I don’t know the name of the road to White Thunder Ranch; I just know it when I see it. Turn right near the end of town and drive past the odd, weirdly out of place geodesic dome put up by Vista workers when they weren’t busy smuggling weapons into Wounded Knee. Originally a meeting place, then a restaurant, then who knows what, it looks deserted, but many people are sitting outside as it is an unusually warm April day—they look up at me as I pass, but no one waves or seems that interested. More of the usual: junked-out old cars; dogs without collars; little girls playing in dirt yards; boys on bicycles, not horses; tall weeds; piles of trash; poverty; a movie theater … whoa … a movie theater! An awkward-looking corrugated metal building with double doors, no windows, and a marquee—two Indian characters with braids, one smiling, the other frowning, have replaced Thalia and Melpomene on a sign:
TONITE’S MOVIES
NOAH RIO2
FREE POPCORN!
Now I’m getting excited. I haven’t seen Vernell in six years. We’ve talked on the phone, exchanged texts and e-mails, but not seeing him for so long was dreadful. While it may seem silly, we’ve been “blood brothers” for forty-two years (he was fifteen, I was twenty-four)—a bond that cannot be broken. It came about unexpectedly; I don’t think it was meant to be serious, but then, over time, as we joked about it, it gained meaning. On a hot summer day in the Badlands, we were riding bareback on one frightfully powerful stallion Vernell called Thunder Hawk, Vernell in front and me precariously hanging on to him.
“Want to see how we defeated Custer?”
“Sure, why not?”
“AYYY, YA TAY HEY!”
Vernell willed Thunder Hawk to the top of a steep ravine and came to an abrupt stop on a tiny bit of flat land just inches before an impossibly steep drop into the abyss, then shouted out, “Custer had no chance!”
Following this display of Lakota horsemanship, Vernell asked me if I wanted to be his blood brother. Still in shock, I didn’t reply, just looked at him dumbfounded as he pulled a penknife out of his pocket, opened it, and stabbed a hole in the tip of my forefinger, then repeated the operation on himself. We intermingled our blood. Vernell claimed this was a traditional Lakota custom, but I think it was something he learned at Waldner’s Boy Scout camp.
“Now we are blood brothers.”
I don’t know when the little three-room house Vernell and Suzy live in became White Thunder Ranch (Wakinyantuwan Tiwahe), with its own Web site promoting horseback-riding lessons, trail rides across the reservation on “beautiful Watogla Lakota ponies,” and overnight accommodations in an authentic Lakota teepee, but I do remember the first time I stayed at the “ranch,” in 1980, sleeping on Vernell’s front room floor under his stunning painting of a male buffalo trudging through a blizzard, with only a thin blanket, my blue jeans rolled up to serve as a pillow. It was late fall, and even though I curled up in front of the little propane stove, it was terribly cold, and it didn’t help much that Vernell didn’t have hot water. At least there was an indoor toilet. Vernell was living alone while Suzy was in Chadron, Nebraska, studying at the local college to be an IT manager. At that time, White Thunder Ranch was more like a slum bachelor pad: kitchen cluttered with refuse-filled grocery bags, stacks of moldy dishes, half-eaten cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, dozens of empty Perrier bottles. There must have been cockroaches, but I didn’t see them, perhaps because it was too damn cold for cockroaches. (All that has changed now. White Thunder Ranch is a now a rustic but charming tourist destination.)
That first morning, Vernell got up before sunrise. I could hear him shuffling about in his bedroom and the bathroom, trying to be quiet so he wouldn’t wake me. I got up, went outside with him to feed the horses. Treading carefully so as not to slip on newly hardened ice, I could see our breath, and up ahead, near the barn, the breath of the horses patiently waiting for their morning hay. My hands were stiff and painfully frigid because I had forgotten to bring gloves. Oblivious to the cold, cheerful and alert, Vernell said he had been up since three a.m., reading The Cherokee Trail by Louis L’Amour.
