She cursed at me, but without much spark, and gestured toward the door. “Definitely not my boyfriend,” she said. She took a giant bite of the sandwich I'd given her and sank back, relieved. “This is my boyfriend,” she said, patting the sandwich and closing her eyes.
“No, your real boyfriend,” I said. After a minute, she opened her eyes and studied me. It was because of the way she looked, on this occasion and previous ones, that I assumed Gurley was, in fact, that “real” man: “Good old Captain Gurley,” I said. I smiled, though any humor, even dark humor, had faded by now.
“You're jealous of Gurley?” she asked.
I thought of the ring, the jeweler, the clipped ad that had disappeared with the suspect fleas. Instead, I said, “Of him and every other guy who comes in here, not even with sandwiches, and gets more- out of you-than I ever-”
“Gets what?” she asked.
“I don't know,” I said, and then added, too quickly: “I'm guessing some men up here feel like they spend enough time with their own palms. Maybe there's other stuff of theirs they want to get read. Maybe-”
But I didn't finish. Lily stood-
No, I need to describe this carefully. Lily, standing there, me on the floor, the two of us lit only by the lights from the street, until she went and pulled the blackout shade. Then it was completely dark, only breathing and steps.
Click. The light went on. And while I blinked, she stepped around in front of me and stopped, just out of reach. It's inappropriate for me to say what her face looked like then, because it was a private thing, a horrible thing, a mix of fear and hate; it was her true face, the one she wore beneath whatever smile she presented to the men who visited her.
I couldn't look, but she stared at me until I did. She was wearing some old fatigues, unlaced workboots. She looked like a recruit about to wash out of basic or a civilian who'd lost her home to a fire and had had to go begging for clothes. The name strip on the shirt was gone, the color worn out of the pants.
Once I'd finished this inventory, I looked back to her face. As soon as I'd met her gaze, she hooked her thumbs into two belt loops and pushed down, first right, then left. Once free of her hips, the pants fell to her knees and she bent, pushing them down farther till they gathered at her ankles. I saw the legs I remembered from the first night, except the knees looked older, the deep brown bruises and scrapes more plentiful across her shins and across what parts of her thighs that weren't covered by the oversized shirt.
I followed the trail of buttons back up to her face, but before I got there I saw her hands descending, undoing each button, one at a time, like a doctor snipping stitches from a scar. When she was done, a narrow, dark ribbon of skin had been revealed. I turned away, and when that wasn't enough, closed my eyes, pulled in my legs.
“Look,” she said. And because, for one syllable, the voice sounded like the old Lily, my friend Lily, the one who helped me find balloons, the one who shared sandwiches with me, talked with me, preserved me, I did.
But it was a trick; the old voice came from this new, horrible face, now set grimly above a body not naked but stripped, everything visible except the feet and ankles, which were hidden in the pile of sloughed-off uniform.
“You read maps,” she said, and ran her hands painfully down her front, palms flat to her skin, fingers rigidly splayed. Then she brought her arms out before her and examined them. She found a bruise on her right forearm. “I got this in Anchorage,” she said, looking up. She lifted her left arm and found a patch of mottled brown-white skin; it looked like a burn. “ Bethel,” she said. She tilted her head back, felt her neck: “Dillingham,” she said, her fingertips fondling a thin, small scar where her shoulder began. She pushed her hands down across her breasts, which were slight enough to disappear beneath her palms. She revealed her chest again, studied it, and seemed about to say something, but gave a thin smile instead and continued. Now her left hand drifted to the base of her stomach while her right searched out something just above where her pelvis jutted out. There. An appendix scar. “ Memorial Hospital, Fairbanks,” she said. She brought her hands together, and lower, covering her sex as if now shy.
