Outside Passage by Julia Scully

Author:Julia Scully
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781602231313
Publisher: University of Alaska Press

THIRTY-NINE

Timmy Sullivan is a squawman. That's what Mother says. Any man who has lived in Alaska for a while is bound to be a squawman, she says. I wonder if she means my father, too.

Timmy's a squawman because he lived with Benita Newtak right here at the roadhouse, and everybody knows it. Benita's dead now, but, still, he's a squawman. And it's not a good thing to be. Eskimo women aren't like white women, Mother explains. They're “loose.” And that's as much as she's going to say about it.

But the fact is, I'm in love with Timmy Sullivan.

Timmy looks so slight and delicate, and his overalls hang loose on his narrow frame. But he's strong as a willow branch, and he can shovel dirt into the small sluice box called a Long Tom and hoist buckets of water all day and never get tired.

But Timmy is different from the other men at Taylor Creek. Maybe that's what makes him a squawman, that difference. But I don't know what it is.

Maybe it's because he grew up in Alaska, in Deering, which is just an Eskimo village. His stepfather, whom he doesn't like, is there. Timmy has brought all three of his half brothers—Lee, Pete, and Donny—to Taylor and gotten them jobs as catskinners at Keenan's. His three half sisters are still in Deering, but Timmy is going to send for them as soon as he can.

Another thing different about Timmy is that he doesn't go Outside in the winter. Or even into Nome. He stays right here at Taylor Creek. Almost nobody else stays at Taylor Creek after the season. Only Andy Conrad, way off in the tundra, and sometimes the two Irishmen. Wien and Munz don't even fly in regularly.

He did go Outside one time. Right after Benita died, Mother says. Went to San Francisco and blew everything he had, just like a drunken sailor.

He never mentions Benita Newtak. Never. But sometimes the men at the roadhouse do. When he isn't around.

“Oh, she had a temper that one.” Jimmy Carroll grins and points up at the wall where there's a slash in the Cellotex right over the chaise. “That big, it was,” he says, spreading his hands. “Oh yes, a knife, a butcher knife. Stuck right in the wall. Could have been in his head.” He laughs.

She seems like a character from a story I've read. Someone made up, not real. I try to imagine her. Squat and dark and wild, in a shapeless calico dress, straight, scraggly hair falling to her waist. Wild and “loose.” Except I know she is real, because she has a brother and he's right here at Taylor, working at Keenan's. His name is Smiley Newtak, and he's not wild or strange. He's friendly and has these pointy eyebrows that make it look like he's about to laugh at you, and he does grin a lot, particularly after he drinks a couple of beers.

I visit Timmy Sullivan on his claim, behind the roadhouse, just past the flat gravel stretch and the two outhouses and down a little incline.

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