three dimensions to none, and all they could hear was the wind and the barking of the dogs, all the island’s dogs, out there cold and wet and mean-tempered, going at one another in the black void beneath the building. He didn’t say anything more, though Charlotte let out a little scream and the other A.J. said, Motherfucker, and then repeated himself, All we need, shit! No, he just took Cherry’s hand there in the dark, her hand he knew as well as his own—better—from holding it through all the never-ending days of sun and on into the dark tunnel of the winter that was coming on day by darkening day, and then he pulled her to him and put his lips to hers and felt her tongue in his mouth and just stayed there like that, hard as a rock, till somebody started up the generator and the lights came back on and he saw that Charlotte and the other A.J. were doing it too.
Food was not going to be a problem, even if they had to stay longer than just the one night, and with a storm like this—a blizzacane, Mr. Adams was calling it now, the rain predicted to turn to sleet by midnight and then snow after that—it could be two or three days, maybe even more. By the time people began to realize it was too late to evacuate because the airstrip was underwater and there was no way to get a boat across the mouth of the lagoon with waves cresting at twenty feet, the most amazing smell began seeping through the whole building from the direction of the cafeteria. The lights had come back on and Cherry had just pushed him away—you didn’t make out with people watching, and especially not in school—when the smell hit him and he realized he was ravenous.
Smell that? He looked at Cherry and the other A.J. looked at him. You know what that is?
Stew? Cherry guessed, and she guessed right, because what else would it be?
My uncle Melvin, he said.
What, the other A.J. said, your uncle smells like stew now? Should be sweat. That’s what he smells like to me.
Charlotte said, Hey, that’s my dad you’re talking about, but she said it with a laugh and he couldn’t help wondering if she was going to start going around with the other A.J. now, the black A.J., and how his aunt was going to feel about that. Or Melvin. Though Melvin, as one of the village’s best hunters, was out on the ice or away inland most of the time, getting meat, which he shared in the way of the old times and which was how he got the things he needed in return. Mr. Adams talked about that a lot, how the people were balanced on a razor’s edge between the old ways and the consumer society of all the vast country strung out below them, the place where there were palm trees and Hollywood and New York City and alligators, which they only knew from satellite TV and the books and magazines in the library.
My uncle got a caribou yesterday morning—before the storm hit? There was a rumbling beneath the building, as if the whole thing was shifting under their feet. Nobody said anything for a long moment, the four of them just listening. Then he reached over and gave Charlotte a nudge. Isn’t that right, Charlotte?
Charlotte nodded.
Okay, he said. Okay, right? That means caribou stew, and I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go down there and get me some of it, like right now?
So they pushed themselves up from the library table with its scatter of books and the computer screens that were like poked-out eyes and went out the door, down the hall past the gymnasium and on into the cafeteria, where the bubbled-up smell of caribou stew was a hundred times stronger and made him feel almost dizzy with hunger. Everybody was there already, lined up outside the kitchen with bowls in their hands, and a couple of the women stood at the stove by the big shining pots of stew, ladling it out one person at a time. He picked up a tray and bowl and utensils and tried to ignore the screech of the wind and the way the waves shook the building—and the dogs, the dogs that were howling now, just howling, and he wondered whether they were all going to drown or get washed out to sea because the school barely had room for the people, and the dogs were going to have to fend for themselves.
What about your dogs? he said to Cherry, and they were like anybody else’s dogs, sled dogs, though she only had three and nobody’s dogs pulled sleds anymore, not when they all had snow machines and ATVs. Which were all going to be ruined if the water got any higher.
My mom put them in the house, like, upstairs in the hall?
Cherry’s mother was blond, like her daughter, and she had a face like a three-quarters moon shining out
over the ice, but she was all right really, and she fit in as well as anybody, even people who’d lived here their whole lives (which was about ninety-eight percent of everybody he knew).
The smell of the food was overpowering. He said, I hate this. You know what I’m going to do, like, when this is over?
Hate what?
