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Authors: Cindy Dyson

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BOOK: And She Was
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It’s a catchy song, and we sang it maybe five times. And no, I don’t know what
alaman
means. There’s something about singing in a dark bar at the end of the night. There’s a warmth, a nostalgia in scores of untrained voices. It puts you in a mood. Even the HiTide cocktail waitresses sang with enthusiasm. I don’t know how the “Rodeo Song” became the national bar anthem, but I liked it. I’ve heard bartenders say it leads to fights, but I’ve never seen anything but a sense of drunken camaraderie. And it helps clear the bar. Men drifted out the door, still singing as they careened down the dirt road toward town or piled into van taxis waiting outside.

I was supposed to stand by the door and make sure no one left with any booze. This should have been easy. But some of these guys had become quite attached to the half-finished drinks in their hands. I let the beer bottles go and focused on getting the glasses back.

My first night at the Elbow Room ended with $250 in tips, a rosy ass, and another two shots. Les handed me the second shot and swished over to the register to cash me out.

“Where’s Thad?”

“He gave someone a ride home,” he said, knocking back a shot of his own. “I think there’s a present for you in the head.”

“What?”

“Just go look.”

I made for the bathroom, knowing it couldn’t be good. My “present” was Little Liz. Marge had told me a bit about her. She was short but not little girthwise. She was a regular in the worst sense. By early evening she was always planted at the same bar stool, where she would remain until she had to hit the bathroom. Most of the time, she never made it out.

I’d seen her that night, but she’d been in the Blue Room, a little partially walled-off corner with a wide window overlooking the bay, sitting at the bar, so I hadn’t served her. In the nights to come, how
ever, I would learn that Liz was my special burden. She would wear the same outfit night after night, or maybe she had several identical suits she swapped out. And suit is the right word—brilliant pink polyester slacks and blazer, the kind you sometimes see at Salvation Army stores. You know it had been neatly folded and boxed twenty years ago until its owner died and her heirs sorted through the basement, squabbled over the good stuff, and placed this suit in the box labeled
DONATE
.

Polyester is not forgiving, and each ring of fat bulged through that cocoon of petroleum-derived fabric. On her lapel drooped a fake red carnation.

I would never see Liz speak to anyone, although plenty of locals journeyed to her corner to say hi. I sensed a sort of homage in these greetings. Liz would always turn her shoulders, smile to expose her questionable dental habits, then turn and go back to drinking, even if the pilgrim was still talking.

In Anchorage, Little Liz would have been one of the scores of drunken natives staggering down Fourth Avenue, sometimes freezing on cold winter nights, lost to anything more than the next bar, the next drink. But here I got the idea that Little Liz was somebody, or had been.

I smelled the piss the moment I opened the bathroom door. She was slumped against the brown paneling sloppily singing a song I didn’t know.

“Come on. Time to go,” I said, squatting to grab her arm.

She looked at me, still singing. I didn’t even see the hand come up. She slapped me hard across the cheek. The accuracy of her aim surprised me.

“Leave me,” she spat.

I stood up, touching my cheek.

The last time I’d been slapped, I’d expected it, provoked it even. Four years ago I’d visited my mom to help celebrate the death of her fourth marriage. She’s on her way out the door, dressed trashy as usual, but worse now that she’s in her late forties. I’m camping out on her couch but get up to help her find her purse. “How do I look?” she asks as I hand her a sequined denim clutch. “Like a tramp,” I say. “Watch your mouth,” she says. When I explain that I am just trying to help her
out, help her see herself, help her see us, from other people’s eyes, she slaps me. I smiled at her and held the door open.

This slap, however, caught me off guard—a stinging reminder that helping a pathetic tramp or a sloppy drunk is a thankless job.

“Stay here then, you fucking drunk,” I said.

Les and Marge laughed at me as I stomped out of the bathroom.

“She slap you?” Marge asked.

“Yes.”

