Ordinary Wolves

by Seth Kantner

  January was old, not as handsome or tanned as TV elders. He wore unlaced shoepacks and an immense unzipped parka over his T-shirt. Maybe he didn’t have a comb either; greasy hair clung in clumps around the back of his head like tundra grass. Fat had bridged a shortcut from his chin to his neck, and the whole mass wobbled, bristling with white stubble.

  He glanced up, startled. “Ho! Goddamn!” He crunched my hand. “Cat my dogs if it ain’t Tom Hawcly’s grandson. Honest-to-gosh dead ringer.” I gasped, peering at people, wondering if they were religous and against swearing, and wondering how did he recognize me, and what was a “dead” ringer? I pulled my shirttail over my sheath knife.

  “Broad shouldered, hell, you must be eighteen.”

  “Twenty-two. How are you, Mr. Thompson?”

  “Never better! Never better!”

  He didn’t look never better; he looked sad and sunken around the eye corners, a smile hoisted in between. “Glad you called. Ho, got your duffle already? That all you brought? Got any money? I happen to be runnin’ low.” The doors opened for his commanding stomach. “You’re quiet. This is Anchorage. What you think?”

  He walked too fast, talked too fast. Somewhere out in the maze of the city was one more person. When I felt caught up to the present, I would hunt Dawna Wolfglove and find out what was left of the past. But I was late again. She’d have boyfriends and music.

  “I expected trash. And apple trees.”

  “Aw, there’s trash. White trash and regular. You limping? Here’s my truck. Brought a sweater if you need. Gimme a coupla’ dollars, wouldya?”

  I pinched off a bill and handed it to him, dubious, and careful of wind. He shoved it in his pants. A sticker on the back window read EAT MOOSE, 5000 WOLVES CAN’T BE WRONG. I smiled, pretended nonchalance, and climbed into my first car ride. The brown seat was slippery and cracked. I rested my feet gently over the area for hammers, newspapers, coffee cups, and extension cords. The engine caught with a flooded roar. We jounced away from a cloud of smoke, almost too thick and blue to disperse. Mountains rose above a line of haze, sharp and friendly on the horizon.

  “Nice mountains.”

  “Agh! Hillside’s full a rich bastards. Varnished snowshoes over their propane fireplaces. They wouldn’t know how to lace the bindings. Kind a people take winter vacations to Florida an’ convince the in-laws they’re pioneers.”

  A bungee cord kept January’s passenger door closed. The pavement blurred right before it went under the truck; at that moment it wasn’t road anymore but a rock waterfall. January gripped the wheel in his giant hand. The back of his thumb was hairy. The smell of his Copenhagen made my tonsils climb. A man cut in front in a black sports car. January smashed the gas pedal. The truck backfired and bucked.

  “Middle a winter, look a’ that joker’s tan. I miss Alaska. This territory used to be a frontier, not a goddamn athletic club.”

  The cars stopped, a river of red taillights. My brain felt slow, layered as a frozen onion. I needed a plan, a goal, probably a career. From what I understood, the first most important thing here was a job, then car, house, spouse, friends. Last came hunting and fishing, right beside opera or Ping-Pong.

  “I need a job.” I pictured the twenty-dollar bill crumpled in January’s pocket, then Melt Wolfglove, Raised you right from my pocket! Melt had gone Out, to boarding school. Chemawa, Oregon, down in the States. Was that where he learned to be unhappy and cruel?

  “Can you do anything?”

  My self-esteem came like static over his words. It seemed as if he wouldn’t believe me if I said “Piss all by myself,” which here in Anchorage was not as simple as it sounded. “I can skin animals real well. And shoot. Build dog sleds? Abe said dog racing is getting popular with city people.”

  “Na! Job work.” The old man bobbed his head. “Carpentry? You ever built houses?” The huge hotels were coming toward us.

  “Peeling logs and stuffing mouse holes doesn’t count?”

  “Nawp.”

  “People ask me to fix their snowgos.”

  “Fix my truck maybe? How’d you learn to wrench? I know a fella fixes cars. John Gordiano. Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t let Gordiano ream my dog’s hemorrhoids.” He fished something out of his lip and peered at it. “Snoose’s gonna kill me. My wife died a cancer. I take pumpkin seeds, PABA vitamin. Prostate gland. Gotta get the PSA checked, you know?”

  “Huh-uh. What? No, I-I haven’t.”

