The War Whisperer: Book 1: Geronimo Page 4

  “That was why,” said Abril quietly from her place at the window. She turned and looked at Mister Makin. “That was why they died, señor: They had their whole lives in front of them.”

  It was silent in the room for a long time as Abril’s words sunk in.

  Yeah.

  We had our whole lives, each year, day, hour, minute, and second of it, in front of us. I was young. I had a very long way to go.

  “This is a school, a home for you children, not a prison,” Mister Makin said at last, pushing the fingers of his right hand through his hair as he looked around at the children. “We care for you, feed you, put clothes on your backs, educate you, and prepare you for life out there in the real world, mostly in government service where you can begin to pay back what this country in its generosity has given you. Go on: Who? Who here thinks they are prisoners?”

  The hand raising was slow in coming. Kendall Makin was the school principal. Why point yourself out as a troublemaker to one who punishes all the troublemakers for a living? But sometimes an honest question deserves honest answers. The hands went up. Mangas and Abril first, the rest of us one after another—even me.

  Honest question.

  Honest answers.

  Los reclusos. To each other, even among the Apaches, that’s what we called ourselves: Inmates, prisoners.

  Each of us noted this honest moment between the keepers and the kept. It became another mental historical monument.

  Mister Makin’s eyes went wide as his jaw hung open in genuine astonishment. “Unbelievable! I can’t— . . . Fucking unbelievable! I never in my life saw such a bunch of goddamned ungrateful brats!”

  He pointed a finger generally in the direction of the HeliDrone pads and swept it around indicating, perhaps, the entire universe. “If you weren’t here at UCH, all of you would be out there! Got that? Out on the streets! Out in the desert! Or back starving in your own damned countries. You got that? You’d be in jail, or in reformatories, starving to death, caught up in prostitution or kiddy porn, drugs, at the mercy of killers and perverts, or already dead. This place, right here, the Uvalde Children’s Home, saved your lives, saved you your futures. No one here is a damned prisoner,” he declared. “We’re your family! This is your home!”

  It was silent for a long time. Papa Makin was looking around expectantly—a bit wild-eyed—as though the room full of his suddenly rehabilitated sons and daughters would rush into his arms for a big hug, to beg his forgiveness, and to declare our undying love and gratitude for UCH, our home, and our big happy family.

  “Am I free to go where I want, señor?” asked Mangas. “Am I free to go where I want, eat what pleases me, wear what I want, learn what I want, work where and at what I want?”

  “You’re school kids,” the principal retorted. “Children! Three quarters of you are even illegal. Not even supposed to be in this country.”

  He took a ragged breath. “Even so, in school there have to be rules. Every healthy home has rules. —Good jobs. Good jobs are waiting for you once you finish your educations. Otherwise you’d all be spending your time staying in bed or playing video games, joining gangs, and smoking dope. Surely you’re old enough to understand that, Mangas. We can’t have you running around loose out there getting into trouble. That doesn’t make this a prison. Does it?”

  “I think that’s what a prison does, right?” said Mangas. “Clothes, food, a place to sleep? And prison keeps people from running around loose and getting into trouble?”

  “Those great jobs out there, señor,” began another boy, “is it like in here? Somebody keep all the money and leave us the dirt, sweat, and paperwork?”

  It was Dylan Nuñez. He was smiling, his eyebrows up, his expression announcing to all that we had the truth, Kendall Makin was caught in a web of lies and didn’t know it, and it didn’t make any difference to anything. Nothing would change. Not for us. Never for us, unless we followed Thiago and Bodaway into the unknown. Death equaled change, defiance, freedom.

  We could hear a heavy truck moving west on Benson Road. As the sound of the truck faded away, a breeze picked up dust from the playground and began the task of covering the blood. No point in more talk.

  Mister Makin didn’t get it. A lock is still a lock even with a happy face painted on it. Control is force whatever well-intentioned kissy-face fuzzy greater-good label you hang on it. Calling yourself a principal and thinking of yourself as the head of a big family doesn’t make you Daddy. It doesn’t change the reality of what the warden’s job is.

