Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Fuck Keith Durochie.”

  Russ took an anger-managing breath. “What exactly is your grievance?”

  “Fuck Keith Durochie. That’s my grievance. Get the fuck out of here—that’s my grievance.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but this is council land, and we have an invitation to be here. We will stay at the school and be gone in a week.”

  “You people are polluters. You can pollute Chicago, but this isn’t Chicago. I don’t want to see you here tomorrow.”

  “Then you’ll just have to look the other way. We’re not leaving.”

  The man spat on the ground, not directly at Russ, but close. “You had your warning.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  The man turned away and walked toward his companions.

  “Hey, hey,” Russ shouted, “are you threatening me?”

  Again, over the shoulder, the middle finger.

  Russ hadn’t been so angry since he fought with Marion at Christmas. He stalked past the bus, back down to the chapter house, and found Daisy stooped in the light of a lantern, her expression unreadable. As the truck screamed past them, he asked her who the young man was.

  “Clyde,” she said. “He has an angry spirit.”

  “Do you know what his problem with Keith is?”

  “He’s angry at Keith.”

  “I can see that. But why?”

  Daisy smiled at the ground. “It’s not our business.”

  “Do you think it’s safe for us to be here?”

  “Stay close to the school.”

  “But do you think we’ll be safe?”

  “Stay close to the school. We’ll have breakfast for you in the morning.”

  The sensible thing to do was to concede defeat and retreat to Many Farms, but Russ’s blood was raging with testosterone. He felt wronged and misunderstood, and the progress he’d made with Frances had elevated his hormone levels. When he returned to the bus and saw the worry and the admiration in her face, the hormones urged him to stand his ground.

  The following day, Palm Sunday, passed without a sign of Clyde. Russ established a perimeter comprising the table of land on which the school was set, a lower yard with a netless basketball hoop, and the arroyo behind it. Sunday was a rest day, and it was hard on the kids to be surrounded by interesting country and not be allowed to explore it, but they had their relationships and their suntans to work on, their books and their playing cards, their guitars. Russ was grateful to see Carolyn Polley, who was going to be a fine Christian minister, introducing Frances to the various girls. He was struck, as he’d been when he first took Frances to Theo Crenshaw’s church, by her hesitancy in an unfamiliar setting, and again it moved him.

  Ted Jernigan had a problem with the mandate. While Russ and the other alumni adviser, Craig Dilkes, were inventorying the ramp-building supplies, which had been dumped in an otherwise empty classroom, Ted remarked that the money might better have been spent on central heating.

  “Government money comes with mandates,” Russ said.

  “And I’m saying it’s an idiotic mandate.”

  Testosterone stirred in Russ. “I’ll remind you,” he said, “that we’re mainly here for ourselves. The point is personal growth, individually and as a group. If the Navajos want handicapped ramps, that’s good enough for me.”

  “How does a kid in a wheelchair get up that road? How does he get across the ditch? Are they planning on landing him in a helicopter?”

  “You can lead the bookcase-building crew. Would that meet your high standard of utility?”

  The sarcasm drew a frown from Ted. “I don’t get you.”

  “What don’t you get?”

  “That was quite the welcoming committee last night. We might as well be under siege—I don’t get why you’re so hell-bent on staying.”

  “I just explained the point of it.”

  “But a place where the kids can’t even take a shower? When we’re obviously not wanted?”

  “If you don’t like it here, I can find you a ride back to Many Farms.”

  “You’re telling me you don’t think this is dangerous.”

  “Kitsillie can be rough,” Craig Dilkes interposed. He’d been a sophomore on the fellowship’s first trip to Arizona. “It’s the roughness that really pulls the group together—people taking care of each other.”

  “Maybe,” Ted said. “Provided no one gets hurt. If someone gets hurt, in a place we should know better than to be, the buck stops with the leader.”

  He left the room, and Craig raised his eyebrows. They were blonder than his mop of red hair. “I’m not liking the vibe here.”

  With Craig, Russ could be honest. “I agree,” he said. “Keith warned me about it.”