“It’s all you fault, you know?”
“Why my fault?”
“‘Cause I was a dumb happy Indian, and you taught me to read.”
* * *
As I continue driving, it seems Vernell’s ranch is farther south of Kyle than I remember, but then I see a few people mingling on the built-on deck of a trailer house to my right on the far side of a small valley. I must be getting close—I have been here, sat on this very deck with Vernell and his friends, drunk coffee out of tin cups, and listened to them gossip about and tease one another, seamlessly switching back and forth from Lakota to English.
It must be time for Viva VW to slow down, as the view of the ranch from here is blocked by a steep, sage-covered ridge; here you have to keep a lookout for the sign, WHITE THUNDER, hand painted on a plywood board. Nailed on a post, it marks the turnoff to a gravel access road over this ridge and down a long, gentle hill into Vernell’s sprawling front yard. I worry that I might have already passed by and will end up wasting precious time before I give up and turn around, but at last, there it is! I turn, go up the ridge and over a cattle guard, and see the same little white house, the separate garage, the red barn, the corral, several horses, three horse trailers, four or five cars, a flatbed truck, a couple of pickups, a snowplow, a tractor, a backhoe, and hay wagons, plus a large metal building I don’t remember. As I pull up near the front door into an empty spot between vehicles, I wonder if Vernell is home or maybe out in one of his pastures, but before I open the car door, he comes bounding out the screen door and down the steps to greet me. He is wearing the same grease-stained black cowboy hat he’s had for twenty-five years, its sides turned up just right; a pink cowboy shirt hanging outside his blue jeans, the sleeves rolled up; and scuffed cowboy boots. He’s heavier than when I last saw him, with a few more wrinkles and a few less teeth but the same ironic grin, same distant black BB-pellet eyes. His ruddy face is weatherworn in that handsome way reserved for good-looking older men like Clint Eastwood and Harry Belafonte. Vernell has always been a prime male specimen, a ruggedly beautiful man, testimony I suppose to the superiority of Lakota DNA. He says something I don’t want to hear—“You’re older”—but everyone is getting older. Tail wagging, his dog, a pure white part-coyote, part–Australian shepherd named Cookie—alarmingly friendly for a rez dog—jumps up to lick my face. We go inside through the front porch, Vernell cautioning me not to fall through the hole in the floor that has always been here, and then through a second door to the living room of his little castle. Everything inside is clean and orderly, a sure sign Suzy must be around … and sure enough, she emerges from the kitchen. “Hi, David. Nice to see you after so many years.”
As much as I love Vernell, there was a time when I couldn’t understand how Suzy could be married to such a wild, untamed man who was happy taking his occasional cold showers outdoors, eating a can of beans for breakfast, another for lunch, and another for dinner—happy as long as he could raise horses and live the life that he calls “playing cowboys and Indians.” I sometimes wondered how she could take on all the household and child-rearing responsibilities, serve coffee but stay in the kitchen when Vernell’s friends dropped by. But Suzy has a PhD and she is not in the shadows as much as you might think. She shares the hard life with Vernell, cleaning and cooking for a big Indian man on the rez when she could be making good money in Denver. Suzy teaches online college classes, manages most of their tourist business, and behind the scenes has a much bigger voice in family decision-making than either lets on. She grew up here too and loves the rez.
I notice that while the White Thunder kitchen is still barely big enough to turn around in, it has been remodeled, the old tile floor replaced with polished white oak, matching cabinets, new furniture; “A present for Suzy,” Vernell says. Otherwise, the rest of the house is the same. Vernell’s dramatic painting of a buffalo charging head-on through a blizzard still hangs behind the cozy sofa covered with his grandmother’s star quilt—hundreds of diamond-shaped patches of fabric, in tones of blue and white, intricately fashioned into eight-point stars. The little propane stove I fondly remember is still in the corner, and the antler rack for hanging cowboy hats is still above the bedroom door. Vernell motions for me to sit on the sofa; he plops down in an old easy chair. Suzy hangs back in the kitchen; she’s boiling water for cowboy coffee.
