I needed money. I had been in Alaska long enough and it was time I moved back to LA because in LA I could pursue drumming—I could take lessons and make connections, and later on get some jobs—and that wasn’t possible in Unalakleet.
One afternoon Kiana was at our house, looking for Go’s checkbook, trying to see if he’d paid his bills.
She said, “What’s this?” and held up some type of nasty car part that looked like a whistle or a pipe. She set it on a stack of newspapers. She wiped her fingers across the headline, leaving two faded smudges over an article about highway repairs in Anchorage.
Kiana and Mom were now certain Go-boy was crazy. They were just searching for proof. They were trying to convince me, and I was still staying out of the whole business. Kiana said Go-boy had probably flushed away his savings since he didn’t have a job and had lost his college scholarships. Since birth he’d pooled all his Permanent Fund checks into a savings account. All his summers on the fish tower and summers crabbing with his uncles—saved. But Kiana couldn’t find his checkbook and that meant something.
I said, “It means you can’t find it.”
Kiana again ignored me. This was the most she’d talked to me in weeks, so I was fine with her attitude, and besides, she’d just given me an idea—ask Go for money. I was broke, so what would it hurt? Because even if Mom hadn’t spent all her money moving us up here, she wouldn’t buy me a ticket back to California—for her California represented everything bad about Pop and Wicho and twenty unsuccessful years of her life, and she projected that onto me.
“How much money did he flush?” I asked.
Kiana held up a magazine that had a rectangle cut from one of the pages. She eyed the page a bit too long, then said, “He probably doesn’t even know.”
After that I figured maybe Go would give me the money because he was feeling good—he had all kinds of energy—and his tattoo had come back. He had drawn that Eskimo Jesus on his forearm almost every other day for a week and he showed me every time he changed something. He switched from black ink to blue ink. He added a whole background of angelic clouds and rain. The tattoo now stretched up to his shoulder. And since I had mailed his letter to Yoko Ono, he was treating me like I knew what he was talking about, like we were in this together, and for some reason I didn’t mind.
So that night I asked Go for money. I told him I needed cash for a plane ticket so I could follow my heart and move back to LA and play drums. Maybe attend music school. I talked a little too much and a little too fast and Go-boy waited for me to finish. He told me he was worried I’d get back into my old life—that I’d be back running with gangs. Then he paused and told me he’d think about it.
He said, “I’ll lose the bet if you move back.”
I smiled, said, “That’s fine.”
But before he gave me any money and before we could talk about it again, a forest just east of town caught fire.
The burning started one morning. We could see a thin trickle of smoke rising up out of the hills. The town’s only fire truck filled its water tank and drove up the road, no siren, no lights. But by afternoon there was a gray wall from the ground to the sky, threatening to engulf the entire village. It had taken a few cabins already, including Flo’s, and the Bible camp. It had gotten out of control. And then the planes and the helicopters arrived, dropping ocean water into the smoke, and the state newspaper ran a picture of Unk on its front page with the headline BIBLE CAMP BURNS.