The Warriors Page 3

  “Come on, son,” the gray-uniformed bus driver said. His voice had some kind of deep southern accent that Jake had never heard before. Jake could see the man’s dark face smiling at him in the big rearview mirror. “Summer’s over,” the man said, laughing. “Get on in there.”

  Jake walked down the aisle. His backpack caught on one seat after another as he walked, as if it didn’t want to get off the bus, either. But a bell was ringing from somewhere inside the building, and Jake knew that, bad as it was, it would be much worse if he were late.

  He jumped out of the bus and ran up the steps toward the door where the last of the other kids had just disappeared inside. He noticed something that made him pause for a moment before going inside, something that was carved into the stone at the right side of the door. It looked like an engraving of two lacrosse sticks.

  He stepped through the door into a lobby with a ceiling so high that one of the tall maples along the driveway would hardly have touched it.

  “Backpack and ID,” a voice to his left said. Jake pulled his eyes away from the lobby ceiling. A tall man stood there holding out his right hand. The man had on a blue uniform with his name on a tag above the left pocket. THOMAS, it read.

  Jake fumbled in his jacket pocket for the laminated ID card that his mother had given him. It hung from a red cord so he could wear it around his neck, but Jake had been too embarrassed to put it on.

  The man took the card, looked at it, looked at Jake, and then nodded. He leaned down and used both hands to place the cord around Jake’s neck.

  “Supposed to wear that when y’all are on campus, Mr. For-rest,” the man drawled. Then he placed the backpack on a small conveyer belt that ran through a detector of some kind. The man looked at a TV monitor and nodded. “Your turn, Mr. Forrest,” he said.

  Jake stood there in confusion. The other boys had all vanished from the lobby. He hadn’t seen what they’d done. He didn’t understand what the man named Thomas expected him to do now. Jake wondered, too, why Thomas, a grown man, had his first name on his badge while he called Jake, a kid, “Mr. Forrest.” Jake looked at the conveyor belt. Was he supposed to lie down on it?

  Thomas took him by the shoulder and gently steered him toward an open white plastic doorway. “Through there, just like in the airport,” Thomas said. “You know the drill.”

  “I never—” Jake started to say. Then he choked off his words. He was probably the only kid in the whole school who had never been on an airplane. But with all the stuff that had been on the news over the last couple of years, he realized that he knew what he was supposed to do. Jake searched his pockets for metal of any kind, pulling out his house key and two quarters, which he dropped into a tray Thomas held out. Jake walked through the white plastic doorway. On the other side Thomas handed him his backpack, his change, and his keys. The look on Thomas’s face was a little different now. He seemed a little less bored, a little more sympathetic.

  “Go on,” Thomas said. “You’re going to do just fine here. New student check-in down there to the left. You see that sign there? Says ‘Guidance’?”

  Jake started down the hall. As he walked, he noticed a trophy case on the wall about fifty feet ahead. He wasn’t close enough or at the right angle to see into it fully, but his heart began to beat a little faster when he thought he saw some rawhide webbing.

  “Mr. For-rest,” Thomas called to him.

  Jake looked back.

  Thomas motioned for him to come back.

  “Forgot to tell you. Y’all are supposed to report to the Headmaster’s office. Third door, down there on the right.”

  A red-haired woman sat at a desk just inside the open door. She was listening to one of those telephone headsets that looked like something Jake had seen country western musicians wear at big concerts on TV. She peered over the top of her glasses at Jake. Then she held up the oversized green pencil in her left hand, motioning with it for Jake to enter, move right, sit, wait.

  “Excellent,” she said into her headset. “Good-bye. And you are?”

  Jake realized she was talking to him now. “Me?” he asked.

  The woman with the glasses and headset nodded. “Yes, I’m sure you are,” she said, “but I also would like to know your name, young man.”

  She pointed her giant green pencil at the ID that was only partially visible because Jake had tucked it out of sight inside his jacket.

  Jake pulled out the card and looked at it. Why was he doing that? He knew his own name. He felt like an idiot.

  “Jake Forrest,” he mumbled.

