Sample Chapter

What follows is preview of Where I Belong. Enjoy Chapter 1 and then consider picking up the entire book!

The Cessna ascended, like my expectations.

This was it, I hoped. I go into all of my various new jobs thinking this way. No more bouncing job to job, city to city, country to country, continent to continent. Aluktuk, I prayed, would be my last stop. The time was right, the pay was even better. I was cautiously optimistic about teaching at Inuk Valley School.

And then I met this large white man.

One doesn’t normally associate black clouds of mosquitoes with cold Alaska, but that’s what the sweaty large white man sitting next to me in the tiny plane warned about. Cramming into one of these six-seat tubes is already an uncomfortable trip, and this guy wasn’t making it any better. I was sitting sideways and up against the window. Our conversation began with him apologizing for taking up one seat and three quarters of mine.

“Here, I want to show you something.”

He reached into his back pocket, which only pressed me more firmly against the window. He pulled out his phone.

“Look at this. What do you think that is?”

I studied the picture and shrugged.

“Those are mosquitos, buddy!” he said excitedly. “And guess where that is?”

Again, I shrugged.

“Where you and I are both headed! Aluktuk!”

He pulled out a handkerchief from his other back pocket, smushing me yet again. He wiped his brow. He pulled down his mask and wiped the sweat beads off the top of his lip.

“And you’re getting there right in time for the swarm! This is the only month we see ‘em in the village, then they die off. But ohhh, it gets bad, buddy. They’re everywhere! They get in your mouth, your hair, under your clothes! You won’t even want to go outside.”   

Great. I was going to the mosquito capital of the world. They wouldn’t be a problem initially as I wouldn’t be allowed outside. This was July 2020, and COVID was in full effect. I would need to quarantine the first seven days in the Bush village while I waited for my test results.

As I admired the Chukchi Sea below, the large white man started up again.

“You love salmon?”

“I do. I guess I’ll get tons of it, being in Alaska and all?”

“Ha, wrong! You’ll get none of it.”

I stared at him, confused, waiting for a punchline.

“Climate change. Salmon can’t survive in our river water. It’s too warm. But there’s good news.”

He waited for me to ask what, so I finally did.

“You can eat all the caribou you want. Tons of that here. Our villagers will go into Barrow to hunt whale. One whale can feed an entire village, so you’ll get plenty of that, too. It’s called muktuk.”

I had read up on muktuk. It’s the whale’s skin and blubber and is eaten cold and raw.

“You drink?”

“Occasionally,” I lied. Excessively would have been more accurate.

“Ha, wrong again, partner! Our village is dry.”

This, I already knew. It was one of the reasons I chose Aluktuk. Of all the Bush villages begging to employ me, Aluktuk was the only one with no booze. I looked at it as a sort of intervention.

“The mayor did away with liquor about five years ago. Made my job a lot easier. The natives can’t handle their drink. Stagger out drunk in the dead of night, pass out in the cold and freeze to death. Used to happen quite a bit. How regularly do you see a doctor?”

“I try not to.”

“Ha, good. All’s we got out here is a health aide, a glorified nurse but not even. Make sure you don’t break a leg or something. It could get bad. What’s your name?”

“Lance.”

He offered me a meaty, sweaty hand. COVID, I thought. But I didn’t want to be rude. He shook my hand exactly like you’d think a big man would – with vigor.

“Nice to meet you, Lance. I’m Buck.”

Of course he was named Buck. This is precisely the name you’d expect for a large white man in Alaska.

“I’m the cop in town. There’s two of us, technically. But we rotate. I’ll man the village for a couple months, and then Ted – that’s the other cop – he’ll come in for two months. I just got off vacation. I live in Montana, with my wife and three kids.”

He was swiping his phone, muttering under his breath and shaking his head.

“No … no … no. Ah! Here’s a good one. Check it out.”

It was a group photo of his family. They were all big as Buck. One of his chubby sons offered a broad, red-cheeked smile as he held the antlers of what I assumed was a dead caribou.

“Nice. They keep you busy around here?”

“Nah, not really. It’s a simple job. They don’t ever come to me for help, and they don’t cause too much trouble. I mean, they do but they don’t. A lot of sexual assaults and rape out here. And I mean a lot. Mostly teenage girls. Most of them go unreported. When it comes time to press charges, they all clam up. Because the one doing the raping is usually a relative.”

