Crossroads

It emerged that only the two guitars had been stolen. The greater damage was in the violation of their space, the chill that Clyde’s aggression had put on their fellowship. When the group gathered again around the candle, the contrast to the previous night couldn’t have been starker. Unhappiness or fear was in almost every face.

“So we’ve encountered our first adversity,” Russ said. “Adversity can strengthen us as a group, but it’s important that I hear from every one of you tonight. We’ll go around the circle and hear what each of us is feeling. Speaking for myself, I’m very sad—sad for us and sad for whoever broke in. It could be that we’ll decide not to stay here, but my own inclination is to stick it out and deal with the issue, not walk away from it. In practical terms, at least one adviser will now stay in the building at all times, and tomorrow morning I will deal with this. I will try to get Darcie and Katie’s guitars back.”

“How about just calling the police?” Ted Jernigan said unpleasantly.

“We can report this to the tribal police, but I’d like to understand better why it happened. Let’s see what we can achieve with listening before we bring the law in.”

It took more than an hour to go around the circle, and Russ wasn’t Ambrose. He didn’t have limitless patience with the self-drama of adolescents, the Crossroads-encouraged inflation of emotional scrapes into ambulance-worthy traumas. He himself was upset, but his fault gave him the right to be, and although he’d asked to hear from everyone, because this was the Crossroads way, it tried his patience to sit in a world of real social injustice, real suffering, and make such an opera of the theft of two guitars, easily replaceable by their owners’ parents. The outpouring of support for Darcie and Katie was comparable to what Alice Raymond had received when her mother died. Of all the feelings voiced at the long candle, the only one Russ respected was the group’s frustration with being quarantined from interaction with the Navajos. He shared that frustration.

In the end, they voted to stay at least one more day. All the advisers except Ted Jernigan favored staying. Afterward, while the group bedded down, its spirits subdued, Russ went outside to look at the sky. He hoped to reconnect with God, but the door behind him opened. Frances had followed him.

“I thought you handled that well,” she said.

“I feel bad for the kids, especially the sophomores. This is their first experience here.”

“They respect you—I could see it. I don’t know why you thought you shouldn’t be a youth minister.”

His eyes filled with gratitude. “Now I’m the one who needs a hug.”

She gave it to him. The blessing of her touch, the palpable reality of the woman in his arms, was making a believer of him. It was as if he’d yearned to know God without actually believing that He existed. Now he could feel that, far from overhoping, he might have underestimated his chances—that Frances’s decision to come to Arizona had been, in fact, a decision about him.

“We’re having the full experience,” she said.

Behind them, the door creaked open again.

“Whoops,” a girl said.

As if excited to be discovered with him, Frances squeezed him harder, and again he thought of kissing her. To let himself be seen as the man she’d chosen, to cement his status with a public kiss, was worth the cost of what Becky would learn from her friends, what Ambrose would say. But to do it on a night when his group was in crisis could send a bad message. He contented himself with breathing his thanks into her hair.

The next morning, very early, after sleeping essentially not at all, he stole out of the school and walked down the road. The sun hadn’t cleared the ridge, but a flock of mountain bluebirds was awake, foraging among bitten tussocks, perching on fence posts glaucous with frost. Daisy Benally was chopping onions in the chapter-house kitchen, her sister still asleep. When Russ told Daisy what had happened, she just shook her head. He asked where he could find Clyde.

“Don’t go there,” she said.

“But where is he?”

“You know the place. Up the canyon where Keith lived.”

“Are you saying Clyde is a Fallen Rocks?”

“No, he’s a Jackson. You shouldn’t go there.”

Russ explained why he had little choice but to go. Daisy, who’d reached an age where she greeted anything the world did with resignation, allowed that he could borrow Ruth’s truck. He would have liked to leave immediately, before he had time to be afraid, but he waited until the group came down for breakfast. Everyone’s hair was flat and dirty, every eye red from a night on a hard floor. By way of mending fences, Russ asked Ted Jernigan, who’d sat down with Frances, to take charge of the group for the morning.

Frances, too, looked dirty and poorly slept. “You’re not going alone,” she said.

“It’s fine. I can take care of myself.”

“She has a point,” Ted said. “Why don’t you and I go together?”

“Because I need you to stay here with the kids.”

“I’m going with you,” Frances said.