Ordinary Wolves

by Seth Kantner

  I paced. Out the window, the neighbor beyond Cheryl’s was making a bird feeder in his yard, wearing a hard hat. I turned on the TV. Dan Rather’s news: crimes, spills, and bodies. America: something, somewhere, south. The boss stepfather of Alaska. Noticing how fresh and pretty she was looking.

  “Caribou soup matters. Feeding the dogs. Bears.” Suddenly air didn’t want to go back in my lungs. I missed it all! Hawk owls on the slop hole tree. The pastel of evening sky over the snow. Caribou clicking past. Ravens on the wind, cataloging every movement from above. The fire crackling in the morning. The smell along the riverbanks of grass and tundra and highbush cranberry. Fox tracks in fresh first fall snow. Ermine tracks by the quaq pile. Out on the river ice, otters nuzzling beside deadly open water. Wind moving the tops of spruce.

  The trailer was dusky. I slumped down and idly turned over a newspaper.

  WOMAN FOUND STABBED.

  There was a photograph—of tarps hanging in trees below the railroad tracks, a tattered couch, a campfire, and a clothesline. An unidentified Eskimo woman with multiple stab wounds was found Thursday near Fish Creek, according to Anchorage police. The woman was believed to have been sexually assaulted prior to death . . .

  I snatched the phone. Punched numbers. “Who’s this?”

  “Hi Cutuk!”

  “Stevie? Whacha’ doin’?”

  “Sitting in dark. There’s no electric. Nippy’s drunk, he been alapit. They was never let him sing in church so he busted into AVEC and shut off the power. Day before yesterday Tommy Feathers Junior hang himself. Kids saw him. They couldn’t lift him. Nobody tell you? Fifteen years old.” Stevie sneezed. “Uh-oh.”

  “What else been happening?”

  “Caribous crossing. Real fat ones. That dog musher, that Ted Brown fella, he find ivory tusk by Igisuktuk. With Honda. Hunnert thirty-seven pounds. People are complaining alright. That’s not his land. Here. Mom wanna talk.”

  Janet shouted, in case the phone line wasn’t large enough. “Hi, Cutuk! When you going home? We miss you, son. Arii, Melt been pass out right now. I hope he never miġiaq again. We’re doing good.”

  “How’s Abe?”

  “Abe got no sons here! He sure get gray.”

  I scraped my fingernails clean along the inside leg seam of my jeans. “Has anybody heard from Dawna?”

  “Dawna peen go Uktu, how long. Flossie’s real bat. Lucky he been sick long enough, I get most of the presents sewed for her funeral.” Janet giggled. “She’s letting Dawna listen to her old stories. That’s good, you think?”

  “Janet. Who died in Anchorage?”

  “Ah! Hannah Wana! He’s Feathers, adopted to Uktu. To Mildred Wana. He been go Anchorage how long. That was his real brother, who suicide around here,” she said, mixing male and female pronouns again. “Arii! T’em young ones! You should go home.”

  Stevie’s voice came on the line. “Say, Cutuk, when you come, bring me coupla’ jugs!” There was the sound of a slap and “Arii you!” “Let’um then, I jokes.”

  Reluctantly, I lowered the phone and let five hundred miles of mountains spring back up and put my head in my palms, breathing carefully, allowing credence to the irony of bad coincidence. If there were a God, this would be a test. Am I going to get drunk or pack? Iris was probably cooking caribou patiq bones in soup for the men in the tribal building making the casket and, while it simmered, helping stain boards pretty for the cross. In Uktu—and in how many other Eskimo villages?—they would similarly be dealing with their deaths. January and Lance? They had simply stepped out somewhere. Dawna took a trip home. Cheryl was doing what she needed to do in the “real world.” And Hannah? Hannah arriving at that end of the trail we didn’t allow ourselves to think clearly about, no more tracks ahead.

  January would return, drive up any moment. His front left brake would grab, his truck pitch slightly to the side—I still needed to fix his brakes. He’d get out and spit and wave, kind, and happy that I was back. He’d turn on the TV and poke in the freezer for moose or caribou meat that had been frozen too long.

  I jumped up—tonight desiring something less predictable than conversation in a trailer—and snaked out the money. September darkness was condensing outside. The bright summer had gone and stars scraped through. Up north, after the long day of summer, the first black snowless nights made people afraid. Janet would be whispering stories, Melt and Woodrow and everyone keeping their shotguns loaded. Spirits and bears and iññuqun were out, the inky blackness rustling.

