by John Smelcer
Arthur kept his head down.
“I guess. But I can’t take it anymore,” he whispered, just loud enough to be heard.
Noah didn’t respond.
“When do we go home?” asked Arthur, a great, billowing anxiety behind his question.
Noah thought carefully before he replied. He knew that a place like Wellington could destroy a spirit, rip it to shreds the way a grizzly bear rips apart a salmon. He remembered how he prayed that would not happen to Simon when he was chained to the storeroom wall.
“Look, none of us can change the way things are,” he said as gently as he could. “Our parents can’t change things. It’s the law. So we have to be strong. We have to fight back. Resist. We have to make it through. You crying all the time reminds us where we are. Can’t you see that?”
Arthur stopped rubbing his hands together, and although Noah couldn’t see his face, he saw tears falling onto Arthur’s lap, soaking into the neatly folded brown-paper bag.
Noah felt sorry for the boy. He wanted to say something useful.
“It ain’t fair, that’s for sure. I don’t understand it myself. But there it is. It’s just the way things are.”
Neither spoke again for the rest of the ride. Arthur kept his head down, occasionally trembling and wiping tears from his face. Noah stared out the window, his jaw clenched, looking at the fields and the far hills, wishing he could be out there, alone, in the greening forests.
WHEN THE BUS PULLED INTO TOWN, the streets and sidewalks were busy with Saturday afternoon shoppers walking in and out of storefronts and diners, the corner grocery, the Five & Dime. A double feature was showing at the theater, their titles displayed on the marquee—both westerns.
Cowboys and Indians.
Indians always lost.
Wellington students were allowed to go into town once a month to spend the meager allowances sent by their families. School officials kept careful records of who went each time. Many were prohibited from going, as another form of disciplinary punishment. Indeed, Simon had been caught speaking Navajo again, so he wasn’t allowed to go. Instead, he was scrubbing bathroom floors with a toothbrush. Lucy was helping with preparations for the school dance, and Elijah, who wasn’t feeling well, spent the day catching up on his sleep. Besides, like most of the other students, Elijah didn’t have any money to spend in town anyhow. Those who did have some jingle in their pockets and were allowed to make the trip might spend their money on a movie or a burger and a soda. Some bought ice cream cones or malts or milkshakes. Some kids pooled their money and bought large pizzas, sitting together at a table adorned with a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth and a frothy pitcher of root beer.
Noah wanted to see a movie. He hadn’t seen one in a long time. His parents had sent him a dollar, more than enough for the ticket and a small box of popcorn.
As the students rushed to get off the bus when the door swung open, filing out into the sunshine, Miss Creger shouted, “Remember to be back here no later than three o’clock! Three o’clock!”
It was almost noon. Noah walked quickly toward the theater. The feature started in ten minutes. Luckily, Arthur didn’t follow him.
The movie, North of the Great Divide starring Roy Rogers, was less than two hours long, even with the news reel and two cartoons. When it was over, Noah joined three other school mates who had seen the same movie. Since the bus wouldn’t leave for almost an hour, they talked about the film as they walked to the pizza parlor. One of the boys was doing a pretty good imitation of Iron Eyes Cody as they entered through the glass door, laughing. The four young Indians took one of the few remaining empty tables, still smiling and talking about the movie and deciding what they were going to order.
Noah was the first to notice that everyone in the whole place was staring at them, that he and his friends were the only Indians in the restaurant. Not a single person was talking. All eyes were on their table, all mouths frowning. It was so quiet that Noah thought he could actually hear his pride fall into the pit of his knotting stomach, like the silvery sound of a pebble dropped into calm water.
The other three Indians stopped what they were doing and looked around the hushed, angry room. Joshua Gray Hawk, a year older than Noah, the boy who a few moments before was comically imitating Iron Eyes Cody, straightened as tall as he could in his chair.
“What are you looking at?” he snarled at a family sitting at a nearby table, his gesture challenging the room, as though he had spent his entire life challenging the world—which, of course, he had.
