by Seth Kantner
“Musta been trick,” I said.
“Musta been trick.” He offered the tooth again, then scooped his other hand in his pocket. His palm cupped an assortment of lint and treasures: a lead .44 slug, a weathered moose molar, a YKK zipper handle, an antler toggle, a rotted strip of wood, half of a flint arrowhead. He poked a couple times, pinched the toggle, and handed it over, nearly hidden between his thumb and knuckle. He glanced around. “Enuk’s,” he murmured. “Back part dog harness. Enuk only one always use that kind. Maybe your dad still, too, huh?”
The antler toggle was old and punky like wood. It was the kind we used, at the end of each towline, to loop through the loop at the back of each dog’s harness—something we could make with what we had, free, as opposed to brass swivel snaps that cost dollars. Maybe Abe had given one to Charley. Maybe one had surfaced in the Wolfgloves’ yard, pressed into the hard-packed dirt.
“Where you find it?”
“I always walk lots. I find things. Troopers gonna hire me for searches, alright. Find clues and do the underwater diving. They all know I was a Navy Seal.”
I handed it back, biting the grin again. Charley’s maze of lies, like trying to follow wolf tracks through caribou wintering ground. How much did he believe himself? How much did he know? “Where did you find this?”
His eyes were dark, inscrutable. “I can’t remember. I sure need hunnert bucks, bart.”
Woodrow Sr. flooded my head—seventeen-year-old memories borrowing fifty dollars out of Abe’s Hills Bros can—telling of Harry Feathers committing suicide with a double-barreled shotgun. It was all so ancient, Harry too far back, no face anymore. I handed Charley fifty dollars. Fifty bucks for half a friend in the crevasse. All friends half off.
He stuffed the treasures in his pocket and grinned. “I gonna buy jugs.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll wait at airport.” He nodded, shook hands again, and sauntered away.
Charley wouldn’t talk so friendly in Takunak. Bacardi 151 sold there for three hundred dollars a bottle. If he could pawn artifacts he’d take home a case, and for a day have something everyone wanted. Maybe a woman would even go with him briefly. Either way, in a week that party would be past. He wouldn’t pay back the fifty.
Charley leaving and the return of loneliness lifted the floor heavy against my feet. It was time to give up here, once again, on a date; time to find my bike and start home. January needed company. He might actually get around to the roof in the morning.
Pay phones beckoned, promising a last chance at possibility. Dial tone acknowledged my one-sided conversation to Dawna, then beeped viciously. Lying to a phone isn’t allowed. My spoon face leered in the polished metal coin box. The phone book was heavy with names. No Wolfglove. No Fluck, Ubaldo. Shaw, L. L., was there.
“Lance? This is Cut-tuck.” I stammered about Dawna.
“Try four-one-one?” His voice came down the wires different, quiet and no mechanic banter.
“That isn’t the cops?” He sounded sincere, but I was learning about these people.
“That’s nine-one-one. Let me try. I’ll ring you back.”
I faced the mall ice-skating rink, wheeling with bleached beauties and nine-year-olds hopped up on Pepsi and Gummi Bears, out of control. The phone rang.
“Got your pencil, Igloo Gigoloo?”
I scratched the numbers on my thumbnail with the tip of my knife.
“Hey,” he said, “give a call sometime. We’ll get together, swallow some suds.”
I hung up and dialed, wondering, did white people drink soap? Melt drinks aftershave. I was somewhat white and had drunk Lysol in Crotch Spit. The truth was I’d drink soap any day in Anchorage for a friend.
“Who’s this? Sugar?”
“Who’s this?” I returned the Takunak phone greeting. Who was Sugar? I envied him a name that dissolved so easily into English.
“Cutuk! You’re in Anchorage?”
“I’m inside Dimond Mall.”
Memories draped down—that smooth skin above her cheeks, tattered Sears catalogs, snared ptarmigan with their eyes frozen closed, thawing beside Janet’s stove.
“Stevie called collect from jail. I thought you were there. Him and Lumpy broke into some teacher an’em’s house and drank their vanilla and NyQuil. They iġitchaq them naluaġmius’ pet bird!”
“What kinda bird?”
“Wait . . . you want to go to the movies with Dave and me?”