Rape is a problem in the Bush. One of the online modules I had to watch as part of onboarding focused on its prevention. The rate is much higher in Alaska than it is in the lower 48. So is suicide.

“We get a lot of suicides, too. Sometimes we’ll go a year or two without any, then we get ‘em in waves. Always with the shotguns these people use to hunt. We had six back in the winter of ’17. But usually one or two a year. None so far in ‘20. So, what brings you way out to Aluktuk? You know there’s nothing here, right? Unless you’re into tundras.”

A good question. What did bring this middle-aged black man to the Bush? What was the yearning?

“I like to meander.”

            There was more to it than that.

He wouldn’t shut up, not about sports, politics or religion. It was the world according to Buck, and I concluded that his marriage was in shambles. He had to be unhappily married and thirsting for conversation. That’s the spouse’s job. To lend an ear before bedtime.

But here he was rambling on to me like I was his goddamned wife.

My mind drifted. How did this happen? How did I end up on a small plane in the middle of nowhere to fly somewhere to live in the middle of nowhere?

Sure, there’s an element of wanderlust that I do enjoy – I can have an intelligent conversation about three different countries’ culture, from three continents, because I’ve lived in these places for an extended period. I’m proud of this.

But then I get home, the place where reality stares us all in the face. I don’t like what I see. Someone who’s destined to go it alone until he dies. I’m not proud of this.

So I keep it moving.

“Hey, did you hear about Dave?”

“What? Where is he this time?”

“Dig this. Dude moved to the bush! In Alaska! What a real go-getter.”

Yes, that Dave Lance, he’s always up for an adventure.

I had constructed this image of me that I liked: Man of the world. He’s lived everywhere, it’s so impressive! He must have friends everywhere, he’s just so … so … global.

I liked it. Only the feeling didn’t last as long as I would have liked. Because it was a facade. So I kept running, all the way to the next stop.

Look, I was afraid, alright? You happy? I said it. Afraid to face my reality. Most men my age were married or divorced. I had never been the former. They were empty nesters, with the kids in college or just out and they bragged about them incessantly.

The friends I made in my teenage and early 20s have moved on from the single life. And with their new families, they gravitate and bond with people like them with kids their kids’ age. And these new like-minded friends come over for dinner parties, where they talk about their kids’ accomplishments. That, or the addition they’re building on their suburban home. Or the bathroom they’re remodeling.

They are now refined. They drink no longer to get drunk. No, they drink to savor the flavor.And they laugh at the same things that are happening in each of their lives, while I stand to the side, with no home remodeling to talk about – hell, I don’t even own a home – getting blindly drunk off some high-end booze I never even heard of.

I had turned 50, with no wife, no girlfriend, no kids. There was nothing to come home to. I belonged to no one. I belonged to nothing. I had no purpose, and I’m afraid it’s going to be that way the remainder of my life. There’s a void. So this is how I confront that fear. I get a move on. It sets me free.

Up until it doesn’t. And I’m off again. And again. And again. And again.

When would the running stop? I hoped soon. I was getting winded.

I worry about people’s perception of me. Almost as much as I worry about my own. I’ve gone to countless movies alone. I try to sneak out just when the end credits start and before the lights come on. I’m surrounded by a bunch of strangers, yet I still don’t want them to know.

Hey, honey, get a load of the guy trying to sneak out the theater! Why he’s … ALONE!

Making matters worse, I have no support system to soul dump all this on. Part of this is my fault in that I haven’t made a slew of life-long friends along the way - I’ve inherited my dad’s loner tendencies and I’m fairly tough to get to know; I’m hard on friends. Still, everybody needs somebody sometime. My bank of somebodies, never large to begin with, is shrinking.

*******************************

Smoke was exactly what I needed as a teenager, a good friend, a neighborhood tough who wouldn’t let anyone bother me. And I was an easy target. I was always the smallest kid everywhere I went, with braces, headgear and glasses to complete the look. But Smoke was a good protector. Only problem with him was that he never grew up. He was still acting at 40 the way he did at 16: “chasin’ bitches and takin’ no shit from nobody.”