Almost immediately the room returned to normal, filled with the sound of low conversations and silverware against plates. The waitress went back to taking orders and pouring water from a pitcher, while several men in a window booth kept turning around, scowling at the Indians and then returning to their conversation, occasionally looking back or pointing.
For ten minutes Noah and his schoolmates waited for the waitress to take their order. Then twenty. Each time she passed their table with a round tray of pizza or several sodas, they tried to catch her attention. She even took orders from two couples who came in well after the boys did. After half an hour, it became clear she had no intention of serving them at all.
Before leaving, Noah went to the bathroom. The walls were scribbled with the usual graffiti found in any men’s room: “Call Debbie for a good time,” “Kilroy was here,” “Freddy loves Mabel,” and brief limericks rhyming with various acts related to defecation. But above the urinal was scrawled something Noah hadn’t expected to find. In big, black letters were four biting words: “Better dead than Red.” Noah looked around. Beside the mirror someone had written, “The only good Injin is a dead Injin.” And on the walls inside the toilet stall, was the warning, “Go Home Redskins!”
Noah wet a paper towel to erase the cutting words, but they persisted no matter how furiously he wiped and scrubbed. He snatched more towels and added soap to the mass of soggy, brown paper. But the words were indelible, stronger than any solvent, utterly resistant to friction, as if they were an actual part of the masonry or tile or steel on which they were scrawled. He gave up, angry and worn out. He hadn’t asked to come here. None of the children at the school had asked for any of this.
Noah was visibly upset when he walked out of the men’s room, quickly crossing the floor to his friends, still waiting at the table.
“Let’s get outta here,” he said, impatiently, motioning toward the door.
By the time the four boarded the bus, it was almost time to return to Wellington. They sat together in the back row. A few minutes later, Arthur Pretty Shield climbed the steps, found an empty seat in the middle, and sat down by himself.
“What got you so riled up?” Gray Hawk asked Noah, as the bus driver started the bus.
“Nothin’,” replied Noah, looking out the window at all the townspeople coming and going, smiling warmly, nodding toward one other, and shaking hands on the street.
Miss Creger walked down the aisle, using a finger to take a head count.
“Everyone’s here,” she said to the driver, who closed the door and drove around the town square and back onto Main Street.
At the edge of town, the bus started sputtering. The engine was dying. The driver quickly turned into the parking lot of an old church, which had been built about the same time as Wellington. The building’s exterior was made of white-painted clapboards. The parking lot was half-filled with cars and pickup trucks. A large sign at the driveway entrance read, “Revival Today! Come Feel God’s Love! Visitors Welcome!”
Just as the bus cleared the church driveway, the engine sighed, coughed, and finally died with a shudder, like some child with tuberculosis. The driver turned the key half a dozen times, but the engine only clicked or made no sound at all. At least the bus was off the road. The driver told the kids to stay seated while he went outside. He lifted the heavy yellow hood and inspected
the dead engine. He was a driver, not a mechanic. He didn’t know the first thing about engines. He stood looking for something obvious, a disconnected spark plug wire or battery cable. He tried to jiggle the battery cables. Nothing appeared out of place. He even kicked a tire for good measure.
The inside of the bus was getting hot, even with the windows open, so Miss Creger directed the students to sit outside under some trees on the edge of the property while she went inside the church to call the school for help.
The sound of singing drifted across the parking lot from the open windows and front doors of the church.
Miss Creger walked through the open doors and addressed an elderly lady in a pink dress and a fine, wide-brimmed flowered hat.
“Afternoon, Ma’am,” she said smiling. “Our bus broke down in your parking lot. I wonder if it would be an inconvenience if I used your telephone to call for help.”
The woman looked over Miss Creger’s shoulder, saw the broken down school bus with the word “Wellington” painted on the side. Several dozen Indian children were sitting on the lawn or standing and talking outside the bus.
