Ordinary Wolves (8 page)

I figured that, being Enuk's granddaughter, she should want to learn to scrape skins and sew.

She leaned forward and put her hands on the cold paper of the stack of brown boxes and peered past them into the interior of the Twin Otter. Her fingers were long and brown. One of her little fingernails was unusually wide, and she kept it tucked out of sight. I thought that one fingernail was the only imperfect thing about her whole person, all condensed into one point, a mere mosquito bite of badness, and I was jealous because my eyes felt wrong, my hair, my speech, my entire skin felt wrong.

Everyone inched closer to the plane. I fantasized that Abe would step forward and offer to start the airplane. Why wouldn't he do such things? He must remember how. It would be so easy for him, and I would have friends after that. But Abe was kneeling, biting ice off Farmer's feet, nodding attentively as twenty-four-year-old Charley Casket bragged how to shoot wolves with a .22 Magnum.

“You got any catalog orders coming?” Dawna whispered.

“Only what Abe ordered—things we
need.
Vanilla. Paints. Sled bolts.” Vanilla wasn't sold in the store. People would buy all of it the first day and get drunk.

Dawna's laughter pealed out. “Bolts? Like washers and stuff?”

People stared. Dawna didn't flinch. She was the only one in the village—besides Abe—who didn't seem to care all the time what everybody thought. Dawna's gaze flicked the crowd and caressed the last mail handed from the plane. Commiseration flexed under my ribs, and I cherished the feeling that we had a desire in common. A longing, for something, too exotic even to know how to name. Something better than sled bolts and vanilla.

“You wanna try race?” asked a boy. He was my size and had the wide friendly features of a Washington. Kids stood expectantly. I glanced at Dawna, and across at Stevie, talking to Jerry beside our dog team.

“'Kay, then,” I said, trying to avoid two prominent town taboos—acting scared and sounding smart. We raced to the schoolhouse. The boy wore fast, light tennis shoes. “My
mukluks
are too slow,” I panted as we walked back. It had been close. I knew I could easily beat him if we traded shoes, but no kid here would be caught in
mukluks
.

“Aiy,
try blame.”

A group of big kids surrounded me. “You wanna fight?” someone asked. Elvis and his younger brother. I sped up.

“You're
naluaġmiu,
huh?” Elvis sneered.

“I dunno.”
Naluaġmiu
meant white person; the Eskimo dictionary didn't list it as a dirty word but everyone knew better. All conversations with Elvis were to the point—usually that one.

“Aiy, kinnaq.”

That meant dumb. My face reddened.

“Sure try fool!” Kids jeered.
“Aiy!
He sure get red!”

“You wanna fight, honky?” A boy yanked my wool hat down over my eyes. I dragged it back up, but the elastic was old, stretched and saggy. Whatever
honky
meant, I must be one of those, too.

“What's six times six?” asked Lumpy Wolfglove. I smiled, relieved to recognize him. Lumpy was seventeen and in eighth grade. There were
three things about Lumpy: he was good at math, he was a great rifle shot, and he liked to torture puppies and mash their heads with hammers. He was Stevie and Dawna's part-brother.

“Thirty-six.” Iris had taught me math for as long as I could remember in the winter evenings when it was too dark to do anything and Abe wouldn't yet light the lamp because that would waste kerosene.

“Yuay!
How 'bout seven times eight?”

“Fifty?” I glanced around for smiles and shifted toward the airfield.

“You always know ninja?” Elvis asked. The boys waited.

“I don't know lotta Eskimo words.”

“Aiy!
Not even. So dumb.”

“You're some kinda
kinnaq.”

Someone choked me in a headlock. I twisted his thumb. He grunted in pain and shoved me forward on my knees.

“Hi-yaa.” Elvis spun. His boot blurred. It slammed to a stop against my ear. I skidded behind a snowdrift, other boots in my back, neck, and face. In my head his stretched-out brag, “No fuggin' problem.” My mouth tasted salty. This part of town I was familiar with—this was the part I wanted to get past. I couldn't see the crowd and hoped none of the adults had seen.

A woman on the edge of the crowd shouted. “Hey, what you try let them boys do? Don't always pick fight.” She turned back to the airplane. My eyes joined the laughing boys as they jogged away on the hard-packed snow.

