“Your Eskimo name will be Atausiq,” Go-boy tells me. He comes back after disappearing for almost a month, and that’s the first thing he says.
Well, no. The first thing he says is “Let’s take a ride.” So we jump in his AMC and tour the whole village about eight times in fifteen minutes. He talks nonstop while he drives and waves to people, but he isn’t talking to me. He’s wound up. I wonder when he’s had time to fix his wagon.
I say, “Nothing’s changed,” but it isn’t very convincing.
And that’s when we end up on the bridge at the edge of town, when he tells me my Eskimo name. He’s driven three miles out on the road to see how construction of the new jail is coming along and then has turned back around. The car dies as we roll onto concrete, leaving us in the middle of the single-lane bridge. Go-boy holds the wheel with three fingers of his right hand as the car crunches rogue pieces of gravel on the pavement. We stop halfway. Steel railing on either side. A light on the dash blinks red and a smell like melting rubber is right there with us. Go keeps holding the wheel. His nails are cut short like a farmer’s, or a mechanic’s.
He says, “Yeah, man. Atausiq. Just in time.”
He tells me everyone in the village has an Eskimo name, but most of the time it isn’t official. It isn’t on a person’s driver’s license or birth certificate—an Eskimo name is like a fancy nickname. I’m not sure where Eskimo names come from—ancestors or mountains or rivers, or if they’re just made up—so I ask Go.
“Atausiq?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Does it mean something? Like whale-fighter or seal-clubber?”
“Atausiq doesn’t mean anything,” he says, smirking. “It’s just a name.”
It has been three months since he came up with his plan to give me an Eskimo name, right here on this same bridge, on my second day in town. Go reminds me of this. He mentions our bet and I tell him I had forgotten all about it.
“So what do I do with an Eskimo name?” I ask, but I’d rather know where he’s been for the past month.
He rolls down his window and hangs his elbow into the breeze, smiles. He hasn’t stopped smiling since coming back. And he hasn’t taken his hand off the wheel. “It’s part of the new beginning, the reason I came back.”
“Where were you?”
“I was preparing for exactly this,” he says, waving his hand at the village. “Heaven on earth.”
The town in front of us stretches out all soft blue and rust-colored to the left. Snow fences line the slough’s edge, bordering the town from tundra. To our right a small passenger plane is landing on top of the horizon, kicking a trail of dust that crescendos and blurs across the landscape and circles around behind us to where dump trucks are kicking up their own puffs, running down our same road, pulling onto the bridge behind us.
I turn around in my seat and look behind us. I say, “We better do something.”
Go-boy wipes the Plexiglas dash panel with his index finger, smearing dirt film, as if a diagnosis could be found in that blinking red light. He says, “Everybody’s sure always in some kinda rush.” Then he laughs.
I say, “I need to get back to school. Lunch break is over.”
“You need to experience something phenomenal. We all do. We all have an idea of what we want but we’re too afraid to express it.”
Then Go sticks his head out the window and yells, “Heaven is a dead car stuck on a bridge!”
“We’re in the way.”
I hurry out of the wagon and start pushing us toward town—leaning into the trunk, my feet slipping on loose rocks—to at least get us off the bridge so the trucks can pass. It’s better than trying to tell Go that our boss has fired us and that I put his dad in jail by ratting him out to the police.
A dump truck inches up behind me, close enough that I can smell its sulfuric exhaust. He’s losing money the longer his load takes, but now I don’t care. I ease up. The AMC slows down. I turn around and look at the driver, smile, shrug. It feels good to have Go-boy back. And by the time Go steers off the bridge and onto the shoulder, and the train of diesel rigs blow past while I hop into the passenger seat, I’m no longer ready to find out where he’s been, what he’s done, and why the hell he ditched us for a month, but I am ready to become Atausiq.