Free And She Was by Cindy Dyson Page A

waded in beside the whale to slash away at the skin and blubber around the spear puncture.
    The boys yelled as they spotted the gray beached form. Slukax’s boy Alidax ran hard into the water to jump up on a flipper, trying to spring to the whale’s back. He slipped and crashed into the waves. His two friends laughed at him and jumped to the flipper, then boosted each other up. They were shouting and jumping, slipping and laughing when the village women reached the whale.
    Tugakax’s little girl placed her hands on the whale’s cheek and raised to her tiptoes to gaze into its open eye. “Look, Mama,” she said, pulling Tugakax over, “I am in the whale’s eye.”
    Tugakax clutched the girl to her chest, closed her eyes, and hid her tears in her daughter’s hair.
    Aya didn’t need to worry about the mark of her spear on the whale. With skill and relish, the women fell on the carcass, marking squares of blubber with their short knifes. This was women’s work, and they did it well. Slukax shouted needless instructions. Two women took the whale’s back, ripping regular squares of rubbery skin and yellow fat, which they handed down to two other women, who placed it on skids and harnessed themselves to drag it back to the village food pits. Others carved the sides and finally rolled the carcass to expose the belly. Children smeared fat in one another’s hair and licked their fingers clean. Women smiled and talked in hushed, brief sentences.
    “Such a gift. Such a gift.” Slukax repeated the phrase often through the afternoon, giving the village women a safe word to remember.
    They worked until nightfall, leaving the bones and innards for the next day. The village women and children walked together back to their homes, full with meat and the knowledge that they would live for another winter.
    Aya watched them leave. She heard the questions they buried under the taste of fat meat. Some knew this whale had not drifted onto the beach. But Aya also knew that suspicion had been driven under hope, and the village women would ask no questions. She knew these things through her new awareness, a dark awareness she could touch only lightly.
    She stood near the whale much of the night. The wind skiddedacross the beach, making its way toward the ocean. Her black hair lifted like fingers telling tales across her face. It stuck to the whale blubber smeared on her chin and in the moisture brought from her eyes by the wind. She didn’t lift her hand to brush it away until the dark straight mask covered her face, until she could no longer see.

JULY 7, 1986
making sure
    D arlene Panov unlocked a heavy padlock on the grayed plank door. It swung into a narrow arctic entry, bare and dry. Thad and I followed her through another door into the cabana. She gave us exactly twenty seconds to look around, which was really more than we needed. I loved it.
    “You want it, two hundred fifty a month.” Pricey for a place with no water, no electricity, no telephone wires.
    Thad flicked several fifty-dollar bills from a roll.
    I don’t know if it was the view, the smell of old sea-soaked wood, or the way Thad handled rolls of cash, but blood fell immediately to my crotch, and I wanted nothing more than a good, slow fuck on the hardened floorboards. I pressed myself against Thad, conscious of making hip contact. Darlene left without a word.
    I had my doubts about whether Darlene actually owned the cabana. More likely she owned the padlock. The feel of smooth dry wood under my shoulder blades and Thad’s tense weight on me mingled with the smells of grass and ocean brought in through the open door.
    Five replicas of our cabana dotted the hill below, and I could see the rotting remains of dozens more sinking into the scrub all around. The military had built these cabanas scattered in the hills after their typical barracks housing system proved, well, deadly. Up until June 1942,most of the soldiers stationed on Unalaska were housed in long barracks,