Joe smiles the kind of smile that says he knows stuff that other people don’t know.
“You mean your momma never told you? Th
em Catholics,
they eat horse meat.”
Mom doesn’t hear this because she’s too busy pouring tea for Aaka. But Jack hears it, all right, and he’s not happy about what he’s hearing. I can see it in the way he looks up from his magazine real sharp, fi xing his eye on Joe. Jack keeps his mouth shut, though, because Uncle Joe don’t think much of white men, and Jack knows it.
“What they want to eat horse meat for?” I ask.
“Cheaper,” Joe says.
Aaka is still eating maktak, and even though no one ever said it, I know them horse-eating, kid-stealing Catholics aren’t ever going to feed me what I like—whale meat and maktak.
And I’m all of a sudden so hungry, it seems like I could never get enough to fi ll me up.
Bunna fl ops down onto the bed next to Jack and Isaac.
Jack’s got a picture in Life magazine of a school somewhere down south in the Lower 48. It has one of those big orange 5
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school buses out front of it, and I don’t like the way Bunna looks at that bus, his eyes all full of possibilities, because I know there’s no way I am ever going to fi nd any possibilities at all at Sacred Heart School, big orange bus or not.
Mom sets the teakettle on the stove, gazing at the three of them, her eyes soft.
“Isaac, your face,” she says.
Isaac slips off the bed quick as a lemming, but Mom catches him quicker.
“You want them white people to think you’re a puppy?
Here, lemme wash your face.”
I hear the plane overhead, fl ying low enough to shake the windows. I hold Joe’s gun on my shoulder, sliding my cheek sideways along its smooth stock, trying to pretend it’s not heavy, watching the plane buzz down out of the sky at the far end of town, like a big fat fl y. It’s one of them military planes, a C-46. I squint down the gun’s barrel with my good eye as the plane lands, following it through the gun’s sight as it drags its swelled-up belly across the tundra, sunlight fl ashing off its silver skin. Th
e dogs are complaining about it, their
voices yapping mad at fi rst, then yowling up together into one voice, that long-tailed howl they always make when the plane lands.
As far as you can see out, there is tundra, tundra turned red and gold with fall, tundra full of cold air and sunshine. I take a deep breath. It feels like that plane has poked a hole in the sky, and all the air is leaking out.
I hand the gun back to Joe, the gun that’s gonna be mine 6
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y / L u k e when I’m old enough to take the kick. Next spring maybe.
“Boys?” Mom says. “You hear? Get your stuff . Plane’s come.”
I’m twelve years old, all right, and Bunna, he’s ten. But Isaac, he’s only six, and all I can think of is those Catholics and what they say about kids. Why can’t we wait until Isaac turns seven?
When I climb up into that plane, the wind’s blowing hard, same as always.
“Take care of your brothers,” Mom calls, and I turn around quick. One last time.
Th
e wind sweeps my hair across my eyes and carries Mom’s words backward. It pulls me backward, too.
Stay here, the wind says. Stay.
Mom stands on the edge of the runway right next to Jack, my aapa and aaka and all our aunties and uncles with their babies. Some of our aunties are crying, but not Mom. Mom says we’re Eskimo and Eskimos know how to survive. She says we have to learn things, things we can’t learn here in the village. Mom does not cry, and neither do we.
Take care of your brothers. I hang on tight to those words as I sit down inside the plane. It’s full of kids, this plane, kids going off to boarding school, mostly teens, because there’s no high schools in none of our villages. Every single teen from every single village in the whole world, maybe—all of us being swept off to some place where there won’t be no parents, no grandparents, no babies. Only big orange buses and trees and teachers choking on our names.
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Bunna and Isaac are looking around with wide eyes.
“Th
ey all going to Sacred Heart?” Bunna whispers.
“Naw,” I say. “Most of them going off to BIA schools.”
Bureau of Indian Aff airs schools don’t take kids as young as us—that’s what the man who convinced mom to send us said. He said we’d get a better education at a Catholic school. I don’t say any of this to Bunna. I don’t think Bunna cares much about his education right now. Me neither. And Isaac, sitting in between the two of us, doesn’t even know what it means,
