The Smell of Other People's Houses Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  The Smell of Other People’s Houses

  “The physical landscape of Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock’s Alaska is raw, beautiful and wholly unfamiliar, but the true wonder of this thrilling, arresting debut novel is that the emotional landscape feels just as powerful—and just as untrammeled.”

  —Gayle Forman, New York Times bestselling author of If I Stay and I Was Here

  “Hitchcock’s debut resonates with the timeless quality of a classic. This is a fascinating character study—a poetic interweaving of rural isolation and coming-of-age.”

  —John Corey Whaley, author of the Michael L. Printz Award winner Where Things Come Back

  “An honest, gritty, and moving portrait of growing up in Alaska. Only someone who knows and loves this place through and through could tell this story. This book is Alaska.”

  —Eowyn Ivey, author of the New York Times bestseller The Snow Child

  “As only a native of Alaska can, Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock blends narratives of indigenous and non- into a buffet of pain and beauty. Highly recommended.”

  —Tim Tingle, Choctaw author of the series How I Became a Ghost

  “The untamed landscape is reflected in the wilderness of the human heart. Hitchcock shows us that it’s possible to survive the crossings between wealthy and impoverished, indigenous and settler, proving that any line that divides can just as easily bind.”

  —Anne Keala Kelly (Kanaka ˋŌiwi), filmmaker and journalist

  “The Alaskan answer to The House on Mango Street, with full, round portraits presented with poetry, grace, and insight.”

  —David Cheezem, Fireside Books, Palmer, AK

  “This is a novel of second chances, of teens being teens, and of what it meant to be the first generation of youth in Alaska to experience statehood. Truly universal.”

  —Kari Meutsch, Phoenix Books, Burlington and Essex, VT

  “A thoughtful, realistic novel about community, both the one you are born into, and the one you can create.”

  —Erin Barker, Hooray for Books!, Alexandria, VA

  “As Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich showed readers life on Native American reservations, now Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock shares the lives of native and white inhabitants of Alaska shortly after it became a state. Poignant and heart-wrenching.”

  —Danielle Borsch, Vroman’s Bookstore, Pasadena, CA

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

  Cover art copyright © 2016 by Getty Images

  Interior illustrations copyright © 2016 by Rebecca Poulson

  Map copyright © 2016 by Kayley Lefaiver

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Chandonnet, Ann: Lines from “In the Cranberry Gardens” from Ptarmigan Valley: Poems of Alaska by Ann Chandonnet. Reprinted by permission of Ann Chandonnet.

  Straley, John: Haikus by John Straley. Reprinted by permission of John Straley.

  White Carlstrom, Nancy: Lines from “Sun at the Top of the World” from Midnight Dance of the Snowshoe Hare by Nancy White Carlstrom. Reprinted by permission of Nancy White Carlstrom.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books,

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,

  a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  A previous version of the title chapter was published as Fast Fiction in the Los Angeles Review, Volume 18, Fall 2012.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouseteens.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools,

  visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hitchcock, Bonnie-Sue

  The smell of other people’s houses / Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Growing up in Alaska in the 1970s isn’t like growing up anywhere else: Don’t think life is going to be easy. Know your place. And never talk about yourself. Four vivid voices tell intertwining stories of hardship, tragedy, wild luck, and salvation”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-553-49778-6 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-553-49779-3 (lib. bdg.) — ISBN 978-0-553-49781-6 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-553-49780-9 (ebook) 1. Alaska—History—20th century—Juvenile fiction. [1. Alaska—History—20th century—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.1.H58Sm 2016

  [Fic]—dc23

  2015011309

  eBook ISBN 9780553497809

  Cover design by Ray Shappell

  Random House Children’s Books

  supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Cast of Key Characters

  Map

  Prologue: The Way Things Were Back Then

  Spring

  Chapter One: The Smell of Other People’s Houses

  Chapter Two: The Ice Classic

  Summer

  Chapter Three: Ballerina Fish Slayer

  Chapter Four: Chasing Orcas

  Chapter Five: Shoot for the Stars

  Chapter Six: Fish Camp

  Chapter Seven: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

  Chapter Eight: On Being Noticed

  Chapter Nine: The Snowball Effect

  Chapter Ten: That Damn Blue Note

  Chapter Eleven: If You Must Smoke, Smoke Salmon

  Chapter Twelve: Something to Look Forward To

  Fall

  Chapter Thirteen: Bluebells in Whiskey Bottles

  Chapter Fourteen: Blueberry Pie

  Chapter Fifteen: Bun Heads

  Chapter Sixteen: Brothers

  Winter

  Chapter Seventeen: December 1970

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Gramzy

  Cast of Key Characters

  (roughly in order of introduction; narrators in boldface)

