“My mom. She pushed me out the window just before the roof fell,” Amiq said. “I was the youngest, the only one who fi t.”
It felt like it was somebody else talking, somebody whose voice had become little more than a whisper, a whisper that seemed really loud in the silence that surrounded them. Th ey
sat there, the two of them, all alone in that silence. When the spruce twig in Amiq’s hand snapped in half, it sounded 129
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like gunshot. Amiq took the two splinters of dead wood and stabbed them into the frozen ground.
“My dad died in the war,” Sonny said.
Amiq looked up quick, but he didn’t say a word.
“Left my mom alone with all us kids.”
Amiq had known that Sonny didn’t have a dad, but he’d never really thought about it. Now he realized something surprising: both he and Sonny knew what it felt like to grow up with only one parent—Sonny with his mom and all those brothers and sisters and him with nobody left but his old man.
“My old man was in the war, too. Ever since the fi re, though, he likes his jug,” Amiq said. “Likes his jug a whole lot.”
He mounded up a little pile of dead leaves and needles around the bottom of one of the spruce twigs, wishing, suddenly, that he hadn’t mentioned that part about his dad drinking. Him and his big mouth. He looked up quick, brushing the dirt from his hands and forcing himself to smile.
“Yeah, but you know what? Th
em scientists pay twenty-
fi ve cents apiece for lemmings, and they always have a hot meal. Beef stew and chicken soup, that kind of stuff . And they got a whole library full of books, science books, mostly. Th at’s
where I pretty much grew up, at that library. Th
ey’re the ones
paid to send me here, too. Th
ey fi gure I’m gonna come back
home and be a scientist.”
It felt like he was talking too fast.
“So are you?”
130
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“Am I what?”
“Going to be a scientist?”
“Heck if I know. All I know for sure is they aren’t going to turn me into some kind of lab animal. I seen what they do to lab animals.”
Sonny fi dgeted. “Least they pay your way home, summers,” he off ered.
Amiq looked at Sonny. “You can’t ever go home sum-
mers?”
He didn’t really have to ask. He knew it was true. But he’d never really thought about it.
“Mom’s got a lot of other mouths to feed,” Sonny said.
“Guess I’m down for the count.”
Sonny looked so sad all of a sudden that Amiq wanted to say something to make him laugh. He pinched his voice up tight again, just like how the general talked, like how generals in movies acted.
“An educated man we shall have,” he said.
And Sonny did laugh. Both of them laughed softly, like two educated men. It was not the kind of laugh you laugh when something’s really funny, though. It was more the kind you laugh when something bad happens and there’s nothing left to do but laugh.
Sonny looked out across the river to where the last of the sun was sinking behind a bald-topped hill. It was glowing like the embers of a dying fi re, and the shadows in Amiq’s hideout had started to get dark and fl ickery. Flickering in a funny way, Sonny thought suddenly, just as the fl ickering began to 131
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sharpen into a small shaft of bright light. Without saying a word, both boys dropped down low on their bellies. Somebody who didn’t know much about walking in the woods was making a lot of noise, cracking dead wood with every step, swinging a bright light every which way. Amiq and Sonny lay still as stones. Sonny could feel his heart pounding hard against the cold ground. He thought maybe he could feel Amiq’s heart pounding just as hard, their two hearts pounding warnings back and forth through the hard, dark earth. Th
at fl ickering
light, searching the woods, made him think of the crazy gleam Father Mullen got in his eyes when he got really mad.
Th
ey waited, without hardly breathing, until the light faded off into a distant pinpoint, then went out altogether, like a snuff ed candle. Slowly they eased themselves back up, still afraid to even breathe.
“We better fi gure out a way to get back into the school or they gonna send the dogs out after us,” Amiq whispered, fi nally.
Dogs? “What dogs?”
Amiq grinned. “Your mother’s dead dogs.”
Sonny punched him on the shoulder, hard, but that crazy Eskimo just kept