Vernell wants to know about my family; not the family I live with now, but the first family he remembers: my ex-wife, Linda; my daughters, Mara and Buffy; Linda’s mother, Blanche; her sisters … where are they living, what’s new with them? He also asks about my brother, Roger, who lives in Alliance. Does he still work for the railroad, is he still building dragsters, does he still collect assault weapons? He moves on to my current family, remembers when Jackie was here for the Fourth of July powwow, remembers posing next to her for a photograph while holding up a rattlesnake he had just killed. What about my stepdaughter, Jazz, and my granddaughter? He even asks about our dogs, Charlie and T2. He sees all of us as part of his tiyospaye, one big extended family that includes Suzy; their son, Chris, and daughter, Ellen; his brothers, George and Anthony; his dad; his cousins; and if not his dog, most definitely his horses. If we were Lakota and living in the nineteenth century, our tepees would be clustered together along the Niobrara River. At night, we’d feast on newly killed buffalo, share the sweat lodge, and dance around the campfire until dawn.
Vernell called me when his mother died a few years ago—he was very sad; he could hardly talk and said he didn’t know what to do. I wanted to drop everything to be with him, but I was leaving the very next day for a conference in New York. He didn’t actually ask me to come, but I knew he wanted me to, and I still feel guilty because he was there for me during my times of sadness: my dad’s death from a protracted illness, and the unexpected tragic death of my son, Aaron, who was only twenty-six. Vernell and his son, Chris, then a teenager, came to both funerals—my dad’s in Alliance and my son’s in San Francisco. At each service, they burned sage, played traditional buffalo hand drums, and sang sweet-sad Lakota memorial songs. They were warmly received in San Francisco but met with suspicion in Alliance, where before the service, my brother took me aside to say, “I hope they aren’t going to do some mumbo jumbo.”
Don’t get the impression that Vernell is a saint. He’ll tell you he hasn’t had a drink in thirty years and that’s true, but there were a few rowdy years out of high school when he could have easily become just another drunkard on the path to nowhere. When Vernell first visited me in Albuquerque in 1978, we ended up in a downtown honky-tonk bar on a side street behind the KiMo Theatre. It was the kind of hidden-away place where urban natives like to drink because the cops don’t give a shit as long as whatever happens stays out of sight. I bought drinks for the house, we flirted with a gaggle of pretty Navajo girls, may have left with them, but I’m not sure or don’t want to remember what all happened—I just know that around sunrise, I somehow ended up in my bed, the room spinning and spinning, no way to make it stop. Sad to admit, Vernell and I also went drinking in Kyle. Good white teacher man and his prize student copping cheap wine from the local bootlegger, going drunk to the powwow just as Waldner would have imagined it; a blight on my character much worse than Vernell’s. I am embarrassed about these things, but when I mention them to Vernell, he only laughs and launches into a story. “One time I was with a couple friends driving through Scenic on our way to Rapid City. We didn’t have money for beer, so we stole the front tires of the man who runs the liquor store, took them inside, and traded them to him for a case of beer.”
“Vernell, that’s crazy. But I want to know about your dad—how is he and can I see him?”
“Oh, I don’t know. These days he spends most of his time sitting outside his house, waving to people as they drive by.”
“How old is he?”
He laughs. “Eighty-nine going on twenty-nine. We try to get him here for dinner, but it is painful for him to move around much.”
I bring up the subject of the missing Crazy Horse memorial sign. What happened? Who took it and why?
“I don’t know. Must have been a couple years ago. They took it for the aluminum. They also steal copper wires, rip out the plumbing at the schools, whatever they can sell or trade for drugs and alcohol.”
“But that monument was sacred; all they left is a couple steel poles. And now people are leaving litter all over the place.”
“No one cares.” Vernell shrugs.
“But your dad wrote such great poetry honoring Crazy Horse. Someone needs to raise the money to restore it for future generations.”