“She’ll do that if she’s not totally passed out. You gotta grab both hands before you even get close. Come on, I’ll show you.” Marge came around the bar.

I was in no mood to learn how to stuff a slap-happy, piss-soaked, polyestered drunk into a cab. “Fuck that,” I said and stomped back to a bar stool to wait for Thad.

Marge shot me a look. “I’ll do it this time. This time. Got that?”

“Whatever,” I said.

Marge made for the bathroom.

Les giggled and poured me another shot.

“You know, I’m in love with your boyfriend,” he said.

I had absolutely nothing to say to that.

“I was making progress until your fucking creamy ass showed up.” He smiled but flicked his cigarette aggressively. I wasn’t sure which gesture to give more weight to.

“My ass is far from creamy at the moment. Feels black and blue.”

“I’ll bet.” He looked me up and down, at least as far down as he could with the bar hitting me right below my tits. Handy height, most bars, you can often rest them right there.

Marge slammed back through the bathroom door, yanked the taxi phone from the hook by the door. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s Little Liz.” Pause. “Don’t tell me that, you little peckerhead. Get your ass over here.”

Les turned back to me. “Guess the competition’s too stiff. I’ll have to find another honey of a fisherman to woo.”

Marge harrumphed into the phone and clomped back to the bathroom. Les and I watched through our jets of smoke as she half carried, half dragged Liz from the bathroom to the wall beside the door, where she let her slide down to the floor. Neither of us moved.

Les half turned toward Marge as she came around the bar and started counting out the till. “Hey, Marge, who do you think would like a dark-eyed beauty like me?”

“Shut the fuck up, Les.”

He rolled his eyes and leaned across the bar toward me. “I figure her for a dyke who doesn’t know it,” he whispered.

“Shut the fuck up, Les. Where’s that fuckin’ taxi?”

The door banged open, and Thad walked in, the wind whipping his coat around his legs. Les straightened and smiled. “Can I get you something, Thad?”

I winked at Les and slid off the stool before Thad could answer. “I think I’ll take care of him.” I hooked a leg around his and pulled his oilskin open.

“Get out,” Les said.

I wasn’t sure if I’d made a friend or an enemy.

We almost made it to the truck.

“Hey, Thad, wait a minute.” Marge was shouting out the door. “That fuckin’ taxi didn’t show. You gotta take Liz home for me.”

I laughed aloud, my head leaning back against Thad’s shoulder, because of course he would just keep walking, laughing too.

Except he didn’t.

He was walking back to the bar. He was wrapping his arms around that puddle of a woman. He was, gulp, sliding her into the truck.

“Thanks,” Marge shouted, and I could hear Les laughing before the bar door banged shut behind her.

I held my breath and climbed into the truck. Liz had drooped over to the driver’s side, and Thad lifted her a bit to get in. He let her slide back to rest her head on his shoulder. I rolled down the window quick as I could and stuck my head out. Her place was only a few blocks down, by the creek. Thad pulled in, set the emergency brake, and helped Liz to her door. The headlights shining a path for them.

The amazing thing was that by the time she got to the door, she seemed to be walking on her own. I watched her kiss my boyfriend on the cheek and whisper something in his ear.

Thad pounced back into the truck. “She said to tell you she was sorry,” he said, throwing the truck in reverse.

“No she didn’t,” I said and jerked my head to look back at her as the headlights pulled away. She was still standing there. And she was looking at me and her eyes were wide and her head was up and she was looking at me and her lips were moving and she was shouting something and it wasn’t in English. “No she didn’t,” I said again.

SEPTEMBER 1764

Famine

T
he people of Unalaska Island called themselves Unangan, The Real People. They were part of a larger group who called themselves Unanga or The People. They have lived on these water-soaked volcanic pinnacles for more than eight thousand years. Always near the ocean, from the ocean, and with the ocean. They live in a rich and fearsome place, where nature whips the sea into towering waves, sends rivers of lava over the beaches, and hides its creatures, leaving bellies empty for weeks. It is a place held lightly by men, who know that magic and taboo are the breakers between themselves and death.

