Staggerford (24 page)

Miles understood why Wayne loved to use the telephone. On the telephone it was so easy to have the last word.

Under the leafless basswood, Miles lay so that the sun fell on the swollen side of his face. It felt good. He dozed again. The phone rang again.

“Pruitt, your Indian is missing!” It was Wayne.

“My Indian?”

“He’s gone.”

“What do you mean, my Indian?”

“Sam LaGrange. Your Indian. At the faculty meeting Monday you signed up to befriend Sam LaGrange, and now this morning he’s absent.”

“He doesn’t want to be friends.”

“For godsakes, Pruitt, quit trying to be clever. Today is LaGrange’s birthday. He’s sixteen and he has quit school. Your job is to bring him back. You could do it right now, before study hall. You could bring him back.”

“Do you mean by force, or what?”

“I mean find him and talk to him. Think of the example you would set for the rest of the faculty if you followed one out to the reservation and brought him back.”

“Wayne, to tell the truth, I’m not optimistic about your plan for befriending Indians.”

“I’m not surprised, Pruitt. When were you ever optimistic about anything? Remember what I told you about being an obstacle in the road to progress? Well, you are. You’re keeping the world from advancing.”

“Now that’s saying quite a lot, Wayne. I don’t think—”

“You’re an obstacle, Pruitt. You’re holding back the advance of the world.”

Miles expected him to hang up, but apparently these were not Wayne’s last words. He waited to hear more.

“Pruitt, you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Pruitt, do you know what it looks to me is wrong with you?”

“What?”

“It looks to me like you’re prejudiced against Indians.” He hung up.

This time Miles took a pillow and one of Miss McGee’s afghans out to the chaise longue and he went back to sleep.

“My, if we aren’t the picture of comfort this morning,” said Imogene Kite, striding across the alley. She was on her way to work.

Miles opened and shut his eyes. Imogene stood slightly
to one side of the sun and she was blinding to look at. “I’m recuperating from yesterday’s ordeal, Imogene.”

“You’re certainly playing that tooth for all it’s worth.”

“Imogene, would you care to look in my mouth and see the destruction?”

“Don’t be gross, Pruitt. You’re making a big case out of a swollen cheek which will be down to its normal size by nightfall. Mark my words. Mucous membrane heals fast.”

“That’s what Doc Oppegaard said.”

“Don’t you know that the mild chemical components of mucous act as a soothing balm to mucous membrane?”

“Imogene, before I forget it, I‘m sorry for yesterday. But you realize I had no alternative but to come straight home.”

“Well, I did want a winter coat, and goodness knows when I’ll get back to Duluth again. As I said yesterday, Pruitt, I am tall for a woman.” She turned to go.

“Have a good day in the stacks,” said Miles.

Later, Miles put on a tie and walked to Doc Oppegaard’s office. Stella Gibbon and the dentist had finished their wine and cheese and were reading jokes to each other from two issues of the
Soybean Monthly
.

“My tooth,” Miles pleaded. “Karstenburg did me wrong.”

In the inner office Doc looked at the damage Karstenburg had left. “Boyoboy,” he said, “what a mess. Look here, Stella, he’s developing a dry socket.”

Stella peered into Miles’s mouth, then reeled back. “How absolutely ugly!” she said.

Doc packed the hole with cotton dipped in something sour. “Hold that in there and come back tomorrow. Boyoboy, Karstenburg really butchered you. I could have done better than that.”

“Then why didn’t you?” said Miles.

“I don’t pull the tough ones. No small-town dentist pulls the tough ones because the tough ones are always painful no matter who pulls them, and a small-town practice depends on a painless reputation. That’s why I sent you to
Karstenburg. It’s better for Karstenburg to take the blame than me. But I swear to God I could have done better than that.”

“I have one more wisdom tooth,” said Miles, getting out of the chair, “and when that goes bad, I’ll let it rot before I’ll go back to Karstenburg.”

“Go to Hoover in Fargo. He has his office right in downtown Fargo, and he’s a crackerjack.”

“Oh, Dr. Hoover,” said Stella. “He’s out of this world.”

