button of her work pants, I wondered what would happen if I let her hand slip free—an accident. If maybe she would be able to gouge out Kid’s eyes with her nails, scratch the mania from his face, and manipulate her other arm free so she could punch and kick her way into chaos, out of the trap, into the possibility that she wouldn’t be raped, into the possibility that someone, maybe a parking lot maintenance man, would notice suspicious activity before anything happened.
Then there came this point, when the girl was pinned in the back of some stranger’s parked pickup and Kid Cab was forcing her pants and panties off, when everyone’s mood switched. Before this there had been some laughter at the shit the girl was screaming—angry and aggressive insults. There had been the occasional joke about sexual performance. Sick stuff, of course. But when Kid started in with her pants, everyone’s jaw tensed and everyone got quiet like we had all bitten down on a mouthful of sand that we couldn’t spit. We were all under each other’s microscopes. The girl stopped screaming. The air was dead like we were sealed in a bag, and the only sounds were our breathing and the girl struggling, and we all watched each other, waiting for someone to fail. Waiting for the fake one to give in first.
It was then that I hit the girl in the face. I did it because she started screaming. Or maybe I did it because I thought it would be less painful for her if she were unconscious. Or maybe I was mad at the whole game—the never-ending cycle of attacks and paybacks. I hit her in the temple, and for a second I thought she went unconscious—her shouting stopped and her eyes closed and her head tipped to the side. But instead of nodding off, the girl being raped started to cry.
Valerie told Go-boy to call her later. “Okay?” she said. He didn’t answer.
The girls got in the boat and Mr. Larsen pushed off. Valerie still held on to the ulu. After being cleaned in the river it looked new again, almost too bright against her dark fingers.
Go-boy didn’t wave or nod or say anything. He was standing on the shore, shoulders slumped. Without looking at me he turned and walked toward the picnic table, stopped halfway, and sat on the embankment between patches of crabgrass.
“He’s filing an offense,” Go-boy said.
His forehead creased near his nose and his left eye squinted more than his right. He was biting his lower lip, almost chewing. He said, “It’s something like a misdemeanor.”
“You’re in trouble?”
“We both are.”
I was right there with him, but not sure what to do. I thought about asking Go why he’d said those things, why he hadn’t sold me out and turned me in, why he felt so responsible for me. I wanted to ask if he really had lied about the counts, but in a way I already knew the answer.
After a couple minutes I headed for the tower to finish my shift. Maybe at noon I’d grab a sandwich and start a second shift, give Go some more time off for covering for me. When I was halfway up, Go said, “It’s easy not to care.”
I stopped.
It seemed like he was about to say something mean or sharp, but he said, “You’re not from here. This isn’t your home. You’re leaving.”
I thought about telling him I might not get back to California. Maybe it wouldn’t pan out right away. I thought about telling him that, not because I believed it but because it might make him feel better.
I said, “What if I do stay here? Will you still want me on your shift?”
“Man, you won’t stay.”
“But no, what if I do? What if I stay in Unalakleet?”
I daydreamed different scenarios about that night in the parking-garage basement. In one scenario I convinced Kid Cab and the rest to give up, to just dump her in a random car as a funny joke—the valet bringing someone a vehicle with a girl screaming and kicking from the trunk. In another daydream I stopped it all, I beat everyone—my friends, the girl, even Chunky when he tried getting in my way. And in another daydream the girl was laughing back at us while being raped, laughing the way she was laughing when she shot Kid Cab, mocking him and all of us, mocking me.
But somehow each daydream led to the same finale—I saw the girl being raped, and instead of Kid, it was me on top of her. I was watching myself. At first I saw everything from a detached bird’s-eye view. Then I was next to the girl and I knew I was raping her. I noticed how ugly I looked when angry. It was a disgusting and an embarrassing ugly. It was a weak ugly. A fake ugly. And each time I tried to reach out and push my face off the girl, I couldn’t. When I walked away, I couldn’t get anywhere either. I turned to see if all my friends were still there watching me with the girl. They were. Then I turned again to see if my face got any less ugly.
The fish were running strong, wiggling past the plastic, getting in little fights with other fish for sperming territory. I didn’t pay attention to which ones were kings and which ones were chums. I blurred my eyes and watched the river wash one way and the fish swim the other.
Go-boy had walked back into North River, along the white plastic, the scrub brush in his hand. He went all the way to the far shore. His back was now to me. Low tide was over and the water was getting deep—up to Go’s waist. With the brush he was working on a dark spot.
I still wasn’t counting fish. There were salmon in the river, hundreds of them, but I just stared and bounced between thoughts of the Kiana I’d had sex with and the Kiana who was Go-boy’s sister.
The last thing I remembered about my night with Kiana was how she slipped her bare feet back into those bunny boots. I was bent over, searching for my shoes in the dim light, and Kiana’s foot—dark with diagonal tan lines—pushed past my face and slipped into a big white winter boot, a bunny boot. The boots were all rubber and were cartoonish in size, and I left the party thinking of how it felt for her beautiful bare feet to be swimming in the oversized boots, walking the dirt roads home. I imagined her removing them in her own bedroom, parallel-parking them next to the door, crawling into bed with her favorite stuffed animal. And that was it, that was the place I wanted to be—in her room, discovering her routine, observing her meaningless actions—rather than the strange room where we had just been.
The smoke from the mosquito coil had my nose aching. Out in the water, the tarp didn’t look any better, but Go was still trying to wash it. His forearm was now clean where the ink-pen tattoo had been.
Then Go-boy stopped scrubbing and looked downstream, taking a break. The water wrinkled around his hips as he leaned into the flow. He held the scrub brush above his head, his hands resting on his hair. Go had a squint in his eyes like he still couldn’t believe what had just happened, but at the same time, like it was always what happened.
Upstream, about fifteen feet from him, I saw a giant maluksuk. A mammoth. It swam past the spawning fish, slow, and right toward Go-boy. The thing was an easy five feet, maybe six. I was sure it was a maluksuk—I could see its greenish moldy skin and its top fin cutting out of the water. It created its own small wake. And I was sure it was going to swim right into Go-boy.
I grabbed the clipboard to make a mark under MALUKSUK. But then I looked again at the dead fish, and something in me switched. I dropped my blue pen and was out of my seat. I was on the ladder, climbing down the tower, then I was on the riverbank. I was running toward the water with the scrub brush high above my head, ready to swing at the dead fish. I yelled, “Maluksuk!” and splashed knee-deep. But I stumbled before I could get to Go. I fell face-first.
For a moment I was underwater, with my eyes shut. The river
