The Atlas полностью

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.

Beaks, not tails! said his friend.

No, tails. A beak is a tail. A bird got two tails.

Is that girl your girlfriend? a boy asked me. He was one of the ones I knew from backfloating and glistening, heads and bodies sparkling with windy light.

Probably.

Is she always naked?

Probably.

Is she pregnant from you?

No.

Why? he cried in surprise.