The Russians found them first. In 1741, Vitus Bering spotted the fog-shrouded coast known in legend as The Great Land. Although Bering died on the journey home, his crew returned to Russia with a cargo of furs. The conquest of the Chain had begun. The Russian men who followed committed brutal acts against the Aleuts—murder, rape, kidnapping.

In 1763 the Aleuts of the eastern Aleutians stopped raiding and enslaving one another and formed a rare alliance to fight back. They attacked the crews of four ships wintering on Umnak, Unalaska, and Unimak islands. Of the two hundred men aboard, only twelve survived.

Commander Ivan Solov’iev vowed retribution. He systematically gathered information on Aleut strength, then attacked. Aleut warriors failed to stop him. Solov’iev rampaged, destroying a people’s means of
survival—their boats, weapons, and hope. Solov’iev entered The People’s folklore as Solov’iev the Destroyer.

 

Ayagax-Agaluun was seventeen as the summer ended. A full woman, with a husband, and a baby at her breast. She moved to another dying patch of crowberries, wrinkled with loss of juice. She wove her fingers through the scratchy twigs to find every last one. These three baskets of berries would be the last harvest. With those drying in the village, they would have enough to last maybe four months, five if they didn’t feed the older ones. She was getting used to the feeling of doom now. She felt it in muscles that always held themselves ready. She felt it in her belly, which she was careful never to fill. She felt it when she climbed to the rock lookout that her people had once used to watch for enemy raiders and that she now used to search the ocean for returning warriors.

Little Anshigis woke hungry as usual. She wailed and kicked. Aya left the berry patch and sat in the low grass beside her baby. She lifted the little one and slid her under her kamleika. The baby’s dark eyes held on her mother’s as she sucked, smiling around the nipple in her mouth.

As always when her body was at rest, Aya’s mind turned to calculations. Thirteen had been left, and two more joined after escaping the Russians at Illiuliuk. She numbered the caches of fish and berries, still unable to stretch the supplies past five months. And with little seal oil left, the winter’s cold would take its own toll. Her husband along with the other warriors had set out four months ago now. The year before, the Destroyer had attacked villages across the island, killing and pillaging weapons and food caches. Aya’s village had been spared, simply because it was so small and remote. But they had heard the stories. In villages that resisted, people were slaughtered; villages that didn’t fight were stripped of their weapons, food stores, and dignity. Many starved. The men of Aya’s village had met with the remaining men in other villages across the near islands. They had all known it was a battle they could well lose. And they had gone, vowing to avenge their lost wives, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. Although no one spoke it, Aya knew most of them were already dead. Even him; he would have
fought too bravely, too foolishly, she thought. Perhaps a few would return, when they were able.

The ones left behind had been old, young, or women. The
kalgas
had fled back to their own villages on other island groups as soon as there were no men to enforce their slavery. Of those left, only Aya and four others were strong. Most were children still learning to climb for eggs and wait near snares. The two old men had been brave. When they understood that the men were not returning this season, they had paddled out to lose themselves in the sea.

Aya pulled the baby from her breast and took up her baskets. She had walked several miles in search of berries, and it would be nearly dark before she reached the village. A stiff wind pushed against her, coming off the water and floundering through the mountains, sometimes at her face, sometimes her side. Anshigis cried when the wind turned to the south and stung her eyes. Aya stopped to pull the sealskin over the baby’s head.

Aya’s face was not plain. She had been decorated since late childhood. First the pierced circle of ivory beads that rimmed her ears. Next her aunt had punctured her face with a fine needle rubbed over black stone until two parallel curving tracks ran from her hairline near her ear to the curve of her nostril. When these had healed, she had a broad band of five lines tattooed from the lower curve of her lip to her chin. Later she had added labrets, bone carved like barbed hooks inserted below the corners of her mouth. Her bangs were cut straight and high across her forehead. Before the trouble began she had worn her hair knotted in back. But now she often forgot or didn’t have the energy to wind and fix it.

