Stealing Indians

by John Smelcer

  Finally, the headmaster’s speech was over. After the somber faculty marched out the double doors to the gym, all of the students emptied out and hurried to lunch, some racing to be first in line.

  Lucy, Noah, Simon, and Elijah took their time, talking and even laughing as they made their way to the cafeteria, Simon occasionally dragging a hand across his shaved head in disbelief.

  They had survived the long journey and the first day of school. What’s more, they had made friends. They looked around at the stark buildings, at the tangled vines climbing up the dark, reddish-brown brick walls, at the broad fields, at the cemetery of dead children, and down toward the iron gates separating them from the world. The geography of their past lives, including their families, lay somewhere on the other side of the rusting gate. But however far it was to home, this place would be their home for the rest of the year, perhaps for many years to come.

  The nameless days ahead were uncertain. None of the four friends felt certainty or hope or joy, but at least they took some consolation knowing they would not face their unwelcome future alone.

  Chapter Five

  LUCY HATED THE NIGHTS at Wellington. Although she had been there nearly a month, she was still afraid to fall asleep, frightened by what the other girls whispered, about things that happened at the school at night. Even though her roommate, who was older than Lucy, tried to play down the rumors and whispers, Lucy remained frightened at night and insisted on maintaining her booby trap of tin cans.

  She missed her tiny, sagging log cabin, the flavorless boiled rabbit, the after-supper conversations and stories, the crackling wood stove. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was home. Mostly, she missed her mother’s reassuring closeness beside her in their bed. She missed the way she smelled, the way she breathed quietly in the dark, the way she could feel her mother’s warmth radiating from her side of the bed, piled heavy with blankets and quilts, the northern lights outside glimmering below the starlit spiral arm of the galaxy.

  At Wellington, Lucy rarely fell asleep before midnight, and then only fitfully. Instead, she’d lie on her narrow, spring-infested mattress tossing and turning, listening, her eyes forced open despite the darkness, the lateness of the hour, and her body’s need for recuperation.

  Outside her booby-trapped door, strange sounds came from the hallway, from the stairs at the end of the hall, from outside her window, beneath the floor, above the ceiling, and from the bathroom three doors down. The floors creaked, the heating pipes groaned like lonesome ghosts, and vague voices echoed in the dark. Throughout the night she’d hear doors open and the sound of feet pitter-patting down the hall to the bathroom. Shortly thereafter, she’d hear a flush and the pipes would groan again. Every twenty minutes the heater would kick in, hissing and rattling as it heated up.

  Sometimes the sounds would even awaken her roommate, Maggie Yazzie, who would stop her sometimes raspy breathing, turn over, and fall back asleep. Maggie was the most beautiful girl on the floor, maybe in the entire school. Although barely sixteen, she looked seventeen or eighteen. She was tall, with long black hair and jade-green eyes.

  All the boys wanted to be with Maggie.

  Some of the male teachers, too.

  Lucy envied her self-confidence and popularity. Even though Maggie was older and seldom with Lucy during the day, for they had no classes in common, she was pleasant to Lucy while in their shared room, and Lucy began to think of her as a big sister.

  Sometimes while lying awake at night, Lucy, in her paranoia, would think footsteps stopped just outside her door. She’d stare at the door knob until her mind played tricks, convincing her that the brass knob really was turning. In her sleepy mind’s eye, she could see shadows under the door trying to wriggle into the room past her neatly stacked pyramid of tin cans.

  For the most part, Maggie eventually convinced Lucy that such visions and fears were the product of an over-anxious imagination. But no matter the reality, the distressful stories lingered in Lucy’s mind.

  For almost an hour one night Lucy endured the need to relieve herself. She kept hoping the increasing discomfort would go away. But like the unsettling sounds, the pain persisted until she had to get up and go to the bathroom. She had heard some of the other girls speak of enduring the pain of a full bladder. To them, it was better to suffer than to walk alone through the long, dark hallway to the bathroom. On her knees, Lucy carefully dismantled her alarm system of empty cans, placing each one in a row beside her bed, a few feet from the door. She always took great care in this nightly ritual, not wanting to wake Maggie. Then, she slowly opened the door, looked both ways down the long, poorly lit hallway, and walked as quickly and as silently as possible in her cotton nightgown to the bathroom, located about midway between each end of the long, narrow corridor.

  When she was finished, Lucy washed her hands and leaned close to the mirror on tiptoes looking at her face, her eyes, her eyebrows, the shape of her lips, her cheekbones, her thin-ridged nose, and her long hair. She wondered if the place had changed her somehow, if her mother would see the changes in her, would recognize her.

  Looking both ways again, Lucy crept quietly back to her room, trying not to make the worn floorboards squeak.

  When she came to her room, the door was ajar. Hadn’t she closed it? Lucy stopped for a moment, trying to remember if she had. She replayed her earlier movements, clearly recalling the sharp click of the latch catching. But now the door was slightly open. Lucy pushed on it lightly. It swung inward with a slow, soft creaking.

  A blade of the hallway’s light pierced the dark room and cut across Maggie’s bed. At its edge, a man hunched over her motionless form inside its cotton nightgown, one hand under the dark blue blanket. Startled, the man swung his face toward the sound and light and saw Lucy standing in the doorway. He jumped to his feet and lunged toward the girl. Without even thinking, Lucy jerked the door closed and ran down the hall to the stairs at the nearer end of the hallway, while back in the room the man fumbled in the darkness feeling for the doorknob. In his haste, he kicked some of the tin cans across the room, waking Maggie who sat up in her bed.

  “Who’s there?” she called out in her half-sleep.

  Enough moonlight poured into the room so that she could barely make out the shape of a tall man. She screamed just as he twisted the doorknob and sprinted out of the room. Maggie jumped up and rushed to Lucy’s bed.

  “Wake up, Lucy,” she shouted, probing amid the disheveled blanket for her roommate.

  DOWNSTAIRS IN THE LOBBY, Lucy tried to open the front doors, but they were locked. She pushed uselessly against the handle until she heard the sound of someone coming down the staircase. In a panic, she looked around the large room, trying to find some place to hide. But the spacious, open lobby provided no concealing cranny, no large furniture. As quietly as possible, she ran down one of the two halls that led from the lobby. At the end of the hall was a large window and when Lucy lifted, it rose stiffly in its peeling-paint sash. By hiking up her white cotton night shirt, she managed to crawl out the window, drop to the ground, and hide behind a bush at the corner of the building.

  The rain had long stopped. The moon was full, and silvery light fell on the world, casting shadows. The sky was almost entirely clear, the moon so bright that only the brightest stars were visible. It was near freezing outside, but Lucy’s shivering was not from the cold.

  From her hiding place, she could see the man emerge from the front door. She wondered how he had opened the locked door. Did he have a key? Everything had happened so fast that she didn’t get a good look at his face. From what she saw and remembered, she did not recognize him. Once outside, the man walked slowly in Lucy’s direction, close to the wall of the building, occasionally stopping to look behind shrubs.

  He was searching for her.

  Lucy held her breath, trying to slow her heartbeat, trying to vanish altogether. She looked around for a
better place to hide, but there was little between her dormitory and the next building, the gymnasium.

  When he drew close to the building’s corner, she bolted like a rabbit across the lawn toward the gym. The man, suddenly seeing her, ran after her, tripping and falling on an exposed tree root. Lucy heard him curse, and over her shoulder she could see the man scrambling back to his feet. When she had made it safely around the corner of the gym, she threw herself against the dark wall, catching her breath and peering around the corner. The man was midway across the lawn. In the half-dark, she could see that he was limping badly from the fall.

  Looking around her, she saw the trees at the far edge of the football field, the beginning of a dense forest, about a mile square. It would be a long run across the playing field with nothing at all to hide behind. Even the grass was still short from the last mowing at the season’s end. She peeked around the corner again and saw that the man was close, his limping gate aimed at Lucy’s position.

  With no remaining options, Lucy decided to dash across the wide, open field, certain she would be seen.

  At that very moment, quiet as lust, a cloud—the only one visible in the entire night sky—slid under the moon like an umbrella, blocking most of the bright silvery light. It was a small cloud. It should have passed quickly beneath the moon, but it seemed to be fixed in the sky, in such a way that no light fell in pure rays on the dewy field, on the distant forest, or on the little, desperate girl running.

  When the man finally made it to the back of the gymnasium, the field before him was dark. Everything around him was dark. In the inkwell of that night, he leaned heavily against the brick wall with one hand, rubbing his wrenched ankle with the other. The man looked along the wall of the building, then back toward the dorm, and finally out into the dark field, concluding that toward the football field and the woods beyond was the only direction the girl could have run. Yet he saw nothing moving on the field, could barely make out its edge at all.

  He shuffled uncertainly toward the field as the small cloud’s edge drew close to the hiding moon, its light beginning to spill over the small cloud’s brim. Just as the field began to reappear in the moonlight, a motion from near the bleachers caught his eye. He stopped to watch as three deer, all does, stepped onto the turf cautiously, the way all deer betray their nervousness. They started for the middle. The man looked back toward the buildings, and then to the left and right of where he stood. But there was no sign of the girl. When he looked back to the field, the deer were standing in the middle, between him and the dark woods, between him and Lucy’s fleeing form. As if guided by a sense of geometrical precision, the deer blocked the girl’s terrified escape from the man’s angry eye. If they had stopped anywhere else, a few feet left or right, a few steps closer or further away, the man might have seen her. But for that exact instant, Lucy was invisible—shielded, as it were, by deer—as she raced across the field, trembling from fear and cold.

  Confused about Lucy’s whereabouts, the man cursed, shrugged his shoulders, turned, and shuffled away, favoring his right leg.

  After he was gone, the nibbling deer moved on, their ears pricked for any sound, their lithe muscles tensed to jump at any motion. The little cloud moved on too, and the moon once again bathed the field fully in bright moonlight, pouring down on the tiny shape of the distant, barefoot girl as she entered the safety of the shadowy forest on the other side.

  Afraid that she might be caught, Lucy huddled in some low bushes beneath a great tree, shivering all through the long night.

  AFTER FINDING LUCY’S BED EMPTY, Maggie woke up the floor monitor, who awakened the dorm mother, who called the headmaster. Everyone assumed that the intruder had abducted Lucy, that the perpetrator had entered the room on her account, that she, not Maggie, had been the target. Throughout the rest of the cold night, staff members searched the campus, calling out Lucy’s name, the yellowish beams of flashlights bobbing up and down in the darkness. But huddled where she was beneath a tree in the woods across a field at the farthest edge of Wellington’s grounds, Lucy never heard their shouts.

  The whole school was in an uproar. Boys and girls in every dorm opened their windows to look out and listen. Noah, Simon, and Elijah heard the shouting. They heard the rumors about a young girl named Lucy and pleaded to join the search party, but they were not allowed. None of the students were allowed outside the dorms. They were told sharply to go back to their rooms. But the three boys were committed to finding their friend. All three pulled their bed sheets, met in Elijah’s room, and tied the sheets together, forming a rope long enough to reach almost to the ground. They secured one end to a heater and, one by one, slid down the thick, knotted rope, crouching beneath a shrub when two teachers hurried by, shining their flashlights along the cobbled walk ahead.

  After they passed, Noah stood up and signaled for the others to follow him, as he crept like a thief across the lawn separating the buildings.

  When they arrived at Lucy’s dorm, Noah walked slowly and carefully along the outside walls, pausing briefly beneath each window. At one open window he paused longer than he had at the others, his fingers feeling the soft earth.

  He stood up and looked toward the gymnasium.

  “She went that way,” he said quietly as they took a few steps. “The strides are longer here. She was running. Somebody must have been chasing her.”

  The three boys raced to the gym. At the corner, Noah knelt down, studying the ground again. He stared at it intensely for almost a minute, his eyebrows knit tightly, trying to focus in the dark, looking first at the ground and then toward the football field.