Just then, a deacon stepped out from the double doors separating the sanctuary from the lobby. He had a hymnbook and a flyer in his hands. When he saw the pretty teacher he greeted her warmly.
“Glad to have you here, Sister,” he said, shaking her hand and proffering the hymnbook. “Come join us.”
The congregation began singing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”
“No, no, Brother Jones,” the lady in the yellow dress interrupted. “This woman is with another group,” she said, nodding in the direction of the broken down bus.
The deacon glanced out the open door and then back toward the woman.
“Her bus broke down. She needs a phone to call Wellington. I was just about to tell her . . .”
The deacon set the hymnbook on a nearby table.
“Sorry, but we don’t have a phone here,” he said. “Nearest one’s at that service station about half mile back, where Elm Street crosses the highway.
The elderly woman confirmed quickly. “Yes, Elm Street. You know that Gulf Station, don’t you? Ernie Turner’s place.”
“Yes, thank you for that, Ma’am,” replied Miss Creger. “Do you think we could get some water? It’s pretty hot today.”
“Our faucet’s broken,” replied the deacon, looking down at his polished black shoes.
As Miss Creger walked out the door, she heard a phone ringing in the church office.
Outside, she told the bus driver, who volunteered to walk to the gas station.
“Now, you kids stay put,” he said, before he started down the road. “Mind your teacher, and don’t get in no trouble.”
The driver hadn’t been gone five minutes when three men, each dressed in their Sunday best, emerged from the church and crossed the parking lot to the bus, the benevolent words to “Amazing Grace” spilling out of the open church windows behind them.
“You fellas come give us a hand,” Deacon Jones said, addressing group of older boys, including Noah, standing nearby. “We’re gonna push this thing over there.” He was pointing to a place on the other side of the highway.
One of the other men climbed inside the bus, sat down, released the parking brake, and shifted the gears into neutral.
“Go ahead!” he yelled out the side window.
The men and all the Indian boys, even a couple older girls, pushed the bus out the church entrance and across the road, where it came to rest on the narrow gravel shoulder, part of it still dangerously exposed on the asphalt, the bus pointing in the wrong direction.
Deacon Jones and the other men stuffed their starched shirttails back into their pants and adjusted their neck ties.
“That outta do it,” he said, wiping dust from his hands. “Now you kids stay out of our parking lot. And mind the traffic.”
Just then a semitruck passed, the driver blasting his horn.
“What’s wrong with you people?” Miss Creger shouted as the deacon and the two other men crossed the highway. “This is a church, for chrissake!”
None of the three men looked back.
The kids sat around in the ditch alongside the road waiting for help to arrive. Some of the girls were picking dandelions. Noah sat down beneath a tree, leaned against its smooth trunk. The shade felt good. From where he sat, he could see the church sign.
Come Feel God’s Love.
Noah closed his eyes and fell asleep to the muffled sound of singing. In his dream, he was standing at the edge of a wide river. A grizzly bear sow and two cubs searched for salmon on the far shore, occasionally smacking the water with a fast paw. A young eagle soared overhead. Noah knew the place, knew where he was. He could see forested hills and white-capped mountains piling up in the distance. He was near his village, alone in the vast, wilderness, except that he wandered beneath trees that never grew in his village. In the pleasant dream, he walked along the river for almost a mile, alternately resting in a meadow of yellow flowers and tromping through drifts of powdery snow, until he slumped forward, waking himself.
Groggy, Noah looked around, his eyes adjusting to the brightness. The tranquil dream was lost. The bears and eagle vanished. The hills and mountains flattened into the rolling highway, and the meadow of yellow flowers resolved into the school bus.
For the first time in months, Noah began to cry. He wiped his eyes quickly before anyone noticed. When he looked up again, he saw Arthur Pretty Shield sitting with his back against a rear tire of the bus, his head cradled in his hands. Noah stood up, wiped the back of his jeans, and walked over to the friendless boy. He sat down on the ground beside him. Neither spoke to the other. Instead, they both sat on the narrow gravel shoulder, quietly holding on to dissimilar memories of home.
