“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.”
BUNNY BOOTS
I told myself that as long as I was living way the hell up here in Alaska, I would have some fun. I would be with this girl—Kiana.
It was her face. She was beautiful, attractive, sexy, all those things, but those weren’t what did it. What got me, what hooked me from across the room that night—from the other side of the party—through the beats in the speakers, the smoke in the air, the fight about a crashed four-wheeler, the screams for them to shut the fuck up, the hole punched through a wall—what turned me away from the door and my next shift on the fish-counting tower was Kiana’s compelling face. She was mixing rum and diet soda in the kitchen, and instead of leaving I walked over to her.
She was Go-boy’s stepsister. She was my stepcousin. I knew I should’ve forgotten about her and gone back upriver to work my graveyard shift. I knew she had already forgotten about me moving here. But none of that mattered. She had the air. She had the look. I couldn’t stop myself. I was walking across the room.
I said, “Kiana?”
Her face was wide and strong, but it wasn’t a physical characteristic that gave it gravity. It was the way she looked through everything. It was the relationship between her massaged expression and all the hyper kids in the room who were experimenting with all the shit they weren’t supposed to. It was something just behind her face. She stood there, looking older than everyone—older than seventeen, anyway—acting like a woman who had it all, who had already been to this party.
She set the pop can down. I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or smiling. Everything seemed to be getting darker, even though the sun outside still refused to set. I noticed Kiana was wearing winter boots—white military boots—bunny boots. It was June.
“We haven’t met,” I said.
She slid the half-empty can of soda across the counter to me with a mix of boredom and mischievousness. She smiled. I reached past and grabbed the jug of rum.
“Cesar of Los Angeles,” she said. “Where’s Go?”
She said my name like it meant something. Cesar. Like it had purpose, and history, like it was a whole goddamned team to cheer for. Cesar. I loved it. She said my name like it had been my destiny. Like Cesar wasn’t just some of Pop’s superficial garbage he dumped on me to somehow fix his own lack of Cesar—or his own lack of Wicho—but like Cesar was me.
“He’s at work,” I said.
I didn’t tell her Go-boy’s shift was now over and that I was supposed to be there, upriver, on the tower, counting the fish in the river. I didn’t tell her he was now covering for me. And I wouldn’t tell her that at the moment I didn’t care about Go-boy.
“Good,” she said. “He needs to save money.”
“And Kiana, what about you?”
All along my plan in Unalakleet had been simple—pick up a job, a few paychecks, a plane ticket home. So right after I arrived I started looking around. But jobs weren’t available. I tried to get on with the company building the new jail, but I didn’t have construction experience, and the crews had already been filled, and something about building a jail seemed wrong. That left the grocery store and the fish-processing plant. The grocery store only had a few employees and all the positions were taken, and I didn’t want to work ankle-deep in fish guts and end each day smelling like seafood waste. So I turned to Go-boy. And just like Go-boy—supportive and helpful to a fault—he set me up with a job at the North River counting tower just a few weeks after I arrived, counting fish, making more cash than I would’ve imagined ever being possible in a place like this.
From the jump, when I moved here, when I got the tour of Unk, Go-boy had been trying to make me feel like a local. And he still was. He stopped by our house every day. He introduced me to his friends. Invited me on boat rides when he and his girlfriend, Valerie, would ride up the coast. He asked Mom if she needed anything from the store or needed help with anything around the house, and asked me if I wanted to check out a movie or ride around in his AMC. And if I did, if I jumped in the passenger seat of his car, Go would point out people to me on the streets and tell me their stories. He’d tell me who was dating, who was married, and who was part of our extended family. He’d stop and hang out with kids on BMX bikes, introduce me. They’d always ask Go when he wanted to play basketball or softball or bat again, and Go would sometimes make plans to meet them in a day or two, and other times Go would drop everything and we’d all head to the court for a game of bump or tip or three-on-three. And other times, while riding around, Go would warn me about who to avoid—who would steal my stereo, who took basketball too serious, who not to start shit with. Go knew which adults were on probation, and who was smuggling booze and drinking anyway. He even knew who was dealing. And I was grateful he was trying to look out for me and make me feel wanted, but sometimes Go disappeared. Sometimes he was sad and just wanted to be alone. He could spend an entire day or week in his room, writing his girlfriend a thirty-page letter or carving her a miniature wolf head from a caribou antler. So I was bound to hang out with somebody besides Go-boy.
One night I walked over to Go’s place in Happy Valley. It was the first—and only—time I saw Kiana before the party. When I was still about a half a block away I saw a girl come out of Go-boy’s house, jump on a four-wheeler, and take off. I didn’t get a good look. It was raining and she had her hood up. When I got inside I asked