 

 

AT THE NATIVE CACHE,
Jerry offered to watch the dogs while Iris and I accompanied Abe into the store. For Jerry it was no great sacrifice—he knew shopping with Abe and without money had slim potential. And he was big and powerful and had the axe handle. Nobody would mess with him. Beside the door I rubbed snow on my swollen lip and flung the bloody slush under the steps. Jerry looked away. The storekeeper's Can't-Grow dog yapped from under the boards and gobbled the mouthfuls
of my blood and snow. I growled and it ran yelping under the building. Inside the crowded cabin, a lit Coleman lantern hung from a nail on the ridgepole. Guns leaned behind the counter. The walls glittered with a miscellany of store-bought items: nylon jackets, Timex watches, fishing lures, sunglasses, aftershave. Carnation canned milk. Framed holograms of Jesus. Wolverine traps. In the center of the floor three men stood by the stove, talking, occasionally laughing at a joke kept behind the walls of Iñupiaq. I heard the word
naluaġmiu
and turned away from the fire.

In the back, two of Abe's homemade birch tables were on consignment. One had sold. Abe picked out sparse supplies that we couldn't order cheaper through the mail. He didn't enjoy being in a store. He believed most of what was sold here to be unnecessary clutter blocking the view to life, and he suffered the task patiently only because he didn't want to come back anytime soon. He was blind to the shiny watches and jackets that hooked Iris's and my eyes. “Hello,” he said to the men by the fire. Abe liked them. He didn't count it as any of his business that Nippy Skuq nearly killed his wife once or twice a month, drunk and beating her; that Melt Wolfglove talked about white people as if he were the Eskimo gestapo; that Tommy Feathers shot every bear he ever caught sign of—even when they were skinny or had cubs—and left them dead because a bear had once taken their dried fish when he was a kid and his family had to go without. For one night.

Iris and I carried our parkas under our arms and searched WASHINGTON boxes for apples. Not even their faint clean smell lingered on the blue tissues they had once curled in. Iris wet one of the tissues with her mouth. Her smile looked strange, like it did when she was picking blueberries and holding a bitter green berry under her tongue to keep from eating every other handful when we needed to be putting berries away for winter.

She dabbed at the blood on my lip. “Nobody can see to the inside of us. Nobody's taking us apart like it feels, Cutuk. Smile. 'Kay? Think of that kaleidoscope Jerry made out of tomato paste cans. Remember the mouse turds he sneaked in with the beads? Think of a smile inside a kaleidoscope. Come on! Come on! Let's check for oranges!”

Tommy Feathers leered at her and wiped his chin. Iris dropped the mud-died tissue back in the box. She found a last onion, composting in the papery brown skins in the bottom of a mesh sack. She led me to the counter.

“No apples?” she begged. She smiled prettily at Newt Clemens, the store-keeper. I wiped my lip on my fingers and stood awkward as bent wire.

“Arii
. We got nothing. Sorry,
Bun.”
Newt's wrist stub showed smooth in his sleeve. He only had one hand. His right arm was thick. It could hold a rifle, people said. Before he'd shot his hand off, he'd been a real bad drunk,
guuq. Guuq
in Eskimo meant “it is said,” a convenient word for passing gossip.

Newt glanced up. “You big boy small laugh. How come?”

I dropped my gaze and stood mute. What made a person shoot his hand off? Something bad. Maybe hate inside, but not enough to die? No one had picked Newt up off the bloody floor. He picked himself up and cinched a piece of fishing line around his blasted stump,
guuq.
Because of that pain, Abe said, Newt had stopped drinking and turned into a kind man. Abe said that pretty much showed Newt had been a kind man to begin with, otherwise he'd have gone the other way, like a dog that's a biter.

Newt shook Abe's hand. It was strange. A white thing to do. They grinned at each other like old friends. I decided they must have done things together, way in the past. They never hunted or camped now.

“Onion.” Abe nodded. “That'll be good with fresh moose heart.”

Iris kicked my foot. “The season's closed,” she whispered. “That poster on the back wall says all the rules. Only one brown bear every four years. And there's a season on ptarmigan!”

“Yep. 'Sgood eating alright.” Newt paused, “Here's your fifty for your table I sell. Then—” He hunched over the cast iron cash register, rubbed his chin with his round wrist end, and peered at the confusing numbers. Abe reached over the counter and put a Bit-O-Honey candy bar on our pile.

