by Don Reardon
“If we were, you would have killed me, to have the food you saved for yourself. Maybe eat me with salt and pepper. I jokes, John. I’m no good for one of those people. Besides, we’re not like them, are we.”
She said it like a statement. Not a question.
14
The figure stood in the doorway for a moment and moved toward the kitchen and then stumbled over the first bodies. A gasp came from across the gym and John watched as the person half-crawled, half-walked over the corpses toward him. He was no hunter.
John stepped back a little, waited for the right moment, and flipped on the flashlight, shining the beam straight into the man’s eyes. The man jumped to his feet and shielded his face.
“That’s far enough.”
The man, wearing a tattered fleece jacket and Sorel Packs, shuffled another step forward and pushed a woman’s leg out of the way.
He shone the light across the gym. A glint of steel by the door caught his eye. He shone the light at it and spotted two portable generators he hadn’t seen before.
“Start clearing the path to the door and I won’t shoot you.”
“That food’s going to make you sick. You can’t take it. I came to tell you to leave it. Going to make you both real sick.”
John shone the light on his pistol for a moment, for effect, and said, “Turn around slowly and start clearing me a path. I’m going to be right behind you. Try anything and you’re dead. I should have already shot you.”
The man turned slowly and started pushing bodies out of the way. John tilted the handcart back with one hand while holding the pistol and flashlight against the top box with the other. He started rolling through the path of bodies. The flashlight and the pistol pointed at the man’s back.
The man began kicking the corpses out of the way with his boots. The sounds of his boots hitting them and the rough skin scratching against the floor made John’s stomach turn again. He swallowed hard and steadied his breathing.
“They’re going to get you,” the man said.
“Are there more people out there?”
“Not out there. In here.”
John flashed his light around the gym, suddenly paranoid.
“Who?”
“These people,” he said. “You’re stealing from the dead. That food is theirs. This is their grave now and you’re stealing from them. We don’t take from the dead.”
The man stopped pushing the bodies away and turned toward John. With the light shining into his dark brown eyes the man stared at him, unflinching.
“You shouldn’t have disturbed them,” he said.
“Why did you come in here, then?”
“I’m not the one stealing from them.”
“Yeah, but I’m not the one kicking their corpses. Come on, we’re almost there. Keep moving.”
“Out there, he’ll get you.”
“Who?”
He looked over his shoulder and grinned. “You know who.”
“Keep moving.”
Just before they reached the door he told the man to stop. He didn’t want to walk out into an ambush. He needed a moment to think. If a group of them were waiting in the hall, he and the girl would be easy prey. If he shot the man now, he wouldn’t be keeping his word. He didn’t want the girl seeing him lie like that. He didn’t know where the girl had hidden—he didn’t want to call her out yet.
He wheeled the handcart within three feet of the man. “Okay, once we get to the door I want you to stop. Then you’re going to turn around and wheel this cart in front of you. Don’t test me.”
Near the door he told the man to stop again. The man turned and took the cart and wheeled it out into the hallway, with John right behind him. John stopped at the door and looked down the hall in both directions. Nothing. The man set the handcart down and turned to him.
He was rail thin. Mid-thirties. A thin LA Lakers shirt with holes hung from his knobby shoulders beneath the fleece jacket. The man’s black hair, shoulder length and stringy, almost mangy, hung in clumps from his head.
“You going to blast me now?”
“Not if I don’t have to. Who’s waiting out there for us?” John asked.
“No one. There’s no one. Let me take a case of those chickens. Please. I’m so hungry. Come on, man. I helped you. One can. Just give me one can, dude. One.”
“What about them?” John said, gesturing to the bodies in the gym. “I thought you were afraid of them.”
“Too late for me now, too, I guess.”
“I’m leaving here with this food. When I’m gone, you can go back in and take all you want.”
John felt a hand on his back. It almost made him drop the pistol.
“Sorry, I couldn’t stay in there no more,” the girl said, her voice barely audible.
“It’s okay,” he said.
He watched as a smile spread across the man’s face.
“I know you,” he said to the girl.
Her face shifted. She took a deep breath and stepped back to the side of the door.
“I know you,” the man said again, and in the dim light of the hallway, John could see the raised burns on his neck.
AFTER THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, in their little one-bedroom shack of a house, Anna cried. She curled up on the couch, which was made from two wrestling mats stacked on top of each other with a heavy flannel sheet covering them, and cried.
“What the hell are we doing here?” she asked between sobs. “Who are we fooling? Why did you let me talk us into this? It’s my fault, isn’t it? I wanted this so much for you, I should have known this would be too much for me to handle, shouldn’t I?”
The questions were building to a level of hysteria he hadn’t seen since the day before their wedding, when her mother insisted she hire a real florist and not leave the flowers to her hippie friends. He knelt down beside her and tried to soothe her. He knew better than to set foot into one of her spring-loaded questions.
