My Name Is Not Easy (17 page)

M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

Both of them were nodding together, like two heads on one neck, both of them eyeing the door for deliverance. Father dismissed them with a curt nod.

Th

en, right there at the door, just as they were ready to step across the border into freedom, that crazy Eskimo—

Amiq—he raised up one fi st, held it tight against his chest, and grinned.
Right at Sonny.
Maybe he thought Father didn’t see him, but he was wrong. Father sees everything.

Before they could even move, Father fl ew to the corner and grabbed the two-by-four. Sonny felt the force of it cracking against Amiq’s bones as if against his own. But Amiq just stood there, his back bent to Father’s blows, staring at the door to freedom, smiling.

Amiq and Father were both in their own narrow spaces, both seeing only what they wanted to see, but Sonny saw it all—the bent back, the crazy priest, the smile stretched so tight across Amiq’s face, you could probably snap it like slingshot rubber—and something else, something in Amiq’s eyes—a look no two-by-four could ever touch. And even though Father couldn’t see it from where he stood, you could tell by the way he was swinging that paddle that he knew it was there.

Sonny watched Father, imagining what it would feel like to slam a kickball right through Father’s gut, right out that door, right down the hall, reverberating from fl oor to ceiling like gunshot.

Indian kickball.

And when he played it, he would win.

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18/07/2011 8:25 PM

The Size of Things Back Home

SUMMER 1961

LUKE

—

It seems like everything in the world has changed. Th en we get

home and it seems like nothing has changed. Except for the size of things—the door has gotten shorter and the window, lower. Mom seems smaller, too, somehow. Small and brittle, like she might break. She watched us getting off the plane and kept watching. Even after we had walked all across the runway, she kept watching, holding her heart and waiting for Isaac, knowing, just like we knew, that he wasn’t there. Isaac’s gone. It had to do with papers we didn’t understand. And now, none of Mom’s letters to Isaac—the ones she sends to the school—get answered. Mom moves about the house and no matter what she’s doing, it still feels like she’s holding her hand over her heart, missing Isaac. But she won’t talk about it. Whatever there is to be said about Isaac, nobody’s saying it.

Not to us kids, anyhow.

Th

e hurt of Isaac’s absence slaps back and forth between us like a closed curtain over an open window. Aaka eyes it
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

sometimes, then looks at Mom, but Mom doesn’t look back.

She just sighs and keeps on making their tea.

Aapa sits his Bible on the washstand in the corner, right alongside his typewriter, just like he always used to. And that’s where he stands, pecking the Good Word into Iñupiaq with his two old pointer fi ngers, letter by letter. Same as ever.

Me and Bunna are sitting by the door, waiting for Uncle Joe, and I am looking out across the room, remembering how it used to be when we were little—not so long ago, when I think about it. But it feels like forever.

We used to play cowboys and Indians here. Isaac was always the captive Indian—exploding out from underneath the bed, clawing his way across the plywood fl oor like a blind lemming and getting caught every time. I remember him bumping right into Aapa, once, making Aapa’s fi ngers slip from the typewriter keys. Making him type wrong.

Th

e words that came out of Aapa’s mouth that time were not good ones, not in any language. He reared up like a bear, raising his big old arm, ready to swat us. But before he could fi nish his swing, Aaka had her broom out, and Aapa stopped in midair, dropping his arm and bending his back with a little smile, like he was just waiting for Aaka to hit him. And she did, too—Aaka, hardly any bigger than us boys—she hit that broom so hard against Appa’s back, it cracked the handle right in half.

It makes me smile, too, when I remember Aaka, waving her splintered broom in the air, spitting mad, scolding Aapa like an angry squirrel.

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T H E S I Z E O F T H I N G S B A C K H O M E / L u k e , S o n n y & C h i c k i e
Aapa pulled his parka from the hook that time and

shuffl

ed out the door without looking back, his voice soft as rain. “You boys ever gonna learn?” He came back later, holding out a brand-new broom for Aaka like a stiff bouquet, smiling.

I sit here, nodding at the memory: Yes, we learned. We learned how not to talk in Iñupiaq and how to eat strange food and watch, helpless, while they took our brother away.

Th

ere’s a clatter of sound as an empty coff ee cup rolls across the fl oor. Mom sighs and mutters, “Clumsy.” Th

en she scur-

ries across the room to retrieve it.

Mom isn’t talking to any of us, really, but when her eyes meet mine, there are tears there, tears that make her eyes look like they’ve turned to water.

“Why can’t we just go fi nd him?” I whisper.

Mom looks at me, her eyes full of hurt and something else, something that makes me feel protective, suddenly, like I’m the parent and she’s just a little kid.

SONNY

—

Old Anna is gone now—that’s the only thing I know, reading Ma’s letter, all alone at Sacred Heart School after most of the others have left for home.

Nobody here knew a thing about Anna, who died in her sleep, all alone.

Old Anna and her canned peas. Th

at’s what she and I used

to eat back home when I used to chop wood for her. Canned
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

sweet peas. We ate them together, after the wood was piled, the two of us sitting at her table, a can of sweet peas between us. I sure miss the sound of that spruce wood crackling in the barrel stove on a day when it’s so cold outside, the river ice cracks like gunshots. Us two enjoying the smooth taste of those peas and the smell of smoke, fi relight fl ickering on the walls.