by Kurt Caswell
Staring out the window like that, I heard a knock at my front door. I was immediately embarrassed to be caught gawking that way, for I hadn’t seen anyone approaching through the dark. Whoever it was had seen me, a little goldfish staring through the glass of his reservation goldfish bowl. I answered it, opened the door right up to face my charge, and she stood there, her hand on the door now, already midsentence, talking so fast and panicked as she tried to catch her breath from running up the road and over to the light in my window.
“You got a phone?” she said. “You got a phone I can use? I haf-ta call the cops!”
She wore jeans and cowboy boots, a blouse cut low, long long black hair, and big glasses. Her nose was sortof flattened out, and she had beautiful hands—that most of all, her beautiful hands on my trailer door. I suddenly remembered I was lonely.
“I have a cell phone,” I said. “It doesn’t always work.”
“I haf-ta call the cops!” she said again. “Can I use it? It’s my uncle. He’s fightin’ again. And he’s gonna lose. He always loses.”
I understood her uncle to be the smaller man. Maybe. “Okay,” I said. “Come in.”
She called the Navajo police in Crownpoint, and they told her they wouldn’t come out because she had called about her uncle too many times already. That made some sense to me, but not to her. She cursed and put the phone down hard and did not thank me and did not press “End,” so the cops were still on the line burning my cell time. She rushed out the door without closing it, without saying “Thank you,” without shaking my hand, at least, with her pretty fingers and knuckles and wrist. I saw her join the two men in the roadway in that beam of the headlights. She went from one to the other, the other to the one, and soon enough, the fight broke up, and the cars crawled off into the night.
“No one ever comes to the front door,” I said to my parents. But before long there was another knock. I answered it.
“Mr. Cas-well,” Virginia Puente said before I realized who she was. “We don’t got no ride home.” She stood at my door in the dark and the cold with three boys I did not know. She wore only a T-shirt and jeans, and she shivered as she spoke.
A student in my eighth-grade class, Virginia was quiet, kind of shy, but a little fierce in her eyes, angry-looking all the time. She had long lovely hair, and she stood only about four foot ten, not five feet tall, anyway. At sixteen, she was one of the older girls in her class, but she didn’t have much pull among them. She seemed always on the outside of anything going on. She barely ever uttered a word in class, and here she was asking me for a ride home. Perhaps she had already exhausted all her other options. Perhaps this wasn’t a matter of choice now, but of survival.
“You don’t have a ride?” I said.
“No, we don’t got no ride.” she said again. “We were over there at the dance, ya know? And now we can’t get home.”
The seventh-grade class had hosted a dance in the gym that night. From where I stood, the parking lot looked empty. I couldn’t see a car anywhere.
“Don’t you have a coat? It’s cold out,” I said.
“No, we don’t got no ride, and no coats neither. And it’s too cold out here too.”
“You mean everyone just left you?” I asked.
“Well, yeah,” Virginia said. “There wasn’t no room in no one’s car. So of course they left us. So will you take us?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll take you home. Let me get my coat.”
As the seventh-grade class adviser, I was in charge of raising money for the class and planning a spring field trip. While making plans to hold the dance, one of our big fund-raisers for the year, I told the class that Thanksgiving break was not a good time for me. My parents would be coming from Idaho for the holiday. We could put on a dance the weekend before the break, or the weekend after, or any other time. But not Thanksgiving weekend. And besides, the students would all be on vacation too. That seemed reasonable to me.
“Okay, you guys,” I said. “What weekend do you want to hold the dance?”
“We wanna do it that weekend. Thanksgiving weekend,” Jolanda said.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do it that weekend,” I told them again. “But I can do it almost any other weekend.”
“No,” Jolanda said. “It has to be Thanksgiving.”
“Yeah,” said Maria Young. “It has to be Thanksgiving.”
“Why does it have to Thanksgiving?” I asked.
“Of course it just does,” said Jolanda.
