Chapter 7
The summer before Lu and I arrived in town, someone torched Mildred High School, Home of the Fighting Common Nighthawks. The arson took place on the eve of the final day of school, and made possible the finest hour of the Mildred Volunteer Fire Department, which had never before had to deal with a structural fire of such magnitude. Stomping about in their oversized boots and new slickers trimmed in safety-reflective yellow-green, the firefighters managed to prevent the complete destruction of the building, but the fire caused the postponement of commencement exercises, which had to be moved outdoors to the James Stirling Recreation Park and Softball Field. Luckily the weather, often unstable at that time of year, continued clear, and the graduation went off all right. It was widely believed that at least one of the 18 graduates who proudly crossed the portable stage, actually the trailer of a flatbed truck draped with festive bunting, was responsible for the blaze.
Some of the townspeople dismissed the fire as a traditional senior prank that had gotten out of control; others hinted at something darker than mere adolescent highjinks. Questions were asked, on one side, about the increasingly repressive culture of the school under its new principal, Javier Shivwits, who was attempting to emphasize academics and downplay sports, and, on the other, about the malign influence of the permissive coastal California cultures that were lapping up onto the western foothills and even beginning to spill over some of the lower passes into the Eastern Sierra, in a caustic trickle that was eating away at the traditional values of the region. Though there were plenty of theories about who was responsible, the culprit was never brought to justice, so the question of his or her motivation remained an open one.
Everyone in the suburbs and rural zones knows the lore of the urban public high school – embattled administrators barricaded in their offices, hallways flooded with fire hoses, desks tossed out third-story windows onto strolling passersby, squirming graffiti on the walls, doors torn off the stalls in the restrooms and shit smeared on the floors, gangfights in the auditorium, methamphetamines on the cafeteria menu, teachers assassinated at their blackboards with switchblades or Saturday Night Specials. In the same way, city teachers hear tales about the sullen, combative Caucasian kids of the rural schools, with their savagely repressed home lives and the deceptive bucolic courtesy that disguises a dangerous explosiveness and diabolical expertise with machinery and weapons – teachers’ cars hot-wired and driven into cattle-watering tanks, and the teachers themselves drilled from afar with deer rifles while innocently turning the warm garbage in their compost heaps. The school-burning was in fact much worse than any act of vandalism I had ever encountered in my long urban teaching career, and it confirmed and encapsulated some misgivings I had about our move from San Francisco to the wilderness.
But I discovered that teaching at Mildred High School wasn’t really very different from teaching at General Benjamin “Beast” Butler High School in San Francisco. The school was newer, cleaner, and better maintained, of course (once it was rebuilt, that is; for the year after the fire, classes were conducted in a row of double-wide trailers tractored in for the purpose), and the children of the lonely desert countryside did indeed tend to be somewhat quieter and more polite than those raised in the negligent bedlam of city housing projects, the downside being that they were also more guarded and enigmatic. But our aging Honda Civic was never molested, no matter how much homework I assigned, and deer rifles were not in evidence, at least not in school, although every highway sign had its bouquet of bullet holes, as if swarms of bullheaded metal bees patrolled all the roads.
My new colleagues at Mildred High also seemed to present more of a cross-section of wholesome Americana than the crowd at Ben Butler. Most urban teachers are quite normal, of course, but there is a subset whose somewhat rumpled and too-oft-worn clothes and permanently furrowed brows seem to signal their status as survivors of a psychological holocaust of some kind. Or maybe it’s just that big-city public school teaching, with its difficult-to-quantify product (what DO we want our high school graduates to be, after all?), its protective unions, and its lackadaisical oversight by administrators who are themselves often refugees from the turbulence of the classroom, provides a relatively safe habitat for the occasional odd duck who likes to paddle among the broken reeds at the fringes of the mainstream.
Mildred High School, however, had only seven teachers, and any true eccentricity would have stood out boldly in such a small crowd, to be ruthlessly pruned by the principal or school board. Not to mention that the recognized boundaries of acceptable behavior were a good deal narrower than they were in the urban environment. Matt Matawan, as previously mentioned, was the lone science teacher, now that Parnell had finally retired. The paralyzingly beautiful Myrtle Bench taught all the math classes, Genevieve “Madame” Malesherbes covered French, Spanish, and Latin, and Dale Twombly did most of the literature and composition classes. I, of course, had social studies, everything from European history to economics to psychology, not because I was expert in those fields but because I knew slightly more about most of them than any other one teacher in the school. Our swing man was Tucker Wing, who handled the miscellaneous stuff that nobody else wanted – Driver’s Ed, career counseling, Phys Ed, that kind of thing – along with the occasional surplus class in almost any subject. He also had the controversial “Family Life” (read: sex education). His status as the only Asian in town seemed somehow to derail any potential flareups about the content of the course. Visual and performing arts classes had to be canceled when Janet Blythe went into hospice, and no replacement for her had yet been found or, as far as anyone could tell, searched for.