Once again the two of them saw Miles to the door, and on the front step Doc said, “How much did Karstenburg soak you?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“It will be high. You’ve got to pay a guy plenty to take the blame for a mess like that.”

Toward the end of fifth hour when Mrs. Horky saw Miles standing with his briefcase in the hall, she left her class and seemed to be on the verge of falling into his arms. “Miles, thank God! You can’t imagine what I’ve been through. Jeff Norquist is a brutal, incorrigible, hellish criminal. He insulted me and disobeyed me. And Roxie Booth is absolutely irredeemable. She told two stories this morning about incest. How in the world do you get up in the morning when you know second hour is waiting for you? If I had to teach second hour every day, why I simply wouldn’t teach. I would take my pension and go clerking at the five-and-dime. This fifth-hour class is a charming class and I got along all right with first and third hour, though there’s not a bit of sparkle in either one of them, but I absolute refuse ever again to take your second hour, Miles, even if it means striking my name from the substitute list. And the same goes for study hall. I told Wayne Workman that never again in my life would I step foot into the same room with Jeff Norquist, and I find that he’s not only in your second hour, he’s in your study hall as well. That boy needs help, Miles. There’s something bad cooking in that boy and I don’t want to be around when it boils
over. And between classes he hangs all over that little Indian girl, Annie Bird. I mean he’s all over her
body
right out here in the hall. I’m going home and dust. I’ve been here two days and all the while there’s been dust settling on my furniture.” Mrs. Horky streaked out the front door. The bell rang and students came spilling out of classrooms.

Beverly Bingham had not seen Miles for forty-eight hours. Now, using the crowded hallway as an excuse, she pressed herself against him. She said, “You don’t look so hot.”

“Hello, Beverly.” He tried to back away from the touch of her body, but there was no place to go.

“Do you have my letter?”

“Yes, it’s here in my briefcase, but I didn’t get a chance to look at it yet.”

“Maybe you could read it this hour and I’ll pick it up after school.”

“Yes, I’ll do that. I’ll meet you back here in an hour.”

She smiled and brushed her attractive front across his arm and was swept away down the hall.

Across the hall Wayne Workman had been standing on tiptoe in order to see over the stream of students. He had been watching Miles and Beverly.

In study hall, little Hank Bird pulled a knife on Jeff Norquist and said, “You better lay off my sister.”

Later in thinking it over, Miles couldn’t believe that Hank had been serious. Hank had an IQ of 99, which was enough sense to know what was bound to happen if he threatened somebody two years older and considerably larger. Maybe it was Hank’s way of showing off the knife he had stolen during the noon hour from Olafson’s Hardware. Maybe Hank secretly admired Jeff Norquist (Jeff had once stolen a new LTD from the Ford dealer) and was awkwardly trying to strike up a friendship between thieves.

But Jeff Norquist didn’t see it that way. In the time it took Miles to get from his desk at the front of the room to the fight halfway down the middle aisle, Jeff put little Hank out of commission. He closed one of Hank’s eyes, knocked out one of his front teeth, and broke one of his fingers.

Miles separated them and picked up the knife, which still had Olafson’s price sticker on it. It was a large jackknife with two blades, a bottle opener, and a screwdriver. Three ninety-five, plus tax.

The screaming of the girls in study hall carried all over the school, and as Miles rushed Hank down to the nurse’s office, he met Wayne Workman on the stairs.

“What’s happening?” asked Wayne.

“I’ll tell you later. Watch my study hall for me.”

The nurse was not in her office. Miles found a bottle of aspirin and handed it to Hank, whose eyes were filling with tears of pain. Miles put him in a chair and told him not to move. He ran to Delia Fritz’s office for the keys to the school car. He returned to the nurse’s office and led Hank outdoors and across the street to the shed behind the football bleachers where the school car—a green station wagon—was kept. He drove to the emergency room of the hospital, where Hank was drugged and his finger was put in a splint. Then he put him back in the car and headed west out of town. He passed the road leading to Evergreen Cemetery, he passed the Bingham driveway, and he crossed the Badbattle near the entrance to Pike Park. He came to the weathered wooden sign marking the border of the Sandhill Reservation, and as he approached the village of Sandhill he saw short, crooked trails leading from the highway to clearings in the forest. In each clearing an old car was parked next to the only door of a small house. The Indians had not built their houses in clusters; they were scattered like this throughout the forest of the reservation. Each car had on its roof a wooden structure like a rickety pulpit, a platform from which at night an Indian with a spotlight was allowed to shoot deer along the reservation roads.