Chapter Thirteen
“HEY YOU! Hold up there! C’mere!” a large Indian boy shouted down the busy hall to a skinny Indian boy holding a bundle of books beneath one pencil-thin arm.
“Yeah, you. I wanna talk to you.”
The skinny boy in thick-rimmed glasses looked around, frightened. He quickly ducked into the boy’s bathroom and hid in a stall, pulling up his legs so they wouldn’t be visible from outside the locked stall door. He sat quietly on the toilet, trembling. Then the bathroom door opened with a loud bang, and he heard footsteps echoing in the tiled room.
“I know you’re in here, Brainiac. I just wanna talk to you.”
The frightened boy held his stack of books tight against his thin chest, holding his breath, trying to meld with the porcelain and tile and plumbing.
The footsteps stopped in front of his stall. The terrified boy could see scuffed, brown shoes. Silence. Then a hard knock on the metal stall door.
“Come on. Open up. I know you’re in there.”
Silence again.
The skinny boy wondered how long he could hold his breath.
Then the shoes backed away from the door. A noise in the adjacent stall made the frightened boy look to his left, at the gray-steel wall of the compartment, just above the roll of toilet paper. The sound of a toilet seat lid dropped hard. Suddenly, a head appeared over the wall.
“You got my English paper, Brainiac?”
The scared boy didn’t move. The Indian standing on the toilet of the adjoining stall leaned over until his face was directly over the other boy’s cringing face. He let out a long, thick string of spittle, controlling it so that it slid slowly toward the weaker boy’s face, thinning as it grew longer. Just as the spittle was about to land in the small boy’s eye, he turned his face so that the spit landed on his hair, spilled over, and clung to his ear.
“You comin’ outta there, or do I have to do it again?” the older, muscular boy asked, his voice full of the confidence that comes with size and age.
He hacked up another wad of spit, and just as
it started its long, slow drip, the skinny boy burst out of his stall, trying to make it out the door.
“Help me!” he screamed, hoping people in the hallway would hear.
But he wasn’t fast enough. The taller boy caught him, preventing his escape by blocking the door from opening with his foot. He gripped the skinny boy’s collar in a fist and seized a shiny cigarette lighter from his pocket, flicked it open, and lit it, holding the tall flame close to the younger boy’s face.
Without a word, the scrawny boy pulled a paper from between the pages of one of his books. Whimpering, he found a pencil in his shirt pocket and erased his own name from the top right-hand corner of the paper. He handed the nameless paper to the burly Indian, who slapped him hard on the side of his head. Before leaving the bathroom, the victorious thug spoke softly.
“See, Brainiac? All you gotta do is what you’re told. It’s that simple.”
And that was less than ten minutes of one day.
Every school has its bullies. They are as ubiquitous as food fights in cafeterias, as kids smoking behind buildings. Some bullies are created by abusive parents—an alcoholic father who beats the hell out of his son because he hates his dead-end job; an indifferent and neglectful mother, strung out on booze and cigarettes and unfamiliar, broken men.
And some bullies are formed from other circumstances.
Back on his reservation, Philip Highmountain was big for his age, nevertheless, a kind and considerate boy, helpful and selfless. He had worked to collect canned food for a local food bank, always helped out at church when asked, and volunteered in the community whenever he had free time.
Everyone was proud of him.
“That boy’s gonna be somebody,” people would say.
“Why can’t you be more like that Philip Highmountain?” parents would often scold wayward children.
Some children learned to deal with life at Wellington, steeling themselves against the neglect, the indifference, the denigration, the brutality. Some, like Noah, Simon, Lucy, and Elijah, had friends to help them endure the misery. Some collapsed under the pressure, like Arthur Pretty Shield. Over the years, Philip Highmountain’s soul slowly corroded, like an iron ship at the bottom of a sunless sea, until what remained was ugly, twisted, and monstrous.
