This Is Not Civilization

by Robert Rosenberg

  The message was clear, and Jeff did not want to think about who had sent it. Later, he would remember this moment and wish he’d had the strength to persevere in the face of the insult. But he was only twenty-three years old, this was his first failure, and he did not yet have the heart to think about putting the place back together.

  He locked up the teen center, walked the half-mile past the Lutheran mission over to the tribal offices, explained to Councilman Dale what had happened, and offered his resignation.

  Larson Dale leaned back deep into his chair, looked straight at him, and said, “We’ll get an Indian to do the job. That’s what should have happened in the first place.”

  Everything Jeff owned lay spread out in the dusty shade of the old cottonwood, at the center of the town of Red Cliff. His pots and pans, his Tupperware, his coffeemaker, his rowing machine, his microwave, his thirteen-inch television, his plaid comforter, his desk chair, his Oxford English Dictionary, his acoustic guitar. He was moving on, and he didn’t want this stuff anymore. He wanted lightness, mobility, and flight. One year he’d been on the Red Mountain Reservation, and the village was no better for his having come. But he refused to blame himself. The world was large, and other places needed him if this one didn’t.

  He heard footsteps approaching on the bridge over the creek, and his assistant at the teen center, Adam Dale, all legs and arms, appeared around the gnarled trunk of the cottonwood. His thick, dark hair curled down to his black Metallica T-shirt. He was carrying a Walkman and wearing headphones, from which tinny murmurs of heavy metal escaped. He squatted next to Jeff, removed the headphones, and tossed the Walkman onto the blanket. Jeff looked away. A hummingbird darted between the white blossoms and spikes of a yucca to his right.

  “You just leaving then?” Adam asked.

  Jeff stared at the ground. “Yeah. Packing it in.”

  “Just gonna give in so easy?”

  “What do you want me to do? Hang around to fix things up? Have this happen all over again?”

  “I’m saying you come here to help. We blink, you’re gone.”

  Last summer the center had struggled for its first six weeks of operation. Hardly anyone had used it. In September, in coordination with an after-school work-for-credit program, Jeff had hired Adam. The kid had been the only student at the high school trailer with the attendance record to qualify. Adam had bestowed a palpable legitimacy on the center, and soon his friends and basketball teammates were showing up. Packs of teenage girls appeared. Younger brothers and sisters started tagging along. The Chief Alchesay Teen Center, once deserted, suddenly bustled seven days a week.

  “You said you were here for the long haul,” Adam murmured.

  “Come on. I’m not wanted here.”

  “You only think that ’cause of what my dad said to you. About taking an Indian’s job?”

  “I’m not holding any grudges.”

  On a lark, Jeff had applied for the manager’s position straight out of college and was surprised when he was hired. He had put himself through school at Arizona State, working as a residence counselor in a troubled-boys home in Phoenix. By his senior year he was practically running the place. The Chief Alchesay Teen Center, then, had seemed like a manageable new challenge. Before graduation last May he’d come up to the reservation, four hours from Phoenix, for the interview. The center, he learned, had been organized through the donations of all twelve churches in town and grants from both Indian Health Services and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Its advisory board—three priests, a female IHS official, and Adam’s father, Councilman Dale—had been impressed by his experience in working with troubled teens. During the interview they complimented his knowledge of Apache history (he had always read heavily on the Southwest). Later he was told everyone on the board had chosen him over four other candidates—everyone except Adam’s father, who had refused to accept the hiring of a white man for the position.

  The center occupied the abandoned movie theater next to the post office in the Commercial Center, the town’s single burnt-out strip mall. The main room had been converted into a small auditorium, and adjoining that was a library, an arts and crafts room, and a game room. As manager Jeff had run a program of after-school activities, including Friday night films on the wide-screen television. Teens could sign out boom boxes. The dance floor on the stage had a large stereo and two enormous speakers hanging high on the wall, so the kids could come in and “jam out.” Through donations from two pharmaceutical companies in Phoenix, Jeff had built a computer center and by Christmas stocked it with fourteen Macs and three color printers. The meeting hall he repaneled, and in the winter, officials from IHS used the center for counseling programs on teen pregnancy and diabetes. He’d had plans to buy a drum set and organize a local rock band.

