Sucktown, Alaska Read online

  In memory of John “Big Papa” Pace.

  He was a hard-working, Chicago Bears-loving, sockeye-slaying loudmouth who put others before himself.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  When I Daydream

  CHAPTER 1: Welcome to Kusko

  CHAPTER 2: Cheechako

  CHAPTER 3: High There, Finn

  CHAPTER 4: Reunited!

  CHAPTER 5: Hot. H-O-T. Hot.

  CHAPTER 6: Ready, Set, Hike

  CHAPTER 7: Don’t Print That

  CHAPTER 8: My Crib

  CHAPTER 9: Little People

  CHAPTER 10: Dead End

  CHAPTER 11: Try Some Beaver

  CHAPTER 12: Glowing Fish

  CHAPTER 13: Accidental Enemy

  CHAPTER 14: A Grisly Encounter

  CHAPTER 15: Dry-Land Therapy

  CHAPTER 16: Meet the Boss

  CHAPTER 17: Seeing More of Taylor

  CHAPTER 18: Sting

  CHAPTER 19: The Stiff Arm

  CHAPTER 20: Changing Course

  CHAPTER 21: Still in Sucktown

  CHAPTER 22: Indebted

  CHAPTER 23: Crime of Opportunity

  CHAPTER 24: The Tundra Run

  CHAPTER 25: Headaches

  CHAPTER 26: Silent Night

  CHAPTER 27: Tough Call

  CHAPTER 28: Judgment

  CHAPTER 29: Goodbye, My Love

  CHAPTER 30: Seeing It Through

  Q&A with Craig Dirkes

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Back Cover

  WHEN I DAYDREAM

  I’m back out there alone, riding on the tail of a dogsled, gliding across the flat, frigid Alaskan tundra, trying to make one last delivery to a guy in a village ten miles from Kusko.

  No clouds block the morning sun. The twelve huskies barrel toward the pink horizon atop a desolate, treeless landscape that looks like a vast white sheet. The windless dawn is so quiet, the only sounds I hear are the patter of the dogs’ paws on the narrow snow trail and the whooshing runners of the sled. I’m bundled in a thick red hunting coat, black snow pants, and my heaviest boots. The air is cold, near zero. I don’t mind.

  I spot something ahead in the distance. To my right and far off the trail stands a guy wearing a furry parka, the kind made from animal pelts. Drenched in the rose-colored light, he stands knee-deep in snow and clutches a rifle at his side.

  I’m not alarmed. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a random guy with a gun in the middle of nowhere. I figure he must be out for an early hunt, but I squint to get a better look. I see him raise his rifle. I scan the snow for game animals but see none. I barely have time to process the fact that he’s leveling the gun when — BANG! — I hear it.

  Did that dumbass just fire in my direction? That’s my first thought. Then I hear the second shot.

  CHAPTER 1

  WELCOME TO KUSKO

  I got my first look at Kusko through the window of a sketchy twenty-passenger commuter plane as it circled above the town.

  I sat in the far back, nervous, wiping ice crystals from the bottom half of the window to get a better view of the remote Alaska settlement below. From high above, Kusko looked like a sprawling shantytown, but with snow. My curiosity hummed louder than the propellers of the twin-engine aircraft.

  As the plane bounced through strong winds and began its final descent, I rubbed away more ice crystals and caught sight of small houses with heaps of junk piled in back. They dotted the town like sucky versions of suburban homes with swimming pools. The houses appeared to be grouped into three clusters, all wrapped around a town center, situated on the banks of a big, frozen, snow-covered river. Two trucks drove on top of the river ice, looking like ants marching in a sugar trail.

  A few rows in front of me, a baby howled, and when his mother tried to shush him, he only howled louder. I looked out the window and tried to ignore him.

  Right before we landed, a heavy crosswind sent the plane’s wings seesawing up and down. My heart skipped. I clutched the armrests and shut my eyes. Five seconds until solid ground, I thought.

  The plane skidded onto the runway and bounced a few times before it stabilized. I opened my eyes and exhaled. The baby kept howling.

