by Seth Kantner
Charley Casket ambled around the corner of the old Wolfglove shack and adjusted his course our way. He shook hands. His hand was limp—the way Eskimos shook hands—but clammy, too. It dipped in his jacket pocket, came out palm open. “This was my taata’s.” In his hand lay a coarse caribou antler lure, with heavy copper wire hooked through it. The copper gleamed, uncorroded, fresh out of its plastic insulation. “Hunnert bucks. That archaeologist fella say he gonna give me five or eight thousand.”
Iris squeezed my neck. She smiled. “This place was getting hard to believe.”
“You bring weed, Iris? How ’bout le’s trade for pin joint?”
“Com’on, Charley.” Lumpy spat between his teeth, barely moving a muscle. “Get the fuck outta Cutuk an’em’s way.”
Inside, Janet got out black muktuk she’d been saving in her freezer. “Long time you have no this kinda, huh?” She smiled at Iris. “We’re so broud of you,” Janet said, confusing her ps and bs.
“I’ve been eating store-bought food for so long I’m surprised I don’t look like a loaf of Wonder bread.”
“Maybe you’re almost Wonder Woman.”
Everyone laughed.
“Arii, you always let us laugh. You’ll live with us if you start peing schoolteacher. That way we’ll see Cutuk,” Janet cuffed me fondly on the head, “’cause he sometimes always forget us for long time.”
Melt walked in. The room went silent. He nodded briefly at Iris. “You buy me salt?” Janet asked. Melt wrinkled his nose, no in Iñupiaq. Lumpy stood, dark and wary, staring out at the sunny day. He shrugged into his jacket, lackadaisically hefted his shotgun, and went out.
“I’m going Uktu!” Melt shouted.
“How come?”
“They’re going over!” Melt put his arms in the sleeves of the fancy sealskin jacket Janet had sewn for him. He paused, grabbed two beaver hats she had just finished, and hurried out the door.
“We got no salt for the muktuk.” Janet giggled. “Anyways, let’um.”
“Where is Stevie?” Iris asked.
“She go Barrow. He, I mean!” Janet laughed at herself. “He watch them hunt whale. That’s my son. I love him pest than anyone. He’s a good boy. I wish he start hunting, alright. I don’t know how come he can’t.”
We sat eating, talking. The deep snow. The warm winter. Did Iris ever see Dawna in Anchorage? “I worry for her.” Janet sighed. “Maybe she’s not going to her schooling anymore. I think Lumpy always let her send marijuanas. He sell ’em to help pay her apartment. She got naluaġmiu poyfriend, guuq.”
I stared out the window, willing the conversation past Dawna. I remembered one trip home from Takunak, in a snowstorm. Abe had snowshoed out front, trying to lead the dogs into the wind. His eyelashes kept freezing shut. The side of his face was frozen. “Better find willows.” The unfrozen half of his grin curved. We camped under our tarp in a drift. We lay in our parkas and overpants inside our sleeping bags. The dogs tried to gather around. We fed them dried siulik and ate some ourselves. It was good, except where the fat bellies had gone orange and rancid. Iris had tickled our ears in the dark. “You guys want to remember the Monopoly? Cutuk, start at GO.” When we got home we dug out the door and fed the dogs, hauled wood and hung our icy clothes over the stove. Jerry slid the wooden Blazo box that we called the all-of-ours box out from under his bed. He cut property cards out of school construction paper. I colored in green Pennsylvania Avenue, blue Park Place. Iris rolled back the caribou skins on our bed, chased off a shrew that gnawed underneath. Iris glued together six sheets of paper. Iris remembered hotel rents, Community Chest cards. For hotels we cut beaver teeth into rectangles. Beaver teeth were orange and white and four inches long where they had curved way down inside the beavers’ jawbones, always growing new, for spare. A beaver couldn’t afford to go without spare teeth. It made sense to saw them into hotels.
I remembered Iris and me when Iris was thirteen, stacking frozen whitefish on the flat dogfood cache. The river ice had recently frozen. Yellow grass-seed stalks still waved above the first new snow. A drone floated out of the distance. Out of habit we listened, in case January Thompson might finally bring our mother home, or even just a snowgo might appear, anyone with a face, to talk to, and to speak. Suddenly the sound swelled and we clambered up on the piles of fish to see farther. The plane came in low, following the river. It swept over, the roar crackling against the frozen willows like a huge tent of sound. We saw the tiny figure of the pilot examine us. The white top of the wing showed as he banked. “It’s coming! It’s going to land!” Iris shouted, shaking my shoulders. When we glanced again, the plane was turning east. It flew away to a dot, disappearing.
