Good Vibrations by Tom Cunliffe

Author:Tom Cunliffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd
Published: 2012-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

14

A CLOSE CALL ON

THE RESERVATION

I settled into my personal, vibrating semi-consciousness, reflecting as I rode that even the Colonial Motel had turned out to have its dark side. I was suffering from back pain that morning as a result of several bad nights in a bed that for the money should have been a lot more comfortable.

‘Lumpy,’ was the verdict.

Apropos of nothing in particular, Pokey had told us that the manageress had used our room while her apartment was being renovated. The day before we left, she was not in her office when I went to settle in advance for our final night. Various people were hanging around the check-in, and finally the owner of the place showed up to find the manager’s apartment stripped and the cash-box empty. The good woman had ‘done a runner’ with the proceeds.

‘She always treated us right,’ Wayne said as he started up his sparkling truck. ‘Nice lady.’

That last evening, Roz and I had given up trying to convince ourselves the bed was tolerable, so we chucked the mattress on to the floor, always the last-ditch answer. As it had come away from the base, the mattress revealed a stash of a dozen or more empty bottles of gin and vodka tossed at random between it and its supporting springs.

I was still chuckling about the excesses of our unusual hostess when we came up with a throng on horseback following the high roads towards Pine Ridge. The altitude had been imperceptibly rising for hundreds of miles as the plains rolled towards the Rockies so that we now enjoyed blissful relief from the noonday heat, with cool mornings and evenings. For some reason I could not identify, once inside Indian country, the land actually felt higher and, as the outsiders had promised, the organised wheat-fields were replaced by unkempt, yellow-brown prairie. The first indication of the travellers was a tailback of traffic along the two-lane highway. Next, a dust cloud could be seen rising ahead. Finally, we trundled past a hundred or more full-blooded Native Americans, men, women and children, meandering towards the town. Perhaps a third straddled ponies, the rest were on foot. The ponies were athletic-looking creatures, light-coloured with bold brown or black markings. The horsemen went bareback. Many had long hair with coloured headbands like the Apache warriors of my schoolboy comic books; one or two wore feathers slung point-up. Beads and brightly patterned cloth swung in the sunshine, and there was a joyous lack of formality in the way the group moved amongst themselves. A mounted man trotted by, half-turning on his pony’s back to joke with a bunch behind him, youngsters scampered here and there, almost between the horses’ feet, women swayed along chatting amongst themselves, and the whole crowd ebbed and flowed out on to the blacktop, seemingly unaware of the traffic jam. Like just about everyone else in North America, however, they registered the bikes, waving and calling as we trickled slowly ahead.

The Indians could have been heading

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