  IN FAIRBANKS, ALASKA

  Ruth

  Mama

  Daddy

  Lily: Ruth’s younger sister

  Gran

  Ray

  Dumpling

  Bunny: Lily’s best friend, Dumpling’s younger sister

  Selma: Ruth’s best friend

  Alyce: Selma’s cousin

  Dora: Dumpling’s best friend

  Bumpo: Dora’s dad

  Mr. Moses: Dumpling’s dad

  Dora

  Crazy Dancing Guy

  Mom

  Dumpling’s mother

  Paula and Annette: Mom’s friends

  George: cashier at the Salvation Army

  IN SOUTHEAST ALASKA AND CANADA

  Alyce

  Mom

  Dad

  Aunt Abigail: Selma’s mother

  Uncle Gorky

  Hank

  Sam: Hank’s younger brother

  Jack: Hank’s youngest brother

  Mom

  Nathan: Mom’s boyfriend

  Phil: night watchman on the ferry

  Isabelle: social worker

  Ruth

  Abbess

  Sister Agnes

  Sister Bernadette

  Sister Josephine

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  I can’t stop remembering the way things were back then. How my father hunted for our food. How he’d hang the deer in the garage to cure and how the deer’s legs would splay out when its belly was sliced open, its hooves pointy like a ballerina’s toes. I watched him dozens of times as he cut the meat off the animal’s backside. I can still hear how the knife sounded when metal scraped bone. Backstrap was the best cut, my favorite, and Daddy sliced it off the deer’s spine as beautifully as Mama curled ribbons on presents. He carried the fresh meat to the house in his bare hands, blood dripping all the way from the garage and across Mama’s shiny linoleum to the kitchen sink.

  Sometimes Daddy would bring me a still-warm deer heart in a bowl and let me touch it with my fingers. I would put my lips to it and kiss its smooth, pink flesh, hoping to feel it beating, but it was all beat out. Mama would call him Daniel Boone as she laughed into his bare neck and he twirled his bloody fingers through her hair and they danced around the kitchen. Mama was the kind of person who put wildflowers in whiskey bottles. Lupine and foxglove in the kitchen, lilacs in the bathroom. She smelled like marshy muskeg after a hard rain, and even with blood in her hair, she was beautiful.

  My easel was set up on the counter, so I could watch Mama cook the meat while I painted in the tutu Daddy had brought me from one of his many trips Outside. It had matching pink ballet slippers that I wore constantly, even to bed. Mama buttoned one of Daddy’s big flannel shirts over me so I wouldn’t ruin my special tutu. It hung all the way down to my toes; the long sleeves were rolled up so many times, it was like having big, bulging cinnamon rolls for arms. I tried to make red that was the same color as the red in Mama’s hair, but mostly I mixed everything together and got brown.

  Daddy often said things I didn’t understand, like if statehood passed we would probably lose all of our hunting rights and the Feds would run everything into the ground. My five-year-old brain thought statehood was a new car, one with a really big front end. I didn’t know who the Feds were, but Daddy seemed to think they were going to tell people how much venison and salmon they would be allowed to eat. Mama’s belly had grown big and round, which even I knew meant another mouth to feed. Daddy would pull up her shirt and kiss her ballooned stomach the same way I had kissed the deer heart.

  “Is it all beat out?” I asked him. Her belly was as white as the underside of a doe.

  “This one’s definitely still beating,” he said. “No worries there.”

  Statehood turned out to be not a new car but something much, much bigger, and Daddy had to fly to Washington, DC, to try and stop it—a place where he had to show his passport just to get off the plane, and nobody hunted or fished, and he had to buy new shoes to go to a meeting to talk about why Alaskans didn’t want statehood. Except for the ones who did, and they were not my daddy’s friends.

  He told me that most people didn’t pay that much attention to stuff that happened in Washington, DC, but Alaskans would be sorry when Outside people started making decisions for us. I didn’t know who these Outside people were, but I hoped I would never, ever meet them.

  When the letter arrived in an envelope stamped with a flag I’d never seen before, Mama read it with shaking hands. I watched her lips moving without any sound, but I knew whatever it said was bad because she fell over clutching her belly, making sounds that I’d only heard from wild animals, deep in the woods.

  Lily was born the day after the letter arrived, and I don’t think Mama ever really saw her at all, because when I looked at Mama’s eyes after the birth, they were blank. The nurse asked what the baby’s name would be, and when Mama said “Lily” I thought she was staring at the flowers next to her bed, not the pink lump wrapped in a hospital blanket, screaming as if she didn’t want to be here, either. Gran had come to the hospital for the birth, but afterward Mama stayed behind while Lily and I were put in a moldy brown car with cigarette burns on the seats. I didn’t think a brand-new baby should breathe in all the smells in that car, but Lily just lay there like the lump she was, and I held my scarf over my nose all the way to Gran’s house in Birch Park.

  “Your mama needs more time,” Gran said, and she told me what was in the letter. My father’s plane had crashed in the Canadian Arctic, right next door to Alaska. Gran said the men were on their way home from the meeting when the plane went down. Something about the way Gran talked told me she did not think Daddy was “a brave man, with big ideas for Alaska,” which was what the letter had said. When Gran read it, she snorted, then wiped her nose with a tissue.

  Afterward she said, “You can cry if you want, but it won’t bring him back.”

