Because he'd look stupid with a glove compartment.
Six thousand people from all over the delta showed up, many coming just after midnight so that they could see the MarkAir Here fly in at dawn with the performers and the animals. The circus was going to take place at the National Guard Armory gym, with the bathrooms converted to costume changing areas. Cane and Daniel, running ragged around the edges of the activity, even got to hold a rope as the big top was pitched.
During the show, there were trained dogs in ratty tutus, and two lions named Lulu and Strawberry. There was a leopard, which waited for its cue outside the big top, drinking from a mud puddle. There was calliope music and peanuts and cotton candy, and for the little children, an inflatable house to jump in and Shetland pony rides. When Shorty Serra came thundering out to do rope tricks with his monstrous horse, Juneau, the beast stood on his hind legs to tower over everyone, and the crowd shrieked. A group of Yup'ik boys sitting behind Daniel and Cane cheered, too. But when Daniel leaned over to say something to Cane, one of them spit out a slur: “Look at that: I always knew kass'aqs belonged in the circus.”
Daniel turned around. “Shut the fuck up.” One Yup'ik boy turned to another. “Did you hear something?”
“Want to feel something instead?” Daniel threatened, balling his hand into a fist.
“Ignore them,” Cane said. “They're assholes.” The ringmaster appeared, to the roar of applause. “Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid we have some disappointing news. Our elephant, Tika, is too ill for the show. But I'm delighted to introduce . .. all the way from Madagascar . . . Florence and her Amazing Waltzing Pigeons!”
A tiny woman in a flamenco skirt walked out with birds perched on each shoulder. Daniel turned to Cane. “How sick could an elephant be?”
“Yeah,” Cane said. “This sucks.” One of the Yup'ik boys poked him. “So do you. And I guess you like white meat.”
All of his life, Daniel had been teased by the village kids for not having a father, for being kass'aq, for not knowing how to do native things like fish and hunt. Cane would hang out with him, but the Yup'ik boys in school let that slide, because after all, Cane was one of them.
These boys, though, were not from his village.
Daniel saw the look on Cane's face and felt something break loose inside of him. He stood up, intent on leaving the big top.
“Hang on,” Cane said.
Daniel made his gaze as flat as possible. “I didn't invite you,” he said, and he walked away.
It didn't take him long to find the elephant, penned up in a makeshift fence with no one to watch over it. Daniel had never seen
an elephant up close; it was the one thing that he had in common with kids who lived in normal places. The elephant was limping and throwing hay in the air with its trunk. Daniel ducked under the wire and walked up to the animal, moving slowly. He touched its skin, warm and craggy, and laid his cheek along the haunch.
The best part about his friendship with Cane was that Cane was an insider, and that made Daniel one by association. He'd never realized that it could go the other way, too, that their acquaintance might make Cane a pariah. If the only way to keep Cane from being ostracized was to stay away from him, then Daniel would.
You did what you had to, for the people you cared about. The elephant swung its massive head toward Daniel. Its dark eye winked; the loose-lipped drip of its mouth worked soundlessly. But Daniel could hear the animal perfectly, and so he answered out loud: I don't belong here either.
* * *
It was still dark out the next morning when the cargo plane arrived, puddle-jumping from village to village to pick up the dogs that had been dropped by mushers along the trail. They'd be flown back to Bethel where a handler could pick them up. Willie was driving his cousin's pickup truck to the airstrip, and Trixie was in the passenger seat. They held hands across the space between them.
In the flatbed were all of Alex Edmonds's dogs, Juno, and Kingurauten Joseph, who was being transported back to the medical center. Willie parked the truck and then began to pass the dogs to Trixie,
who walked them over to the chain-link fence and tethered them. Every time she returned for another one, he smiled at her, and she melted as if she were back in the steam again.
Last night, after the steam had died out, Willie bathed her with a rag dipped in warm water. He'd run the makeshift sponge right over her bra and her panties. Then they'd gone back to the cold room, and he'd toweled her dry, kneeling in front of her to get the backs of her knees and between her toes before they'd dressed each other. Fastening and tucking seemed so much more intimate than unbuttoning and unzipping, as if you were privy to putting the person back together whole, instead of unraveling him.
“I have to take my uncle's coat back,” Willie had said, but then he had given her his own lined canvas jacket.
It smelled like him, every time Trixie buried her nose in the collar.
The lights on the airstrip suddenly blazed, magic. Trixie whirled around, but there was no control tower anywhere nearby.
“The pilots have remotes in their planes,” Willie said, laughing, and sure enough ten minutes hadn't passed before Trixie could hear the approach of an engine.
The plane that landed looked like the one that had flown Trixie into Bethel. The pilota Yup'ik boy not much older than Willie jumped out. “Hey,” he said. “Is this all you've got?” When he opened the cargo bay, Trixie could see a dozen dogs already tethered to D rings. As Willie loaded the sled dogs, she helped Joseph climb down from the back of the pickup. He leaned on her heavily as they walked to the runway, and when he stepped into the cargo bay, the animals inside started barking. “You remind me of someone I used to know,” Joseph said.
You already told me that, Trixie thought, but she just nodded at him. Maybe it wasn't that he wanted her to hear it but only that he needed to say it again.
The pilot closed up the hatch and hopped back into his plane, accelerating down the airstrip until Trixie could not tell his landing
lights apart from any given star. The airstrip blinked and went black again.
She felt Willie move closer in the dark, but before her eyes could adjust, another beacon came at them. It glinted directly into her eyes, had her shielding them from the glare with one hand. The snow machine pulled up, its engine growling before it died down completely and the driver stood up on the runners.
“Trixie?” her father said. “Is that you?” 8
In the middle of the Alaskan tundra, staring at a daughter he could barely recognize, Daniel thought back to the moment he'd known that everything between him and Trixie was bound to change. It was, like so many of those minutes between a father and a little girl, unremarkable. The season might have been summertime, or it could have been fall. They might have been bundled up in winter coats, or wearing flip-flops. They could have been heading to make a deposit at the bank, or leaving the bookstore. What stuck in Daniel's mind was the street - a busy one, in the middle of town - and the fact that he was walking down it with Trixie, holding her hand.
She was seven. Her hair was French-braided - badly, he'd never quite gotten the hang of that - and she was trying not to walk on the breaks in the sidewalk. They reached the intersection, and like always, Daniel reached for Trixie's hand.
She very deliberately slipped it free and stepped away from him before she looked both ways and crossed by herself. It was a hairline crack, one you might never have noticed, except for the fact that it grew wider and wider, until there was a canyon
between them. A child's job, ostensibly, was to grow up. So why, when it happened, did a parent feel so disappointed?
This time, instead of a busy street, Trixie had crossed an entire country by herself. She stood in front of Daniel, bundled in an oversized canvas coat, with a wool cap pulled over her head. Beside her was a Yup'ik boy with hair that kept falling into his eyes.