Epilogue ~ A New Gun
1965
LUKE
—
Th
e dogs are howling with voices that say a plane is landing, but there’s no plane, no distant buzzing in the clouds. It’s a new sound making them howl—Uncle Joe’s snow machine, come roaring into the yard, bright red and shiny new, the sound of it banging up against our ears like a blizzard against an old shed door.
I like it.
Uncle Joe is kneeling on the seat on one knee, holding hard onto that machine’s handles like it’s a big animal that needs taming. Isaac sits behind him, grinning hard. His face has grown up, but it’s still the same old face, and every time I look at it, it feels like a miracle.
We found him with that ad in the Dallas paper: Looking for Isaac. It took a lot of people helping—kids and adults, both. O’Shay’s dad did the legal stuff , and Father Flanagan found the money. But we did it. We got him back.
Me and Mom stand at the doorway, watching that snow 240
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E P I L O G U E ~ A N E W G U N / L u k e machine fl ash past us, watching its runners carve a wide circle in the snow. Th
e dogs lunge at the ends of their lines, yapping
at the edge of that circle like it’s a border to a new country, their mouths snapping open and shut with a voiceless violence. It’s like a movie with the sound turned off , watching those dogs lunge and snap into the roar of that machine.
Th
e sun against the snow is bright enough to burn your eyes.
“Too much racket!” Mom hollers. “You gonna shake
peoples’ ears off .”
Joe cuts the engine and steps off the machine, never even hearing Mom. He has his gun, his brand-new gun, and he stands in front of that snow machine with that gun strapped across his back like a hunter with a big, shiny catch.
“How you gonna hunt with all that racket?” Mom calls.
Even though it’s quiet now, the sound of that machine echoes in our ears, and Mom is yelling like it’s still a competition between the two of them.
“Forget the noise!” Isaac hollers back. “It’s the speed that counts!”
“Th
is thing goes fast enough you could jump on the back of a running caribou,” Joe hollers, then winks at me. “Or rope
’em riding by.”
Mom is kneeling down next to Pakak, her lead dog, trying to calm him down, a wisp of gray hair falling across her cheek.
“And what good’s all that speed if it can’t even fi nd its way home in a storm?” she asks Pakak.
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y
• • •
Isaac’s right, though. It’s the speed of things going faster and faster in this fast new world—that’s what’s gonna count, not the noise.
But not right now. Right now, as we sit down to eat, all that matters is us, sitting here at our own table eating frozen fi sh quaq until our stomachs grow warm and our eyes grow sleepy and the world gets slow. All that matters right now is that I’m home and Isaac is fi nally home, too. And being home is good because I can lean back in my chair and say, “Where’s the seal oil?” saying it in Eskimo like I never even left, never even went to Sacred Heart School where they don’t know nothing about seal oil, not in any language.
“Where’s the what?” Uncle Joe says.
I’m slicing off a buttery smooth slice of frozen fi sh, suddenly aware of the fact that both Uncle Joe and Mom are looking at me funny, both of them real quiet.
“Misigaaq, ” I say again, the Iñupiaq sounds tickling the back of my throat.
“Missy-gaq, ” Joe says, sliding the jar across the table, mimicking the way I’ve said it, making me hear how funny it sounds, Catholic-shaped on my Catholic-trained tongue.
“What kind of talk they teach you down there in that place?” Joe asks, laughing. “Swahili?”
And I laugh, too, although there’s nothing funny inside my laughter. Inside there’s words I can hear, clear as birdsong, words I will never ever say again. Words that make me feel like 242
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E P I L O G U E ~ A N E W G U N / L u k e those dogs out there snapping and lunging, voiceless against the roar of the future.
But never mind, because when the time comes, we’re
gonna shake everybody’s ears off ; that’s what I think. Shake them good with the sound of all us kids come home, full of new ideas, loud as engines revving. Th
e future may be slick
with Latin words and loud machines and the kind of laughter that burns your throat, but it’s gonna take off like a shiny new snow machine, ready to go anywhere. Everything, both good and bad, all messed up together. Th
at’s what I think.
Uncle Joe is done eating, and he’s standing in front of me now, holding his new gun, the gun with the site that’s never less than a hair from right. He isn’t laughing anymore.
“Guess you’re ready for a new gun by now,” he says, his voice soft.
Guess I am.
We’re roaring across the snow-fi lled tundra on his snow machine, me and Joe, caribou scattering before us like brown stones rolling across a white