He still played the rap music so loud in his car that it shook his rear-view mirror. A little bit of all that goes a long way. We drifted apart. Still, I was bogus to not return his call when his grandfather O-Dad died when I lived in New York. Smoke was closer to him than anyone in his family. He needed a shoulder to cry on but I wasn’t there, as he had been for me decades earlier. That said, I’m sure, now that it’s I who needed somebody, he would have pick up if I called.

I never did.

My dad and best friend are dead, and the sister might as well be. We haven’t spoken in 30 years. My mother’s still alive, but I find her incredibly hard to talk to. She’s a hoarder, a natural worrier and born complainer. And you never get the feeling that she’s listening to what you’re saying. Just waiting for the moment she can jump in and express her thoughts and opinions on … cats. The woman loves cats, always has, always keeps around at least two. The conversation always comes back to cats.

So I tend to avoid her, which is starting to have an effect on me. She’s in her mid-80s. Her best days are behind her, and her time on this Earth grows shorter every day. This bothers me.

I don’t want her out of my life.

But I don’t want her in it either.

It’s going to be terrible when she’s gone. There’s going to be a tremendous hole. Much more than when my dad died. I always was a momma’s boy. And no one’s loved me as much as she.

So why don’t you visit her more often?

Because I already know all I want to about cats.

Buck’s gabbing was interrupted by the pilot. She turned around and told us we would be landing in less than five minutes. Buck continued his gabbing. He told me he could guess why I had moved to Aluktuk, and he was right. He frowned disapprovingly.

“Bad gig, buddy,” he said. “The kids are awful.”

The Cessna descended, like my expectations.

The kids in Aluktuk cannot be as awful as the ones I’ve taught. No way.

Javarion Butler was in the seventh grade at Hudson School of Excellence my last year there. The moniker “School of Excellence” designates it as a turnaround school managed by the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL). In short, the school was failing, so AUSL takes over, replacing much of the staff, including the administration, and institutes its own set of rules and guidelines to follow in hopes that the school will quickly make this turnaround and be in better standing with Chicago Public Schools. The city invests more money in these schools than the others in CPS, so the stakes are high and the new teachers and admin are monitored closely. Very closely. Outsiders stopped by to see what was going on in classrooms all the time. No one was around the day Javarion approached.

He was nearly six feet and already almost my height. I had him barely beat in the weight department, too, when I was his teacher in 2019, I’d say by about 10 pounds.

This sounds like I’m sizing him up, and there’s a good reason for that. I was. We, the 13-year-old man-child and 50-year-old has-been, very nearly came to blows in the winter in my classroom’s doorway. And it occurred to me in the moment that had he lunged my way, had he hit me, I would have had to fight him like I would a grown man – with intensity.

This was my world, Chicago’s West Side, North Lawndale exactly. But this could happen at any urban public school throughout the country, where kids are hard, though not as much as they want you to believe.

As it was, Javarion only verbally beat me up. He was in my homeroom and I walked his class to my room from lunch to our social science class. He would regularly leave the line and wander the hallways, finally rejoining the group sometimes 15 minutes into my lesson. This was one of those occasions. I happened to be making a point about the history of Halloween when he burst into class, laughing about throwing water on someone in the bathroom. He then exited the class, and when he tried to return a few minutes later, I met him at the door, informing him that he would have to stay either inside the class or out. He was just clear of the door, but he stuck his foot out so I couldn’t close it. He had read my mind.

He wouldn’t move. So I told him he’d have to, otherwise the door was going to clip his foot. I asked him once again, either inside or out, and he held firm. Predictably, the door scraped and scuffed his white Nikes, which is enough to get oneself gunned down where I’ve taught. But Javarion wasn’t packing – not at school anyway – so instead he leaped toward me and pushed. I extended my arm and stuck my elbow and forearm into his chest, kind of like Magic Johnson backing down smaller defenders.

Did I mention that I’m black? That I, like Javarion, am born and raised on Chicago’s South Side? That I grew up in the Roseland community, the notorious “wild 100’s,” which is much like North Lawndale with its violence, crime, gangs and poverty? And that I know where this kid comes from, understand the obstacles he faces and can help combat them? I wore a button-up shirt, tie, slacks and dress shoes to work nearly every day in the hopes that, in dressing unlike what they’re used to seeing from adult black men, I’d serve as a role model. In this moment, none of those things meant anything to Javarion as he teetered on crossing the line.

