He washed the dishes every night and put them away. He swept the floor every morning before he went to school. He kept the top of the oilstove scrubbed clean. He lined the cans up in the cupboard according to size.
It didn’t matter. She hit him anyway.
After a while he started hiding under the sagging porch, even in winter, but when she found him she dragged him out and hit him for that, too.
When he was ten he made his first friend, an older girl who tutored him when he fell behind in class. Her name was Christine, and she had dark eyes and a merry smile. She was going to be a teacher, Christine told him, so she was practicing on him.
As soon as she got to know of it, the old woman, his grandmother, had tried to get Christine to stop tutoring him. He wasn’t worth it, she declared, this bastard son too stupid to learn what every other student could in school, this bastard son of an unwed daughter who didn’t even have the decency to move to Newenham, or Anchorage, even, somewhere far away where she could bring her decent, hardworking, God-fearing family no shame. Christine had heard the old woman out with an expression of polite attention fastened firmly to her face, and had tutored Tim anyway, staying after school to instruct him patiently in the mysteries of geography and history. They spoke English in the morning and Yupik in the afternoon at school, and you had to speak both fluently before they’d let you graduate. English was easy, his mother never spoke anything else and wouldn’t let him, either, not around her house. “It’s bad enough you got a brown skin in a white world, kid,” she’d said. “Don’t talk like you got a brown skin, too.”
Christine had taught him Yupik. But then she had gone away, one day she was there, the next she was not. Tim figured the old woman had gotten her way after all, and he retreated once again into solitude.
One day soon afterward his mother had been very drunk and the hitting had been very bad. Uncle Simeon had done other things to him, too. The counselor in the hospital had tried to get him to talk about them, but he wouldn’t. He never would, not ever.
Besides, that was all done now. He was with his true mother. Wyanet Chouinard had flown into Ualik that day when the hitting had been very bad, and when she had flown out again she had taken him with her. She had visited him in the hospital, she’d come every night and talked to him and read to him and brought him presents, and when he was well enough, she had taken him home. She had asked him if he wanted to live with her always and his throat had been so choked that he hadn’t been able to speak, to say, to shout, to scream out the word “YES!”
He had thought he’d died and gone to heaven.
Newenham wasn’t heaven, though, and getting used to the differences between Ualik and Newenham was a long and difficult process. Ualik, his birthplace, was a village of two hundred, Newenham a city of two thousand. Newenham had cable, and two grocery stores, and nine churches and two bars. Ualik had one satellite dish that acted as a conduit for the state-run channel, no churches and a bootlegger. Ualik was Yupik. Newenham was mostly white.
He tried so hard to fit into this new world, afraid that if he didn’t he’d be shipped back to Ualik. For a while he had thought fitting in meant wearing the baggiest jeans, smoking the most cigarettes, saying “fuck” between every other word and hanging with Eric Walker and his gang. He’d been lucky there; his mom, his adopted mom, had been watching too closely for him to follow Eric and Vasily into McLaughlin. He shivered. Liam had taken him down to the place in the woods and shown him Rudy’s body, what Eric and Vasily had done to it. It had looked like something out of the movies.
It had looked like something from the other side of the curtain in Ualik.
Now here he was at Old Man Creek. Old Man Creek sure wasn’t Ualik, and sure wasn’t Newenham, either. The old man, Moses, was sober for a change, although that wasn’t necessarily an improvement. Drunk, he was one tough bastard. Sober, he was a fiend from hell.
They’d been standing post for twenty minutes and Tim was afraid he was about to disgrace himself by falling flat on his face. Moses had gone up on the porch, where he’d pulled Bill to her feet, sat down in her place and pulled her into his lap. Man, those two were always hugging and kissing and patting each other’s asses-and other things, too, he was sure. Bill Billington had to be sixty years old, Moses had to be a hundred, old enough to act like respectable elders, for god’s sake. The chair creaked and all by itself Tim’s head turned to behold Moses and Bill in a liplock that involved more than just their lips. He forgot himself and stared. They were worse than his mom and Liam. At least Liam pretended to sleep in that camper, and Mom pretended to let him.
Bill gave Moses a last kiss and pulled back to see Tim staring. She had the audacity to grin at him. Moses put back his head and howled.
Tim’s head snapped around to eyes front. He stared hard at the red lengths of salmon drying on racks and hoped his face wasn’t as red as the salmon.
Next to him, Amelia moaned, a quiet little moan, as if she’d had practice in hiding it.
“Keep breathing,” he said in a low voice. “Keep breathing, steady, in and out, in and out.”
“My legs don’t stand up straight anymore,” she whispered.
“Mine, neither,” he whispered back. “We’ll be walking bowlegged by the time that old man is done with us.”
She was silent for a moment. “Like cowboys.”
He bit back a laugh. “Yeah. Like in the movies.” He felt her shoulders shake. “Like John Wayne.”
Moses, walking light-footedly up behind them, pounced, buffeting first one and then the other with rough but not brutal slaps about the head. “I see talking don’t help your standing post none, boys and girls. Let’s see if a little form will keep you quiet.”
He took them through the form three times, going from commencement to conclusion slowly, steadily, progressing inexorably from one movement to the next and the next, grinning evilly at Tim when he became completely lost between the second and third Fair ladies, barking his disapproval when Amelia nearly fell during Turn Round and Kick Horizontally.
It’s not fair, Tim wanted to say, you’ve been doing this for a hundred years, we’ve been doing it for a couple of days, you can’t expect us to be perfect this soon.
At the end of the third conclusion, when Tim was sure in his gut that Moses was going to go for a fourth form, the old man straightened up all the way to his five-foot-seven-inch height and brought his right fist in front of his face, snugging it into his left palm. Tim and Amelia mimicked him. The three bowed.
“I suppose that’s enough for now,” Moses said grudgingly. “ ’Course the two of you got about as much style as a rhinoceros at the ballet. Dismissed until this afternoon. Go on, take a dip in the river. There’s a backwater about a hundred feet up the bank, shallow and still pretty warm. Go on, git!”
They got.
It was a nice little pond, snugged into the curve of a short, smooth ridge of glacial silt and rimmed with tall reeds. Tim stripped down to his underwear and fell in face first. He surfaced to see Amelia standing on the edge, uncertain. “What?”
She blushed. “I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“Just do like me and keep your underwear on.”
She hesitated.
“It’s real nice,” he said. “Warm, and the bottom’s sandy.”
“Okay,” she said.
He tried not to look as she undressed, but as with Moses and Bill, he couldn’t help sneaking a peek or two. Her breasts were bigger than they’d seemed under her shirt, and she wore bikini panties he’d only ever seen on magazine models. Her bruises were fading, faint shadows on smooth skin.