by Kurt Caswell
I asked him what he did and how he liked working at Borrego.
“I’m the GATE coordinator,” Juan Carlos said. “My job is to get as many kids qualified for the GATE program as possible. Then I fill out a lot of paperwork and send it in. The more kids I get qualified for the program, the more money we get. It’s just paperwork, really. It don’t mean nothin’. So if you come here, you’ll work with me some, and your job will be to find kids I can qualify in the paperwork. Sometimes I help with Special Ed too.”
“Do you live here?” I asked.
“I gotta place here. A trailer over there,” he motioned the direction with his chin. “But I stay over there in Albuquerque a lot too. Mostly every weekend. It’s a good job because nobody bothers me. I can do what I want.”
That turned out to be true. One afternoon the eighth-grade class was working on individual reading projects, and Renee Benally looked out the trailer window and said, “There goes Jerry with Juan Carlos again.” Several of the girls frowned and got up to look out the window. I looked out, too. We watched Juan Carlos lead Jerry across the parking lot and out into the residential part of campus where students were not allowed to go. They went up the steps to Juan Carlos’s trailer, went inside, and closed the door.
Jerry had started the semester in my language arts class, but Juan Carlos had him qualified for Special Ed, which meant he spent his language arts and reading class periods out in the Special Ed trailer, where he would receive focused instruction. It was true that Jerry read below grade level, Lauren had confirmed that, but I doubted the attention he got from the Special Ed teacher would help him. Maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about, but in my estimation she didn’t speak English well enough herself to teach reading and writing to a struggling student. To Juan Carlos, qualifying Jerry for Special Ed brought in funding for the school, improved job security for him and, more important, gave him access to Jerry anytime he wanted. Juan Carlos often pulled kids out of classes during the day to take them to medical appointments in Crownpoint or down to the school nurse (who was his sister) for medication. Sometimes he took students for “testing.” Testing for what, I didn’t know.
“What are they doing in there?” I asked.
“You know,” Renee said.
“I don’t know. What do you mean, ‘You know’?” I said.
“You know,” Renee said again. “They’re doin’ it in there.”
“Doing what?” I asked.
“Maybe Jerry’s payin’ for it in there,” Renee said.
“Renee!” Vanessa Angel said.
“No, Renee,” someone said.
“What’s he paying for?” I asked.
Of course I thought “it” was either sex or drugs or maybe both. Maybe drugs paid for with sex? But I wanted to hear her say it. I wanted to know what was going on. I hadn’t decided what I would do with this information if I got it, but I knew I had no information until someone spoke clearly about it. No one did.
“Maybe I don’t know,” Renee said, and she sat down.
Everyone got real busy as if suddenly classwork meant everything to them.
From my classroom window I observed Juan Carlos leading kids away to his trailer several more times. Jerry went regularly, and Vanessa’s brother, Leonard Angel. One day Clemson and Caleb went into Juan Carlos’s trailer together without Juan Carlos. They just wandered out into the forbidden residential zone at recess and went in. I didn’t see the boys come out. But just before recess ended, Juan Carlos opened the door and walked out. He came across the parking lot looking cool as ice and went in the school’s front doors.
Frank Lee and Deena Bell invited me to dinner. They lived in the duplex just across the drive from the one I had moved out of. I could smell the food from Deena’s kitchen through the open door as I came up the concrete walkway. Inside, handsome wool rugs covered the bare floors. Clean, comfortable-looking furniture warmed the living room, a couch and an easy chair. When I knocked, Deena’s son, Kestrel, came running out of somewhere and slid around the end of the couch in his socks to get the door. “I got it. I got it,” he shouted, and let me in.
Kestrel looked small for his age, a little thin and frail. Maybe he was seven or eight years old. He had much lighter skin than most Navajos at Borrego. I came to understand that he was Deena’s son from a previous marriage, and maybe her husband had been white. That didn’t seem to matter to Frank, though. He treated Kestrel like his own son. Deena prepared something simple and wholesome for dinner, chicken baked on a bed of wild rice. For dessert, Navajo tea and apple pie. Frank told me again and again that whatever I needed, I should just ask him. He would help me, if he could, and so would Deena, if she could.