  He spat specks off his lips. “Twenty-two! You look like him. When I met Tom in Barrow I was a youngster. Abe, younger’n you. Fresh from Chicago an’ already lost that finger in the winches. Tom wasn’t motherly. When he get liquored up: ‘Boy don’t need all his fingers if he stays on his toes.’

  “That was the first time I saw Abe paint.” January’s loud voice disappeared and his grammer improved. “He didn’t talk for days. It was three feet high on a piece of tent canvas. I still get shivers. Just this figure standing on the ice, facing the other way, hands hanging out of his parka. Shoulders crooked with the weight of the world. All grays and whites and a finger behind him red on the ice. Your eye couldn’t do anything but go right to that finger and hurt. Wheww!” January shook himself. His loud voice came back. “Don’t he want you going to college?”

  My mind was on the fast ice, north off Barrow. Why couldn’t I have lost a finger? Why couldn’t I paint? A piece torn away, a scar to forecast all this imperfection, and this scream inside, out and dried on canvas. “Abe-I-Abe doesn’t care what I do. Long as I’m happy.”

  January arched an eyebrow. “Well, now ain’t that whitey might a him.”

  “Did my sister Iris come see you?”

  “Sure she did. Nice girl. Real pleasant girl. Yep, she did.” He hooked his thumb. “Lake Hood. Busiest float and ski airstrip in the world.” Between hotels stretched a snow-covered lake with trees around the edges and steep-roofed houses across on the hills. “Recognize”—I blinked, startled; did he know I’d walked this road?—“my old Cub on the shore? That’s the plane your dad give me, after Tom cracked up his other’n. Before Abe went to college in Chicago. Oh, I sent him bucks sometimes, when a bounty check come or I sold wolf pelts. You fly?”

  Abe gave away an airplane? Dead wolves helped pay for his education?

  “. . . teach you to fly, the way your granddad taught me. That would make me proud. One small hitch, though,” he chuckled wryly, “name a the I-R-S. They got me on back taxes.”

  If this fat old man knew . . . how my memory had engulfed that blue and gold ski plane like a tree growing around rope.

  January braked in the middle of the road. His turn signal clicked. Cars boiled around us, impatient white people, honking their horns, none quite colliding. I grinned slowly—honkies! Damn, was I learning everything now!

  “Need to buy gas here.” January pulled in, stepped out, and grabbed a nozzle. There were six pumps, men and women driving in, driving away, no one overflowing. Accurate city people. Halfway down the pumps tiny numbers read 863,231, 235,982, and 799,514. I leaned against a pump. Maybe I could be a pilot. The tiny digits increased with every gallon pumped. Millions of gallons? I had walked this city; all of Anchorage didn’t buy gas here at this one spot. It was incomprehensible, and I tagged along behind January into the glass store. Aisles were lined with Ritz crackers, Butterfingers, Tide, magazines—everything a person might need, and more I may never learn how to need. A blue and yellow can of WD-40 leaked on a shelf. I inhaled the sweet odor. A taaqsipak woman behind the register watched. Quickly, I replaced the can. Behind the woman a back room was stacked with shelves of bottles: whiskey, wine, beer.

  I didn’t feel allowed to look near a woman’s chest, especially a taaqsipak, but a name tag was pinned there. Lacey. The name had a sweet sound. Her eyes were alluring and dark, her fingers graceful over the keys. Would she like me if I were an Alaska Airlines pilot? Probably not. I didn’t know how to play basketball.

  Real unpowdered milk was shelved behind more
glass. I’d tasted it once when the firefighters brought a gallon home to Takunak. “Plenty a time later to pick that up,” January said. “My place is a stone’s throw up the street.” He jingled coins in his pants and strode out. I set the milk on the counter and handed the beautiful woman my leathery secondhand check for five dollars and seventy-four cents that had passed around Takunak.

  “What’s this?” Her eyes were black with tiny brown specks in the white.

  “It—it’s . . . money.”

  She frowned and flipped it over to see the signature. Nelta Skuq. A man as huge as January stood on my heels. He looked naluaġmiu, but his cap read Cleveland Indians.

  “Are white people allowed credit here?”

  “You in the wrong store,” she snapped. “We take cash. C-A-S-H.” The man roared with laughter. I turned my red face. The carton thudded like a frozen duck on the floor. A thin squirt of milk beaded across my shoes. I dropped the check and raced out the glass door.

