Bo at Ballard Creek Read online

  The yellow National Geographics were the ones all the children liked best. The old-timers and the miners liked the scientific magazines the best. They had lots of new inventions in them. The men in Ballard Creek used to get more excited about new inventions than almost anything else.

  The miners who lived out at the creeks would take loads of magazines out to their claims and bring them back in their rucksacks or at the bottom of a sled. After all this borrowing and going back and forth, all the magazines looked pretty shabby, and some of them didn’t have covers. But no one ever threw them away.

  Milo always said magazines in Ballard Creek had nine lives.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AT THE ROADHOUSE

  WHEN BO AND OSCAR went into the roadhouse with Clara’s magazines, Milo was making a new pot of coffee in the big percolator.

  Milo was a short, square man from Yugoslavia. He had a huge head of gray hair, and he always wore a dirty dish towel wrapped around his middle.

  His coffeepot was dirty, too—black and greasy, not shiny like Jack’s.

  Some of the old-timers, Jimmy the Pirate and Tomas and Ollie Deglar, were there as usual, drinking coffee. They were retired and had time to drink coffee all day if they wanted.

  They bragged that Milo made the worst coffee on the Koyukuk, and only strong men like them could drink it and live. Bo and Oscar had tried some once, and it certainly was terrible.

  Dinuk, who was Jonas’s papa, and Unakserak, who was Nakuchluk’s old husband, were there too, playing cribbage. They didn’t like coffee.

  “Here’s Bad Oscar and his sidekick Bo,” Milo said when they came in together. That was what he always said. “What are you two outlaws up to today?”

  “Up to no good,” said Jimmy the Pirate. They called him that because he had only one eye. Sometimes he wore a black eye patch over his bad eye, but sometimes he didn’t. His bad eye was very interesting, milky and twisted, the lid red and angry looking.

  “Akutaq today,” said Bo. “Nakuchluk is making it.”

  Ollie made a gagging face to show what he thought of akutaq, and Bo laughed.

  “You kids don’t go around the river today,” said Jimmy. “Ice breaking up. Water might come up fast.”

  “We know,” said Bo.

  Oscar held out the magazines his mother had given him. “Ma says thank you,” he said to Milo.

  Cannibal Ivan came into the roadhouse looking grumpy. He was called Cannibal because he liked his meat just barely cooked, pink all through. He never got it that way at Milo’s, though he complained about it.

  “Rheumatism kept me up all night,” he said, pulling up a chair. “Getting old.”

  Bo looked at Cannibal carefully. “I thought you were already old,” she said.

  Cannibal ignored that. “Well, don’t just stand there,” he said to Bo and Oscar. “Sit down and have a cup of coffee with us,”

  Bo and Oscar smiled at him. “I hate coffee,” Oscar said.

  Jimmy leaned forward and looked at Oscar seriously. “That’s why you don’t have no whiskers yet,” he said.

  * * *

  THERE WERE A LOT of good things to do at the roadhouse besides reading magazines. Milo had a big fancy iron coffee mill that stood on the floor next to the big woodstove. Milo let any of the children who were handy turn the crank to grind the coffee beans into powder. It wasn’t hard, and the coffee smelled good.

  Bo wished coffee tasted like it smelled.

  The bar stools were another good thing. They were left over from the old days when people sat at the bar to drink whiskey. Before there was the law about whiskey. Those stools would spin around in a circle. The children took turns spinning each other until they were dizzy.

  And there were two big brass spittoons at either end of the bar. Spittoons were for people who didn’t set their tobacco on fire. They chewed their tobacco, and when they were finished with it, they needed a place to spit it out. That was what a spittoon was for.

  No one in Ballard Creek chewed their tobacco anymore, but Milo kept the spittoons. He said you never could tell when someone would come in who needed one. And you certainly didn’t want to have people who chewed left on their own without a spittoon—couldn’t tell where they’d let fly.

  What the Ballard Creek kids liked about the spittoons was that you could see yourself in them. Not your real self, but a shiny gold self with a big fat nose and weird eyes and all sorts of funny mouths, depending on how far you stood away and how you made your faces.

  Making faces in the spittoons was one of their favorite things.