“Yeah,” said Maria. “It just does.”
“I can’t do it,” I said. “Let’s choose another time.”
“No,” Jolanda said. “There isn’t no other time.”
Jolanda led this charge for the girls, and so I appealed to the boys. “Okay, you guys, speak up,” I said. “Any other ideas? Caleb? Clemson?”
Caleb shrugged and didn’t answer. The rest of the boys frowned and looked down, mostly apathetic. None of them would offer anything unless Caleb did. And it seemed Caleb had decided to follow Jolanda.
“Yeah,” Jolanda said. “Let’s have a dance over there. We wanna have a good time. That’s all.”
Two of the cardinal rules of teaching middle school, as I see it, are: (1) never get drawn into an argument with a student, because it is impossible to win. Offer a few choices, and let the student choose one. And (2) know when to bend (about 15 percent of the time) and when to stand firm (about 85 percent of the time). The second rule is the more difficult of the two because it is easy to bend or stand firm at the wrong times, even if you’re getting the ratio right. So I talked about the dance with Lauren, who had been teaching far longer than I had, and then with Louise, who had been at Borrego for a hundred years and knew these kids. They both said that I should stand firm in this case and offer to hold the dance the weekend before the holiday, or the weekend after, which is what I had already done. Louise also suggested that maybe the kids could find someone else who was available that night, then they could have the dance without me. I think the idea just crossed her mind and she said it, but it violated the first rule, which encourages choices but does not open those choices to interpretation. When seventh graders interpret rules or choices, they forget all limits. It wasn’t Louise’s fault. She just offered her thoughts by way of consolation really and expected me to use good judgment. I did not.
“All right,” I told my class later, “if you can find someone else to help you put on the dance, you can do it whenever you want to.”
“We can do it on Thanksgiving, you mean?” Jolanda asked.
“Whenever you want to, provided you find someone who wants to help you,” I said. “But I can’t help you Thanksgiving weekend.”
“All right!” Jolanda cheered.
Jolanda led the girls around the school courting teachers and staff to help them with the dance. No one was interested. Juan Carlos, who was usually into this kind of thing, said no. Like almost everyone who worked at the school, he was going to be somewhere else over the holiday.
The girls were desperate and they returned to me again and again. “You haf’ta help us,” they said. “We’re just trying to have a good time. We just wanna have a dance over there.”
“Right,” I told them. “I know. And you can have a dance. And I will help you, but on some other weekend. Let’s set a new date. How about the weekend just after Thanksgiving?”
“No,” Jolanda said. “It has to be on Thanksgiving.”
“Why is that weekend so important?” I asked.
“Well, yeah,” Jolanda said. “Why is it? Why can’t you help us?”
“My family will be here.”
“So.”
“And I’ll be busy taking them around and spending time with them.”
“So.”
“So. I can’t do it that weekend. I don’t see why it has to be that weekend.”
“Oh, it just does, of course,” Jolanda said. “Why can’t you believe me?”
The frenzy seemed t
o die down and go away, and I didn’t hear anything more about it. Perhaps Jolanda had given up, and after the break, I would meet with my class again and we would plan the event. But the first day of Thanksgiving break, the same day my parents were to arrive, Jolanda, Maria, and Clemson approached me as I was shoveling up the dog shit scattered behind my trailer.
“You have to help us, Mr. Caswell,” Jolanda said.
“Yeah,” said Clemson. “We’re gonna have a dance over there tonight, and we need some help.”
“Tonight?!” I said, baffled that they still would not accept my steady refusal.
“Yeah, don’t you remember?” Clemson said.
“Well, of course I remember,” I said. “But I can’t help you tonight. Don’t you remember?”
“You have to,” Jolanda said.
“Don’t you have someone else helping you?” I asked.
“Nobody,” Clemson said. “We can’t even get inside. So we need some help real bad.”
“Well, how can you have a dance if you’ve not done anything yet to plan it?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Clemson. “We just go in there and have one.”
