by Kurt Caswell
He exaggerated himself in the classroom to the point that he seemed crazier than the students he taught. Probably he was. One day in the cafeteria Jerry Valdez, an eighth grader who held an alpha position among the boys that rivaled Caleb Benally’s, said something nasty to Mr. Wiseman in Navajo. Mr. Wiseman latched onto his arm as he passed, pulled him in close, cradling him, and said, “Jeerrryyy. Honnneeeyyy. Come sit on daddy’s lap.” Jerry ran away shrieking.
The owl that lived behind the Wiseman’s house told the kids that Mr. Wiseman was a skinwalker. He wore big eyeglasses that darkened in the sun, so that sitting in a classroom in front of a sunny window, the kids told me, he looked like a skull with cavernous black holes for eyes. And they were sure he could take himself apart, which he proved by removing his false teeth and clacking them together in front of the classroom. In addition to these powers, the boys at school had seen Mr. Wiseman out behind his house crawling around on all fours like an animal, collecting hairs and bits of bone, they said, to use in dark spells.
I knew, however, that Mr. Wiseman wasn’t collecting hairs. Every time it rained he went out to collect the potsherds that washed down into his backyard. He laid them out like puzzle pieces on a table in the kitchen and fixed them together where they would go. He had several ancient Anasazi pots emerging at once, a slow, steady resurrection.
Even so, to the Borrego boys, Mr. Wiseman was a witch. It only reinforced their position when the maintenance man, Everett, put his rez dog down after it broke free of its chain and attacked Miles. I first heard the story when Everett offered me a doghouse for Kuma. I accepted it, then asked why he was giving it away. I heard the story again at school when Charlie Hunter told me to be careful around Mr. Wiseman, that dogs like Everett’s only attacked witches and their relations.
Miles showed me the bruises and puncture wounds under his right arm and along his ribs. He wore these wounds like a badge of honor, proof of his hardiness, and made them available to anyone who wanted to see. As the only white kid in school, he’d been taking a lot of shit from the other boys, and no one, not even his good friend Tom Charlie, could defend him. It was about this time he started karate lessons in Gallup.
Mr. Wiseman’s growing reputation as a necromancer gave him increasing power in the classroom. He knew it and seemed to like it. No matter how unruly, how crazy the kids became in the classroom, he challenged them by acting crazier. It didn’t seem to calm them down any, but perhaps it allowed Mr. Wiseman an outlet for the inevitable frustration, and even anger, that might arise out of working in the center of such madness. His other tack was one of assuming a royal air. Students in Mr. Wiseman’s class could do or have whatever they desired as long as they acknowledged his special birthright: “Yes, Oh Great One,” they called him, and he would then grant their wishes.
Mr. Wiseman also loved to say, over and over, the phrase “As Shakespeare said.” He used it as a prefix or a suffix, depending on the situation. “As Shakespeare said, it was fuckin’ awful,” he would say. Or, “The dirty sons-of-bitches, as Shakespeare said.” Once he told me that his secret to solving discipline problems in the classroom at Borrego was to pinch these Navajo kids on the soft underside of their arms, hard—except the girls, don’t touch the girls, he said—and that would take care of the little shits, as Shakespeare said.
Beyond substitute teaching and crawling around on all fours like an animal—which seem somehow related—Mr. Wiseman spent a lot of time hanging out at the Trading Post. I found him down there a number of times sitting on a stool behind the counter like he ran the place, while Merle stood in front of the counter like a customer, sporting his usual Wranglers and cowboy hat. Mr. Wiseman would sit there all day, if Merle let him, and neither of them would get anything done. It seemed to me that Mr. Wiseman wasn’t really the kind of guy who would sit around at a Trading Post telling amazing stories, a kind of barfly without the bar, but that he wanted to be, so he went down there regularly as if in training. I think he was lonely, too, spending day after long day alone in his house fitting potsherds together while Jane worked and Miles went to school. The Trading Post offered him a much-needed distraction.
