William Vollmann - The Atlas

Two more boys came running up the road.

Hi, called the girls. You gonna swim? You gonna swim?

I was watching them to see what it was that I had lost. They seemed to make no motion without a purpose, and to do nothing that they did not want to. They did nothing to fill time because they swam time and breathed it. They flapped their arms against sodden shirts, stood still, put bathing suits on, all with the quick confidence that doing these things was right and that afterward there would be other good things to do.

A truck went by and drenched me in white dust.

I knelt down to fill my water bottle from that stream well spiced with stones, that stream which curved around the curvy horizon. I felt the cold touch of a mosquito against my face. When my bottle had surrendered its last bubble of emptiness, I climbed back up to the road again. The bottle was very chilly and heavy in my hand. I stood at the bridge, and two couples I'd seen in church came on their four-wheelers and greeted me. They asked the children if the water was warm. With them it was different. They weighed possibilities, with easy indulgence. They could take or leave anything. But, just like the younger people, they owned their lives.

I was at the bridge and everyone was there. And I was alone.

All this changed on the first day that I went swimming. The coolness, the novelty, the loveliness, all these things engrossed me so that I was like them, learning the blue and green and brown lives of water, speaking with shouts and stone-splashes to the kids wrapped in towels like Arabs. Water ran from our lips. Happily straining reddish-orange faces swam around me and teased me. Little kids were riding me, clinging to me, calling my name in the water. A small girl braced her skinny brown knees against the current and crossed back and forth, dancing from stone to stone. We were always throwing stones at pop cans which we floated down the current, or trying to wing birds, though I made sure never to hit a living thing because I was not a hunter; my friends were quite good at striking a mark. They taught me about the strange current on the south side, right by the bridge where the little birds lived, so strong that you could not cross the creek without angling upstream. I let it catch me, and was caught up in life.

Boys kept diving off the bridge. The girls were dressing and undressing on their side. When they came out they shivered.

At ten or eleven at night, when dusk rose out of the island like fog, the river beneath the bridge darkened until it resembled the purple altar-hanging with its polar bear and stars, its two igloos, and its man and woman entering the yellow-windowed church. I had felt rejected by the Anglican god until the second Sunday, when the white-gowned priest shook my hand, and they sang one hymn in English; I realized that that was for me. On the third Sunday a man loaned me his battered hymnal, and the priest preached part of the sermon in my language. I loved that church. The youngest children were screaming, crying, talking, giggling, going in and out to their hearts' content, leaping into the arms of their parents and kissing them. People smiled at me at the church door. I was happy to be with them. That was how it was swimming, too. Entering the cool rocky water, trying not to stub my toe or be knocked backward when kids jumped onto my shoulders, I agreed to underwater contests with all comers, especially with the nine-year-old boy who chewed snuff and with the fat boy whose glistening black pants upturned as he stood on his head underwater, bringing up a rock, spouting through his mouth.

It was just before nine. The sky was pale blue, with a cold evening wind. The sun was somewhat low in the sky. The boys hunched over, pulling their caps lower against the mosquitoes. They kept asking questions about my Indian girl. They'd seen a nude I'd painted of her. Was she Inuk? Was she mine? What color were her pubic hairs? What color were her nipples? Was her hole thick? Did I lick her hole?

But I could handle them. One of them, the kindest ugliest one, had already confided to me: In this town, we answer a question only by I don't know and probably . — He was the plump shaggy one in coveralls who'd taught me that in the dialect of this town hello was kujalu , which actually meant let's have sex; he'd taught me that goodbye was iti-pau , which really meant your ass is full of coal . I'd said kujalu to a serious man on a four-wheeler; the man stopped, gazed at me, and inquired politely: Are you a prostitute? — The shaggy boy and his friends laughed so hard they fell down onto the tussocks frosted with pale green lichens. After that I saw the shaggy boy every day. He'd drive up in his Fourtrax, pink-brimmed cap pulled low and backward, stand on a rock, and ask all the shivering kids if the water was hot. No matter what they replied, he'd lean over, squinting at the water, blink, and drive off to get his bathing suit and towel. On that very first night when he'd teased me, he taught me about I don't know and probably.

So come on, aye? How deep was her hole?

I don't know, I said, poker-faced like him.

Did you get her pregnant?

Probably.

Yes or no?

I don't know.

Then they slowly grinned. I was one of them.

Maybe I'm gonna get one tonight, too, said a twelve-year-old.

I got fifty girlfriends and they're all pregnant from me! a nine-year-old cried proudly. (I'd met him on a hot day of grey dust and white dust when a wedding cavalcade set out for Fossil Creek. He was the one whose big brother had seen a polar bear that day about six miles out, just swimming.)

You gonna dive? said the shaggy boy.

Half a moment later, creamy white splashes formed around the reddish bodies. I flitted with them through the exquisitely cold water. I watched those kids throwing stones, crawling into shallows, calling: le's go, aye? back and forth between the two grassy gravelly shores under a chilly purple-colored wind.

It was a gray chilly evening and everyone was at the bridge. The girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid crouched on the railing, shouting: All right, you motherfuckers!

Come on, Lydia, jump! they shouted up from the water. Five, four, three, two, one!

If you talk like that I'll never fuckin' jump!

As I approached, she shouted at me: Get out of my fuckin' way!

She looked like a boy as she stood here on the bridge with her wet hair gray against the skull — very different from when she'd been in my tent, lounging so sexually, swearing and smoking cigarettes. — By now, practically everybody who swam had come to see me. The boys would visit my tent three or four at a time, burping and farting, drinking from my canteen and spitting jawbreakers into it when they talked, then sucking them out, trying on my hat and glasses, shouting with laughter at how stupid each one became in them, joking about fucking dead seals, telling me that if when I shat I wiped my ass with a rock then any seal I shot would sink, making hangman's nooses in the ceiling — good company, in short. The shaggy boy loaned me his favorite thing, his electronic keyboard, for a night and a day without my dreaming of asking for it, and I listened to it play "Ave Maria" over and over, the dogs pleading and cursing across the water. The ten- and twelve-year-old boys were always giving me snuff. A boy brought me a dried hunk of the caribou his brother had shot two weeks before in Arviat; another brought me a piece of his mother's fresh-baked bannock. He was the boy who collected the offerings in a vessel of sealskin, then held them high above the altar until the congregation had finished singing the hymn. — When you come back, we'll go out there to the place of birds with sharp tails and get their eggs! he promised me.