The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [34]
ON THEIR FIRST FULL DAY in the village Anna and John decided to go for a walk. They hadn’t reached the bottom step of their new house before the first kid, wearing red basketball shorts, no shirt, and rubber boots, skidded to a stop on his green BMX bike and greeted them.
“My name’s Yago,” the boy said. “Whatch yer names?”
“I’m Anna. This is John.”
“Where you guys going?”
“We thought we’d go for a walk,” she said, waving her arm at the black cloud of mosquitoes that had descended on them.
“Why?” the boy asked.
“We want to see the village, maybe go down to the river.”
“I’ll go, too. Okay?”
“Sure,” Anna said.
John bent down and pressed his hand into the tundra moss. The stuff fascinated him. Up close he could see countless species of intricate sponge-like plants all connected to each other: lichens and moss and grass, roots, berries, mushrooms, flowers of all colours, all in the space of his hand. He pressed his fingers into the cool wet sponge and held it there for a moment. The ground felt alive.
They started down one of the boardwalks that connected all the village buildings with each other, like long, narrow wooden veins. Yago pushed his bike in front of them. John studied the two-by-eight wooden planks and then noticed the small black rubber threads still sticking to the sides of the boy’s tires.
“Got yourself a new bike, huh?” he asked.
“No. It’s not mine. My brother’s. Mine’s so cheap. It has a flat tire. Maybe I’ll get a new one when dividends come.”
The boy stopped and pointed to a house. “That’s where I live,” he said. “My bike’s under the house. There comes my cousin Roxy.”
A young girl was speeding down the boardwalk toward them. She rode a boy’s BMX, wore a black baseball cap backward, and from the looks of it, was all tomboy. A second before she would have run into them, she skidded the bike sideways, blocking the boardwalk.
“Hey, Yago,” she said. “Where you guys going?”
“I’m showing the new teachers around,” he replied proudly.
The girl reached into the back pocket of her jeans and removed a can of chewing tobacco. She opened it and offered some to them. Yago took a pinch of the dark grains and slipped it behind his lower lip. The girl did the same.
“Aren’t you guys a little young for that?” Anna asked.
“See those kids playing over at the playground, those little ones?” Yago said, pointing beside the school. “Those second-graders even already chew Copen. Everyone chews. Everyone.”
The girl got off her bike and began walking it beside Yago.
“You know it’s bad for you, right?” Anna asked.
The girl spat. “So. Seems like everything’s bad for you. Stop the pop. No candy. No chips. No snuff. No, no, no—never anyone tells us what’s good. Native food is only thing good for me to eat, my mom says. And that’s so boring, always eating fish and ducks and things. You guys husbands and wifes?”
“That’s Anvil’s store there,” Yago said, pointing to a building that looked like the rest of the village houses. A boxy one-storey plywood house, with ATVs and snow machines in various stages of disrepair parked outside.
“Yeah, we’re married,” Anna replied.
“What do they sell in there?” John asked.
“You know, store things,” Yago said. “Pop, chips, gum, frozen pizzas.”
“They got movies to rent there, too,” Roxy said.
“Movies?” Anna chuckled.
Yago said, “My brother said they got dirty naked kind of movies in the back behind the curtain, too.”
Yago looked at the girl and the two laughed. The girl covered her mouth with her hand, as if to keep the laughter contained.
The two kids reached the end of the boardwalk, at the edge of the ten-foot-high riverbank. From a distance, it looked to John as if the wooden walkway just went right off the edge of the bank,