by Kurt Caswell
“Well, Bob King knows about it. And so does Louise. I don’t know what we do. We don’t do anything. We just teach them. We can’t do anything.”
“We can’t do anything?” I said.
“Well, I think we’ve done everything we can, I mean. Someone reported it, and I think they’re making sure she’s staying somewhere safe right now. That’s about as far as it goes. From here, we just teach them.”
We stood there looking out, the playground awash in children running and shouting and playing like children, and I saw where the desert fell away into the morning sun and a red-tailed hawk rode the currents there along the rocky edge headed south and stretching out into the flats where the hunting was good in the mornings.
Here, then, were the two opposing forces at Borrego—its austere, clean beauty, and its belligerent, ugly darkness. I had only been here a couple of weeks, and already I felt utterly helpless and broken in the face of it. This was a violent world, one that stole energy and hope from its people, beat them down, and then kept them down, possibly forever. There must have been something else here too, something soft and caring, something safe and loving, something good that held this community together. If so, I could not, as yet, see it. Perhaps in time I would. But why, I had to ask, did I so readily witness the cruel and violent face of Borrego, and nothing of the other side? Why would a community like this one show me, a stranger, this dark part of itself, and hide its best qualities? Was this an American characteristic, or was it specifically Navajo? Whatever, I began to wonder what effect living and working in such conditions might have on me. Would I too find my energy and hope stolen away? Would I give up on my students, my fellow teachers and friends, myself?
Not much later, I moved out of the duplex. Fifty years of tree roots growing through the underground sewage lines brought the maintenance man, Everett, to my place every couple of days, the days when shit backed up into the bathtub while I showered. He carried the big electric snake up onto the roof and drove it down some pipe and ran the motor. It thumped and whined up there like a great pterodactyl in amorous display. I stumped around in the kitchen below with dark remnants of the event still outlining my toenails. Everett came again and again, hauling that heavy machine up a ladder onto the roof, until he tired of it, and left it up there. At last the maintenance foreman, Dean West, decided that it wasn’t going to end and he’d have to dig a trench and replace the sewage line. That would take, he told me, oh, maybe a week or two. I should move into the empty trailer near the fence across the way. I could easily walk everything over. It wasn’t far.
“I can wait a week or two, no problem,” I said. “Until you get it fixed.”
“Well, maybe it’ll be a little longer,” Dean said.
“How much longer?” I asked, recalling my conversation with Navajo Communications. “I like the place I’m in. I don’t really want to live in the trailer.”
“A bit longer,” Dean said. “We’re on Indian time, remember. You’ll be happier if you move into the trailer.”
In other words, instead of two or three weeks, it might be two or three months before he got to it, or even two or three years. What was the hurry? So I moved. The rent for the trailer was $150 a month, almost double what I had been paying for the duplex, but since it wasn’t my fault about the tree roots, Dean said my rent would remain $80 a month.
“That’s a good deal,” he said. “You get all those rooms for half the money.”
But I didn’t want all those rooms. I had too much space in the duplex already. Everything I owned fit into the back of my truck. That trailer was going to swallow me whole. Yet, one lazy weekend, I toted everything over.
The trailer was comfortable enough, clean enough, when the wind didn’t blow. When it did, the walls bowed and rattled, and sand sifted in through the gaps. I borrowed a vacuum from the janitor closet at school and used it to rake the green shag carpet clean. For the green linoleum in the kitchen I used a broom, and then got down on hands and knees and scrubbed it with a wet rag. I pulled the frosted mirrors off the wall in the main room and painted over the scars on the wallboard (I couldn’t stand staring at myself all day).