I can see that my passion moves Vernell, but he says, “What is gone, is gone … there’s nothing we can do.”
“Sad if I don’t see him this trip. Remember when I was here last, he drove over in his old Ford pickup truck. He sat in this room, talked for a good hour before he went outside and saddled up one of your horses and took off.”
Vernell smiles. “He’s more ornery the older he gets.”
While Vernell and I talk, I hear Suzy shuffling around the kitchen, setting the table, filling water glasses, opening and closing the refrigerator door; the sound and smell of sizzling meat soon follows. The moment things quiet down, Vernell looks over at her, pushes back his chair, and slaps his hands on his knees as he stands up.
“Lucky dude. You’re in time for lunch! Sorry, we ran out of beans, but I can get you some Jack Daniel’s for your coffee.”
Vernell makes me laugh not because it is particularly funny, but because he has been making jokes about Jack Daniel’s since he stopped drinking. He has never fallen off the wagon, but whiskey is constantly on his mind.
We amble into the kitchen, sit at a small wood table. Suzy sits down too, and I’m happy to see this; I would feel uncomfortable if she were just serving us. Lunch is more coffee, hamburger patties, and cottage cheese mixed with chunks of canned pineapple. And considering the probability that this meat came from the Sioux Nation Shopping Center, I am not unhappy that it is well done. Well done and dry. Vernell and I solve this problem by drenching our burgers in Worcestershire sauce.
“Both the Europeans and the natives owe a lot to the Greco-Romans for inventing this fermented sauce,” I joke. “You know, if you eat enough of it, it will make you drunk.”
“Not like Jack Daniel’s.” Vernell smiles and rubs his belly. Bemused, Suzy eats her hamburger plain.
Wanting to include her in the conversation, I think of something to ask her. “You have a brother … what was his name? I don’t remember.”
I can barely hear her answer. “Doug. His name is Doug.”
“He was too young to be in one of my classes. Does he live nearby?”
I reply, “Few summers ago when I drove through Colorado and Wyoming, I saw hundreds of bikers on the interstate, headed for Sturgis … all of them riding Harleys. My brother goes every year.”
“Half a million last summer, but we stay away. We don’t like the desecration of nearby Bear Mountain—the drinking, drug dealing, and rape that goes on there.”
Suzy continues: “Bear Mountain—in Lakota, Mato Paha—is one of the last sacred grounds. Many generations climb it for prayer and fasting—if you go there, you will see prayer cloths hanging from all the trees near the trail.
“There is a secret cave where Maheo, the Spirit Creator, gave the people four sacred arrows. Vernell’s great-grandfather, the first Chief White Thunder, was the Keeper of the Arrows.”
“So what does it mean that your great-grandfather was Keeper of the Arrows?” I ask Vernell.
“He was the Cheyenne medicine man who guarded them at all times from being touched or seen by anyone except those in a Sacred Arrow ceremony.”
Suzy adds, “This is one of the stories Vernell told to Chris and Ellen when they were little.”
Vernell takes the cue:
During the “Year of the Starving Winter,” around the year 1840, there were very few buffalo—people were hungry and complaining to the warriors. Some of the warriors decided they would ride to the lower Platte River to seek out a Pawnee camp where they could steal food and maybe a few horses. But they were discovered by a bigger group of Pawnee warriors, who trapped them, killed them, and cut their bodies into little pieces, which they threw into the river.
When the murder site was discovered, our people were really angry and wanted revenge, but Chief White Thunder said they should wait one winter, use this time to build up their strength, then move the sacred arrows against the Pawnee. He sent war pipes to headmen of other bands of Lakota and Arapahos, inviting them to join together in one big camp.
