Ordinary Wolves

by Seth Kantner

  Did Abe have it all backwards? Again?

  Now I wiped grease off my fingers and tried to grin easy like Joe. “I’m still trying to figure out how to be gay in this city.”

  Joe buckled over. “But,” he gasped, “you had it figured out before, right? All those great times in the wilderness, just you and your dad?”

  I stared at them. The truck pitched as Ubaldo stepped off. “Joe, give it a rest.” He sounded tired. “Gay is slang for homosexual. Someone attracted to the same sex? You know?”

  “Where’s that old guy?” Joe glance around. “Lance. He’s definitely a little faggot. Comes up to about here. He can show you all about it.”

  My fingers wrapped around the torque wrench. For some reason I’d expected white people to be fair and logical; in Takunak the schoolteachers and construction workers and other passers-through had exuded confidence, the impression that their culture was founded on purpose, with science and God both behind it. Takunak—somehow it made sense that Takunak didn’t make sense. The steel wrench was smooth and heavy. Good for cracking patiq bones. I wanted to crack some of Joe’s.

  “The day before yesterday you said village people were all gay.”

  “The Village People, ya freakin’ moron!”

  The garage smelled of cold used oil. I felt myself retreating behind my face, warming up on hate moving like synthetic lubricant through my veins. White-people chatter—without cognizance of football players, famous actors, or processed food, most of the conversations might as well be dogs barking. Except dogs barking meant something: bear on the tundra, caribou crossing, dog team coming . . .

  “. . . this beast on the blacktop,” Ubaldo was saying.

  I suspected what his words meant, though he didn’t suspect the most important thing about cars that I didn’t know. Even my garage-sale bicycle I still pushed out of sight around the corner of the garage before clambering on.

  Lance Shaw strolled in. His eyes were water blue under a ball cap and black hair. He carried a Snap-on ratchet set. He waved big, not caring who waved back, smiling crooked white teeth. We all knew he was the only real mechanic among us.

  “’Lo, Fluck.” He nodded.

  John leaned in the garage doorway. “Boys,” he clapped his hands. “Fuckin’ com’on! Fuck! We need to fuckin’ hustle.”

  Joe bent close, charismatic again. “So what’s it like to butt screw a penguin, huh?”

  “What? There are no penguins in the Arctic. Don’t you respect animals enough to even know which hemisphere they live in?”

  “Shee . . . I seen ’em on TV. I bet you’ve corn-holed hundreds. Or did you have a sister that was easier? You eat pussy, don’t you?”

  Bone tunnels in my temples throbbed. I pressed the sides of my head, pictured Abe rubbing his forehead. Lance glanced up, straight into my eyes. He raised one eyebrow. His socket set dropped. Sockets bounced, tapping and rolling away. He dropped to his knees, scrambling after them. John shook his head, flicked a cigarette butt, strode toward his office.

  “Why do you people ask that?” I muttered at Joe. “I finally tried it, ’kay? The meat’s mushy, like ground squirrel. We like lynx. My dad always tried to get a lynx for Thanksgiving.”

  “Pussy for Thanksgiving! Ha, ha! ‘Come here sister, it’s Thanksgiving. Dad and me gotta have pussy for Thanksgiving.’”

  A translation dawned in my brain and next came nausea. Enuk Wolfglove, Iris, Janet, Jerry, Abe—they welled up behind my eyes. They had been good people, good gatherers and hunters who cut their own meat, saved the sinew for sewing, built fires, froze their faces and scarred their hands simply for food. For all it mattered in Anchorage our lives might as well have been lived on the Discovery Channel. I slammed Joe against a wall. A girl-calendar fell. A box of oil smacked to the cement. The police would come, with their sirens and great black flashlights. Take me to jail. Maybe I could escape and leapfrog to America’s Most Wanted. Joe stumbled and got his heels under him. Frustration lifted the torque wrench, to smash through meaningless slang, style, and combed hair, to something as reasonable as bone.

  “Please.” Lance peered around, making sure John was out of earshot. “I don’t like getting splattered with brains.” His knees scuffed cement. His words were like sockets bouncing at a great distance. “Not that there would be an excessive amount—” The air compressor surged on. Air stacked into the tank. The wrench slowly lowered to my side. The machine wheezed and clicked off.

  “Tell Joe don’t talk things I don’t understand about my sister.”

