He didn’t look up, said, “Who, Donkey Kong?”
I nodded. I couldn’t say her name—Kiana—it felt weird. I said, “Yeah, her.”
Go-boy had told me about the nickname Donkey Kong. He’d given it to her while on a family vacation in South Dakota, in the Black Hills. They were driving a nature loop and parked by a bunch of mules. Kiana was young and she jumped out of the car with slices of bread to feed them, and when the animals started fighting, one bit Kiana on top of her head. She got scared and bled a little, and he’d called her Donkey Kong ever since.
Go said, “Donkey Kong believes in algebra.”
Then he laughed, and by the sound of it I knew he hadn’t heard anything about me and her. This was the good thing about Go’s recent funk—it kept him locked up in his room, away from the rumors and gossip.
“Algebra?” I said.
“Any kind of math.”
Go said Kiana was some sort of math prodigy. As a sophomore in high school she’d been taking satellite classes from the university in Anchorage. By the end of her junior year she’d been a quarter done with an undergraduate degree. Go said she could leave the village that coming school year and start college early, but for some reason, she didn’t want to. Maybe she was afraid. He said, “She tutors our math teacher.” Kiana was a genius, but she did bad in most other classes. She spent too much time on math. Never did anything else.
“My sister thinks that living in the village after high school means failure.”
He said this like he was proof she was wrong, or like she was young and dumb and had a lot to learn. But for me, Kiana was speaking the truth. For me, living in the village a year before I finished high school was failure.
“Wanna go potluck?” Go-boy asked.
I said sure, and we left his place.
On the way I asked Go-boy why Kiana liked math. Why not something else—art, or biology?
He said, “She thinks it’s simple.”
“Math?”
“She likes all the rules and formulas,” he said. “She likes the patterns. It’s just the way she is.”
But I wondered if that was really it. I said, “What if she gets to a level of math that doesn’t follow formulas?”
Go-boy and me walked across town to the bowling alley, to the funeral potluck for Jay—Trilogy. Jay had shot himself in the neck with a .22 pistol. He’d bled to death. Go said, “There’s been a lot of this stuff this year.”
I wanted to ask him about work but didn’t. We hadn’t talked about what had happened because we didn’t need to. At least, that was what I thought.
At the old gym we kicked off our shoes on the worn-out snowmachine track—the village-style doormat—and walked in. Pinsetters were lined up under old basketball hoops. The place was packed, and about half the lanes were filled. This was when I saw Kiana and my mom together for a second time. They sat with Uncle Stanley, tying their laces and sizing up the bowling balls. Mom examined her seal finger. Kiana waved to her brother, not looking at me, and Go walked to the group.
Uncle Stanley held a blue marbled ball and was giving tips on bowling form and the definitions of certain terms. He had a smooth voice that was easy to ignore, and Kiana sat at the scorer’s table, humoring him, penciling names and numbers and sneaking sips from her water bottle when he wasn’t looking.
Mom said, “Can I have a drink?”
“Oh, I . . .” Kiana murmured, nervous, tracing her fingers down her jaw and kicking the container farther under her chair. She said, “I think I might be sick. I have a cold.”
Mom leaned out of her plastic booth, hinting with a type of nod, and said, “I’m sick too.” Then she helped herself.
Before we moved here Mom told me that alcoholism was a problem in the village. She said her mom, who was a Scandinavian teacher from Minnesota, had a drinking problem and ended up running back to the lower forty-eight, leaving her dad alone with six kids. She said this place was a damp village, meaning booze wasn’t illegal, yet they couldn’t sell it at stores. But after living here a month I knew more people who never drank a drop—like Go-boy—than I ever did back home. The difference in the village was that there were no secrets. Like at this bowling alley, at this funeral potluck, it was no secret Kiana and my mom were getting drunk, not to us or anyone. It was cheap if you asked me. Disrespectful. And I didn’t even know the kid, but I knew that Go-boy knew him and that was enough of a reason to pay respect.
As I stepped up to the lane to bowl, I turned and saw what everyone else at the potluck saw—we were those people, the people on the outside edge of everything, laughing and sneaking booze into some poor kid’s funeral. And I could tell this embarrassment was as real as anything to Go-boy, and it was destroying him—this was his family, and would be forever, and he didn’t know how to save it. We were his family.
Stanley said, “I heard when you get shot your brain stays alive three minutes before you die.”
Go-boy shifted in his seat and looked the room over, trying to ignore Uncle Stanley. I thought about those fifteen-year-olds that Wicho shot.
“Three minutes to think,” he said, scratching his bushy gray sideburns. “Pretty long time when you’re dead, I guess.”
Mom stepped up to the lane for her roll, but she couldn’t fit her thumb into the thumbhole. She tried every other ball she could find, but none would fit that seal finger. She already had sort of mannish hands, and her swollen thumb exaggerated it. So first she tried lefthanded, and she almost rolled down the wrong lane. Then she went with just the right hand, without using the holes, but the ball slipped and landed by her feet. So Mom settled on using two hands and a shoveling motion from her hip, like she was slamming a car door shut.
“That’ll wreck the lane,” Stanley said.
Mom didn’t respond. She had her back to us and she jackhammered her right leg, nervous, waiting for her ball. She then threw a second roll from her pocket and sat down. Kiana cheered as the ball hit the gutter.
“Sure is a big seal finger all right,” Stanley said, laughing with a little wheeze. “Should call it walrus finger. Call it flipper finger.”
Mom showed Stanley a little smile, then flipped him off.
Stanley laughed even harder. “Flipper finger,” he said again.
It turned out that Go-boy was a dynamite bowler. But you wouldn’t have known he was even trying. As we played, he was distracted, looking for Valerie. We were at the far end of the room, against a wall, and Go scanned the crowd nonstop, looked at the clock. People were everywhere. People walked in the door and shook off their logo-embroidered jackets. People dished up seconds from the buffet of Eskimo potluck food—dry fish and seal oil, herring eggs on kelp, black meat. People stood around, watched cousins and nieces knock down pins, consoled mourners, sometimes forced exhausted laughter. Huddled groups of people cried and shared stories. Kids boomeranged around the room like they did anywhere, anytime. There was always someone to look at. And when it was Go’s turn he’d roll a strike and then sit back down, look out