  Being in that classroom was getting boring now that the cops and ME assistants had left and the FBI wasn’t going to show. My stomach was growling.

  Mister Makin eventually sighed, shook his head, looked through the windows at the place where the two boys died, and told us to go on to lunch.

  Too High

  A few days later a song began making the rounds of the dorms. The rumor was that Abril had made it up. I heard her sing it as she accompanied herself on her beat up old guitar. She played well and her voice was clear and soft on the ears. We all learned the song:

  I’m only a bird in a rusted cage,

  An ungrateful sight to see.

  You may think I’m happy and free from care,

  I’m not, though I seem to be.

  It’s sad when you think of my threadbare ass,

  And school books yellowed with age,

  But my childhood was spent,

  On the government cent,

  I’m a bird in an old rusted cage.

  Soon after the song made the rounds, we were forbidden to sing it, which meant that everyone memorized it. The school confiscated Abril’s guitar and held it hostage. It became just one more meaningless contest of wills. Catching someone singing the song resulted in loss of “privileges” such as eating food, seeing the sun, sleeping on a bed, wearing clothes, and using enough toilet paper to properly wipe one’s ass: Solitary confinement. We called it “the hole” and I don’t think anyone missed a few days in the hole.

  One thing the snoopy blogs never found out about UCH: We had solitary punishment cells. They were in the basement of the cafeteria building. No furniture in them. Just a bare floor, masonry walls, one tiny window high up for air. No clothing allowed. No books, no papers. Nothing but water and scraps for meals. A bucket for wastes emptied once a day. Twenty-four squares of cheap toilet paper per day. For some, even beatings were part of the rehabilitation program.

  Mangas was kept in solitary a long time and beaten until he needed to be taken in town to the hospital in an ambulance. He never said who did it.

  Four months later, after Mangas had been back ten days, Mister Salinger, the “isolation supervisor,” was found drowned in a toilet in the cafeteria faculty rest room. The door had been locked from the inside, there was no window in the room, and no sign of a struggle. The medical examiner had to rule it a suicide.

  Carlos, one of the sixth graders from Venezuela, said he heard the ME say to Mister Makin, “Imagine the degree of pain, the amount of will power, to die like that.” And Carlos said that Mister Makin shook his head and said, “Frankly, I never thought Jeff Salinger had it in him.”

  Neither had we.

  Ten days later Mangas was gone—a scholarship, we were told, to some kind of special school in Maine.

  The song of the bird in the old rusted cage was translated into Spanish, an Apache dialect, and pig Latin. Pictures were drawn on walls and blackboards of singing cartoon buzzards in rusty cages. Drawings of toilet seats appeared, too.

  Goodbye cruel world.

  *flush!*

  All the burnt umber, sienna, red, brown, and orange chalk was removed from the classrooms. When green became the new rust, the various shades of green were also removed.

  One of the very young teachers, Bonnie Davidson, jokingly pleaded with the “cage artists” during one recess not to make white the new rust. “We really, really, really need the white chalk.”

  Nothing but white cag
es from then on.

  Later that year, two weeks from Christmas, the air outside crisp and cold, we got denim jackets with plaid flannel linings and Mister Makin was replaced by Ms. Brenda Kohl. We were informed Mister Makin needed a rest. Abril’s guitar was returned to her as well as all the colored chalk to the teachers.

  After dark that night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I wrapped a blanket about my shoulders and stood in the second floor back stairwell of Northwest Dorm “C” watching the HeliDrone techs in their faded blue coveralls as they waited near the pads, but away from the flood lights which still drew an occasional insect. Three of the techs were smoking skunk, talking a little, a laugh or two, a yawn. Suddenly they all at the same time pressed their right ears, then stepped back until they were well clear of the pads. Less than a minute passed, then as if by magic the drone on the right appeared as if out of nowhere. It was flat black, with a humpy little body and a wingspan of around five meters, heat distortion waves rising from its tail. It looked like a huge black bat with a gas problem.