  “Me?” Lance peered behind cardboard boxes of two-stroke crankcase halves protruding long studs. He rocked back on his heels. “Jock junior lifts weights, and he’s a mechanic! You’re some igloo-dude meat-eating bookworm. That’s complex interpersonal communication! Ask Fluck, man. Why do you think he’s doing his shrink residency in this garage?”

  “Jesus!” Joe breathed. “Learn to take a joke.”

  “You learn to be careful. Where I’m from, when somebody gets mad, sometimes people don’t ever look the same again.”

  Joe licked his teeth. He put his hand on the door frame and swung out. Ubaldo scooped Simple Green on his palm, busily. Lance mouthed an O that collapsed into a grin. His finger and thumb moved to his lips; he inhaled, pantomiming smoking a joint. He raised his eyebrows, nodding encouragingly, Wanna? I shook my head, put my tools in the trays, and moved to the Toyota carburetor. My keep-your-mouth-shut-and-be-nice training was losing compression. I didn’t want to inhale marijuana. I didn’t want anything in the way of stray truth. I wondered if this was how Abe felt when he did the painting of his finger on the ice. Tired. Like you’d gotten your dog team on a trail you knew to avoid, a far trail you never thought you’d come to, and now it was Snowmelt, too many creeks open to turn back. It made me smile, in a detached way, that I got mad, and Abe made art.

  Melt Wolfglove got mad, Enuk hunted.

  Suddenly my throat tightened, and I hummed to cover distress. Melt flashed in my head, the memory of the memory of him holding a baby porcupine. A younger man, and smiling. Memories shuffled. Woodrow’s words sprang out, Melt never always can’t find golt, only thing jade rock too pig can’t lift.

  JANUARY CRANKED THE FOOTREST out on his sunburned La-Z-Boy. The chair squeaked and groaned. He scratched his huge hairy belly under his book. The book told the true story of coliseums, roads, and cities on Mars kept secret by the government, guuq. Important pages he’d tagged with pink squares of paper. January tilted a magnifying glass on a photo, trying to spot undiscovered structures that the author—and NASA, apparently—had missed among the grainy dots. He sighed. His glance strayed to the ex-Six Million Dollar Man on his new TV show. “Hey, hey. Looka’ Heather!”

  I rinsed my hands and turned the faucet knobs closed. The smell of chlorine twinged in my nose. I started to use a paper towel but quickly dried on my jeans. Lee Majors, The Fall Guy; Cutuk Hawcly, The Fall Boy? I tried to picture January and Abe in the same igloo. Hunched on skins. Talking about Martian environmental problems? Giving away airplanes?

  Lights swept the window above the kitchen sink as cars turned out of Party Time Liquor across the street. In Takunak the PTL would beat any PTA for attendance; Stevie would trade his numchuks, Taata Nippy his snowgo, Nelta her body. And me, what, more wolves? I poured a glass of unpowdered milk. Blissfully creamy—the best thing about Anchorage. The headlights swung shadows of January’s dishes in the drying rack and slit eyes of the spatula along the side of the refrigerator. On the fridge’s flat top was a dusty polar bear skull with cracked incisors. Framed pictures showed a broad young January with his hand on the prop of a plane; an Eskimo couple standing at the entrance to a buried sod igloo; and January’s wife, pale and frail.

  I knelt by the door and laced my boots.

  “Thanks for doing them dishes.” January spat into a Spam can. “You’re a good roommate. You don’t preach or shed.” He started to set his book on the floor and thought better. The roof leaked behin
d the oil furnace and the water ran along the wall to pool at the lowest point in the trailer—under his recliner. “Don’t know why I don’t drill a hole in that floor. Where you heading?”

  “Dimond Mall.”

  A cereal advertisement flashed on the screen.

  “Ma used to let me ride the combine with my brothers. Until the war come.” He spat. “They went and were shot down. I threw them schoolbooks in the coal stove an’ run off to join the Army. Sixteen an’ never been outta Iowa. The recruiting officer drove me home. Said ‘Sarah, I brought your little Nazi killer. Make him some corn chowder.’”

  I waited by the door.

  “Four years later I sold my octagon-barrel .22, for cash, an’ hitched the Alcan. Bound for Alasker.”

  “You met Abe’s dad?”

  “Looka’ that photograph. In that birchbark basket.”

