Читать книгу Sometimes We're Always Real Same-Same - Mattox Roesch - Страница 10

We leave the airport and Go throws my bags into his busted hatchback.

He says, “You want the Unalakleet tour? I could ride you around, show you everything.”

I assume he means drive.

As we ride, Go only talks about the village. In the village . . . In the village . . . He’s trying to sell me on this place. I’m not interested. This is the second time I’ve met Go, but the first was years earlier, back in California, and it feels like I’m meeting him all over again.

“In the village,” he says, waving to a group of kids, “everybody’s sure always waiting for their shipment.” He lists things like house paint, mattresses, rubber boots, even food.

“There’s no stores?”

“Well,” he says, “there is. But . . .”

He rides me around and we coast over washboard ripples and potholes on the gravel road. The sun is strong. Everything is dry and chalky. The colors, even—dusty beiges and light blues. The dashboard is dirty. An AM station buzzes, and Go waves at everyone he sees. He points out cousins of ours, aunts, family members who weren’t at the airport.

“That’s your mom’s uncle,” he says. “Our grandpa lived over there.”

He shows me the post office, AC Store, Native Store, Igloo, the lodge, and a bunch of other plywood buildings with tin roofs. There are no signs or advertisements, no trees or grass lawns, and the houses are crowded under empty grids of telephone poles. It’s the ugliest place I’ve ever seen.

Go calls it the real Alaska.

Go says, “In the village, there’s no such thing as a family reunion.”

As we drive I see a tattoo poking out from under his right cuff. He sees me looking and pulls up his sleeve. Go even smiles a little right then. It’s a drawing of an Eskimo Jesus, stretching hand to elbow, wrapping around and blanketing most of Go’s forearm. Thin blue strokes shape the Eskimo’s face and parka. Facial features are labeled with descriptions. The eyes are INFINITY. The ears are UNITY. And so on. I want to ask him why he drew Jesus looking that way, but instead I tell him it kind of looks like the guy on the Alaska Airlines logo. Go says it isn’t a guy. Go says the returning Jesus will be a woman.

“A Daughter. Daughter of the world.”

We pass a playground set in the middle of a dirt lot next to a school. The radio regains reception and I bounce my heel with the song. Go-boy asks if I’ve graduated. I haven’t.

“My pop and me are starting a business together back home, in the fall.”

We drive down Beach Road beside the ocean and then back through town on Main Road. Some houses are painted teal and every yard is littered with skeletons of four-wheelers and snowmachines and 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, six years earlier, and maybe even more now that he was in prison.

We both ran with Hispanic gangs even though neither of us had a drop of Hispanic blood. Pop always tried telling us our great-grandma was Mexican and we shouldn’t forget that. All Pop’s friends were Chicanos and he seemed to think he was Chicano too. He was older than Mom and had grown up in a part of town where being white wasn’t cool—that was why he gave his sons Mexican names. Wicho—Luis. Luis Daniel Stone. Me—Cesar. Cesar Silas Stone. He had our names tattooed on his chest, and later I learned that we were named after friends of his who had died. RIP WICHO. RIP CESAR. Pop said they were also family names from his grandmother’s side. But Wicho said that everybody in LA had a Mexican grandmom and that Pop was just full of shit. And when it came to Pop and his stories and his plans, Wicho tended to side with Mom.

It was just like when Pop beat us, how Wicho—from when he was a little kid all the way up—would throw himself in front of Mom or try to pull Pop away. And it was Wicho who ended up with the purple cheeks and the weeklong limps. Pop would only hit us when he was superdrunk, and I reminded myself of that. Regardless, his punches ended when I was about nine, when Pop threw me backward over an end table, about to pounce because I’d said something about money, and Wicho, at fifteen, stomped in and beat Pop into some kind of mess that surprised both of them. But it was during the years that Pop was raging and we all got beaten that I felt he was raging against us for who we weren’t. I felt he was beating me because I wasn’t Cesar enough and Wicho because he wasn’t Luis enough.

