Ordinary Wolves (15 page)

Dawna's bare fingers sank into the side of my neck. She seldom wore gloves; she held her sleeves shut, as if she were simply waiting to leave this place of mittens and gloves.

“Cutuk, you know the nurse who came when I was nine? Alicia McBride?

“She was twenty-three. So pretty. Fellas all thought they were gonna make something about it. But she wasn't like that. She wouldn't smoke weed with my aunts. Alicia knew medicine, and good poems even. She never try let me eat porcupine shits like Melt does if I get stomachache. When I had hiccups she let me stare in her eyes and they go away. She asked me what I liked best. I said ‘pictures.'”

Dawna stopped walking. “I think she liked herself the right amount. Like your dad, maybe.”

I stared across the darkness, at the school generator shack throbbing under a cone of yellow light.
“Abe?”
Dawna had never talked about way-inside feelings—I didn't think anyone in Takunak even had them—and she never said Abe's name.

She leapt a few steps sideways. “Look at me!” She giggled. “Pretend I'm just a picture and say what you see?”

Dawna stood still. The morning night and streetlight shared shadows on her face, glinting her eyes, laying dusk caves under her chin. Frost jeweled the black silk of her hair. She stood with her knees close, slightly bent in the cold, her stiff hard tennis shoes pressed together. A smile lifted the top line of her lip, folding it back provocatively. Behind her the school waited, for me a terribly cold heated place, for Dawna a pasture of popularity. My chest was full of air and empty. I loved her. I wanted to hold her. The magazines and TV didn't know; beauty was Eskimo and brown and named Dawna Wolfglove.

“The prettiest girl ever,” I breathed.

Her smile vanished. “I want to go away where people are not messed up. Don't try let it be tough.”

“You're—” The words that came to me I could see were useless as lazy dogs and I let them go.

“You're the only one I can talk to, and you can't listen. My brothers, my aunts, my cousins. They're being losers.”

I stared, dismayed.

“Alicia said I could follow her and go to college. But Melt threw her letters. Now she's somewhere and I don't know where even.” Dawna glared. She shoved my shoulders like the welcome to a fight. She was lithe, strong muscled like Enuk, quick-tempered. On New Year's Eve she gave Elvis Jr. two black eyes. “He was drunk and tried to be funny to me,” she'd said. Which meant he'd tried to pants and rape her. She shrugged when she told me, and stuck out her tongue and laughed.

“So what, I'm pretty? Just like everybody only wants in my pants. Is that all you want, Cutuk? You want to
nulik?”

“Dawna! That's not what I meant.” My face felt red, my voice thick with disgust. I laid an arm across her shoulders, clumsy with uncertainty.

“I need to leave around here!” She shrugged away. “This is some kinda no-place place to be from.”

I trudged for the school. My safe smile on. “Where you think you'll maybe go?”

“Cutuk!” Now Dawna sounded like she cared. None of it made sense—didn't the whole town love her and think I was dogshit? Lower than dogshit. Dogshit was everywhere. Dogshit was normal. “I'll go Anchorage,” she said, pronouncing it the way the religious ladies pronounced
heaven.
A twinge tightened my stomach. I heard Iris's same unhesitating tone,
First boat after Breakup.
And now she was down in Fairbanks, deep in her college lectures, scribbling notes. Her letters were scribbled notes, happy rushed things cluttered with friends. Meanness flowered inside; suddenly I hated Dawna, and the cities because they were coming, and already claiming the best of everything we had. I felt the pull to go, too. Abe had mentioned there used to be bars in Anchorage and Fairbanks with signs out front that said NO NATIVES. I didn't quite believe that he hadn't gotten confused as usual and really meant NO WHITES. I knew exactly how
that
sign would make me feel; the other I couldn't say. Probably just
as mad. Hopefully not gleeful. Maybe it was true, and Dawna would feel what I felt whenever people aimed their eyes my way.

Suddenly I felt cheap. Had to spit, and shake my face. Dawna better
never
have to feel the kind of crushed stuff inside my skin. We walked on in the silent movies of our thoughts, our eyes flitting along the parallel grooves left by snowgo skis on snow compressed hard and white as porcelain.

 

 

THE BASKETBALL BOUNCES OFF MY FACE.