  The photo was curled and brown. Tom Hawcly wore a polar bear parka. He was tall. The puffy white fur made his legs underneath look skinny and his arms huge as stovepipes. In Takunak it would have made him look like a white-man Outsider, trying too hard to be local. But the man’s eyes were confident and fearless. He was a bush pilot in the late 1940s and 1950s in the territory of Alaska. Of course nobody messed with him. I tried to feel proud. But nowadays villagers would mutter behind his back and put sugar in his gas—a white wasn’t allowed to show that much pride without asking for every kind of trouble.

  “Why didn’t he change the spelling of our name?”

  Hawk—or even Hawkly—would have been much more romantic. Such an effortless switch arriving on a frontier. From what I’d seen, nothing about being born on the frontier felt like arriving driving from America.

  “You off your feed?”

  My gaze dropped and crawled to the TV. A Doritos commercial flashed on, a scrunch-faced guy leaning on a car. Why was it deemed so important to recognize these humans? On TV the woman with the giant milluks was Dolly. George Bush spoke in a way that made it clear he wouldn’t be a lot of fun to camp with. Sylvester Stallone was tough and cool and so shook up about that, that he couldn’t talk. His stalking—abrupt lunges with a chrome knife glinting in his hand—was inept; even Elvis Jr. would have plugged him behind the ear, first shot. Me, I could have left him bleaching on the tundra. But that kind of truth didn’t count. The big question was, what kind did?

  “Next show’s pretty good.” January horsed the chair upright. He walked into the bathroom, nearly as tall as the door frame and filling the small space, and pissed in small spurts and farted, with the door open, talking, “I’ll take you shoppin’ na’morrow. If the rain quits an’ them leaks ain’t stopped, you give me a hand before you go to work, we’ll take a looka’ that roof. How’s them fellas you work with? You tell ’em where you’s from? You tell ’em you’s a goddamn real Alaskan?”

  “People don’t care about that old caribou-hair stuff. They ask one question, about where to hunt ‘big griz’ or gold, then slip in something not nice about Eskimos. Talk goes back to Shirley and Laverne or their magic johnson.”

  “Ugh.” He came out zipping his pants. “Take my Ford.”

  “I don’t need to pollute air. Thanks, though.”

  “I notice—”

  “I know. I don’t know how to drive.” The flimsy aluminum door swung against my collarbone. I hoped this didn’t mean he’d forget about what he already seemed to have forgotten—taking me up in my grandfather’s airplane, teaching me to fly.

  A COLD DRIZZLE thickened the air. Anchorage’s sky was a constant wool blanket. I rode down the hissing edge of Minnesota Drive. The overpasses and exit ramps were monsters, concrete brachiosaurs, their backs lifting trucks and cars, the people in the cars veering together, beside each other, close enough to speak, share a sandwich, or fall in love, for a few moments. My nose drowned in fumes. A man held a scrawled cardboard sign; WILL WORK FOR FOOD. Exactly what Abe had taught us to do. You kids want to gut that caribou and hang it under the cache and then we’ll go after cranberries?

  How badly did this man need money, here where money connected—or separated—everything? Distrust squirted under my ribs and immediately I didn’t like it. This must be how you get empty eyes. I braked and handed him some rolled-up dollar bills; six dollars. “Here. Until you find job.” He squinted dubious and unfriendly at my blue bike, white throat, greasy fingernails. Beside us, beside the highway, stood a stretch of unmolested trees—stunted black spruce—small and worried as if they wished to bolt before pavement ate them.

  AT DIMOND MALL I locked my bike to a light pole, pulled the wrinkles out of my jeans, and strode into America. Multiple floors, lights, glass, glitter—invitation sweet as roses, with price tags and pretty-woman scorn waiting to thorn the poor and nonconforming. The mall was an aggregation ground for herds of young people. I moved along, longing for someone to invite me home for soup, the way people in the bush invited a stranger in, though that was begining to seem as likely as a caribou following me home to be soup.

  Mirrors hung everywhere. Columns of mirrors, mirrors behind rows of shoes, doubling their number, doubling their customers’ feet and needs. Everywhere my reflection lurked in ambush. Veins showed in my sinewy forearms. My jeans were stained, my shoelaces, my vocabulary, my history, stained. High school boys brushed by on either side like a creek flowing around a deadhead. They wore faded jeans, faded leather jackets, fronds of faded hair curled in their eyes. Their leather jackets—former Carnation contented cows—cost more than my best paycheck in two months at the shop. That didn’t count the price of their jeans and socks, watches and hair. Humans Wearing Money—probably already the name of a punk band.