All through growing up, we didn’t see Mom as an Eskimo. Maybe Mom didn’t talk about it because she was trying to forget about her family, or maybe Pop tried to ignore the fact that his wife had darker skin than he did. And maybe that was why he thought he could get away with giving us Mexican names—he knew Wicho and me would look just like those pale-skinned Chicanos he’d been running with his whole life. Light, but not pinkish, with black hair, and a day at the beach would tan the shit out of our skin. And he was right. We were those chameleon kids who almost blended in but never quite did—we were too dark to look white with white people and too pale to look anything but white in the streets. I don’t know about Wicho, but I always felt like an imposter—Cesar, the white Chicano—like it was a matter of time before my friends called me on it. But they knew our mom wasn’t Mexican because she didn’t speak Spanish. Not a syllable. And our friends didn’t care. Wicho and me weren’t the only light-skinned kids running with Sureños or Salvatruchas. We ran with the crews who didn’t keep track of where everyone’s family was from. And regardless, or maybe as a result, I had forgotten Mom was Native.

Mom said, “It’ll be good for you to spend time with your real family.” She was trying to convince me that going to Alaska was a good idea. But I’d only met Go-boy and his parents, and the rest were just a bunch of strangers. That wasn’t family.

The first step Mom took in leaving Pop was leaving his neighborhood. She moved us out of LA right after Wicho was sentenced. Besides leaving Pop, she thought a better area would be good for us, get us away from the place that landed her son in jail, get us away from the things she related to being poor—the street art and street vendors and tangerine-colored buildings on Pico Boulevard. We moved in with first-generation strip malls. Moved to Santa Ana. And that was where I hooked up with Los Primos.

That was why I didn’t want to leave—my friends were in Santa Ana. But more than that, if I moved I could never come back. The thing that had landed Wicho in prison was the same thing that would happen to me if I was ever seen around home again. None of my friends knew I was going to Alaska.

They asked me one night when a dozen of us were at a hotel party. Kids were sitting on beds and tables and the air conditioner under the window, ladies too, smoking and drinking, waiting for me to answer. They were extra suspicious these days because about half our crew was in jail, waiting on a trial, and anyone who disappeared was suspected of pulling some shit and making a deal with police.

I told them we’d bought a house a couple miles up Tustin Ave in Orange. I told them that in spite of moving, nothing would change.

Even though all those kids in the gang would’ve left if they’d had the chance, disappearing was the worst. Any secrets were the worst. We weren’t a real violent clique, like those always out there carjacking or starting shit in other neighborhoods for no reason. Sometimes, if necessary. And we had some enemies. But most of the time we’d just be hanging out, throwing these hotel parties, selling some drugs, getting high, and having sex with girls. School nights, weekends, anytime, it didn’t matter. Teachers would flunk us and send us to the non-college-bound part of school. And those teachers would just chuckle when we fell behind and send us down to the technical high or to charter schools—whoever would take us. The teachers spent all their time trying to convince us that we needed to believe our future was important, that we needed to commit our lives to something. They always tried to convince us to get off our butts and work harder when all we wanted to do was have fun. And they were just saying that stuff to make themselves feel good, feel like they were doing the right thing. We knew our future was important. We knew what they didn’t believe—that it would work out, somehow.

Nope,” Go-boy says. “I bet you never leave, man.”

We’re still parked on the concrete bridge. Still blocking the road. But it doesn’t matter because nobody is coming or leaving. Go adjusts the rearview mirror, nods, says, “You’ll sure always find a nice Native girl and get married and have a bunch of real Native kids.”

“Tell me what we’re betting.”

Instead Go-boy tells me more about the village and our family. He tells me he’s just gotten back from college in Anchorage, and he’s working upriver for the summer on a fish tower. He’s not planning to go back to school, though. He’s dropping out. And I’m not supposed to say anything about it to anybody because it’s still a secret and he doesn’t want his sister to find out, but I don’t even think twice. Who would I tell? When I ask him what he plans on doing instead of school, Go says he doesn’t know yet, but he has lots of ideas and possibilities, maybe jobs, and maybe even a few options that will include me.

“Something’s bound to happen around here,” he says, still looking through the windshield, as if it’s waiting for him. “It already feels like 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.

Mom walked in behind me, hesitated, then hugged people. Those expecting us looked surprised that we were there, that we hadn’t bailed at the last minute. Other people said, “Hey, Lynn,” 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 was his duty to dedicate his life to the cause. He called it his strange plan.

Go-boy was convinced that with the right perspective, anything was possible. This was always evident, even when I’d met him the first time, when we were younger, and the second time, at the airport. He said people walk around most days without feeling alive; people go every moment without paying attention to the quiet life—the life that matters—the voice that can direct a person’s destiny away from a world of shame and guilt to a world of meaning and realization. According to Go, the way to live was to listen to your heart. Intentionality, he called it. Something about how you’ve already sketched out your life—joys, sorrows, mistakes, accomplishments—before birth, and it is your conscience that reveals how to live your intended life. The goal is to experience multiple lives, experience everything.