School started up again the day after New Years. I don’t like that time of year very much, being the kind of person who gets depressed if he doesn’t get plenty of sunlight on the pineal gland. I hate walking to school through the cold and dark. The job being what it is, I often end up walking home in the dark as well. Of course, I have opportunities to duck outside a few times during the day and rest my eyes on the mountains and the towers of cumulus and the distant desert horizons, which usually does me some good. But the winter skies are often cloudy all day, and the gloom can lure me into a mental sink. I think the darkness and gray weather also tend to make the kids lethargic; and of course the pit of winter and the halfway point of the school year coincide. We’re already tired, and spring break and summer seem a long way off.
Luckily the kids, stimulated by the wild speculations of their elders, were still buzzing about the Christmas Eve lights. I decided to go with the flow on the first day back by making a point about scientific reasoning. It seemed to me I was really doing Matt Matawan’s job for him, but it was clear from the website that he wasn’t going to do it himself.
“ ‘Occam’s Razor’,” I read to the seniors in my American Democracy class from Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, “ ‘[William of Ockham]: a scientific and philosophical rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities.’ Do you get what they’re driving at here?”
“Yes, Mr. Houba, we know what you’re trying to do,” said Brad Pentane, sarcastically. “Your meteor theory may be natural, but it isn’t very simple. They didn’t just go streaking across the sky like shooting stars. I don’t see how you can explain the way they stopped and started. And then they landed up there on Devil’s Table.”
“Wouldn’t they look like they weren’t moving if they were coming straight toward us?” I said, pretending to know more about geometry than I really did. They all looked at me thoughtfully, but I could tell they weren’t convinced.
“Well then, why would they start moving again?” asked Peggy Wilco, who was wearing a baseball cap, against school regulations, with her blond ponytail sticking out through the gap in the back.
“I don’t know the detail
s,” I said. “But I’m sure there’s an explanation. Miss Bench could probably explain it to you, or maybe Mr. Matawan.”
“Mr. Matawan told us he thinks it may have been extraterrestrials,” said Brad. “He didn’t want to say it right out, but that’s what he thinks.”
“Yeah, I know he’s toying with that idea. I’ll just point out that he’s already been up on Devil’s Table looking for signs that they landed there, but he hasn’t found anything, and neither has anyone else. The point of Occam’s Razor isn’t so much the simplicity, anyway. A wrong theory can be very simple. It’s really that business about known quantities. You’re not supposed to bring in supernatural explanations if there are natural ones that will work. Don’t multiply entities unnecessarily. Mr. Gish, my high school geometry teacher, used to annoy us by telling us the sound of the air blowing in through the heating ducts was actually the breathing of a giant who lived under the school.”
We all sat listening to the sound of the forced air heating for a few seconds. “We couldn’t prove he was wrong,” I went on. “We’d say ‘Well, we could go down to the basement and look.’ And he’d say ‘The giant lives in the ground below the basement.’ ‘Well then, we could dig up the floor down there.’ ‘How do you know how deep he is?’ ‘We could just keep digging, until it was so deep that even if he was there, you wouldn’t be able to hear his breathing up in the classroom.’ ‘Well, suppose he’s an invisible giant?’ At that point what could we say? But he knew, and we knew, there was no giant living in the basement. The point was not to use a supernatural explanation when there was a perfectly good natural one – the heating system. Of course, William of Ockham got thrown in jail for heresy.”
“Why didn’t you just get the janitor to turn off the heat, and see if the noise stopped?” Arnold Barns spoke up from his usual seat, as far back in the room as he could get. “Anyway, that’s not what William of Ockham said. He didn’t say you couldn’t bring in a supernatural explanation. He just said you had to suspend judgment if there was a reasonable natural explanation. There could have been a giant living in the basement of your school. It was more likely that it was the heating system, but you couldn’t be sure, at least not without tearing up the whole building. And he didn’t get thrown in jail, he just got excommunicated because he called the Pope a heretic.”