The following spring, scouting parties searched for many weeks before they found the Pawnee, and once again, the young warriors wanted to attack right away. My great-grandfather tried to hold them back, saying, “We must first hold a Sacred Arrow ceremony to protect our warriors,” but the young men galloped off in defiance, not even taking the arrows with them. Because Maheo forbade White Thunder from carrying the sacred arrows into battle, White Thunder gave them to a fellow medicine man named Bull and told Bull to chase after the warriors. So Bull tied the arrows in a bundle to his lance and followed after.
It was bad luck for us that an old Pawnee decided this was his good day to die. He got off his horse and sat on the ground in the path of our oncoming warriors. When Bull saw him sitting there all alone, he charged to count coup. Bull leaned to the side of his horse to strike the old Pawnee with his lance, but the old Pawnee suddenly reached up with both hands and grabbed it. To keep from falling from his horse, Bull had to let go of the lance. By the time our warriors came back to kill the Pawnee, it was too late—the sacred arrows were lost.
Without telling anyone, my great-grandfather and great-grandmother rode out of camp with a few horses and supplies. It took them ten days to find the Pawnee. Slowly and peacefully they rode straight through the Pawnee camp. People were shocked. They could only look on with respect at this brave act by their old enemy chief.
Chief White Thunder stopped in front of Pawnee chief Big Eagle’s lodge, handed the reins of his horse to my great-grandmother, and with no weapons, walked in. Using sign language, he told Big Eagle he wanted to make peace, wanted the sacred arrows back.
You could see the arrows; they were hanging behind Big Eagle in the back of the lodge.
Big Eagle too was impressed with White Thunder’s courage. He said, “I will give you one arrow for one hundred horses.” Not a great deal, but without at least one sacred arrow, Chief White Thunder knew his people would be unprotected and would go hungry. So he picked out one of the arrows and left. Big Eagle got his horses, but he never returned the other arrows.
Ten years later, in 1850-something, during the month they call “Winter of Stealing Arrows from the Pawnee,” a Brulé Lakota warrior named Iron Shell raided a band of Pawnees and luckily captured the other arrows. My great-grandfather wrapped the arrows in a bundle and returned them to the holy cave at Mato Paha. They are still hidden there.
“They want to drill oil at Mato Paha,” Suzy says. “The people own the land, but the government manages it and can issue the leases.”
“Now you see why I am studying to be lawyer,” Vernell exclaims as he again jumps up from his chair and motions to the living room. “Let’s move back to my conference room.”
As I shuffle behind him into the tiny living room, Vernell mentions that he is taking law classes at Oglala Lakota College, which seems amazing for a fifty-eight-year-old, but at that moment I didn’t think he could be really serious about becoming a lawyer.
“Next summer I graduate, then I will have my law degree. I already found somebody to help me study for the bar exam.”
“Wow. You could be that far along—how the hell did you get to be so smart?”
“I don’t know, but if you had only taught me how to spell, it wouldn’t have taken so long.”
* * *
I was working at a computer company in Albuquerque when Vernell graduated from Crazy Horse High School in Wanblee in 1975. He was offered a scholarship to study at Dartmouth, which in and of itself is mind-boggling, an unheard-of accomplishment. When I asked him how he had managed this, he said, “I don’t know. I just filled out the application and mailed it in.” He was really excited about Dartmouth until he found out he would need to pay for his own room and board, books, and transportation. Normally the tribe would have helped cover these costs, but post–Wounded Knee, the tribe was broke. Everyone was too distracted by all the disappearances, suspicious fires, and drive-bys to care much about a seventeen-year-old Lakota boy who wanted to become a treaty lawyer.
“Even with a full scholarship, I could not afford to go.”
“So if you couldn’t follow your dream, what did you do?”
Suzy laughs. “He followed me to Rapid City.”
Disillusioned because he couldn’t go to Dartmouth, Vernell got a ranch job. He was digging fence posts, breaking horses, living in an unheated bunkhouse when he got a postcard from Suzy. She was leaving Kyle for Rapid City to study at the University of South Dakota and would be gone for a least a year. A few days later, Vernell sold his horse, used the money to buy a ’63 Chevy, threw his clothes in the trunk, and drove up to “Rapid,” where he easily got a job unloading and loading the semitrucks on the loading dock at Sears & Roebuck. “I lived at a cheap motel, ate bologna sandwiches and drank soda, which I stored in my cooler. That and some Jack Daniel’s.”