  The woman nodded again. “Thank you,” she said. She looked down at a sheet of paper on her desk, and then raised her pencil again like a baton to point it at the open door behind her.

  “Go right on in, Mr. Forrest,” she said. Then she smiled, and Jake realized that she wasn’t being mean, just business-like. “And relax. He’s not going to bite you.”

  Jake had seen a movie once about a private military school for boys. His image of what a headmaster should look like came from that movie. So he half-expected to see a tall, uniformed soldier with a straight back and a stern face staring at him. To his surprise, the man who smiled to him from behind a cluttered desk was small and chubby. He had white hair and a white beard, and he was as round-faced as Santa Claus. “Dr. Cortland Marshall,” read the nameplate on his desk. When Dr. Marshall stood up, he was shorter than Jake.

  “Sit down, Mr. Forrest,” he said.

  Jake sat, feeling slightly surprised. Dr. Marshall’s voice was at least twice as big as his body, the words coming out in full, round tones. The whole room seemed to reverberate as he spoke.

  Dr. Marshall chuckled, clearly aware of the effect his voice had. When he spoke again, his voice was softer, much closer to normal, though still full and deep. He remained standing.

  “I’ve invited you in here this morning for no particular reason, Mr. Forrest. I just wanted to let you know my door is always open. It’s a Weltimore tradition that any student may ask to see me whenever he has a real need. Since you were a late admit—although a welcome one—you missed our opening orientation sessions.”

  Dr. Marshall held up a folder with Jake’s name on it. “The teachers at your former school gave you some high praise, young man. Intelligent, cooperative, never a discipline problem, always on time to class. Admirable. Although they do feel you have been hiding your academic light under a bushel. Well, here at Weltimore we are known for bringing out that light in students and helping them make it shine.”

  Dr. Marshall paused and smiled again at Jake as if he expected Jake to say something.

  “Unh-hunh,” Jake said, making it an enthusiastic one.

  Dr. Marshall’s smile broadened, and he patted his desk with both hands as he continued to look down on Jake from his standing position. Jake began to realize just how short the chairs were in Dr. Marshall’s office. With the exception of the headmaster’s own chair, the other chairs were all so low that anyone sitting on them was practically sitting on the ground. Jake guessed it was one way for Dr. Marshall to make sure people were always looking up at him.

  “I know,” Dr. Marshall said, “that you may be worrying about how things here are different from your old school. But Weltimore has a long tradition of helping its students from different backgrounds adjust. We have boys here from more than twenty different nations.”

  Other Indian tribes? Jake found himself thinking. Then he noticed that Dr. Marshall had accompanied his words with an expansive gesture toward a school photo on the wall just five feet from Jake’s head. Jake studied the picture for a few minutes, sensing that was what Dr. Marshall expected him to do. A dozen faces of different colors were sprinkled here and there in the photo, smiling young men who mostly looked to be white. Gradually Jake realized that Dr. Marshall meant that there were people from different countries at the school. But he didn’t see anyone who looked like an Indian.

  Dr. Marshall leaned forward and his voice became more co
nfidential. “I do have one question, Mr. Forrest.”

  He began to say “unh-hunh,” then thought better of it.

  “Yes, sir?” he answered.

  “How many goals have you been averaging per game this past year?” Dr. Marshall asked, almost in a whisper.

  Waiting for Jake’s answer, Dr. Marshall leaned closer, so close that Jake noticed for the first time that there were tiny designs on the headmaster’s tie. Pictures of tiny people playing lacrosse.

  C H A P T E R S I X

  THE CABINET

  BEFORE JAKE REACHED THE DOOR to the guidance office, he stopped to look into the case on the wall. What he had seen from a distance earlier was a lacrosse stick, all right. It was one of the old ones from his great-grandfather’s playing days. Jake knew it had to have been handmade, probably by an Indian at Akwesasne, like Frank or Alex Roundpoint. They’d crafted the best Indian sticks back in the 1930s and 1940s.

