“I’m making an ulu for Valerie. The handle will be glass.”
I didn’t know what that was, and I asked him.
“An ulu is an Eskimo knife,” he said.
Go pointed to a rounded steel blade—about the size and shape of the bill on a Lakers cap—that had a small handle. He made a motion with one hand, like he was dealing cards, and said, “We always cut fish like this.”
There were five or six other ulus, varying in size and shape, lying in the sink. The blade of the new ulu was cut from a Skilsaw blade, the company logo still visible, the teeth ground to a slick edge. In the center was an inscription:
The seed of God is in us.
Now
the seed of a pear tree
grows into a pear tree;
and a hazel seed
grows into a hazel tree;
a seed of God
grows into
God.
. MEISTER ECKHART.
Go said, “Great quote, ah?”
I shrugged.
“Sure always something to live by,” he said. “A seed of God grows into God.”
“Did Valerie just leave?”
“No, Kiana.”
I said, “I haven’t met her yet.”
Go had a torch and leather gloves and had his project splayed all over the kitchen, so I left to find something else to do. I walked back down Main Road, kicking rocks, sometimes picking one up and tossing it into a silver herring boat that was jacked up on pallets in someone’s yard. People in trucks passed me, waving. I thought it was odd how so many vehicles didn’t have license plates.
A couple guys pulled alongside me in a beat-up Toyota truck. I had met them playing ball with Go. The driver was a guy they called Bum One and he invited me to ride wherever they were riding to. I said okay. They had some beer in the cab and we all squeezed in and rode out of town. Bum One was wearing little earphones, and he asked me about California. About LA. I didn’t tell these guys lies like I told Go-boy. We got to a gravel pit and drank more and shot a handgun at the empty bottles. These guys were cool and they loved to just hang out and joke and tell me stories. They told me what it was like in the winter. Told me the sun only shines for a few hours. Said it was the opposite of California. And as they tried to scare me during this night and for nights to come, I wondered where Go-boy was. Bum One told me how it starts snowing in September and doesn’t stop till May. He started every sentence with Did you hear? He said, “Did you hear we get polar bears?”
“Shit!” I said, acting surprised and worried, but his exaggeration added to Go-boy’s mystique—these guys talked as if there were no way I could spend a whole year in Unalakleet, but Go was convinced I’d live here longer than a year, maybe forever, and he’d even bet I would. He seemed more confident that I would stay than I was confident that I would leave, even though I had already started planning my trip home and now was working and saving money.
But there was a part of me that didn’t want Go-boy to act so close, like family, so quick, or act like he’d known me for so long. And I didn’t know how to say it. And I didn’t know if that was even the problem.
It was hard to tell how Kiana and me went from talking in the kitchen over rum and diet soda, to walking down a hall, to messing around in a bedroom. I don’t remember much. She was a lot shorter after taking off those bunny boots. She left them by the closed door. Through flashes of nakedness—long thigh, collarbone, brown plains of skin stretching chest to waist—and my hands—my hands and her movements inviting them to explore the soft and the wet and the hot—through it all I kept seeing those enormous white winter boots, each puffy and padded like a volleyball.
Later, at another house, I was passed out between a beanbag and an open window. I felt that swimming sensation as I lay on the gnarled, gritty floor. When I woke the sun was ironing my forehead. It was morning. I was still a little drunk. I couldn’t remember specifics, but I knew right away. I knew Kiana and me had had sex. I didn’t have any idea of where or how or what, only a handful of images, and that mysterious other feeling—the guilt—the knowledge that I had just jeopardized my friendship with Go.
MALUKSUKS
Go-boy said, “Where you been?”
He wouldn’t look at me. He bumped a tin can of peanuts and it fell under the table, spilling open. I could smell the salt. The CB radio was switched off. The pale glow of sunlight through the tent walls gave everything a dead yellow color—the same dead yellow color of old curtains, of bedrooms at two o’clock in the morning.
“I thought the moment is all that exists,” I said.
“You saglu, man, you said you’d come back.”
I knew it wasn’t possible for a normal person to count fish for twelve or sixteen hours straight. It was crazy exhausting, but I also knew that Go-boy would be the type of guy to try something like that.
I said, “You should’ve just penciled in the numbers.”
“If we count wrong—” Go said, but didn’t finish.
I tried telling him we couldn’t be expected to sit on that tower and count every single fish that swam up or down. I tried telling him it was a give-and-take thing. Shoot for the averages. But he left the kitchen and went back to his sleeping tent, zipping me out. Go-boy had been doing this for a few summers, so questioning his knowledge of the job wasn’t a good idea. But neither was telling him why I was late.
Inside his sleeping tent he zipped and unzipped a mummy bag.
“I brought breakfast,” I said, lying.
Go-boy told me I should be on the tower, counting. His voice behind the canvas was sluggish. He flipped in his bag, sending a wave along the tent wall. He let out a deep-lung exhale that was so long and full it seemed it would balloon his whole shelter.
Within minutes on the tower the mosquitoes caught up with me, so I lit a coil and balanced it on the empty soup can that was buried under a month’s worth of ashes. I overlooked the river, trying to count fish, trying to record their numbers and wondering about Kiana. Wondering why she hadn’t stopped us. Wondering why I hadn’t stopped us.
Yet when I just thought of Kiana—of the way she looked through me, and of the way she laughed, diverted her flat smile, and slipped her white thumb ring on and off—I allowed myself to remember.
Fish were everywhere in the water. Fish swam past the tower and it was my job to count them, to mark an ink slash under each type that I saw and add up the total every half hour. I had never thought about fish before we’d moved here, before I’d started working this job. But in rural Alaska fish was money. Fish had Natives banking their year’s income in a few months and stocking their freezers full for the winter. People woke up in the morning for fish. People stayed up all night for fish. There were jobs catching them and cutting them, jobs weighing them and shipping them. All for fish. Even the people who’d left for college and gotten master’s degrees and doctorates—they had nets in the river and vacuum-packed meat in their freezers.
I first learned these kind were salmon. Silvers. Humpies. Kings. Reds. Chums. All salmon. The fish swam upriver to spawn, and they did the same thing every year at about the same time. I figured the rest of the job was simple—tower—clipboard—eyes—count the fish. But from twenty-five feet up, I couldn’t tell the humpies from the kings and the silvers. I’d grown up in California. I hadn’t spent every summer of my life on the river like most people. And even after the training, with all the instruction about the different