  No one moved until the drone on the left pad appeared, as well. As soon as it did, the techs broke into two groups of four, each group to a drone, and moved in. The techs applied some kind of brakes to stop the blades in each drone from turning. Once stopped, two techs on each drone unlocked and folded the wings while the remaining techs read off check lists, fiddled with this and that, tiny red and blue lights on the drones flashing, then each group dragged and pushed its drone toward the maintenance garage bays.

  Once the drones were in the bays, two of the techs stayed in the building while the rest of them pulled down the doors. The flood lights went out, and the techs and flight operators who were outside left, several by car, out onto the Fort Clark Road. The rest walked through the dark along a path behind the flight operations shack leading back to a fence on the other side of which were both of the ugly Quonset hut UPD HeliDrone Unit barracks. In the drone maintenance building, someone turned on a radio, the faint strains of mariachi music on the night air.

  Seeing the drones appear was kind of cool, but I’d seen better than that in that one old Star Trek vid with the whales. Thiago used to think it was cool, but he was dead. Looking at the empty drone pads in the dark just made me feel awfully sad. In a matter of weeks, though, the pads were still there, but the drones and their mechanics and operators were gone, the barracks closed. The police drone unit had moved to their new location somewhere else.

  Pre, K, First, Second, and by Third grade I was a cynical hardened old-timer assigned to Center Group Dorm “D” Down. Two floors in the dorm, each floor had seventy-five beds, girls upstairs, boys downstairs. Mister Ross was the Down floor res. We were to call him “Scotty.” Ms. Sayers was the Up floor res. We were to call her “Nikki.”

  We slept in old double bunks that weren’t too bad and kept our stuff in old wall lockers. My locker still had a name stenciled on it: “Postal, I.M.” When the senior boys from North Dorms came in to paint the lockers tan, the redneck boy named Harold who painted mine looked at the name and laughed. I asked him why he laughed. He told me the name I.M. Postal was a joke name like I.P. Daley and Claude Balls.

  I didn’t get the joke.

  Harold explained that the post office employees in the States decades ago got a reputation for going crazy, grabbing guns, going back to work, and shooting up the place. It was called, “going postal,” but now the ISW terrorists did most of that work.

  I could relate to going postal.

  I often looked at my locker and thought of the name I could no longer read: I.M. Postal.

  “Not yet,” I would whisper.

  Much to do first: Weapons to collect, rope to reach the end of, actual blind-level rage to achieve.

  Not postal yet, but I could tell I was saving my stamps.

  That night I found a lump in the back of my right leg just above my knee. It didn’t hurt so I ignored it.

  The next day monotonously awful music began being played over the public address system. It was a collection of Mexican pieces performed by individuals and groups who hailed from Uvalde. The oldest of the groups went back sixty and seventy years and was called Los Palominos. The experiment lasted only three days. As one of the Mexican kids said, “This shit was lame when my grandmother was a chick.”

  We had another two days of various artists, the semi-rap Fuego, and the unwrapped Las Pinzas. After the first and only protest demonstration I ever saw at UCH, the school went back to using the PA system for announcements and letting us listen to whatever we wanted or could get over the net, the airwaves, or the rare listenable public domain downloads.

  One night I was on the bottom bunk and a new third grader named Antonio Costas was brought in and assigned the top bunk. It was his first day at the Crotch. He cried almost every night and I talked with him a little. Tony remembered back to when he had parents and a sister in Laredo. Tony was slow and would get frustrated and throw and break things and finally his parents turned him over to human services in Houston who tried him out in a couple of foster homes then sent him to UCH. Sometimes when I would hear him cry, I would cry, too, but not making any noise, and not really knowing why.

  I tried making friends with Antonio, but either I was unlikable or Antonio Costas believed that if he could make UCH as painful as possible on himself, his god would notice and force the government to send him back to his home. It took three weeks, but once he realized he already was home, he jumped the fence during a heavy rainstorm. The police pulled his body out of the mud beneath the Crystal City Highway bridge over Cook’s Slough two days later.