Blood drummed in my ears. I’d rather go midnight solvent dipping for a Nissan needle bearing. I scratched the mouthpiece, tempted to manufacture a sudden bad connection. I needed to find the roads home to January’s. Why had I called? Hadn’t I come to meet a mall girl, someone from this world, someone who never had to know I had been naluaġmiu, and too shy to say God or love, or kiss?
“We’ll meet you out front.” Her words were city-woman words now, farther from the throat. Suddenly the mall stretched too vast, a glass prison, loud, and chemical food, light-years from any sort of land at all.
“’Kay then. I’d do anything to see—” The phone began beeping.
SIXTEEN
ORANGE SNOWFLAKES FLOATED down the sky above the streetlights and landed soft on my hair. The fresh snow smelled genuine. I missed stepping out every morning and having weather decide my day, dogs prancing in the snow, sky arching over unowned horizons, sustenance waiting out there: caribou or rabbit, muskrat or bear. The tiny wet stars brushed my face. Cars migrated along Dimond Boulevard. The March evening had cooled, and in the parking lot shoppers tilted their heads, covered their perfect hair with newspapers, and rushed to their vehicles, cursing winter for showing itself, then riding away seated in their heated metal boxes to houses bright with electric lights, hot baths on tap and a hundred songs waiting inside every radio.
A red Mustang II hatchback slid into the parking lot. Gutless. Four-cylinder cake mixer. Dawna was in the passenger window, appearing out of traffic, the way Enuk had out of storms. And me? On square stone sidewalk, hands in pockets, gripping an ancient ivory bear, guessing what Dawna and I had left to cross a city about.
She jumped out, her legs in acid-washed jeans, longer and thinner than I remembered. Her face thinner. Behind the wheel a white man with puffy eyes watched like ukpik, the snowy owl.
“Hi Yellow-Hair!” She said it all in one word, like in the village, and giggled and hugged me. The years weighted my arms with uncertainty. People exiting the mall glanced over. Hair tangled in my lips. “When are you going home? Mom send niqipiaq?”
“Janet sent beluga muktuk. I ate it.”
“Ah you!” She slapped my shoulder.
The boyfriend peered out, forearms cool on the wheel. I wondered if he knew how to cut joints—I could cut his wrist joints in six seconds. Leave him handless as a village disciplined by Attila the Hun. I touched my knife, recently sharpened.
“Dawn. Let’s go!” His voice was nasal, hoarse.
Dawn? Dawna was one of a kind. Eskimo. Not abbreviation material. I concentrated on getting into the back seat, angled and slippery, red fake leather that had never been an animal’s skin. The vinyl smell hurt. I smelled an ashtray, too, and cigarette ash, and roaches. Dawna turned, her cheek crushed against the headrest. “We’re going to pick up some stuff and head back to our place.”
“I should have ridden my bike.” Now suddenly I hardly cared if the bicycle rusted to iron compost, nourishing the light pole’s metal roots. I examined Dave’s neck. He seemed easy to hate—blow-dried brown hair parted in the middle, long in back. My mind played with a collage of city images. Dave had rich parents, both with mustaches. He worked in the Safeway dairy department pushing cottage cheese. His mother was a fingernail artist, with one-tenth the brains of a two-year-old wolf, a Bible and a diaphragm in her purse, and material desires itching like cold sores.
He touched the brakes, oversteering. The car swung. Maybe Dawna was in love with his driving. It was all so sickening. We passed centers, not the center of th
e city—Anchorage it turned out had hundreds, maybe thousands of “centers.” My bike grew farther and farther away. A car leaned on the curb, crippled, waiting for wheel donors.
Dave got out. Slammed his door.
She swiveled around, her Seawolves jacket slippery against the seat. I wondered what a seawolf was, and why my brain wouldn’t stop wondering about these things. A sea-bear would be a polar bear. Stupid humans, naming their proud jocks after an animal, one that doesn’t even exist.
“My GPA got low.”
“What do you eat?”
She giggled and shoved my shoulder. “I was going to be a photographer. In the darkroom? Dodging and burning? I sure like photography. I thought I was good, but that teacher said my pictures weren’t very art. You shoulda’ been here to tell me.”
“Me? I wish I knew some art.” Dodging and burning?—sounds like war, not art.
“Those professors, they sure always think they’re something else.” Her jacket made a nylon sound. Her features were scooped shadows and streetlight. Her nails pattered the headrest. “Ever try coke?”