“How come you always never can't catch nothing?” Nippy Skuq Jr. had a gash across his forehead and a brand-new shiner. He stank sour. Booze sweat. I thought about telling him I didn't grow up with balls, but it didn't seem like the thing to say. His brother Elvis Jr. rushed across the snow court. I thought about telling Elvis that his mom had named him Junior, too—not after his wife-beating bumpy-eyed dad, but a fat-chinned singing white drunk,
in a movie.

Elvis and Nippy weren't even in school anymore; they had dropped out and now their lives balanced between the bottle and the basketball rim. They'd joined the National Guard. For a month. Then returned with cropped hair and word of how they'd served in the Marines and been taught kung fu.

I started laughing. I couldn't control it. It happened when things were completely unfunny. My palm unconsciously wandered up, to flatten my nose.

Nippy shoved my shoulder. “'Cause you're
naluaġmiu.
Ha!”

“Don't be mean,” Dollie Feathers cried. She was Dawna's cousin. Treason and her were “going out,”
guuq.

My nose watered. I backstepped, hands like flippers protecting my eyes. Kids gathered in the familiar loose circle. Elvis moved forward for the kick, the face kick we all delivered in our karate daydreams. Suddenly he was my size, no longer the giant he'd been all my life. I'd grown up hauling logs, holding back huskies. I grabbed his foot and threw him on
the ground. My fists were square clubs that swung themselves. That face that leered at everything I had ever been—I hit it down.

I expected the usual boots, brothers, and cousins on my back, but Lumpy dragged me off, his thick forearm clamping my throat in a fancy headlock he'd brought us home from Nome's Anvil Mountain Correctional Center.

“Enough,” he growled in my ear.

The ring of faces were sharp. Elvis came into focus, puffy and the corners of his eyes sticky with blood. The circle stared. “What you try to prove?” Elvis's sister screamed. “Nobody wants honkies around here. Go back to Dallas or someplace.” She spat and threw an open 7UP can at my head.

I dodged it. “I'm not from Dallas.” My voice sounded wet.

“Aiy!”
Girls jeered and stepped away, like nervous herd animals, but acting nauseated. Nervous caribou, at least, had never been nauseated by me.

Little kids raced up to see what was going on. They skidded to stops, spitting and patting snowballs. There wasn't anything grosser than me to throw at on the playground. I didn't know which way to look, if I should blink more or less. If I should run, and which way not to catch a beating. I slumped there—only I could win a fight this badly.

“Elvis, you got what you been asking him for, how many years now,” Stevie said scornfully. He leaned out a window of the school. His fingers were on the sill. His words were electric. I lifted my head, eager to beat up anybody else available, basking in the lee of scorn, for one time aimed the other way. And no matter where the years might haul us, I promised I would not forget what I owed Stevie Wolfglove for standing up for Cutuk Hawcly on the packed snow, gum wrappers, and spit ice of the Takunak school playground.

NINE

BEHIND WOODROW WASHINGTON JR.´S
new government house the Arctic Cat snowgo gleamed on the snow. Woody flicked a cigarette stub away. “It got only”—he peered at the speedometer—“only four thousand mile. Not bad, huh?”

“The radius of the earth,” I murmured. A ways to travel on a snowgo.

Woody grinned and shrugged. He had a slow smile that the women liked. “Maybe not that far I guess.”

“Thousand dollars? How come you're selling it?”

Charley Casket walked up. He spat. We talked about the weather for a minute. He held out his hand, cupping a jade arrowhead. “Fifty bucks. You could sell it five hunnert, I guess. Could be more.”

Woody ignored him and nodded toward his other snowgo. “I got new Panther. When I go Prudhoe everybody always borrow. Goddamn, when I come home all my good stuffs jus' be junks. My clothes even, ready for dumps.” Woody wore an expensive leather jacket. A gold watch hung
loose and cool on his brown wrist. He was a good-looking man and dressed like a catalog.

I knelt down, admiring the thick springs and shocks under the tracks. Charley gripped the throttle, wide open.

“Let that be,” Woody said coldly.

Charley's hand dropped. “I gonna get new Indy six-fifty. Next month, alright. For sure.”

Woody didn't respond.