  The propellers stopped rotating after the plane halted in front of Kusko Airport. I wiped the top half of the window to get a full view of the building. It looked smaller than the car wash where my dad worked back home — and more rundown than the abandoned gas station across the street from it.

  Outside the wind whipped. Snowdrifts had already begun to form on the side of a luggage trolley that was being driven around when we first landed.

  Another strong gust rocked the airplane just as my five fellow passengers rose from their seats. The woman carrying the baby lost her balance and had to sit back down. Her baby cried into her chest. I figured his ears hadn’t popped. Mine hadn’t either. I’d been too preoccupied with curiosity and eagerness to think about manufacturing a yawn.

  Other passengers put on their parkas and gathered their things. I stood up, stretched my legs, and collected my backpack from underneath the seat. My other bag was bigger and had to be checked. Back in Anchorage, I’d crammed everything else I owned into my truck, which would be transported to Kusko via cargo plane in about a week. That was the only way in — by plane. No roads connected Kusko to Anchorage, or to anywhere in civilization. That idea — the remoteness of the place — had intrigued me.

  “Welcome to Kusko,” the pilot announced over the PA.

  Now a sharp reality struck me: The fabulous life I’d been living in Anchorage was officially gone. For the next year, there would be no more amazing mountains. No more college. No more awesome house. No more epic parties. No more Taco Bell.

  All because I flunked out of college in my first semester.

  My dad would kill me if he knew. My mom would roll over in her grave.

  I had to redeem myself. I had resolved to do anything I could to make things right. “Anything” turned out to mean Kusko.

  * * *

  The inside of the airport was just as dingy as the outside. Puke-orange walls. An empty vending machine with cracked glass. Faded nineties poster advertisements from air carriers I doubted existed anymore. The waiting area held clusters of light-blue plastic chairs, cracked and grimy, with stainless-steel ashtrays in the armrests. Three of the ashtrays overflowed with all colors of used chewing gum.

  Right away I spotted my new boss — Mr. Dalton Pace, publisher of the Delta Patriot newspaper. He stood at the edge of the waiting area. I recognized his smiling face from the paper’s website.

  Dalton was fifty-something, clean-shaven, and mostly bald, with a dusting of gray stubble covering the sides of his head. He had tired brown eyes and was my height — six feet or so. His smile revealed teeth that were stained yellow, presumably from chew or cigs or both. He wore the same clothes as three other men in the airport lobby — a flannel shirt covered by tan Carhartt overalls. His feet were wrapped in thick leather work boots. He had the chest and arms of a gorilla.

  “Are you Eddie?” Dalton asked, walking toward me, extending his hand for a shake. His voice was powerful — a low, gravelly tone that sounded like a cheerful version of a narrator in a horror-movie trailer.

  “Better believe it,” I said.

  We shook hands. I nearly dropped to my knees and yelled mercy from the strength of his grip. His calloused hand was quintessentially Alaskan, with fingers as thick as bratwursts.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said. “You’re a bigger guy than I had in my mind.”

 
I sometimes get that from people whom I’ve only spoken to on the phone. My voice is a tinge more high-pitched than it should be, leading people to envision me as a noodle-armed twerp. But seeing me in person sets the record straight: six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, blond hair, blue eyes, and stronger than most. Back home in Minnesota, I was a typical Scandinavian boy.

  There was no baggage-claim level in the Kusko Airport — only a greasy-haired guy setting suitcases in the corner. Dalton and I walked across the room to retrieve my checked backpack from a stack of luggage.

  “I have to admit, part of me thought you’d back out,” Dalton said. “A few years ago, I hired a young reporter who landed in town and hopped on the first flight home. Never saw him again.”

  I laughed long and loud, as if he’d told me a hilarious joke. “What a pansy!”

  “I know,” Dalton chortled, grabbing the larger of my two backpacks. “Okay, then. A nasty storm is coming and we need to hustle. We’ll stop by the office to crank up the heat so the pipes don’t freeze, then dash home to feed the dogs. Ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, snatching the smaller backpack. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  I followed Dalton outside to the parking lot. The bright sun glistened off snow that swirled on the wind around us. I zipped my red wool hunting coat all the way up, pinching my bare neck in the zipper teeth.

