Northern Lights

NORTHERN LIGHTS AT NOON

Solomon Mongopoorok cursed in Inupiat when the steaming Colombian coffee splashed over the lip of his stoneware and scalded his right index finger. Quickly setting the cup on the edge of his teakwood desk, he jammed his finger into the frigid water of the silver ice bucket beside the desk. The bucket would not have been there had it not been for the Japanese fur buyers coming in from Anchorage. Maybe it was fate that of all days, this would be the one when he burned his finger and an ice bucket choked with a bottle of Mum’s would just happen to be next to his desk. He didn’t drink Mum’s at all. He had been told on extra special occasions when there was a lot of money to be made, Mum’s was the best way to celebrate — even if you were an Eskimo.

Outside was typical day for Kotzebue in mid-February; 20-below zero with a slight wind. It had been clear as smooth ice for two weeks and the sun had been wearing sun dogs[1] like a necklace the whole time. It was a sign, the elders said, and not a good one.

Solomon could have cared less. The day he took off his parka and put on a business suit, he had stepped from the world of the Eskimo to that of the international entrepreneur. What the old Eskimos said didn’t bother him any more.

“What the hell are you doing?” Solomon’s older brother, Jacob, ran into the room with a paper towel to soak up the water running down the side of the ice bucket. “The champagne’s for the Japanese. Stop playing around with it.”

“I’m not ‘playing around with it.’ I burned my finger.”

“Fine. Cool your finger down and then get it out of that bucket.”

Jacob walked over to the window-side of the deck and looked out over Kotzebue Sound. He had shot seal in these waters when he was younger. He and his brother were good seal hunters. They had to be. It was in their name, Mongopoorok, which meant “little seal” in Inupiat.

But this was the last year of seal hunting for everyone. The new dock had changed the currents in the Sound. The LNG, liquefied natural gas, plant was pumping money into the village but the tankers scared the seal away. LNG was in and the seals were gone forever. That was a trade-off. Now the Eskimos worked on the dock, year-round on the tankers and in the company office. In the old days, there were only 100 ice-free days a year when ships and barges could get into or out of Kotzebue. Now, with the ice breakers, LNG tankers could travel whenever the company pleased, winter or summer. In fact, a fully-loaded LNG vessel was locked in the ice at the dock at this moment, waiting for the ice breaker. The future was now.

Jacob’s gaze traveled from the LNG tanker, down the dock and up Front Street. Then he saw something he didn’t want to see.

“Oh, no!” Jacob froze as he watched the familiar figure hobbling down the beach toward the Mongopoorok Fur building.

“I don’t need any surprises today. What’s the problem?” Solomon didn’t like Jacob’s tone of voice.

“He’s back in town.”

“Dad?” Solomon pulled his finger out of the ice bucket and stepped over to the window.

“Yeah. He’s back,” Jacob kicked the wall of the office in anger. “Couldn’t have a chosen a worse time to come limping into Kotzebue.”

“Why doesn’t he just stay in Shungnak?”

Jacob ignored his brother’s comments. “Damn. He’s going to stink this place up with seal oil and dried fish again. We don’t need this. Not today.”

Together they watched the old man hobble down the street toward the fur company building. Step and scrape. Step and scrape. He advanced in pain, his damaged right hip a sign of good luck. He had gone through the ice into the Kobuk River the previous winter. Had his luck been bad, he would not have been able to pull himself out. Now he lived in pain and once that demon gets into your bones, the old people say, it lives there forever.

The old man stopped and looked up. He spotted his sons standing in the window and he waved slowly, his right hand moving slowly back and forth as if he were wiping snow off a window.

“Ouch!” Solomon pulled back from the window. “Let’s keep him out of the stock room. I don’t want these furs smelling of rancid fish and seal oil when the Japs gets here.”

Jacob went downstairs and let the old man in. Solomon guided him onto the gloomy warehouse floor.

“This is how you treat your father? You greet him in on a warehouse floor?” The old man limped toward a crate of whiskey and sat down heavily. “You have much to learn, my sons.”

“Father. Your visit is inconvenient. We . . .”

“Inconvenient? Inconvenient? It is inconvenient? You have not learned much since leaving home, Solomon.”

Jacob cut in quickly. If the old man started on one of his rampages, he would be there for hours. “Father. We have important business to do today.”

“Important business. You know nothing of important business.” The old man broke into a spasm of coughing. He had been spitting blood earlier in the year but that had gone away. The cough, however, was still with him. “You know nothing. . .”

