Читать книгу Sometimes We're Always Real Same-Same - Mattox Roesch - Страница 15

Kiana and my mom became friends the first time they met. They bonded over something called seal finger. Kiana stopped by our house and walked around the little place, looking at each decoration and family picture, even the stereo, as if everything were exotic. Mom apologized for the mess. She said we hadn’t finished unpacking yet. It was Mom who had the seal finger, and Kiana claimed to know a cure.

Kiana pointed to a living room wall, said, “I always wanted a map of the world.”

It was the first time I had seen her since we’d had sex, and again I was taken by her striking cheekbones, how high and chiseled they were under her mysterious, almost sad eyes. She had a face with the strength and danger of a hundred-foot cliff.

There was now a well-spread rumor going around town that Kiana had things to say to me, that she was pissed. And I knew it was true. But right here in our living room she acted like she didn’t recognize me. Acted like she didn’t even know me. Then I worried that maybe she didn’t. Maybe my face didn’t register. Then I didn’t know which would be worse.

Mom held out her hand in the middle of everything, showing her swollen thumb and blocking Kiana’s path.

Kiana said, “Real huge, man.”

I wanted to leave the room and the house but couldn’t. I’d been avoiding the unpacking chores for over a month, but now, with Kiana here, and with the energy of all the rumors surrounding her, I was held captive, and I pulled back the tape on a box labeled PHOTOS. There were four albums and they were in good shape. I flipped through pages. Kiana kept pacing our house, faking curiosity, and I noticed the pictures were all out of order. Pictures of me as a baby were scattered, sometimes right next to the most recent. Others were doubled up or missing.

“Why did it get like this?” Mom said, still displaying her injury in the middle of the room.

The seal finger was ballooning Mom’s thumb. She’d been away from Eskimo life for so long that she didn’t remember how to use an ulu and sliced her finger open while trying to help Uncle Stanley skin that seal. The little bit of oil that was on the blade had mixed with her blood and cartilage under the skin. When the cut closed up, her thumb swelled like a marble inside a glove.

“Because of the seal oil,” Kiana said.

Mom asked, “Can we get rid of it?”

Kiana raised her eyebrows and nodded. But it wasn’t very convincing.

I was trying to ignore Mom these days. It had only been a month since we’d moved up and she’d already changed her last name from Pop’s back to her family’s—Ayupak. She hadn’t lived here for twenty years and she was trying to act like she hadn’t missed a beat, like she still remembered everything. Overcompensating, it seemed. Like getting a divorce and moving four thousand miles away. Like trying to skin a seal and damn near cutting off her finger.

It was sometime this week that I heard a couple of ladies talking shit about Mom at Native Store. They were standing next to a circular clothes rack, thumbing through outdated Nike t-shirts, using her first name—Lynn. Saying Lynn always showed off by wearing fancy clothes. They said she was trying to act better than the village because she lived in Los Angeles. And they were right. Back home Mom wore tank tops and jeans, and up here she was flapping around with windy black pants and matching v-neck sweaters.

The day we moved here a group of church ladies welcomed Mom by giving her a kuspak they’d made. It was nice, and since Mom had up and left all those years ago and never returned or kept in contact, they could’ve just ignored her. I would’ve. The kuspak was a fancy parka cover, like a dress with a hood and pockets, and it was common for ladies to wear them with jeans to church or pie socials or any village event. But Mom would never wear this one. She wanted to be as good an Eskimo as all the other ladies (or so she thought)—she wanted to sew her own.

And I’d just found out that she’d started dating some local dog musher. My only salvation these days was work, and the fact that Pop was coming to visit us sometime soon.

Go-boy and me were working at the fish tower again, but not together. We were sentenced to some kind of probation and separated. I’d heard Go was in a funk because of the whole thing, and I wasn’t surprised. He loved that summer job. Always had. And the prospect of losing it had deflated him. Mom tried convincing me Go was depressed, trying to argue it was something deeper than work problems, calling it chemical and genetic. She said he’d had a rough childhood, but she didn’t give any specifics to back it up. She just said that Go’s biological mom was a disgusting, messed-up woman. “A sick chick,” Mom said. Yet I knew Go-boy always strove so hard to do everything right. He was maybe down on himself for messing up at work. That, and a friend had just killed himself. Who wouldn’t be depressed?

The whole village loved Go-boy because he was always dependable and energized and smart about how stuff ought to work. He always told me stuff like, When everyone does better, EVERYONE does better. Yet I was realizing that since I’d moved here, Go didn’t seem to be doing any better. And I didn’t want anyone, including Mom, to know I was the reason he’d almost gotten fired.

