Back at the motel the introduction to Hudley was difficult. Warlock assumed that Indians were new to the dog, but Aurora deftly won him over with niblets of pepperoni. Then an entire piece of the pizza when it had cooled sufficiently. She ate quickly and enormously but had been kind enough to strip down to her undies. He drank a largish glass of whiskey from his travel bottle, feeling the trepidation of approaching a new species. He was amazed that so slight a girl, he guessed about a hundred pounds, could wolf down that much pizza with three beers, yet her tan tummy showed no bulge. They must work her hard on the reservation. He envisioned her scrubbing her buckskin clothes by a river while being watched by deer and raccoons. There was a minuscule gobbet of tomato sauce on her neck embedded with a speck of oregano, a red jewel of sorts. He reached for her.

“Not so fast. My stomach was hungry for food. Now I need a shower.”

“I’ll take one with you. We’ll pretend it’s a waterfall.”

“Why?” She looked a little alarmed as he speedily undressed, wanting to encourage hygiene.

“I saw this painting of an Indian maiden under a waterfall. It wasn’t dirty. There were these raccoons and deer watching.”

“Far out. Many times have I stood under a waterfall.”

She was almost too much of a spitfire, and at times during the next hour he wondered if he had bit off more than he could chew. She had a nervous disposition, orgasm resistant, or hard to bring off, as the magazines say. His jaw ached to the point that he imagined a few days of Rabun’s porridge diet. You can’t say I’m insensitive to her wants, he thought. These Indian girls knew positions that Warlock thought modern but must be a tribal legacy.

He awoke earlier than he had hoped to find her weeping and fully dressed, standing beside the bed. She was shaking the hundred dollar bill he had stuffed in her wallet. She said she wasn’t a whore. She said she wasn’t an Indian. She was of Armenian descent from Detroit, a third grade teacher taking a summer course at Lake Superior State College. She kept the money.

“Meet me at the bar for lunch?” He had checked her wallet in the middle of the night when he got up to pee and knew the whole story. The slamming door inferred a negative.

Chapter 26

At mid-morning in the motel a psychiatrist, had one been handy, would have diagnosed the first anxiety attack of Warlock’s life. It began with the usual sense of displacement, the eternal question of “what am I doing here?” The spark for the displacement was a liquor advertisement in a magazine, quoting Robert Service’s “The Men That Don’t Fit In”:

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,