Alongside the Road

Why was he sleeping on the floor, Jack asked himself when he woke up, and why did his head hurt so bad. They were in jail again, Billy answered, and swore to him and James "Carrot Stick" Rawlins that they were getting out of this town, whatever its name was, as soon as they got out of jail. And that is what they did, but not before Kate caught a ride with them. She'd seen the bar fight the night before that had gotten them thrown in jail, and knew they could protect her from her biker boyfriend who was demanding she marry him so she couldn't testify against him and his crimes. Heading south out of Montana in Billy's old worn-out 1947 Ford pickup truck, it was in Wyoming where they came upon Indian. He was standing alongside the road lost and in a daze, skinny from not eating, his clothes matted with weeds from sleeping out on the open prairie. He didn't know who he was, or where he was, but they gave him a ride, anyway. They couldn't leave him, even though they thought he was crazy, he needed help, something to eat, a bath, and clean clothes. The three men and their new female companion were headed south. They wanted to get someplace warm for the winter, but they decided to help Indian by finding his family and home instead. They knew they could do nothing for him, not as lost in his mind as he was. Indian looked Lakota to Jack, who was half Cherokee, half Apache, and half Irish, by his reckoning. Jack knew there were Sioux reservations in North and South Dakota, not far from where they were in Wyoming. They could go through the Black Hills on their way there, he proposed, it was a special place he'd always wanted to visit. Maybe Indian would reclaim his sanity there, the four considered if they couldn't find his family elsewhere. As it turned out, Indian wasn't crazy, and the Black Hills were the sacred land of his Lakota people, where he needed to be, along with these four who had found him. It was there that Indian's rescuers would be rescued from themselves and the lost desperate lives they were living when they found him.