The day Kiana and my mom met to heal Mom’s seal finger, I stopped by Go-boy’s house. He was at the kitchen table, reading a note written on a page torn from the Bible. The girl’s handwriting was in green marker, her note written on a page from the New Testament. Parts of the text were underlined with red pen. There were arrows and X’s connecting and editing things.

“What’s that?”

“A letter,” he said, drumming one heel on the floor in his reserved excitement.

I was wondering if he had heard anything about me and Kiana. It shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but in a small village, when the word hits the air, it becomes gospel.

“Is that from your girl?”

Go-boy smiled, said, “It’s a list.”

He was now tapping his heel against the leg of the chair and he leaned out of the way so I could read the title. It was called TEN THINGS I LIKE ABOUT GO-BOY.

“Valerie doesn’t believe in heaven,” Go said, and it sounded like he wanted to do something about that.

I asked, “What about your sister?”

He didn’t look up, said, “Who, Donkey Kong?”

I nodded. I couldn’t say her name—Kiana—it felt weird. I said, “Yeah, her.”

Go-boy had told me about the nickname Donkey Kong. He’d given it to her while on a family vacation in South Dakota, in the Black Hills. They were driving a nature loop and parked by a bunch of mules. Kiana was young and she jumped out of the car with slices of bread to feed them, and when the animals started fighting, one bit Kiana on top of her head. She got scared and bled a little, and he’d called her Donkey Kong ever since.

Go said, “Donkey Kong believes in algebra.”

Then he laughed, and by the sound of it I knew he hadn’t heard anything about me and her. This was the good thing about Go’s recent funk—it kept him locked up in his room, away from the rumors and gossip.

“Algebra?” I said.

“Any kind of math.”

Go said Kiana was some sort of math prodigy. As a sophomore in high school she’d been taking satellite classes from the university in Anchorage. By the end of her junior year she’d been a quarter done with an undergraduate degree. Go said she could leave the village that coming school year and start college early, but for some reason, she didn’t want to. Maybe she was afraid. He said, “She tutors our math teacher.” Kiana was a genius, but she did bad in most other classes. She spent too much time on math. Never did anything else.

“My sister thinks that living in the village after high school means failure.”

He said this like he was proof she was wrong, or like she was young and dumb and had a lot to learn. But for me, Kiana was speaking the truth. For me, living in the village a year before I finished high school was failure.

“Wanna go potluck?” Go-boy asked.

I said sure, and we left his place.

On the way I asked Go-boy why Kiana liked math. Why not something else—art, or biology?

He said, “She thinks it’s simple.”

“Math?”

“She likes all the rules and formulas,” he said. “She likes the patterns. It’s just the way she is.”

But I wondered if that was really it. I said, “What if she gets to a level of math that doesn’t follow formulas?”

Go-boy and me walked across town to the bowling alley, to the funeral potluck for Jay—Trilogy. Jay had shot himself in the neck with a .22 pistol. He’d bled to death. Go said, “There’s been a lot of this stuff this year.”

I wanted to ask him about work but didn’t. We hadn’t talked about what had happened because we didn’t need to. At least, that was what I thought.

At the old gym we kicked off our shoes on the worn-out snowmachine track—the village-style doormat—and walked in. Pinsetters were lined up under old basketball hoops. The place was packed, and about half the lanes were filled. This was when I saw Kiana and my mom together for a second time. They sat with Uncle Stanley, tying their laces and sizing up the bowling balls. Mom examined her seal finger. Kiana waved to her brother, not looking at me, and Go walked to the group.

Uncle Stanley held a blue marbled ball and was giving tips on bowling form and the definitions of certain terms. He had a smooth voice that was easy to ignore, and Kiana sat at the scorer’s table, humoring him, penciling names and numbers and sneaking sips from her water bottle when he wasn’t looking.

Mom said, “Can I have a drink?”

“Oh, I . . .” Kiana murmured, nervous, tracing her fingers down her jaw and kicking the container farther under her chair. She said, “I think I might be sick. I have a cold.”

Mom leaned out of her plastic booth, hinting with a type of nod, and said, “I’m sick too.” Then she helped herself.

Before we moved here Mom told me that alcoholism was a problem in the village. She said her mom, who was a Scandinavian teacher from Minnesota, had a drinking problem and ended up running back to the lower forty-eight, leaving her dad alone with six kids. She said this place was a damp village, meaning booze wasn’t illegal, yet they couldn’t sell it at stores. But after living here a month I knew more people who never drank a drop—like Go-boy—than I ever did back home. The difference in the village was that there were no secrets. Like at this bowling alley, at this funeral potluck, it was no secret Kiana and my mom were getting drunk, not to us or anyone. It was cheap if you asked me. Disrespectful. And I didn’t even know the kid, but I knew that Go-boy knew him and that was enough of a reason to pay respect.

