My Name Is Not Easy (32 page)

eir hideout.

Sonny had never seen it before.

“How’d you fi nd this place?” Sonny asked, looking around, clearly impressed.

Amiq smiled. “Luke and Bunna found it. Trying to hide from old man Pete.” He thought of old man Pete’s wrinkled-up face and the suspicious way he always looked at the Eskimo kids. “Man, that bugger’s mean,” he said.

Sonny grinned. “Never been mean to me,” he said.

Amiq rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, you tell him about this here Eskimo fort, and I’ll have to kill ya,” he said in his best John Wayne voice. “And if they fi nd out I took you here, I may have to kill you anyhow,” he added. “’Course, I do owe you something, us being brothers and all.”

Sonny laughed. “Yeah. Practically twins.”

Amiq was warming up to being out in the woods, out in their hideout, their Eskimo hideout, out here with an Indian, both of them hiding from the military. Th

is was an adventure,

all right, a real adventure.

“Ah well, you know how it is with these Na-tives,” he said, pinching his voice up a notch. “Th

ey all of them look alike,

and that there’s a fact.”

Now both of them were laughing, laughing about the gen-127

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eral actually mistaking them for brothers.
Brothers!

“Kid brother,” Sonny snorted, patting Amiq sweetly on the head.

“No!” Amiq hollered gleefully. “No. Twins, remember?

Twins!
”

Th

ey were laughing really hard now.

“Th

e whole dog team?” Sonny said. “Th

e whole team took

sick? All together?”

“Measles,” Amiq said crisply, “Siberian measles.”

Sonny doubled over. “Stop!” he begged. “My mom doesn’t even
have
dogs.”

“I am sorry to hear that, very sorry indeed,” Amiq dead-panned. “Well, we just might have to resort to snowshoes this year, son.”

He reached down and picked up a spruce branch, all rusty orange with dead needles.

“We always use snowshoes,” Sonny said.

“Oh, yeah. I forgot.”

Amiq rolled the branch back and forth between his palms, watching the river and thinking how funny it was that things could change all of a sudden, people changing with them.

“What about those tests?” Sonny said. “What were they?”

“Hell if I’m going to drink iodine-131,” Amiq said.

“What’s iodine-131?”

Amiq shrugged, running his fi nger along the rough edge of the spruce branch, making the dead needles shoot off like little arrows. “It ain’t sacramental wine, that’s for sure.”

He looked down, thinking about that name.
Iodine-131.
It
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T H E M E A N E S T H E A T H E N S / S o n n y a n d A m i q
sounded like a cross between some kind of medicine and some kind of motor oil.

“I grew up with scientists, and I’m sure as heck not going to be somebody’s lab animal,” Amiq said.

“You grew up with scientists?”

“You know, the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory. It’s in Barrow. You never hear about it?”

Sonny shook his head.

“Yeah, well, I spent a lot of time there after my mom and brothers died. After the fi re . . .”

Amiq looked down, bending the dead twig farther and farther back against itself, aware of the fact that Sonny was watching him. Not wanting to look up. Not wanting to say anything. What was there to say? He was surprised to hear himself talking about the fi re like that, and talking about it with Sonny, of all people. He’d never said anything about the fi re to anybody, but here was Sonny, sitting right next to him, nodding his head like he knew all about it—fi res in the dead of winter when the stove is roaring hot and the house dry as tinder. A house so small it had only one tiny window in it.

“My mom. She pushed me out the window just before the roof fell,” Amiq said. “I was the youngest, the only one who fi t.”

It felt like it was somebody else talking, somebody whose voice had become little more than a whisper, a whisper that seemed really loud in the silence that surrounded them. Th ey

sat there, the two of them, all alone in that silence. When the spruce twig in Amiq’s hand snapped in half, it sounded
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like gunshot. Amiq took the two splinters of dead wood and stabbed them into the frozen ground.

“My dad died in the war,” Sonny said.

Amiq looked up quick, but he didn’t say a word.

“Left my mom alone with all us kids.”

Amiq had known that Sonny didn’t have a dad, but he’d never really thought about it. Now he realized something surprising: both he and Sonny knew what it felt like to grow up with only one parent—Sonny with his mom and all those brothers and sisters and him with nobody left but his old man.

“My old man was in the war, too. Ever since the fi re, though, he likes his jug,” Amiq said. “Likes his jug a whole lot.”

He mounded up a little pile of dead leaves and needles around the bottom of one of the spruce twigs, wishing, suddenly, that he hadn’t mentioned that part about his dad drinking. Him and his big mouth. He looked up quick, brushing the dirt from his hands and forcing himself to smile.

“Yeah, but you know what? Th

em scientists pay twenty-

fi ve cents apiece for lemmings, and they always have a hot meal. Beef stew and chicken soup, that kind of stuff . And they got a whole library full of books, science books, mostly. Th at’s

where I pretty much grew up, at that library. Th

ey’re the ones

paid to send me here, too. Th

ey fi gure I’m gonna come back

home and be a scientist.”

It felt like he was talking too fast.

“So are you?”

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“Am I what?”

“Going to be a scientist?”