  The job came with a small, rent-subsidized house up by the Day School, where he retired late at night, the sounds of blaring metal music and screaming teenagers echoing in his head. He read in the torn-up armchair he’d owned since college and slept on a mattress on the floor. He had never gotten around to furnishing his place; his salary had been paltry, and though officially the teen center required fewer hours than the boys’ home in Phoenix, he volunteered most weekends in order to keep it open.

  Adam was saying, “You think it’s hopeless, then. You think we’re hopeless, isn’t it.”

  “How do you want me to answer that, Adam? I don’t think you’re hopeless. Get yourself to college. Find someplace better than this town, someplace with a future.”

  “I’m talking about the tribe.”

  Jeff didn’t answer. Adam had given more than his share of time to the center too. He’d helped Jeff keep some semblance of control when fights broke out, when neighborhood kids would show up high on weed or glue, when strangers from other towns tried to get in. Without his help, Jeff knew he never would have survived the job for more than a couple of months.

  Now a truck had pulled off the road, facing them, and an entire family—the Peaches—sprang out. The five children were all named after Chris, the father. There were Kristen and Kristina and Krissy and Krista, and the only boy, Chris Junior. Jeff could never keep the names straight.

  One of the children—Krissy, perhaps?—hustled straight to Jeff’s thrift-store rowing machine and started kicking the handles back and forth. Mrs. Peaches was piling up dishes and Tupperware in her arms. Two of the younger girls adjusted the size of his baseball caps, then tried them on. Chris Senior lifted a double-bladed camping ax off the blanket and ran his finger along the dull edges. “How much?” he asked.

  Jeff said he could have it for a buck.

  “The Tupperware?” Mrs. Peaches yelled over the shouts of the children.

  “You can have all the plates and silverware. Three dollars.”

  “Dad! Dad!” screamed whichever Kris was on the rowing machine.

  Mr. Peaches pointed over to her. “How much for that thing?”

  “I’m trying to get rid of it. You just take it.”

  Chris Senior stood over the rowing machine, his hands on his hips; then he adjusted his large black sunglasses. Slowly he pushed his daughter off the seat, sat down, and started rowing, alternating arms.

  Adam walked over to help him. “Do them both at the same time, like this. Build your back muscles up something big, isn’t it?”

  “You’re never gonna use it,” Mrs. Peaches was mumbling. “It’s gonna sit and take up space.”

  In his denim shirt and Stetson hat, the large man was getting into a rhythm, pumping his arms furiously. “I’ll use it,” he said. “Just like this, I’ll use it.”

  The girls circled around their father. “Let me! Let me!” Mr. Peaches wiped the sweat off his forehead.

  Adam yelled, “Help your husband get rid of that gut, eh, Mrs. Peaches?” She raised her eyebrows and went back to examining Jeff’s silverware.

  In a few minutes they left, the cookware and the dishes and the rowing machine piled into the back
of the truck, as were the children, each wearing a different-color ASU cap. Jeff had charged them ten bucks for everything.

  Adam watched them drive away. He was silent for a few minutes, sitting on the edge of Jeff’s blanket, staring out at the empty road. Adam had thin arms, a chest that showed mostly ribs when he played in pickup basketball games, but his shoulders were well defined and his fingers especially long. He slid over into the shade. “Don’t want to get any darker,” he’d once told Jeff. Jeff, for his part, didn’t mind picking up a little sun, though he’d have to be careful—the pale skin on his legs was already burning. He was wearing worn running sneakers without socks, and he noticed his ankles were filthy, covered in the red dust that blanketed the town.