  Cutuk, Enuk said, you see gonna too much shiny. Too much shiny whoa-mun.

  Strange and ugly puppies wagged in cupboards behind glass. Someone had chopped their tails off. ALL ANIMALS AND FISH 40% OFF. Beside me a man and woman stopped. “Oh, so cute.” She clapped her cheeks. One of the dogs was barking, faintly audible through the glass. The man groaned and grinned in my direction. “The worst four-letter word around a woman, S-A-L-E.”

  “Why do they cut their tails off?”

  “They do that,” he said.

  I had no idea what to say, or if the conversation was over. People didn’t really buy dogs and fish at the mall? I expected the next store: Babies for sale. Trees for sale. Land for sale.

  But only more shallow shoes.

  A shop sold photographs of eagles and bears, and wolves—two hundred and seventy-nine dollars, roughly half the price of a real dead wolf. The wolves looked combed and extra good-looking, movie-star wolves; could they live in Hollywood, too? At the entrance to a clothing store, two women storekeepers stood, piled with curly brown hair. Pepto-Bismol nails. Silver rings. They wore name tags: Taffy. Shannon. Who got to kiss a girl named Taffy? I’d fight a bear. Drink solvent.

  “Good evening. Would you like to see our men’s apparel?”

  Did apparel include jeans that fit? The word apparel made me think of the chewed apple cores Abe taught us to save in an Adams Old Fashioned peanut butter jar of water, to let them ferment and salvage the last bit of cidery juice. But these mall women—like girls in Takunak—wanted nothing of that kind of hunger.

  I hurried on, thinking of Dawna. What would she need? But no, that was the wrong idea here. What would she desire?

  “Hi Cutuk!”

  Leaning over the rail, across the ice-skating rink, waved Charley Casket. He beamed with recognition; no flat Takunak greeting, more like a traveler stranded on a sandbar, mosquito-bitten and starved to see another human. We shook hands, his limp and wet. His hand dipped in his pocket. I stepped back involuntarily. A big brown bear tooth lay in his palm. Bog soil had stained it pearly black. “Sabertooth tiger,” he said. “Pretty rare. When you been come around here?”

  “Almost three months. Finally get job.” Instantly, I knew my bragging, like bragging about hunting, would have a cost. “They find Enuk?”

  His eyes pulled away on a pa
ssing blonde. “Lotta blond girl.”

  “Thousands. Just like caribou way across the river at Breakup—nothing you can do about it. I got nothing they want.”

  We grinned. Suddenly I worried about hurting his feelings. Charley, with his lies and lack of machinery, with his bone fragments and fake fish hooks, was a professional at having nothing anyone wanted.

  “You got naluaġmiu girlfriend?”

  “I wish. How’s everybody up home? How come you go Anchorage?”

  “Janet an’em’s good. That letter say I win car. In steaksweeps,” Charley said importantly. “Trans Am, I guess. Jus’ like Knight Rider in TV.” He shrugged. His eyes were flat and expressionless. “There’s nothing by that address. Even they let Mom send ’em seven hunnert bucks.”

  I bit a grin—“let” in Village English meant “make.” Tat trooper let Lumpy go jail.

  “I sure wanna learn to drive, alright,” Charley said.

  “Me too.”

  Charley Casket was thirty-five or so, missing teeth and some gray hairs showing up, and still lived at home, on a mattress in the corner. Talking to him, I stood straighter than I remembered. Something was changing. In Takunak I was on a whole lower level than he who was the bottom—my eyes apologetic for being round and blue, embarrassed and staying to the ground, making quick forays to faces. In Takunak, Charley was Charley, Cutuk was Cutuk, our positions frozen in for the winter of our lives. Anchorage was free from that, but held something larger and vaguely similar. In the village, the new rhetoric had been natives “walking in two worlds with one spirit.” Too crucial and cool, clearly, to assimilate a lone member from the Not-Quite-Right-White tribe.

  Dimond Mall scurried past. I didn’t have one spirit walking two worlds. More like Siamese spirits crawling the crevasses in between. Charley was on the Eskimo ice sheet. But what was Eskimo? Native, nowadays, much more than a connection to the land, seemed to be the state of being uncertain of who you were, basketball and booze the only constants. Television, teachers, and tomorrow were white. Charley might search there forever and never find his face. The way mine was not on heroes at home. The whole societal systems of walls left me disoriented, disillusioned, wanting no part of so much judgment.