  This stick was in perfect shape. It had been restrung and varnished so that the beautifully shaped hickory wood shone. When Jake looked close enough, though, he could see the scratches and nicks that were a sign of its long use. Jake remembered Grampa Sky telling him what it was like back in the days before plastic sticks. Back then, you’d get shipped a big bundle of sticks, every single one different. Everybody would be excited, first picking up one stick, then another, each one trying to find the stick that fit him just right. Jake wondered whose hands had held this stick, and he wished it wasn’t locked up in a glass cabinet.

  The old lacrosse stick, though, was only one of the things in the display case. Jake read the large letters above the display: WELTIMORE WARRIORS’ PROUD HISTORY. The sign was dominated by a bronze statue of a nearly naked Indian. Jake stared at the mean expression on his face, the two feathers on his head, and the lacrosse stick in his hands. Jake looked back over his shoulder. The thought of anyone seeing him staring at that statue made him feel embarrassed.

  It was the way so many people wanted to see Indians—not as real human beings, but as symbols of something fierce and untamed. Jake thought of how Uncle Irwin sometimes joked that more people probably would hire him if he put an Indian like that on his trucks and changed the name of his business from PRINTUP CONTRACTING to NOBLE SAVAGE ROOFING.

  Jake knew he should stop staring at the display case, but his eye was caught by something else now. It was a sort of timeline, a history of lacrosse, “The Fastest Game on Two Feet.” It listed such notable dates as 1867, when the Dominion of Canada was formed and lacrosse was proclaimed as its national sport, and 1932 when a lacrosse team from Johns Hopkins University won a gold medal at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. But it was the first entry that kept Jake’s attention most of all:

  Lacrosse was played in its most primitive form

  by American Indians as a means of training

  their young men for war.

  Jake shook his head. He wondered how people could love this game so much and know so little about what it meant to the Iroquois people. And what it still means today.

  He looked back down the hall toward the front door. Jake wanted to run out that door and keep running until he was back home on the rez where people understood things—understood him.

  Then he shook his head again. His mother was counting on him to do well in this school. But things were getting really complicated, especially since the headmaster seemed to suggest that he might be their new star attack man. He even mentioned that it would be good if Jake could help the school win the local junior league championship in the spring. What could he do?

  Lacrosse, it seemed, was the most important sport at Weltimore Academy. Ever since 1959, when Little League lacrosse was established in the Baltimore area, Weltimore had been the home of the very best junior league teams. Many of the top players on the area prep school teams had been Weltimore stars first. Scorers. Most of them had gone on to colleges like Johns Hopkins, often with full rides on lacrosse scholarships.

  “You have come to the right school, my boy,” Dr. Marshall had concluded when he ushered Jake out the door.

  Now Jake’s head was aching. Why do things have to be so complicated?

  He stopped for a long, cool drink at the drinking fountain. As the water trickled down over his cheek and into the basin, Jake remembered one of the stories Grampa Sky had told him last winter. In that story, a boy lived with his little old grandmother in a little lodge deep in the forest. The only game he played was lacrosse, and he practiced it by himself all the time, throwing the ball and catching it and running as fast as he could. He was so fast that he could even outrun the deer. So his grandmother gave him the name Deer Foot.

  When he was twelve-winters-old, Deer Foot decided to search for his lost parents. His little old grandmother told him that monsters out there would try to eat him, but Deer Foot was determined. With his lacrosse stick slung over his shoulder, he set out on the path to the north. As soon as he left the forest, he came to a village by a lake. The people in that lake village greeted him and asked him to come and play a game of lacrosse with him. When he agreed, those people smiled, and Deer Foot saw that they were not really human beings, but terrible creatures. Their lacrosse sticks were made of bones, and their lacrosse ball was a human head.

  “When you lose this game,” they told Deer Foot, laughing and growling as they spoke, “we will use your head for our new ball.”

  Jake shook his head. Why had he remembered that story? Jake recalled how sad he had been feeling the day Grampa Sky told him that tale. It was one of those times when Jake’s mom was supposed to come back and spend time with him, but her schedule had changed, so she hadn’t made it.