  The roadhouse was a long building, and it had to be because it was used for so many things.

  In one corner was Milo’s little store, where he sold everything—canned food and dried beans, sugar and salt, 30-30 shells, tobacco, Pilot Bread crackers, tea. Sometimes Bo would dust all the tops of the cans and set them up in neat rows after everyone had messed things up.

  When the scow came in, there were American cheese and eggs, onions and sometimes oranges. But they didn’t last long, because when the scow came in with fresh food, people would pile up at the store counter in the roadhouse, pushing each other a little, and before long, it was all sold.

  But Milo always saved exactly fifteen oranges, enough for every child in town. He’d write their names on the bumpy skin with a grease pencil so he wouldn’t leave anyone out or give two to the same person: Ekok, Sammy, Manuluk, Jonas, Johnny, Della, Atok, Peluk, Kapuk, Evalina, Oscar, Lena, Annie, Betty, and Bo.

  Lots of times, people couldn’t pay for their groceries, but Milo would just write their names in the book on the counter, and they’d pay when they had some money or when they brought in something to sell, like furs in the winter or dried fish in the fall, or maybe fresh caribou or sheep meat after they’d been hunting.

  When Jack sent Bo to the store for something, Milo always opened that green book with red leather corners and found the page that said Ballard Mining Company. Then he’d tell Bo to sign her name next to the list of things she bought. She could write a really lumpy o, but her B always went wrong.

  “Is that right?” she’d ask Milo.

  “Backwards again,” he’d say. “Better luck next time.”

  Upstairs there were six rooms for overnight visitors. That was where the game warden, Sam White, stayed when he came to town, and the mail carriers, and the marshal, Hank.

  In the winter, it was very cold upstairs. Everyone who stayed there said they could see their breath. But in the summer, it was incredibly hot up there, so Milo said it evened out.

  Those six rooms were pretty dusty and not noticeably clean. But nobody who came to the roadhouse was fussy.

  * * *

  BO AND OSCAR and Jimmy the Pirate watched Unakserak and Dinuk play cribbage for a while. Bo thought it looked like fun, but there was too much counting. Counting was not one of her best things.

  “My wife liked to play cribbage,” said Jimmy. “She always cheated.”

  Bo looked at Jimmy with surprise. None of the old-timers had wives.

  “Where is your wife, Jimmy?” she said.

  “Oh, I kind of lost track of her,” Jimmy said, and winked at Milo.

  Bo hadn’t known you could lose track of wives.

  * * *

  JACK WAS SHAVING and Arvid was putting wood in the fire for the night, and they both stopped what they were doing and looked at Bo when she said, “Did you lose track of your wives?”

  “Wives?” said Jack, in his are-you-crazy voice. “What wives?”

  “Jimmy the Pirate had a wife, and he lost track of her,” Bo explained.

  “Ohhh,” Jack said, trying not to smile. “What Jimmy meant,” he began, and then stopped, looking as if he didn’t know what to say next.

  “What Jimmy meant,” Arvid said, “is that his wife walked away, or he walked away—you know, like your mama. People who are married don’t always stay together.”

  “Well,” said Bo, “did you have wives?”
r />   “No,” said Arvid, “we never had any wives, me and Jack.”

  “Why not?” said Bo.

  “Well, for my part, no one ever asked to marry me,” said Arvid with his biggest smile. “And a good thing, too,” he said.

  Bo felt that there was something wrong with that answer, so she looked at Jack, who had gone back to shaving.

  “I was going to get married, when I was real young, back home,” Jack said. He wiped the soap off his face with the towel.

  “Nellie, that was her name. She died of the fever, same time as Mama Nancy.”

  Bo stood still. A lot had happened to her papas before they got her. It made her feel funny. She pulled her pajama top over her head and bent down to put her slippers on.

  Then she looked up into Jack’s face and said, “Was she nice?”

  Jack smiled and nodded.

  “Was she pretty?” Bo asked.

  “People you love are always pretty,” said Jack.

