Deviant (6 page)

“Danny, I've been talking to you … We're ready to go,” Walt said.

“Uh, OK.”

“You can borrow those 'zines if you want,” Bob said.

“Yeah, thanks, we don't have TV yet,” Danny replied.

He grabbed a few magazines, said good-bye to Houdini, and walked with them outside.

“Nice wheels, by the way,” Bob said.

“Yeah, Tesla Roadster. Apparently, Glynn's trying to play up the Tesla link because the new casino is right next to the scientist Nikola Tesla's old laboratory. The casino's giving away the Roadster as a prize and we get to drive it until they do. You like it?” Walt asked.

“It's the future, man,” Bob said.

They said good-bye to him and drove out of the prison.

Back on Correctional Institution Road, Danny noticed another hole in the fence of Cobalt Colorado FCF, which made him think that minimum security really meant the
bare minimum. Grover Cleveland Middle School back in Vegas had better defenses.

When they got home, Juanita was back already and baking a chicken in the oven.

An hour later at dinner, Walt filled Juanita in on Bob, the prison, and his job. He seemed excited, and Danny knew that this would make his mom happy.

Danny ate his dinner hungrily, folding strips of chicken and spoonfuls of rice into the tortillas his mom must have gotten from a local supermarket, because they didn't taste homemade. Which meant that they had Mexican food in Colorado.

“Mom?” Danny said after finishing his plate. “Can I ask you a question?”

Juanita looked at Walt, but he didn't know what was coming.

“Some people say the casino isn't very popular round here.”

“Who said that?” Juanita asked.

“The girl across the street. I think they're kind of religious or something. She's nice, though.”

Juanita thought for a moment. “Well, I don't know, there are going to be people who are resistant to us making money from gambling, and if that's their religion that's OK.”

“Do you think it's OK to make money from gambling?” Danny asked.

“People have freedom of choice. No one forces them to fly to Las Vegas. No one's going to force them to drive up
that long road from Colorado Springs. And let me tell you something else. Mr. Glynn is building this casino for the Ute and Cherokee Nations. He'll run it, but it's going to be theirs. The people around here have gotten pretty rich taking Ute and Cherokee land and building prisons all over them, and if the Utes and Cherokees wanna take some of that money back by building a casino, I think that's a very good thing.”

Danny nodded.

“OK?” Juanita said.

“Sure,” he muttered. “I don't really care. It was just something that girl said.”

He stared out the window at the snowflakes. He looked at his mother. She was tired. She was holding a glass of iced vodka tonic against her forehead with her left hand. “Mom, do you
feel
Cherokee?” Danny asked.

Juanita put down her glass and looked at him. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“But you're only half Cherokee though, really, and I'm only a quarter,” Danny protested. “A quarter Cherokee, a quarter Mexican, and half God-knows-what.”

Juanita had had this conversation before. She wasn't going to be sucked into it. Danny appeared to be fishing around for a potential argument to alleviate his boredom.

“My dad was Cherokee, and that makes me Cherokee, and it makes you Cherokee if you want to be,” Juanita said gently.

Danny shook his head. “I don't want to be.”

“Why not?” Walt asked loudly, butting in like it was his business. Danny looked at Walt's place setting to see how many beers he'd had. Only one bottle of Heineken. There was no point trying to bait him. “I couldn't care less about it,” Danny said, addressing his mom, not Walt. “This is the twenty-first century, we're, like, going to Mars and stuff this century, you know? That Stonehenge stuff? Nobody cares about that anymore. That's the past. It's all dead and gone.”

Juanita didn't get the Stonehenge reference, and Walt just shrugged and took a bite of his tortilla. “This is delicious, honey,” he said.

Later, when it was pitch-black outside and so cold it hurt your face even at the open window, Juanita came into Danny's bedroom.

Jeffrey jumped onto her lap and she stroked him absently and looked at Danny until he put down the copy of
Surfer
magazine.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing. How was your day?” Juanita asked.

“Fine, boring.”

“Are you OK, Danny?”

“I'm OK. It was kinda weird with the cops yesterday and actually going inside a prison today.”

“That is weird. You should keep a journal.”

His mother was always trying to get him to write and read more.

“Uh, no, I'll just check out these magazines, OK?”

“OK, I'll go,” she said, and as she stood, Jeffrey hopped
off her lap. She walked over to the door, turned the handle. Danny didn't want her to go just yet. “Oh, Mom, can you tell me about La Llorona? The Cherokee La Llorona,” he asked casually while turning the page of his magazine.

“La Llorona? Aren't you too old to believe in that nonsense?” Juanita said.

“Of course, but I was just wondering …”

“Well, I don't really know that much about it. You should ask your aunts if you want the real story …”

“What do you know?”

“OK, um, well, when the Cherokee came to the mountains, they found a race of people already living here. But gradually the spirits fled, and when the white men came, they were all gone, except for La Llorona, the mother goddess, who haunted the mountains.”

“That's not the bit I want to hear about,” Danny interrupted. “Tell me about the cat. There's a bit about a cat, isn't there?”

“A lynx took her baby. You know what a lynx is?”

“Of course.”

“She hated cats. She killed cats wherever she could find them.”

“That's what I thought.”

“What put this into your head?” Juanita asked, ruffling his hair.