“Coke? Of cour—. No. Not yet.”
The car was silent. Her eyes had dark circles underneath and stared a lot farther away than the back seat. Her fingers curled along my neck, twisted gently in my hair. “Cutuk, I’m still waiting to see you smile like you don’t care who else is in the world.”
“So, you’re gonna let me learn? Or are you coming out on the tundra where I already know how to do that?”
Dave sprang into the seat.
“Sugar have some?” she asked.
“Re-friggin’-lax, why doncha.” He pitched away from the curb, not moving any direction I wanted to go. Streets led to streets. In front of a bank, under shrubs, little lights with black rings glowed like recently hatched UFOs. The alien city went by, frozen stone, glass, locked locks, and enough left-on light to last lifetimes. I hunched in the back, wishing the car had four doors; I’d give a testicle to jump into the ephemeral freedom of car-made wind.
DAWNA SLAMMED THEIR upstairs apartment door. She’d left lights on. On a four-drawer dresser the TV stood. A green couch faced the TV. Dave pulled the switch. “I wanted to catch Letterman.”
A blue truck door lay across cement blocks. The window was rolled down, clothes heaped and hanging through the opening. No books—college textbooks or otherwise—in the room. No meat saw. No skins. To the left was a kitchen, dark paneled walls, lined linoleum. Dawna had never had time for kitchens. I wanted to escape there, to wash her dishes; it wasn’t even work with water coming out hot and going somewhere by itself.
David Letterman flung a book through a good glass window. The only book in the house. Both Daves laughed. There was a rabbity resemblance. Maybe they were cousins, white people had them after all. The sofa was tired, the springs bony. A caribou skin would help, and smell like home. The house made self-important noises: hums, drones, whirs.
“You want pop?” Dawna leaned into the fridge. The silver bars of empty racks gleamed. A twelve-pack of 7UP lay in there, a Ziploc of paniqtuq, a yellow squeeze bottle of mustard. I raised my eyebrows. She tossed a can. I scrambled after it.
She grimaced. “Adii, I forget you always can’t catch.”
The village rushed back, all the shame of not knowing how to play basketball—or anything else that mattered—and having red hands doing it, instead of brown. The clean bubbly taste of 7UP brought new memories, the jet ride with the beautiful flight attendant. My fingers played with the lock on the truck door while I kept my eyes off Dawna’s body.
She sat beside me. “So how you been?”
Dave glanced over, leaned forward, turned up the volume.
“I’m working as an auto mechanic.”
“For real? Say! I’ll let you fix my car.” She pulled strings and fought a curtain open. “Ever see this kind with strings?”
“Maybe Abe’s nailed-up flour sacks worked better?”
“Nay! There. That’s my car.”
I leaned across her. She didn’t use Pert shampoo anymore. Abe slipped in with stray thoughts—what was he doing without me to shoot mice with a big rubber band? They must gnaw all night at our soap in the Darigold butter-can soapdish nailed to the wall. Iris had said on the phone that Franklin had left his igloo and moved up to stay with Abe. Would they get around to shooting enough meat?
“You gotta kick the shifter, but now that can’t even—what are you dreaming?”
“I—”
Dawna and I giggled, the way we used to by the dogfood bucket, behind Janet’s stove. We reached out and gripped each other’s wrists. I felt myself falling into the pools of her eyes. Her thumbs sank in like Janet’s, reminding me of her strength. There was no slipping away. And for me it was like pushing freezing hands into a warm basin—it felt so good but along came the agony.
Finally, I looked down. “Dawna, did Melt go to school in the States?”
She jerked out of my hands and stood. “Shuck, I dunno. Oregon someplace. Chemawa. Teachers cut his hair and beat him for speaking Iñupiaq. Indians beat him for being short. Everybody knows those parts, if you been around when he’s feeling high. How come?”
“Just wondering. How about Newt Clemens? Where did he go to school?”
She shrugged.
“Is your car an automatic?”
“Our parents are inside us.” She giggled. “Have to be careful what we let out.” She stood sexy in tight jeans, hands brushing easy on her thighs. The rings on her fingers were supposed to be gold. The plating had worn through. “Dave, what’s my car?”
“Chevy Shove-it.” Dave pried his gaze off the screen. “Let’s cut some lines and get amped. You want to—?”
