Ordinary Wolves (31 page)

The small crowd ah'ed.

Jerry scratched his cheek contemplatively with the claw of the crowbar.

Her pointer wasn't actually at the renowned Kuguruk site, but miles upriver, on the island near Franklin's igloo,
exactly
where he'd built his
initial crap pit too close to the cutbank and after the big Breakup of 1976 it had sluffed out
its
articles.

Outside in the sun, Jerry paused to pull a linty stick of gum out of his pocket. His big thumbnail scraped away tatters of wrapper. He bit it in half and handed over the other half.

“Gum?”

“Why don't we ever say anything?” I muttered.

He chewed, too loud.

“People at home chase bears every time they see a track! They leave the skin. If the bear's skinny or eating fish they leave the whole thing. They boil up bear for dinner, then go play city league, not have a feast for the friggin' white people. Except Tommy—he blasts every bear and saves only the gall bladders to sell to the Koreans.”

Jerry pinched damp gum wrapper off his tongue. “Native worshipers. It's a designer religion. Part of talking about going off to live in a cabin, but staying in range of Kmart.” He glanced in mild surprise at the crowbar in his hand. “We're white, better to keep your mouth shut. Abe doesn't like conflict—neither do Eskimos. They just swallow it and walk away. And laugh. So laugh, Cutuk.”

“And get drunk,” I growled, “and beat somebody up.”

“That's
after
the traditional feast.”

We laughed and turned toward the eight-story dorms. I knew the lawns from stories Iris had sent home. The students throwing footballs and Frisbees might have been the same ones she described. We stepped inside the brass-trimmed front doors. I tensed, expecting a security guard to stop us, or people to stare, spotting instantly that I was too ignorant and confused to be a college student. Jerry had agreed to come, even though he had things maybe the law could take. A laughing fiancée, a Japanese truck, an honest reputation poured into the foundations of a lot of buildings. The sack of ice cooled my hand. The curve of the Bacardi bottle showed through. The lobby was quiet and deserted. Jerry stopped at a candy machine. Wordlessly, he handed me a granola bar. We never seemed to take time for meals, and now Mrs. Spenholt and her anthropology flavored the oat bar rancid as dried trout belly.

Jerry led into an elevator. The machine fell at the top, and queasiness greased my stomach. We tiptoed up a half flight of stairs. Jerry inserted his crowbar into the door. He paused and tried the knob. It turned. He grinned sheepishly and motioned me through the steel doorway. We moved excitedly out onto the black roof.

Heat waves curdled the horizons. We peered over the eight-story cliff just as a university security vehicle was driving away. It braked and stopped. We eased down out of sight, like stalking Canada geese. A brown Ford passed on the road and the security vehicle turned and followed it.

I knelt and opened the One-Five.

Jerry sipped and coughed. “You drink this stuff?”

“In Takunak it seems normal.” I realized we were whispering. “Here, I brought a Coke to pour in when there's room.”

He flicked a leaf off his shorts, over the edge. It floated, fluttering down. He clanked the crowbar beside him and peeled off his sweatshirt. We took off our shoes and cut our toenails with our knives and sharpened the knives on the bar and put them away. A pair of birds sang piercingly down in the trees. “White-crowned sparrows,” Jerry said. “What did we call them, spits?” I nodded, and we called to them. A puddle spread out from the bag of ice and water tongued west. “Building's not level,” he pointed out. A raven landed on a Dumpster. We cawed and he tilted his head in surprise.

The sun was a burning eye; I stared until the sky blobbed black. I ripped the sack and scooped ice into Jerry's hands. Half of it was gone, melted, flowed across the roof and evaporated. Like my life, I thought. I was quickly getting drunk, mad at the city down below for taking the animals' beautiful land and turning it into ridiculous things: parking lots and strip malls, pensions, section lines, and new hairstyles.

I flung a handful of ice. Together we flung handfuls, higher, as high as our strong arms could throw. Store-bought ice. The cubes flashed in the sunlight. They fell, exploding in small dry disappointing puffs on the asphalt. Looking down it was obvious—like so much else on Iris's path, I'd come up this trail too late, at a cost too great. I was here, but I wasn't
all here. I was rushing and earning, waiting and hurrying, but somehow not even here. My legs stuck out of the shorts, white.
What am I doing wearing these half things?
The stun of admitting to being lost whacked into me and put its hands in my guts, and it hurt. All the storms, all the mountains and rivers and hills—and here I was, finally lost beside a street with a name. I was less than a wolverine in the wake of America, and the sky and the ground and tomorrow and everything else grayed because I was nothing.
Is this what Melt Wolfglove brought home? Is this how villagers feel when the parade of pretty white social workers climb off the airplanes, step in the snow for an hour, and urge them toward college and careers, away from suicide, Lysol, and the land? All my longing to be Eskimo
—
did I get myself no browner, just the damaged parts inside?
I leaned out, watching the ice pulverize. A heavy pull tugged me—like an under-the-ice fishnet set in too much current—to dive slicing into the waiting pavement, warm and black and deep as forever. Suicide, nowadays, was as Eskimo as hunting. I could finally be one of the People.

Jerry flicked a lump of dried bird shit. We watched the white sail slowly down to the earth. “Why did Abe take us Out?” I asked vacantly. “I mean . . . I am glad we grew up with animals instead of wall sockets and Little League, but what are the stories no one tells me? What happened? Did we have a baby porcupine?”

“She was mine! She liked glue.” Jerry smiled down at memories.

Birds sang down there.

