American Boy - Larry Watson [71]
I gave up. Either the doctor would come along or I’d freeze, and I was so cold and tired that the first option didn’t seem so awful.
At just that moment, a car approached. I had an impulse to leap into the ditch, high-step through the snow, and hide among the trees. But I stood my ground, and the car’s headlights cast my shadow back toward Bellamy. It was an old Hudson, with piles of snow clinging improbably to its sloping lines. It stopped next to me and the Valiant, though the driver made no attempt to pull over to the side of the road. The passenger’s frost-covered window rolled down, but it was the driver who shouted out to me.
“You got trouble, ain’t you?”
“I sure do.”
“You ain’t hurt?”
“No.”
“Where you going?”
“Willow Falls.
“You’re pointed the wrong way.”
The man in the passenger seat removed his hat, as if its brim might be blocking the conversation.
“I know,” I said.
“How long you been stuck?”
“Just a few minutes.”
“So you ain’t froze.”
“Not yet.”
The Hudson’s engine misfired, coughed, and threatened to die, but the driver gunned it and kept it running.
“You got money?” he asked. “We could get you out of that ditch for the right price.”
“Only a couple bucks.”
He laughed. “Then I guess that’s the right price!” The Hudson’s gears clashed, and he eased the car onto the shoulder.
In spite of the cold, the two men who climbed out of the car were in shirtsleeves. In the moonlight I could see that the passenger, a slender, stooped man, was walking slowly and grimacing as if he were in pain. But the driver was big and robust enough for both of them. He looked like a grizzly bear shaved and made to wear a T-shirt. Both men were Indians.
Like almost everyone who grew up in our corner of Minnesota in that day and age, I had been exposed to plenty of anti-Indian bigotry during my formative years. As part of this instruction in racism, we were taught to be wary and perhaps even fearful in our dealings with Indians. But even if I had taken those lessons to heart—and I hadn’t—I wouldn’t have cared that night. What could they do—rob me of the few dollars I was going to give them anyway? Steal the car that wasn’t mine? Beat me up? The side of my face was swollen from the doctor’s fist, and the small of my back ached from the pressure of his foot. I had nothing to fear from these two.
Together we walked back to inspect the Valiant. The Indians smelled of wood smoke, whiskey, and cigarettes.
“Yep,” said the bear-man. “High-centered. You’re in there good.” But this was not the expression of hopelessness it might have seemed. “You and me’ll push,” he said, “and Barney’ll drive. He’s sick, so he’s got to take it easy.”
Barney was bending over even farther.
“What’s the matter?”
“Bellyache. He’ll be off his feed for a couple days and then he’ll be fine.”
Barney obviously objected to having his condition minimized in this way. “Bellyache!” he growled. “Feels like I been gut shot!”
“You ever been?” Barney’s friend asked.
Barney said nothing.
“Then I guess you can’t say, can you?”
Then we stopped and listened. A car was approaching, the whine of its engine sounding at first like a taut wire vibrating in the wind. When I realized it was coming from Willow Falls and not Bellamy, I relaxed. Headlights swept around the curve of the highway ahead of the car, and then it appeared. The driver saw us and slowed. And then something—the depth to which the Valiant was sunk, the presence of two Indians along the road, the lateness of the hour, the quickening cold—changed the driver’s mind, and he sped up again.
Barney grunted and crossed his arms over his abdomen.
The big Indian asked me, “Got a flashlight?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know!” He found my answer hilarious, and his laugh boomed out across the dark snowy plains.
“It’s ... my mother’s car.”
That was even funnier to him. “Barney, look in his