  January fought the stick into reverse. He looked over his shoulder and backed up. “Decided to wait?”

  I hunched low. Beside the truck, brown cropped grass showed around a heap of melting snow. I touched beads of milk on my shoe and touched my tongue. Why had Jerry remembered lawns from Chicago? He could have saved sweeter memories: kisses and songs, glass glasses of Carnation real milk from our mother.

  January swung left and quickly right. The woman who had hollered at me for not letting her dog bite me—her house was a quarter mile away, Lacey’s store almost across the street. For a moment it all pressed in like Takunak, but this was city, with thousands of other houses and stores. A thousand cities in America. A million friends waiting to be mine. This must be what they called freedom.

  We slid to a stop in front of a row of movable homes, too close together for people to live in all of them. Some had to be caches. The brand name on January’s trailer read FRONTIER. He didn’t seem embarrassed by it. Across the road stood a whole village of peak-roofed houses. Two Can’t-Grows barked behind glass in the next trailer, a dented gray aluminum home like an airplane with the wings unbolted. A pretty teenage girl peered out. Her hair was long and blond. Something made me stare back the way Lumpy would. Her gaze trickled down my body. The rug-faced dogs knocked over cups and dishes on a table. I stepped out, exhausted and excited, my feet tingling and numb.

  “Handy, you live in one of these movable houses. You can migrate any time. Have you been in this spot long?”

  “Sixteen years.” January splashed on the melting ice, slippery and warbled as frozen fish eggs. He arranged his crotch, cleared his throat, blew snot out one nostril. Behind the window came the sunshine of a smile from the girl.

  “Home Sour Home,” January said. “Com’on in.”

  FOURTEEN

  A WIND BLOWS SNOW SOUTH, a wall of stinging grains of ice riding into the sky the length of the mountain range. Wolves hide out in the willows of a creek. They wade the deep snow, sniff rabbit trails, chew feathery meatless ptarmigan wing tips abandoned by foxes. They haven’t killed a moose in weeks. The big male is dead, shot, the naked carcass windswept and partially drifted on the ice at the mouth of the creek. Occasionally, at night, wolves visit the site. Ravens have picked the eyes and back fat and streaked the area with poop. Two steel traps are set there, too deep, chained under the snow.

  The remains of a second pack join the first. The leaders also have been shot. Social order, and the feud for territory, for now, are dead. Wind gusts overhead. Snow sifts down. Yips and howls sing here and there in the trees. Hormones commandeer blood and all the mature wolves mate.

  FIFTEEN

  UBALDO FLUCK WHACKED me on the back. The Toyota carb clattered on the cement. “Oops. You getting solvent DTs?” He laid the connecting rod he’d been polishing on a rag. “I’ll go to the corner, get us a couple Cokes.”

  He ambled out the garage door into drizzle, his shaggy head and beard like a brown bear’s, swabbing a swath of drops out of a wet afternoon. The snow outside was gray-brown. I breathed damp air and glanced at the sky. It was late March. Fat geese would be up north in a month. Their iŋaluat would be edible, empty from not eating during the long flight. Abe would be wearing his mamillaks soon, oiling them with rancid seal oil.

  I sloshed the carb again, sprayed it with compressed air, and set it on the bench, wondering how much solvent soaking into your arms did it take to dissolve your brain? When Iris and I had skinned foxes our arm-pits smelled of fox the next day; when we skinned wolverine, we smelled of wolverine. Brass jet needles winked in the light. Linkages and vacuum lines contorted. It seemed impossible to remember where they all went. Every day I spent hours elbow deep in solvent, making junkyard parts shiny new for John Gordiano. He conveyed the impression that they were new. My arms tingled. My feet still tingled—trench foot—nerves rebuilding themselves after being chilled too long on the street. On the radio a man named Bruce sang. I floated on his voice, dancing in the dark, not able to start a fire without a spark. Somewhere in the city people did dance. At home Abe had faintly tapped his foot when the schoolteacher Ron Newton played his Yamaha guitar and sang “Country Roads.” I never tapped anything; anybody would see I was doing it wrong. My bones were hard; hopefully it wasn’t too late.

  “Igloo Gigoloo! Here.” Ubaldo kicked his boots. He was large and broad with invisible eyelashes and blond hairs curling out of his collar. Every noon he roared up on a Harley with cut-away pipes, straight from psychology classes at the university. He was twenty-eight, finishing a master’s degree. Mr. Standle would say he was “making it.” And me? If earning potential and popularity were it, I was neck and neck with good trapping bait.

