Ordinary Wolves (25 page)

Did apparel include jeans that fit? The word
apparel
made me think of the chewed apple cores Abe taught us to save in an Adams Old Fashioned peanut butter jar of water, to let them ferment and salvage the last bit of cidery juice. But these mall women—like girls in Takunak—wanted nothing of that kind of hunger.

I hurried on, thinking of Dawna. What would she need? But no, that was the wrong idea here. What would she
desire?

“Hi Cutuk!”

Leaning over the rail, across the ice-skating rink, waved Charley Casket. He beamed with recognition; no flat Takunak greeting, more like a traveler stranded on a sandbar, mosquito-bitten and starved to see another human. We shook hands, his limp and wet. His hand dipped in his pocket. I stepped back involuntarily. A big brown bear tooth lay in his palm. Bog soil had stained it pearly black. “Sabertooth tiger,” he said. “Pretty rare. When you been come around here?”

“Almost three months. Finally get job.” Instantly, I knew my bragging, like bragging about hunting, would have a cost. “They find Enuk?”

His eyes pulled away on a passing blonde. “Lotta blond girl.”

“Thousands. Just like caribou way across the river at Breakup—nothing you can do about it. I got nothing they want.”

We grinned. Suddenly I worried about hurting his feelings. Charley,
with his lies and lack of machinery, with his bone fragments and fake fish hooks, was a professional at having nothing anyone wanted.

“You got
naluaġmiu
girlfriend?”

“I wish. How's everybody up home? How come you go Anchorage?”

“Janet an'em's good. That letter say I win car. In steaksweeps,” Charley said importantly. “Trans Am, I guess. Jus' like Knight Rider in TV.” He shrugged. His eyes were flat and expressionless. “There's nothing by that address. Even they let Mom send 'em seven hunnert bucks.”

I bit a grin—“let” in Village English meant “make.”
Tat trooper let Lumpy go jail.

“I sure wanna learn to drive, alright,” Charley said.

“Me too.”

Charley Casket was thirty-five or so, missing teeth and some gray hairs showing up, and still lived at home, on a mattress in the corner. Talking to him, I stood straighter than I remembered. Something was changing. In Takunak I was on a whole lower level than he who was the bottom—my eyes apologetic for being round and blue, embarrassed and staying to the ground, making quick forays to faces. In Takunak, Charley was Charley, Cutuk was Cutuk, our positions frozen in for the winter of our lives. Anchorage was free from that, but held something larger and vaguely similar. In the village, the new rhetoric had been natives “walking in two worlds with one spirit.” Too crucial and cool, clearly, to assimilate a lone member from the Not-Quite-Right-White tribe.

Dimond Mall scurried past. I didn't have one spirit walking two worlds. More like Siamese spirits crawling the crevasses in between. Charley was on the Eskimo ice sheet. But what was Eskimo? Native, nowadays, much more than a connection to the land, seemed to be the state of being uncertain of who you were, basketball and booze the only constants. Television, teachers, and tomorrow were white. Charley might search there forever and never find his face. The way mine was not on heroes at home. The whole societal systems of walls left me disoriented, disillusioned, wanting no part of so much judgment.

“Musta been trick,” I said.

“Musta been trick.” He offered the tooth again, then scooped his
other hand in his pocket. His palm cupped an assortment of lint and treasures: a lead .44 slug, a weathered moose molar, a YKK zipper handle, an antler toggle, a rotted strip of wood, half of a flint arrowhead. He poked a couple times, pinched the toggle, and handed it over, nearly hidden between his thumb and knuckle. He glanced around. “Enuk's,” he murmured. “Back part dog harness. Enuk only one always use that kind. Maybe your dad still, too, huh?”

The antler toggle was old and punky like wood. It was the kind we used, at the end of each towline, to loop through the loop at the back of each dog's harness—something we could make with what we had, free, as opposed to brass swivel snaps that cost dollars. Maybe Abe had given one to Charley. Maybe one had surfaced in the Wolfgloves' yard, pressed into the hard-packed dirt.

“Where you find it?”

“I always walk lots. I find things. Troopers gonna hire me for searches, alright. Find clues and do the underwater diving. They all know I was a Navy
Seal.”