On a late fall day at Borrego, I walked down the cow trail to the Trading Post for something, a nail, or a can of beans, or to relieve the monotony of a lonely day. The little bells on the knob jingle-jangled as I opened the front door. I noticed a flyer posted there that read “Gospel Teardrop God Ministry Banquet. Evangelist Samuel Begay. Next Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to whenever.”
“Mr. Cas-well! Welcome,” Mr. Wiseman called out from his bench behind the counter.
To which Merle added, “Yá’át’ééh!”
Merle spoke pretty good Navajo, as he’d been dealing with Navajo artists and traders, not to mention customers, for years.
The Borrego Pass Trading Post opened in the 1930s under the leadership of its owners, Don and Fern Smouse. They set up a silversmith operation there and employed dozens of Navajos who made hundreds of pieces of silver and turquoise jewelry: belt buckles and pendants, rings and watchbands, bracelets, earrings, far more than they could sell. Years later, Smouse tapered off production and stored most of the jewelry in a room beneath the Trading Post. He and his wife retired and hired Merle and Rosie to run the place. Every now and again, Mr. Wiseman told me, Smouse drove up to Borrego and rummaged through the jewelry collection. He’d take a box with him to exotic places like Albuquerque and Santa Fe and sell it all. Because the craftsmanship of those early years was far superior to the work of today, that jewelry was worth quite a bit of money. “Well,” Smouse said to Mr. Wiseman one day, “that last box was worth ten thousand,” or some big number like that.
“What can I do for ya?” Mr. Wiseman said. He paused a moment to reconsider. “I mean, what can Merle do for ya?” he said. “Or Rosie,” and Rosie smiled.
Her face, wrinkled and beaten by the New Mexican sun, evened out when she smiled, and I could see that she had been a beautiful woman in her youth, or rather she was a beautiful woman even now. She wore her light brown hair in tight curls against her head, and large squarish glasses. I felt a confidence and stability in her that made coming into the Trading Post a pleasure.
Merle was a Korean War veteran who had taken shrapnel in his left arm and leg when a mine exploded, killing the soldier next to him. Merle carried his arm around like it didn’t quite work, and it probably didn’t. After I got to know him a little better, Merle told me that his fighting team had had to walk from Pusan in the south of Korea all the way to Seoul just to get to the war. Now when Rosie asked Merle if he wanted to go with her on an evening walk out behind the Trading Post or up Borrego Pass Road, he always responded the same way: “I had enough walkin’ in the goddamn war.”
“The gate back there against the wall was open,” I said to Rosie. “So I latched it.”
“Oh, that,” said Rosie. “That latch doesn’t quite hold anymore. Thank you anyway.”
“Maybe ’cause that damn wall winds around like a snake,” Merle said.
“Oh, it does,” said Rosie. “But I’m rather partial to it.”
“It’s falling down in places,” Merle said, “because those Navajos who built it weren’t worth a damn.”
Mr. Wiseman laughed. He’d heard this story before.
“You see,” said Rosie, as if on cue, “those men who built that rock wall kept a bottle hidden in with their lunch. They didn’t start drinking much until after lunch, usually, but the drunker they got, the longer they worked, and the longer they worked the more that wall began to sag back and forth. They were good boys and they did their best to keep it straight, under the circumstances. They didn’t mean no harm.”
“Jesus,” said Merle.
“It looks more natural like that anyhow, to me,” Rosie said.
“Christ,” said Merle.
“Wasn’t that one of them who came in here just the other day?” asked Mr. Wiseman.
“I don’t know,” said Merle. “Was it?”
“Could have been, I guess,” said Merle. “Did he pay for it?”
Mostly Merle and Rosie tried not to enable alcoholics, especially those who resorted to all kinds of elixirs for a fix: drinking cleaning fluids or cologne, huffing hairspray or gasoline, and the like. Therefore, it wasn’t proper or legal to fill anything at the gas pump but your truck. Once in awhile, though (maybe Merle would be sorting through nails or bolts or cans of tomatoes), someone would pull up, run a pint of gas into a Mason jar, real slick-like, screw on the lid, stow it, and then fill the truck.