I looked away, and then up at her, but she shook her head and nodded down. I looked away again; she stepped closer, and took my hand, my right, in hers, and slowly ran it flat across her stomach. I could feel each little hair. Back and forth, up and down, until she said, so quietly that she did little more than move her lips, “Feel that scar?” I shook my head; I didn't breathe. She took my hand by the wrist, lowered it, and slowly began to run it up the inside of her thigh. I tried pulling my wrist away, forcefully at first and then desperately, but she held on. “Some of my scars, you can only touch,” she said. “Even I can't see them. They're too far away.”
“I don't want to,” I said. “Lily, I'm sorry.”
“Why are you sorry, Louis?” she said. “You didn't make the scars.” I said nothing. “Or maybe that's why you're sorry-you think? Jealous there's no scar on me you can claim?”
Lily waited another moment, then moved to the other side of the room and dressed slowly. When she was done, she came back to my side of the room. She turned off the light, and then, back against the wall, slowly slid to the floor until she was sitting beside me in the perfect dark. We sat that way for a while until she got up and opened the blackout shade. The light in the room rose to a gray glow.
I missed the dark. I couldn't look at her. I looked at my hands, at the door, at the grain of the hardwood floor. When I finally turned to face Lily, I was surprised to find her looking relieved, even pleased. She gave me a nudge and sat back. I inched away.
“Louis,” she said, and shifted closer. “I'm sorry,” she said.
“No, no-Lily, I'm sorry, I-should I leave?”
“No,” she said, and nodded toward the middle of the room. “It's your turn.” Then she laughed, so loudly and so briefly it sounded like a cough, and asked for my coat. When I hesitated, she laughed again, softer this time, and said, “Don't worry-that's all I'll ask you to take off.” I looked at her. “I'mcold” she said.
I took the coat off; she put it on and shivered once.
“Louis,” she said, settling back, her eyes closed. “If I tell you this story, the whole story, will you promise not to believe a word of it?”
“I promise,” I said.
“Think about that first,” she said. “You promised too quickly.”
“I won't believe it,” I said.
“You will,” she said. “That's what you do. You believe-believe in- everything. Don't you? You believe in your country, you believe your country is going to win this war, you believe in your God.” She sat up now, looked me in the eye. “You believed that I was Japanese, that I was a palm reader.”
I nodded.
“Well, you're wrong about all of that. Your country is going to lose. Your God is a fake, and so is your-”
“And so are you,” I said.
She took a deep breath. “Good,” she said. “That's a start.”
LILY CAME FROM Bethel, Alaska. Describe Bethel today-tiny homes, riverfront warehouses, a lot of sodden earth in the process of freezing or thawing, a horizon whose limits seem more lunar than earthly-and you would more or less capture Lily's Bethel of decades ago. It's more crowded now, more stores, more houses, more whites, more government people and programs, but it's still the same place, a permanent splotch on the tundra.
But nothing about it was permanent for Lily-half Russian, half Yup'ik, missing both parents, Bethel didn't have much to hold her. It did, however, have plenty of missionaries-Moravian, Catholic, Methodist, Orthodox, and more-and Lily convinced one of them to get her a place at a special girls' boarding school in Fairbanks. It was supposed to be just for the smartest girls-which Lily, without a wink, told me she was-but Lily was a compelling candidate in another way. An orphan, she was a more attractive prospect than many other Yup'ik children, who had to be pried away from wary parents before being sent off to di
stant schools where they would learn the ways of a white world.
What no one could tell her in Fairbanks, however, was why going there had made her so keenly aware of yet another world-a world just like this one, but a world in which she was privy to the secrets of people, places, and things. She had sensed this world back in Bethel, but it was only a sense, and seemed as much imagination as anything. But in Fairbanks, she knew differently-she knew, for example, the life stories of girls she had just met, before they had said a word. She knew when the weather was bad back in Bethel, whether the seal hunt was going well, even the date of breakup-the day the Kuskokwim River finally thawed.
Before she knew better, she talked about such things with the other girls, and they in turn talked to their families about her whenever they returned home on breaks. Lily always stayed in Fairbanks. But then, one break, one of her classmates said that her father wanted to meet Lily, and so Lily made the long trip back to Bethel.