After that night, Deena and Frank invited me over every couple weeks. One evening after dinner, while Deena and Kestrel dished up dessert, I followed Frank out to the front step, where he was working on a kachina doll to fill an order from a buyer on the East Coast. He had made most of his living this way before he was hired on at the school. He didn’t think of himself as an artist, but I considered him one. We generally avoided talking about school when I came for dinner, but I burned to tell Frank about Juan Carlos. When I did, Frank nodded and said, “Hmm,” and continued working the sandpaper over the wood. “I’ll look into it,” he said, but I sensed in his voice that Juan Carlos was well protected, and Frank knew there was nothing he could do.
One Sunday afternoon Juan Carlos knocked on my door and invited me over to his trailer to have a look at a leather chair he wanted to loan me. He didn’t have space for it, he said, but he didn’t want to sell it or give it away either. Since I didn’t have any furniture, it sounded like a reasonable arrangement to me. He pointed out a box of marine fossils sitting on his front steps that he had collected up on the mesa.
“Tourists in Albuquerque and over there at Santa Fe love these things,” he said. “I can get a few bucks apiece for ’em.”
The interior of his place was dressed in black like him. A black leather couch and easy chair. A black rug in front of the couch with a black coffee table. Black stereo equipment with huge black speakers. Black curtains over the windows. He showed me the chair, a heavy oak rocker with a brown leather cushion and back. It was the only thing in the room that wasn’t black. I could have it on loan, he told me. I accepted, and thanked him.
“In fact,” Juan Carlos said, “I’m selling some things. Not this chair I’m loaning you, of course, but other things. Is there any thing you want to buy?”
I took this to mean he had drugs for sale, probably pot. I told him no thanks, and then thanked him again for the chair.
“You’re not from New Mexico, are you?” Juan Carlos asked me.
“No. I grew up in Oregon,” I told him.
“I was gonna say California,” he said. “I grew up in Albuquerque.”
“So what’re you doing way out here?”
“I was gonna ask you the same.”
“Well,” I said. “I’m just trying to work as a teacher. Making a living, you know?”
“I know,” he said. “Me too, I guess. I don’t know. It’s a good job, you know. And I got family out here. But when I was growing up, I didn’t know I was a Navajo. I thought I was Chicano or something. So later I decided maybe I should know something about what being Navajo means, so that’s why I came out here. Anyway, I got family out here,” he said. “You know Caleb and Clemson are my cousins.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do know that. You like it out here?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe okay. Enough anyway. Mostly I like it over there in Albuquerque. That’s where most of my friends are.”
“So why stay here?”
“Maybe ’cause I’m Navajo,” he said. “This is Navajoland. This is my ancestral place, you know. The old people say Navajos gotta live inside these four sacred mountains. And I’m Navajo, so seems like I should live here, and I should know something about it.”
William Brown was a very simple boy.
He was in the eighth grade, and he was big, the biggest kid in school. His hair was cropped close and stuck up on top of his head. He lived with his grandma in a little hogan not far from the school. He seemed to be a natural Zen man: among his favorite things to do in the world, he said, were splitting wood and carrying in the water. He spoke with a kind of lisp and whistle because a week before I arrived at Borrego, he got into a fight with Tom Thompson, and Tom broke three of his front teeth out.
I heard that story not too long after I had an encounter with Tom myself. That fall, I coached the seventh- and eighth-grade cross-country team with the second-grade teacher, Lorrain Puente. She worked mostly with the few girls who wanted to run. I worked with the boys.
I had been running since I was twelve. When I was in the eighth grade at a small school in western Oregon, I broke district records at both 800 and 1,500 meters. In high school, I competed at the state level. My high school track coach, Mark Ferris, was a tough retired air force officer. His father was a retired air force officer too and had survived a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. Sometimes before a hard workout or a race, Mr. Ferris would step in front of me, look me in the eye, and say: “Get your game face on!” and he meant it. And so I did. I admired him for it and loved him like a father. One day before I ran the hardest and best workout of my life, he put his index and middle fingers together, made a hard missile out of them, and thunked me in the middle of the sternum. “Get your game face on!” he said. It hurt and I shrank back, but I felt tough knowing that I could take it and that he did it because he wanted me to do well.
