from the tyranny of stratigraphy
Lonnie Brightboy was a Choctaw. Or that, at least, was what he had been told. He was from Montana and he knew that the tribes in Montana weren’t Choctaw. But it mattered little. He lived on the reservation there with his parents and Dodo, a pet raven, which his mother said he couldn’t bring along when they came to live in Utah. Because of this fact alone, he would hate Utah for all of his life. Dodo was his best friend. The bird had been clipped by a National Park Service truck and left to die on the Two Medicine road when Renee and Sarge had found it and brought it back to Lonnie’s father, Renee and Sarge not having any idea what else they could do with it. Lonnie’s father and mother were both special education teachers. When they’d come west, it had all of the charm, for them, of a great western novel with history in every face and the stoic grandeur of the Park always lingering on the western horizon. But with time it had become, in more so his mother’s perception, more and more only a dangerous town.
An older boy had taken Lonnie away from the Indian school one afternoon and attempted to sell him to men, leaving the reservation, and going from bar to bar. When Lonnie’s mother found that he was gone, she’d searched first around the school and then had driven into town and gone directly out to the bars. At the first bar she learned of what was happening and only by the fifth did she find Lonnie. He was unharmed and didn’t understand what had happened, considering the entire outing to have been only a small adventure. Lonnie’s mother remembered that half hour between the first and fifth bar and reminded Lonnie’s father of it so often that by the end of that winter both of Lonnie’s parents had found jobs in Utah.
Lonnie had one more spring and summer with Dodo and Lonnie’s friends from the Indian School. On a day in early August, Lonnie watched his father and mother load a rental truck and then Lonnie left with his father to a bridge on the Two Medicine road, just below the entrance to the Park, where they let Dodo out of Lonnie’s father’s truck. Dodo had made a gurgling sound like the sound of a water cooler or of the sound an eddy makes beneath a bridge all of the way out on the road as it wound up from prairie to the beginnings of the high country timber. The bird hopped from the asphalt and then through a field of boulders, down to the water. It drank there and flopped its wings back and forth in a still eddy beneath the bridge as it did whenever they took it back to this place, near to where it had been first recovered.
Lonnie saw the bird look up as they drove away and begin to frantically hop back up through the boulders. His last sight of the bird was it attempting a long hop to a boulder near the road and it slipping and sliding down behind it.
“I want to go to school with you and Dad,” Lonnie said with a determination which was new and both of his parents enjoyed.
“No, Lonnie you can’t,” answered his mother. “Because your Dad says we have to live in the mountains. We’re going to work in a big city and you and, us too, will all live together in a little apartment for a while in the high mountains. Then you can go to your first grade there while Dad and I go to work in the city.”
“I like it better at school with you. I don’t care nothing for the mountains. We’ll go to school together. You teach me like at home.”
This was the first day of school and Lonnie’s mother was attempting to get him to stay at the school bus stop and wait for the bus. But every time she began to walk away, she noticed him not far behind her. He would only begin walking when she was about twenty feet away and then he walked at her pace. She finally decided to be even later for work than she had projected on that day and wait with Lonnie for the bus. He had gone to the Indian School for kindergarten and an elaborate preschool system which was available on the reservation.
Both of his parents worked there and were friendly with his teachers and were always able to anticipate and solve his problems before they occurred. Because of this he was advanced in most subjects. His parents were involved in everything he studied and would often take him out of classes whenever they had free time and work individually with him on his more difficult subjects.
He realized that his mother was angry with him and wasn’t going to go away or take him with her to the school where she taught. So he became stoic and quiet and watched with the other children for the bus. His mother asked for the names of the other children and introduced Lonnie and then he became embarrassed for having followed his mother. He decided not to follow her again, but to accept things as they were.
She watched him get on the bus and he found a seat on her side of the bus so that he could wave to her as the bus pulled away. But she had already begun walking up the street hurriedly and didn’t look back to see him waving and calling out.
At school, a woman wearing a costume like that of wizard – it was purple and had stars and crescent moons in silver and gold printed on it, and she wore a matching hat, directed him to his classroom. At first he was afraid to ask her but he walked around a long circle of hallways and had thought he was lost for a while. He finally went up to the wizard woman and asked for the first grade and she asked him for his name and she told him to go to Ms. Langyard’s class.
Ms. Langyard was a very tall woman with stiff blond hair and a lot of color on her face. She smelled clean, Lonnie thought, so he sat near her. He was afraid of what the other children might think of him. He felt different. His mother told him to get to know the teacher and that the other children would respect any child who was liked by the teacher.
The classroom was divided into six small tables and five children were to sit at each table. He sat nearest the teacher’s desk and was the first student to sit at that table. Soon after he sat, first one and then another four girls, who knew each other’s names, stood around the table and looked at him. He thought about running away. He looked for spots at the other tables and saw one in the back. Just as he was about to get up, Ms. Langyard told the five girls to find a seat and sit down. So four of the girls sat with Lonnie and the fifth went to the last spot in the back of the room.
The morning was spent with Ms. Langyard explaining the rules of the school and of her class. And then she gave a short quiz to see what skills the children possessed. It was a simple quiz where she read a passage from a book and then said, (a) it means this and (b) it means that, and all Lonnie had to do was color in the circle for the letter which was right.
Lonnie was red in the face for the whole morning because he had chosen a table with four girls. Then in the afternoon she said there would only be two hours left of school before a lengthy recess and they would draw. She explained that she was very interested in art and would be very impressed by the great artists she knew she had in her class. She passed out a lot of paper and pencils and said that the children would work at each station for a while and then would move on to the next station.
It took Lonnie a long time to realize that a station was the same thing as a table and by the time he realized this simple fact it was too late for him to understand exactly what he was to do. He thought that at his table he was to draw a duck, and he knew that at the next table, the children were to draw a lion.