  And Bo knew that was true.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BEAUTY PARLOR

  AFTER THE ICE had gone out and the river was clear, tiny leaves came out on the birch trees and the aspens. The new leaves looked like a pale green mist all over the far hills across the river. The snow had gone except for in little hollows where it had lain very deep and under the spruce trees where the shadows stayed all day. Mud had taken its place. It would be a long time before it dried up.

  When Bo went to town, she’d decide who to visit first, depending on what time it was—early in the morning, or afternoon—rain or sunshine. Oscar usually went visiting with her, but this morning he was out in the woods behind town cutting wood with his father.

  Bo decided she’d visit Lilly or Yovela. Maybe Yovela. Lilly liked to sleep late, but Yovella’d be up.

  Everyone called Lilly and Yovela “the good-time girls,” or sometimes “the sporting girls.” Jack told her that was because when Lilly and Yovela were young, they’d worked at the dance hall when the town was full of stampeders, and dance-hall girls were there so you could have a good time. And sporting meant the same thing, having a good time. The rest of the good-time girls had gone way before Bo came along, but Lilly and Yovela stayed.

  Yovela was dark and plump and round, with deep dimples in her face and shining black eyes. She always wore long dangling earrings that made little noises when she shook her head.

  Lilly had blue eyes and long blond hair that she twisted on top of her head. Into the twist she put shiny combs with jewels in them. She said she got her hair out of a bottle, but Bo didn’t know what that meant.

  Bo wore overalls every day, the kind that buttoned over her shoulder. Arvid made them out of blue denim or out of the blue-striped twill the miners used for their shirts. In the winter, she had woolen long johns under the overalls, and wool sweaters over them. When it got to be summer, she could take off the long johns, and then she wore just the overalls and little flannel shirts that Arvid made, too.

  Lilly and Yovela hated to see Bo dressed like a boy. So they made her dresses like they did for the other girls in town. They liked to sew.

  When Bo went to a dance, she always wore one of the dresses. Lilly and Yovela didn’t like it that Bo wore her heavy leather shoe packs with the dresses, or the moccasins the Eskimo mamas made her. They said she should have proper shoes to wear with a dress.

  Yovela showed Bo a picture of herself when she was a little girl. She was wearing little shiny high black boots, with lots of buttons on them. Yovela said you had to have a special tool to button those buttons. Bo was very happy that she didn’t have to wear any such thing.

  It was Lilly who made Bo’s bear, when Bo first started walking. Lilly dyed some white drill cloth with tea to make it brown. She cut the bear out of that and sewed it up with scraps of cloth for stuffing, and embroidered round black eyes and a nose and a mouth. It had sharp ears like a fox, not round like a bear, so people used to tease Lilly that she must have gotten her animals mixed up.

  But Bo liked his ears just fine and hardly ever went anywhere without that bear. At night, he slept in the little cradle Sandor had made for her when she was a baby.

  She called him Bear.

  “Ought to name him,” said Jack from time to time.

  “I’m waiting for a name to come to me, like you found the name Bo,” she always said.

  Bear got very beat up in his life with Bo, so Lilly had to take the stuffing out of Bear every year and wash him and redye him with tea. Once she put buttons on for eyes after she’d washed Bear, but he looked so different with buttons that Bo cried and Lilly had to take them off.

  * * *

  BO AND ALL the other children liked to visit the good-time girls because their cabins were so fancy. Especially Yovela’s.

  You had to take your shoes off in Yovela’s porch so you wouldn’t track in dirt when you went into the cabin. Yovela’s board floors were painted and shiny, and there was a flowered rug right in the middle of the floor.

  As soon as you opened the door, you smelled Yovela’s special smell. It didn’t smell like slop bucket or cooking, like everyone else’s cabin. It was her perfume, Eau de Gardenias, which she kept in a little glass bottle with a rubber pump on top. It was very expensive, and you couldn’t play with that bottle, but once in a while, she would squirt a little on Bo. When she went back home, Jack would take a sniff and say, “Been visiting Yovela, huh?” because Yovela was the only one who ever smelled like that.

  Yovela’s big bed had olive green silk pillows that matched the coverlet. Propped in the middle of the pillows was a beautiful doll, dressed in the fanciest dress you could ever imagine. Bo always put Bear up there so Bear and the doll could talk.