To my mind, these Navajo boys had no work ethic when it came to running. Most of the best runners quit, like Caleb Benally, because they said it was too hard and wasn’t any fun. The team dwindled until I was left with just a handful of boys, boys who kept with it because they were a little hardier maybe, or they had individual goals, like Will Brown, who said he was running to lose a little weight. Miles Wiseman and Tom Charlie said they’d try anything, and they were best friends, so anything they tried, they tried together. And Tom Thompson. He kept running because he was good; he was the strongest runner in the school.
I pushed them all too hard, I know. They didn’t have dreams of grandeur, they just wanted to do something, to be part of something that would open their world a little. And I should have admired them for that, but I wasn’t very happy at Borrego in those earlier days. Maybe I wanted to punish them for it. Or prove to them how tough I was in order to regain control of my classroom. So one day when the whole team was just fucking off, I lost my cool.
Will Brown was tearing off the branches of the little willow tree that grew in front of the school. Miles and Tom were giggling and laughing like girls, but minding their own business. We were waiting for John George, who was always late, and Jerry Valdez, who could never remember to bring his shorts. (I kept loaning him mine until he owned more pairs of my shorts than I did, but still forgot them, and sometimes ran in his pants.) And that’s when Tom went after Will again. Will started something near the willow tree, an argument about nothing. He was a clown. He didn’t like fighting because he often lost, and he always lost against Tom, but his clown nature always seemed to trump his fear. He said something to Tom and teased him and laughed and then ran. Tom ran after him. And I ran after Tom.
I caught up to him somewhere behind the school. We were running fast, and I grabbed the back of his neck and jerked him back and stopped him and turned him around. I was inches away from his face, and I shouted obscenities at him and waved my arms in the air and threatened and shouted and cursed.
“You want to run hard?!” I yelled. “You want to do well?!”
“Yes,” Tom said.
“Well, you can’t fuck off like this if you want to do well!” I sputtered.
“Yes,” Tom said.
My face felt hot and I felt my hands clenched into fists. I could see he was scared, at least a little, but he didn’t back down. He stood there against me and took it.
“Goddamn it!” I yelled at him. “All you gotta do is run. Nothing else! No fights. No Will Brown. No nothing. Just run!”
“Aoo’,” he said, speaking in Navajo this time.
“That’s it!” I yelled. “That’s all there is if you wanna do well. Just run. That’s all.”
“Aoo’.”
I didn’t know what else to say, but I hadn’t cussed out my anger yet, so I kept saying the same thing over and over again. I wanted to hit him. I felt it in my hands, in my arms, in my face. I knew from the way he stood there, a little hunched over and leaning into me, that he expected it. He’d been hit before, probably by his father, or an uncle, and at the very least, I knew he’d been in a lot of fights. I had to stop. I had to back down. Tom looked me hard in the eyes, and I wondered if he wouldn’t hit me. If he did, at least I’d have a reason to hit him back. But that was crazy thinking. I was twenty-six and he was probably fifteen. I took a step back, and that softened the space between us. We stood there, that great anger cooling a little in the silence.
Then Tom said, “Aoo’,” in acknowledgment and contempt.
“Let’s run,” I said, and stormed off. The whole team snapped to attention, with Will Brown in the lead, and John George just getting out of the gym doors, and Jerry Valdez running in his pants again, and Miles and Tom together as usual, and they all followed me, and I ran them hard and fast up the dirt road past the Trading Post because I was going to run them until they puked, until they couldn’t run anymore, until they bitched and complained about how tired they were and how this sucked and how they hated it and hated me and I’d hate them back, so I led them on and up into the higher pinyon pine country beyond the derelict hogan where someone a long time ago had died, and the family had boarded up the door and windows and left the place behind forever.