  But who was I fooling? Spirits and bears and iññuqun didn’t walk electric Anchorage. Cities were about remote control; they cleared out bad luck with the trees and brush and planted streetlights. Paved the dark nights and spirits. I checked my jeans and shirt for mud or stray snot and raced toward the airplane, glancing back. My heart faltered. The street up from January’s trailer had two names. The big green sign on this side read IRIS STREET. Where had my eyes been? And I called myself a hunter? A sharp reader of sign? If I believed in “meant-to-be” I was doing fine after all, sensing some snowed-in trail like Plato used to.

  The problem was, I didn’t believe. Hawclys found their own food, sewed their own torn skin, and put stinkweed on everything else. Hawclys believed in themselves—and the inevitability of failing themselves—surrounded by nature too big and unpredictable to imagine controlling; they were responsible for their own lives, as far from welfare, suburbs, and “meant-to-be” as any place had ever been.

  The ski plane was gone.

  The chains were gone. The ground underneath the skis had sprouted its grass, vigorous and still growing. I stood for a moment, tossing possibilities, and what I didn’t understand but already knew—something inside of me was a compass, as sure as the compasses in caribou and Canada geese. I sat on my heels, examined my hands and underneath them my dreams to fly my grandfather’s airplane. Every flight plan pointed north. Soaring above the land, into the past that didn’t exist. Glancing down for the tiny black line of Enuk’s team that didn’t exist.

  Cars purred past. Along the shore, water slapped and plunked softly. The memories of Cheryl’s and my time together here swirled in the dark. I’d done it; I’d found jobs, friends, an amazing girlfriend, even my brother, and a bunch of dollars. Now you can go home where real things happen! Have a dog team, hunt, find Enuk’s trail.

  I paused, then turned, and, one foot in front of the other, followed Spenard Road, one last hunt into the heart of lights. The moon was full and clouds were sweeping by. There were dark pocks in the moon’s bright face.

  A BURLY BLOND MAN questioned me in the qanisaq of Chilkoot Charlie’s. “A learner’s permit? No driver’s license? Where are you from, Russia?”

  “Close.” Song Spenholt flashed in my head, smiley with prevarications. “Up north we don’t have roads.”

  “No roads? No chicks? What do people do?” He guffawed. “Okay, go on in.”

  Sawdust was on the floor. Fishnet hung from the dark ceiling. The stools were made of cutoff logs and beer kegs, the tables from wooden wire spools. Out through a back door was a country band; inside, two louder bands. The people shone. I’d never seen such narrow women, such muscular men, with such young faces, and weak hands.

  “One-fifty-one, please.”

  The bartenders ignored me. I glanced up, half expecting a NO WHITES sign. Beside me, on a bar stool, a crewcut man whistled. “Wrrrt! Hey! Man here with a hundred-spot, so dry and rich he’s croaking.” He twisted around. “Bobby. I’m from Texas.”

  “Cutuk.” We shook hands, shouting in each other’s faces, like fore-play to a fight. Bobby shrugged and let my confusing name blow away in the rock and roll storm. Shots came, and a stack of change. I swept the quarters into my pockets. His eyes were friendly and brown with freckles flung underneath. I recognized a drug, this spending money and making friends, and not being alone with your thoughts. My cells welcomed the alcohol and the angles inside the music. I smiled and glanced at women—everywhere Aphrodites—an
d touched the thousands in my pocket. How could I turn from this, back to the immense silence and cold? How could I stay and stand the way it all felt paid for by the land? I gazed around, wishing. An Everything-Wanter with everything!

  Bobby bent close. “I’m only seventeen. My daddy works on the Slope.”

  Prudhoe!

  He asked the usual questions about the Arctic, then told about a friend in Matanuska Valley who had fourteen snowmobiles, and a little toboggan they dragged behind, loaded with cases of Budweiser. Shots came. Bobby watched my hands take out money. He mentioned taking a spin. I raised my eyebrows. Lights were sharp and threatening to spin. The place had become crowded, people pressed like fish upright in a bucket. For a moment I panicked—where was the door? “Just push,” Bobby urged. He squeezed a woman’s black-skirted butt. He grinned and pretended to wave to a friend. The woman wore a metallic blouse, like some sort of alien goddess, and leaned close enough to me to kiss, her eyelids silvery as smashed moths. “Watch out, asshole, or you’ll be sorry.”

