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