This is the first time I have been in Kayenta during this time of year in three years. The air smells like football games, like sports practices. It is more autumn here than in Flagstaff. There are leaves all over the ground that move the way they always have. There is an abandoned bike at a playground, the streamers on its handlebars are pink and opalescent and move in the wind. There is a pile of apple cores and skins. In the middle of the disintegrating pile is a pamphlet belonging to one of the many evangelistic sects in Kayenta. LDS? Witnesses? The Baptists? I have not be religiously propositioned since moving too Flagstaff. I almost missed the well-dressed and ultimately well-meaning missionaries asking me if my mother was home.
I’ve been making generalizations about small town life for about thirty-six hours now. I’m wearing silk but my sleeves smell like diesel. I am confused about my capacity. Am I to be soft and impressionable or fueled, spitting fumes, an aluminum dragon?
Writing is, I suppose, viewed as being a transformative art. When you type you are really spinning out cocoons for yourself and your friends. Write something that will make you change. People keep asking me what I think of the changes.
“What do you think of the new school,” one teacher asks me, from behind and metal screen that separates the cafeteria from the courtyard.I look at the rows of cafeteria tables, the giant menu on the wall, the big screen TV where CNN broadcasts Ike swirling collision with Texas.
“It’s so,” I’m trying for linear. “Institutionalized,” he finishes for me. I interview him tomorrow.
And maybe he’s right.
But I walk through the halls, I can’t help but wonder if those cameras are functional.
The school was always a place of half-hearted noncommittal threats.
A nine-foot black metal fence borders almost all of the school property. The tops of the fence are sharp like spears and I imagine them snatching a wiggling sophomore by their backpack. But I opened the gate as easily as anything tomorrow and entered the science building unnoticed.
Inside that black fence at least ten red-roofed pagodas have been built, kids get shade from a beige brick wall. I can already hear what everyone was talking about.
You can change the property but you can’t change the school. Or the people inside. The lockers and the couches in the library are the same. So are the kids, from what I can tell. High school, the land of sneakers.
It’s weird to inhabit a place where so many dramas took place. Where friends dished out sympathy or talked behind your back and shoved notes gleefully trashing the newest white girl. Francesca, olive-skinned, and oozing tom-boyish sexuality was the target in the 7th grade. After her, it was Jenny, who had animal fur from home stuck to her fleece sweater and a habit of spouting socialist-esque propaganda.
I’ll admit to my espionage. I helped create ugly nicknames for all these girls, while, at the same time, brought them Christmas presents. Eventually the girls, pale and cracked thermometers, moved away.I befriended a lot of these girls, and, to an extent, found them more comfortable than Racquel, Beranda, or Brittany. Brittany is the one friend I can’t find, in my memory, perhaps because we were the closest or because, in the end, I chose myself over her.
The faces that stump me the most are those of the Anglos. At Basha’s, which looks like a well-stocked warehouse, I play the Tourist Game, my own invention. I try to guess if this or that white face is a tourist. And, if possible, what country they hail from. A lot depends on whether or not they have a fanny pack.
Everyone expects that I am here with a Kayenta-instilled sense of pride. I don’t know what I am here for. I imagine my mind to be like on of those space-age smart foam mattresses. I imagine the impressions left behind my fingers and kneecaps.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Katherine, one thing that has changes,” my mother says. “I remember people coming to town with wagons and mules. No one liked to drive at night. Because of the sheep, and the yannies. Now you see all those houses, but then it was dark. Dark as a wilderness. Now there are so many lights.”