“Don’t forget you used my cafeteria card,” Suzy says. “It was supposed to last all semester, but I was feeding him, so it went really fast.
“Vernell still has his Sears name tag,” she adds.
By now Suzy’s chewy coffee has worked its way through my system. I tell Vernell I need to use the bathroom.
“You don’t say that here,” Vernell says in a semi-stern voice. “Here you say you got to count your money.”
“Excuse me, I’ve got to count my money.”
“That’s better.”
In the bathroom I wonder how long Suzy lived here before Vernell installed hot water for the shower. A couple days … or did she tough it out for months or even years? The bathroom, like the rest of the house, is much improved and spotless. I also wonder if as Vernell grows older, he will depend ever more on Suzy, the way Russell Means depended on his wife.
Probably so.
When I come out, Suzy tells me Vernell is outside waiting. “He wants to give you a ride in one of his race cars.”
Standing on the front steps, Vernell points to a beautifully restored ’57 Ford Fairlane two-door sedan—metallic blue with a creamy white top, creamy leather interior—a hot car powered with a rebuilt V8 and factory supercharger parked in his rutty dirt driveway in the middle of the reservation, and says, “Hop in.” I’m not too surprised. The last time I was here, he gave me a ride in a 1931 Ford Phaeton Model A.
“You must have a thing for Fords.”
He turns the key just as he answers me—vroom! vroom!—so I don’t hear him except for something about “cheaper parts.” The engine sputters, growls, and emits another vroom! vroom! and we head up the hill with ease, out the White Thunder Ranch gate, cruising toward Kyle. I sometimes wonder what people living here think of Vernell. They say it is not acceptable for a Lakota to draw attention to himself, to show off, even though their history is rife with great leaders who did just that—adorned themselves with beads and feathers and war paint and had many wives, many horses, and many followers. Red Cloud was fond of ribbons and eagle feathers; his long, black-bear-greased hair was plaited around the wing bone of an eagle to signal elegance and propriety. You might even say Crazy Horse’s minimal style was just a way to be different; his war paint was a simple yellow lightning bolt down one side of his face. No war bonnet, a single feather in his ponytail, a pebble behind one ear—much like Steve Jobs’ jeans and black turtleneck, his simple garb made him cool.
Vernell’s working cowboy dress, his friendly demeanor, even his laugh are completely ordinary … the same as many Lakota men’s. But he drives around the reservation in vintage automobiles, has the most beautiful horses, an educated blond wife—tourists from Europe and even Japan come to visit his ranch. I worry that some people are jealous of Vernell and might want to harm him, but nothing like this has happened and I’ve never seen him get angry with anyone—disappointed, but not angry. Perhaps his eccentricity is overlooked because he is otherwise authentic, about as pure Lakota as anyone could possibly be; he lives the spiritual life, speaks the language, has ridden in every Big Foot Ride, and is one of the last great storytellers—Vernell is a human repository of the rich culture and history of his people.
He slows the Fairlane and points out a newly opened café in a rotting old building with a frontier façade and chipped red paint, which looks like it must have come from the set of Gunsmoke. A hand-painted sign announces the name: THE FOOD STOP CAFÉ. It has a drive-up window, but no separate “Order Here” station … you stop at the window, tell someone inside what you want, and wait for it to be cooked and handed to you. If there is a car behind you, they have to wait until you drive off before they can order.
“People say they have the best hamburgers on the rez, but I prefer Burger King.”
“Yeah, competition must be fierce!”
We both laugh.
“I’d eat Burger King every day if Rapid City were closer.”
“Good thing you work so hard or you’d be diabetic.”
“Many people here die from diabetes; Norman Underbaggage died from diabetes.”