Anyone who’s ever taught high school kids, maybe even middle school, knows that every year there’s at least one who inspires in his teachers a kind of schizophrenia. I say “his” because it’s usually a boy, the girls tending to deploy a somewhat different set of techniques for disordering the adult mind. The characteristic qualities of this kid are intellectual brilliance, usually coupled with a quick and acid tongue; the kind of amoral creativity that is probably responsible for some of our greatest works of arts and the most grotesque serial murders; a precocious instinctive grasp of psychology; and a profound (and often, it must be admitted, justified) cynicism about adult motivation; all catalyzed by an irrepressible will to disrupt. To make things more difficult, curiosity, humor, and an incongruous naivete are often also part of the package.
The glinting blade of this sort of personality can effortlessly cleave teachers from their best impulses – their real desire to instruct, their ambivalent love for the innocent and ruthless teenage psyche, their sympathy for the anxious searchings of untrained minds – almost without their being aware of it; so that at one moment they’re happily facilitating a stimulating discussion of the nationalist motives that drove the Congress of Vienna and at the next they’re issuing Hitlerian threats of detention and telephone calls to parents, with red faces and veins pumping obscenely in their temples.
Arnold Barns had been the very model of this kind of student at Mildred High School for all four of his years there. Luckily, I’d first encountered him when he was still only a sophomore, before his talents had fully flowered. Our few early run-ins had taught me the futility of trying to outdo him or assert direct control. I had adopted instead a generally successful policy of civil disobedience: complete refusal to respond to his provocations, frosted with a light sarcasm intended to suggest that my worldview encompassed and trivialized his, along with a passionless delivery that of course masked a volcano of irritation.
It was far from the first time that Arnold Barns had deployed his vast reading for the purpose of busting my chops in class. In fact, I usually welcomed his attacks, because when he wasn’t harassing me he was sitting back there turned sideways in the desk that was way too small for him and staring out the window, as if even the gray winter sky were far more interesting than anything I could tell him about the American judiciary system. I secretly agreed with this judgment, which may explain why the students’ evaluations of my teaching at the end of the year were invariably rather lackluster. Matt Matawan, on the other hand, always got very high ratings. He’s an enthusiastic son of a bitch, in addition to which he takes his kids to the sewer pond. Myrtle Bench also received reviews much better than mine, but then no one was likely to give Aphrodite a bad mark for her classroom management skills.
“Arnold is right,” I admitted. “It’s possible that those lights were an alien spacecraft, or even a sign from Heaven. That’s what my wife thinks, and Father MacGill, I guess. But isn’t it more likely that they were some natural phenomenon, like meteors? Just like the heating system was a more likely explanation than the giant. We don’t know for sure, so we have to suspend our judgment, as Arnold says. But if you had to bet on it, what would you say?”
“Why were there two of them at exactly the same time? Isn’t that kind of unlikely?” Peggy Wilco had been emboldened by Arnold’s lethargic attack on my erudition.
“And they were moving exactly together, like they were coordinated,” added Brad.
“I’m not an astronomer, for god’s sake,” I said. “I’m sure they could explain it to you. How about a little extra credit project. Somebody want to do a little research on the Internet and find out what the astronomers are saying?” No hands were raised. They knew I wasn’t going to give anybody less than a B anyway.
“You should do it, Mr. Houba,” said Peggy. “You’re the one who thinks they were meteors. Everyone else thinks they were spaceships.”
“Not everyone. I told you about my wife. And there’s another theory going around, that it was the CIA or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Not to mention UFOny.”
“We already asked Mr. Twombly,” said Brad, “but he won’t tell us if he had anything to do with it. He just keeps saying ‘A little uncertainty is good for the human spirit.’ ”
Peggy said “I think our theory’s as good as yours. We can’t prove they were spaceships, and you can’t prove they were meteors. What’s the difference?”
“I can’t prove they weren’t a precision dance team of chocolate-dipped marshmallows, either!” I was beginning to get exasperated by their obtuseness. “Does that mean the dancing marshmallow theory has the same status as any other one?” Arnold was smiling faintly, contemptuously, from the back row. I was sure if he were propounding the meteor theory himself he’d have some piece of unassailable evidence to trot out. But he wasn’t about to rescue me.
