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.
Sled dogs barked and howled all over town. Our dogs raised their muzzles to inhale the sweet scents of love, food, and fights. Their tail sinews tightened; their eyes gleamed in the corners. They yanked sideways on the necklines, sniffing stupidly into other dog yards. Loose dogs ran out and held lightning skirmishes and growling matches with our confused team. Our dogs didn’t know how to calmly pass another team or loose dogs, or even how to run past another dog yard. At the Wolfgloves’ house, Abe smacked George and Figment with the axe handle and the team hunkered down while we chained them to willows.
Janet Wolfglove leaned out the door. “Praise Lord!” she shouted. “Go