In addition to the master bedroom with the attached bathroom on the west end of the trailer, I had two more bedrooms and a second bathroom down a narrow hallway on the east end. One of the two bedrooms looked out across Borrego Pass Road onto the low escarpment that rose up along the winter sun in the morning. The desert out there was green and inviting in the fall after the monsoon rains. A soft patch of grass grew up against that end of the trailer. The wind couldn’t reach it here, and so whatever moisture the sky gave to the ground lingered a little longer there than in other places. I thought about putting my desk down there, and my books, so that I could watch the sun come up in the mornings, but I couldn’t stand the thought of spreading myself out all over the trailer. I wanted Dean to repair the sewer lines and open the cinder block duplex again, though I knew that it was futile, that he’d never get the job done while I lived at Borrego. I felt an uncontrollable urge for something smaller and safer to live in. Someplace smaller and safer. I wanted one room with one door. My feeble response to this impulse was to shut the doors on the two extra bedrooms and the bathroom and hang a towel from the ceiling at the head of the hallway to keep the heat from going down there in the winter. I brought my blue canoe in out of the weather and stored it upside down in the hallway; at least that long corridor had some use. I lived only in the master bedroom and the living room, which was open to the kitchen. I was living scared in Navajoland. I didn’t feel at home here, so I lived in a state of fearful readiness. If I had to, I could pack up and get out fast. Moving from the duplex to the trailer revitalized this impulse in me. I didn’t want to take my things out of their little boxes again. I lived in a state of preparation for some frightening eventuality, but I knew this state was a measure of me and not of the place. Huddled in my little rooms in the trailer, I felt an overwhelming agitation, a fear of the place that crept up into my chest and knocked at my heart like the wind.
In that new space, in that new feverish agitation, I sat at my desk, placed sidelong to the living room window, and wrote long, wistful letters to Sakura. I ached for her. I imagined her there in my trailer, sleeping in my bed in the early morning, and cooking with me in the evenings. I imagined her face so close to mine, and her smell, the beautiful presence of her, that deep female way she blossomed in my nose. As a parting gift she had given me Yukio Mishima’s The Sound of Waves, a novel about youthful love in a fishing village. I kept it on my desk beside me, because inside she had left a note card graced by a flower she painted in watercolor and scented with her perfume. I would open the book as I wrote to her, and draw in her memory from those fragrant pages.
“Where we goin’ now, Mr. Caswell?” Shane asked. “We goin’ to China?”
“Hey, yeah, let’s go over there to China,” Manny said. “They got a lot of cool stuff over there.”
“Naw, naw,” said Kyle Bigfoot. “Let’s just go outside and mess around.”
“You guys!” said Leanne Yazzie. “Stop it. Ssshhh. Or we won’t get to go.”
My sixth-grade class was lined up against the wall in the cafeteria after breakfast that October morning, following standard procedure. Every class lined up this way before leaving the cafeteria, and the rule was that everyone had to be quiet and stand at attention before we could go. This didn’t seem to me like a rule anyone would want to follow, because the reward was going to class. But no matter. When my class had lined up that morning, I had told them I had a surprise for them. We were not going to the science room for class; instead, we were going on a journey.
The journey I promised wasn’t much of a journey at all, and yet I hoped it would improve my teaching life at Borrego. I had grown tired of sharing space in the science room. One of the portable classrooms at the edge of the playground went mostly unused. A double-wide manufactured building, it featured two main rooms, one on each side
of the median; a small reading room with a collection of books; two bathrooms; and a kitchen. It housed some old computers that functioned well enough but had been forgotten when the school invested in new computers that were networked throughout the main building with access to two CD-Rom towers housed in the library. I needed only to arrange a classroom on one side of the portable, and leave the other for the computers that no one wanted. Bob King agreed to my proposal, and I moved my classes out there right away. I had already moved my living quarters from the duplex into a trailer. I might as well teach in a trailer too, I thought.
“Yeah, for reals, Mr. Caswell. Let’s go over there to China,” said Shane, swinging his little rooster tail back behind his shoulders. “I want to be a China-man.” He stretched his eyes out sideways.
“Hey, Mr. Caswell,” Manny said. “Michael stepped in dog shit, I think. It smells real bad, too.”
“Ooh, yeah,” said Kyle Bigfoot. “I can smell it.”