As I stepped up to the lane to bowl, I turned and saw what everyone else at the potluck saw—we were those people, the people on the outside edge of everything, laughing and sneaking booze into some poor kid’s funeral. And I could tell this embarrassment was as real as anything to Go-boy, and it was destroying him—this was his family, and would be forever, and he didn’t know how to save it. We were his family.

Stanley said, “I heard when you get shot your brain stays alive three minutes before you die.”

Go-boy shifted in his seat and looked the room over, trying to ignore Uncle Stanley. I thought about those fifteen-year-olds that Wicho shot.

“Three minutes to think,” he said, scratching his bushy gray sideburns. “Pretty long time when you’re dead, I guess.”

Mom stepped up to the lane for her roll, but she couldn’t fit her thumb into the thumbhole. She tried every other ball she could find, but none would fit that seal finger. She already had sort of mannish hands, and her swollen thumb exaggerated it. So first she tried lefthanded, and she almost rolled down the wrong lane. Then she went with just the right hand, without using the holes, but the ball slipped and landed by her feet. So Mom settled on using two hands and a shoveling motion from her hip, like she was slamming a car door shut.

“That’ll wreck the lane,” Stanley said.

Mom didn’t respond. She had her back to us and she jackhammered her right leg, nervous, waiting for her ball. She then threw a second roll from her pocket and sat down. Kiana cheered as the ball hit the gutter.

“Sure is a big seal finger all right,” Stanley said, laughing with a little wheeze. “Should call it walrus finger. Call it flipper finger.”

Mom showed Stanley a little smile, then flipped him off.

Stanley laughed even harder. “Flipper finger,” he said again.

It turned out that Go-boy was a dynamite bowler. But you wouldn’t have known he was even trying. As we played, he was distracted, looking for Valerie. We were at the far end of the room, against a wall, and Go scanned the crowd nonstop, looked at the clock. People were everywhere. People walked in the door and shook off their logo-embroidered jackets. People dished up seconds from the buffet of Eskimo potluck food—dry fish and seal oil, herring eggs on kelp, black meat. People stood around, watched cousins and nieces knock down pins, consoled mourners, sometimes forced exhausted laughter. Huddled groups of people cried and shared stories. Kids boomeranged around the room like they did anywhere, anytime. There was always someone to look at. And when it was Go’s turn he’d roll a strike and then sit back down, look out the door, and sometimes take long walks to the bathroom, searching for his girlfriend. He had something to give her. I’d gotten the impression that tonight was important to him. Go and Valerie hadn’t yet kissed, and maybe this was the night he would make his move.

I was bowling pretty good too. Not like Go, but better than Stanley and way better than the girls, who were buzzed, giggling every time someone saw them sipping from the water bottle. Sometime around the fifth frame I leaned over Kiana to see my score. She’d only given me twenty-seven points. I was in last place. She almost laughed when I looked at the card. And I knew she hadn’t forgotten about me.

That was when Mom leaned in with her hot breath and said, “Thanks for bringing Go-boy, that’s real good of you.”

By the eighth frame an argument had started. Kiana was doing terrible and getting frustrated. She’d rolled her fourth gutter ball in a row and was ready to storm off, half drunk. It was a one-sided argument about how lame bowling was, and everyone pretended they couldn’t hear her.

Go said, “We shouldn’t be keeping score. It doesn’t matter.”

“Gotta keep score,” Uncle Stanley claimed. He pulled his dentures from his mouth, licked the gum side, and slipped them back in.

“Stanley, you can keep your own,” Go said. “Then compare with the little kids. See who’s better.”

Stanley said, “I know who’s better.”

This was when Go saw his girlfriend and smiled like everything before that moment was forgotten. She was at the far end of the room, watching someone bowl, with her baby nephew asleep on her back, held between her jacket and body like a hiking pack, like how all the ladies in town carried babies. She smiled across the room, and the cracking sound of bowling pins wove between them as they shared in each other’s sameness. I knew they would kiss tonight.

The dog musher had shown up while Kiana rolled another gutter ball, and he and Mom were flirting, not paying attention to anyone. Stanley stepped up to the lane, getting ready for his turn. This was when Kiana started to argue, not with anyone or anything but just with the state of things, complaining and not noticing that nobody was responding.