Go drives us out of the hills and back into town, and I start lying again. I say, “Did you know Los Angeles is the religious capital of the world?”

“No,” he says. “How?”

The gravel road runs straight downhill and all we see in every direction is miles of open tundra and water. It’s strange how small the village seems compared to everything else. I’ve never been to a city that is so dominated by empty space all around, like a strong wind or wave could just wipe it away.

“LA has the most religions, or is the most religious, or something.”

Go parks his car in the middle of the concrete bridge again. This time we are facing the village.

He says, “When I think of LA, I think of Hollywood. And Hollywood projects this America where everything is a product for sale, everything is buyable material—most importantly, identity. Even spiritual identity has gone public. And man, the more we rely on external identity the more detached we become, because the only things of value are earned, and there is never enough to go around, and the travesty is that the valuable and sacred aren’t inherent. There’s no image of God. No creativity. Only image of image, only replications of replicas.”

We watch a lady in a fishing boat pull up to the shore, throw out her front and back anchors, and then hop onto the sand and walk away.

“I’ve never been to Hollywood,” I say, lying.

“LA. New York. Doesn’t matter, man. Rural is the new city.”

It’s my second day here, but it feels like I’ve already lived in Alaska for too long.

“So this is the only concrete in town?”

Go says, “No, there’s the basketball court.”

I picture every kid hogged onto that slab, shoulder to shoulder, dribbling basketballs, tre-flipping skateboards, even hopping on pogo sticks. Everyone pushing and shoving for their fair share. And the other kids who aren’t into sports sit on benches and watch.

“In the village,” Go says, “time is way less important than purpose.”

For a minute we see no vehicles. No people are out walking along the roads. No dogs are testing the lengths of their chains. No airplanes are delivering or loading supplies or people. It’s as if the village is unpopulated. I never would’ve imagined something like this being possible in the middle of the day, here or in LA or anywhere. For a minute nothing happens.

Then Go says, “I’ve got it. I’ve got the bet.”

“It won’t even matter.”

“If you stay here longer than a year, you have to change your first name.”

“Change it?”

“To your Eskimo name,” Go says.

“But I don’t want an Eskimo name.”

“You don’t have one?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t want one.”

“Man, I’ll give you an Eskimo name.”

Go-boy starts thinking, and I wonder if Eskimo names can be given to non-Eskimos—this is the first I’ve ever heard of them. I wonder if they are the kind of thing that Go can just hand out without talking to anyone. It seems like something parents should decide, like something Mom should come up with. But I doubt she’s thinking about that on her second day home after twenty years. I can’t imagine what she’s thinking about. And I can’t imagine having something like this—an Eskimo name—without Wicho or Pop having one too. A name is such a permanent thing. A name makes the person almost as much as the person makes the name. And as we sit in Go’s car on the bridge, I think about how even though I don’t like the name Cesar, it was given to me by Pop, and so I accept it and can’t fathom changing it.

He says, “Sure always takes long time to find the right Eskimo name.”

Go-boy sits behind the steering wheel of his AMC Eagle for what seems like forever, moving his lips every few seconds and thinking about possible names. And Go keeps on like this—in his car on the bridge . . . and back at his house later that day . . . and even later that summer.

A work truck rolls onto the bridge, maybe heading out of town to the new jail. The guy looks like an engineer from Anchorage. He pulls alongside us, slow, trying to pass, then stops. There are just a few inches between our vehicles. The guy folds in his side mirror. He rolls down his window, and Go, seeing this, rolls down his.

“You got trouble?”

Go-boy says, “No, we’re just waiting.”

The guy looks up and down the slough for signs of something to wait for. I look with him. He glances around the open fields in front of his truck, then he turns in his seat and looks back at the village. There is nothing happening anywhere. He asks, “For what?”

I am wondering the same thing. Go stares through the windshield, straight down the road and back into town, maybe running through a list of possible names to give me, maybe not. A kid on a bike rolls across the gravel where it curves between two homes. On the left side is a row of dogs who’ve appeared, sitting on top of their little plywood houses, ugly dogs, watching us.

Go turns back to the guy in his truck, says, “We’re waiting to find out.”