Javarion kept pushing my arm down, so he could stand literally nose-to-nose with me. And I kept Magic Johnson-ing his ass, keeping him at arm’s length. Eventually, a female security guard down the hallway heard the commotion and radioed for one of the male guards, who came running to escort Javarion away. He didn’t protest. Oh, he called me a bitch-ass a few times and a goofy. Or he might have used goofy to describe my bitch-ass. I can’t remember. And he didn’t stop with the language when his grandmother came to pick him up. But by that time, he remembered he was just a child, as he was now crying, though it was hard to tell – his long, thin dreads were covering his eyes.

In looking back, I don’t think Javarion really wanted to fight me. He never took a swing, he just pushed, which I bet in hindsight was a non-verbal cue that he needed a hug. Or some help. At least that’s what I hope. I’d hate to think I’m the problem, that I bring out the worst in my students. The awful truth is that in every one of the many American public schools where I’ve taught, at least one pupil has confronted me much in the same manner as Javarion.

Sometimes a little more aggressively. Sometimes even females.

But Javarion’s timing was worse than theirs.

I called my dad Joe, his given name, once I became an adult. Purposely disrespectful. I had my issues with him. Thought he wasn’t present in my life, even though he never walked out on the family. Thought he hadn’t acted like a dad. So I didn’t call him that.

The man worked two jobs, 16 hours a day – and I had the nerve to hold a grudge against him because he very rarely would go out in the alley and play catch with me. Because he never went to my bowling tournaments, never went to my wrestling matches.

I thought he was selfish. It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood, probably my 40s, when I realized how stupid and wrong I was, how I was the selfish one. The man supported a family, paid for a house, paid his two kids’ college tuition. All this from a high-school dropout from rural Mississippi.

And I had the balls to think that wasn’t enough.

Want to know how I figured out it was? Because as I’ve aged, I act just like he did. When I get home from teaching these crazy-ass kids, all I want to do is veg on the couch and sip on vodka. He’d pass out before he ate. Then he’d eat his dinner in the morning. I do the exact same things. Please no visitors, no interruptions, peace, quiet and Smirnoff.

He was like that all the way until he died, a little more than a year before leaving for Alaska. His death was expected and welcomed. He’d been sick for two years, bedridden for one. Cancer, a stroke, dementia. They all did him in, the stroke was the death blow.

He had colon cancer, had surgery and licked it. But then it came back. He didn’t want to have another surgery. He was ready to go. I insisted he have it anyway. He relented. He lived another two years. Meaninglessly.

We didn’t have a funeral. He didn’t say he wanted it that way, but Joe was not a people person. A couple of his brothers would sometimes visit. And I think one guy he worked with came over once to watch the football game, but that was it. So my mother decided no funeral, puzzling the people on the block. Particularly Mike T. He was disappointed. His dad had just died not even a year before mine. He was devastated. His dad’s funeral was the first time I’d ever seen Mike cry, and I’ve known him all my life.

Of all the kids on the block who were his age, like me, Mike T. was always the most mature of us. At 15, he had a job before any of us and at 18, a car, too. He was a grown man at a young age, but then he had to be with the tragedy he endured.

Mike looked older than the rest of us. The guy had a beard by the time he was 15. Not like Grizzly Adams but still something beyond the five-o’clock shadow. And there were no patches! He was allowed to go into South Side bars unencumbered by the time he was 18.

His eyes were disproportionately bigger than the rest of his facial features and he had a widow’s peak, which we teased him about. And he was dark-skinned. We teased him about that, too. He was given various nicknames from us on the block that spoke to his complexion. Some of us called him Blacula, others Prince of Darkness or simply Blacky. Some called him Tiddy. Which was short for Tiddy-Head T. The origins of this nickname remains a mystery.

The guy was a fantastic cook. He had no choice. He learned how when his mother died in her sleep when he was 9. His dad was always working. So Mike’s aunts taught him how to cook. He was frying steaks by the time he was 11, even though he could barely see the stove top. He literally had to stand on his tippy toes. He had the nerve to ask you how you wanted your steak cooked, like he was some sort of short-order cook.

He could cook anything: Italian, barbecue and soul food were his specialty. He put shark on the grill once, oversalting it as he did everything, but it was fantastic. He took great pride in his cooking. Mike had an underbite, so when he ate, he chewed his food with his front teeth. He would take a bite, close his eyes and savor. Then he’d smile and open his eyes up. “Needs more salt.” And he’d sprinkle on more than a little bit.