  “Thanks, I’m already aware of that.”

  Bobby’s car was a blue Mazda RX-7. I flipped pages in my library-book memory. Wankel rotary engine. Couples stood cooling off after dancing. Bobby’s wrist flicked as he shifted. He used the brake and throttle hard. “Let’s cruise Fourth.” We were at a light. The night raining now. Neon signs flashed and taxis rolled away from DWI-scarred curbs. “I hear you can trade a bottle for ivory. Hey, what’s Eskimo pussy like?” He pounded the steering wheel. “Is it, like, cold and shit?”

  Hannah Wana’s dog-chewed face rose behind my eyes. My throat lifted. I breathed, inhaling the essence of the car—the engine, the plastic dash and seats, the stereo—letting this inanely expensive freedom wash under my skin. Men shuffled the sidewalks, fists deep in their pockets, wading into a permanent wind. My pockets were stuffed with money. I twisted around; was that Elvis Jr.? Rain swallowed the figure.

  “There’s a fight!” Bobby said.

  A palm cracked on a face. Bitch-slap, in Mechanic English. “Hold on!” He veered left, left again, around the block. I slumped low in the seat, carsick. The door latch slick and cold. We could roll by. But Bobby rolled down his window. The tires hissed. The air cool and damp. The night street flashed wet neon. The man was big and heavyset, vaguely familiar. Woodrow Jr.! Beside him the woman’s head was bowed. Drizzle glittered on her black hair.

  Bobby bent forward, leaned out the window. “Now you two rub noses and make up!”

  Woody had a bottle. He flung it.

  Bobby stomped the gas pedal. The car twisted and lunged. “Yeehaaa!” The bottle shattered in the street. I hunched against my knees. Had Woody seen? The woman wasn’t Dawna but so easily could have been. She’d been struck by one person and racially insulted by another. I was old acquaintances with that pain raining down. What is it with lucky people? I tried to concentrate on how to convince this white stranger how truly amazing Eskimos were. How truly amazing the arctic landscape was all by itself without Prudhoe, roads, and cases of Budweiser. Where would I start? With words? Or my knife? Suddenly it was so elementary. I leaned his way and stuck my finger as far down my throat as it would go. The shifter and stereo got the second round.

  A DRIZZLE MISTED THE LIGHTS. The air was pleasant. In the lee of a skyscraper, I spat and ducked into a phone booth and dug out handfuls of quarters. It was all so magic; Iris answered on the fifth ring. She was groggy but listened to the story. She laughed over and over. I smiled huge in the dark, and imagined her doing the same.

  “You give him money?”

  “Shuck no!”

  “How about Woody, did he recognize you? You know, I rent my cabin from Woody.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Sounds as if you’re doing as well as I am, teaching.” She yawned. “My gosh, the papers I grade!”

  “What? Is it a lot?”

  “That too, but no, it’s my students.” Her voice grew serious. “They have such a rough go. Nelta Skuq, she’s got nine kids, you know; she just got her AFDC check and split again, who knows where—Nome? Anaktuvuk? Fairbanks? Her thirteen-year-old, Mary, is on the CB asking for diapers.”

  “Mary’s thirteen?”

  “She’s pregnant! And here’s Miss Hawcly, assigning a paper—one page on her favorite experience. Mary writes one run-on sentence about the Bulls. The errors were in perfect vernacular. So I asked the kids to write about their worst experience. Mary writes another sentence, this time about a fly that got in her Coke and she almost drank it. She’s been raped, Cutuk! By her brothers and uncles, and who knows who. Who even knows how many times. She’s been beaten and abandoned and passed around since she can remember. And she writes about a fly in her Coke? Most of the kids don’t write anything. They throw stuff and bounce off the walls, or zone out and be drones. There’s no intellectual curiosity. I shouldn’t be whining to you. It’s just hard.”

  “Iris, I worried about you. Only . . . since I left I’ve been living some strange egocentric existence. I’m caught up in all this . . . stuff. Can I send you something? I have money now.”

  “How about a pizza and a beer?” Iris giggled. “How about if you came home?”

  A police car rolled past the phone booth. The brake lights flashed red, and then it continued down the street. “Maybe. I don’t know if I can live in Takunak, with everybody staring and complaining about white people.”