Miles turned off the highway and onto the single street running through Sandhill. The street was sand. He parked in the shadow of the Sandhill General Store.

“You belong to Bennie Bird, don’t you?” Miles asked the boy, making sure.

Little Hank nodded slowly. He was groggy from the shot he had been given at the hospital.

Miles helped him out of the car and through the doorway of the dark store. Mrs. Bird was inside, alone. She was sitting in the shadows behind the bar at the back of the store, probably on the same stool where Superintendent Stevenson saw her twenty years before. When she saw her son being half-carried, half-pushed toward her, she stood up and came around from behind the bar and took him in her arms. She was tall. Her skin was very dark, and her gray, coarse hair was tied together at the back of her neck by a piece of bright red yarn. Her face was expressionless but she drew herself up so erect that her height became a reprimand, and Miles felt, for no good reason, quite guilty.

Little Hank struggled feebly against his mother’s embrace, and Miles began to explain what had happened. “What started the fight was that Hank drew a knife—”

Mrs. Bird spoke to him over Hank’s head. “Get away from here before his father sees him.”

Leaving the store, Miles saw this sign tacked on the inside of the door:
DID YOU FORGET SHOELACES?

He got into the school car and drove ahead, thinking that he would circle the block, but he found that Sandhill was not laid out in blocks. Sandhill was a dozen buildings strung out along this one bumpy street. He drove past the Sandhill Public School, which had been closed when the Sandhill and Staggerford school districts consolidated. The building, according to a small sign above the door, was now the “Chippewa Folk-Arts-And-Crafts Center, Open June 1—September 1.” He passed St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, a small replica of the white, wooden churches of New England, but falling into ruin. The spire above the empty belfry was bent; it leaned, like the leaning jackpines all around it, with the prevailing northwest wind. The white paint had flaked off the walls and the windows were covered with boards. He passed the Sandhill Post Office, a square brick building (the only bricks on the reservation) no bigger than his classroom. Over the door a brand new American flag moved limply in the breeze; it was illuminated by the late-afternoon sun, and it shone like a jewel against the gray November landscape. He passed a gas station
with one pump. He came to a narrow, two-story house and slowed down to read the lettering on one of the windows:

Miles made a U-turn, then stopped to let a blackhaired girl cross the road. She was carrying a blackhaired baby and she was followed by four black dogs of four different sizes. Next he was met by the school bus from Staggerford, which extended its stop signal and let out ten or twelve students in front of the General Store. They ranged in age between six and sixteen. Miles had seen them all at school but he knew only one by name: Annie Bird. As Annie crossed the street in front of the school car, she turned and gave Miles a look that startled him: two angry eyes in a face round as a saucer, an expression that said, “The trouble has only begun, Mr. Pruitt—you haven’t heard the last of this.” Unlike her mother, Annie was small—smaller than Hank—but like her mother she had mastered the intimidating expression. Her eyes spoke of storms. She went into the store, slamming the door behind her.

The bus driver and Miles exchanged a wave and drove off in opposite directions. On the sandy street Miles took it slow. The street was full of holes, and the school car, although only two years old, had been abused by dozens of different drivers and seemed about to rattle itself to pieces.

Once on the highway, he sped back to town. He parked the car in the shed behind the bleachers. Everyone except the secretaries and wrestlers had left school. When he gave Delia Fritz the car keys, she told him to call Wayne Workman at home. He used her phone.

“How’s the Bird kid?” Wayne asked.

“His eye and his fìnger will be all right. He lost one of his front teeth.”

“Your study hall kids told me what happened. I suspended Jeff Norquist.”

“For how long?”

“Two weeks.”

“Did they tell you Hank pulled a knife on him?”

“They did. I’ll suspend Hank too. We can’t stand for that kind of thing. Somebody could get hurt.”