The sun had left the sky when Aya reached her village, situated on a headland between two bays so that if enemies invaded from one direction, the villagers could escape from the other. The waters were high and growing. The wind pushed waves farther up the beach. Perhaps they will bring us a whale, Aya thought. She had held such hopes many times, even wandered far along the beach after such onshore winds, looking for a gift. So far, the sea had not given one.

She descended the notched driftwood log into the calm air of her
ulax
and quickly placed her baskets of berries in a storage pit, covering
them with a stone slab then a grass mat. Slukax stirred an egg and nettle mix over a stone hearth while her two small boys fought over a driftwood stick they had tried to carve into a throwing lance.

“Alidax!” she said. “Take your brother outside. You two will poison the dinner with your fighting.”

When the boys, still shoving and tussling, climbed outside, Slukax lifted her face to Aya. “When the winds leave, we will walk the beach. The sea knows we won’t live without a gift. Perhaps he will leave one for us tonight.”

Aya nodded.

 

But the morning brought nothing. The two women traveled six cragged miles along the east coast the first day and four along the west the next. The second day, they had to wait out the tide and stopped to eat dried salmon and berries beside the sea lion rookeries, deserted now as fall came.

“We should have come with seal clubs months ago, when the men first left,” Slukax said. “My mouth waters thinking of seal meat.”

Aya’s eyes darted to the older woman’s face. She saw no sign Slukax was teasing. A flash of fear ignited in her chest followed by a lingering hope. Twice in the last weeks, Aya had peeked at the spears, throwing boards, and clubs stored in underground pits. The men had taken the best weapons, but a few remained, some broken, some forgotten. She had been afraid, even though she’d been careful to make certain no one was watching. But the spirits, she knew, were always watching. A woman’s power did not mingle well with the power of a man’s hunting weapons. A woman’s power, her mother had explained, was too wild, too uncontrolled for the fragile precision of a spear or a throwing board. To touch them, even talk about or gaze at them, could provoke a spirit of the hunt. And soon the ocean was hiding its creatures from the hunter or cursing him with impossible seas. And then people were dying.

She had never touched one of these magically crafted things. But Aya knew what each did, how each was used. She’d been with her own brother, now gone with the others, as he’d practiced launching his spear into kelp bulbs staked to the beach.

He felt her envy and teased her often. “Too bad you’ll be a woman,” he taunted as he pulled his lance from its target. “I will hunt great sea creatures, while you hack up their stinking blubber on the beach.”

When her mother learned Aya had been watching her brother practice, she had taken her outside. “Aya,” she said, “do not take your brother’s hunting power from him by looking too long. He will need it, and more.” Then she had taken Aya’s hands, turning them palm up, and recited the same strange words Aya had heard since she was a child. “In your hands you hold your fate, and in no one’s hands but your own does your future rest.” She squeezed Aya’s hands. “Do you understand?”

Aya nodded. “Yes, Mama.”

Her mother pressed a bead into Aya’s hand. “For your necklace,” she said. Her mother looked away toward the water as Aya strung the bead with others around her neck. “If you watch, watch in secret,” she said, turning to go back inside.

Aya had expected worse for testing this taboo, and her mother’s leniency had frightened her more than a threat of shunning or even banishment would have.

Aya’s fingers went to those beads now as she thought about how to answer Slukax. Slukax had taken a fearsome risk even speaking of sea lion clubs. Aya turned the pierced bead as she listened to how her next words would sound. She spoke them with care.

“The sea lions are feeding in the kelp.” She said it without inflection. Slukax could take this many ways.

Neither spoke for several minutes. Aya felt the wind on her face and the openness of the sea before her. When the baby on her back cried, relief cracked her stiff shoulders. She unbundled the little one and nursed, grateful for a reason not to meet Slukax’s eyes. The moment had passed.