“I don’t remember if he paid for it,” said Mr. Wiseman. “Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t.” Then Mr. Wiseman said to me, “Isn’t it right that you come from Idaho? We were just talkin’ about Idaho. Isn’t that right, Merle?”
Merle nodded.
“You know I knew Mr. Hemingway,” Mr. Wiseman started in. He had lived in Ketchum, he said, while working on his dissertation. He became friends with a certain medical doctor in town, and they had a practice of drinking together at various Ketchum and Sun Valley bars. It was about ten one morning when Mr. Wiseman ran into his friend on the street. The doctor carried a guitar case and walked with a purpose.
“Morning,” said Mr. Wiseman.
“Morning,” said the doctor. “Where you headed?”
“To such and such,” said Mr. Wiseman. “I didn’t know you played guitar.”
“Forget that,” said the doctor. “Come with me.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the such and such bar,” said the doctor.
“At ten in the morning?”
“Yes. C’mon. You won’t regret it. You’ll see why.”
“I never drink in the morning,” said Mr. Wiseman.
“You should make an exception,” said the doctor.
So Mr. Wiseman followed the doctor to the bar. Of course there was Hemingway, leaning expertly over a pitcher of iced daiquiri already half empty. He wore a dirty sportsman’s cap. His gray beard was twisted and parted like he hadn’t slept well. The doctor introduced Mr. Wiseman, and the two men sat down.
Hemingway said, “Have a drink, gentlemen.”
And so the gentlemen did.
Mr. Wiseman was about my age, he told me, and because he was working on his dissertation, he counted himself something of a writer. “Hemingway,” Mr. Wiseman mused in the middle of his story. “I never knew a man so attentive to detail. So clear and focused in his mind. If you had a flower in your hand, Hemingway wouldn’t stop until he knew everything there was to know about it.”
“Hmmm,” Merle said. “Everything.”
“Oh yes,” Rosie said. “Everything there was to know.”
“Right. I know,” Merle said. “He was very attentive to detail.”
Obviously they’d both heard this story before.
Mr. Wiseman continued. Then Hemingway said, “Have you got it there?”
“Right here,” the doctor said, patting the guitar case with his hand.
“Let’s have it, then,” Hemingway said, taking the guitar case across his lap. He opened it. “Isn’t she a beauty,” Hemingway said. He reached in and lifted the shotgun out. He set the case to the side and stood the shotgun erect in his lap with the two barrels pointing at the ceiling.
“I lost a bet,” the doctor told Mr. Wiseman.
Hemingway asked Mr. Wiseman, “Do you hunt?”
“No,” said Mr. Wiseman.
Then Hemingway said, “Well, if you did, you’d know that you’re looking at such and such a shotgun with a such and such and a this and that. And a real fine one, too.”
Then Hemingway broke the shotgun open and sighted through the empty barrels. “A real beauty,” he said again. He reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and took out a shotgun shell. He set the shell into the right chamber, snapped the barrel back, set the stock firm against his thigh, and blew a hole in the ceiling of the bar.
Then Hemingway said, “Yes, a real beauty. Thank you, doctor.” And he poured all three glasses full.
Mr. Wiseman told me that if I was ever in Sun Valley, I should go to that bar and see that hole in the ceiling. “They never repaired it,” he said. “Instead they made it into a monument.”
That was the day that Leonard Angel came to class drunk. I quite liked working with the eighth grade. They were no kinder, no more accepting of me, but we moved faster, seemed to accomplish more, and could sometimes hold together a discussion about our reading. I hatched a plot to read Romeo and Juliet with them in the spring, maybe with the seventh grade too.
