Betwixt Read Free Page B

what you’re talking about.” Jacob shook his head. “But suit yourself, Nix.”
    “I think I will.”
    He had to say it. He had to make Jacob think he was a punk kid, an asshole with an attitude. A prick. A tweaker. Someone you
     didn’t want around.
    The slice he took on his way out of the kitchen—artichoke hearts and feta, Yuppie’s Delight, Jacob called it—would get him
     through till tomorrow.

    I N S ITKA IT HAD GONE THAT WAY, TOO.
    Nix walked down the sidewalks of Northwest Portland toward the forest that crowned downtown like a shaggy head of hair, and
     he thought about Alaska. He hadn’t let himself think about home often since he’d left, but in the last few weeks since Jacob
     had gotten the light, Nix had been thinking about his mother.
    Bettina Saint-Michael had been the prettiest Indian to come out of Sitka’s Mt. Edgecumbe High School since no one knew how
     long. Or that’s what the white principal had said when he tried to pick her up at the grocery store she worked at after graduation.Bettina wasn’t having any of it. She rang up Principal Harkin’s mayonnaise; his cans of salmon (caught somewhere out in that
     water she looked at every afternoon while trying to picture what life was like across it); his white bread; his canned green
     beans; and the bottle of vodka Bettina knew was for Abby Harkin, his drunk wife; and ignored him when he said they should
     meet for lunch at Koloskov’s Diner on her break to discuss college plans. Bettina knew what Principal Harkin was after and
     it had nothing to do with her fine Indian mind.
    “Nicholas,” Bettina had said to her only child many years later, “you treat women right, you respect them for what they know,
     and they will open up to you like flowers in springtime.”
    Bettina had laughed when she said that. She was undoing her hair from work at the cannery, and while she spoke, she ran her
     fingers through the soft dark-brown strands.
    Nix loved to hear his mother laugh. She started like a bird, little pulses of high cool notes, and ended with her head thrown
     back, her hands holding her stomach. She would bang the table or the wall or whatever she happened to be next to and tickle
     her son and nuzzle and kiss him. She smelled like woodsmoke and fish and coffee.
    That time so many years ago Bettina had laughed not because it was funny, but because she had to. Otherwise things would have
     been too sad. That winter was a long one. It was thefirst year she stopped putting in a summer garden, the year Daddy Saint-Michael had died and Bettina and Nix were left alone.
    “Did you hear me, son? Treat a woman right and …” She trailed off, fingers still touching her hair.
    Daddy Saint-Michael was Nix’s grandfather, and he loved Bettina and her son more than anything in the world. Nothing was good
     enough for Bettina. Which somehow made Bettina think that she was not good enough for anything.
    Nix, pudgy, saucer-eyed, was the son of a ghost who passed through Sitka on his way to somewhere else. Bettina didn’t talk
     about him except to say that he had been her first love, and that he was smart and sad, and that he played Ann Peebles’s “I
     Can’t Stand the Rain” on Koloskov’s jukebox the summer night they met.
    He figured his father had worked for the mill or the fisheries, seasonal help like everyone else. Which would explain why
     Bettina always shimmered during the warm months, even in a town that slept for three quarters of the year. He figured he was
     Aleut, too, from somewhere farther west, because Nix himself was dark haired, dark eyed, full cheeked, and stockier than his
     mother, had thick hambone muscles when he was eight that he tried to hide under the parkas his mother was always buying him
     from hippie friends who had made their way to Sitka from California or wherever.
    “Hello, little brother,” they’d say with a straight face.
    “You’re not my brother,” Nix once retorted. Bettina slapped him for that