I’m stunned. I was going to ask Vernell about Norman, hoping we might even get the chance to see him. Now I feel even older; I never thought I would outlive my students, students permanently fixed in my mind as teenagers.
“Who else has died?” I ask.
“Calvin and Myron Fire Thunder. They got into a car accident. Francis Harlen, his three sisters. David Black Bear.”
We drive on, Vernell now and then revving up his 500-horsepower engine. We pass by the outdoor basketball courts behind Little Wound School, stop to watch a game in progress. It’s much faster than the style of ball played by white kids and even by black kids—a visual frenzy, a blur of arms and sneakers, nonstop weaving, head faking, cutting, passing on the run, behind the back, between the legs, three-point shots, blocked shots, follow-up dunks … the boys are up and down the court so fast it is like watching a Ping-Pong match, all the while whooping and laughing, their athleticism undeniable.
“Rezball,” Vernell says. “That’s what we call our style of basketball. When I played in high school, we didn’t do all those fancy things, but we always out-hustled the white teams, wore them down. They said it was unfair. Whenever us Indians find an advantage, white people try to change the rules.”
One of the boys yells out to Vernell, “Nice wheels,” and the other boys stop for a moment. They look over at us, wave. The game continues.
We drive onto an old dirt road that curves down to a body of brackish water, the Kyle Dam, where all too many of Vernell’s high school contemporaries took their girlfriends to drink beer and have unprotected sex. Another item in the Lakota litany of woes: the high rate of teenage pregnancy, irresponsible teenage boys, and responsible grandmothers stuck with the consequences.
“We used to fish here,” Vernell says with a twinkle in his eyes.
“Yeah, I bet you did.”
“Remember that time we got drunk when the Vista workers had movie night, how they terrorized the little kids by showing scary movies? You were trying to hit on that Vista woman with big boobies, no bra. That was funny.”
“Fortunately, I do not remember.”
I do, however, remember the Vista girl. She was thin, biracial with wild curly hair, wore no bra, was constantly smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Inhaling brought attention to her large breasts. I visualized them filling up with smoke, but I don’t remember being particularly attracted to her. Besides, her boyfriend was always hovering about; they argued bitterly.
Changing the subject, I ask Vernell about horses. “Why don’t I see horses running free, young boys riding bareback? When I lived here, there were always horses.”
“Too many people, too many cars. Back then people drove slower, thirty or forty miles an hour. Now they go much faster.”
“This land is no longer free range?”
“No. When it was free range, a tourist from Minnesota killed one of my horses. He wanted me to pay for the damages to his car. I told him as long as a person is a responsible horse owner, he is not the liable party. The man didn’t believe me, but his insurance company sent me a check.”
As we drive back up the dirt road from the dam to the teacher housing section, we pass by a small section of one-bedroom houses reserved for single teachers.
“Vernell, do you remember Maggie, the pretty young teacher with red hair and freckles who taught seventh grade?”
“Yeah,” Vernell says. “All us boys liked her.”
“There was a rule against single teachers having an overnight visitor of the opposite sex. When I walked to work one really cold morning—temperature below zero—her boyfriend, who had driven all the way here from Oregon, was sleeping out front in his car.”
“So if she was a lesbian and had a girlfriend over, that would have been OK?”
“Even now, I don’t think the BIA would admit they have lesbian or gay teachers.”
“We always had gay Indians,” Vernell says. “We call them ‘winkte.’ Some like to do women’s work and they like to care for the children. In a naming ceremony, if a winkte names your child, it brings good luck and fortune to that child.”
* * *
Vernell stomps on the gas pedal; the Fairlane’s V8 howls, its spinning wheels kick up a massive dust devil, and we peel down the gravel road, rocks spraying every which way. “Spent all last winter working on this baby,” Vernell says. “Got to have a little fun with it.”
And then he says, “Want to see where I get my spare parts?”
“Sure, Vernell. I would like to see where you get your spare parts.”