I looked at pictures in my mind—riding up to the school Monday morning. Searching valleys for Enuk. Impulsively, I handed Woody my rumpled thousand-dollar Alaska Permanent Fund check. The state had started giving a yearly oil-money bonus to every man, woman, and child. This year, the second, had been three hundred and eighty-six dollars. Charley's eyes followed the check. I didn't bargain with Woody. Bargaining was white, uncomfortable. Regular people said,
I'll pay you when my check comes,
and if by then they arbitrarily decided the price was too high, they just didn't pay.

He ran his thumbnail along the zeros. “How I'm gonna cash this before I
—Yuay,
Cutuk! You never spent your last year's Permanent Fund?” Woodrow grinned. Only a white person was crazy enough to save a thousand-dollar check. For a year.

“I didn't have anything to buy. Abe wanted me to buy a wind generator. Or solar panels, but they're made by ARCO, too.” I trailed off; Abe's fossil-fuel philosophy was meaningless here. I felt anxious to drive away. I had just turned eighteen but still glanced about, as if there was a hurry, before Abe stepped around the corner of the house, reminding: “What about your dogs? And the petroleum just to manufacture the
seat
on that machine . . .”

Woody stepped up on his porch and placed the check in his Eddie Bauer leather wallet. Charley pushed his gloves in his pocket and wandered west watching the ground go under him. I yanked the starter. The snowgo sparked to life with a throaty roar, full of its own dangerous power. My body seemed to expand with the vibrating machine. I felt young and lunging with strength, not only from the engine, but also the
potency of buying. This was why people lusted after money. Why villagers seldom walked unless they had to.

I was still floating when I located Nelta Skuq, the gas pump attendant. She had slipped home from work and was with her parents, eating caribou soup, the bowl right up close to her lips. Her mom had a tremendous necklace of bruises across her throat. Nelta had equally tremendous hickeys. Her youngest brothers—or her kids; I didn't know which—ate strawberry Pop-Tarts out of a box. They all hunkered around a glowing hot plate. A Jesus hologram hung over the kitchen counter. The floor was unfurnished to the walls, the linoleum gouged and worn through to plywood. Around the worn holes, the linoleum had been stapled down with hundreds of staples. An empty whiskey bottle lay in the doorway to the toilet. Skuqs' toilet was clogged. With dog chain. Folks in town knew these things, whose flush toilet worked and who was back to crapping in a kerosene can. A whitefronted goose—what people called a luck-a-luck—lay on the floor as if he'd been shot that morning. A luck-a-luck was all about the open air of spring, and bewildering to see in February. It took effort to remember that this house and all the other HUD houses that replaced people's cabins had been sparkling new American store-bought houses three years ago.

“They buying gas today?”

“They are.” Nelta continued slurping her soup. She had ten or eleven brothers and sisters. Some were in jail. The Skuq girls were making babies, handing them over to their parents, leaving no clear line between generations.

I leaned by the door, uncertain what to do with my feet, hands, eyes. Nippy Skuq Sr. leered out the cracked, duct-taped window. My snowgo was parked next to the two his family owned. He sucked at his one front tooth. His lips puckered up and down. “You get snowgo, huh, Cutuk?” I nodded, disbelieving of the speed of the village grapevine. He guffawed, coughed, hacked, and spat in a Hills Bros can. “No more live in camp. They get you now. Ha! Now you gonna alla time need big money for little part.” He roared with gleeful laughter. “They get ta last Eskimo camp boy today. Ha! Ha! Ha!”

Nelta eventually filled my five-gallon can. The gas cost three dollars and fifty cents per gallon. Going down the hill I squeezed the brake. Nothing happened. The speedometer digits hadn't shifted either. Old Nippy was wise as the wolves.

 

 

AT THE WOLFGLOVES´.
I paced the snow, impatient for Stevie to get home so we could go hunting. Figment stretched to the end of his chain and sniffed the snowgo. He lifted his leg to piss on the ski.

“Get away!”

He winced as his frostbit testicles swayed. I felt bad, and a little shaky and uncertain about my purchase and what this new addition to the family was going to mean. Figment walked in a circle, came back and pressed his smiling head against my thigh. “Just when you dogs were learning to pass another team on the trail.” I sat on the seat and petted his wide face. “What are you smiling about, fool?”