I handed it back, biting the grin again. Charley's maze of lies, like trying to follow wolf tracks through caribou wintering ground. How much did he believe himself? How much did he know? “Where did you find this?”

His eyes were dark, inscrutable. “I can't remember. I sure need hunnert bucks,
bart.”

Woodrow Sr. flooded my head—seventeen-year-old memories borrowing fifty dollars out of Abe's Hills Bros can—telling of Harry Feathers committing suicide with a double-barreled shotgun. It was all so ancient, Harry too far back, no face anymore. I handed Charley fifty dollars.
Fifty bucks for half a friend in the crevasse. All friends half off.

He stuffed the treasures in his pocket and grinned. “I gonna buy jugs.”

“Oh.”

“I'll wait at airport.” He nodded, shook hands again, and sauntered away.

Charley wouldn't talk so friendly in Takunak. Bacardi 151 sold there for three hundred dollars a bottle. If he could pawn artifacts he'd take
home a case, and for a day have something everyone wanted. Maybe a woman would even go with him briefly. Either way, in a week that party would be past. He wouldn't pay back the fifty.

Charley leaving and the return of loneliness lifted the floor heavy against my feet. It was time to give up here, once again, on a date; time to find my bike and start home. January needed company. He might actually get around to the roof in the morning.

Pay phones beckoned, promising a last chance at possibility. Dial tone acknowledged my one-sided conversation to Dawna, then beeped viciously.
Lying to a phone isn't allowed.
My spoon face leered in the polished metal coin box. The phone book was heavy with names. No Wolfglove. No Fluck, Ubaldo. Shaw, L. L., was there.

“Lance? This is Cut-tuck.” I stammered about Dawna.

“Try four-one-one?” His voice came down the wires different, quiet and no mechanic banter.

“That isn't the cops?” He sounded sincere, but I was learning about these people.

“That's
nine
-one-one. Let me try. I'll ring you back.”

I faced the mall ice-skating rink, wheeling with bleached beauties and nine-year-olds hopped up on Pepsi and Gummi Bears, out of control. The phone rang.

“Got your pencil, Igloo Gigoloo?”

I scratched the numbers on my thumbnail with the tip of my knife.

“Hey,” he said, “give a call sometime. We'll get together, swallow some suds.”

I hung up and dialed, wondering, did white people drink soap?
Melt drinks aftershave.
I was somewhat white and had drunk Lysol in Crotch Spit. The truth was I'd drink soap any day in Anchorage for a friend.

“Who's this? Sugar?”

“Who's this?” I returned the Takunak phone greeting. Who was Sugar? I envied him a name that dissolved so easily into English.

“Cutuk!
You're in Anchorage?”

“I'm inside Dimond Mall.”

Memories draped down—that smooth skin above her cheeks, tattered
Sears catalogs, snared ptarmigan with their eyes frozen closed, thawing beside Janet's stove.

“Stevie called collect from jail. I thought you were there. Him and Lumpy broke into some teacher an'em's house and drank their vanilla and NyQuil. They
iġitchaq
them
naluaġmius'
pet bird!”

“What kinda bird?”

“Wait . . . you want to go to the movies with Dave and me?”

Blood drummed in my ears. I'd rather go midnight solvent dipping for a Nissan needle bearing. I scratched the mouthpiece, tempted to manufacture a sudden bad connection. I needed to find the roads home to January's. Why had I called? Hadn't I come to meet a mall girl, someone from this world, someone who never had to know I had been
naluaġmiu,
and too shy to say
God
or
love,
or kiss?

“We'll meet you out front.” Her words were city-woman words now, farther from the throat. Suddenly the mall stretched too vast, a glass prison, loud, and chemical food, light-years from any sort of land at all.

“'Kay then. I'd do anything to see—” The phone began beeping.

SIXTEEN

ORANGE SNOWFLAKES FLOATED
down the sky above the streetlights and landed soft on my hair. The fresh snow smelled genuine. I missed stepping out every morning and having weather decide my day, dogs prancing in the snow, sky arching over unowned horizons, sustenance waiting out there: caribou or rabbit, muskrat or bear. The tiny wet stars brushed my face. Cars migrated along Dimond Boulevard. The March evening had cooled, and in the parking lot shoppers tilted their heads, covered their perfect hair with newspapers, and rushed to their vehicles, cursing winter for showing itself, then riding away seated in their heated metal boxes to houses bright with electric lights, hot baths on tap and a hundred songs waiting inside every radio.