“Yeah,” said Maria. “We just have one.”
“You can’t even get into the gym,” I said.
“You can help us,” Jolanda said.
“I don’t have a key to those doors,” I told them. “We can’t do it tonight. I can’t help you.”
“Everyone’s coming,” Clemson said. “So many people are already coming. We have to get inside. You have to help us.”
I couldn’t believe it. They had gone this far with everyone around them saying no. Somehow they still trusted they could make this thing happen. And it sounded to me like they were going to do it. They were going to hold a dance. I should have given in then. I should have let go of my position and exercised my 15 percent flexibility quota, which to this point I had probably not even dipped into. I should have helped them because they were just kids trying to hold a dance, trying to have a good time, but I heard the warnings in my mind of seasoned teachers who had told me that to give in, especially at the last minute, was to lose face. “They will never respect you again,” I remembered hearing, “because your word will mean nothing.” My gut told me, however, that I should give in and help them, but then what grew out of control inside me was frustration and annoyance. How could they be so persistent? How could they be so insistent? How could they be so optimistic that they could pull this thing off? They were using me, and I wasn’t going to let them.
“No,” I said. “We’ve already been through all this. We can put a dance together next weekend. My parents are going to arrive soon.”
“So?” said Clemson. “Oh, c’mon. You have to.”
“No,” I said finally. “I won’t do it. I’ll help you next weekend, but not tonight.”
“Hey,” said Clemson to Jolanda. “What about Alice?”
“Yeah,” said Maria. “She’ll help us.”
“Of course Alice will help us,” Jolanda said. “She likes us. Not like you.”
Alice lived in the trailer a couple doors down. She was almost always home, keeping a weather eye on her supply trailer behind the school. She had everything in there for the classroom, and more. She ran her post with royal autonomy. She ordered and distributed supplies to teachers and staff, some days according to obsolete BIA guidelines, I guessed, and some days according to her mood. “Let’s see,” she might say, looking over her inventory list, “you can only have five sheets of black construction paper, but thirteen of red.” On another day she might insist I take supplies I didn’t need. “No, take’em,” she said to me one day, pushing two huge cotton canvas laundry bags into my arms when I came in for pencils. “Take ’em home. For takin’ laundry to Crownpoint. Take ’em. We don’t use ’em. And here’s some liquid hand soap, too. Kills germs.”
“Okay,” I said. “Go ask Alice, then. I hope she can help. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
“You’re not sorry,” Jolanda said. “You’re not sorry. You don’t even like us.”
“That’s right,” said Maria. “You don’t even like us. And we don’t like you.”
“C’mon, you guys,” Jolanda said, and she led them off.
Though I tried not to admit it to myself, I felt responsible for whatever was going to happen inside the gym that night.
I took up my coat and put on my shoes to take Virginia and her friends home.
“I’ll go with you,” my father said. “And we can take my truck.”
“All right,” I said. “See you in a bit, Mom.”
“I’ll just be here,” she said. “I’ll be here watching these dogs.”
Outside, the three boys climbed into the back of my father’s big Dodge under the camper shell and Virginia sat in the cab beside me to show us the way. We started down the bumpy dirt road toward the Trading Post.
“So who ran the dance?” I asked Virginia. “Juan Carlos?”
“No. Not him,” she said. “He was there. But Alice did it. Alice let us into the gym.”
“And she supervised all night?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “She stayed with us and helped us. Jolanda got a lot of money from there. You should have helped your class.”
She was right, of course. A long silence went between us.
“Why was Juan Carlos there?” I asked, trying to find something to say. “I thought he wasn’t going to be there.”
“Oh yeah. He was there. He’s always there,” she said.
Juan Carlos hosted the prom each spring in the gym during the school day. He ran the event like a city dance club that allowed entry based on one’s “look.” All eighth graders were allowed in because it was their prom, but sixth and seventh graders, and anyone from the outside, was allowed entry by his evaluation only. It seemed to me that sixth graders were especially young to be worrying about meeting Juan Carlos’s social standard.