  “There’s that, but I meant Ted.”

  In the evening, the group gathered around a single flame in their dark room. The “candle” began with the singing of two songs and the giving of what Ambrose called strokes—a stroke to someone for having a great sense of humor, a stroke for trading potatoes for nasty turnips, a stroke for taking a risk in a new relationship, a stroke for being smart, a stroke for letting go of being smart and speaking from the heart, a stroke for sharing a candy bar, a stroke for teaching someone how to tie a bandanna. Frances herself spoke up and stroked the group for welcoming a middle-aged housewife. Kim Perkins, whom Russ had so far left alone, owing to his troubles with her sister, surprised him with a stroke for his courage in handling the four angry Navajos. His heart swelled with the contrast to the last Arizona candle he’d led. Here, unpoisoned by Laura Dobrinsky and Sally Perkins, were forty good kids in thick socks and thermal underwear, with sleeping bags draped over their shoulders, and his beloved boy-haired woman on the far side of the circle, holding the hands of two girls she’d only just met. How much better his life was now! How nearly joyful again!

  And then Ted Jernigan raised the issue of security. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said, “but I don’t enjoy feeling threatened every time I step out for a meal. Do you mind if we have a show of hands? Does anyone else think we’d be better off closer to civilization?”

  The memory of Russ’s expulsion three years earlier, the traumatic call for a show of hands, triggered a fight-or-flight response in him.

  “Ted,” he said hormonally, “if you have an issue with my leadership, you should direct it to me personally.”

  “I already did that,” Ted said. “What I’m looking for now is a sense of the group. Is anyone else thinking what I’m thinking?”

  He raised his hand and looked around the circle. Russ glanced at Frances and found her smiling at him, perhaps conveying her opinion of Ted, her hand unraised. Among the kids, only Gerri Kohl, she of “velly stlange,” raised a hand. Russ, sensing victory, was all over it.

  “Gerri, thank you for your honesty,” he said, sounding like Ambrose. “That is a brave thing to admit. That took real guts.”

  Gerri lowered her hand. “It’s just one vote,” she said. “I can go with the flow.”

  Though Russ felt bad for her, knowing she wasn’t well liked, her unpopularity was an advantage to be pressed. “Ted is right,” he said. “The energy up here is somewhat negative. I intend to find out why and see what we can do to repair it. But if anyone else feels the same way Gerri does, now is the time to say so. If you’d rather go back to Many Farms, we can still be together as a group there.”

  “Is there hot water in Many Farms?” a girl asked.

  The discussion devolved into bitching and laughter at the bitching, followed by a final song and a closing prayer, which Russ handed off to Carolyn Polley. He blew out the candle, relit the Coleman lanterns, and checked the kerosene heater. There was a rush for the bathroom, which he’d plumbed three years earlier, and squeals of mock horror, the nightly Crossroads silliness, a sophomore boy prancing in his BVDs and singing “Let Me Entertain You,” an ovation for Darcie Mandell when she took off her sweatshirt, a screaming discovery of a rubber scorpion, cries of d
ismay at a leak in an air mattress, a posse of ticklers bearing down on Kim Perkins, David Goya pissed off at them. Russ tried to have a private word with Gerri Kohl, but she was embarrassed by her vote and didn’t want to talk about it.

  He was an old-school camper, eschewing a sleeping bag, preferring blankets. In dim moonlight, after the flashlights had gone out and the room had quieted, and after the comedy of breaking the silence with a loud random remark had been exhausted, he got up in his long johns and went down the hallway to take a late leak. Among his hundred worries was the bathroom water supply. The tank on the hill above the school was filled by a windmill, and he had no way to gauge if it was full enough to last them for a week in which he had to mix concrete and clean equipment. He’d asked the kids to flush only solid waste, but they were kids and forgot.

  Leaving the toilet unflushed, he opened the door and was startled by a figure standing outside it. In her own thermal underwear, her hunting jacket. She backed him into the bathroom and put her arms around him. He could feel her shivering, presumably with cold.