They laughed out loud.
Michael stood there grinning like he’d done it on purpose. He was a quiet, small boy, but I came to think of him as a master of deception, inventing little pranks and tricks which he unfolded daily, and for which someone else would be blamed.
Shane breathed in deep through his nose to take in the smell. “Ooh, yeah,” he said. “Ooh, yeah! Smells so good.”
The other boys giggled and breathed deep through their noses too and made farting sounds with their lips.
“C’mon, you guys,” Leanne said. “We can’t go unless we’re quiet. I want to see where we’re goin’.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m just waiting for you to be quiet.”
“Ahh, we ain’t goin’ nowhere ‘cept over there to language arts,” said John George.
“No, no, we’re gonna go outside and mess around,” said Kyle Bigfoot again. “Then we’re gonna get a big truck and drive all the way over there to Gallup and drink some whiskey.”
“Yeah, for reals, Mr. Caswell. Let’s do it,” said Shane.
“Yeah, c’mon!” said Charlie Hunter.
“Shut up, you stupit boys,” Leanne said.
“Children!” Louise barked at them. “Mr. Caswell is waiting for you. And I’m waiting for Mr. Caswell. My class is ready to line up. So be! Quiet!” she said.
“I’m ready,” I said, about to break the golden rule. “Let’s go!” And I led my class out the front doors and into the sun.
I wondered what would happen next. The previous spring, when Lauren was hired, she had used this same portable as her classroom. That first morning, she lined up the sixth graders along the wall in the cafeteria, just as I had done. She demanded their attention and waited until they got quiet, just as I had failed to do, and she led them out the front doors into the sun, just as I was doing now. It was February and cold then, 40 degrees, maybe 30, and the sky was clear and too perfectly blue to be possible, the sun so bright it wanted to be warm, but it wasn’t. When those sixth-grade boys hit daylight, they bolted, or five of them did. Lauren heard them behind her as the line broke apart into an amorphous pack of testicular whir and speed, and the boys came by her on both sides, their heads tilted back like Edwin Moses, their knees rising and pumping in the sprint, and they hit the corner of the building and disappeared around it. Lauren sauntered casually on, not worried at all about their prank, opened the door, went in, the girls following her, and prepared to begin the lesson. The boys would be along soon, she thought, just as soon as they got cold and tired. But Navajo boys like these are tough, and used to the cold, and they were not going to give up on their fun without a fight.
Well, they didn’t show up, and they didn’t show up, and they didn’t show up, until Lauren felt she’d be remiss if she didn’t go look for them. So she did. She went out with the girls onto the front porch, and one of the girls suggested that the boys might be hiding underneath the portable. And they were hiding underneath the portable in that cool, dark silence. They had crawled under through a gap in the skirting, and there they were, hiding in that happy darkness. She called for them to come out, but they wouldn’t. She called again for them to come out, but no, they were not going to come out. Why should they? This was much more fun than reading class. So standing outside like that, Lauren began to talk with the girls about what nasty things lived under portables like this one—rats, she said, and black widows, real big fat ones, and poisonous snakes. Three of the five boys came out right away, but the other two were not afraid of anything. They stayed under there for the entire class. All Lauren could do was turn their names in to the front office.
The next day Bob King gave those boys what-for before they went outside to the portable. Lauren thought that would do it. It didn’t. Those same two boys, those brave boys, those foolish boys, once they hit daylight, they were under the portable again, quick as weasels. This time Bob King came out to help, but they wouldn’t come out for him either. At least not right away. Then some strange urge came into them, perhaps that same urge that drove them underneath in the first place, and they crawled back out. A teacher has two choices at such a juncture: rule by force, or rule by reward. Lauren chose reward. She developed a system founded on offering stickers for good behavior, for staying with her through the lesson, for trying hard. At the end of each week, anyone with ten stickers earned a little pack of peanut butter crackers. It seemed to work.
