The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [40]
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