  “I made it through the first day,” she whispered.

  He clasped her delicate head to his chest, and his testosterone manifested itself in his long johns. A possibility he’d been too obtuse to be aware of on his previous Arizona trip, before Sally Perkins had appeared to him in a dream, a possibility inherent in the nighttime mixing of sexes in close quarters, on the margins of civilization, was now being realized.

  “I felt so lonely on the bus,” Frances whispered. “I was wishing I hadn’t come.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t even know what I’m doing here. It only makes sense with you.”

  In the intimacy of her you, he detected an invitation to kiss her. But she lowered her arms and turned away.

  “Just please include me,” she said. “I need to know you’re there.”

  The next morning, after a breakfast heavy on grits, he began work on the handicapped ramps. David Goya did the math on the ramp angles while Russ and Craig Dilkes sorted lumber for the pouring forms and the rest of the crew moved earth. In previous years, when Keith Durochie was involved, Russ had sent crews to nearby ranches. This year, with forty kids penned up at the school, where the only other work was building bookcases, he was at once overstaffed and worried that the ramp-building job was too large to finish in five days. Stripped down to a T-shirt, under a warming sun, he worked with the focus of his mother and his grandfather, and the long morning seemed gone in ten minutes. At lunchtime, he asked Daisy Benally again about Clyde’s grievance with Keith, but Daisy again declined to elaborate. He reproached himself for having been too scattered to get the story from Wanda when he had the chance. Now there was nothing to be done but wait for Wanda to come and explain.

  In the evening, when the group was eating dinner and he heard a vehicle on the school road, he briefly hoped it might be Wanda, but he didn’t stop to wonder where the vehicle was going. Not until it came roaring back down the hill did he wonder. Stepping outside, he saw Clyde’s truck turning onto the main road.

  Only he had seen it. The group’s merriment level was high; a piece of turnip had been flung. He had to pretend to be surprised when, after dinner, he led the group back up the hill and found the school door, which he’d been careful to padlock, standing open. The doorframe was splintered, the hasp dangling from the lock.

  David Goya, speaking for everyone, said, “Uh-oh.”

  Quietly, as a group, in wandering flashlight beams, they went inside and surveyed the room where they slept. Suitcases and duffel bags had been emptied on the floor, sleeping bags tossed around, a bottle of talcum powder thrown against a wall, but Bobby Jett’s expensive camera was sitting where he’d left it. Frances took Russ by the arm. He could feel her looking up at him, but he didn’t want to look at anyone. The fault was clearly his.

  “Where’s my guitar?” Darcie Mandell said.

  “You’re missing your guitar?” Russ said in a choked voice.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “They took mine, too,” another girl called from across the room. “It’s definitely not here. They freaking stole my Martin!”

  Catching a note of hysteria, Russ removed himself from Frances and found his voice. “All right, ah—listen up. This is obviously not good, but we need to stay calm. Let’s get the lanterns on and do a careful inventory. If anything’s broken, anything’s missing, I want to hear about it.”

  “My guitar is missing,” Darcie Mandell reported dryly.

  “So, yes, we seem to be missing two guitars, but let’s see if there’s anything else. We’re in a place of underprivilege, and sometimes these things happen. The important thing is that we’re together as a group. We’re safe as long as we stay together.”

  “I’m not feeling especially safe,” Darcie said, “despite our being together.”

  “Let’s straighten up the room and see what we’ve got.”

  Still unable to look at Frances, he lit two lanterns and checked his own belongings. He wasn’t angry; he was struggling not to cry. The sorrow pertained to everything—the hardness of reservation life, the fears and hurt feelings of forty good kids, the cultural and economic gulf between New Prospect and Kitsillie—but especially to his own vanity. He’d imagined himself a friend of the Navajos and a bridger of divides, imagined he knew better than the people who’d warned him not to come here. He hated to think what God thought of him.