I heard the front doors of the school close behind the end of the line, and as we made our way out into the parking lot, I expected something out of the ordinary to happen, something wild, something I could write home about. But nothing happened. Everyone stayed in lockstep, and in fact, Shane, who liked to make things happen, began to walk in lockstep behind me, his right foot hitting the ground as mine did, and then his left foot hitting the ground as mine did, right, left, and so on. Was he mocking me? It didn’t matter. Kyle Bigfoot picked it up behind Shane, left, right, left, right, and then Manny behind him, Michael, Leanne, even Leanne, Joseph Jones, Charlie Hunter, and right on down the line. Shane began to sing it out as we walked: “Left! Left! Left! Right! Left!” he sang. “Left! Left! Left! Right! Left!” And that’s how we came to the portable.
“Remember what we learned last time?” I asked, as everyone found a seat. The room was small for the twelve to fifteen students in a typical Borrego class, but we could make it work. I had arranged the tables and chairs in a semicircle so everyone could see everyone else, and there was plenty of open space in the middle of the room. As I waited for a response to my question, I propped the outside door open to let the sun in.
“Does anyone remember what we learned last time?” I asked again.
“Nope,” said Joseph Jones.
“Me neither,” said Manny. “I’m stupit, Mr. Caswell.”
“I know. I know,” said Leanne.
“No, you’re not,” I said to Manny.
“Yeah, real stupit. My grandma even says so,” Manny said, smiling big.
“That’s ’cause you are,” said Valeria.
“Just like you,” said Manny.
“Anyway,” I said. “I’ll remind you. Last class we talked about the six steps in the writing process. Does anyone remember all of them? Or just one of them?”
“Yeah, Kyle Bigfoot said. “Hamburgers and french fries.”
“I know one,” said Leanne.
“No, it’s going all crazy like this,” said Charlie Hunter, and he shook his body like a madman and let his lips flap against his teeth.
“Aawww,” said Manny, laughing. “That’s crazy, isn’t it, Mr. Caswell.”
The girls in the room, most of them, except Valeria, were not amused at all. They rolled their eyes and stared at the ceiling.
“Okay! Okay. Okay.” I said. “You need some paper. You’re going to write this down now.”
Everyone got out a sheet of paper or borrowed paper from someone else, and then waited, quiet and ready. This seemed always to work best, to have the class, especially the sixth graders, active. I
f they were not physically doing something—writing notes, writing in their journal, reading aloud, answering questions about the reading—the class was a bust.
“Number one,” I said.
“I know one . . .” said Leanne.
“All right,” I said. “What is it?”
“Drafting,” Leanne said.
“Rafting!?” Joseph Jones said. “What?”
“Oh, I know, Mr. Caswell,” Manny said. “That’s when you go around in a big boat and crash through the waves.”
“No, that’s rafting,” I said.
“Is it?” Manny said.
“Leanne said ‘drafting,’ which is right, but it’s not the first one,” I said. “It’s the third one. We’ll get to that one in a minute, okay? The first one is—”
“Prewriting,” Leanne said.
“Yes, yes. Good,” I said. “Prewriting. Write that in your notes.”
“How do you spell it?” asked Michael Benally.
“Just a moment,” I said. “I’ll write it down for you on the board, if you give me a moment.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Michael, and he nodded his head in approval.
“What’s that mean?” asked Valeria.
“Yeah, what are you talking about?” asked Charlie Hunter. “What’s a process?”
“I’ll explain that too,” I said, speaking very slowly and calmly, “after I write it down on the board.”
“Oh, okay,” said Manny. “Let’s hear it. Tell us then.”
I wrote the word on the board. “You see,” I said, “if you’re going to write a paper or a report or something for one of your teachers, you have to go through six different steps. The first one is prewriting. Prewriting is when—”
“How come you gotta do it?” asked John George. “You don’t need steps. You just write it.”
“Yeah, just write it anyways,” said Valeria.
“Or don’t write nothin’,” said Kyle.
“I can’t write it, Mr. Caswell. My pencil’s somehow,” said Manny.