Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (28 page)

Hatcher droned on and on. Salas looked up at the clock. Only ten minutes into the class. He thought about leaving and then returning to watch what she did in the last five minutes, but the room’s warmth relaxed him. Several students had closed their eyes. Besides, the waiting papers in his office weren’t going anywhere.

His thoughts drifted to what he knew about The Battle of the Little Big Horn: almost nothing. He’d seen a movie with Dustin Hoffman in it years before,
Little Big Man
, that had the battle in it.

Hatcher’s voice rose and fell in the background, like a breeze. Salas listened, and he found himself imagining the sun setting behind the low Montana hills. He pictured sitting on a horse blanket, back from the cooking fire. It had been too hot during the day for him to want to sit closer. He leaned against his bedding, his mind drifting. They’d been told not to set up tents, which meant they’d do a night march, another long, stumbling trek in the dark, walking from one desolate spot to the next.

Salas twitched, then looked around the room. Had any students noticed he’d almost gone to sleep? None appeared to be looking at him, though. Some were in the exaggerated slump mode like the girl sitting in front of him. A couple rested their heads on their arms. Some propped their elbows on their desks and cupped their chins.

Still, Hatcher continued talking. “Single-shot Springfield carbines jammed when overheated,” she said, and then went on to horses used as breastworks. Twenty minutes passed. Salas closed his eyes. The pencil in his hand grew heavy, reminding him of a gun stock, how it would feel, its solidity. He propped the gun across his knees, sitting on the ground. In the distance, gunfire, the heavy pop of Springfields filled the afternoon air. Custer’s forces, he thought. Custer would drive the enemy back and join them. There were so many hostiles! Even their women were in the battle, waving blankets, scaring the horses away. Did Reno and Benteen know what they were doing?

He took a long, warm drink from his canteen. Other soldiers sat around him, exhausted, frightened. They smelled of dust and horse sweat and days of travel. More gunfire to the north, but the sounds didn’t appear to be getting closer. A horsefly landed on his neck. Bit him. He slapped at it, too tired to care.

Behind the muffled battle sounds and the tired horses’ breathing, he heard a bell. He cocked his head. Who would be ringing a bell on the battlefield, in the sun and dirt and waving grass? He regripped the rifle, and it became a pencil, and the dismissal bell rang, ending class.

“Tomorrow we will cover the aftermath,” said Hatcher. “Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the others make for an interesting story.”

Salas looked around, confused. Some students appeared dazed too, but they shook it off before heading into the hallway.

Before going home that afternoon, Salas stopped in the school library to pick up a book on Custer’s Last Stand, but the books were gone. The librarian said, “It was a massacre. Every source checked out before the first bus left the parking lot. Kids were on the computers doing searches like crazy until we closed.”

That night it took a long time to fall asleep. What had happened in Hatcher’s class? The experience unnerved him a bit. Had he suffered a fugue or a blackout? He scratched at the spot on his neck where the horsefly had bit him. The insect must have been in Hatcher’s room, and he incorporated it into the Custer hallucination, because it left a distinct welt on his skin. When he did fall asleep, screams and gunfire and arrows haunted his dreams.

At the day’s beginning, Leanny leaned into his office the same way she’d done the day before. “Did you watch her yesterday? What did you think?”

Salas nodded. When he’d gone over his observation sheet from the day before, he had a hard time remembering what he’d seen in Hatcher’s class. If he’d drifted off while evaluating her, it wouldn’t be fair to the teacher.

“I’m not sure.” He swallowed. “I’m not sure what I learned.”

Leanny nodded knowingly. “But you learned, didn’t you? Did you know that more Hatcher kids go into education than any other teacher in the building? Talk to counseling. They’ll tell you. I’ll bet half the history teachers in the district are Hatcher’s former students. You want to know something else interesting? Look up Theodore Remmick’s grades for this year. He hasn’t had a mark above ‘D’ since sixth grade.” She laughed. “I saw him in the lunch detention room yesterday after you talked to him, reading.”