  It emerged that only the two guitars had been stolen. The greater damage was in the violation of their space, the chill that Clyde’s aggression had put on their fellowship. When the group gathered again around the candle, the contrast to the previous night couldn’t have been starker. Unhappiness or fear was in almost every face.

  “So we’ve encountered our first adversity,” Russ said. “Adversity can strengthen us as a group, but it’s important that I hear from every one of you tonight. We’ll go around the circle and hear what each of us is feeling. Speaking for myself, I’m very sad—sad for us and sad for whoever broke in. It could be that we’ll decide not to stay here, but my own inclination is to stick it out and deal with the issue, not walk away from it. In practical terms, at least one adviser will now stay in the building at all times, and tomorrow morning I will deal with this. I will try to get Darcie and Katie’s guitars back.”

  “How about just calling the police?” Ted Jernigan said unpleasantly.

  “We can report this to the tribal police, but I’d like to understand better why it happened. Let’s see what we can achieve with listening before we bring the law in.”

  It took more than an hour to go around the circle, and Russ wasn’t Ambrose. He didn’t have limitless patience with the self-drama of adolescents, the Crossroads-encouraged inflation of emotional scrapes into ambulance-worthy traumas. He himself was upset, but his fault gave him the right to be, and although he’d asked to hear from everyone, because this was the Crossroads way, it tried his patience to sit in a world of real social injustice, real suffering, and make such an opera of the theft of two guitars, easily replaceable by their owners’ parents. The outpouring of support for Darcie and Katie was comparable to what Alice Raymond had received when her mother died. Of all the feelings voiced at the long candle, the only one Russ respected was the group’s frustration with being quarantined from interaction with the Navajos. He shared that frustration.

  In the end, they voted to stay at least one more day. All the advisers except Ted Jernigan favored staying. Afterward, while the group bedded down, its spirits subdued, Russ went outside to look at the sky. He hoped to reconnect with God, but the door behind him opened. Frances had followed him.

  “I thought you handled that well,” she said.

  “I feel bad for the kids, especially the sophomores. This is their first experience here.”

  “They respect you—I could see it. I don’t know why you thought you shouldn’t be a youth minister.”

  His eyes filled with gratitude. “Now I
’m the one who needs a hug.”

  She gave it to him. The blessing of her touch, the palpable reality of the woman in his arms, was making a believer of him. It was as if he’d yearned to know God without actually believing that He existed. Now he could feel that, far from overhoping, he might have underestimated his chances—that Frances’s decision to come to Arizona had been, in fact, a decision about him.

  “We’re having the full experience,” she said.

  Behind them, the door creaked open again.

  “Whoops,” a girl said.

  As if excited to be discovered with him, Frances squeezed him harder, and again he thought of kissing her. To let himself be seen as the man she’d chosen, to cement his status with a public kiss, was worth the cost of what Becky would learn from her friends, what Ambrose would say. But to do it on a night when his group was in crisis could send a bad message. He contented himself with breathing his thanks into her hair.

  The next morning, very early, after sleeping essentially not at all, he stole out of the school and walked down the road. The sun hadn’t cleared the ridge, but a flock of mountain bluebirds was awake, foraging among bitten tussocks, perching on fence posts glaucous with frost. Daisy Benally was chopping onions in the chapter-house kitchen, her sister still asleep. When Russ told Daisy what had happened, she just shook her head. He asked where he could find Clyde.

  “Don’t go there,” she said.

  “But where is he?”

  “You know the place. Up the canyon where Keith lived.”

  “Are you saying Clyde is a Fallen Rocks?”

  “No, he’s a Jackson. You shouldn’t go there.”

  Russ explained why he had little choice but to go. Daisy, who’d reached an age where she greeted anything the world did with resignation, allowed that he could borrow Ruth’s truck. He would have liked to leave immediately, before he had time to be afraid, but he waited until the group came down for breakfast. Everyone’s hair was flat and dirty, every eye red from a night on a hard floor. By way of mending fences, Russ asked Ted Jernigan, who’d sat down with Frances, to take charge of the group for the morning.