“It’s so . . . false,” she said. “How can I relate to something like it?”

I tried to ignore her like everyone else, but she turned to me and said, “Hateful.” It was the first thing she’d said to me since the party.

“We should play Donkey Kong instead,” I said, and smiled.

Kiana dialed in an expression like she remembered she was pissed at me. She walked over, stood above me, and grabbed my arm. She started talking about us. Her anger may or may not have been authentic, it may have just been the booze, but I wasn’t sure. Maybe both. Her voice was loud enough that Mom and the dog musher could now hear everything, interrupting their bowling-alley moment. Go-boy even turned from smiling at his girlfriend, and Stanley paused before he tried to roll a spare on a seven-ten split. Kiana called me an asshole and kept reinforcing the fact that she had a boyfriend. “Loser,” she said. You can imagine a drunk seventeen-year-old mathematician, angry, giving you hell in front of your mom. But it was Go-boy I wanted to protect from hearing this more than anybody. I didn’t want to ruin his night. It was Go-boy who would be wounded and haunted for days by the weaknesses of his stepsister and his cousin, the weaknesses of his family.

“Yeah, we had sex,” Kiana said. “But it wasn’t anything.”

Her confessions got so loud that other groups started noticing. I had the feeling of being tried and convicted and sentenced, which I hated because I was a terrible liar. When pressed, I gave in. This was why I hated Wicho’s trial because I knew his testimony was a lie, and the whole time I worried the prosecutor would grab me from my seat and ask me if Wicho was guilty. What would I have said?

And this was why I hated the thought of my friends sitting in jail for the rape of that girl. They were waiting to be tried, and how could they not say my name, knowing I was free? I imagined Kid Cab and the others, alone with a couple of cops, being questioned, recorded, pressured. I wondered, under all the stress and fear and intimidation, if Kid Cab was ready to crack, ready to break down, ready to tell them everything that had happened, tell them everyone who was there. I know I would have cracked, and that was why, each day before we’d moved to Alaska, I’d waited for the cops to stop in front of our house—just like they had the day Wicho had been hauled off—but each day passed, no cops, no phone calls, nothing. Even in Alaska I was waiting for it all to catch up to me, like I was expecting it. And I knew if I walked away from the rape without being convicted, it was by luck. I walked away free because I had no priors and because I wasn’t well known to our enemies—to the girl—and because my friends still held true to the backward rules of all that gang shit. I walked away free and I wasn’t sure that was such a good thing.

Mom stepped in and pulled Kiana away from me, quieting her anger. It was then that I left the potluck.

Late the next day Mom told me the dog musher had proposed—right there in that bowling alley, at the funeral potluck. It happened after I left. In front of a small group of people, including Stanley and Go-boy and Kiana, he stood up on an orange bench seat and said a whole bunch of beautiful things to his drunk bride. He ended the speech with a marriage proposal. They were planning a fall wedding.

As she told me this she was soaking her seal finger, sitting at the kitchen table. It was just the two of us in the quiet house and only her hand agitating water in an ice-cream bucket made any sound. Kiana had told her a mixture of saltwater and boiled stinkweed would shrink the swollen bump. But that wasn’t true, and Mom would later realize this. There was no cure for her seal finger.

She said, “You’ll like him.”

Mom could see me through the doorless frame that separated the living room from the kitchen, but I couldn’t see her. I could see a silhouette. I was on the couch, flipping through more photo albums. Sunlight glared through a kitchen window from behind Mom so that everything between me and the window was an overexposed blur.

“He’s a good guy,” she said. “He mushes in the Iditarod. He’s working construction at the new jail.”

Sometimes Mom would pull her thumb from the bucket and hold it up to examine the seal finger. When she did this, her hand was just outside the beam of sunlight, beside the window, and I could see her thumb against the flat background of wood paneling. I watched the water drip off and melt down her forearm. Steam smoked into the path of light as she flipped her hand back and forth—thumb up, thumb down—and her finger was still as bloated as before. She did this every ten minutes or so, sometimes massaging to feel the bump, and I watched with her, and it never got any smaller.

There was a time when I might have said something at that moment. I would’ve told her not to jump into another marriage so quick. I would’ve told her I didn’t like the idea of this guy—he didn’t sound very smart. Who proposes at a funeral?

Mom kept soaking her hand at the kitchen table, holding it up every few minutes to watch if the swelling had gone down. There was a time when she might have said more to me too. She would’ve used this opportunity to explain herself and try to get any sort of reaction. She would’ve tried to further sell the idea of her marriage. But now we both stayed silent, waiting and watching her seal finger, not sure what would come next.