Salas checked his to-do list. He needed to observe the other two teachers Wahr had added to his evaluations, plus handle today’s parent contacts. He hoped he wouldn’t have a schedule buster, but he ended up spending the morning talking to a junior who had started (and ended) a fight in the locker room. Fighting drew an automatic suspension, but the other student’s parents also wanted to press assault charges, so the campus police officer visited his office several times, as did the district’s lawyer, both boys’ parents, the teacher, and witnesses who couldn’t agree on even the most basic details.

At one point, the parents who wanted to press charges started yelling at Coach Persigo for not supervising the locker room “in a professional manner.” They said they wanted to sue him and the school district.

It took Salas a half hour afterwards with Persigo to convince him the parents weren’t going to sue. “I’ve been in the district too long to put up with this shit,” said Persigo. “We got a real chance to make the playoffs this year. I don’t need the distraction. I can’t teach classes, coach baseball and worry about lawsuits at the same time. No respect. There’s no respect. ”

A false fire alarm cleared the building ten minutes before lunch, which took forty-five minutes for the fire department to respond to, so Salas spent almost an hour wandering around the practice football and baseball fields with the students and their teachers, waiting for the okay to reenter the school.

Leanny caught up to him as he followed the students back into the building. She walked beside him for a minute without talking. Finally, she said, “Do you have an opinion about the new evaluation forms?”

“They’re clear. Fill in the rubric. Add up the score. Teachers know what’s expected. Evaluators know what to look for.”

“Did you notice there’s no measurement like ‘Instills a love of learning in students’? It doesn’t say, ‘Changes students’ attitude about the subject’ or ‘Enriches students’ lives’ or ‘Provides a meaningful adult role model’ or “Creates an environment for student self discovery’?”

Salas put his hands behind his back. Most students were entering the building through the gym doors. They’d piled up to squeeze through the bottle neck, and they weren’t in a hurry to get back to class. He and Leanny stopped behind the milling heads. “You can’t evaluate those areas. They’re subjective.”

“Exactly,” said Leanny. “How much do you remember from high school? I mean, if you had to take a subject test in any class you took, how would you do?”

Leanny smiled at him, which made Salas think she was leading him to a trap. “Not well, probably. I haven’t studied for the tests.”

“Exactly, so if you don’t remember much, and you can’t pass the tests, what was high school’s point? Did you get a measurable experience from it?”

Mostly Salas remembered being on the baseball team during high school. He remembered sitting in Algebra, keeping one eye on the clock and one on the cloud cover out the window. If it rained, they’d go to the gym to throw, which he didn’t like. In the winter, he did weight room work and he ran. By late February, he started marking the calendar, tracking the days left until spring training. He loved it when the coaches trotted with them out to the field, wearing their sweats and ball jackets. He loved wheeling the trashcan full of bats into the dugout. He remembered stepping onto the freshly swept infield and how satisfying a grounder thumping into the glove’s pocket felt.

“I decided to major in P.E. in high school.”

“So other subjects for four years were worth it. You discovered what you loved!”

The crowd shuffled forward. In a few minutes he would be back at his desk, trying to do a full day’s work in the half day he had left.

“I don’t know. Where are you going with this?”

“Just saying the evaluations aren’t the whole picture. Maybe high school is more than observable, measurable achievement.”

Wahr waited for Salas in his office. “We need to move up the schedule on these evaluations. The superintendent wants preliminary staffing done by next week. I’m putting out a note to teachers who are quitting, transferring or retiring. We still have to cut a position, though. How’s Hatcher’s evaluation? Did you watch her?”

Salas didn’t know where to go in his own office. Wahr partially sat on the desk, so Salas didn’t feel like he could sit in the desk chair. He felt like an intruder. “She looks bad on paper. She lectured for the whole period.”

“Just like I said. You need to do at least two more observations. We can’t move on a teacher without three full observations. Collect her lesson plans and check her students’ benchmark test scores to complete the packet.”

Salas thought about the class he’d watched. He could still smell the horses at Greasy Grass. “She gave an . . . interesting presentation. Being in her room felt . . . different.”

“I don’t care if she delivered the Sermon on the Mount. You can’t talk to fifteen-year-olds for that long and be effective. She’s an expensive, entrenched fossil who’s teaching like it’s 1950. I can replace her with a first year teacher whose salary would be half as much and who would know the latest trends in education.”

