Jackie wanted someone to admire, someone wise and noble with qualities she could refashion like fine strands of silver and wear around her neck. She lived on a reservation in northern Minnesota in the second poorest county in the nation and worked in a twenty-four hour restaurant/bus stop that served up lumpy potatoes with thick gravy to tourists and hot chili late at night to men who lined up at the counter and slurred their words and smudged chili over the counter-tops like children with finger-paints. Only it was a greasy, reddish paint, a war paint, a paint that stained and smelled and made Jackie’s stomach uneasy.
Sometimes, while walking home near midnight, she would stare down the deserted grubby main street and compose poetry in her mind. She kicked at old wine bottles and crushed paper cups.
Yellow trashcan
Tipped disconsolately
Disgorges its wealth
Upon the empty street.
She stared up at the sky trying to see past the town, past the reservation, past the confines of her own seventeen years. Milk white lamps stood useless sentry in rows along the avenue. And when she couldn’t get past the weak glow of street lamps to the dark wide sky beyond, she tried instead to open her belly and let the sky come to her.
Lifeless neon
Calls to no one
No one answer.
Something was blowing up inside of her, a mass or a tumor of emotion that needed to be bled off or poured into something worthy. It made her silent and watchful. It made her want to finger the faces of the townsfolk, to crawl behind their eyes into complex optic networks and explore neural catacombs and pathways. She listened, wanting to reach past greasy insides to feel a heart. Was it pumping? Throbbing? Alive?
She went to school, went to work, went home. She went to parties and pretended to join tribal dances around beer kegs on deserted beaches where young warriors honored the sky with thin sticks of marijuana and peace pipes full of hashish. Even here she tried, working hard, to learn the mathematics of human existence.
But it never added up. Not in the early seventies. Vietnam, the American Indian Movement, drugs, education, parents, values–do what I say and not what I do. Finally she chicken-scratched with a dark lead pencil every wrong answer and found only that she had no respect. None. Finally, bloated and thick with anger and not understanding, she became a child activist showing up at city council meetings, racial forums, writing pieces for the school paper, speaking loud and out and waiting to see what happened. Nobody paid much attention to a noisy child who partied and worked in a greasy spoon–except Smith. Smith noticed.
Smith was a huge man, a giant of a man and the principle of Jackie’s high school. “Smith” was his first name. He was a white man with a gray fuzzy tangle of hair on his head and shoulders so broad they carried the whole school, teachers and students alike. Smith didn’t mess around. It was not unusual to see him strolling the halls of the high school with a smirk on his face as if he wished a fight would start so he could stop it. And when a fight did start the huge bear of a man would grab a squirming ninth or tenth grader in each hand and hold them inches above the floor against the cold metal lockers and demand, “What is the problem here? Is there a problem?” The boys would shake their heads wildly, their feet dangling like horse-thieves beneath a rope. The truth was, none of the kids wanted to risk attracting Smith’s attention. Normally he was as gentle as a mamma bear with her cubs; playful, pawing, teasing, making even the poor reservation town a den of safety. And he didn’t watch just the tough kids having tough times–he watched them all. He watched Jackie.
Of course there was much about Jackie that he saw but did not understand. For instance, he didn’t know that the year before Jackie had decided to quit crying. And since making that decision, she had only cried once. Last September.
True, it was a hard, sucking avalanche cry that took her breath and buried her momentarily. Grandma Clara had a stroke and Jackie’s mom sent her to wait for the ambulance. Something about seeing her great, huge grandmother’s form so still and helpless on the floor caught Jackie in the middle like a hard punch. Clara, who grew bright finger carrots and let the kids pull them from the stubborn dark soil and wash them under the outdoors faucet, sweet and good. Clara, who played 31 like a master, gathering grandchildren’s dimes in a neat pile with hands delicate and bluish and then, at the last minute, would go soft-hearted and give the dimes back. Or Clara, who fingered holy beads with a whisper, her lips moving in long lines of Hail Mary, Mother of God. Jackie did cry then. When Clara hit the floor. But that was the last time she cried.
Not even when she visited Clara and hated the nursing home with its acrid smell and Clara, so thin now, would move the lifeless left arm by a bony wrist with the hand that still worked and lean over toward Jackie with a sagging mouth and ask, why? Why has God done this to me? Why? Please tell me. And Jackie had nothing to say about nothing and only made herself more determined to find out why, God. Why?