  Once Bo had jumped up on that bed and one of the mattress coils that was broken and sticking out had cut her leg badly, and she had bled all over Yovela’s rug. Yovela got the blood out of the rug, but Bo still had the scar. After that, the children were not allowed to climb up on the bed, ever.

  Yovela had lots of records, and she’d always let the children play whatever they wanted. She had one called “Who Takes Care of the Caretaker’s Daughter When the Caretaker’s Busy Taking Care?” You had to sing that very fast, so all the words ran together. That was Bo’s favorite at Yovela’s.

  Yovela was happy to see her, as she always was, and she showed Bo her new magazines and let Bo play her favorite record. But while Bo was listening, Yovela came behind her and picked up Bo’s braids in a thoughtful kind of way.

  Bo’s heart sank. Sometimes Yovela took a notion to play “beauty parlor” with the girls. That’s what she called it. She’d fix their hair with ribbons or flowers and combs, put rouge on their faces, and screw a pair of her long earrings onto their earlobes. The big girls, like Della and Lena, Oscar’s sister, and the twins Annie and Betty, loved to play beauty parlor. Bo hated it.

  But Bo was the only one with long hair. The other girls—even the little ones—had their hair cut short like the women in the catalogs. So Yovela liked playing with Bo’s hair the best.

  “Bo, let me fix your hair nice,” Yovela said.

  Bo could only look at her. Yovela didn’t seem to notice that Bo was feeling unhappy.

  She took Bo’s hair out of its braids, and then she made her bend over the wash bowl while she washed her hair with some perfumey soap and then toweled it almost dry. She rubbed it so hard that Bo’s breath was coming in gasps.

  Then Yovela made Bo sit still on the chair by the table while she brushed her damp hair out straight. Then she wound up fat round curls, which she tied with her curling rags until Bo’s head was full of little packages of curls tied in bows.

  “Now we’ll have some tea and Melba toast and wait for them to dry,” she said in a pleased way. “It’s going to look so beautiful.”

  So she made the tea in the fancy little pot Bo and the other girls liked so much and put the toasts on a plate with roses on it. But Bo couldn’t enjoy the pretty pot or the roses. Yovela chattered a
bout hair. She thought the new fashions with short hair were terrible and Bo should never think of it.

  “A woman’s hair is her glory,” she said. “When I was a little girl, I had scarlet fever, and they cut all my hair off. That’s what they used to do in those days to help you get well. I cried and cried when I saw my head covered with prickles. My mother said, ‘Don’t cry, Emma. It will grow back,’ and it did, but it took so very, very long.”

  Bo looked up quickly when Yovela said that.

  “Why did your mother call you Emma?” she said.

  Yovela laughed. “That’s my real name,” she said. “I just thought it was too plain, so when I left home I called myself Yovela. Don’t you think it’s a pretty name?”

  Bo did, but she asked, “Was your mama sad that you changed your name?” Yovela picked up her cup and looked into it. “My mother died before my hair grew out,” she said.

  When Yovela thought the curls were dry enough, she untied each one and then brushed it out, wrapping it around her finger, and placed each long corkscrew carefully on Bo’s shoulder.

  “There! You’re a picture.” She held up her fancy gold mirror to Bo. When Bo looked in the mirror, she bit her lip and scowled horribly.

  “What a face!” cried Yovela. “Don’t you like it?”

  Bo threw a despairing look at Yovela and backed away from the mirror. “I have to go.” She took Bear off the bed and tried not to run out the door.

  “Well, wait,” Yovela protested. “Here’s some chocolates for you. I saved them from my last box.” Bo took one of the chocolates to be polite and then she turned and ran.

  Bo ran all the way through town. She ducked into the bushes when Peluk, Oscar’s brother, pumped by on his bicycle, and she dashed across the bridge. She stomped into the cookshack and was happy that Jack wasn’t there to see the miserable curls, bobbing and bouncing on her shoulders.

  She grabbed the brush she shared with Arvid and Jack, not that they needed it much. Jack had a shiny bald spot on top of his head and lots of curls fluffed out around his ears, and Arvid, whose hair was straight and thick, kept his cropped very short and it sort of stuck up in porcupine tufts.