“They hated me,” she said. “They looked at me, and stared at me like I’m some sort of hellish freak alien, and they hated me, John. Hated me.”
“I’m sure they didn’t hate you, Anna. They’re second-graders. They don’t even know hate yet.”
“Thanks. That’s so reassuring. Now I’m teaching them to hate! They weren’t excited or motivated or interested. They just sat there and stared at me and didn’t do or say anything. They wouldn’t answer my questions or do what I asked them. They just sat there. Some of them covered their faces! They couldn’t even bear to look at me!”
“I’m sure there’s an adjustment period, you know? You’re new here—new to their world—that’s a big thing to remember.”
“And I’m white. White.”
“And white. So what? You’re dealing with kids. This whole school thing is as foreign to them as their culture is to you.”
She looked up at him, her face awash in tears. “And you’re the expert now? Is it just because you had a great first day? Or did your Native roots suddenly kick in?”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” he said. He got up and went back to the stove and stirred the pot of chili. He tasted it, and added another dash of Mexican chili powder, more pepper, and two pinches of dried garlic, anything to make the tin-can taste disappear.
He tried his best to just answer the question. “It wasn’t great. I mean, after the first two minutes I threw the whole first day of lesson plans out the door. We spent the day getting to know each other. It took me about thirty seconds after the first bell to see that they weren’t ready to jump right into school mode.”
“So what did you do?”
“We talked. Scratch that—I talked, at least initially. They asked questions, and more questions, and all I did was answer them one right after the other.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Where are you from? Do you hunt? Where have you been? Do you play basketball? Did I play college hoops? Why didn’t I play in the NBA? Where are you from? Again. Wh
en did you get married? Why did I marry you?”
“They asked about me? They asked why you married me? Even your students don’t like me?”
“Relax, Anna. They asked about everything. Then, when they couldn’t come up with any more questions, I started asking questions. And that’s what we did for the day. We just talked and got to know each other. Sometimes we just sat there and didn’t say anything.”
She stood up and let her hair down. She tasted the chili and poured herself a cup of hot water from the kettle on the stove and began to dip a green-tea bag.
“What sort of questions did you ask?”
“I started simple. Nicknames, favourite subjects, favourite sports. Then I asked about things they learned over the years in school, past teachers, and what they wanted to do in the future—but that’s the one thing that stumped them a bit, or something they couldn’t really answer.”
“No one expects high school kids to know what their future holds,” Anna said.
“Yeah, but not just that. The question really took them back. I mean—I tried to reword the question. You know, what will they being doing in ten years, and that drew even less of a response. Michael, that tall, skinny, talkative kid? He said they don’t think about the future like that. It’s against their culture, he said.”
“To talk about the future?”
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe I misunderstood him, or they just didn’t quite get my question. This chili is as ready as anything from a can will be.”
He began filling two blue plastic cereal bowls with the meatless chili. She took her bowl, sat down, and pushed her spoon around the bowl.
“You’ll do fine, hon,” he said. “Just give them some time. I would guess that with those young ones, they’ll be a bit shy at first and then you’ll have to beat them off you with a stick.”
“Yeah, well, if tomorrow doesn’t go any better, I might get a stick, and then you might be teaching here alone.” She pushed her bowl away and he pushed it back to her.
“Eat. You’ll need your strength to swing the stick tomorrow.”
THE GIRL AND JOHN awoke to a rare clear, crisp day that reflected against the snow a blinding white and forced him to squint until his forehead burned like an ice cream headache. A strong wind pushed at their backs, and he was happy to not have to worry about frostbite on their faces. Travelling went smoothly enough that his mind wandered back to thoughts of Anna and their first night together. He forgot the blind girl walking beside him, and the toboggan with their gear, a few cans of food, and her grass bundle. For those few moments he was in an anchored rowboat, rocking with the waves, in the middle of a lake, naked from the waist down, with Anna on top of him. Above them, the stars of a Wyoming night sky pulsed.
The memory slipped away when the girl asked if they could stop for water, but that night, when the two of them made camp beneath the stars, exhausted, the memory came back, and he escaped to the boat again. She rocked with the waves, dropping down onto him, letting her long brown hair fall over him, covering her eyes, and when she lifted her lips to him, her withered face twisted with pain, and she coughed and lurched toward him.
“John? John? You’re nightmaring again,” the girl said, gripping his shoulders.
“Sorry. Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Anna … That was your wife?”
He nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see his head move. The girl smiled and returned to her work with the grass.
“It’s okay. You must have been dreaming of her,” she said, and put the end of one grass stalk into her mouth.
He tried to close his eyes, but as soon as he did, Anna’s face would reappear, the horrible image hanging in the sky above him. He tried to see through it, to the stars, but it wouldn’t go away.
“What did she look like?” the girl asked.
He couldn’t answer her. She waited for a while, and then asked another question. He knew she changed the subject for him.
