Arctic Thunder (5 page)

“On the right is our Northern Store,” Fitz said. “It carries everything from groceries and clothes to hardware. They do pretty well getting in fresh food. Of course, things get more expensive and a bit dicey when the ferry's out in the fall and the ice road's breaking up in spring.”

“Fitz, you said that like it's the only store in town,” Jeannie said. “Where else do people shop?”

“Well, Jeannie, the Northern Store's pretty much it for groceries and clothing of any variety. Quite a few people drive over to Whitehorse from time to time to get stuff you can't pick up here, but the Northern Store has pretty much all the necessities.”

Mike's mother sat back to ponder this information.

“One main store,” she murmured. “My, my, my.”

Ben half turned and smiled at his wife. “Look on the bright side, Jeannie. We live less than a minute from
the
store. We can skip over, shop for what we need, and be home in a flash. Pretty great, eh?”

Jeannie shook her head. “You're such a
man
!”

Fitz chuckled. “You'll get used to it. I bet every husband and wife who moves here have had this conversation. It just makes trips to Yellowknife, Edmonton, and Whitehorse all the more special. Quite a few of the wives do a tonne of mail order, too. Get out those catalogues.”

Ben groaned. “I don't think you're helping, Fitz.”

Mike's head fell back heavier into the corner of the window and seat, his mind fogging over with sleep. His face felt warmer and warmer. He was barely aware of the droning voices around him, and the movement of the vehicle lulled him deeper into slumber.

The next thing he knew he was blinking. Not sure of his surroundings, he opened his eyes wide. His mother had her hand on his shoulder and was pointing out the window on his side of the Explorer.

“Look, Mike, our new house,” she said.

He shifted his gaze out the window and followed the direction of her finger.

“It's so cute,” she added.

It might have been cute, but it was small. It looked like an A-frame and had a very steeply pitched roof.

“They're not big, but they're cozy,” Fitz said. “Great location and close to work and to Mike's school. Pretty much close to everything in town.”

“We were close to everything even when we were at the airport,” Mike said groggily.

“Well, it's home, Mike,” Ben said. “When you were taking your nap, Fitz had some exciting news, too. The moving truck actually got here yesterday. Our stuff's inside the house. We'll stay at the hotel tonight, but we can move in tomorrow. Everything will seem a little better when you get into your own bedroom and unpack your own things.”

“My bedroom's in St. Albert,” Mike muttered, turning back to the window.

He slid down in the seat and closed his eyes. What would the kids be like in Inuvik? He was good-natured and made friends easily. His mother was of South African descent, and the mixture of features she had passed on to him often made it difficult for people to place him. With his large, expressive, dark brown eyes, caramel skin, and loosely curled black hair, he usually fitted in no matter where he went. People guessed he was everything from Dene and East Asian to East Indian and African Canadian.

Although short for his age at fourteen, he was built like a muscular bowling ball: wide shoulders, thick chest, and massive legs and butt. Whether it was for hockey, lacrosse, or any other contact sport, he always surprised his opposition. If they hadn't played against him before and saw him in equipment for the first time, they had no idea that he likely outweighed them by a good ten kilograms and was one of the fastest, most competitive players they would face.

But what if none of that mattered to anyone in Inuvik? What would he do?

CHAPTER 5

F
itz was wrong. Inuvik didn't look that much different the next day. After an early breakfast at the hotel, Fitz had picked them up and taken them to the house. Mike recognized Mackenzie Road from the previous night: hospital, stop at
the
light, post office, turn left, police station, house. The A-frame appeared even smaller in the mid-morning sunlight.

Mike had to admit that though the town appeared the same, the weather was a whole lot better. The sun shone brightly and reflected off the snow, making him squint as he stepped down from the Explorer. Tiny crystals in the snow glistened like millions of diamonds. They were in the air, too, and made him feel disoriented as he blinked, momentarily snow-blinded. Fitz said they were ice crystals. Even though it was sunny, the air temperature had dropped to minus thirty-five, which was unseasonably cold, Fitz told them. Unseasonably cold! Did they even have other seasons up here?