I leaned on Janet’s window sill, looking out at the soft river. Who’d been on that plane? Iris raised her eyes to mine. They focused on some great distance. When they came back for an instant they were bent with concern.
“I thought maybe we’d go up tonight if there’s a crust. If it doesn’t freeze”—I shrugged and grinned, imitating Treason—“we won’t make it.”
“‘Thought maybe?’ You sound like Abe!”
“That’s Abe Junior,” Janet said. “But blenty different, too. He’s still gonna change if he get older.”
“Anytime you want to head home will be fine,” Iris said. “I learned a lot at college, and made friends, but you don’t know how I missed running the dogs. And warming up by the fire. And making ice cream. Oh, I can’t wait to see Abe!”
“Him too.”
IN THE EARLY MORNING, by the time we neared home, water had spread across the ice from the mouth of Jesus Creek. I left the engine idling and clambered up the fifteen-foot-high snowdrift along the north bank. The snow in the middle of the river had sluffed green with overflow—water soaking under the snow. But it appeared that the ice on the river hadn’t yet buckled or shifted. It was still a quarter-mile-wide white winter highway.
I gestured. “We’ll follow the drift here and check the creek.” Two ravens flew overhead, traveling east, their wings panting. They rolled and dipped. Iris clambered up the drift. “Last spring I jumped my snowgo across the mouth when it was wide-open water. Just go fast!”
“You wrote to me about that,” she said skeptically. “Gas is four dollars a gallon now, isn’t it? I’m surprised you’re not using the dogs. Don’t forget I’m heavier now than I used to be, ’kay?” Her face dimpled. “Education weighs a lot.”
“You were never fat.” I shoved her toward the cornice of the snowdrift. She spun and grabbed my leg. She was still strong and fast. We rolled, wrestling on the edge. The snow was loud, crisp and icy.
“Watch out, boy!” Iris panted. “I’ll let you cry yet.”
We slid over the edge. She twisted on top, her hair in my eyes, laughing and riding me headfirst down the drift to the river ice. I scooped snow out of my neck and threw it at her. “Ride in the sled, ’kay?”
She raised her eyebrows, yes. “Don’t want all your eggs out on one limb?”
“Are you making fun of me? That’s two different expressions, isn’t it?”
She shrugged. “Why not use two?” She sat in the sled. “I think I picked it up from January Thompson, the way he talks.”
I glanced up quickly, curious. The machine was already idling. I drove until we found a slanted drift and shot up the bank. We continued along the top of the hard-packed snowdrift, weaving around willows that reached all the way up through the snow. Smoke rose above the buried igloo. Abe was making breakfast. Jesus Creek gushed with brown tundra water, its banks sheer and tight with willows. A cow and calf moose stood shoulders showing over the willows. The ice on the main river stretched solid, with a narrow black trench where the creek current boiled under. I considered going back downriver, out on the ice and around. But suddenly I wanted to show Iris how competent I’d grown at reading the subtle differences in ice conditions. I wanted to show her that staying here at home had educated me, too—to the nuances of the land.
“Cover
your face and hold on!”
I squeezed the throttle. The snowgo shot down the drift onto the river ice, skimming on the crust. The skis skipped on the open water. The black channel was wider than it looked, but we would make it. The right ski wavered and slammed into the edge of the ice. A pan cracked and broke free. The snowgo and sled jackknifed. I flew and skidded headlong across the needled surface. Iris screamed.
The ice stunned me, but Iris’s call lifted me to my feet. The sled jutted half out of the water, still hitched to the overturned snowgo. Iris was not in sight. My leg collapsed. As I fell forward I saw blood on the ice, and wished desperately that it all belonged to me. I heard dogs howling. I saw her. Struggling in the black current. Iris’s eyes found mine. For an instant we looked at each other across a bridge full of anguish, and then she slipped under. “IRIIIIIS!” My mind crashed into steel. Nothing around me could gather its breath enough to be real. I crawled to the edge of the ice. Yanked out my sheath knife. Lurched into the water. The cold vised my chest, knocking the air out. I ignored it. I didn’t deserve air; I didn’t deserve to breathe. I stabbed into the ice for a handle and peered under. Blackness. Current tugged my body. My head turned gray inside from the pain of the cold and the enormity of what I’d done. I inched along, stabbing new holds, groping under the ice.