  I peered west and saw an apocalyptic wall of gray clouds. Holy shit, I thought but didn’t say.

  “Get used to that,” Dalton said, holding down his stocking cap to keep it from blowing away. “The wind gets hundreds of miles to work up its momentum because it’s so flat out here.”

  And flat it was. I gazed toward the Kusko city limits a mile away and saw that wherever the town ended, an empty, horizontal, snowy-white abyss began. A second later, a wave of blowing snow blocked my view of the city like a white curtain.

  I could already tell that my Journalism 101 professor in Anchorage, Dr. DeMarban, had been right: Kusko was Alaska without any of the benefits of Alaska.

  DeMarban was an old, ink-stained wretch who’d written for practically every newspaper in Alaska at one time or another — including the Delta Patriot, back in the seventies. A month ago, in December, he pulled me aside after class to say he had no choice but to fail me. I knew that topic of conversation was coming, and by then I had already started making my plans to get some work experience in Kusko, get some money, and get back to Anchorage.

  “Kusko?” DeMarban said. “That’s the last place you want to be.”

  He explained that Kusko sat five hundred miles west of Anchorage on flat and empty land, with no mountains to be seen other than the underwhelming Kilbuck range — which he told me you could spot from Kusko only on a clear day. During summer, he said, the town stinks like a compost heap, there are flocks of mosquitoes, and there is more dust than a Sahara sandstorm.

  “Bottom line,” DeMarban told me, “is that there’s a very good reason every book you’ve read and every movie you’ve seen about Alaska failed to mentioned Kusko. It’s an unromantic shithole.”

  I didn’t believe him. I thought there was no way the place could be that bad. Before I’d moved to Alaska in August, I envisioned the entire state as being a big orgy of mountains, humpback whales, and grizzly bears. For the most part, it was. But Kusko, as I could already see, was a different deal. If DeMarban was right, Kusko was six thousand people voluntarily living in a place flatter than Iowa, windier than Chicago, and dumpier than Detroit — with virtually no escape.

  Dumpy town or not, I didn’t care much. I viewed the whole thing as an experience.

  * * *

  Dalton and I climbed into his truck, a rusty blue Ford F-150 with an old topper that must have been red once but had been oxidized pink. My feet crunched on empty pop cans and candy wrappers. The interior stunk like mold.

  Dalton turned the ignition and checked his watch. “Let’s get moving. About twenty minutes before the storm hits.”

  During our drive toward the middle of Kusko (on the only stretch of paved road in town, Dalton informed me), I saw that nothing, anywhere, looked new, be it a home, car, fence, shed, or whatever else. If something was made of metal, it was rusting. If it was wood, it was rotting. If it had paint, it was faded and peeling.

  “What’s up with that?” I asked, pointing toward a cluster of giant red shipping containers that sat near the road, the sort I’d seen on the freight docks in Anchorage. Smoke billowed from pipes protruding from their tops.

  “Those are people’s homes,” Dalton said, fighting the steering wheel against the wind battering the side of his truck. “They insulate the walls, add heaters, cut out doors and windows, and move their families in.”

  “Really?” I asked, craning to get a better look as we passed the shipping containers. A husky tethered to a pole outside one of the homes lifted its leg and pissed against the tire of a pickup truck.

  We drove near the frozen river I’d seen from the plane. It looked even bigger at ground level, perhaps as wide across as two football fields. I could barely see the other side because of the blowing snow.

  “That’s the Kuskokwim,” Dalton said. “Its big brother is the Yukon River, a hundred miles north. Almost every village you’ll visit for your stories will be on the Yukon or Kuskokwim. Nothing happens out here without those rivers. The Natives have relied on them for food and transportation for thousands of years.”

  In Anchorage I’d learned that “Native” was the preferred term Alaskans used for “Eskimo.” My college friends who were from Alaska said most Natives didn’t get pissed if you called them Eskimos, but most everybody stuck to the script.