The big winter boots his father had given him that morning crunched loudly on the snow. He stopped in the driveway and took in his new neighbourhood through the frozen mist of his breath. Most of the buildings seemed pretty old. The police station was next to their house, and other than the post office and the schools he could see across Mackenzie Road, he didn't know what anything else was. As his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he did notice one thing. Because the snow was so white, the colours of the buildings were incredibly bright. Even the brown of their house was intense.
Jeez, get a grip, Mike
, he thought, shaking his head.

“Mike, let's go inside,” his mother said.

He followed his parents and Fitz toward the house he was supposed to call home.

“This door at the side is basically your front door,” Fitz said. “Let's go around to the back door, though, because it'll give you a view of the yard and I can show you through from there.”

They followed a wooden walkway along the side of the house, then turned right at the back and came to the other entrance. Absent-mindedly, Mike glanced around the yard as Fitz fumbled with the key. It wasn't a bad-sized space — bigger than his yard back in St. Albert at least. Lots of snow and a few scraggly trees. Mike's attention was drawn to a long, rectangular tube covered with corrugated metal. Running along the back of their lot, it continued in both directions out of sight and stood off the ground on thick wooden logs spaced at intervals. The logs held the tube about a metre off the ground. The tube itself was about a metre high and perhaps a metre across. A section branched off and entered their yard, disappearing into the side of the house. As Mike scanned both directions, he saw where the tube branched off into other buildings in the area.

“There we go,” Fitz said, pushing open the door. “Let's head inside.”

Mike followed the others inside. The smell of fresh paint, Mr. Clean, and stale air assailed his nostrils simultaneously.

“It's freshly painted, and we had a couple of ladies come in and clean things from top to bottom,” said Fitz, struggling to kick off his heavy boots. “To be quite honest, Jeannie, Sergeant MacLean's wife, Gwen, was awfully fussy, so it was pretty clean to begin with. This is the storage room, and the crawl space is right under here.” Fitz lifted a piece of the floor by a metal ring fixed in the centre. “If you bring in a barge order, this is where you can store most of your supplies. Seems a bit odd, since we have a road up from the South and so on, but it can save you a heap of money.”

The house was built on wooden supports like the ones holding up the metal tube in the backyard. Mike noticed a miniature bathroom to his left as he walked ahead into the kitchen. There was a table and chairs, and he remembered for the first time that the house was owned by the RCMP and came with its own furniture. Their furniture was stored back in St. Albert. There were boxes with kitchen scrawled across them along one wall. That would be the stuff the movers had dropped off.

The kitchen was small, too. As he moved ahead, he realized the whole house was tiny, and pretty plain, as well. The walls were off-white. The floor in the kitchen was white linoleum with a checkered black pattern. He passed through the kitchen into a living room with a dining area to the right. The floor had a nondescript dark brown carpet, and judging by the drag marks, it had been recently shampooed. To the left was a set of stairs. Beyond that was a small room that could be used as a study or bedroom. Mike heard voices above him and started up the stairs, which were steep and covered in dark brown carpet. That made him realize how pointed the roof of the house was, and he wondered what the bedrooms looked like.

There was a bathroom at the top of the stairs, and a hallway extended to his left and right. The same nauseating brown carpet flowed out of sight in both directions like a muddy river without an end. He turned left, away from the voices, and wandered into what had to be a bedroom. Judging by the twin bed against one wall, this was his room.

The walls to his left and right rose more than a metre. At that point the ceiling angled up to a peak in the middle. The walls were off-white and the carpet was the same dirty brown. There was a window on the far side of the room. Mike wandered over and stared into the backyard. He could now see over the metal tube. Trees and other houses sat silently on hidden streets. In the distance he thought he spied a lake, but with the snow and brightness outside, it was hard to tell. Mike moved away from the window and allowed himself to sink into a sitting position on the bed. It felt soft. Too soft.

