The best rides were in the fresh air swirling about in the bed of a truck. Although he savored the long conversations ridin’ shotgun, it was the thoughtless view of the landscape, and the steady bump of the road under his ass, that he most enjoyed.
He jumped into the back without much discussion as to where, other than West. The two Native American’s appeared pleasant , and anyway, he had been waiting long enough to lose the desire to be choosy. Motoring across the last quarter of the big state before Idaho, he developed a real admiration for this territory. Big alright, in fact, more expansive than he had ever been witness to prior. Then again, his was just a young life.
He was quick to his feet when the truck rumbled to a stop, just outside Plains. They had pulled off and aimed the pickup North. No sooner had his boots met the gravel, when the passenger with the long braided hair grabbed his backpack and tossed it into the grassy ditch alongside the road. Not a word was spoken, and they drove off. He noticed it first, as was he shaking the sawdust off his jeans, that his camera, which he had hung on the top rack of his pack, was gone.
It did not take long for the guy to make up his mind. The driver of the old red Cadillac, so overweight that the wheel rubbed back and forth over his belly, who stopped without invitation, was convinced that the reservation Indians had stolen the camera. Harv, as he introduced himself, shifting his derby-like hat back on his sparsly rooted topside, insisted that they make this wrong right.
He had just about convinced himself to forget the loss, assuming it lay innocently in the sawdust, and now he was headed North up to the Flathead reservation. The music on the radio blared redneck, and the speedometer topped a hundred, more than once.
This situation was just the cause the heavyset fella needed to act out some sort of fantasy. So this just unfolded without any resistance, because it was a time in his young life when he was more apt to experience what was happening, then to try to alter or control its outcome.
As they drove slowly past dilapidated mobile homes (the new tepee), he glance back and forth with his chin on a pendulum, searching for, and secretly hoping not to find, the red pickup. Enough was enough when they realized that all the pickup trucks on the Flathead Reservation were painted red, or so it seemed. Oh well, security in numbers he guessed, though certainly not in twisted treaties.