“What do you think, Arnold?” I said, hoping I might at least get him to commit himself, instead of just hanging back there with his superior air.
He said, “Us Native Americans have our own ideas about those things. But aren’t we not supposed to talk about religion in the classroom?”
“Not at all. We can talk about religion, we just can’t push any particular religion. What’s the Native American point of view?”
“Well, there are lots of them. Which one do you want?” he drawled.
“Why don’t you give us some options. Then maybe we can apply Occam’s Razor to them.”
“Star shit,” he said, leaning back and stretching out his legs. “That’s my personal favorite.” Like Peggy, Arnold had a ponytail hanging out through the back of his extralegal baseball cap. His
was a lustrous black, however. The other kids giggled and watched me to see how I’d deal with this provocation.
“You want to explain?” I said. One thing about teaching in the San Francisco School District is that you learn not to get bent out of shape by words like “shit” in the classroom.
“Just what I said. What you call shooting stars are really just the stars taking a shit.”
“OK, but then aren’t you saying they were meteors? That’s really the same as my theory, except we have different explanations for the origin of the meteors. And anyway, how does your theory explain the way they started and stopped up there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the stars have irritable bowel syndrome. Anyway, mine’s about as good as yours, or as bad.”
This obviously wasn’t getting us anywhere, but it was typical of Arnold Barns’s dismissive approach to the formal educational endeavor. As I’d discovered by examining his cumulative file the first time he’d hassled me in class, Arnold lived with his mother in Mildred’s slum, which a tourist would notice only by accidentally following the sandy ruts back up into one of the narrow draws that snake down out of the mountains to the west of town. It was a sad collection of trailers and listing recreational vehicles, slumped in their final resting place amid a sculpture garden of rusting appliances, unidentifiable lumber and sheetrock residues, and the gradually accreting glass, plastic, aluminum, and paper waste of the depressed inhabitants.
Arnold was one-quarter Chumash Indian, but his mother, who had been fortunate enough to land a job cleaning rooms for minimum wage at the Travelodge on the north edge of town, was Vietnamese. The Travelodge was the only motel in town that had any business in the winter, so Mrs. Barns was able to cling to her job on a part-time basis through the cold months. The file, of course, gave no hint of how she had fetched up here in the Eastern Sierra, or who or where Arnold’s father was. His test scores were stratospheric, while his grades tended to dribble off the other end of the spectrum, with occasional spikes when some teacher managed to get his attention temporarily. He was also a brilliant but erratic tri-sport athlete, at one moment casually running back a kickoff 95 yards for a touchdown and at the next jeopardizing his quarterback’s life by not bothering to block a blitzing linebacker.
“There’s never been a verifiable sighting of an extraterrestrial landing on this planet,” I stated pompously, “whereas plenty of people have seen meteors land. A few people have even been hit by them. One came through the ceiling of somebody’s dining room a few years back. You can see them in museums. The meteors, I mean. The scientists find them in Antarctica all the time, sitting out on the ice. They actually go out there looking for them. When was the last time you saw an extraterrestrial?”
“Christmas Eve!” yelled Peggy Wilco, and everybody laughed again.
Brad Pentane said “A hundred years ago there had never been a verifiable sighting of a smart phone, but now they’re all over the place. That doesn’t prove anything. There has to be a first time.”
I threw up my hands, and avenged myself on them by assigning them to poll their parents’ theories about the lights, and their reasons, and write them up in a two-page essay. My sadistic pleasure at their groans was slightly dampened by the knowledge that I’d have to read the damn things.
“Things are poppin’, Houba,” Matt Matawan told me at lunchtime in the teachers’ lounge. Matt’s lunch invariably consisted of two giant sandwiches, white bread slathered with mustard and mayonnaise, embracing some kind of meat, some kind of cheese, and a few leaves of generic greenery. After consuming those, he would clear his palate with grapes or chunks of seasonal fruit and then finish it all off with a chocolate chip cookie or two. The result of all this, as he moved into his late 40s, had been a noticeable rotundity around the middle, which he carried nonchalantly, knowing it didn’t at all diminish his emanations of power and inexhaustible energy. All that food, along with Matt himself, left very little room for me and my carrot strips and peanut butter sandwich, especially since the teachers’ lounge was also home to the rattling copy machine, the paper cutter, the coffee maker, and a table, too wide for the room, at which all seven teachers of Mildred High School could sit uncomfortably, along with the principal, Javier Shivwits, for our monthly meetings. Today, however, only Myrtle Bench was seated at the far end of the table, thoughtfully nibbling a radish with perfect white teeth.
