As a seventh-grader in rural St. John's, Ariz., Brady Udall once played a football game against a ramshackle rival school on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation.
The reservation school had the hopeless air of a prison. Its football field was littered with broken glass, and a cactus grew in one end zone. After St. John's beat the ragtag Apache players by some lopsided score, Udall and his teammates climbed back onto their shiny new bus to head home.
Udall was gazing out of the bus when Apache students began hurling bottles, folding chairs and chunks of concrete from a nearby three-story dorm building, denting the bus and shattering its windows. In the seconds before the barrage, Udall locked eyes with an Apache boy staring back at him through the bars of one of the dorm's windows. The youth had broken teeth, scabbed hands and a expression of weary disdain.
"For some reason, the look on that boy's face has never left me," says Udall, now 31. "I knew one day when I wrote a novel it would be the first thing I'd write about. I'll never know anything about that boy, but as the god of my own little universe, I decided to give him a story and a name."
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment