Stealing Indians

by John Smelcer

  Simon wondered what he should do about his epiphany. Should he tell the other students? Should he tell the administration? Start a rebellion? Do nothing? Weep?

  To be or not to be.

  Suddenly, Hamlet’s dilemma made more sense than ever to Simon. Should he act or do nothing? He slept on it until the next day. By morning he decided to tell the other students what he had concluded. He didn’t mention his dream. He sought out many of his classmates at breakfast, showing them the sheet of paper with each student’s name and his or her grade. He told them what he suspected. They all agreed, all except Nila Harjo, who never made less than an A and wasn’t about to give up her belief in her perfect record just because she was fair-skinned and blue-eyed.

  Little by little, a simple plan was formulated. Each student would write his or her next paper as always. But then each would trade with another student—each Indian-looking full-blood with a less Indian-looking half-breed. They would deceive the teacher by writing under assumed names.

  And, sadly, it worked perfectly. The grades followed the names. Students who usually received good grades but who had exchanged names with students who did not failed, and those who normally received F’s and D’s earned A’s and B’s under other names. The hypothesis was corroborated. The theory held.

  Feeling vindicated, Simon was further encouraged by several class members, who convinced him to carry the results of their concern to the administration. Several students went with him. In all, five students marched into the administration building, energized both by anger and by a sense of pride in their risk and daring to right a wrong, that Mr. Hand would feel the hand of justice. They had to sit in the hall for thirty minutes waiting for the assistant headmaster, who was on an important long-distance phone call. It was his job to deal with academic issues. By the time he finally opened his door, two of the students had already left to attend a class. He invited the three to sit down.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked, closing the office door behind him.

  He was a stern man, younger than the headmaster by ten years or more.

  Simon told him the story. The assistant headmaster listened carefully, taking notes and asking questions. When the meeting was over, he stood up and escorted the three students to the door, shaking their hands on the way out.

  “I’m certainly glad you brought this to my attention,” he said. “It’s quite a serious matter. We’ll get it resolved soon, I promise. We can’t allow this kind of behavior at Wellington.”

  Ironically, the man kept his word.

  He interviewed Mr. Hand, after which they decided that Simon and the other students had cheated. They were guilty of plagiarism. Everyone received a zero for the assigned paper. No one in that class ever received an A again. For the remainder of his time at Wellington, Mr. Hand would never give another A, regardless of a paper’s quality.

  Mr. Hand pursued his own version of equality.

  “Y’all thought you could fool me,” he told the class the day after the failed coup. “But y’all thought wrong. Indians just ain’t smart ‘nough to fool a white man.”

  For the rest of the year, Simon cared nothing about literature. His papers were always short of the requirement, poorly organized, full of misspellings, and written at the last moment. He never raised his hand in class, never offered his opinion, never read the book. Instead, he spent the empty hours staring out the window, having become, successfully, what the teacher expected of him.

  Chapter Seven

  THE DEAD MUST BE LONELY. Every time Elijah High Horse walked past the cemetery of dead Indian children, their tired and miserable ghosts waved at him. During the first weeks he waved back, even smiled awkwardly at them, but the spirits didn’t stop there. Because only Elijah could see them, the ghosts walked alongside him, howling unintelligibly, pleading with their hollow eyes for him to stop and listen, trying to grab hold of him with their vaporous hands, wispy as smoke from a dying campfire.

  But Elijah had not yet learned to hear the dead.

  Now, whenever he had to walk through the place, he tried to ignore them, acting as if he didn’t see them milling about aimlessly between headstones, and little by little, week after week, the ghosts began to forget that he had ever seen them at all.

  JIMMY RED CLOUD DISAPPEARED eight days before the big, school-wide Halloween party. No one knew what had happened to him. At first, school officials thought he had run away. Runaways were a common feature of the school. But Jimmy’s friends weren’t buying any of it. Most of his possessions remained in his small room. All of his clothes were neatly folded in dresser drawers. His pocket watch, two framed pictures of his family, and his worn-out wallet containing eight dollars were all still sitting on the dresser top. Most importantly, his portable chess set still lay on his bed. He took that game everywhere—not only to classes but also to the cafeteria. On many nights, he’d sit in the dormitory lobby playing anyone who would play with him. Sometimes he sat by himself playing both sides.

  If he had run away, Jimmy’s friends argued, he certainly would not have left his wallet and chess set.

  Eventually, school officials gave up searching and turned the matter over to the local sheriff’s office, which investigated the circumstances of Jimmy’s disappearance for two days before announcing that he had run away, despite obvious evidence to the contrary.

  About as quickly as the ink dried on the sheriff’s official report, so too did the school administration’s interest in the matter. That was because nearly everyone imagined he’d appear one day at his family’s home. That was the usual pattern. He would then be escorted back to Wellington, back through the wrought-iron gates, back to where he belonged.

  But Jimmy started showing up at Elijah’s window one night.

  That’s when Elijah knew Jimmy was dead.

  At first Elijah tried to ignore the floating ghost outside his second-floor window, but after the third night the ghost started coming into his room. Elijah pulled the blanket over his head, hoping it would go away. Sometimes, it would disappear in a blink, but more often than not it would hover above his narrow bed, its dark mouth moving, trying to speak. Just as with the big-antlered deer on the sand bar, the sad, lifeless man in the subway, and the restless ghosts in the cemetery, Elijah could only see, not hear, the dead, see Jimmy floating at his window, see him, plaintive, in his room.

  At first he didn’t tell anyone what he saw, but eventually he told Simon, Noah, and Lucy at breakfast while eating a bowl of sticky oatmeal.

  “You know that kid who ran away . . . Jimmy something?” he asked his friends in between bites.

  “Red Cloud,” Simon replied. “He was in my geography class.”

  Noah joined in the conversation. “Yeah, I knew him. He was a nice guy. Too bad he ran away. Hope he’s okay.”

  Elijah refilled his milk glass while speaking.

  “I don’t think he ran away.”

  “What do you mean?” Lucy asked, her face scrunched up in a puzzled expression.

  “I don’t think he ran away at all,” Elijah repeated quietly, setting down the glass pitcher and looking at his empty bowl, a few flakes of oats stuck to the side.

  All three friends stopped eating, urging Elijah to explain.

  “I’ve seen him.” Elijah paused before speaking again. “He comes to my room every night.”

  “Comes to your room?” Noah asked. Elijah had not spoken to his friends about his being a shaman. He was embarrassed and worried what they’d think.

  But Simon knew. He remembered the day in the subway in the big city. He remembered how Elijah had seen the dead father of the grease-haired hooligan.

  “I mean Jimmy’s dead,” Elijah said flatly. “His ghost comes to visit me, only I don’t want nothin’ to do with it.”

  The three friends listened patiently while Elijah described the ghostly events of the preceding se
veral nights. Noah and Lucy kept glancing at each other, exchanging looks of skepticism. When he was done, Simon recited the bizarre incident in the big city subway. The looks of skepticism turned to wonder. Indeed, Lucy’s doubt turned into sympathy for the ghost. She felt sorry for it. For some reason she thought about what the choir teacher might have done if he had caught her the night he tried to fondle Maggie in their dorm room.

  She wondered if she had come close to being a ghost.

  Eventually, Noah and Simon formulated a plan. That night they would sneak into Elijah’s room after curfew and wait with him until the ghost came, which was usually a little before midnight. Lucy couldn’t come because there was no easy way to sneak a girl into a boy’s dormitory. Elijah would have to tell his roommate, Moses Crow, so that he wouldn’t tell on them. Moses was an okay roommate. He was a year younger than Elijah and at least thirty pounds overweight. But Moses kept mostly to himself. He played flute in the school band, and he would sit on the edge of his bed practicing for hours before bedtime. Sometimes his mother sent him homemade cookies, which he generously shared with Elijah.

  That night after supper, the boys tried to work on their homework in the common area, eager—for the first time since attending Wellington—for bedtime to arrive. All three were distracted but tried not to show it. When the floor monitors yelled, “Bedtime!” all three boys immediately rose and went to their rooms, closed their doors, and lay awake on their creaking beds, staring at the slow-turning hands of their wall clocks, waiting exactly one hour—time enough for the dorm to settle in for the night—until Noah and Simon would sneak down the hallway to Elijah’s room. If asked, they would simply say they were going to the bathroom.

  Simon arrived first, knocking softly.

  Noah arrived a minute later.

  The boys, Moses Crow included, sat in the near dark quietly playing cards until it was near midnight. Moses had placed a small lamp beneath his bed with a towel over it to swallow most of the light. If the floor monitor passed by in the hallway and saw light pouring from under the door, they would all be in trouble. The available light was so weak that each boy had to hold his fan of cards close to his face. Shortly after the two clock hands aligned at the top of their perfect, mechanical orbit, Elijah stopped playing and stood up.

  “He’s here,” he announced calmly, as if he were expecting a guest, as if it were routine to see the dead.

  The other boys stopped playing and looked around, seeing nothing, only the shadowy, dark room and a net of stars, which filled the black sky outside the closed window.

  “Where?” asked Moses, following Elijah’s gaze.

  “Right there, standing by the radiator in front of the window. Can’t you see him?”

  Both Simon and Noah stood up and walked closer to the window.

  “There’s nothing here,” Noah said, beginning to think this was all a prank.

  But Simon knew better. He sat down on Moses’ bed and addressed Elijah.

  “What’s he look like? What’s he doing?”

  Elijah described what he saw.

  “It’s Jimmy all right,” Elijah whispered. “He’s just standing there, looking around, like he lost something.”

  Moses and Noah stood beside Elijah, trying to see something from his angle. But still, to them, the room looked the same.

  As Elijah sat down on the edge of his bed, Noah walked toward the window just as the ghost floated toward Elijah. The ghost of Jimmy Red Cloud passed right through Noah and stopped directly before Elijah and worked its mouth frantically.

  “It . . . it’s trying to tell me something, I think,” Elijah said aloud to his friends.

  But the other boys saw nothing, only Elijah sitting on the edge of his narrow bed, looking slightly upward, his eyes intent on something nearby, invisible.

  Finally, Elijah spoke directly to the ghost.

  “I don’t understand you. What do you want?” he asked.

  The spirit turned, floated back toward the window, through it, and then hovered outside, two stories high, motioning with one hand to follow. The other arm hung limp at its side, twisted impossibly backward as if broken. After several minutes, the image began to vanish like dissipating fog.

  Elijah walked to the window, looking out for a long time before he spoke.

  “It’s gone,” he finally said to the panes of glass before turning around.

  The other boys quietly asked all kinds of questions. In the end, however, all were in agreement that the ghost of Jimmy Red Cloud had a real presence and somehow wanted something. He wanted Elijah to follow him somewhere. They sat on the floor, talking for another half hour until each boy crept back to his own room for the night.

  Halloween was a couple of days away, the coming Friday. The cafeteria was already partially decorated with dancing skeletons and a variety of small, toothy jack-o’-lanterns fashioned from real pumpkins grown by one of the kitchen workers. Orange napkins on every table included the black silhouette of a witch flying a broomstick. At breakfast, Noah, Simon, and Elijah told Lucy what had happened. As she listened, tiny black hairs on her thin arms raised stiffly.

  After listening to everything, Lucy summed up what the others suspected.

  “He wants you to go find him,” she said. “His body. He wants you to find it.”

  Everyone was speechless after that. The idea of finding a dead body was fearsome.

  Elijah spoke first.

  “We’d have to wait until he comes again and follow him.”

