stepped close. She smiled. “Hi, Cutuk. When you come?”
“While ago.” I looked at my mittens. Dawna had a heart-shaped face. Her wide eyes seemed to beg an answer to a question no one had heard. Her hands were bare and pulled into the sleeves of her white nylon jacket. She wore faded jeans, perfectly frayed around the bell-bottoms. Dawna was fourteen and had recently changed in ways that I found embarrassing to snag my eyes on, and impossible not to. Before last year I had thought she was dumb—the pastime she enjoyed most was cutting up Sears catalogs to make collages, and looking at the photographs in women’s magazines, wishing about cities far from Alaska. Sometimes she looked at the pictures upside down. Her dad, Melt, got mad when he caught her doing that. He ripped the magazines out of her fingers, cuffed her head, and threw her collages into the stove. “Don’t always sometimes try to think you’re something else,” he shouted.
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