It wasn’t his food that first drew me to him. It was baseball cards. We both collected. His was the house directly across the street from mine, but before I was 9, my mother wouldn’t let me cross the street on my own. Mike T. could and he would, bringing over his pack of cards. We kept our stash in separate purple Crown Royal bags. We’d empty them out on my back porch and trade one White Sox after another with each other.

“I’ll give you my Steve Stone for your Eric Soderholm and Wayne Nordhagen,” Mike would say.

“Only if you throw in Chet Lemon,” I countered.

“I’ll give you Oscar Gamble but you can’t have Lemon.”

While Gamble’s card was more aesthetically pleasing than Lemon’s – his Afro was outta sight – Lemon was bound to be a bigger star than Gamble, offensively and defensively.

“Why not?” I demanded.

“Because he’s good and he’s going to the Hall of Fame. And my dad says the cards are worth more when they make the Hall of Fame.”

“Alright then, give me Alan Bannister and Steve Stone.”

I always rooted for scrappy White Sox middle infielders. Bannister, Tony Bernazard, Jorge Orta, Jim Morrison. I tried to play like they played – gritty, get your uniform dirty - though Bannister wasn’t too good at picking up the ball. No one else was pining for Bannister’s card. I was.

“You want Bannister, you can have him. I can’t stand him. He makes too many errors.”

“Deal.”

“Deal.”

We made shrewd transactions like that on a weekly basis. Gradually, we became best friends. Until, gradually, we were not.

We might have outgrown each other as adults, but never the wretched White Sox, the love of our lives. The last conversation I had with him was on Memorial Day at a party on the block we grew up on. I told him why the Sox would regret trading Chris Sale, arguably the game’s best pitcher when the team jettisoned him.

“Who’d they get? The third baseman, Moncada? What’s the pitcher’s name? Kopech? Please. They didn’t get enough back, bro. Time’ll tell, you’ll see.”

He disagreed, but then he always did about everything. A professional contrarian. He never listened, and he was always right, which led to our falling out as adults. And everything had to be his way, even to the detriment of his health. Everybody told him to stop putting so much salt on his cooked food – this, after over-salting when it was raw. He had a stent, for Christ’s sake. Yet he refused to use Mrs. Dash or Nu-Salt, which his ex-wife and girlfriend begged him to use. And he kept frying every damn thing.

He did all this up until the day he got in his car after work, headed to grad school where he was completing his master’s in math and slowly crashed into the side of a house, the victim of a massive heart attack.

Mike was pronounced dead on the scene, a block down from the public school where he taught. He was 49. This was eight months before I headed to Aluktuk. The Javarion accosting came two months later.

Bad timing.

An expected death, an unexpected death. You’re already down for the count, and here comes this young fool with the death blow.

I was hoping to escape from all this in moving to the vast nothingness of the Alaska tundra.

Escape. Ever since I can remember, I’d been trying to distance myself from my reality. Either through booze or the freshness of a new job. I’d bounced around. I wrote for six newspapers in 15 years and taught in nine schools in 14. You might call me a quitter. I prefer the word explorer. In the U.S., I’ve only taught in Title 1 schools. They are given this designation, and federal funds, if they have a high number of low-income students. From all the difficulties students at these schools must navigate, from violent neighborhoods to broken homes to possible learning disabilities (diagnosed, misdiagnosed, or undiagnosed), they can be hostile. My colleagues in New York and Chicago like to say if you can teach at their schools, you can teach anywhere. It’s draining.

Since I started teaching, I’ve been called more profane names by students, middle school and up, more times than I can remember. I was called a bitch-ass nigga and a punk-ass bitch by the same eighth-grade girl. I’ve been told that I suck dick, to go suck a dick (from another girl), fuck you and warned that I was going to get “shot up” (The seventh-grade boy, not even five-foot tall, followed up by adding, “I can make that happen, you know.” Looking at his stone face, it looked like he could, too. Then he broke character and started crying.). I’ve been called a lame-ass teacher, faggot and a fuck nigga, whatever that is.

This is why most teachers don’t want to teach at Title 1 schools, because they know what comes with it. Disrespect, parent apathy and an over-reliance on high-stakes standardized test scores that largely predicts a teacher’s assessment. Eventually, I got tired of it.