The sky spun, and out in the swirl Abe ran. He was black on the glaring white ice. His legs lifted so high. He moved so slow. My thoughts mixed like slush with words coming out of my mouth. Maybe I was screaming aloud or only whispering in my mind. Dad. I love you. I’m sorry for being so wrong. This water will take me away. My hand was an iron clamp on the knife. Under the ice my other hand was numb, refusing to obey, miles away, touching—clenching. Cloth! Dimly I could see her face now. My body became a single clenched muscle, between the knife in the ice and my sister in the water; for the first time in my life I was exactly strong enough.
PART II
CITY
TWELVE
ON THE EDGE OF CROTCH SPIT, wind shook the Alaska Airlines metal building. It moaned in the eaves. In morning darkness jet engines whined against an east storm lancing snow down the airstrip. I whipped snow off my duffle bag with a glove. A dog without a collar appeared. I knelt to pet it. It grabbed my other glove, nosed under a metal fence, and disappeared.
“Shuck,” I muttered at the bad omen.
In the terminal, locals stared as if I were a tourist or a serial rapist—the first, of course, being the less desirable. The fluorescent lights overhead were painful; my skin felt as thin as a shrew-tunneled quaq fish. I’d woken up high on Lysol on my twenty-second birthday, Stevie and Treason gone, passed out with girls who didn’t make eye contact with nervous white boys. I stumbled along the drifting streets from Stevie’s aunt’s, Elsie Feathers’s, house to the terminal. Houses were half buried. Snowgo headlights cut cones out of the flying grains of snow.
All week there had been twilight, darkness, and wind. And the blow-torch roar of the daily Alaska Airlines jets. Outside Crotch Spit were no trees, no animal tracks, only the snowmobile-hunted tundra and sea ice. The only trees were flung-out Christmas trees, some of them plugged into the snowdrifts of people’s yards to look alive. Humans lived here off the slough of American government millions.
“Here you go, Mr. Hawcly.” A ticket agent with black hair bleached orange on top, like a beaver’s after a sunny summer, handed me my ticket. She’d torn it by accident. Superstition sprouted roots—quickly I jammed my hands into my pockets. Enuk’s ivory bear was sandwiched there between dollar bills. Out through the giant glass windows I glimpsed the ice-crusted dog burying my glove.
“Mr. Hawcly? Mr. Hawcly? We’re boarding. Through the gate, sir.”
Mister made me sound like a schoolteacher. I wondered how Iris was doing, back teaching school after New Year’s, in a village distressed that she was still single. The silhouetted doorway of the metal detector seemed to be the magic door in the Chronicles of Narnia, books a yellow-haired boy had once read at the kerosene lamp.
I hurried into the bathroom. Water surged up and down in the toilet the way it sometimes did at home in the water hole, when a wind was blowing. On the wall a poster listed Iñupiaq values: Sharing, Respect for Elders, Hunter Success. Someone had penciled in Love for My Arctic Cat. There was no sign of Fairness or Unwasting. I threw up in the sink. Lysol burned in the back of my throat. Behind me an Eskimo man entered and held up a yellow and green Remington Shotshell box hung with ivory earrings. Some of the ivory had spent time in the coffeepot—the way Melt transmuted new walrus ivory into fossilized mammoth ivory. In the big mirror I wrinkled my nose, no in Iñupiaq. He didn’t understand; he saw too much whiteness to register. My eyes were wide, round, and dark blue. It left me ashamed and weak—how naluaġmiu I looked. I rinsed my mouth and face in chlorine-flavored water, flattened my nose, moved away from the sickening mirror.
Outside, I walked out toward the jet, pledging to be a different person, somehow, in the place it landed. On the building gutter a raven hunched eating something. A frozen banana! The bird was heavy-beaked, feathers puffed with cold. Its black eyes watched like an elder’s, flat and declaring, You don’t know what you’re doing. Ravens didn’t fly south or migrate, did they? They knew the country, were wise, could live half a century. Ravens were locals, indigenous, and moving to town, the same as people, addicted to later stages of the same junk, but without free health care. Maybe this one had watched beside my fire on that lake with the wolves, twelve years ago. Maybe later the same bird had circled overhead, seen exactly how adroit I was at killing a wolf. Maybe last spring it had seen what I nearly did to Iris. I respected ravens more than any other bird, more than most people. What was happening? Was I giving up on being Eskimo?
