fishing boats. Sometimes ratty dogs. Sometimes fifty-five-gallon barrels. There are bunches of people out walking around, and I wonder if they have no place to dump all this junk.
Go says, “Yeah, man, in the village there’s never any street addresses. No grid. Houses were always just built any old place. Pretty champ, huh?”
A little farther down the road he refers to this place as Unk—its airport code.
Go-boy drives us to the edge of town and parks his AMC in the middle of a concrete bridge, blocking the single lane. He shuts the engine off. My side overlooks a slough—a water parking lot of fishing boats lining the shore. In front of us the road splits bare fields of brownish tundra, stretching out and ramping up hills, disappearing into evergreens. With the town in our mirrors and the empty nature through our windshield, we stay in his station wagon, parked on the sun-bleached bridge, waiting for something. At least I think we’re waiting.
“Where’s this road go?”
“About twelve miles,” he says, and laughs.
I ask him if that’s it, if it just ends, because I’ve never heard of a road just ending, but right then a huge jet flies over us and he can’t hear me.
Go-boy tells me the plane is Northern Air Cargo. It flies over the village every day at the same time, around three o’clock. The plane is too heavy to take off the runway traveling north like all the other little jets. So at three o’clock it roars over every house and building, roaring over every phone call and TV show, rattling picture frames, interrupting everything. Go says, “If there’s something you need, NAC will bring it.” He tells me the cargo plane is the town’s only connection to the stuff of the world. Mail, groceries, building supplies, everything.
“People sure always phone the airport, ask, “There a NAC today?’ Meaning, ‘Did my stuff come?’ Village-style shopping, man.”
I look through the windshield. “The only road out of town doesn’t get anywhere?”
Go-boy nods. “I could show you.”
I tell him I’m planning to save money so I can leave Alaska at the end of summer, when I turn eighteen. I say my pop and me are opening a starter and alternator rebuild shop. That it’s a respectable gig.
“In three months?” he asks.
I watch that big plane through my passenger window as it tips left and fades behind a wash of distant clouds. We stay parked on the bridge way too long and I wonder what the hell we’re doing, but it doesn’t matter and I don’t even care because I have nothing else to do.
Go is silent. I notice that when he’s not talking bullshit, he can be calm. Quiet, even.
Then he says, “I’ll make a bet with you, man. I bet you stay for one year.”
“A year?”
“Yeah,” he says. “You’ll stay at least a year. Maybe more. I know you’ll do good here.”
I laugh because it’s ridiculous, because Go has only known me for an hour, and because everything about me—my name and my style—is still back in Los Angeles.
“What are we betting?”
Go looks right to left, through the windshield and out over the nothingness, as if there is anything on the tundra worth wagering. “Does it make a difference?”
It shouldn’t, I think. I know I’m leaving. I have to. I know I could never stay in a place like this. But I don’t answer.
Five years earlier I met Go-boy in Los Angeles. He’d won a trip to Disneyland for his whole family after making a home movie and entering it in a contest for Native Alaskan high school students—What are the most important issues facing rural villages in the twenty-first century? I remember because it was the first time I had ever thought about Alaska. Go-boy brought the tape along and showed us. Mom was silent the whole time, watching. After a while, she asked Go’s dad—her brother—“When did they build those snow fences? What happened to General Store?” Go narrated the ten-minute video and ended it by saying, “Unalakleet, like most Alaskan villages and other Native communities, will be a gauge for America’s priorities in the twenty-first century.”
That was the same month Wicho went to prison. Wicho was my older brother and my only brother, and he had already been locked up for almost a year, in and out of trial, so we were used to him being gone. But it was that month, when Go-boy came to Disneyland, that Wicho was sentenced to life in prison, putting an end to months in limbo.
I remember everything that happened at the time—Wicho’s arrest, his trial, his sentencing. I remember how through all the waiting—the string of trials and mistrials, the settlement offers, and the damning evidence—Mom was busing to the courthouse for every meeting and hearing, always convinced of Wicho’s innocence, always on time, always optimistic. And I remember when the jury called him guilty and the guards hauled him away (and scolded Mom for trying to talk to him), she managed to stay composed. She led me out of the courtroom, silent, ignoring the PD and the victims’ families, not flinching until one of the jurors found us in the hall and tried to apologize. “I’m sorry for your son,” he said, jumping in front. I told him to get the hell away, but it was too late. After a year of silent humiliation, Mom broke down. She cried. But when she did, when she walked off through that hall, her arms wrapped around her torso, I wasn’t sure if it was for her son or for herself.
What happened was that Wicho gave his life for a gang. A year before any college or army could claim him, he shot two fifteen-year-old kids on a Wednesday afternoon. He shot members of his own gang—Mara Salvatrucha. They had tried to leave the clique, saying they had never represented anybody, but Wicho told me they’d been jumped in and everything, and one even had MS13 tattooed on his stomach Old English–style. He said they knew what they’d gotten themselves into. Knew being jumped in meant forever.
We lived in West Los Angeles at the time. Every day Go-boy and his family were in LA they’d come by our house in a rental car—Go and his dad and his stepmom—and it was the first time I’d met any of our family from Alaska. Growing up, we’d heard nothing about Mom’s side, but there they were in our house. Go-boy looked about the same age as Wicho, but taller, and he spent most of the time trying to find out what we had in common.
Go said, “The Lakers could win the whole thing this year, ah?”
“I like Chicago.”
Go told me I should come visit Unalakleet. They were leaving LA, and he said I should come for Bible camp or for silver fishing or even to play on his basketball team in the holiday tournament Jamboree. He said, “Did you know Alaska is so big it stretches from Florida to Minnesota to California? And the whole state only has the population of Milwaukee.”
I knew Pop never had any interest in Alaska. When he was around, living with us—which wasn’t often—he never talked about Mom’s family or where she’d grown up. Never gave her the chance. He’d even change the subject.
Mom’s take on her marriage with Pop was this—when she needed him, he was never around, and when she didn’t need him, she said, “He eats all our food and tries to get me pregnant.” That wasn’t true, but this was after she kicked Pop out of the car and left him with the street murals by the Celaya Bakery on Twenty-third. She was trying out this attitude to see how it sounded. I didn’t expect she’d turn it into a habit. And that was the last time we saw Pop. Not long after, she started talking about moving to Alaska.
I kept telling her I wanted to stay with Pop, start a business with him, stay in LA. I kept telling her I wanted to stay for Wicho because when I turned eighteen at the end of summer, I would be able to visit him. I told her I wanted to be with my friends.
“Fine, I don’t care,” she said after a while. “Don’t come. Do whatever you want.”
That year I was running with a Sureños Thirteen clique—Clicka los Primos. It was a rival gang of Wicho’s on the streets, but in prison it was the same. Wicho was Mara Salvatrucha,