Her classmate's father was known as Peter to the white community, a capable, if grumpy, boatbuilder. But the entire Yup'ik community knew him as one of the last shamans.
“Among every generation of Yup'ik,” Lily told me, “there are those who are granted special sight, and special powers.” If you were sick, if you were worried about the presence or absence of fish or game, you went to the shaman. When to move to fish camp, when to return to town-all these things the shaman knew. But, she added, “the missionaries hated shamans. They told the people that the shamans were just magicians-people who got in the way of God.”
Peter had gotten in the way of God for a long time and had suffered for it, suffered physically he told people, as though God were throwing an elbow every time they passed. Old and hurting and lonely, Peter was looking for someone to take his place.
But Lily? Could it be possible that the magic should have survived in this girl? Lily's long-gone father was a kass'aq; she was being educated far from home; she was female. But after a day of observing her and another day speaking with her, Peter decided that Lily was, in fact, gifted.
Or rather, able to receive the gift: it really wasn't for him to choose; they'd have to go out, deep into the tundra, to see for sure.
He wouldn't tell her where they were going, he wouldn't let anyone else come with them. They traveled downriver for several miles, until they came to a bend where the river had worn much of the bank away, exposing a small bluff that looked as though it were built of layered chocolate. He found a place to beach the boat, and had her climb up the bank with him. Then they went walking. Do not be afraid, he said, but this is a place for-
“Ircenrrat.” Lily knew this. Little people. Sprites. They could be friendly or not, Lily told me, depending on how you behaved. There beside Peter, Lily was worried. Walking along that eroded stretch of riverbank was not good behavior. Growing up, she'd always been told to avoid this place.
“Let's look for mouse food,” Peter said. Lily just wanted to leave, but Peter insisted. Tundra lemmings foraging for the winter would often build up little subterranean caches of roots and stems that Yup'ik men and women would later seek out. (Dried fish or cracker crumbs might be left by way of thanks.) It took a practiced eye to spot and follow the little pathways the lemmings wove through the tundra, and a practiced hand to find the soft or spongy areas that signaled a likely spot. Lily was surprised to see that she was having more success than Peter.
She was looking over at him at one point, wondering what he was up to, as she sunk her hands into the tundra moss and cottongrass. Then she felt something odd-warm and slick. When she looked down, she saw that she'd uncovered a roiling cache of insects-worms, beetles, ants, all slithering through her fingers. She yelped and tried to leap up, but somehow, Peter had made it to her side. He held her down.
“ Melquripsaq: the worms, the insects! You have found them,” he said, smiling and breathless. “The ircenrrat have let you find their magic.”
“Let go of me!” said Lily, about to scream. Several of the insects- bigger and stranger than ones she'd ever seen-had begun to trail over her wrists, up her forearms.
“Wait,” Peter said. “Let it come to you.”
“No!” Lily shrieked. She could feel them swarming now, prickling up past her elbows.
“Wait!” Peter shouted. “You'll see! You must do this!”
“No!” Lily yelled, and broke free. She swung her arms wildly, clapped her hands together, scraped at her scalp.
Peter fell to his knees and searched the grass. “Too soon,” he cried.
Lily looked down. Her arms were clear. She looked around. No trace of insects. She walked back to the cache. Empty.
Peter stood and walked back to the boat. “I cannot say what will happen to you now,” Peter said once she'd joined him. Lily later left for Fairbanks without his having said another word to her. His daughter did not return to school.
Lily told no one about her trip out on the tundra with Peter. But back at school, if the other girls ever started talking about shamans, about the stories the elders used to tell, Lily would listen carefully. That's how she learned that her experience was not unique; many shamans before her had sought and received their powers the same way. One or two of the other girls said they had uncovered buginfested caches as well, but none had ever plunged their hands in, frightened either by the bugs themselves or because they knew magic was at work.