I don’t know, like, this, this storm. It used to be we would just stay inside till it blew itself out, but now we have to worry if the island’s even going to be here when it’s over. Plus the house stinks. Everybody’s house stinks.
So what’re you going to do about it? You heard Mr. Adams—this whole place’ll be underwater in ten years. Cherry was wearing the white sweater her mother had knitted her, the one that clung to her across the chest and showed the outline of her bra straps in back. He could still taste her on his tongue.
I’m going to go to California, he said, and, I don’t know, go surfing, pick coconuts all day.
Right, she said. And I’m going to Washington. I’m going to be president, didn’t I tell you?
No, he said, really. I am. I am so out of here. This was a theme he’d been developing lately, trying it on for size, though they both knew he wasn’t going anywhere. Her father had met her mother at college and they expected Cherry to go to college too and the whole idea of that—of her going away—just froze his heart like the ninth circle of hell Mr. Nordstrom told them about in English class, no devil breathing fire but a big frozen-over place just like this would be if the skies never grew light again and the ducks never came back and the winter went on forever.
He was going to say more, puff himself up, show her how cool he was, how dedicated to her, how worthy and true and not really desperate, not desperate at all, when Corinne came up to him, took hold of his arm and hissed, Mom needs you. Like, right now?
His father had found a place for them in the gym, but not up against the wall where you could at least have a little privacy—all those spots were gone—but out in the middle of the room, right where the key of one of the baskets was painted on the floor. The Go, Qavviks! banner from last weekend’s three-day tournament with Kotzebue, in which they’d got killed and his legs had felt so heavy he might as well have been playing underwater, was peeling away from the wall behind the backboard, one long fold of brown construction paper drooping to the floor like the tongue in the dead head of a whale. Everybody who wasn’t in the cafeteria was here except for some of the kids who were out there in the halls doing whatever, and whether they’d eaten yet or not he didn’t know, not that it mattered—the stew would last for days, just like the loaves and fishes in the Bible story, plenty for everybody even if the storm went on for a week.
The thing that surprised him was seeing his mother lying there on her back in a pile of blankets and black garbage bags of clothes instead of sitting up cross-legged, which was her usual pose. Was she going to bed already? It was only eight-fifteen. And she was a book addict who’d stay up all night sometimes when she really loved a story, so this wasn’t what he’d expected. That was when he saw the look on her face, all the color gone out of her till she was as white as Cherry’s mother, and that brought him right to attention. What? he said. What is it, Ma—you sick?
She forgot her medicine, Corinne said, and she didn’t look scared the way she had the last time their mother’d had an attack and went all pale like this—just pissed. Or exasperated, that was a better word.
Where’s Dad? He found himself staring into the face of Joe Sage’s mother, who was perched on her bear rug not three feet away, but then Mrs. Sage, who never missed a thing, turned her face away and pretended to watch somebody else.
He says he’s not going back out there. Nobody is.
You mean for her medicine?
He says she’s just going to have to tough it out.
That was when his mother’s eyes opened up like two breathing holes in the ice and she whispered his name and he went down on one knee and bent close to her. You all right, Ma? he asked.
Nothing. All he could hear was the soft murmur of the hundred conversations sifting round him—that and the wind. And the howling of the dogs down there beneath the floor that was just like the wind, only angrier.
Ma?
Her voice was weak and fluttery, caught deep in her throat. I need my medicine. The heart medicine?
What about your insulin? You have your insulin?
She shook her head against the bag she was using as a pillow. The black plastic rippled and glittered dully under the overhead lights. Go get it for me. You know where it is.
Corinne was hanging over his shoulder now with her big face and crooked teeth and her breath that smelled like seal oil. She said, You heard Dad. He says it’s too dangerous.
He wants me to die, I guess. Is that what that means? And you—you want me to die too?
His sister said, No, no, Ma, it’s not that, but he was already on his feet and picking his way across the gymnasium floor, dodging little kids and stepping over people’s things. He didn’t care what his father said or anybody else either—he was going out there and he was going to get in that boat or do anything, swim, whatever, because he wasn’t going to let his mother suffer like that, not for one minute more.