I got into the education field through Peace Corps as an intermediate grade level English teacher in Madagascar. From there, I taught three years in the South Bronx, one in a Chicago middle school, two in the Philippines (Peace Corps again, this time in Bakhawan High School, Bakhawan Elementary and Cebu Technical University) and six more in Chicago at three different schools.

I’m game for an adventure, even when it takes me out of my element. As a cub reporter, you’re asked to cover the events the veterans don’t want. So, I was the auto racing reporter for the Dayton Daily News for five years, a beat I loathed. A black kid from Chicago’s South Side, I knew nothing about downforce, HANS devices, throttles or drafting. But you took those jobs with the hope of better beats on the horizon. You name the obscure sport, I’ve covered it: Frisbee golf, trapshooting, cutting horses and hydroplane racing. If it’s lame, I was game. Been there, hated that.

My willingness to cover these sports would have been rewarded. In fact I did become a co-beat writer for pro football’s Cincinnati Bengals while in Dayton, but I’d never hang around long enough to reach the summit. I worked one year at the Chicago Sun-Times, one at the Munster Times in Indiana, three at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, six in Dayton and three at the Dallas Morning News, my last stop before switching careers.

A teacher in the Philippines is called a maestro. I like to think of myself as the meandering maestro, going from village to village like a nomad in search of the strange, challenging and unpredictable. In extreme conditions, weather and otherwise.

It helps the time pass.

As the plane finished landing, paranoia set in as I watched the other five passengers prepare for war. They sprayed their bodies and clothes with OFF!, pulled over hoodies even though it wasn’t particularly cold, and then, almost in unison, put on head nets. My principal was right; in the welcome letter she mentioned that new teachers should bring protection from mosquitoes, but I didn’t heed the warning. I hoped she wasn’t right about needing boots this time of year.

“You’re gonna need some of this buddy,” said Buck, who sprayed my arms with no solicitation. As he urged, I tapped some of the repellent on my fingers and spread it across my face. Now ready for the battle, and with the Ride of the Valkyries playing inside my head, I exited the plane – and was greeted by a disciplined, buzzing army of pests that, like birds, swirled in choreographed rhythm, attacking one person and then another. I swatted furiously, but they were relentless, OFF! be damned, landing everywhere, with two being adroit enough to maneuver under my mask and up my nose.

“Here, put this on.” The stout, gray-haired white woman who handed me the head net was Inuk Valley principal Laura Schultz. She adjusted the oversized red frame glasses, much like Sally Jessy Raphael’s, that dominated her face. “I told you there’d be a bunch of ‘em.” Now a little less harried, I waited in line with my boss for my luggage. The mud was as high as my ankles, sometimes deeper depending on where you stepped, and my shoes and socks were thoroughly submerged. So thick was the slop that it almost pulled a shoe off as I moved.

“Glad you could make it, Lance,” Laura said as we drove off in her truck. I apologized for tracking so much mud in it. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got some rubber boots you can borrow. I’ll bring them over tomorrow.”

During the five-minute drive to my place, Laura pointed out the landmarks. The only school in Aluktuk, where kindergarteners through 12^th graders attended, was to our right, two stories high and towering over everything else in the village. Having been refurbished five years ago, the school looked new, while all the other buildings looked old though not dilapidated. The post office was non-descript, unlike the post offices in the lower 48. You wouldn’t know it was a post office unless someone told you, and nothing outside it hinted it was a government building. No state seals, no mailboxes, no hours of operations posted, nothing. It was no bigger than a one-car garage.

The gray building with a four-wheeler parked beside it was the convenience store. It was only the size of a 7-Eleven, but Laura told me not to worry. “They’ll basically have everything you want, especially if you’re into caribou. Spaghetti sauce, dried beans, canned beans and spices. Got that. Sometimes the stuff expires. You can still eat the dried beans and use the spices if they’re old. Wouldn’t trust old canned beans though.

“They’ll have ground beef, pork chops and those pre-cooked Tyson chicken wings. You’ll find all that in the freezer in the back of the store.”

I told her no when she asked if I smoked.

“They have plenty of cigarettes in there. Soda and candy, too. It’s the natives’ vices. No booze, so they find other ways to get buzzed. But you should see what it does to their teeth. Nicotine, sugar and phosphoric acid. Bad combination. Their teeth don’t stand a chance.”

