My Name Is Not Easy by Edwardson, Dahl (the reading list TXT) 📗

How Hunters Survive

SEPTEMBER 7, 1960

LUKE

—

It’s still dark outside, like this is the kind of place that’s always gonna be dark. And I can’t sleep.

All I can hear is the sound of other boys breathing. I think maybe I hear the whole place breathing—every last one of them. Nuns and priests, girls and Indians, all of them fast asleep. Bunna looks tense, even in his sleep, clutching Isaac’s toy gun. He didn’t think I noticed that he had it, but I did.

Some of the younger kids are making little hiccupping noises, hunched into their blankets, trying not to let anyone hear them crying.

I wonder if Isaac’s asleep now, too, wherever they took him. I try real hard to imagine him sleeping—snoring soft with that twitchy little sleep smile he gets. But no matter how hard I try, all I can see is his tear-streaked face, pressed up against the black window of that car, disappearing into tree-shaped shadows.

I stare up at the ceiling, wishing a person could go from 37

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

one place to another, just like that. I’d make myself go from this lonely bed at Sacred Heart School to my own bed back home, curled up with my brothers—both of them.

I have never in my whole life been spanked, and I’m wondering what’s so bad about Iñupiaq that they have to make your hand sting for speaking it. I can still feel those Iñupiaq words, warming the back of my throat, only now it feels like the sounds got twisted around somehow . Like if I try to say a word, it’s gonna come out bent.

But I know for sure what I gotta do now. I lean over the side of the bunk and shake Bunna hard.

“Bunna. Wake up. It’s time,” I say real soft.

“Time for what?” he asks, his voice loud and groggy.

“Shhh. Time to go home.”

“Where’s our stuff ?” He’s wide awake now, whispering.

“We don’t need stuff .”

“I’m taking Isaac’s gun,” he says, his voice rising a bit.

Isaac’s toy gun is on the bed, next to him. He slept with it, I just realized.

“Go ahead,” I say. “Take it.”

Outside it’s dark, but there’s a moon slung low, and the dirt road that leads away from the school is lit with a shadowy light. It’s the same road that priest drove down when he took Isaac away, his car spitting stones and dust. At the end of that road is the highway that leads north to Fairbanks and south to Anchorage. If we can fi nd Isaac and hitchhike north to Fairbanks—and then get a message to Uncle Joe somehow—we can get home. Uncle Joe has a friend who fl ies planes.

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“I’m hungry,” Bunna says. “We oughtta eat fi rst.”

“Eat what? Horse soup?”

Th

is shuts him up.

We’re coming up on the place where the school road turns out onto the highway. Th

ere’s a cabin on the corner there and

it has its lights on.

“Wait here,” I tell Bunna, but he don’t listen. He follows right behind me like a shadow.

“What the heck you doing?” he asks.

“We gotta fi nd Isaac. Maybe this is where they’re keeping him. Stay low.”

We sneak up to the window of that cabin and peek in.

Part of me already knows we aren’t going to fi nd our brother in there. Th

e other part is desperate enough to look any-

where.

Inside is an old Indian man sitting there, all alone, wearing dirty brown coveralls, staring at his stove and drinking coff ee. He’s got his back to us, and the hair on the back of his head looks matted, like he just woke up. He looks mean, even from behind. When he stands up, I duck down quick, my heart pounding. Now what?

I think about my grandpa’s uncles, killing all them Indians, but I don’t feel that brave. All I feel is a sudden need to get off that road and out of sight.

“We gotta cut through the woods behind,” I whisper.

Bunna looks at those big old black trees, moving their branches back and forth like fi ngers. “What about Isaac?” he says in a small voice.

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“I don’t know where they got him. We gotta go get Uncle Joe to help us.”

Bunna is still looking at the trees. “I’m not going in there,”

he says.

I don’t want to go in there either. “You rather stay here?

Th

at what you decide?”

“No,” Bunna whispers. “I never.”

“Okay then.”

Bunna and I never been in woods before, and right away we don’t like it. Th

ere’s things on the ground you can’t hardly

see: roots and rocks and bushes and pieces of tree. Th ings that

make it hard to walk. And the trees lean in so close that when you look up, you can’t even see the sky.

Th

is place is not right. You’re supposed to be able to see things when you’re outside. You’re supposed to be able to look out across the tundra and see caribou, fl ickering way off in the sunlight, geese fl ying low next to the horizon, the edge of the sky running around you like the rim of a bowl. Everything wide open and full of possibility. How can you even tell where you’re going in a place