The skinwalker

When I tell this story aloud, I do it with a  lot less detail and lot more whispering and bulging eyes and hand gestures, but this is what happened.

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When I was 8, we moved to the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona, where my mother (28) was a kindergarten teacher at the small community school. We lived in one of the six teachers' trailers on the school grounds. Down the hill there was a hogan where the principal lived, and up the hill there was a small group of community housing for school staff members and their families. There was a dirt road that rattled off into the desert for hundreds of miles. The kids bussed in from hogans and trailers around the mesa. There was one phone in the school office. The police were an hour away, at the trading post. If things went wrong, you pretty much had to help yourself.

This was a few years after Nightmare on Elm Street had come out on VHS. With no television reception, the neighborhood relied on swapping tapes for entertainment. You got whatever people had, which is why I have seen every episode of Northern Exposure and can recite Lethal Weapon 2 by heart. So by the winter that I was 9, everyone had gotten a peek at Freddy Krueger, and when my classmates began whispering to me, "Frankie says he's gonna get you," I tried to play along and give a little pretend shiver of fright. I didn't want to correct them by saying, "It's Freddy, not Frankie".

It snows on the mesa. There was one lamp post to light the driveway, and on winter nights I would stand beneath it to stare up at the snow pouring down, imagining huge animals standing just out of view, watching me from the darkness. 

My mother and I shared a bed, since the trailer was small and it was just the two of us. I liked the outside of the bed, so my arm could dangle over the side. One night that winter I had a dream that there was something wrong with the bedroom window, and I had a long confusing moment where I was trying to wake up but couldn't, feeling like my eyes were open but my brain was asleep. A thought suddenly boomed, THERE'S SOMEONE AT THE WINDOW, and I sat straight up in bed, wide awake. The bedroom window was dark and empty. I was scared to look outside, so I shook my mother and whispered, "I don't know if I was dreaming or if someone was looking in the window." Some mothers might tell a kid to shush and go back to sleep, but that is not my mother. She wakes up quickly and takes things seriously. If there is a problem, she heads straight at it. So she listened quietly, then got up and walked through the trailer. I followed her, but I didn't want to walk past the back door, so I stood in the short hallway and watched her look out windows and check locks. When she came back to bed, I was relieved she hadn't seen anything, and went right back to sleep.

The next night, it happened again. This time I woke up with my eyes already open, clamped on the window. In the dark grey of the window was a darker outline of a man's head and shoulders. I stared at the figure for a few seconds before whispering to my mother, "Can you see that?" I expected her to explain it away, like the way laundry can make a shadow look like a face, but instead she surprised me by vaulting over me and running right at the window. I had half a second to feel embarrassed about scaring her over nothing, but then the figure reacted and fled, and she ran out of the room to chase it. Time suddenly became very slow. I was alone on the bed, listening for the sounds of the door breaking or a fight, afraid she was about to be killed in the next room, and wondering if I could make it to the back door in time. I imagined the shadow circling back around and bursting through the window like a werewolf. After a few minutes, my mom walked back into the bedroom and got under the covers on the side closest to the window. "I couldn't see anybody outside. All the windows and doors are locked." She watched the window until morning.

It was Saturday, and folks woke up early if they needed to make the 3-hour trip to town for groceries; you had to hit the road while the mud was still frozen. We were already up and dressed when the teacher next door began banging around, loading a group of school kids for an excursion to town. My mother pulled on boots and went outside to talk to her, but hadn't even gotten down the steps before our neighbor spotted her and stomped over, yelling (not unkindly), "Braffet! You can't leave knives just laying around out here, kids will cut themselves!" "What knife?" "The big one. Under your window. I put it in the bed of your truck."

The truck was parked at the end of the trailer, beneath the bedroom window. In the bed of the truck there was a large, battered skinning knife. While the two women looked at the knife and talked quietly about the figure in the night, I considered the window. The trailer was up on blocks, and the window was about 7 feet above the ground; too tall for a man to just look into without standing on something. There were no footprints in the new snow. I looked at the truck, and found skidding muddy boot marks all along the driver's door where someone had propped themselves up.

That night, I slept on the inside of the bed again, and in the middle of the night I woke up to see my mother standing at the window, outlined in her night gown by the light of the lamp post. When she climbed back into the bed and said everything was ok now, I fell asleep again. I was young enough to believe that my mother could keep the monsters away.

On Sunday, our vice-principal came over with a small bag of cedar ashes. "You have a skinwalker," she said, "Put the ashes across all your windows and doors at night." I was pretty sure skinwalkers wouldn't need to prop themselves up on trucks or leave boot prints, but my mother sprinkled lines of ashes across our thresholds as instructed. "Can't hurt," she said.

We had no visitors that night, and went to school on Monday morning feeling pretty good. "Frankie's gonna get you," my classmates said. "Yeah, yeah, so I heard." "No, really, Frankie's telling everyone he's after your mom." I was tired of this joke. "Freddy, you mean. Freddy Krueger?" "No, Frankie, the crazy guy across the street. He's been telling everyone he's going to kill the new white teacher." The pieces clicked together and my arms went cold.

At just about that point, our principal ran into the room, "I NEED EVERYONE ON THE FLOOR NOW. DON'T GET UP UNTIL I COME BACK." She rattled the back door to make sure it was locked, told our teacher, "There's someone with a gun circling the parking lot," and ran out again, slapping off the lights. My seat was near the rear of the room, and I scootched on my belly to the floor-to-ceiling window by the back door and looked outside. "It's Frankie," my classmates whispered.

Across the school, my mother's kindergarten kids were lying on the floor and crying. A couple of them were sobbing, "Frankie's going to kill you!" My mother stood at the window, watching a pickup truck circling the school parking lot with a rifle pointed out the driver's side. Our school maintenance man, Edward, was standing at the back of the classroom when the principal came back. Edward was a quiet, kind-hearted man who had kids in a few of the classes, and he was standing in my mother's classroom because he knew who was in the truck outside; he was related to him by marriage. The principal said, "The guy's name is Frank, and he's just shot his brother-in-law. The police have been called, but they won't get here for 40 minutes." Edward turned and walked straight out the side door, toward the parking lot.

From where I was on the floor by the window, I saw the truck idling in the circular driveway. Suddenly it jerked into gear and roared away, and Edward was sprinting across the playground. He got into his truck and chased after him.

Around the bend at the base of the hill, the mid-morning melt had created a quagmire of mud and snow. Frankie's truck slid off the road and got stuck in the mud. Edward pulled up behind him. Frankie panicked, because he knew Edward, and he knew he was in trouble, so he completely forgot he had a rifle in his lap and instead ducked down in the cab of his truck to hide. Edward waited there until the police finally arrived. The brother-in-law who had been shot lost a chunk of liver, but survived. Our skinwalker never returned.

"What do you know?" said my mom, "The ashes really did work."

I still sleep on the inside of the bed, and cover all the bedroom windows.
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Note: we still have the knife.

Other note: Frankie is dead. He got drunk and crashed his truck after getting out of jail.

Pictures from internet sources:

Aerial views from google maps, panning out (mind you, these are recent, and I lived there 25 years ago. In all that time, they have only added a couple of teacher houses):

The front of the school - my classroom on the far right, kindergarten class (and door facing the parking lot) to the far left.