The days are long on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, especially on the weekends when you live in the teacher housing. Only the packs of dogs move around with any sense of urgency. I was nervous getting in the car. I’d only been in Kyle four months and it had been my habit to drive up to Rapid City on the weekends to do my food shopping, catch a movie, and have dinner at the Outback Steakhouse. The contact with other white people—even an unrecognizable Western Dakota version of them—was enough to dull the edge of my homesickness. It was late morning on a warm early November Saturday. Instead of driving to the city, I had decided to visit one of my students at his home. The earth was dry. Only one snow had fallen so far and that had just been a dusting. The light was brittle and clear and the clouds moved high and fast in the sky.

All I had to track Joe Saknikent down was an address. No one had answered the phone at the Two Shots residence where he lived. 484 No Flesh Rd. Addresses don’t mean much on the Rez, because they generally denote an approach road marked by a cattlegrate. A whole extended family might live down such a road. There could be twenty trailers along a road like that all with the same mailing address. Kyle is a small dusty town on the Kiyaksa side of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Kiyaksa means, “they stay away.” That’s Bull Bear’s Clan, in contrast to Red Cloud’s band who signed the treaty and settled in the agency town of Pine Ridge. They stayed close and took advantage of their privileged relationship with the traders to build what tribal government there is on Pine Ridge. Kyle is the deep country side of the Rez, teetering on edge of the badlands. It is really just a five-way intersection, a spider of lights in the prairie night. BIA Rt. 2 runs east west. Allen Rd. runs south. North Route runs north and deadends at the badlands. No Flesh Rd. runs southwest to Martin. The Two Shots lived out that way.

I sat in the car, listening to a tight fan belt screech, and trying to get up courage to put it in gear. Joe Saknikent was one of the students I wanted to reach. I’d been teaching 11th Grade English at Little Wound School for four months. Grades don’t mean much on the Rez either, unless you’re filling out your state-mandated curriculum worksheet. I had students from 2nd to 12th Grade reading levels in the same classroom. The class had twenty-five kids enrolled. About twenty came regularly between Tuesday and Thursday. Mondays and Fridays were a wash, no more than fifteen ever. The beginning of the month was the worst. People got their checks and took off on road trips or parties and their kids went along for the ride.

I’d decided on Friday during a class in which I threw the movie Smoke Signals in the federally-funded big screen television, turned the lights off, and prayed that the hours would pass faster, that I needed to visit Joe’s house. He’d missed three days of school in a row and I hadn’t visited anyone’s home yet. I was avoiding it because I was chickenshit and the guilty claws of fear were digging in my shoulders and making it hard to doze off during the movie. I’d been happy up to that point in my teaching career to be a cheerleader, applauding the kids when they handed in shitty one-page essays on whatever I could think to assign them, editing their papers for them and stressing the importance of doing re-writes. I knew I wasn’t helping them. My principal, a pock-faced Northern Cheyenne who’d been a tribal police chief for twenty years, called me into the office early in the week.

“These kids don’t need anymore friends,” he said. “They need teachers.”
“I know, Ted,” I said. “I just need to win their trust first.”
“You had their trust just by coming out here. I’ll back you up if what you’re doing in there is teaching but if I think you’re trying to be their friend, I’ll kick your butt right out of here.”
“Yes, sir,” I’d said. “I’m on it.”
But then I’d found myself back in the hallways of a dysfunctional public high school a lot less sure. What the fuck was I supposed to teach a bunch of kids who could not get jobs and had almost no chance of finishing college when apparently nobody had managed to teach them shit before I got there? Plus I didn’t have any friends and I needed some.
Joe had given me hope. He’d just moved back to his uncle’s place from Oklahoma. He was a gangster kid who wore red, a dangerous prospect on that side of Pine Ridge Rez. Everybody’s blue there, Gangster Disciples mostly or some other kind of Crip affiliate. He’d sat in my class everyday for two months and not opened his mouth or responded to me in any way. I sent him to the office twice for being disrespectful and he came back each time, folded his hands in front of him and said nothing. One day he walked up to my desk and handed me two pages of graffiti script, neatly penned on lined paper. No punctuation and all lower case. It was a kind of abridged life history beginning with his dad leaving his mom and ending with a fight he’d had in Oklahoma. He got chain whipped and hospitalized. What was beautiful about the story was that he told how he’d thought of his dad watching him as he was being hit with a chain. He said it had made him unafraid.
I pulled out and steered my car through the empty teacher housing bloc. Only the Lone Hills stayed around on weekends and their lights were off. All of the other teachers lived off the Rez, stayed in the housing during the week, and left on the weekends. Tumbleweed collected on their chain link fences in their absence and the rez dogs did what rez dogs do, drink motor oil and fight and fuck, get food where they can.
The school is the biggest building in Kyle. It’s façade was designed to look like a buffalo head but like most shit on the Rez was not executed particularly well. You’d have to have a vivid imagination to find a buffalo in that jumble of concrete and tile. Anyway the school’s one of four major structures in town. The majority of the buildings are trailers. The post office, Lil Angels convenience, the CAP office, the clinic, the college center and the concrete block homes in the public housing would not blow away in a tornado. Everything else probably would.
I turned left off BIA 2 and then right on No Flesh Rd., a gravel road with pastureland on both sides. The road surface was a washboard and if you went too fast, it would rattle your back end right around and you’d wind up in a ditch unless you had real skill as a driver. A hundred people have died on that road testing their skill against a night of drinking. One of my students, a mix-blood kid named Blaise Zephyr, died two months earlier. His luck was bad. He was drunk and going fast one night and he hit a big black bull that was standing in the road. Both of them died. On the Rez you cannot die hitting a black bull and explain it away as coincidence. That bull was either somebody who had a beef with Blaise or his family, or that bull came to take Blaise somewhere. The community was split on the verdict. The whole school stopped for a week to mourn him and everyone cried a lot and his picture was put up everywhere and the quilts were made and given and the stories of his life told and the feasts took place. I was blown away by the spectacle. Next Monday the school was back to normal. That was the hardest part for me. Blaise was the fall tragedy. There would be one in winter and spring also. Life goes on. Hecetu, as they say out there. So be it.