  For the rest of the day, whenever any of the four saw another, they huddled to refine plans for that night. An all-school Halloween party and dance was to be held until after midnight. No one would miss four students in all the excitement. Lucy was to sneak down to that open window on the first floor of her dorm a little before midnight, the same window through which she had escaped the choir teacher. She’d lower herself out the window, hide in the bushes, and wait for a signal. They planned what they would take along: warm jackets against the near-winter cold, flashlights, a pack of matches and a candle, a length of coiled rope, and a bag of cookies in case they got hungry.

  Thirty minutes before midnight, Simon and Noah crept into Elijah’s room and waited. Moses changed his mind, saying it was too cold outside. He said he’d catch a cold, maybe pneumonia.

  When Elijah signaled that the punctual ghost had arrived, the boys hurried out the side door of the dormitory and followed Elijah as he followed the ghost. Noah flicked on his flashlight twice toward Lucy’s dorm—their prearranged signal. Lucy ran across the lawn, and all four followed Elijah, who kept the others informed of the spirit’s gestures, as it floated through the foggy cemetery teaming with gloomy specters, seen only by Elijah, who tried to brush them away like mosquitoes. Noah, Simon, and Lucy tried not to imagine what their friend was seeing.

  Once past the iron-and-red-brick gate, the ghost swept across the paved road and across a fallow field on the other side, its one arm dangling uselessly. An owl’s hoot echoed softly from the far tree line, and a fingernail of moon hung on the edge of the earth above an old, partially collapsed barn.

  The night was spooky and dark and cold. Lucy stayed close to Noah, who had picked up a thick walking stick somewhere along the way. For almost a mile the band of friends followed Elijah as the phantom led them into the dark woods beyond the field, frequently turning and beckoning Elijah to follow. After a while, the ghost grew increasingly excited, quickening its floating pace through the darkness. It seemed eager.

  Following became more and more difficult, as the four friends picked their way among the bramble of sapling, over dead falls, and through patches of thorny brush—all of which the ghost of Jimmy Red Cloud passed through without concern.

  Suddenly, the anxious band of friends emerged at a clearing in the woods. At the center was a large mound of ash and partially burned logs—the cold, gray remai
ns of a great fire. The brittle, brown grass all around was trampled, as if crushed beneath a hundred angry feet.

  Beneath a trickle of moonlight falling through the clouds, the ghost of Jimmy Red Cloud stopped abruptly on the edge of the clearing, as abruptly as the apparition had first appeared outside Elijah’s window. Elijah waited for something to happen, but nothing happened. The ghost just stood in the clearing, in the moonlight, in the cold, wet silence of the late October night. Then, growing indistinct in its features, it slowly moved away from the clearing and to the edge of the surrounding woods, hovering momentarily before fading, until it vanished altogether.

  Elijah didn’t know what to say or do. He felt a little embarrassed. No one knew what to do. Why had the spirit brought them so far if only to leave them in this unlikely place?

  Finally, Lucy spoke.

  “Maybe what he wants us to find is right around here.”

  Staying within sight of one another, the four split apart, looking for something, anything, though unable to name what it might be. They methodically searched in a wide circle around the spot where the ghost had paused before moving away. They found nothing on the field. Cautiously, they pushed into the edge of dense forest surrounding the clearing, just beyond where Elijah had last seen the vaporous image. The clouds thickened and grew darker, making more and more difficult the task of seeing the ground clearly.

  Only Elijah and Simon had flashlights.

  Suddenly, Simon yelled that he had found something.

  The three friends scrambled through the undergrowth to where he stood, peering down at and into a sizable hole in the ground. Both Elijah and Simon shone their lights down the hole. It was an old mine shaft. The countryside was full of them—old, forgotten, and frequently unmarked and exposed pits left after the exploration for coal. The opening measured only about four feet across, maybe a bit larger. The flanks of the hole were grown over with vegetation. With both flashlights focused on the bottom, they could see something faintly illuminated in the dark.