  “Oh, that’s spilled milk under the bridge. I know what you mean, but good people are everywhere. Think about Janet. She’d love to have you here. Down there it is easy, in some ways. But something felt a little bit missing. Guess that’s why I’m here.”

  “I feel wrapped in plastic. I thought it was the food.”

  “I think it probably is the food,” Iris agreed. “I’d make you snow ice cream. And roasted caribou leg bones. The Canada geese are still here fattening up on blueberries. Abe brought me two. He came down in his plank boat.”

  “Abe has a boat?”

  “I bought him a little ten-horse motor. He sawed spruce boards and made a river boat. He and Franklin have two solar panels now, too. And a shortwave radio. They listen to BBC and Radio Moscow.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “You should see it.”

  “Maybe.”

  I WALKED AWAY from the mountains, toward the distant thunder of a jet taking off. I realized I hadn’t eaten since the night before in Fairbanks. The One-Five left history in snatches and fragments. Fairbanks squatted fourteen hours back, behind mountains the size of years. Homemade songs jumbled in my brain, the corny words ringing hollow in where my past was peeling off the walls of my skull. Bruce Springsteen would laugh, or vomit into his spruce guitar.

  I pictured Dawna in Uktu, drinking dark liquid—one-night homebrew—with dark cousins. On the street I pushed my hand into my pocket and touched Enuk’s bear. Could the old thing be bad luck? A thicket of willows grew beside the road. I brought back my arm and flung. “Let go when I tell you,” I told my hand. The bear stood in my palm, sniffing the night. Maybe down in the ancient ivory the spirit of an extinct mammoth glowered, still mad at humans for extirpating his species. I flung again. My shoulder popped and my hand opened in pain. I panted, tremulous with shock. The tiny bear glinted in the streetlight, cracked against a branch, ricocheted into blackness and brush.

  No raven flew overhead, no gust of wind in the trees. The planet turned east as I walked west.

  BY THE TIME I found January’s trailer the sky was graying with dawn. Inside, I stood shivering over a metal slot where heat blew out. Alappaa. I missed cutting dead trees to burn in the barrel stove. I rustled in his freezer, found a chunk of caribou. On cardboard I cut shavings and chewed the raw frozen meat. Out of the open bedroom door January yawned. His coarse fingernails rasped coarse hair.

  He shuffled out. He was naked and his hazel eyes were puffy and confused. When I was counting friends and coming up with zeros, I hadn’t considered January. Something slid friends
into the “not quite” slot. We just work together. He’s Abe’s friend. She probably doesn’t like me. All the time I should have been thankful for January, alive and here to share the city with. I should have fixed his brakes.

  He leaned against the counter and scratched his head. “Damn, I miss my hair. Among other things!” His gut hung huge. He glanced wistfully out at the morning coming over the next trailer.

  I leaned back from the table. “Aarigaa taikuu.” I wiped my hands on a paper towel, pried out the aluminum foil. Opened it on the table like a brownie.

  “Ho! How long you been rat-holin’ that?”

  “Since you told me about the IRS.”

  “Guess I best find my trousers.”

  “It’s for your plane. To buy it back. I wanted you to teach me to fly.”

  “Goddammit, kid. They confiscated it. My plane’s all gone. Probably in Arizona by now, being flown by some friggin’ fed counting wetbacks.” January grimaced. “Goddamn old age ain’t all she’s cracked up to be. Wisdom? Shee! Memory loss more like it. And the government stealing you blind, when you hardly got a pot to piss in.” His voice was thick and rumbly. He rubbed his gray caterpillar eyebrows. “That Cub . . . winter before statehood, me an’ your dad headed to Barrow. Them’s were the good old days. That Super Cub was brand-new. People don’t know what that means now-days. Abe an’ me flew dabsmack into weather. Thought we’d crack up putting down on the Kuguruk. Goddamn brand-new Super Cub!”

  The blower started and blew warm air. January’s hanging testicles twitched as he breathed.

  “Dogs, grandmas, everybody come out. Two white fellas I remember, skinny schoolteacher with a beard and a big fat-assed preacher with no beard. Wolfglove come out, invited us to stay in his cabin. More generous people never was born. Telling stories. Eatin’ like you are there. Enuk had a big smile. I know’d what he was after. When the storm lifted I took him up. Where you put the stick in to fly from the back seat, Wolfglove poked his finger in an’ banked me into them Dog Die Mountains. Tremendously strong guy.