  The story had helped. Even though Deer Foot was outnumbered, he won the lacrosse game against the monsters, who were so frustrated that they threw themselves in the lake and drowned. Then Deer Foot went on to find his parents. The moral of the story: Even in the worst situation, you can find a way out of trouble. After Grampa Sky finished telling the story, Jake had smiled. Now he was frowning again.

  Jake wondered what he was going to tell his mom tonight. After all, he had promised her that he wouldn’t play lacrosse. Even though he was determined to keep his word, Jake missed the feel of the stick in his hands and the familiar weight of the ball cradled in the webbing as he raced down the field. But he had promised. The headmaster might want him to play lacrosse again, but Jake wouldn’t even pick up a stick if his mom really didn’t want him to play.

  Jake squared his shoulders, turned away from the display case, and went into the guidance office to get his schedule.

  Two adults who had been talking to each other turned to look in Jake’s direction as he came in. The bigger of the two men was muscular and had very short blond hair. He was wearing a sweatshirt that read TERRAPINS. Jake wasn’t sure what “terrapins” meant, but a little design that looked like a turtle was embroidered below the word, so he assumed it must be a turtle of some kind. The shorter man was slender with a long neck. He had thinning, dark-brown hair and glasses, and he wore a suit and tie, like Dr. Marshall. His red, white, and blue tie had stars and stripes on it. No tiny lacrosse players. Jake felt relieved.

  Both men grinned at Jake. Why did every adult at this school have to show his teeth at him? Indians didn’t grin like that when they met someone for the first time. Jake almost chuckled when he suddenly remembered something he had seen on the Discovery Channel. The show was about baboons, gorillas, and chimpanzees. “Whenever the great apes flash their teeth at each other in a threatening grin like this,” the narrator said, “it is their way of saying, ‘This is my territory, so watch your step.’”

  “Mr. Forrest?” said the shorter man, widening his grin as he spoke and leaning his head forward on that long neck.

  “Unh-hunh,” Jake said.

  Then the bigger man took a long step, almost a lunge, toward Jake.

  “Coach Walter Scott,” he said in a rough voice that was almost a growl. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Fo
rrest.” He grabbed Jake’s hand in one of those hard, white man handshakes that hurt your fingers. Jake didn’t grip back hard, though. Uncle Irwin had told him that most white people shake hands differently than the Indian way. In an Indian handshake, a person just relaxes his hand into the light grasp of the other’s. White people might turn a friendly giving of hands into a way of proving one’s strength, but Jake wasn’t going to do that.

  Coach Scott let go of Jake’s hand, clearly surprised by the tall boy’s limp grasp. But he recovered his composure and put his hand on Jake’s left shoulder.

  “Well, gentlemen,” he rasped, “I have to get to class. I’m your history master. I’ll see you there, Mr. Forrest— and on the field.” He patted Jake’s shoulder once more, and then thrust himself out the door. As soon as he was gone, the whole room seemed to get three times bigger.

  Jake turned back toward the thin man who had first greeted him. The man was no longer grinning now that Coach Scott had left the room, but it seemed to Jake that he looked happier.

  “Culet,” he said, his diction crisp as a leaf of lettuce. “Simpson Culet.” He handed a piece of paper to Jake. “Your schedule. Two of our upperclassmen will show you where. Orientation tour. Happy to do that. Chance to skip their first class of the day.” Simpson Culet pressed a button on the phone on his desk.

  “Yes?” said a voice that sounded like the red-haired woman’s.

  “Tavares and Kilgore,” Mr. Culet said.

  “On their way.”

  A few minutes later, Jake walked along slightly behind the two older boys.

  “You’ll like it here at Weltimore,” Darris Tavares said, pushing open the door to the science room.

  “Not,” John Kilgore added.

  They were almost at the end of their tour, and Jake still hadn’t said more than “hello” and the occasional “unh-hunh” to the two boys. It hadn’t bothered them. In fact they hardly seemed to notice. Darris Tavares, who was short, dark-haired, and built like a muscular barrel, had been talking enough for all three of them. John was almost as tall as Jake and was as fair-haired as Darris was dark.