“Nothing, really … That girl across the street, she's sort of a bit weird-looking, but Jeffrey went right over to her, so she can't be bad.”

Juanita nodded. Danny had not yet had a real girlfriend, but this was the sort of confused thinking she was expecting to see when a girl he liked appeared on the scene.

She smiled and said nothing and left.

Danny lay for a while and turned off the light.

That night his dreams were vivid.

He thought of the men in the prison. He thought of the girl next door. He thought of the spirit men of the mountains.

He woke shivering. Freezing. He had left his window open and snow was coming in. “Jeff?” he said, half expecting to see him, hackles up, backed into a corner, terrified at some unseen creature.

But Jeff was still sleeping peacefully at the bottom of his bed, untroubled by coyotes or bears or snow or anything else.

The house was quiet.

Danny looked out at the blackness of the woods. Not a single light anywhere. A dark world, strange, unknown, almost unknowable.

The hairs on his neck were pricking up. “Calm down,” he whispered to himself. “There's nothing out there.”

He closed the window and pulled across the heavy blue curtains. Everything was normal, everything was as it should be. And yet he couldn't shake the feeling that something
was
there, something—or someone—was watching, waiting …

The windows of Mr. Lebkuchen's office were tinted so that it was difficult to see through them to what would have been a spectacular view of Pikes Peak beyond. The room was bare but for a few esoteric charts and a pristine wooden desk behind which Mr. Lebkuchen sat in an uncomfortable-looking ergonomic chair. Danny fidgeted in his school uniform of black blazer, black pants, white shirt, green tie, black socks, black shoes. He actually didn't mind the uniform too much. Although he hadn't worn a uniform at Grover Cleveland, he had at the Las Vegas Primary School for the Arts. He was only fidgeting because this interview had been going on for almost fifteen minutes now, mostly with Mr. Lebkuchen talking about how extraordinary it was to accept a student in the middle of the year and if it
hadn't been for the personal intervention of Juanita's boss, Mr. Glynn …

Danny's parents were on either side of him. His mom in her smart work clothes and Walt—incredibly—in a suit and tie, the first time Danny had seen him so attired since the wedding. He'd even shaved and tied his graying hair in a ponytail behind his head.

Danny was uneasy. Mr. Lebkuchen looked like a fairly decent guy: late twenties, close-cropped curly blond hair, blue eyes behind rimless John Lennon glasses, and a smudgy Play-Doh friendly face. He wasn't very tall, smiled a lot, and was obviously enthusiastic about his job. He was wearing white gloves, which was a bit eccentric, but the problem wasn't Mr. Lebkuchen. The problem was the words coming out of Mr. Lebkuchen's mouth.

“So you see, Mr. and Mrs. Brown, that's been Danny's main issue, I think. It's not his fault that he's not progressing; it's the fault of his teachers, the fault of the whole educational system. Here at Cobalt Junior High we use the system of Direct Instruction that was developed by Siegfried Engelmann at the University of Oregon. It's now used by two dozen charter schools across the country. Our method is a modified version of the Slavin approach from Baltimore, which has saved many failing Baltimore schools and which has been used by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to completely transform Native American schools.”

Who says I'm not progressing? Danny wanted to protest, but didn't.

“How does it work?” Juanita asked.

“Well, it's very simple. Breathtakingly simple, really. Can I give you the standard school pitch? It'll sound a bit canned, but it covers everything,” Mr. Lebkuchen said, rapping a gloved knuckle on the desk.

“Sure,” Juanita said.

“OK. Here goes. Cobalt Junior High Charter School is a publicly funded, tuition-free charter school running the DI system. Founded in 2008, our school serves students from Cobalt, Manitou Springs, and the entire Colorado Springs area. The mission of CJHCS is to provide a content-rich, academically rigorous education with a well-defined, sequential curriculum in a safe, orderly, and caring environment. With an initial intake of just forty, now we have three grades, one hundred students, and are oversubscribed by fifty percent—in just three short years we've become one of the best public schools in the state.”

Mr. Lebkuchen gasped for breath and pretended to wipe sweat from his forehead.

“Got that? OK then, pitch over, now the basics of DI. All our lessons, every day, are planned in advance. Planned and printed by the Association of DI Schools. Teachers read from a set script, and the children follow along from a script of their own. This is the Direct Instruction method. It sounds strange, but it's been tested and it's foolproof. Our results speak for themselves. It's a little bit hard to describe, so let me show you one of our books,” Lebkuchen said, passing across a reading booklet for the month of January. Every
lesson was indeed laid out in advance: what the teacher had to say in one script in red and what the children had to do in blue. Juanita passed it to Walt, who passed it to Danny, who passed it to an invisible shredder on Mr. Lebkuchen's desk.

“We do intensive reading, mathematics, science, history, and geography,” Lebkuchen continued. “No music, no art, no dance, no silly subjects. We do the three Rs here. By law we are not allowed to teach religious instruction, and by law we have to do PE, but I think that a lot of that is wasted time, especially since we don't have a gym, and we've got to minibus the kids into Colorado Springs.”

“No music?” Walt said, aghast.

“No, Mr. Brown, kids can do that on their own time. However, we are starting an extensive after-school program that includes music and art.”