I have a plan, like we have a plan.”
“My plan is to save cash so I can get back home.”
Go says, “She’s coming, you know. God.” He tells me that humanity has grown from the male essence, the masculine-dominated perspective, and that humanity will become fulfilled in the female, the feminine, the spiritual. When God comes, it won’t be the end of the world, but its fulfillment.
I laugh, say, “Grew from the male? Fulfilled in the female?”
He laughs too and tells me the Eskimo word for penis—tunggu.
“So your tattoo is a religious thing?”
“No,” he says. “How we love is our religion. Not what we believe.”
He’s in the driver’s seat, looking out at a single row of telephone poles that veer off the road and run up into the hills. Both of his hands are resting at the bottom of the wheel, at six o’clock. He leans back, pulls up his right sleeve again, and shows me the sketch that runs along his forearm. “It isn’t real,” he says. “I’ve drawn it on about fifty times with ink-pen.” He tells me he’s planning to get the permanent kind later that summer.
“I thought about getting some too.”
He holds the inside of the wheel at twelve o’clock with that arm, his sleeve hiked to his elbow. He points to parts of the drawing with his left hand. “This will be Native Jesus. She’s reaching into the clouds on this side and the sea on that side.”
Go-boy tells me his tattoo is why he is dropping out of school, the Bible college. He tells me Jesus died for everybody, not just those who know about him. If people don’t believe that, then they’re deciding whose life is worth saving and whose isn’t.
I say, “I wouldn’t give my life for nobody,” and that echoes in the cab of the car for a minute. It’s awkward. I think about Wicho.
“Well,” Go says, “good thing you’re not Jesus, then, ah?”
Two kids on a four-wheeler pass us coming into town and squeeze by our wagon. Go-boy waves and they wave back. We stay parked right there, facing the hills and the sky that wrap around on all sides. In the silence, only the occasional village sound from behind us—a barking dog or pickup truck—can remind me that I am still somewhere.
Before we left California Mom visited Wicho almost every two weeks. When she came home from her last visit she said Wicho didn’t want us to leave but told her he’d do his best to behave and maybe get out on parole. He was optimistic that life didn’t mean for life. Mom reported all of this because I was a minor, and minors weren’t allowed to visit guys locked up for murder.
Mom said, “He still believes you’ll go to college and find a way to get him out.”
The first year he was jailed I wrote him letters, and sometimes, when Mom let me, I rode along to the prison and waited in our Caravan, listened to music. I was twelve, and sometimes we brought my BMX and Mom dropped me off outside the chain-link fences. I biked around the little roads, up and down the surrounding hills. Wicho wrote me letters too, and in the process he’d put this idea into my head that if I worked hard I could get him out of jail. So I had a plan. And while I biked around the prison fences I figured out the time it would take to go to college and become governor so I could get Wicho free—I’d be twenty-four and Wicho would be thirty. One time the yard was full of prisoners and from a distance I could see them watching me, pointing me out to their friends. I kept riding up and down the roads, with the wind kicking hot dust in my face and knotting my hair, and I didn’t even look at the inmates who watched. I just whispered to them. Told them to treat their future governor with respect. Told them if they did that, and if they also treated Wicho good, then I could get them out someday too. One of the inmates in the yard whistled—maybe to get my attention, or maybe to get another prisoner’s attention. I don’t know. Either way, I just kept my eyes on the road. I ignored them. I pretended they weren’t there.
Mom seemed sad and defeated after her final visit to the prison, like she was giving up. And when she told me Wicho still believed I would get him out, even though it was a simple nod to our past—a silent understanding of this thing we shared and would always share as brothers—there was a strong part of me that still believed I would someday set him free. I knew my life would always hinge on saving him.
But I moved to Alaska with Mom anyway. We flew from LAX to Anchorage in a jumbo jet and then hopped on a second flight, a Pen-Air twelve-seater, boarding from the tarmac. The small plane had one thin aisle with a single beige seat on either side. Plexiglas windows. Only a little kid could stand up without getting a busted head. In the sky that thing flew on a bungee cord, dipping and bouncing, its twin engines blaring like they were topped out. Mom seemed like a different person once on board. She wouldn’t pay attention to anything. It had been twenty years since she’d severed all contact with her home, and I knew she wasn’t ready to return. But she had no choice—she was broke.
I’d been asking Mom questions about Alaska since we’d flown out of Anchorage, trying to find something to protest. I asked her if there was running water in the village. If there were cars, TV. I asked about our family. The food. Anything, looking for something that might turn us around and send us home. And in that loud plane, with nobody talking, flying on a string through empty white air, she went along with it all, doing her best not to snap.
“Is there any music in Alaska?” I yelled across the aisle, now less than an hour from Unalakleet.
Mom repeated, “Music in Alaska?” and gave me a dumb look.
“You know, like a sound. Is there such a thing as Alaskan music?”
She mouthed, Music, but then something switched in her and she didn’t try to answer my question. She turned to the passing clouds. She maybe didn’t know. Maybe didn’t remember.
The flight was about two hours long. Pale and bright clouds surrounded us the whole trip, jarring us. The two pilots sat up front, shoulder to shoulder, like in a Ford Pinto. The little windshield wipers worked off the rain. A Native guy in the front seat passed back a wire basket filled with complimentary chips and cookies and juice. Occasional beeping sounds could be heard over the engines.
By the end of the trip Mom had closed her eyes in a way that I knew she wasn’t sleeping, but thinking, and remembering. Stressing.
Then we saw the ocean with its fingerprint of waves, and the plane banked right as wisps of clouds blew past, and down below us, about the size of a pen cap or cigarette butt, was Unalakleet. Mom opened her eyes and we both looked out our separate windows at the village—stacks of homes on a spit of land between the ocean and a mess of rivers. I looked back at Mom, and we caught each other’s nervous glances.
I wondered when she had last seen all this. Later I’d learn that while growing up she’d fly all the time—into Nome for doctors’ visits and shots, Anchorage for clothes and groceries. She’d fly on these little planes packed with the girls’ basketball team on their way to weekend tournaments. Then at some point she flew on a little plane out of here, got married, had kids, lost her oldest son to prison, then divorced. Never once did she visit. I wondered what drove her to disappear for that long.
The airport was an aluminum building, like a farm shed, next to other aluminum buildings with garage doors for planes. About forty people were inside, standing around, joking and sipping coffee from paper cups. A few sat along the back wall under some windows, watching, waiting to board our same plane and fly back to Anchorage.