The dogs were right there, right at the door, a whole pack of them fighting for purchase on the two wooden staircases that sloped down into the rising water. He pushed his way through the door and the wind snatched the breath out of his lungs. The rain was a presence, all-enveloping, and it wasn’t rain anymore but ice, windborne pellets rattling against the side of the building like bird shot. Get down! he shouted at the dogs. Get! And they all nosed up to him, whirling and fighting and scratching at the door, and when he kicked them they snarled at him and that just set him off so he kicked harder until he was down the stairs and into the icy water that was up to his knees and rolling in with that crashing surf—the whole island, as far as he could see, just rolling and rolling. That scared him. If it was up to his knees here, what was it like at the house?
The school loomed above him, a big dark box with the waves disappearing under it. He saw right away the boat was no use. It was straining at its tether, pushed deep under the building along with everybody else’s boats, and it was a miracle the rope hadn’t snapped. He tried to pull it to him but it felt like it weighed a hundred tons and he realized the boat was tangled up with the other boats and maybe wrapped around one of the pilings, and even if he could get it out there would have been no way to row into this wind anyhow. What he did, and he was already wet through and shivering, was double-tie the knot, to make sure it was secure, then he hunched into the wind and started wading.
The buildings across the street helped because they broke the wind and the surge of the water and it came to him that the best thing to do was pull himself along the side of the near building and then the next one and the one after that. By the time he got to the Native Store, which was only halfway, the water was up to his chest, running at his face, and basically he was swimming now, but that wasn’t any good because his parka was dragging him down and he took a lungful of water and before long he was just hanging there, clinging to the rail out front and coughing till he thought he was going to black out. And the cold—he was numb with it. Outsiders, like the other A.J., were always saying how his people didn’t even seem to notice the cold because they were born to it, they were used to it, it was in their blood (You got ice in your veins, man, but me, I’m African and I tell you I can’t take this shit), but that was only partly true. You get wet, you die, like Ray Kinik, who’d fallen through rotten ice last spring and never came back again.
So what was this? Hypothermia, that was what it was. And if the water was rolling in here and the wind whipping it up, his own house must have been flooded right up to the top of the door frames and all their clothes and all their things and his mother’s medicine flooded along with it. He was sixteen years old. He had a thing for Cherry—he loved Cherry, loved her—and Cherry was going away
to college and he wasn’t because he couldn’t fool himself and he knew damn well he was going to end up working the Red Dog Mine digging zinc out of the ground like everybody else, and what was the sense of that? The cold gripped him. It lulled him. That was the way you died on the ice when a floe took you out to sea: you went to sleep. He was sixteen years old. He had a thing for Cherry. And he loved his mother and his father and Corinne too, and he wasn’t going to be able to get back to the house and he wasn’t going to die here on the washed-out steps of the Native Store either—he was going to turn around and go back to the school and get warm and drink black coffee and eat caribou stew, bowl after bowl of it, steaming hot, hot as the shower at the Washeteria when you turn it up full and don’t use any cold, so what was he waiting for?
He pulled himself along, everything black-dark and the wind slapping his face the way women slap men in the old movies when the men get out of line and try to kiss them, and why he was thinking of movies when all the blood was going to his core and he couldn’t feel his feet or his hands either he couldn’t say. Maybe he was hallucinating like that time when Lucy Kiliguk had a marijuana blunt and shared it with him. He concentrated on keeping the water out of his mouth—and his legs, his legs that had to keep going, just like in the basketball tournament, only he was drowsy now and he was freezing and he couldn’t have held on to a basketball if it was made out of solid gold. Then he came around the corner of Leonard Killbear’s house and saw the lights of the school and the water let him go. All at once he was wading again, the wind shoving him forward like a pair of hands pressed to his shoulder blades, and when he reached the stairs and the dogs clawed at him and snarled and barked he just hoisted himself up by the railing and jerked open the door and went inside, back inside, and if one of the dogs bit the hell out of his numb right hand—a cross-eyed bitch that belonged to the Adamses—he didn’t hardly even notice.