When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers, more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependants and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.
--John Adams
Sully was the new kid that autumn at Pia Zadora Charter School in Farmington, New Mexico. There used to be a great joke told about Pia Zadora and her acting abilities:
I am told that in a dinner theater production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” with Pia Zadora in the title role [no, really] when the Germans showed up, looking for hidden Jews, the audience started shouting “She’s upstairs! She’s upstairs!”
Thus it was, for reasons unknown, the founder of the school, no more than a sad collection of rusting Quonset huts set back about 200 yards from old interstate 64 next to a bustling Wal-Mart, named it after one of his favorite soft core porn actresses of the early 1980s.
The students at Pia Zadora were mostly kids from the nearby Navajo/Hopi res’, a few Chicano kids, and Sullivan Dewey. With his black hair and deeply tanned skin he blended in pretty well with his classmates but it was his clear green eyes set in high cheekbones that allowed him to stand out. And, he had a preternaturally vicious sense of humor that stood him in good stead with those same mates in their dealings with one Mr. G. W. Bystander.
His community service defined by the World Court in The Hague in a plea agreement Mr. Bystander, who necessarily operated under an appropriate assumed name, found himself teaching conflict resolution in a dusty part of the four corners area, in a ramshackle charter school in New Mexico.
Mr. Chainey, Bystander’s erstwhile partner was serving his sentence donning a blue vest each Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evening (sunlight being harmful to him) and handing out little yellow smiley face stickers at the Wal-Mart next door to the school. But Chains, as folks tended to call him, with his stroke victim grin just plain scared the hell out of the customers, mostly the children. He was banned from the grocery section where his mere passing soured the milk and spoiled the eggs in their cartons. And he couldn’t work the nursery either because, again, his presence led to massive die offs of the chrysanthemums and the petunias turned brown in their pots, and even the mulch ended up drying out and turning to dust in the bags. It was awful and finally the managers had Chains sit in the back with the security staff watching the monitors, mostly out of harm's way.
Sullivan’s mother was a ranger at the Chaco Canyon Culture National Historical Park Visitor Center. This is where Sullivan spent his weekend days and this is where he first felt the presence of the ghosts. Echoes of souls past and whispered witnesses to the follies and foibles of the present. Sullivan never actually saw a ghost in the empty pueblos and dusty canyons above Farmington but the wind hummed and howled as if in betrayal and mourning and slowly, slowly Sullivan felt a task settle upon him.
The pretzels were Sullivan’s idea.