A red Mustang II hatchback slid into the parking lot.
Gutless. Four-cylinder cake mixer.
Dawna was in the passenger window, appearing out of traffic, the way Enuk had out of storms. And me? On square stone
sidewalk, hands in pockets, gripping an ancient ivory bear, guessing what Dawna and I had left to cross a city about.

She jumped out, her legs in acid-washed jeans, longer and thinner than I remembered. Her face thinner. Behind the wheel a white man with puffy eyes watched like
ukpik,
the snowy owl.

“Hi Yellow-Hair!” She said it all in one word, like in the village, and giggled and hugged me. The years weighted my arms with uncertainty. People exiting the mall glanced over. Hair tangled in my lips. “When are you going home? Mom send
niqipiaq?”

“Janet sent beluga
muktuk.
I ate it.”

“Ah you!” She slapped my shoulder.

The boyfriend peered out, forearms cool on the wheel. I wondered if he knew how to cut joints—I could cut his wrist joints in six seconds. Leave him handless as a village disciplined by Attila the Hun. I touched my knife, recently sharpened.

“Dawn. Let's go!” His voice was nasal, hoarse.

Dawn?
Dawna was one of a kind. Eskimo. Not abbreviation material. I concentrated on getting into the back seat, angled and slippery, red fake leather that had never been an animal's skin. The vinyl smell hurt. I smelled an ashtray, too, and cigarette ash, and roaches. Dawna turned, her cheek crushed against the headrest. “We're going to pick up some stuff and head back to our place.”

“I should have ridden my bike.” Now suddenly I hardly cared if the bicycle rusted to iron compost, nourishing the light pole's metal roots. I examined Dave's neck. He seemed easy to hate—blow-dried brown hair parted in the middle, long in back. My mind played with a collage of city images. Dave had rich parents, both with mustaches. He worked in the Safeway dairy department pushing cottage cheese. His mother was a fingernail artist, with one-tenth the brains of a two-year-old wolf, a Bible and a diaphragm in her purse, and material desires itching like cold sores.

He touched the brakes, oversteering. The car swung. Maybe Dawna was in love with his driving. It was all so sickening. We passed centers,
not the center of the city—Anchorage it turned out had hundreds, maybe thousands of “centers.” My bike grew farther and farther away. A car leaned on the curb, crippled, waiting for wheel donors.

Dave got out. Slammed his door.

She swiveled around, her Seawolves jacket slippery against the seat. I wondered what a seawolf was, and why my brain wouldn't stop wondering about these things. A sea-bear would be a polar bear.
Stupid humans, naming their proud jocks after an animal, one that doesn't even exist.

“My GPA got low.”

“What do you eat?”

She giggled and shoved my shoulder. “I was going to be a photographer. In the darkroom? Dodging and burning? I sure like photography. I thought I was good, but that teacher said my pictures weren't very art. You shoulda' been here to tell me.”

“Me? I wish I knew some art.”
Dodging and burning?
—
sounds like war, not art.

“Those professors, they sure always think they're something else.” Her jacket made a nylon sound. Her features were scooped shadows and streetlight. Her nails pattered the headrest. “Ever try coke?”

“Coke? Of cour—. No. Not yet.”

The car was silent. Her eyes had dark circles underneath and stared a lot farther away than the back seat. Her fingers curled along my neck, twisted gently in my hair. “Cutuk, I'm still waiting to see you smile like you don't care who else is in the world.”

“So, you're gonna let me learn? Or are you coming out on the tundra where I already know how to do that?”

Dave sprang into the seat.

“Sugar have some?” she asked.

“Re-friggin'-lax, why doncha.” He pitched away from the curb, not moving any direction I wanted to go. Streets led to streets. In front of a bank, under shrubs, little lights with black rings glowed like recently hatched UFOs. The alien city went by, frozen stone, glass, locked locks, and enough left-on light to last lifetimes. I hunched in the back, wishing
the car had four doors; I'd give a testicle to jump into the ephemeral freedom of car-made wind.