 

Aya felt Slukax’s eyes on her back many times in the next weeks. A tension between them rattled like ryegrass in an uneasy wind. Aya could not discern what Slukax was watching for. She’d look up while mending a parka to see Slukax’s eyes skitter away from her. She’d feel them on her when she turned her back to climb outside, slowing her move
ments, making her conscious of even the most ordinary tasks. Perhaps Slukax had seen her gazing at the weapons cache weeks before and had spoken of the clubs to trap her. Or perhaps Slukax felt she had betrayed her own evil thoughts and now watched out of fear that Aya would denounce her before the others. Perhaps they were both too afraid of what spirits may have been listening to their hearts. Aya’s wariness grew, but her understanding of her own desires grew as well. Her certainty rose in proportion to the shrinking supply of eggs, berries, seeds, and seal oil. It grew in proportion to the emptiness that had ceased being hunger and consumed her doubts. When Slukax had first spoken, Aya hadn’t known if what she heard were the first calls of evil or the dawning of hope. Now she did. She wanted to hunt, to touch the forbidden weapons, pierce through skin to muscle, and suck the fat from a once-living creature.

She wanted to eat.

The first to die were the two nieces of Slukax. Their mother held on three more days. When bellies were empty and muscles shivered in the cold, even a small sickness could bring death. Slukax insisted they be laid within her own house.

“More pits will need digging in the walls soon,” Slukax said the evening after the women and girls had been buried in compartments off the main room. “Unless”—Slukax looked up from her mending to meet Aya’s eyes—“someone is willing to do more.”

“A person may be willing,” Aya said quietly. The risk was great, but Aya’s fear was greater. Her milk didn’t flow as it had, and the baby was not yet old enough to eat.

“What would such a person do to begin this fearsome task?”

“Such a person would need to inspect the kayaks and weapons. But such a person would need the help of other persons.”

“Would another person be at the weapon stash tomorrow morning when the others are collecting driftwood?”

“Such a person may.”

Aya let the dense silence of the last few weeks fall around them again. If Slukax was laying a trap, it was one Aya must walk into. She saw no other way.

When Aya approached the weapons cache, Slukax was waiting, crouched on the balls of her feet.

“So,” Slukax said, rising to her feet with a smile, “we have decided to trust each other.”

The relief spread over Aya’s face. She smiled and bent to throw off the skins covering the pits.

 

The women pulled two kayaks from their hiding places in the brush, their skin covers still intact. After rewrapping spear fastenings, they lay them in the boats alongside the throwing boards they’d found, and stashed the gear in a field of stiff heath beyond the curve of the beach. The next morning as they practiced in early light, they also found another hunter.

Aya and Slukax dropped their weapons as they watched Tugakax approach.

Tugakax was new to the village. She and her grandfather had come three months before from another village, just south of Illiuliuk, where the Russians had first landed. Tugakax had not said much at first. But as the weeks passed, Aya learned that Tugakax’s village had been invaded early on, that several of the people had been killed. That Tugakax herself was barely living. She had survived only because she’d been young and beautiful. A Russian officer had held her for three seasons, leaving her with a half-white baby and a deadness in her eyes. When the Destroyer came, he had killed most of the men and some of the women. The rest had been left to starve. Only Tugakax, her child, and her grandfather had survived until summer, when they could travel the old inland trails.

Tugakax looked at Aya and Slukax now with a ferocity Aya had never seen in her. “I know what you do. I will help.”

“No, don’t bring any more misery to the village,” Slukax said. “We do this because we must. But the spirits will not care. Aya and I are willing, and that is enough.”

But Tugakax stood before Slukax and spoke with her head up and her eyes still. “I have seen men lined up back to back to test how far a Russian bullet would travel into flesh. I have seen babies bashed against rocks until dead. And I have seen women bat their eyes to save their own lives. I have seen so much my eyes have closed. Now I will help.”

BOOK: And She Was
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