Glancing around, he spotted two identical dark brown wooden dressers. Each drawer had two silly-looking metal handles. A hard wooden chair sat just inside the room's door. Several piles of boxes were stacked against the far wall. These were marked: boy's room. Those were his things. They didn't belong here. They belonged thousands of kilometres away in St. Albert.

“I see you found it on your own,” Jeannie said.

Mike looked up to see Fitz and his parents standing in the doorway. They all had a goofy “Well, what do you think?” expression on their faces. He managed a weak smile and gazed out the window again.

“Well, I won't impose on you folks any longer,” Fitz said, “because I bet you're anxious to unpack. If you can't find anything, just let me know, Ben. You know where to find me.” He motioned in the direction of the police station.

The adults moved away and headed back downstairs. Waiting for a moment or two until the voices were nothing more than a murmur, Mike buried his face in his hands and began to cry.

CHAPTER 6

G
od, I don't want to go to school,
Mike thought. He stood on the back porch, gripped the wooden railing through his ski gloves, and rocked back and forth as he stared at the backyard. Stopping, he pursed his lips and blew a visible stream of breath into the air like a jet. What a stupid place! Minus twenty something in early March. Loads of snow. And what was that metal thing in the backyard, anyway? It looked dumb out there. Despite the cold, he felt the warmth of anger rise in his face and began to shake his head. He was mad at a big metal thing that couldn't even return his anger. How sad was that?

“It's a utilidoor.”

The voice wasn't loud, and it took Mike a few seconds to realize someone had spoken. He straightened and searched around. To his left he spotted a man leaning on an ice scraper in the police station parking lot. The brightening sky outlined the stranger's silhouette against the buildings but made it impossible to see his features because the backlight threw shadows across his face.

“It has pipes in it,” the man continued. “There's too much permafrost here to bury them. They run all around behind the houses and take the water in and out. If they were in the ground, the permafrost would snap them like twigs and nothing would work.”

Mike didn't know what to say, so he just nodded.

“I'm Victor Allen.”

Mike nodded again. The man wore a dark blue parka, but not like the one his father had given him. This one was made of a softer homemade material with dark fur around the hood. Real fur. The man wore a baseball cap, and by the slight glint Mike detected when the stranger moved his head, he had to be wearing glasses. Mike was pretty sure the fellow was aboriginal, but he could never get the names right. There were Dene people and Inuvalut, or something like that. The guys who used to be called Eskimos.

“You don't have a name?” Victor Allen asked.

The man smiled, and Mike couldn't help but smile back. “I'm Mike Watson.”

“
Qanaqitpit
, Mike Watson. That means ‘how are you' in our Inuvialuit language.”

Inuvialuit! That was it. The people who lived in the Northwest Territories who used to be called Eskimos were Inuvialuit. The people in Nunavut who used to be called Eskimos were called Inuit. It was like a social studies lesson right outside his house. It felt funny to even think that.
His house.

“Now this is where you would say ‘
Nakuurunga
, Victor.'”

“
Nagarunka
, Mr. Allen,” Mike said.

Victor winced. “That's close enough, Mike. You must be the new RCMP sergeant's son. Welcome to Inuvik.”

“Thank you, Mr. Allen.” It wasn't a very imaginative thing to say back, but that was all Mike could muster.

“Now if I was a young guy like you, I'd hustle off to school, because I'm guessing within the next five minutes or so you're going to be late.”

School!
Mike rushed down the porch steps and up the wooden walkway to the street. “See you, Mr.

Allen!” he called over his shoulder.

“See you, Mike.”

Mike dashed past the post office and slowed down as he approached Mackenzie Road at the light. It was red! And the orange hand was flashing. One light in town half a block away from their house, and every time he'd been there it was red. He looked both ways and without stopping ran across the street. If he had tried that in St. Albert this time of the morning, he would have died a quick and painful death. As it was, a truck approached the intersection after he crossed. The driver beeped his horn and waved as he passed by.