“So did he help you guys?” I asked.
“Well, no. He was there not helping,” she said. “Just hanging around, you know.”
“Yeah, I should have been there to help,” I said, agreeing with what she’d said earlier. I felt dumb about saying it. But saying it or not saying it, I felt callous and selfish.
“Right here,” Virginia said then, pointing out the window. “Stop here.”
My father pulled over where a driveway led away to a hogan and two trailers. One of the boys climbed out of the back, came around to say thank you through the open window on the passenger side, and then made his way home through the dark.
We dropped off the other two boys at their homes, and then Virginia was alone with two strange white men in a pickup truck at night. She grew quiet and pressed herself up against the passenger side door. I imagined that she felt both grateful for the ride and foolish for accepting it, that she felt both safe and in danger at the same time. The only other option she seemed to have had that night was to walk home, miles and miles down this long dirt road through the cold night with no coat. She would have had the company of the three boys, but that carried certain risks too.
We drove on in silence for a few more miles until Virginia pointed to a driveway.
“Here,” she said. “This is my home.”
We stopped in front of a small house with no lights on. In the darkness, I couldn’t see much, couldn’t see whether there were vehicles parked there to indicate that someone was home. The peak of the little roof looked sharp and unwelcoming where the landscape gave way to the night sky.
“Okay,” I said. “I hope you have a good holiday.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks a lot. See you laters.”
She got out, crossed in front of the truck, and waved to us in the headlights before the place and the darkness swallowed her up.
We pulled away and the big truck followed the road back the way we had come. We bumped along through the little trough of light without saying anything, the truck carving out a safe pat
h in the night, stars wheeling overhead, the high canyon walls up through the pass towering over us. Outside, the desert air was impossibly clear, while inside the cab we rode protected from any discomfort: the cold, the dust rising from the roadbed, the spiny, twisted desert vegetation, the hard, rocky country. And just as we were protected, we were also cut off from the landscape, cut off from what was happening out there in the desert. If coyotes were calling, we couldn’t hear them over the thrumming of the truck’s diesel engine. If a wind was scraping the roadbed or singing in the yucca and pinyon, we didn’t know it. If a star went shooting across the night directly above our heads, we couldn’t see it. All we knew was what came up in the narrow tunnel of the truck’s lights.
We came alongside the deep plunge pool of the arroyo where I had watched that river of water in the storm, and in a blaze of white speed, a rabbit burst up out of the ditch.
“Goddamn it,” my father said.
Hard to know, but maybe it was a black-tailed jackrabbit, the kind with ears almost as long as the rest of them. It laid itself out in front of us, and, unable to respond in time, we rolled over it, crushing it beneath the truck’s big tires. All we felt was the slightest touch, a little tremor in the truck’s frame. Before either of us recognized what was happening, it had already happened. The event was over. The rabbit was dead.
I turned back in my seat to look through the cab and the camper shell windows. I could see nothing but darkness and a weird reflection cast back through the layers of glass by the headlights in front of us. The dead rabbit had already vanished into the dark, and we weren’t stopping to have a look.
“Damn things,” my father said.
“Jesus,” I said at the same time. “So impossible to stop for those things. They’re like, suicidal.”
“Yep,” my father said. “You just gotta run ’em over, or you end up in the ditch yourself.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“But I sure wish they wouldn’t do that,” he said.
He was right. If he had swerved to miss that rabbit, we might have hit the cut bank on the right side, or we might have flown out over the edge into that great chasm. Neither option seemed worth a rabbit’s life. But then, didn’t you have to draw the line somewhere? What life was worth the ditch or the chasm? The life of a spouse or lover? A brother or sister? A parent? A child? An eighth grader at Borrego Pass School? Did ordinary people make such sacrifices, or was an act of selflessness solely the territory of fools and heroes?