  “She went that way,” he said, pointing at the field.

  “How do you know that?” asked Simon.

  Noah motioned both of them to kneel down close to the ground.

  “See these footprints?” he asked, holding an open hand beside the tracks. “Can you tell anything about them?”

  Elijah replied first. “They’re bare feet.”

  Noah gently pressed his fingers into the shallow depression of the fresh tracks.

  “I saw these same tracks under that window over at Lucy’s dorm. Look how small they are. They’re a small girl’s. They were headed this way. She stopped here.”

  Both boys looked into Noah’s face, smiled, and shook their heads.

  “Damn, Noah!” Elijah said, full of admiration and sudden high spirits. “You’re a real Indian!”

  Noah chuckled. “Shut up, jerk.”

  Then, all three followed the tracks toward the football field, Noah in the lead, stopping periodically to kneel and examine the earth.

  “She ran in that direction,” he said, looking across the playing field toward the woods.

  Halfway across the field, the boys came upon deer tracks, like the marks of small prongs jammed into the damp earth.

  On the other side, the tracks of small bare feet led into the dark forest. Noah had difficulty reading the signs at first, but all three were sure Lucy was nearby. They pressed on through the dense undergrowth calling softly, “Lucy . . . Lucy.”

  They eventually found her shaking uncontrollably in the bushes beneath a great, old tree. Her teeth were chattering like a telegraph—her breath billowing like smoke signals. She was too cold to speak. Simon took off his warm jacket and wrapped it around Lucy’s shoulders. Elijah covered her legs with his jacket. Noah draped his windbreaker over her like a blanket and placed his baseball cap on her head. They decided not to try to move her until they could warm her enough so that she could walk on her own.

  While they sat with their quiet friend, the boys talked about all kinds of things.

  Suddenly, Lucy said something so quietly no one understood what she had said.

  “What’d you say? asked Simon, leaning closer, motioning for the other two boys to stop talking.

  “To . . . to-day,” said Lucy, her teeth chattering,
“was my birth-day.”

  Lucy had turned fourteen and no one had even noticed. Most birthdays went unnoticed at Wellington. Indeed, all three boys would turn fifteen during the year, and even they wouldn’t notice. What was there to celebrate at a place like Wellington other than leaving it?

  The three boys huddled around Lucy until the sun braved the cold morning and stretched to look over the horizon. When it was light enough to see, all three helped Lucy up and led her out of the tangled forest, across the wet field, and past the gymnasium.

  WORD OF THEIR RETURN SPREAD across the worried school like a fry-bread grease fire. Everyone ran out to greet them. The school nurse and an assistant came running out from a building and took Lucy to the infirmary, where they quickly warmed her body in a hot bath, giving her cups of hot tea.

  The headmaster came and told the boys to wash up and join the rest of their dorm at breakfast. When they finally walked into the crowded and noisy cafeteria, everyone stopped talking. Several dozen children stood up and began to applaud. Then others joined in until every single person was standing and clapping. Even the kitchen staff came out from behind their kettles and serving stations to applaud.

  It wasn’t until lunch time that they saw Lucy again.

  They carried her tray as they escorted her to their table and asked her why she ran away. Lucy told them about the man in her bedroom. She told them how he was sitting on Maggie’s bed with one hand beneath her blanket. She told them how she didn’t recognize the intruder, but how he fell during the chase and limped from the fall, favoring his right leg.

  For the rest of the day, whenever they could meet, the boys walked around the school looking for a tall man with a limp. They put out the word to other children, who joined in the search. There had been many of these night visits over the years, and it wasn’t always into the rooms of girls that some intruders crept. Most of the accosted girls, and all but a very few of the accosted boys, were too ashamed to tell anyone. The few who had complained to school officials were largely ignored. Some of the complaints were dismissed as understandable childish anxiety. Worse, some were dismissed or covered up as actual events that could cost notoriety, investigations, public concern, budget restrictions, and jobs.