After that she also quit going to confession and stood firm like a warrior in spite of glaring looks as the congregation shuffled up to receive the body and blood of Christ every Sunday morning. Confession, like tears, did nothing, as far as Jackie could tell. Smith did not hear her swear silently that no more would she kneel to a God that had no ears or let the holy mass swirl around her like stinging hornets of fear and retribution. These were the decisions she made as she scanned the world for what meant something.
It was painful to be awakening and impotent at the same critical moment. Idealism, wishful thinking, raced through Jackie like strong medicine and it didn’t seem fair that with the world marching on campuses, on the steps of the Whitehouse, in Georgia–she was trapped shuffling from typing to world history, mute and acquiescent. So when students began donning black armbands and protesting Kent State, it was time. She enlisted two friends, Dee and Wayne, and together they bought rolls of black crepe paper and typed up notices and snuck into the paper staff room and mimeographed half-page notices and wandered the halls slipping them to students both Indian and white. It felt right, to do something. Anything. WE CANNOT LET THEM KILL US! Screamed the half sheet of paper, declaring that on Tuesday, at 2:00, the students were to rise from their desks, don the black arm band and leave the school to sit on the front lawn in protest of the police action at Kent State.
It was important, she believed. It was essential, she believed. It was about speaking out, being heard, showing concern. Probably everybody believed as she did, thought Jackie. Probably the ones that really cared were just shy or uncertain. Probably the 23 kids that showed up on the school lawn at 2:00 really did care about more than a lark on the lawn, a chance to dump last hour.
And probably it was not apathy, but some heavier layer of belief, that made 20 of them scuttle back into the school the minute Smith stood on the steps and said “Git to class” in that big voice of his. And maybe there was a reason that Smith dismissed Dee and Wayne with a glance and stood so long on the steps looking at Jackie like he was wondering what to do next and finally just said quietly, “When you are done, please come and see me in my office.”
And when she sat in front of Smith’s desk with him towering over the whole room with its stacked desk, sagging bookshelves and a window that looked west toward Berkeley, it seemed to Jackie that his face was the center of a Mandela of high school talismans and she waited. Unafraid. She was prepared to pay a price for what she believed.
But she wasn’t prepared for Smith’s deep warm chuckle sprinkling out over her like warm rain and a voice as soft and tender as the wind in trees. In fact, she would rather he picked her up and dangle her from a locker somewhere in a glossy hallway and not just sit there. Silent. Looking her in the eye as if she were his equal. Respecting. Her. For that she was not prepared. And the words that followed scattered her elementary mathematics like torn pages tossed. “Why didn’t you come to me?” he said. “I didn’t know you felt so strongly about the students of Kent State.” he said. “I would have helped you.” And what he said next was like driving little dry sticks and pebbles down her throat because she knew he spoke the truth. “Those others don’t care. Don’t you see that? They just wanted to skip out of school. They don’t care, Jackie. Do you understand?”
And she did understand but she didn’t want to understand and suddenly Jackie didn’t know then where she belonged because Smith did care. That was what really struck her. He did care. And he was a big giant of a man and old, and she was a young wisp of a girl and intense and they sat across from one another and talked for a long, long time after school on Tuesday and when she left a strange, shaky feeling had formed in her middle and it may have been sadness or youth leaving or simply knowing she didn’t know anymore.
Two years later she was in college and heard about Smith’s stroke and that things had turned to shit at school. The police spent noon hours walking the halls of the high school and the little man who had taken Smith’s place stayed in his office and tried to manage things from there. Jackie went to the nursing home and found Smith in the physical therapy room doing rope exercises and he was still a big giant of a man in spite of the wheelchair and loss of speech.
When he saw Jackie his eyes twinkled and he would have chuckled that deep chuckle if he could have but instead he just raised a big trembling paw in her direction and she walked across the room and held the hand of a giant. It was still a big, strong, honest hand in spite of the stroke and she was glad to hold it in both of her smaller hands. She knew he could still hear and understand but that he wouldn’t be able to speak so she talked long in the safety of his silence. There were things she wanted to tell him–things she wanted to tell herself. That she had it figured out, that it made sense now, that she deserved his respect, but she was speechless, thoughtless, about these things. Instead she talked about college, the snow on Diamond Point, how she liked to park her car on Lake Bemidji and walk to class and how many other campuses could boast a parking lot of ice? But all the unspoken things gathered in her throat and stuck there and when she left there were only a few hard, river-rock tears that she wiped on her sleeve like a kid.