“Our mother . . .”
Suddenly Sonny didn’t have the slightest idea what he should say about their mother.
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“Our mother’s not doing so well,” Amiq said quick, starting to rev up like he always did in class discussions. “Her dog team took sick, and it’s going to be a tough winter for them with all the dogs down and all.”
He smiled real big, and Sonny had to turn away quick to keep from laughing. He stole a quick glance at the general.
Th
e general was frowning as though he were starting to catch on. Amiq’s smile died, like he knew he’d gone too far.
“She traps,” Sonny said quickly.
“She has to be able to run a trapline this time of year. It’s critical, sir,” Amiq added.
Critical? Where in the heck did that kid get his words?
Sonny watched the general to see if this word surprised him, but the general just glanced at his watch like he wasn’t even listening anymore.
“All right then, gentlemen,” he said. “Well, it’s nearly lunchtime now, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” they both said brightly.
“Maybe we’ll see you and your brother at lunch,” the general told Sonny. Th
en he bent his head back into his papers
and moved on.
As soon as the he was out of earshot, Amiq slumped back into the wall like all his muscles had melted. Th
en he looked
Sonny square in the eye and smiled. Sonny’d never seen him smile a real smile like that. Not at him, anyhow.
“Let’s split,” Amiq said, and for a moment it seemed like they really were brothers.
Sonny thought briefl y about lunch, lunch with the general.
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T H E M E A N E S T H E A T H E N S / S o n n y a n d A m i q Th
en he nodded his head and smiled. “Th
at guy sure gives me
the creeps,” he said.
Amiq smiled, too. “No shit.”
Without hardly thinking about it, Amiq took Sonny to that spot in the woods that looked like a little room made of trees, the one that Luke and Bunna had found. Th
eir hideout.
Sonny had never seen it before.
“How’d you fi nd this place?” Sonny asked, looking around, clearly impressed.
Amiq smiled. “Luke and Bunna found it. Trying to hide from old man Pete.” He thought of old man Pete’s wrinkled-up face and the suspicious way he always looked at the Eskimo kids. “Man, that bugger’s mean,” he said.
Sonny grinned. “Never been mean to me,” he said.
Amiq rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, you tell him about this here Eskimo fort, and I’ll have to kill ya,” he said in his best John Wayne voice. “And if they fi nd out I took you here, I may have to kill you anyhow,” he added. “’Course, I do owe you something, us being brothers and all.”
Sonny laughed. “Yeah. Practically twins.”
Amiq was warming up to being out in the woods, out in their hideout, their Eskimo hideout, out here with an Indian, both of them hiding from the military. Th
is was an adventure,
all right, a real adventure.
“Ah well, you know how it is with these Na-tives,” he said, pinching his voice up a notch. “Th
ey all of them look alike,
and that there’s a fact.”
Now both of them were laughing, laughing about the gen-127
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eral actually mistaking them for brothers. Brothers!
“Kid brother,” Sonny snorted, patting Amiq sweetly on the head.
“No!” Amiq hollered gleefully. “No. Twins, remember?
Twins! ”
Th
ey were laughing really hard now.
“Th
e whole dog team?” Sonny said. “Th
e whole team took
sick? All together?”
“Measles,” Amiq said crisply, “Siberian measles.”
Sonny doubled over. “Stop!” he begged. “My mom doesn’t even have dogs.”
“I am sorry to hear that, very sorry indeed,” Amiq dead-panned. “Well, we just might have to resort to snowshoes this year, son.”
He reached down and picked up a spruce branch, all rusty orange with dead needles.
“We always use snowshoes,” Sonny said.
“Oh, yeah. I forgot.”
Amiq rolled the branch back and forth between his palms, watching the river and thinking how funny it was that things could change all of a sudden, people changing with them.
“What about those tests?” Sonny said. “What were they?”
“Hell if I’m going to drink iodine-131,” Amiq said.
“What’s iodine-131?”
Amiq shrugged, running his fi nger along the rough edge of the spruce branch, making the dead needles shoot off like little arrows. “It ain’t sacramental wine, that’s for sure.”
He looked down, thinking about that name. Iodine-131. It 128
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T H E M E A N E S T H E A T H E N S / S o n n y a n d A m i q sounded like a cross between some kind of medicine and some kind of motor oil.
“I grew up with scientists, and I’m sure as heck not going to be somebody’s lab animal,” Amiq said.
“You grew up with scientists?”
“You know, the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory. It’s in Barrow. You never hear about it?”
Sonny shook his head.
“Yeah, well, I spent a lot of time there after my mom and brothers died. After the fi re . . .”
Amiq looked down, bending the dead twig farther and farther back against itself, aware of the fact that Sonny was