  We rolled into the center of town. The main drag had a gas station, a restaurant, and a grocery store called Kusko Dry Goods. I spotted more taxicabs than regular cars and trucks.

  The grocery store occupied a glorified pole barn. The gas station had two pumps and a dilapidated wooden kiosk where the attendant hid from the wind. The restaurant, Dalton explained, was a former post office building that some Albanian immigrants had purchased and converted into a slop house called Delta Delicious.

  “Watch out for that place,” Dalton said. “It’ll give you the fuckin’ Delta-rrhea.”

  I was glad he’d cursed. Working at the Delta Patriot would be my first real job, and I didn’t know the swearing rules at real jobs.

  Dalton cranked the steering wheel and fishtailed through a right. “This way to the office.”

  “Shit, yeah,” I said, hoping for a laugh, but getting nothing from Dalton.

  On the road in front of us, a group of teenagers wearing coveralls putzed along on three four-wheel ATVs, single file, with rifles hanging on their backs. Dalton honked at them.

  “C’mon,” he said to himself, checking his watch again. “I got no time for this.”

  The guys pulled their four-wheelers off to the side. A sudden gust of blowing snow knocked the truck toward the ditch and blocked our view of the four-wheeler closest to us. “Shit!” Dalton said, slamming on the brakes to avoid hitting what he couldn’t see.

  The wind let up, and the truck stopped, less than ten feet behind the four-wheeler. “Mother!” Dalton said, steering the truck back onto the road.

  As Dalton continued past, I noticed a dead caribou bungee-tied to the back of the four-wheeler leading the pack. I thought that was pretty cool. It felt like I’d landed in a cold version of the Wild Wild West.

  * * *

  Dalton drove fast and kept glancing at the western sky. His truck skidded a bit on the gravel and ice outside the Delta Patriot office, located inside an old Quonset hut — a corrugated steel building that looked like an airplane fuselage cut in half horizontally.

  I followed Dalton inside and walked into a dim room with two black barber chairs bolted down in front of an oversized, cloudy mirror. The place was empt
y, and Dalton kept moving without a word.

  “Didn’t I come here to write news stories?” I asked, again hoping for a laugh.

  “Our office is on the other side of that wall,” Dalton said, pointing to the far side of the room, near a restroom door. “I share this place with Mikey Colosky, the barber. It works out nice because you can hear everything through the walls. You’ll get good story ideas from listening to all the bitching and gossip.”

  Mikey Colosky must have forgotten to sweep. The floor looked like he’d been sheering a herd of black sheep the night before. I half wondered if he had, considering the place smelled the way a musty barn would if you took away the manure odor and replaced it with hair spray.

  “C’mon, Eddie. We need to move,” Dalton said.

  I followed him through the door to the office, stopped after another step, and beheld bare brown walls. Blotches of rust marked the rounded metal ceiling. One of the four florescent lighting tubes hanging overhead flickered, swinging gently from the wind pummeling the building. There were no windows in the office. The space reminded me of an interrogation room.

  Dalton led me to a tan folding table barely strong enough to support the ancient computer resting on top of it. The old IBM looked bigger than a mainframe.

  “This thing run on diesel fuel?” I asked.

  “Good one,” Dalton replied, jogging to the far side of the room, near his own desk. “That will be your work station.”

  He opened the door to a utility closet. Inside was a water tank the size of a refrigerator and a small space heater on the floor next to it. Dalton flipped on the space heater.

  “Good to go,” he said. “The insulation in this closet sucks. When the temperature drops below minus ten, the water freezes. Mikey and I learned that the hard way.”

  Dalton rummaged through some paperwork on his desk — a real desk, with a decent desktop computer. He seemed to sense my jealousy.

  “You’ll use my computer for uploading stories and photos to our website, and for emailing big files to the printer for layout,” Dalton said. “Your computer is just for writing and emails. Hopefully I can afford to get you a better one soon. For now, money’s tight.”