Solomon surreptitiously looked at the clock behind the grill-work on the far wall. They still had an hour before the jet landed.

“Father.”

“Silence.” The old man was angry. “I have not come to listen to your stories of the modern world. I have come to talk of what your modern ways have done.”

“Oh?” This was a new subject for the old man. Usually he babbled about Maniilaq, the Eskimo soothsayer, and his sobering visions of the future. Like every other son born since creation, Jacob and Solomon could mouth their father’s speech, word for word. This latest subject, however, was new to them.

“You have no respect for the animals or your own ways. No longer do you take furs for cash or credit. Now you pay in white powder.”

Solomon coughed violently. This was a secret they didn’t want out.

“White powder?” Jacob paled as he asked innocently.

“White powder. Do you think your father is a fool? I am not as the gussak.[2] I know you pay for furs in white powder. Everyone does. You pay in powder that demands more and more powder. It is an evil. You do business in evil.”

“Now, Father,” Solomon did not like to hear such things from anyone, least of all his family. “We are businessmen. We buy and sell furs. We are only paying for furs in a coin the Eskimo will take. If we give them money, they will buy liquor and the white powder anyway.”

“I have raised madmen!” The old man became quite frenetic. He rose off the crate suddenly and winced. “You have stolen furs from the land, not just your family, but the land as well. Payment is due.”

“Father, this is not the time to . . .”

“Silence. The time of reckoning is upon us. We cannot kill for white powder. Beware the prophesy of Maniilaq . . . “

Solomon and Jacob rolled their eyes in an agony only a grown child could understand. Another lecture! Solomon glanced at the clock, hoping this would be a short one and that it would finish before the jet landed. Jacob followed his brother glance and Solomon said to himself “Why can’t we be like other Eskimos? They don’t have to listen to the old people. They ship them off to senior centers in Anchorage or Fairbanks. We do not need this in our lives, our business.”

“. . . you will know the anger of the land. Beware the time when a day is split in two. Then you will know the error of your ways.”

Much to the sons’ surprise, the old man abruptly lurched for the door. He hadn’t even started on his usual tirade and here he was, on his way out. Oh, joyous day! They were through with him with more than enough time to fumigate the place before the Japanese buyers came to examine the furs.

More like bouncers urging a patron to find a cab than sons wishing their father God speed and good health, they shooed the old man out into the snow. But he was not going to go without a final word.

“White powder! You are buying furs with white powder! All people know! You cannot steal from the land with white powder! It is evil!” Before he could say another word he doubled over, coughing out of control. When he spit, Jacob saw that the spittle was red.

“Father,” Solomon said as he stepped forward, not really sure what he was going to say.

“Don’t call me your father!” The old man stepped backward with pained dignity. “No sons of mine buy furs with white powder!”

With that the old man hobbled off, going back from the way he came.

Back upstairs the two sons watched the man hobble back toward the dock.

“Maybe we should stop buying furs with cocaine.” Solomon was feeling nervous.

“Why?” Jacob was spraying lemon-scented air freshener above their heads, pungent molecules falling on the two men like rain. “Those that want coke are going to buy it anyway. We just cut out the middle man.”

“No. We are the middle man.” Solomon laughed at his own joke.

The sound of the jet sent Solomon scrambling to pick up the Japanese buyers from the airport. The plane was early but that didn’t matter. Their old man was gone and the smell of dried fish and seal oil had dissipated.

“It’s going to be a great day,” Jacob said to himself. “The old man’s gone, the room smells fresh, we’ve got the largest supply of furs we’ve ever had, the buyer will be here in ten minutes and the connection would be paid off the moment the Japs leaves. Between the coke and the furs, we’ll clear half a million in less than an hour. Not bad for a couple of kids born in a sod barabara.[3]

But the day was still young. As the Japanese buyers were gently fingering the furs, fire alarms across Kotzebue groaned to life. It was a strange sequence of moans, one that the brothers had never heard before. Three long blasts followed two short ones.

“Should we be concerned?” The Japanese buyers asked when they saw the perplexed look on the brothers’ faces.

“I don’t think so, but I’ll check.” Solomon picked up the phone and called the fire station. When he hung up, he had a worried look.

“Somebody’s opened the stopcock on the LNG tanker. The super-cold liquefied gas is erupting out of the ships belly. It could explode. To be on the safe side, everyone’s got to go to the high school at the other end of town and wait for the tanks to empty.”