“It’s clear tonight. Can you see the northern lights? We say those are spirits playing in the sky. I heard elders say they will even come get you if you whistle at them. So don’t whistle. Are they there?”
He stared out at the black above them, speckled with faint stars, but no wisps of aurora.
“Nope. Just the stars.”
“Are there any satellites? I remember seeing those blinking lights travelling across the sky. My brothers said that’s where we got our TV shows. I wonder if we still had electricity if we could get TV still. You think there’s still TV anywhere?”
He scanned the sky. He hadn’t thought about satellites. Were they still transmitting? Could they tell him anything he didn’t already know? If he spotted one, what did that mean?
He closed his eyes. She was gone.
“I don’t see any,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
15
The girl’s body trembled. She had backed herself up against the side of the gym door, away from the two of them. She held her eyes shut tight, her face shielded from his view, her body curled as if trying to shrink out of sight.
“I know her,” the man with the burns on his neck said. “I can’t believe the little blind one is still alive.”
“Shut up,” John said to the man, and then turned to the girl. “What’s wrong?” he asked. Her nostrils flared and her white eyes narrowed, as if she could see the man standing in front of her.
“Little Bug,” the man said. “She’s one of my kid sister’s girls. Lying little bitch made some bullshit story up and got me kicked out of our village.”
John pointed the gun at him. He eased him back a few steps against the other side of the wall.
“That’s enough,” John said, pressing the pistol into the man’s chest.
“She’s my relative. Take the food and go. I’ll take care of her. We’re family.”
“I don’t think so. Step back.”
John knelt down beside her. Tears wet the sides of her cheeks, and the muscles in her jaw trembled. “Is he who he says?” he asked.
She nodded.
“He’s your uncle?”
She nodded again.
One of her hands had found the ice pick, which he’d left against the door frame. She scraped with her thumbnail at the cold steel.
“What do you want me to do?”
She took a deep breath, then let it out in stuttered white bursts that steamed from her nostrils. She took another and it came out smoother.
“John,” she whispered. He leaned in close to her. “Let me talk to him.”
He stood up and motioned to the man with the barrel of the pistol. “She wants to say something to you.” He crossed the hallway as the man approached the girl. John watched, but he was also thinking about the food stacked in front of him. His stomach burned. Nothing sounded as good as a big spoonful of peanut butter. Chicken sounded better, but he knew it would be a while before he could dig into a chicken leg without getting sick.
“Little Bug, I never thought I’d see you again,” the man said, and as he said this she stood, swinging the ice pick like a baseball bat. The side of the heavy steel bar smashed against the side of the man’s head, sending him to the floor. Before either of them could react, she jumped on top of him, thrusting the bar sideways against his throat, pinning him. He gasped for air and tried to push her off. His starved muscles could do little against her rage.
John started to step in, but once he saw the girl had the upper hand he stood by with the pistol pointed at the floor, his finger beside the trigger.
The girl’s breath came from her mouth in frosty bursts. The man quit struggling.
“You going to kill me?” he gasped. “You blind little bitch? Try check if you can.”
“Why would God let someone like you live and so many suffer? Why?” she cried.
She pressed the bar harder against his throat. Blood seeped through the black hair at his temple.
“Why did all those good peop
le in there have to die and you live?”
The man looked up at John. “Please,” he gasped, “she’s crazy.”
“I wish that water had burned your eyes … Tell him how you got your burns.”
“Please,” he begged again, “I can’t breathe.”
“Tell him what you did to me!” She lifted one knee and pressed her kneecap against the bar. The man started to choke and convulse.
A DOZEN STUDENTS all at different ability levels filled the desks of his classroom. This was his challenge. It didn’t take either of them long to realize that the village kids had already known more teachers in their life than most graduate students. Just a quick glance at the file cabinets with different folders from different years, he could see the turnover in teachers from year to year was incredible. There had been one constant in their academic lives—inconstancy.
For all he knew, he and Anna might not be there the next year either, so he decided to quietly stuff the district curriculum guidelines in his desk and find a way to show his students how to teach themselves.
On the day he started the new approach, he sat for a while at his desk, with a smile, just looking them over. They would peer up at him and then glance away, shyly. They were a patient group. Five boys and seven girls. They sat at their desks, some of them with light jackets on, all of them wearing T-shirts, jeans, and Nike or Adidas basketball shoes or knee-high black rubber boots.
Alex, the kid with the Bulls cap, John pegged as his biggest challenge in maintaining any sort of respect with his students, tried to hide the pinch of snuff in his lip as he asked, “Why you always smiling at us, John?”
He wouldn’t tell Alex to spit out the snuff and go to the principal’s office. He knew there were more important battles to win.
“Why am I smiling?” He stood up and walked to the whiteboard. “You guys have told me that you don’t think any of what you have learned in school is important, that it doesn’t have anything to do with you. Right?”
“Well it don’t,” Alex chuckled. “You see any Eskimos using geometry shooting ducks?”