He stopped listening to what Ms. Langyard was saying then because he was deciding about how to draw his duck. His mother drew things. She mainly drew pictures of faces of the people where they had lived before. They would have a lot of ceremonies in the summer and she would take pictures of the dancers and singers and then she would draw them with a black-ink pen on raggedy-white paper in the wintertime and sell the drawings at the Indian store next to the big museum on the highway.
So Lonnie knew quite a bit about how to draw because he watched his mother and she had told him several of her secrets which she would only tell to people she loved. He knew that the first thing was to look real hard at what you were drawing and see wherever there were real lines that you could make on the paper so that the paper would look just like whatever you wanted to draw.
Because he didn’t have a real duck or even a picture of a duck, he closed his eyes as hard as he could and watched a duck in his mind. He’d seen a lot of ducks. Once he saw a bear chase and eat a duck. He thought about whether he would draw the duck sitting on the water or flying. He knew just how a duck looked when it was flying and a duck sitting on the water was easy. He decided to draw a duck with its wings spread out and its legs running along the water in the same way a duck looks when its just about to take off from the water. He saw the water in little drops flying up and held in space, like time had been stopped, around the running feet of the duck. Ms. Langyard and the four girls at Lonnie’s table looked at him while he sat with his eyes closed and his pencil suspended above the blank page.
Then Lonnie thought about the names of the duck parts. His father had taught him the names of all kinds of animal parts. He knew how to say them but not how to write them. He thought he could do his best and write them just as he thought they were spelled. He knew how to make the letters. His mother had told him to do the best he could and everything would be all right. So then in his mind’s picture of the duck he saw the words for the ducks parts written all around it with lines going from each of the words to the correct duck part.
Then he was thinking of why the duck was running so fast and trying to fly so hard. He figured that something was chasing it and since he really saw it once he decided to make it a bear. Then his picture had a bear in the background. A big grizzly with gray hair and a hump on its back. He would make it angry with large teeth. He had a grizzly bear tooth at home and knew exactly how it looked because he worked it in his fingers every night while he fell asleep.
Then he saw how it would all fit together and he held the picture in his mind so that he would remember it when he needed to come back to it while he was drawing. Then he felt a shove against his shoulder and a small boys voice said,
“Hey come on. Do a lion.” Lonnie looked up and the table was full of boys and this one boy was trying to take his spot. Lonnie saw on the table a loose stack of poorly drawn ducks. Most were only partially viewable collections of three or four lines and not really recognizable as ducks.
“Come on move out,” the voice said again.
“Come on Lonnie,” it was Ms. Langyard. She was now standing over him, with the reflected fluorescent light shining from her stiff hair.
“Move on to the next table Lonnie, draw a lion.”
“No,” he said and he bent forward and began to work on his duck, but the confusion of the moment, of his suddenly becoming the center of attention, left him unable to see his duck picture in his brain.
He looked up at the teacher, “I can’t see it anymore. It’s scrambled up,”
“What is that?” Ms. Langyard asked. “What is scrambled up?”
“The duck picture in my brain,” Lonnie said.
All of the boys at the table laughed. “You’re holding up the whole class, silly,” said the largest child at the table. This caused all of the boys at Lonnie’s table and at the three surrounding tables to laugh.
Ms. Langyard said, “Tim Watson,” in a very crisp and hard way that resulted in a hush throughout the classroom.
“I’m still working on the duck,” Lonnie appealed earnestly to the teacher and she smiled back at him. She was curious about why he just wouldn’t move on. It was a very simple matter. All the child had to do was complete five rudimentary drawings and he and the rest of the class would be released to the playground early.
“He’s messin’ with an extra recess,” said the boy standing upright and angry beside Lonnie.
“Yeah, stupid,” said another who the teacher apparently did not know because his comment went without reprimand. Now, Ms. Langyard felt the class slipping into a state of disarray which wasn’t tolerable on the first day. She realized that if she allowed this to continue it would affect her ability to control the class going forward.
She gently placed her hand around Lonnie’s arm and said in a gentle but firm voice that she had practiced at home, “Please, Lonnie it is time to move to the next table.”
“I’m doing the duck. I need to think it real sure.” Lonnie looked at the woman with a clarity of intent that Ms. Langyard would consider remarkable when thinking about it even five years later.
“No way. We’re playing speed ball at the extra recess,” a boy at Lonnie’s table said.
“What’s speed ball?” a girl near the back asked.
Lonnie pried Ms. Langyard’s fingers away from his arm and with a look of stern concentration began to draw the duck’s head and then the first of the ducks feathers on its left wing.
“It’s where Tim Watson gets the ball and he throws it at us as speedy as he can and we runs away as speedy as we can too.”
Lonnie, near completion of the first wing, had begun to draw the droplets of water around the feet so that he could leave blank spaces around where they would be on top of the wing.
Ms. Langyard bent very low and spoke softly into Lonnie’s ear, “OK, fella how about you work over there at the table right by the door. You can sit by yourself and make the duck you want to make all through the extra recess.” She expected him to yield right away when faced with forfeiting a recess period that was not scheduled. But instead he picked up his paper and pencils and began to walk back to the tiny desk beside the door.
“What a fruit,” the boy who displaced Lonnie said.
“Yes, let’s begin the class project again,” the teacher said watching Lonnie sit down and begin his work without looking back at her or at anyone else in the classroom. He worked diligently and had half of the duck completed by the time he was dismissed from the empty classroom to go and catch the school bus. He walked directly from the room, not going back to place his drawing on the teacher’s desk. He wadded it up into a small ball and threw it into a large gray plastic garbage can next to the front door of the school. Then he walked through the door extremely and purposefully slowly and was the last child to get on the bus much to the consternation of the waiting driver.