  “The teen center,” he said. “I want to know, Adam, why’d they fuck it up? Maybe you understand something I don’t?” When he had first arrived last summer, he’d been convinced the center was what this place needed. People in Red Cliff had spent a lot of money on it, years of hard work. “I don’t get it. It was a gift to the community.”

  “Maybe someone here didn’t want your gifts.”

  “You think that’s true?”

  Adam was silent. No, Jeff thought, the kids had liked it, and they had come. They played pool, Ping-Pong, foosball. Video games on the computers. They checked out magazines from the library: Sports Illustrated, Field and Stream, Seventeen. They weren’t home arguing with their parents, or out in the woods all tanked up, or brawling, or getting each other pregnant.

  He heard the sound of a truck racing across the bridge, and suddenly a purple Toyota, freshly washed, squealed its brakes and skidded onto the gravel. Jeff spit, staring out at the red sandstone bluffs in the distance. The truck door slammed, and he heard Levi, Adam’s cousin, greeting them. The voice was guttural and bear-like. Jeff said nothing in return.

  “Hartig!” Levi was calling. “Hey, Hartig, you selling this shit?” He was pointing at the blanket with the television and the stack of CDs.

  Jeff nodded, clenching his lips.

  “How much this TV?”

  He considered not answering, then changed his mind. “Sixty dollars,” he shouted.

  “Sixty dollars!” Levi yelled. “You being stingy with me?”

  “Cost me a hundred,” Jeff said under his breath. After months of grief and confrontations, he wasn’t going to give in to this kid. Levi was stocky and had swollen, permanently bloodshot eyes. He was famous in Red Cliff for his tremendous appetite. At a teen center barbecue Jeff had seen him eat eleven hamburgers with a double helping of onions and hot sauce. He also possessed artistic gifts: last fall he had painted an eagle and a roadrunner mural on the wall outside Jeff’s office. That mural, too, had been defaced the day before.

  “I’ll give you twenty.”

  “Sixty.”

  “You keep it then. I got enough for a while, keep me busy.” Levi laughed, patting his cousin on the back. “You going over there?” he asked Adam quietly, referring to the Sunrise Dance for Adam’s sister, Verdena. “You need a ride?”

  “I’ll be over in a little bit. Nothing going on till six.”

  Levi said something to Adam in Apache, pointing to Jeff’s truck. In English he said, “It’s a piece of shit.”

  Adam shook his head. When Levi left, he sat back down in the shade by Jeff. “I thought you was just getting rid of this stuff?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sixty dollars for that TV?”

  “What’d Levi want?”

  “Wanted to know if you agreed to sell me your truck.”

  “I told you I would.”

  “You haven’t said a price.”

  “Two thousand.”

  Adam’s eyes opened in surprise, but he held back the smile.

  Jeff said, “I’m only doing this for you. For all your help. And I need a ride down to Phoenix on Sunday.”

  “I gotta ask my dad.”

  “You’ll let me know.”

  Adam lowered his voice. “You shouldn’t have been so strict all the time.”

  “Strict?”

  “You shouldn’t have kicked people out so fast.”

  “Who’d I kick out?” If the kids had been drunk, or high, or dealing, they couldn’t come in. It was a teen center, and he was the manager. There were rules. He was just trying to keep it safe. “We never kicked anyone out,” he said. “We asked them to leave for the night. They were always invited back.”

  “Except Levi.”

  “Oh, come on.” Jeff tossed a white rock at the trunk of the Cottonwood. He missed.

  “You should have let him back in.”

  “You’re saying that because he’s your friend.”

  “My cousin.”

  “So he can break the rules, because he’s your cousin?”

  “I’m just saying, you shouldn’t have kicked him out so many times.”

  “I liked Levi. I wanted him to hang out. I used to ask him to come by the center in the afternoons, I’d tutor him for the math GED. He ever come? He’s a fuckup, your cousin. I’m sorry I’ve got to say that. You know it, though.”

  Adam didn’t answer. For three years, Jeff knew, Adam had been trying to get his cousin to come back to school with him. The town’s biggest problem was its lack of a real high school. Kids attended elementary at the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Day School on the hill or at the Lutheran school behind the red church. Most stopped there. Children who wanted to complete their education at a real high school had to endure a sixty-mile bus ride, each way, through the mountains to Blackriver. Red Cliff had no tax base to fund a school of its own, and though the councilman had campaigned for funds from the state congressmen and the BIA, the town was too small—it was too easy to ignore.

  A few years ago Adam’s father had appointed himself head of the school board and called for a series of emergency meetings. He railed at the passivity of the other board members. He explored far-fetched possibilities and came up with a plan. The Day School made extra money: all its students qualified for federal lunch programs and special ed funds. Where did that money go—toward unread textbooks, canned lunch spinach, Halloween decorations? If a little of this money was skimmed, ever so gently, off the top, they would have enough to start a high school and eventually make it grow. So the school board redirected Title IX funds into a private account in the Cottonwood Gymnasium’s name and laid a concrete foundation at the edge of the Day School playground. A double trailer was towed to the site; the board recruited two retired Mormon teachers from town. And Red Cliff High opened that fall—the class of 1993, four students, including Adam.

  “You’ll see. This is just a start,” the councilman had promised. “We’ll do it our way, we’ll do it ourselves.” He talked all the time about building a reservation casino to bring in real money. That would fund a real high school. He swore to Adam that one day their school would have everything other American children had: a gymnasium with bleachers, a library with computers, a morning bell. They’d even have Apache cheerleaders. “Why not?” he’d ask.

  Four years later they still had none of that. Adam had suffered through these years in his father’s trailer against his will—he had wanted to play basketball for Blackriver High—but he hadn’t stopped trying to convince his friends to attend school with him.

  Now Jeff asked, “Did Levi have something to do with the teen center? If you know, you’ve got to tell me.”

  Adam started unlacing his high-tops, then relacing them. Jeff lifted his eyes to the blank blue sky. In the distance a falcon was circling in slow motion over the canyons and arroyos. Jeff said, “The police report says no one broke in. Someone got hold of a key.”

  “They don’t know that,” Adam said. “Someone could’ve just busted the door open.”

  Jeff stared at him. “No evidence of forced entry. Someone had a copy of a key, Adam. It wasn’t my key.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Jeff stood and moved the guitar to make it more visible from the road. He cons
idered for a moment keeping it. His father had taught him his first chords back in eighth grade. Jeff had always played passably by ear and had even begun to write his own songs—slow, wistful folk and blues, mostly. But he’d never learned to read music, and he knew he had no real talent. He walked back over to Adam, who was concentrating on his sneakers. Jeff stood over him. “When I hired you, I gave you a break. You wanted things to change here. I trusted your judgment.”

  Adam kicked at the dirt. “You still coming to the Sunrise tomorrow morning?”

  “Doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “You gotta come. You want to see the real Apache? This is it.”

  “Is this an apology?”

  “I’m just saying—” His voice softened. “My sister asked if you’d come.”

  “Your dad’ll be there.”

  “There’ll be so many people, he won’t even see you.”

  “I don’t know.” Jeff shook his head, stepped away from Adam, and glanced down at the long curve in the road. He had been looking forward to the Sunrise Dance—the Ceremony of Changing Woman—for months. Adam’s younger sister had just turned thirteen, and for four days the extended family camped in the woods in branch wickiups, sharing feasts with the entire town. Tomorrow, at dawn, Verdena would become Changing Woman incarnate, the first Person, the only survivor of the great flood, mother of the Ndee. For a day she would share the blessings and bounty of her womanhood with all who came to witness the ceremony. The community would re-create itself, as it had for centuries. But now, instead of the connection Jeff had hoped to feel, the tiny step closer to understanding these people, he would watch from a distance, as a visitor who had descended on the tribe and just as quickly abandoned them, as little more than a tourist.