  We snapped our Cokes open.

  “I stayed out late last night, drinking.” I’d come down with an infection of lying—nobody believed my stories anyway. Apparently a hangover was a generic macho excuse, something guys bragged about that didn’t involve a ball, or their balls.

  A powder-blue Dodge chugged up the street.

  “Uh-oh. That was one of mine.” Oil rainbowed its wet windshield. I rifled through my brand-new auto jargon. Slant six, three on the tree, fit four Mexicans under the hood—whatever that meant.

  The driver slammed the truck door. He was thin, orange-haired. Freckles overwhelmed his skin like invading dots. The engine drooled oil.

  “You the one worked on my Dodge?”

  I nodded, and that quick was back in the village, waist-deep in scorn, ready to ask if I should go die somewhere. Where would be best?

  John strode out from the clutter of his A-frame house, office, parking lot for lost junk. He flicked a cigarette stub into a grime bucket. He never seemed to smoke, yet always had a butt handy for the casual gesture.

  “What’s up?” John was short, his arms thickly muscled. His jeans bound and rubbed inside his thighs. Holes wore through and his skin peeked out gray. The gray of a lifelong mechanic. His dad had been a mechanic. Probably his mom, too. If a customer weren’t here, John would have spoken Mechanic English: “Fuck! What the fuck is fuckin’ up?” I still couldn’t say the celebrated mechanical description.

  The man lifted the hood. The heavy springs squeaked. Oil sheened. His lips disappeared. “Just fix it right.”

  John inspected him with concerned nods, then automatically shifted the blame. His eyes were slaty. “You lapped this gentleman’s valves? Do it all again. Now, please.”

  It started to rain harder, sogging the remaining snow. I stared at my solvent-whitened hands that might have been my mother’s. There was nothing in them of Abe, standing here in a city, cowering over a job like a dog that wouldn’t pull.

  The man apologized. “Sorry, John, hey. Everything else, and then this crap coming down . . .”

  I saw hard medicinal porcupine shits raining around him, plinking on his massively orange hair like pellets rapping down after shooting a shotgun straight up. Everyone had spoken, except Cutuk, camping behind his face. It was John who had insisted on reusing th
e old valve-cover gasket that had blown, instead of having the NAPA driver deliver a new one. I slipped the Coke can on a shelf, instinctively saving it for shims, took one more glance at the dismantled Toyota carb, and hurried through the rear door of the garage, out to an unloved piece of the planet, to dig for a gasket in the junkyard gravy of grease slush and rust and battery acid leaking from the carcasses and gut piles of dead automobiles.

  John’s dog, Rifle, was tied to a chassis. The red hood and front fenders had been leaned back on the chassis to form a lean-to doghouse. The dog was brown and black and grossly fat—a thyroid problem—its head like a bump on a waddling keg, too fat to shake. It made me sick. It wanted to be petted, and I didn’t pet it.

  UBALDO HELPED TORQUE the heads and Form-A-Gasket the “new” cover gasket. “We don’t have any hours to write down today.” Anything over book time on a rebuild John considered simply our duty, not time he was going to pay anyone for. That included making parts new. “You should go home. Shower—twice. Find a girl to spend your money.”

  “How do you ask girls out?”

  “Just talk to them.” Ubaldo shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter what you say. It’s more how you say it.”

  I pictured the mall.

  He scratched his hairy chest. “Be yourself.”

  “At the mall? That only works for me when there’s no people around.”

  “I don’t know about the mall.”

  I leaned farther down to scrub oil off the firewall of the Dodge. “You’re one of the nicest guys I know, Ubaldo. Why don’t you come—”

  “‘Why don’t you come?’ What are you two, gay?”

  I extracted myself from the engine. Joe, one of the afternoon mechanics, smirked into the lifted hood. His black hair glistened. His arms were crossed to exhibit hard, bulging biceps. He had graduated from high school in December and now was often fresh from the gym. Some days a woman in a tight pink jump-around outfit dropped him off, a woman so improbably gorgeous it made me feel like I had been transported into one of the science fictions that used to arrive in the library boxes: Cutuk the caveman, visiting a planet of goddesses who smelled like flowers. Joe had advised pretty much that. “Nice is boring, man.”