I had fast grown bored with the textbook, its dull patterns and predictability, its simpleton stories and stupid review questions, questions that seemed to close doors to the story, close doors to the world, rather than opening them. I couldn’t imagine bothering with such dross. Wasn’t one of the prime values of literature, of all the arts, that it opens doors to a larger world, that through it we are allowed into an experience or world foreign to us, and after wandering around a bit, we discover the foreign is not so foreign after all, that we are in fact reading a story about ourselves? Review questions like those in our text allowed very little room for discovery because they circled too close to an answer, a literal and pedestrian understanding from which students walked away thinking Now I get it, and all that’s left is the final exam. It occurred to me that such textbooks are written not for students, but for teachers who lack inspiration, creativity, energy, maybe interest. For teachers who used such textbooks when they were in school and so came to believe that art is a little puzzle that must be solved. For teachers who didn’t know what else to do and really didn’t want to do it in the first place. For me, reading our textbook was like living in a plastic house with a plastic family who sat together to eat plastic food—you think you can live on it, but you can’t. Or maybe I was just feeling grumpy.
“What’s goin’ on, Leonard?” I said.
“Nothin’,” he said, with a big grin on his face. His cheeks were flushed, and he stared off into the ceiling. He wore dusty black Levis and that light winter jacket he always wore over a blue T-shirt. The jacket, gray with snap-down chest pockets, bore a dark greasy ring around the bottom about halfway up and around the inside of the collar. The coat was in good condition, it just hadn’t been washed.
“You sure?” I asked. “You look a little too happy.” Too happy? I thought. Who can be too happy?
“Yep,” he said, giggling. “I’m too happy.”
“Leon-nard,” Tom Thompson said, smiling big.
Tom didn’t have anything to say, he was just laughing with Leonard.
“What’s on your mind, Leonard?” I asked again. “You got a story to tell?”
I wanted him to talk a little. It was obvious to me that he was drunk, or buzzing on gasoline fumes, but I wanted him to give it away with his voice.
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “A story.”
“Go ahead, then,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”
He put his head down on the table then, rolled his forehead back and forth over the table.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Ahhh,” he moaned. “I think I’m sick,” he said.
“Git away from me, then,” said Mary Jane.
“Me too, you stupit,” said Victoria Angel, his younger sister. “You’re always so stupit.”
“Shut up,” he told her. “You shut you up.”
Then Tom started laughing, laughing so deep inside himself he couldn’t hold it in. “You shut you up!” he said, laughing. “You shut you up!”
Leonard was laughing too now, only he was also moaning in pain, “Oohhh, I’m sick. I’m gonna get sick.”
“Go outside, then, you ugly dog,” Victoria said.
He did go outside then. He got up and dragged himself around the tables at the edge of the room as fast as he could, keeping his head low and his hand on h
is stomach. Tom leaned back in his chair and pushed the door open for him, and as Leonard crossed over the threshold, Tom pushed him outside and let the door swing closed. We heard him retching out there against the side of the building.
“Oh god,” said Renee Benally. “That’s sick.”
“Yeah, Mr. Caswell. That’s too gross,” said Victoria.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Give me a minute here. I have to call Frank, you know.”
“No, you don’t,” said Mary Jane. “Frank won’t do nothin’.”
“Yes, he does,” said Victoria.
“Yeah, he does too,” said Renee.
“Hey, Mr. Caswell,” said William Brown. “You like to get all crazy like Leonard too? Maybe you drink too much too,” he said, grinning big through his missing teeth.
That probably would have made me mad a few weeks ago, or under different circumstances, but I didn’t have time for it now. I used the phone there in the classroom to call Deena at the front desk, who would then patch me through to Frank. Deena was Frank’s wife, and it was her position at the school that helped Frank get the detention monitor job when Dallas West resigned amid charges that he was too rough with the kids, especially the boys. The story I heard was that a teacher had caught Caleb with a knife in class and sent him down to spend the rest of the day with Dallas. Caleb didn’t just have a pocketknife in his pocket—he had been waving the knife around in class boasting that he might do something with it. Dallas asked Caleb to give him the knife. Caleb refused. Then Dallas gathered the front of Caleb’s shirt in his fist, picked Caleb up with one hand, and slammed him hard against the wall, held him there, hurt him a little.