Matt motioned toward the single window, through which I could see the ridge of the Ash Mountains covered with pristine winter snow rendered blue by distance and, rearing up behind and above them, lofty eruptions of cumulus. “I’m getting more sightings every day,” he said, “all up and down the Front. A couple more from Reno even.”
“Did the ones from Reno include their breathalyzer test results?” I said.
“Very funny. I got a real eye-opener on Saturday night. It’s anonymous, but pretty convincing. Someone who actually saw something land up on Devil’s Table.”
“Really?” I said, a mouthful of peanut butter helping me to feign indifference. “You don’t mean that horseback-riding physicist woman, do you?”
“Exactly.”
“But who could it be? There’s nobody like that living around here.” Could he really be swallowing the hook like this? I was shaken.
“She’s obviously very uncomfortable with the whole thing,” he agreed. “That just makes it all the more convincing, as far as I’m concerned. It’s probably someone who’s deliberately disguising herself, or himself.”
“Or a complete fake!” I blurted. “Aren’t you afraid it’s just one of the kids, yanking your chain? Or how about Don Swayzee? He’s the only one I know who rides his horse up there.”
“It doesn’t sound like a kid, and definitely not like Don. It’s too carefully written, and the details have the ring of truth.”
I didn’t know what to say. Part of me was flattered that he’d found my impromptu composition so believable, but mostly I was appalled that my little joke, instead of administering the jolt of reality I’d intended, seemed to be providing more fuel for the fever that was consuming my friend’s brain. Apparently I’d been too conservative. I should have made her an exotic dancer with a day job in the Department of Ursine Abnormal Psychology at Yale. But then I had to ask myself just how malicious my intent had been. I chewed noncommittally.
“There’s definitely something happening, man, whether you want to believe it or not,” Matt continued. “I don’t know what it is, but I’m not going to sit on my hands. I’m making a spreadsheet, trying to classify and collate all the details in the various reports. There are so many postings now, I’m starting to lose control of the big picture. Thanks for posting yours, by the way. And you too, Miss Bench.” Myrtle Bench nodded slightly, without looking at us, and carefully pushed her raven tresses back behind her ear so as not to interfere with her third radish. Matt had been working on Myrtle for at least three years, without putting any kind of nick in her enamel. At this point he just checked her out absent-mindedly every day, the way you’d glance at the century plant in your back yard to see if it had bloomed.
“I want you to come out to Devil’s Table with me for a while after school,” he said. “I need to see if I can verify any of the particle physicist’s details. Plus I’ve been getting a few reports from around town about unusual lights out on the desert and I want to check it out. Maybe it’s nothing, but you never know. We might find some signs.”
“Why me? Why don’t you get the Cowboys or a couple of the kids? You know I belong to the meteor school of thought. If I’m right you aint gonna find jack shit out there.”
“Exactly why I want you along. I need someone to keep me honest.” Apparently he hadn’t gone completely woo-woo yet. “Anyway, Parnell’s coming along too, so you’ll have a partner in your skepticism,” he added.
“What’s his theory?” I said.
“Which one? Last time I talked to him he claimed we’re being invaded by a race of super-intelligent 4-watt nig
htlight bulbs. I don’t think he has a real theory. He’s says he’s given up on theories since he retired. The world is just a big drunken brawl of unconnected phenomena as far as he’s concerned.” Matt polished off the last crust of sandwich #2 and started on his grapes. Down at the end of the table Myrtle raised a very thin cracker to her red red lips and bit a couple of millimeters off one corner. Maybe she was only pretending to eat, so as not to raise any suspicions amongst us mortals. Outside the window time seemed to have stopped – the same clouds were brooding, apparently unaltered, over the same distant ridge. I’ve noticed that although all cumulus are different, they somehow all look the same. You can find a hippopotamus in any of them.
“Meet me in front of school at 3:30,” Matt said. “We’ll pick up Parnell and go drive around the Point a little bit. It’s a nice afternoon anyway.” I went back to my room to cue up a couple of video clips about the civil rights movement, leaving Matt working on his cookies and glancing occasionally at Myrtle, trying to think of the words that would awaken her from her spell.
A Burned-Over District Page 7