Iris lifted an eyebrow. “Cutuk. Something's wrong with Dear-Old.”

I watched, wishing he'd grabbed a candy bar with nothing as natural as honey.

“Sixty-seven fifty, for tat grub.” Newt squinted. “You got change? No
cash in town.” He had a stack of worn two-party checks in his powerful hand, ready to thumb them off for change if Abe had a bigger check.

Abe draped his arm on Iris's shoulder as he counted up the prices. “Shush, Otter,” he said. “How much for the onion?”

“Le's see,” Newt mused. “Little one. Dollar.” He smiled at Iris and slid a pack of spearmint gum across the counter and under her fingers.

Abe stuffed the onion down inside his warm parka. “Two dollars a gallon for kerosene? Do I owe you fifty-six?” Abe's voice was slow, innocent, uncertain. Now that he'd added the figures and stated that, he wouldn't argue if Newt said no, you owe eighty-one. It would mean we couldn't order an extra case of apples in the fall, but Abe would not dispute. I ignored the exchange and read the tag on a silver-blue jacket. A realization was dawning on me, that this was a requirement to being cool and Eskimo: WALLS, Size M, shell and lining 100% nylon, $97. Woven into that manufactured material was a slippery secret to being Eskimo.

“Could be tat's right, Abe.” Newt nodded. Pouches under his eyes wobbled.

Abe dug under his overpants, in pocket after pocket, to find his cash. The men by the fire watched. I locked eyes on the good jacket, pretending it meant nothing to me that white people weren't allowed credit.

 

 

OUTSIDE, THE LONG TWILIGHT
had faded to blue-black dusk in the north and stars twinkled as we ran the team down the hill to the Wolfgloves'. Their plank house stood near the buried riverbank. It was a cold shacky house, stifling in June. In Takunak we stayed there, or else with the Newtons, who were schoolteachers. The Newtons lived in school housing and owned a record player, an electric coffeepot, and a cake mixer and used paper towels as if they were free. Their boys, John and William, were the only boys in town with Whammo slingshots. Jerry said that people in the States had Mr. Coffee electric coffeepots. I took that to mean all States kids also had store-bought slingshots for shooting squirrels and camp robbers, and more importantly for surviving scary slingshot fights in their villages.

Occasionally we stayed downriver at Franklin's island in his dark igloo with meaningless poems pinned to the posts, and one-pot suppers—rice and rabbit, or whitefish and rice, or boiled meat with rice—and the same for breakfast and lunch. No kids. No candy. Worse than staying home. Crazy Joe's cabin was a mile farther downstream and the size of a tent. It had a square hole in the front you had to squeeze through, like a cache—Crazy Joe's Birdhouse, Abe called it. Joe prospected, and never went anywhere without his rock hammer and magnifying glass. Joe drank a tablespoon of urine and ate a tablespoon of dirt every day to stay healthy and close to the land. It was handy; his floor was dirt. When he was in gold dust he spent his winters near the equator and with beautiful women who wore some kind of airy flat shoes where you could see their painted toes,
guuq.

Occasionally in Takunak we stayed with the Spenholts, evangelical vegetarians from California who grew green alfalfa and mung bean sprouts under a purple battery-powered light. “The microEinsteins entering the window aren't sufficient,” Larry Spenholt would explain. “Not as photosynthetically active radiation.” His dark hair was swept back, voice nasal, eyes piercing. The Spenholts had an eight-year-old daughter, Rose, who cried if she had to go outside. She didn't let us play with her electric Legos. We were a waste of batteries.

The Spenholts were native-worshipers. Everything the villagers did was aboriginal. So special. But Larry and Song went silent if we mentioned skinning weasels or rendering moose kidney fat. They weren't the only ones in the village who believed white people shouldn't be allowed to hunt. The village council—depending on atmospheric conditions and cabin-fever epidemics—voted on random things that seemed a good idea to make illegal for white people to do: Own sled dogs. Haul firewood. Set under-ice nets. Build their own houses. The Spenholts were writing a book about living in the wilderness with the Iñupiat. Gossip said they'd be millionaires when the book got done. But they stayed inside a lot and didn't eat
patiq
bones or seal oil, so no one counted them as living here, just visiting.