Hurriedly the men donned their parkas and headed downstairs. Solomon deposited the buyers in his truck and drove them to the high school as Jacob double-locked the front door and set the alarm. As he was about to get into his truck, a beefy man in a black parka with a blood-red scarf wrapped around his neck caught Jacob by his left elbow.

“Where’s the $l00,000?”

“The Japs haven’t paid us yet. We’ll have the money that after this …, this …, this alarm thing. Then we’ll pay you.”

“You’d better. You’re late already. You know what that means?”

“It means you get your money as soon as we get ours from the Japs,” snapped Jacob. “Got it?”

“Oh, I got it. You just be sure to get me the money.” The man leaned forward, one end of his red scarf spilling out of his unzipped parka. He jabbed a gloved, right index finger viciously into Jacob’s sternum. “Got it?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got it.”

“I’ll be staying right here.” The man pointed to the front of the building. “Just in case, you know.”

“Suit yourself.”

* * *

Standing next to his brother against the back window in the high school gym, Jacob saw a sight few men would ever see. As they were looking out of the upper tier windows, the sky exploded into a spectrum of colors. These were not sun dogs which appeared as a halo around the sun or as rainbow pillars. These spectrums danced across the sky from horizon to horizon.

“What’s that?” A white teacher asked aloud.

“It’s the effect of the extremely cold, natural gas in the atmosphere,” replied one of the LNG engineers who was drinking coffee as he looked out the window, oblivious to the beauty of the spectacle. “It’s like an oil sheen in the sky. When it goes away, that means that all the natural gas has been released.”

“What happened?” The school teacher pressed her nose flush to the window, two circles of frost appearing where the exhale from her nostrils froze on the inside of the window pane.

“Some old Eskimo limped onto the ship and opened a stop cock. It was open too wide for us to get near it. Or him. He’s still lying up there on deck, froze solid by now I’ll bet.” The LNG man moved back from the window in search of more coffee.

“Northern Lights during the day,” the teacher continued to marvel at the sight. “We’ll have them again tonight. Twice in one day.”

Solomon looked at Jacob nervously and asked, “Could this be a day split into two? You don’t think Dad knew what he was talking? I mean, he could . . . “ He let the sentence hang pregnant.

“Naw. The old man doesn’t know how to work on a tanker. That’s pretty technical stuff.”

“What about the ‘day split in two’ stuff?”

“This is an accident. Like me burning my finger. It just happened to come today, on a day when our father mentioned it. This is not prophesy.”

When the ALL CLEAR sounded, the two brothers and the Japanese brokers drove back to the fur company. Jacob turned off the alarm and opened the double-locks on the door. Solomon and the buyer went inside while Jacob talked to the connection.

“Been silent as a grave here.”

“Yeah. I know. We’re here. The Japs are here. The money’s here. Just wait.”

“Don’t jack me around.”

“Stick around. It won’t be long.”

But the moment he opened the door to the fur company, a chill colder than any ice-choked river ran down his back. The office reeked of rancid, dried fish and rotting seal oil. Climbing the stairs he met the Japanese buyers coming down. The buyers didn’t even bother to speak to Jacob as he dashed by.

Upstairs the stench was unbearable, even for an Eskimo. Jacob found his brother opening the two office windows to air out the room. Jacob didn’t wait for the stench to clear. Snatching up the most expensive fur, he dashed to the window and smelled the fur as it was being deluged with crisp Arctic air. The skin was ruined, permeated by a vile stench so revolting that even Jacob’s stomach turned.

“Jacob.”

Jacob looked up and followed his brother’s gaze out the open window. There he saw four figures on Front Street. In the distance were the two Japanese buyers receding toward the airport. In the foreground was the connection, beckoning Jacob down to the street with the first two, gloved, fingers of his right hand.

Between the two was their father, painfully favoring his good hip. He was waving at them, his right hand moving slowly back and forth as if he were wiping snow off a window. Then, as he stood unmoving, he faded until all that was left were his mukluk prints in the wind-swept snow.

Then they too disappeared.

[Steven Levi’s mysteries can be found at www.authormasterminds.com. His other books are available from Kindle and ACX.]

[1] A sun dog is a rainbow of colors in a circle around the sun. They occur in the Arctic when the air if full of ice crystals. Because the ice crystals can be blown around, sometimes they appear as shards around the sun rather than a solid circle.

[2] Gussak is the Inupiat corruption of the word Cossack, a derogatory term for white people.

[3] A barabara is a house of sod, whale bones, driftwood and whatever else is available on the shoreline.