She pulled up to my new home. I was staying in a duplex, where all the other teachers lived.

“Every other month, the store gets a shipment of frozen pizza. Usually DiGiorno, sometimes Red Baron. But stock up on it when you see it. They love it out here and it goes fast. That and soda. Oh, and eggs, too.”

This struck me as funny, someone telling a native Chicagoan, a person born a pizza snob, to stock up on Red Baron. I’d rather eat muktuk.

We unloaded the luggage, and she gave me a tour of my place. It was furnished. My expectations were low, having lived in two other poor villages. So that I’d have running water I considered victory enough. But this place had baseboard heaters, a washer and dryer, sofa, rocking chair, black-out curtains, stove, oven and fridge. The freezer, a little over six feet, stood alone in the hallway just outside my front door.

“Remember, no drinking. Any teacher caught drinking is terminated, effective immediately. When the river freezes over, the villagers like to drive their snow machines to Keyavik, stock up on beer and bring it back. Please don’t do it.”

She told me I could take my mask off.

“COVID’s a rumor out here. We haven’t had any cases. Ever since the pandemic started, the mayor doesn’t let any outsiders into the village except teachers. The staff has to wear masks at school. The students don’t, so they never do. When you’re out in the village, you don’t have to wear it either.”

As we went back outside to get the last of my luggage, a maskless, little white man briskly headed our way.

“Hey, Doug,” Laura said. “I want you to meet Lance. He’s our new teacher. Lance, this is our mayor.”

Mayor? Here I was in an Inupiat village, and all I’d met so far were white people, and they held the most important jobs – cop, principal, mayor. Doug waved but kept moving.

“Sorry, I can’t talk now. Heading over to the river. Heard some people are trying to come in. It’s berry season, but I sent out an edict saying that there was to be no picking this year because of COVID. Looks like some people have decided they’re going to try and do it anyway. Even announced it on social media. See you around. And welcome.”

Laura explained that Doug lived in the village for 20 years and had been mayor the past 10. He was from Washington. Laura, who was entering her third year as principal, hailed from Nevada.

“At 55, I can’t get used to the social media,” Laura said. “Although it has made my skin thicker. The natives like to anonymously post and talk about what a bad job I’m doing. Dave, I’m not saying to let them walk all over you but try not to push back. It’s not worth it. That’s what Alesha did. So, someone put a dead, mutilated wolverine at her door.”

Alesha, Laura said, was the last black teacher at the school. She arrived two years before me but went back to her home in South Carolina over Christmas Break last year and didn’t return. She told no one – not her students or colleagues – that she wasn’t coming back. The next time they heard from her was in the form of a letter written by her attorney. She was suing the school district and principal for racial harassment.

“Dave, Alesha brought a lot of that on herself. She was too combative with the kids and staff. And she was confrontational with me. She came into my office once and …”

Realizing she was telling me too much, Laura stopped and changed the subject.

“So your classes. This is what you’ll be teaching this first quarter: North Slope history, gym, Inupiat Literature, technical reading and composition and a combined class, 5^th and 6^th grade English.”

She looked at me apprehensively. This was supposed to offend me, the wide discrepancy, the varying grade levels, teaching four classes I had never taught. I applied for a middle school English Language Arts job, and this was what I was saddled with.

I shrugged. She exhaled.

“You’re gonna need those black-out curtains tonight,” she said. “It’ll be all-day daylight until the end of the month. You’re probably tired, right? It’s a bad trip.”

This was no lie. To get to Aluktuk, I flew into Seattle near midnight and waited seven hours for a plane to Anchorage. It would be pointless to rent a hotel room – by the time I fell asleep it’d be time to go – so I traipsed around the airport. From Anchorage, I flew into Barrow, got tested and stayed in a bed and breakfast overnight. The next day, I took the Cessna to Aluktuk. Four planes, 48 hours. With COVID in full bloom, each airport, airplane and the bed and breakfast were nearly empty.

“Get some sleep.”

The curtains did what they were supposed to, but I was awakened at 3 in the morning anyways. Under the bright sunlight and oblivious to the clouds of ravenous skin-biters hovering over their heads, children were playing Mr. Freeze in the grassless, muddy lot.

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