  —

  Birch Park smelled like an old person’s house, something I’d never noticed when we only visited, which hadn’t been very often. There were no flowers in whiskey bottles, no fresh deer carcasses curing from the rafters. The only meat in the refrigerator was pale and pink, sitting limp on a foam tray and wrapped in plastic. The blood was completely drained out of it, which made me homesick and suspicious.

  The very next day there was a headline on the front page of the newspaper in thick, four-inch letters that said “We’re In” and Alaska became the forty-ninth state in the United States. Gran clipped it out and told me I should save it forever so I would always remember this day, as if she didn’t understand that this was a bad thing. I didn’t want to remember anything except the way it used to be, before all this statehood nonsense.

  When Mama did not show up that day, or the one after that or the one after that, I figured statehood must have done something to her, too. Maybe she didn’t have the right passport or she had the wrong shoes? Or maybe she had gone to Canada, where she would be swallowed up in the same vast emptiness that had swallowed up Daddy.

  I waited and waited for Mama, worried that Lily would never know how the world was really supposed to be. But the years ticked by until just before my tenth birthday, when the water started to rise and I knew this must be it—the river was fighting back. It flooded its banks and rose higher and higher, grabbing everything in sight with its big, wet tongue. Daddy had been right when he’d said the rivers could never be tamed.

  Rusty metal oil drums, blue plastic coolers, and whole cans of peaches and fruit cocktail from people’s pantries bobbed down Second Avenue. Someone’s red frilly slip got hung up in Mr. Peterson’s climbing peas and made Lily laugh out loud until Gran shushed her. Gran’s face was as red as an overripe raspberry. Even in a flood, underwear was no joking matter.

  Lily was now five and out of her mind with excitement about riding in the skiff that snatched us off the doorstep as the water kept rising. I just prayed that it would never stop, that the river would somehow take us back to our old life.

  But the skiffs dropped us off at the high school just a mile beyond our doorstep, where the ground was higher and still dry. Lily acted like we were on a whirlwind vacation, laughing and playing with her friend Bunny.

  A girl named Selma held my hand when we had to get shots, and I acted like I was only clutching her hand to make her feel better, but really I’m terrified of needles. She was my age, but so much braver than me. Selma was the only good thing to come out of the flood.

  After a few days we went home to the wet, moldy house in Birch Park. There was no furniture, just donated goods that had been trucked up from Anchorage. Under our used sneakers the carpet squelched and burped muddy water for weeks. Gran worked as a volunteer to get the new state government to replace what everyone had lost in the flood. Some of the neighbors reported a lot of missing items. Dora Peters’s mom said she’d lost a washer and dryer, a kitchen table, and some fancy bedside lamps. Gran’s lips were pursed, but she wrote it all down anyway in a big black book with “Property of the United States Government” printed on the front.

  “Nobody in Birch Park had a washer or dryer,” I said to Gran that night at dinner.

  Gran said nothing.

  “Can we get a washer and dryer?” asked L
ily.

  “Don’t be silly,” Gran snapped.

  “But they lied,” I said. “Nobody had all that nice stuff.”

  “It’s not our job to make people accountable.”

  “But you’re volunteering for the government. It is your job.”

  Gran’s eyes narrowed.

  “You do not tell me what is and isn’t my job, young lady.”

  I looked down at the paper plate in my lap. The canned beets had bled into the Spam, which wasn’t even real meat. I wanted a dripping piece of fresh backstrap or nothing. I folded my plate in two, smashing all the food together. No one said a word as I crossed the room, even as a trail of bloody beet juice spilled from the corner of the plate, down my leg, and onto the floor. I pushed the whole thing deep into the garbage can, as if it were my own heart, all beat out.

  At some point I stopped waiting for Mama to come back. It’s hard to hold on to a five-year-old dream, and even harder to remember people after ten years. But I never stopped believing there had to be something better than Birch Park, something better than living with Gran.

  When I was sixteen I thought maybe it was a boy named Ray Stevens. His father was a private detective and a hunting guide in the bush. His family had just built a new house on a lake where they parked their floatplane, and in winter they could snow-machine all the way down Moose Creek from their back door.

  The Stevenses’ whole house was made of fresh-cut cedar. All of Ray’s clothes smelled like cedar, and it made me sneeze when I got close to him, but I got close anyway.

  Cedar is the smell of swim team parties at their house and the big eight-by-ten-inch Richard Nixon photograph that hung in the living room. Cedar is the smell of Republicans. It’s the smell of sneaking from Ray’s older sister’s room (Anna also swam on my relay team; I befriended her out of necessity) and into Ray’s room, where I crawled into his queen-sized bed facing the sliding glass doors that looked out on the lake. How many sixteen-year-old boys had a queen-sized bed? I’m guessing one, and it had sheets that smelled like cedar and Tide, and they held a boy with curly blond hair, bleached from the swimming pool. He was the best diver in the state and I was only on a dumb relay team, but he sought me out anyway. We could have drowned in our combined smells of chlorine and ignorance—guess which part I was?