Lester and Simon sat in the backseat and played at fighting over seat space, but neither one really felt like it. They were too excited by the view, the reality of new surroundings. The landscape didn’t awe them much. It was familiar, but its rapid passing set them straighter in their seats, made them scrutinize the vanishing reservation. This time they were not simply going south for pitched basketball games in a border town. They weren’t on a mission for some exotic tool their uncles and older second and third cousins swore they needed when what they really were after was an unmonitored binge, away from their wives and girlfriends, or both. Simon and Lester were usually taken along as alibi: Here, see? I ain’t going drinking. Usually the boys ended up sitting in the car outside small neighborhood bars until they got bored and roamed the town picking fights with stray dogs and car windshields. When they were discovered by the white kids it became a real fight. The boys held their ground and fought hard so that their bruises and bloodied clothes wouldn’t destroy their uncles’ excuses.

Sitting in the back of the Chevy wagon, they wondered at the passing ditches and overtilled fields and knew that this was different, more significant, and so they struggled to take in everything.

Betty sat in the passenger’s seat with her hands folded over her sequined purse and her legs tucked under her seat as far as they would go, as if her funeral dress, the best she had, demanded a stiff posture, a calculated demureness.

Frederic, Boo’s father, drove and offered a constant stream of talk about this place or that. How a section of ditch that looked the same as any other to Simon and Lester had cradled the crash of four (no, wasn’t it five?) teenagers. Or how about that streambed where so-and-so shot two big bucks. One shot from the .308 passed through the first and lodged in the second and they both went down, but the game warden came, took both, and arrested the dead-eye for poaching.

Betty nodded but said nothing, her silent acknowledgment the extent of her participation in this memory mapping. She just clutched the envelope purse a bit tighter, nodded, lit a cigarette and ashed out of the wing window.

They crossed some tracks and Simon looked up and realized that he had never been this far from the reservation before, had never traveled so far in all his thirteen years. They rounded a curve and the town of Spunkley crept by on both sides of the road like a skulking animal. Betty told Fred to look for a restaurant. They slowed at the Blue Ox Inn but Betty shook her head.

“I ain’t goin all this way to eat shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of lumberjacks.”