“She might not be our best choice to cut.”

Wahr snorted, pushed himself up from the desk, and said, “I need a name by next week. It ought to be Hatcher, but somehow we’ve got to trim a position. Make a choice.”

Hatcher started the afternoon class with Sitting Bull, but by the end had somehow moved into the Alaskan gold rush. Afterwards, when he looked at his observation sheet, he had written “last American frontier,” “Jack London,” and “Klondike.” He hadn’t written how she began class, whether the students’ learning objectives were on the board, or if she had varied her teaching technique.

As he walked away from her room, though, he rubbed his wrists. They ached and his hands were icy cold as if he had been holding a heavy gold pan in the frigid river’s rolling water, swirling and swirling and swirling the nondescript sand at the pan’s bottom, hoping for telltale color, hoping for a nugget to make the weeks in the wilderness worthwhile. Moving through the hallway, jostled by students going to class, he thought he could still hear the mosquitoes’ incessant buzz, and smell the wind coming down from the frozen mountain tops, still snow-capped in the summer’s middle.

After school, the librarian said, “Sorry. We had a rush on gold mining books. You missed out again.”

Coach Persigo called Salas that evening, just after Salas had settled in front of the television with a sandwich and a beer. The public broadcast station scheduled an interesting sounding documentary on the Alaskan Gold Rush.

“That kid’s parents hired a lawyer. He called me to schedule a deposition. Thirty-five years teaching school, and my techniques are called into question because one immature kid can’t settle an argument without hitting another immature kid. Is that my fault? Kids get into it some time. Is that my fault?”

Salas gripped the phone tightly. He never knew what to say to a teacher in full rant mode.

“I’ve got grandkids, Salas, and I don’t see them enough. My gutters need painting. I don’t have time to waste on a stupid lawsuit.”

Salas gave him the school district’s lawyer’s number. “I’m sure it will come to nothing, Coach. The parents don’t have a case. You know how folks can get. A week from now we’ll be laughing about this.”

Persigo didn’t speak. Salas could hear him breathing. The television showed a snow-covered mountain range, and then zoomed until it focused on a lone man leading a burro up a rude trail. A pick and shovel were strapped to the animal’s back. Salas longed to turn up the sound.

“You’d better be right,” said Persigo. “Life’s too short.”

Salas met with Mrs. Hatcher at lunch to go over his observations, a mandated step in the evaluation process. She dropped her lesson plan book on his conference table and sat in the same chair students who were in trouble used. Even her hands are plump, Salas thought. She personified softness, like a teacher-shaped pillow, but she gazed at him sharply, and when she smiled her face broke into laugh lines.

“Your lecture interested me,” said Salas. “You clearly know your subject area.” (“Subject Area Knowledge” was another area on the evaluation, but he wasn’t sure how to evaluate her there. Did she
really
know her subject area? He’d fallen into the weird daydream both days, and he didn’t know what she’d said.)

“I love history. I think what I’ve learned most as a teacher in all these years is a passion for my subject.” Her voice was just as gentle in person as in the classroom, and she smelled of lavender.

“Yes, that’s clear.” Salas took a deep breath. He ran his finger down the check-sheet identifying her shortcomings, which were many. But he couldn’t force himself to make a criticism. He had thought this conference would be perfunctory. He’d point out that she ignored the district’s guidelines and policies, allow her to say whatever she wanted in her defense, and then be able to say later they had had a meeting, which the union required. He’d done numerous evaluation meetings in the past with other teachers that were no more substantial.

The truth, he thought, is I don’t have any idea what’s going on in any teacher’s classroom. I’m in them such a small percentage of the time. He remembered his first assistant coaching position. The head coach had sent him to the practice field with the freshmen boys who wanted to play infield. He was supposed to show them technique and evaluate who could start for the first freshmen game coming up in a week. Ambition and idealism filled him.
Any
boy can learn to play better, he’d thought. They just needed time and the right instruction. He worked with the group for two hours, but just before the practice ended, the head coach stopped by to watch. He said to Salas as he left, “Bad technique. It’ll be a miracle if they win a game this year.”