When vice principal Louise Fairchild called me in to Bob King’s office a few weeks later, I knew it was about Tom. She sat next to him at the long table where just a few months before I had interviewed with the school board for this job. I didn’t know why Bob was out, but on this day Louise steered the ship. Another teacher had busted Tom for fighting again. To take the heat off, he had told Louise about how I had assaulted him during cross-country practice.
“That doesn’t sound like you,” Louise said to me. “Can you explain what happened?”
I sat down at the table across from Tom. His eyes met mine and then he looked away. I sensed that he wasn’t going to forgive me for this. And I couldn’t think of a reason that he should. Maybe I could tell him about the world I came from, about my years running and racing, about my coach and how he pushed me to make me stronger. Maybe I could tell him that what I did was for him, that I yelled at him to encourage him to excel. Maybe I could tell him that I wanted only to protect Will, which was part of my job. Maybe I could tell him . . . But I knew anything I told him was a trifle compared to the humility he must have felt and the anger he held back. What could I say?
Louise looked at me expectantly. Tom looked down at his hands. Instead of explaining to Louise, I spoke to Tom.
“Tom,” I said. He didn’t look up. “I’m sorry that I yelled at you. I went too far. I’m sorry I did it.”
He didn’t respond. Louise looked on, waiting for more.
“You’re a good runner,” I said. “I want you to do well. I was frustrated by you and Will, and I didn’t want you two fighting again. But mostly I’m just sorry I yelled at you.”
He looked up at me for a moment. I thought he looked sad, maybe a little hopeful, maybe a little desperate. We had come so close to blows, a line over which, had we crossed it, neither of us would have been able to return. Likely I would have lost my job, and perhaps been unable to find work as a teacher for a long time, maybe forever. Maybe that wouldn’t have been so bad. I didn’t feel like I was cut out for teaching anyway. But I knew I would have packed a lot of guilt around for years, and Tom would have one more reason to hate people, maybe everyone. H
e was already so angry.
“Now, Mr. Caswell has said he’s sorry, Tom,” Louise said.
She sounded condescending, but I didn’t trust my judgment on that. I waited for Tom to respond.
“Tom, were you fighting in cross-country practice?” Louise asked.
“Aoo’,” he said.
“And you’re in here today for fighting.”
“Aoo’.”
“Tom. We can’t have this,” Louise said. “Maybe we’ll need to meet with your parents again.”
“Aoo’.”
I knew a parent/teacher meeting wouldn’t do any good, and so did Tom. It might even make the situation worse. I’d recently attended a meeting with John George’s parents, all of John’s teachers, and Louise and Frank. After we had presented the problem, said that John was unmanageable in class and was failing everything, his father stopped us. He said that he thought the problem wasn’t John, but us. The school. The teachers. The administration. We did not discipline John properly, he said. He would shape up in class if we meant what we said, if only we would be a bit harder on him. If we hit him, that would do it. It seemed to work at home. Silence went around the table. We asked about another solution. How could we work better with John? John’s father insisted he had given us the solution. The conference ended with Louise explaining that we couldn’t use that kind of discipline, to which the father shrugged and said that if we didn’t, John would continue doing what he was doing.
I was guessing, but I suspected that meeting with Tom’s parents would produce the same kind of stalemate.
“Anything else, Mr. Caswell?” Louise said.
“No,” I said. “Just that I’m sorry for yelling at you, Tom.” I offered him my hand. He took it. We shook hands, which meant something, but it didn’t mean that Tom forgave me.
Cross-country season ended, and Tom did very well. At the district meet, he placed in the top twenty. We rode the bus home that Saturday afternoon. Tom’s father could not pick him up at school, as he usually did. The driver turned east on old Route 66, passed the turnoff to Borrego, and went on through Prewitt past the gas station and laundry. She turned down a dirt road that wound south toward the freeway. It was potholed and dirty, littered with rubbish. We stopped at a hogan where a couple of dogs lay in the sun. Smoke trickled from the stovepipe, and the few windows had been boarded up against the coming winter. Tom got out. I watched him walk across the road in his big shoes, the laces left untied and sloppy, his shoulders slumped forward. The dogs didn’t move. No one greeted him at the door.
