walked up to Mom and stopped three feet away without shaking hands or embracing, and said, “Welcome home!” I met almost everyone in the building. They told me their names and how we were related.
That was when I met Go-boy for the second time. He was even taller than before—his hair adding a couple inches. I could see the tail end of a tattoo poking out from his jacket sleeve. And by the way he weaved through the crowd, smiling and patting shoulders and bringing that same reaction out of everyone, like a hero, I knew he loved this home of his, and this home of his loved him.
Go put his arm around me, said, “Hey, Cousin, here you are,” and pointed to a spot on the big map of Alaska that was pinned to the wall.
Out the window a forklift was carrying a pallet stacked with luggage. It wheeled past the building and set the bags next to the parking lot. One of mine was pinched in the middle.
Go kept his arm around me. He said, “Most people think Unalakleet means ‘where the east wind blows.’ But really it means ‘southernmost.’”
“Southern?”
“Yeah,” Go-boy said, nodding. “Most.”
Go-boy picks me up on my second day in Unk and offers me either a boat ride upriver or another drive up the road. I guess this is what you do here—ride—and there are some things I didn’t see yesterday. A couple gravel pits, a dump, a fuel tank field, and a brand-new jail a lot of guys in town are contracted to build. I say okay to the ride. We drive out of town a few miles in Go’s wagon. On the way we pass the new jail’s work site—a big hole in the ground, bordered with piles of fresh sand and rocks, and I ask why such a small village needs a jail at all.
“It’s for the whole region,” Go says. “But yeah, I doubt we’ll need it much longer. Things have sure been getting better out here.”
Go parks at the top of a hill, at the edge of a clearing, and we get out of the car and look around. Below us the town is a small strip of buildings lining the ocean, small and lifeless, like a distant rail yard.
Go points to the right of town, says, “That’s Amak Hill. Amak is Eskimo for boob.” He traces the perky mound with his finger in the air, then traces a smaller hill right next to it, making a second breast shape. “That used to be the other amak, but they flattened it for the gravel pit. Now we call that one Training Bra.” He laughs.
I decide to tell him some shit about LA. Some lies. I say, “Los Angeles was named Los Angeles because those Spanish explorers believed it was a sex paradise of Indian women.”
“There’s Indians nearby, behind Whaleback Mountains, over at Kaltag.”
“Not right here?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “Eskimos are a totally different race.”
Down the hill I can see guys pouring the concrete foundation for the new jail. It’s just a skeleton of the building’s structure, an outline, and it’s sunk into the side of this hill so it is only visible from where we are standing. You couldn’t see it from town yet.
Go-boy tells me we are on Air Force Hill. There was once an army base here, and another at the end of the road. He says the base had a missile detection system they used during the Cold War. “I don’t know what the army was so worried about. Eskimos never worry about a Russian invasion.”
I spin around and see nothing but little mountains and trees trailing off behind us. The road snakes its way through the hills and valleys, disappearing.
I say, “Maybe they were worried about nuclear bombs.”
“Nukes,” Go says. “Nukes don’t work up here, man. We’re too close to the magnetic pole. It messes with the fission or something.”
I say, “No way, those bombs work anywhere. They could blow up the moon.”
“Yeah, because the moon doesn’t have a magnetic pole,” Go says. “They don’t work in Alaska, though. Lots of stuff doesn’t work here. Cold medicine. Airbags. Condoms.”
“What?”
“Yeah, man. Why do you think people are always getting sick?”
Go sits on the hood of the car. He’s smiling a little, looking toward town. I’m not sure if he’s the type of guy to mess with me just because, or if he knows I was messing with him first, or if he believes all that.
“So what do you want to bet?” Go says.
I was hoping he’d forgot.
“Our bet,” he says, slapping at a bug on his arm. “From yesterday.”
We watch the NAC cargo plane take off again. We are three miles out of town and the jet climbs over Unalakleet, without sound, and then banks toward the interior.
“You still plan on leaving in three months?”
I nod.
“I bet you stay a year, at least. And if you stay, you have to get my tattoo.” Go hikes his sleeve to show me the drawing again. It doesn’t look as good today. Today it’s faded and some of the ink is smudged at the crease where his arm bends.
From on top of the hill—surrounded by the blur of trees and tundra and the bubble of open sky . . . with the strip of an unfamiliar village and all its machinery and junk miles below . . . with this cousin who talks about changing the world from his HUD home—I can’t even begin to think about staying in Alaska and not seeing Pop or Wicho for another year, and yet I can’t even admit to myself how dangerous it would be for me to go home, so the options are ridiculous. They seem impossible.
“By the time you lose, I’ll have the tattoo for real all right. We’ll both have it. We’ll be real same-same.”
“And when I leave before a year?”
“I dunno. Anything. I’ll bet whatever you want, man, because I know you’ll stay.”
“A car?”
He tells me he’ll buy me a house if I want. Anything. All I have to do is move in a year. But instead of a car, I think about college. Would he pay for that? And then I think about a lawyer for Wicho, one that’s not a public defender and could appeal his case and get him out of prison. Would he pay for that?
“I don’t want the tattoo.”
We’re silent for a while and the mosquitoes start swarming—big, nickel-sized mosquitoes—so Go hops off the hood and we get back in the car.
He says, “I know the plan will reveal something.”
It wasn’t until later that summer that I would understand what he was talking about—his plan. It was an idea that everything in his life was part of a world conspiracy—a good conspiracy. It was kind of crazy-sounding. But on my first day in Unalakleet Go was just starting to put these things together. He had always believed everything would work out for everyone. Now he was starting to believe everything would become perfect. Everything would join together to become heaven. Not long after I arrived he said, “People who wait for paradise don’t really want it.” Go started believing in heaven on earth, believing it was about to happen and believing it