“She ate the face off Mom's guitar. It wasn't spruce, those are the expensive guitars. It was a plywood laminate. Too bad, that was her favorite thing.”

“No soap opera stuff? Abe didn't shoot off Newt Clemens's hand? Mom didn't run off with January?”

“Newt shot his own hand. Drunk.” Jerry's lip curled. “Maybe it was because Janet went with Melt after Lumpy was born. Who knows.” Jerry diverted the puddle with his toe. “We're the same as everybody else. Abe's mom sent him to Barrow, to talk his dad home. I guess she never questioned whether she'd lose her Picasso to the barren arctic wasteland, too.”

“He went to college in Chicago. January said that.”

“Sure,” Jerry grinned cynically, “years later. He happened to suddenly have a spare airplane to sell to pay for it. But when he was done, back we went to the people and place Abe respected. He didn't care what other people did as long as he didn't have to be near them doing it.”

“You're saying Abe killed his dad?”

Jerry's eyes jumped. “No! He worshiped the guy. Our grandfather was a free man all the way. He did what pleased him. Abe's the same, just kinder and gentler about it.”

He swung the crowbar in a slow arc.
Our parents are inside us,
Dawna's voice teased.
Have to be careful what we let out.
I said, “That was thirty and forty years ago! It's almost Alaska history. What are we supposed to think?”

“It's almost none of our business.”

As we talked we had moved. We were both standing, feet on the edge. The bottle in my hand. The ground waiting. The city revved down there, McDonald's and Exxon and other transplanted chunks of the States, and we stood up here, two strangers from caribou skins and boiled beaver paws, ice in the basin and bears on the roof. Jerry shuffled close. “Stay in Fairbanks. It's pretty good. You'll get used to all the rules.” He pretended to pat my shoulder. My brother was no actor. He cared nothing for less than utilitarian movement. His hand was hard and tense. I knew he was prepared to grab me, to rip my skin apart with his nails if it came to that. It was a powerful thing to know. Powerful, though not enough to stay in this city for.

TWENTY

CHERYL´S CAN´T-GROWS´
yapping reminded me of the Caplins, a white couple who moved briefly to Takunak when I was sixteen. Stevie gave them a puppy, to be nice, and to keep it out of Lumpy's clutches. The dog was black. Being political creatures and far from home, the Caplins named the dog what they thought was the word for gift in Iñupiaq—
Atchiq.
Come here,
Atchiq.
Roll over,
Atchiq.
From the beginning there was confusion, as the word only meant “to name.” Being adults, and Christian, the Caplins didn't, the first day, learn the word for woman's part—
utchuk.
I didn't know exactly which part, just that people were laughing at white people again. Stevie wasn't enamored. The dog learned to slip its collar. Worse, the Caplins overpronounced Iñupiaq words and confused i's and a's and u's. Across town, Tom Caplin shouting, “AATCHUUUQ? AAAATCHIIK?” Lonnie Caplin over the village CB:
click, shhhhh,
“Has anyone seen my little black Utchuk?”

Billy Feathers finally shot the dog for keeping his dogs barking during
a
Charlie's Angels
rerun. He stuffed it under a tarp on his sled. He couldn't take it to the dog dump. He ended up taking it out on the flats toward the Shield Mountains. Used it for trapping bait. Got two wolverine. Nelta Skuq thought he was quite a hunter, and he got her, too, though in Takunak that wasn't near as big a deal as two wolverine.

In front of January's locked door, I realized that all those people at home were so alive and talkative inside me that I hadn't questioned how they might really be.

I squeezed into his spit window. Dishes were heaped in the sink, set with egg and concrete yogurt. The table was forested with Kmart ads, newspapers, UFO anthologies, precarious Spam cans of snuff juice. A tube of toothpaste lay gnarled and open on the counter. With the Martians already among us, January didn't have patience to fool with a cap on his toothpaste. Beside me Jerry's spirit took up space, slowly growing silent and thin.

Hitchhiking from Fairbanks had been great, like seeing a hole in the city's armor you could enter where you could talk with strangers. Now, wheels hissed invitingly on the wet street. The trailer hummed—that sound of travelers in the distance, but none really coming. Cheryl's window was dark. Looking at it made me lonesome, aware of the heartlessness of change. She had left nine days ago, for Ohio, noncommittal on the phone about whether she wanted company or not. Dental hygiene.
White smiles.

I knelt by the corner of the couch. Eased hundred-dollar bills out and mixed them with the ones I'd brought. Nine thousand fifty-three dollars. In aluminum foil, I flattened ninety bills, pressed the wrinkles out. A horn honked. Boot steps passed outside. The trailer creaked. I listened, moved window to window.

I wandered the rooms nervously, stuffing the money under things and retrieving it again. I hid it under the furnace and, finally, back under the couch. I dialed Lance. No answer. Dialed Dawna. Her number had been disconnected. Dialed Iris. Her phone rang and rang. Gloom rose through me like the stink of bad meat. Money and the telephone—I hated them—leaving you worse than alone, connected to a billion people with no way to buy what you really wanted and no one to call.

I unpacked my Army sleeping bag. Plucked all the new loose feathers and tried to think, here in the city's imitation silence. What mattered? I was supposed to be like Enuk and know; not like some trust-fund Californian who had the hard job of figuring that out. What did I really want? To be Eskimo? That dream had disintegrated. To be a hunter? To be funny, rich, have cars and girls? “One generic American dream, coming right up,” I teased aloud. “Get rich and buy a house.”

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?”