And something was at work in Lily. A strange thing had happened after she'd left the tundra with Peter. Her previous abilities had dimmed. Where once she could look at a girl, even from a distance, and know her village, what her father was like, whether she'd been kissed, or smell the air midwinter and know if the summer would be wet or dry, now she needed to touch something to know anything about it at all. Even then, the knowledge she gained was shot through with static, sometimes to the point of incoherence.
She tested herself and found she did better with people than with objects. She might sit at a desk or hold a book and get a sense of who had done so before her, but these stirrings were faint. But if she shook a hand, received a hug, that contact might grant her visibility into the other person's past or, more rarely, future. Sometimes she'd feel a strange sensation in her hands and forearms- qunguaguuk,-as though the insects she'd uncovered were skittering along her skin once more.
She returned to Bethel at the end of the school year, but it was a bitter homecoming. Peter had died, his family moved away. Before he'd died, though, he must have told others about the trip he and Lily had taken, because everyone knew what had happened. No one approved.
Those who had rejected traditional beliefs and become enthusiastic converts to Christianity rejected Lily for seeking to indulge in “the black arts,” as one missionary termed it. But Lily received even sharper censure from those elders who still had an admiration for, if not faith in, older Yup'ik traditions. A gift had been presented to Lily, and she had refused it. On the tundra, rejecting a gift freely given-whether the gift was shamanic powers or the season's first seal-was unconscionable.
But then, what do you expect, people said. She's a girl. A girl whose mother disappeared with a Russian sailor. This girl, half Yup'ik, a shaman? Peter had made a mistake. The ircenrrat had made a mistake. Lily tried to explain, she hadn't sought the job, she didn't want the job, but that only made matters worse.
In time, Lily realized that it wasn't just her who was making the Yup'ik community mad. It was the world, its missionaries, its kass'at, all flooding the tundra with new ways, food, language, ideas. Even if one no longer needed the services of a shaman to heal a sick child or predict weather, you still wanted one around, as a link to that other, older world they'd all once known. And with Peter dead, and Lily ducking the job, there really wasn't anyone around. Now, there was a young man from Lower Kalskag, a good distance upriver, who came to town occasionally. There were those who said he was a shaman, said they'd even seen him fly. But others said he only flew when he drank, and the only way you'd see him fly is if you drank,
too-a lot.
Townspeople pressured Lily to leave. Go to your parents, they said. Go to Russia, they said. Go live with the other kass'at. Leave us alone. Lily weathered a winter of this and then decided to do as she was told. She'd go to Anchorage. And from there, maybe Russia. Maybe anywhere.
She waited through the spring, and just as the summer began and she was getting ready to leave, she found a reason to stay.
He was Japanese.
HER REASON HAD BEEN living, temporarily, in the back stockroom of Sam's Universal Supply. The Supply was Bethel 's second, and lesser, general store, and Lily worked there as a cashier.
Saburo spoke English fairly well, a little better than Sam, in fact, who had been born an unknown number of years ago to Japanese immigrant parents in Southern California. How Sam had made his way to Bethel, and whether he had done so on purpose, was never clear. But he'd done well once he'd arrived. He was kind, honest, fair to a fault, and extremely generous. Until the war with Japan began, his being Japanese attracted little attention- Bethel had a small but persistent collection of people who were neither white nor Yup'ik, and as a result, little discussed.
Saburo's arrival was only mysterious if you thought about it: one week he wasn't there, the next week he was. And people didn't think about it, not even Lily, at first. People were always passing through Sam's employ, particularly those, like Lily, who didn't quite fit in anywhere else.
She took Saburo at his word when he said he was a relative of Sam's; she didn't realize differently until they were a few days into a fishing trip together. Sam had suggested that Lily “show Saburo Alaska;” she had thought he was making fun. But then, it was summer; almost all of the Yupiit and many of the whites had already left town, journeying south and west to fish camps across the vast, marshy delta that surfaced each year beneath the lingering sun.
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