  I had a secret place where I could be alone, as usual, but unobserved. The stairs that went up to the girl’s floor continued up to a locked door to the roof. I got a junior, a big Salvadoran boy Mateo Domingo, to teach me how to do locks by promising him my desserts for two months. He was not very smart looking, but he was a very good teacher. In four days Mateo had taught me enough for me to pick any of the mechanical door locks and padlocks in school, including the lock to the dorm roof. There was still a lot to learn about electrical and computer controlled locks and I continued with the instruction thinking it a useful skill to have.

  On the roof I was away from the others, no one making fun of my name, no one beating on me. Sometimes I would study the school library books that interested me, mostly biographies and histories. Sometimes I would look across the road that separated the Center Dorms from Cook’s West Dorms and Cook’s East Dorms. The name Cook’s came from the dried up creek bed, Cooks Slough, that ran behind both sets of dorms.

  What I was looking for was a life beyond the wire: Freedom; Not to know down to the particle and second what tomorrow was going to be. It was there I decided that being able to speak, read, and write English would be useful in both an escape and in living a life on the other side of the wire.

  They taught English in the school classes, of course, but mostly by speaking Spanish or from reading stupid lessons on vid screens which would explain the lesson and what to do next, pero en Español, but Spanish with a lisping accent that made the Mexican kids laugh.

  “Correct Spanish pronunciation,” we were informed, “is Castilian,” which had the Mexican kids thpeaking Cathtilian, each “Como ethta uthted,” met with a “Muy malo, grathiath,” followed by wiping up imaginary spittle and laughter, but not learning much English.

  Abril, the girl who informed Mister Makin we had no souls was beginning middle school. She taught English to anyone who wanted to learn during recesses and after classes. I’d seen her little gatherings composed of little kids, older kids, and at times as many as five school employees.

  One day I said to Abril that I would like to learn English, and she added me to her group of eleven Hispanic kids, two Navajos, a handyman born in Argentina, and an Anglo woman who worked in the kitchen. She was from West Virginia and said she never went to school, which I found hard to believe. Her name was Belinda Tolliver and she was a quick learner, and helped me
many times. She worshipped Abril, many times saying how proud she would be if she had such a daughter.

  I asked Belinda once how she had been kept out of school. “Pap never sent me.”

  “The government had to know about you. Hospital records—”

  “Warn’t born in no hospital,” she said. She looked uncomfortable, almost ashamed. She smiled sadly and said, “You ever hear that old mountain joke about why Henry Hatfield wouldn’t marry the virgin daughter of Myron McCoy?”

  “No. Why?”

  “When he was asked that, Mister Henry say, ‘She a virgin. She ain’t good enough for her own kind, she ain’t good enough for mine.”

  Belinda looked at me waiting for a spark of understanding. I just gave her a confused look. I didn’t laugh at the joke because I didn’t get it. “What’s a virgin?” I asked.

  There were depths, oceans, and worlds of pain, degradation, and mental disfigurement I didn’t understand then. Belinda never did explain about the joke and Abril said it didn’t have anything to do with learning English. Belinda did say she had been born in the mountains west of Slaty Fork and east of Bergoo, and even the government workers with good health plans stayed the hell out of Webster County, “they know what good fer ‘em.” She said that with a strange mix of sadness and pride.

  She gave me two honey crisp apples from the kitchen one time after I did cleaning there. I ate one and it was delicious. There was an older boy, Ken Dolan, who was looking at me. He was a fourth grader, pretty tall, his white-blond hair cut short, his eyes blue and squinty in the bright sunlight. I walked over to him and held out the apple. “Would you like it?” I asked.

  He shrugged and looked down. “Thanks but I can’t eat that. I’m Catholic,” he explained. Since my expression conveyed that I didn’t know why Catholics couldn’t eat apples, he said, “It’s Friday. My people say it’s still a sin to eat meat on Friday.”