I recognized his pause, the hydrogenated version of my too-native name. Intoxicating music leaked through the floor from downstairs, a female singer, singing about the weight of a stare. Dave pried a square of newspaper out of his pocket. Raising Dawna, right from his pocket. He went into the bathroom, and, flexing extra, lifted the mirrored medicine cabinet off its clips. Bottles rattled inside. He laid it beside the TV. The picture on the screen flickered and cycled downward. David Letterman’s feet stood above his grinning face. With his driver’s license, Dave cut rows of powder. None of my Eskimo friends in Takunak had a driver’s license. Outsiders, they always had licenses, and all their teeth.
My hands gripped each other. How feeble and pathetic, me subsisting on January’s trust and a flight attendant’s single-serving smile when everyone else was singing, dancing, driving. Dawna’s eyes watched, insolent and unblinking, unapologetic for any distance she had left me behind. I saw the wolf again, running, paying the price of a bottle; and Takunak, a speck in the wilderness, modern as microwaves, yet hissing with voices from a brand-new ten-thousand-year-old past: Kill every animal possible, every fur. Share. Avoid taboos. Don’t get ahead. Never stand out. Live now. Takunak: generous and jealous, petty and cruel and somehow owning us; owning our decisions; calling us home to assassinate our ambitions. How strange my past, even farther back into the earth—the buried caribou-skin entrance, flickering lamplight, dreams and the conviction to hunt the land for them—and now the only thing familiar, a Wolfglove I didn’t know.
I considered clubbing Dave, tossing him out on the dead lawn, and holding Dawna in my arms. It seemed as reasonable as killing a wolf for Bacardi, as reasonable as killing my brain cells scrubbing burnt bent VW lift rods in solvent to sell as new. It was the spontaneous sort of action Lumpy wouldn’t have to think over. But I only thought about it, and thought, in Takunak, was the least-respected bodily function.
They rolled a dollar into a straw. They concentrated, then gulped 7UP. I prepared to be casual. I might sneeze and scatter dollars to dust. I wanted to ask what it did. But coke was expensive; it better not make me feel cheap. The dust tickled in my nose. Then all the way up to my brain a pleasant pain spread in dots like the cut of fine glass. A small bitter gob crawled down my throat.
DAVE LAY
PARTIALLY on top of her on the couch, brushing her neck with his mushy lips. Dawna Wolfglove was the only person I had ever kissed. Including family. On the dresser, a tiny pair of calfskin slippers winked blue beads, Janet’s as a child, later Dawna’s. Some of the stitches and beadwork had broken; the old sinew thread was brittle and needed to be resewn. Dawna probably had no skin needles.
I migrated to the carpet.
Huge yellow wrestling flashed on the screen. Words stood in line in my brain, a blizzard of babble. Dawna sat up. “You ever try Pralines ’n Cream?”
I kept my mouth shut, in case it was a common narcotic, or some kind of bent-over sex everyone else had had. “I’ll fix your car.” I hurried to the door and out before she could untangle herself. It was cold outside. Sitting around too much made me shiver. Or was I turning into a city person who thought cold was equivalent to bad? But no, I’d lived the scars on my hands, made all the down payments for my Eskimo future.
The Chevette was white. “Uh-oh. Bad luck on you. Get a paint job.” Somebody had smashed it hard. The right headlight bulged like Stevie’s eye right after Melt caught him and punched him six times in Wolfgloves’ outhouse. Stevie had smoked Melt’s Marlboros. The last in town. I brought him snow in the outhouse for his eye. “I’ll get gun and shoot him yet,” he said. I thought of Tommy Feathers’s threats to me behind the church. “You’re not like that,” I said. “Everybody doesn’t have to be like everybody.” Stevie’s eye was swelling, the lashes disappearing. His glasses cracked in his hands. I sat on the stained seat. I nicked my wrist and took some of his blood and gave him some of mine. We were best friends and blood brothers again, moonlight leaking in. Our breath froze frost feathers up under the roof. He bowed his head, let spit run out of his mouth. “That guy never tried to love nobody only himself.” He wiped his lips. “Here I been trying.” Offshore, the river ice boomed and echoed. The world outside seemed made of interminable cold. Stevie’s glasses clattered on the boards. He put his hand on my neck. It was warm. “I’m gonna die from drinking. Doesn’t matter. But you better miss me, Cutuk. And if Melt never try cry you let him learn.”