Beyond the towering wing tip the airstrip glinted with supernatural blue lights, so blue that an ancient tribe would worship that blue for a thousand years. Now passengers huddled in their hoods, shouting complaints across the gusts. The gliding snakes of snow were little storm children, childhood companions of mine, and I stepped across them, up metal steps toward the smell of old coffeepots and jet fumes, and an enchanting catalog woman smiling there in the butthole of the jet.
THE AIRPLANE DOOR WOULDN´T LATCH. A muffled banging came through. I pictured Stevie out in the wind pounding good-bye with an unskinned caribou leg. The man beside me said, “This is the kind of thing that always happens to me. You would not believe the experiences I’ve had.”
My seat was between a yellow-haired man with a computer and a white-woman dog musher. She didn’t remove her Alaskan credentials—a huge parka with a polar bear ruff and clinging dog hair. The natives in the plane ignored me. I wished I could say something in Iñupiaq but knew only simple words and phrases. Perfumes combated sharp soaps and the scent of dog shit. I heard myself hyperventilating. My arms were shaking. The trail that carried me here came in flashes, glimpses of sunny days after May; mean times for me though unremarkable against the everyday explosions of rage in Takunak, a native society under technology’s bombing. Snowgoing stoned . . . frostbite way out there on my skin where it couldn’t hurt me. The aftertaste of aftershave . . . waking up itching in the grass with no shirt and nineteen hundred mosquito bites. Catching siulik all night in the sun along the river with Woodrow Washington Sr., him wordless and precise, showing how to clean and boil their thick intestines on a fire to make siulik gut salad.
After Freezeup Janet Wolfglove had fed me boiled tiktaaliq livers, complaining when I wouldn’t eat. Her kitchen smelled of fresh rolls. Out the window on the river ice a black log had frozen in. A good cache pole. As if anyone built caches anymore. And later, packing. What to bring? My two knives, string, matches, an Army sleeping bag, a strip of sleeping skin; leaving everything else I’d ever known there on the north shore of the Kuguruk River.
The jet moved. The man with the computer rocked his knees up and down. “Alaska Airlines is another company just trying to salvage the bottom line.” I had no idea
whether he was addressing me, his computer, or the seat back, or what a bottom line was. I pictured a heavy rope used for towing jets when they ran out of gas or wouldn’t start.
The tube hurled forward, inhaling black sky. My throat swallowed itself. I clung to a knit seat cushion—apparently a life preserver—asking for insurance from a God whose Sunday premiums I’d never paid. We climbed sickeningly, and down into the blue-black twilight the wind and frozen sea fell. Behind my forehead something like a spoon pressed down. Stars shone beside us. Far off to the south the sky thinned to a hazy curtain of blue.
“Are you okay?” The flight attendent offered a toy pillow.
“Fine,” I croaked, the village in my voice. “Fellas let me drink Lysol for my birthday. I’m hungover. I sure tupak to fly.” Village English was a different way of holding the back of your tongue, crushing the words—swallowing the big ones, of course.
Her smile shifted and lodged like a forked pike bone had caught in her throat. In the next row an old woman was telling a light-brown white man about being spanked by missionaries, in boarding school. For speaking Iñupiaq. “Tat what I always see when I see white peoples,” she shouted. I lowered my eyes, remembering running my dog team behind the Takunak church, sixteen and scared. Tommy Feathers roared around a curve on his snowgo. He swerved and plowed into willows. He kicked my dogs. “Goddamn you white shit! How come you be on ta way?” His heavy lips twisted. Booze breath stunk. “Get my gun and shoot you yet!” My rifle hung in its caribou-skin scabbard, ready as always. “Plato, come-gee!” Plato poked her nose under lines, trying to bring the tangled team around. Tommy had stopped at our igloo for all the years I could remember. He spent the night last December rubbing his huge thawing ears, laughing and visiting while Abe soaked moose babiche to repair his sled. Making babiche for snowshoes and sleds involved shooting and skinning a moose—or caribou—soaking the hide, and scraping it daily with a shovel until the hair slipped, then half-drying the hide and slicing it into perfect strips to dry and store. Tommy’s sled was lashed with nylon twine.