cheeks were red, in the village a shout of weakness. I fingered the frostbite burns on my nose, hoping they had darkened into the scab badges of a hunter. I pulled my caribou parka off over my head, squaring my shoulders, exhaling as if I was sweating. Abe glanced up. He stuffed his chalk in his parka pocket. “Don’t get chilled.”
“You wanna fight?” asked Elvis Skuq Jr. “I’ll let you cry.” He had permanent residence in my earliest memories of town. From the time he’d been a small boy he’d enjoyed packing my face with snow and whipping my mittens off with a stick, laughing at my smarting red fingers. A scar ran from his lip up under his nose and, I’d long thought, on up to his brain. He was sixteen and towered over me.
The plane banked and lined up with the airfield. “From where you come?” Elvis repeated.
“Upriver,” Jerry mumbled. I spat out caribou hairs that had wandered out of my hood and collected in my mouth. The plane wheels touched the snow. As it swept down on us, Iris and I jumped behind the sled.
“Aiy,sure iqsi.” Kids jeered and dark-eyed adults smiled at our naïveté. A kid whipped my ear with a piece of knotted rope. Laughter came from behind us. A snowball dissolved against my neck. The props roared, warbling with power as the pilots adjusted the pitch. The turning plane flung a wall of snow over the crowd. Around me villagers faded like ghosts. The props whined to a halt. Everyone surged forward. Stevie and Dawna Wolfglove waved. I stood, a member of a group, all of us united in anticipation.
Woodrow Jr. slapped me on the back. He was in his twenties and carried his son on his shoulders. “How’s the trail from your-guys’ camp? You come to town to fin’ Eskimo girlfriend?” Beside him a pretty woman smiled, her brown face and dusky lashes shining inside her white fox ruff. “I sure want your eyes, Cutuk,” she said. “You should go be my son.” People laughed. I examined the ground, shifted nervously, pictured myself belaying Woodrow Washington down Feathers’s outhouse to salvage my education.
The airplane doors swung open. The pilots stepped down, white-faced and cold-looking with their radio earmuffs, aluminum notebooks, and Colt .45s on their belts. Villagers unloaded the boxes and mail bags.
Dawna stepped close. She smiled. “Hi, Cutuk. When you come?”
“While ago.” I looked at my mittens. Dawna had a heart-shaped face. Her wide eyes seemed to beg an answer to a question no one had heard. Her hands were bare and pulled into the sleeves of her white nylon jacket. She wore faded jeans, perfectly frayed around the bell-bottoms. Dawna was fourteen and had recently changed in ways that I found embarrassing to snag my eyes on, and impossible not to. Before last year I had thought she was dumb—the pastime she enjoyed most was cutting up Sears catalogs to make collages, and looking at the photographs in women’s magazines, wishing about cities far from Alaska. Sometimes she looked at the pictures upside down. Her dad, Melt, got mad when he caught her doing that. He ripped the magazines out of her fingers, cuffed her head, and threw her collages into the stove. “Don’t always sometimes try to think you’re something else,” he shouted.
I figured that, being Enuk’s granddaughter, she should want to learn to scrape skins and sew.
She leaned forward and put her hands on the cold paper of the stack of brown boxes and peered past them into the interior of the Twin Otter. Her fingers were long and brown. One of her little fingernails was unusually wide, and she kept it tucked out of sight. I thought that one fingernail was the only imperfect thing about her whole person, all condensed into one point, a mere mosquito bite of badness, and I was jealous because my eyes felt wrong, my hair, my speech, my entire skin felt wrong.
Everyone inched closer to the plane. I fantasized that Abe would step forward and offer to start the airplane. Why wouldn’t he do such things? He must remember how. It would be so easy for him, and I would have friends after that. But Abe was kneeling, biting ice off Farmer’s feet, nodding attentively as twenty-four-year-old Charley Casket bragged how to shoot wolves with a .22 Magnum.
“You got any catalog orders coming?” Dawna whispered.
“Only what Abe ordered—things we need. Vanilla. Paints. Sled bolts.” Vanilla wasn’t sold in the store. People would buy all of it the first day and get drunk.
Dawna’s laughter pealed out. “Bolts? Like washers and stuff?”
People stared. Dawna didn’t flinch. She was the only one in the village—besides Abe—who didn’t seem to care all the time what everybody thought. Dawna’s gaze flicked the crowd and caressed the last mail handed from the plane. Commiseration flexed under my ribs, and I cherished the feeling that we had a desire in common. A longing, for something, too exotic even to know how to name. Something better than sled bolts and vanilla.
“You wanna try race?” asked a boy. He was my size and had the wide friendly features of a Washington. Kids stood expectantly. I glanced at Dawna, and across at Stevie, talking to Jerry beside our dog team.
“’Kay, then,” I said, trying to avoid two prominent town taboos—acting scared and sounding smart. We raced to the schoolhouse. The boy wore fast, light tennis shoes. “My mukluks are too slow,” I panted as we walked back. It had been close. I knew I could easily beat him if we traded shoes, but no kid here would be caught in mukluks.
“Aiy, try blame.”
A group of big kids surrounded me. “You wanna fight?” someone asked. Elvis and his younger brother. I sped up.
“You’re naluaġmiu, huh?” Elvis sneered.
“I dunno.” Naluaġmiu meant white person; the Eskimo dictionary didn’t list it as a dirty word but everyone knew better. All conversations with Elvis were to the point—usually that one.
“Aiy, kinnaq.”
That meant dumb. My face reddened.
“Sure try fool!” Kids jeered. “Aiy! He sure get red!”
“You wanna fight, honky?” A boy yanked my wool hat down over my eyes. I dragged it back up, but the elastic was old, stretched and saggy. Whatever honky meant, I must be one of those, too.
“What’s six times six?” asked Lumpy Wolfglove. I smiled, relieved to recognize him. Lumpy was seventeen and in eighth grade. There were three things about Lumpy: he was good at math, he was a great rifle shot, and he liked to torture puppies and mash their heads with hammers. He was Stevie and Dawna’s part-brother.
“Thirty-six.” Iris had taught me math for as long as I could remember in the winter evenings when it was too dark to do anything and Abe wouldn’t yet light the lamp because that would waste kerosene.
“Yuay! How ’bout seven times eight?”
“Fifty?” I glanced around for smiles and shifted toward the airfield.
“You always know ninja?” Elvis asked. The boys waited.
“I don’t know lotta Eskimo words.”
“Aiy! Not even. So dumb.”
“You’re some kinda kinnaq.”
Someone choked me in a headlock. I twisted his thumb. He grunted in pain and shoved me forward on my knees.
“Hi-yaa.” Elvis spun. His boot blurred. It slammed to a stop against my ear. I skidded behind a snowdrift, other boots in my back, neck, and face. In my head his stretched-out brag, “No fuggin’ problem.” My mouth tasted salty. This part of town I was familiar with—this was the part I wanted to get past. I couldn’t see the crowd and hoped none of the adults had seen.
A woman on the edge of the crowd shouted. “Hey, what you try let them boys do? Don’t always pick fight.” She turned back to the airplane. My eyes joined the laughing boys as they jogged away on the hard-packed snow.
AT THE NATIVE CACHE, Jerry offered to watch the dogs while Iris and I accompanied Abe into the store. For Jerry it was no great sacrifice—he