My Name Is Not Easy (55 page)

en he goes over to a shelf and pulls out his

notary stamp.

“All right,” he says. “Sit down. Let’s get this over with. You just remember, now, that this here is a legal document, and you two will have to live with the consequences of it.”

When Johnson says the word
consequences,
he turns to look at Amiq, but Amiq is no longer there. Amiq is outside helping Sonny round up the others—Rose and Evelyn, the Pete brothers and the rest—all of them waiting to sign affi

davits.

Just like those duck hunters.

We are hunters, too
, Amiq thinks, looking at them all and smiling:
hunters for justice.

It feels, in fact, like one big communal hunting trip, with Junior as the unlikely guide, and the rest of them watching the horizon and waiting for their turn to shoot.

When Donna slips past him, Amiq tries to catch her eye, but she refuses to look. Even in the dark, though, he sees her blush. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her blush before. He smiles to himself. Th

en he realizes that’s he’s blushing, too.

Luke isn’t outside with the others. He’s right there, leaning up against the darkened wall inside, invisible almost, watching.

As Amiq slips out the door, Luke steps forward, right up to the counter with the sign that off ers live bait and the cartoons about “the one that got away.” He stares at one of the cartoons, old and yellowed, and picks up the pen.

“I’ll be fi rst,” he says.

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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

“Not sure why you want to get mixed up in this one, Luke,” Johnson says.

“Yes, sir,” Luke says, not really hearing Mr. Johnson and not hearing the sound of Amiq and Sonny and all the other kids just outside the door. Not hearing anything except the sound of a small silence deep inside.

He looks at the form, looks at that word
affi

davit
and

remembers, suddenly, that other affi

davit, a long time ago, the

one that followed Isaac. But it wasn’t an affi

davit, Sister had

said—it was a permission form. Luke looks at the affi davit

laid out on the counter and thinks about the word
permission
.

How do you say
permission
in Iñupiaq, he wonders? If there is a word, he can’t remember it, doesn’t need it. He lifts the pen and leans forward. LEGAL NAME, the form asks.

Legal name?
He puts the pen right there on that line and signs his name, his real Iñupiaq name, the one he left behind:

Aamaugak.
He hears the sound of it as the pen scratches the paper, the sound of his mother’s voice, a warm, guttural buzz in the dusty darkness of Johnson’s Lodge and Bait.

Sometimes there’s nobody going to give you permission. Sometimes you just have to take it for yourself.

Johnson looks at his signature and frowns, but he doesn’t say a word. Th

en he signs it himself and stamps it “nota-

rized.”

Aamaugak.
Luke thinks.
What’s so hard about that?

As if on cue, everyone is now lined up behind him, waiting to sign. Everyone except Michael O’Shay, who is still sitting on the bench outside the lodge, staring off into the woods
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C I V I L D I S O B E D I E N C E

morosely until, fi nally, he’s the only one left. Sonny sticks his head out the door and smiles at him broadly.

“Okay, O’Shay. Your turn, my man.”

O’Shay frowns. “I don’t think so. My dad would kill me.”

“Come on, O’Shay, don’t be so damn white.”

O’Shay bristles. “As a matter of fact, I am white, and if I get expelled, I’ll be dead and white.”

“How the heck they gonna expel the entire student

body?”

O’Shay looks off into the woods thoughtfully. Th

en he

stands up.

“Oh, what the hell.”

“Here’s the real story, sir,” Junior tells Father Mullen, handing him the stack of affi

davits. “And we all wrote it.”

And that was the truth, the whole truth. It was no longer just one person’s opinion. It belonged to all of them.

Father leafed through the affi

davits, and all he said was,

“I see.”

What else could he say?

“I see.”

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Good Friday

MARCH 27, 1964

Father Mullen needs a break. Lord knows he needs a break. He needs a break from all those brats and their nonsense. Th at’s

why he’s here, isn’t it, walking the deserted beach of Seward, Alaska, which seems suddenly calm. Too calm. He sighs, thinking unaccountably of his mother. He doesn’t remember her, of course. He was just a baby. But sometimes, at odd moments, he feels her presence. It seems by turns to be both an admonishment and a comfort.

Lord knows he could use some comfort now.

He picks up a stone and tries to send it skating across the rolling, smooth skin of the sea the way he used to do on the pond back home in Missouri when he was a boy. It sinks on the fi rst skip. He watches it, absently, thinking about those Native boys, the ones he’s supposed to mold into Christians, the ones trying to break their thick, senseless skulls against the mold. Th

e beach is full of fl at, smooth stones perfect for skip-ping, but Father seems to have lost the knack.

In the sanctuary at Sacred Heart School, hundreds of miles
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G O O D F R I D A Y

north of Seward, Father Flanagan pauses, briefl y, to wonder if they aren’t overdoing it a bit, making these kids sit through Mass more than once in the same day. Even if it is Good Friday. Making them say Mass every day, for that matter. Th

ere are better ways to model Christian charity, one would hope.

Luke Aaluk, in the bathroom at the Sacred Heart dorm, doesn’t think much of Christian charity, but he would agree with the part about overdoing it. He stares at his refl ection in the steamy mirror of the shower room, altogether sick of stepping out of squeaky showers, freezing cold, of getting dressed in stiff white shirts and choking ties and mumbling the words to Mass over and over until none of it makes any sense in any language. When he goes home, he’ll for sure go the rest of his life without ever taking one more single stinking shower or wearing one more stiff white shirt or sitting through one more mumbling Mass. Th