Good Vibrations (18 page)

The Weather Channel promised storms by the evening of the third day, with 50 per cent chance of hail. The combines pressed on with renewed effort as the clouds gathered. This was the fourth day the Korn boys had worked this farm. They had known the family for years and were apprehensive for them, but you can no more rush a combine than you can a sailing ship. Wayne and Travis kept to their cabs and I accompanied Pokey to the elevators where the atmosphere was so dust-filled that no man could work there and hope to survive for long. Masks were required, of course, but masks are rather like crash helmets to a Western American motorcyclist; to be worn when absolutely unavoidable, but otherwise shunned as a restraint on freedom. The inside of the hoist was like a cathedral, dark and echoing. Above us, the silo soared skywards like a round-topped spire.

Roz had been fascinated by the sight of the wheat being churned around and whirled into the maw of Cody's combine, so she stayed in the cool cab, contemplating the catharsis of the year as the storm clouds gathered, chatting of family and the practicalities of living life in Missouri. Cody's even temperament had survived the tragedy of two lost chidren. He kept himself busy, he said, which helped balance his mind. As Roz talked the day away with the quiet man of the outfit, he told her Wayne and he were considering making an offer on Betty Boop if ever she became redundant. They'd both sampled her around Gordon and, like the rest of the world, seemed to have fallen in love with her. Roz suspected that this idea was equivalent to the acquisitive infatuation sailors feel for all manner of unlikely items thay see in far lands. ‘These guys remind me of seamen,' she said to me late one night. ‘They're staring at the horizon, but really, they're thinking of home.'

The last of Gary's grain came in half an hour before the storm broke. Watching the precipitation sweep towards us like a scythe riding on gale force winds, we rushed the bikes and Wayne's truck into the barn to keep them from the otherwise inevitable damage. We beat the weather by seconds. The stones were not the tennis-ball-sized grapeshot we'd been shown down in the sandhills, but they would have done well as musket balls and would surely have destroyed all our paintwork. The hailstorm blew off to leeward after fifteen minutes, leaving us all hanging about shell-shocked. Gary looked as though he could hardly believe how closely he had been let off the hook for another season. The rest of us were glad for him, but fearful for his neighbour. The hail had mostly scattered off the road and piled into the sides, where it was melting as fast as ice in a cooking pot. The gleaming truck was stuck behind the bikes and Gary's car, so Wayne borrowed Betty Boop and chugged away up the road while the rest of us drank coffee with the farmer's wife. He was back in a half-hour.

‘Sure enjoyed the ride, Ma'am,' he said to Roz, polite as always, but for once not smiling. Then he turned to the company. ‘But the next job's a mess.'

The boys agreed that the best they could do was rally round, help the poor guy salvage what he could and hope his insurance didn't renege. What remained of the job wouldn't take up all the time allotted for it and so far they had had good fortune from the weather, leaving them a week or more ahead of schedule. It was even possible that they would win enough days to go back to see their families while they were waiting for their next crop to ripen up on the Canadian border.

‘Can't I stay on here, Dad?' demanded Travis immediately. ‘You know Ma'll grab me for the start of school if we go home, and you need me to drive.'

The parallel with my own daughter's upbringing was obvious. Year after year, she had been a week or three late for the autumn term so that she could complete some voyage or other in the family boat. She had taken no harm. Even if his wife disagreed, Wayne clearly thought as we did. Travis could well miss a fortnight's schooling, his father said to me later.

‘I was just testing to see how he really felt. We'll hide him away clear of the schoolroom until the job's over. The plains will take up the slack.'

Roz and I returned to Gordon for the last time after sharing an impromptu harvest supper with the whole team. As my headlamp blazed ahead into the starry night, I realised that watching the Nebraska cattle families and the plains farmers living their compromise with the ancient prairies was giving me the beginnings of an understanding of the underlying strength of the United States. Roz had remarked in Baltimore that America is too close to its past to recognise itself. In these parts, it seemed almost as if the past had never finished at all, and that the life the settlers risked everything for had been found and kept. My overall impressions had been very different in the multi-cultured cities of the East, and I concluded that the ordinary people of the plains were somehow cleansed by the unavoidable certainties of Nature which confront them every minute. Theirs is the life of freedom, secured by service to the family, the nation and their god, that the Constitution of the United States foresaw.

14
A CLOSE CALL ON
THE RESERVATION

I settled into my personal, vibrating semi-consciousness, reflecting as I rode that even the Colonial Motel had turned out to have its dark side. I was suffering from back pain that morning as a result of several bad nights in a bed that for the money should have been a lot more comfortable.

‘Lumpy,' was the verdict.

Apropos of nothing in particular, Pokey had told us that the manageress had used our room while her apartment was being renovated. The day before we left, she was not in her office when I went to settle in advance for our final night. Various people were hanging around the check-in, and finally the owner of the place showed up to find the manager's apartment stripped and the cash-box empty. The good woman had ‘done a runner' with the proceeds.

‘She always treated us right,' Wayne said as he started up his sparkling truck. ‘Nice lady.'

That last evening, Roz and I had given up trying to convince ourselves the bed was tolerable, so we chucked the mattress on to the floor, always the last-ditch answer. As it had come away from the base, the mattress revealed a stash of a dozen or more empty bottles of gin and vodka tossed at random between it and its supporting springs.

I was still chuckling about the excesses of our unusual hostess when we came up with a throng on horseback following the high roads towards Pine Ridge. The altitude had been imperceptibly rising for hundreds of miles as the plains rolled towards the Rockies so that we now enjoyed blissful relief from the noonday heat, with cool mornings and evenings. For some reason I could not identify, once inside Indian country, the land actually felt higher and, as the outsiders had promised, the organised wheat-fields were replaced by unkempt, yellow-brown prairie. The first indication of the travellers was a tailback of traffic along the two-lane highway. Next, a dust cloud could be seen rising ahead. Finally, we trundled past a hundred or more full-blooded Native Americans, men, women and children, meandering towards the town. Perhaps a third straddled ponies, the rest were on foot. The ponies were athletic-looking creatures, light-coloured with bold brown or black markings. The horsemen went bareback. Many had long hair with coloured headbands like the Apache warriors of my schoolboy comic books; one or two wore feathers slung point-up. Beads and brightly patterned cloth swung in the sunshine, and there was a joyous lack of formality in the way the group moved amongst themselves. A mounted man trotted by, half-turning on his pony's back to joke with a bunch behind him, youngsters scampered here and there, almost between the horses' feet, women swayed along chatting amongst themselves, and the whole crowd ebbed and flowed out on to the blacktop, seemingly unaware of the traffic jam. Like just about everyone else in North America, however, they registered the bikes, waving and calling as we trickled slowly ahead.

The Indians could have been heading up to Medicine Lodge 120 years ago to meet Black Kettle and Standing Bear, such was the effect of their costume and the totally non-Caucasian dynamics of their interplay. They reflected the high sun softly from their buckskin and wampum, we shot it back off our chrome and steel like helio mirrors, yet with the styling of our leather saddlebags, our scarves drifting in the wind and the essentially ‘Western equestrian' seating position of the Harley-Davidson, we were far more in harmony with the scene than any of the air-conditioned cars and their white inhabitants.

Why this tribe were on the road remained unclear for only a short while. We were low on fuel when we arrived at the settlement of Pine Ridge, so our first stop in the main town of a reservation the size of Yorkshire, was the local filling station which was also the most significant building around, part store, part restaurant and automotive centre. Before we had even opened our tank caps, a heavily built young Indian descended on us aboard a 1971 Harley held together with wire and string. Sid Half-Head wore no helmet, his long braided hair flowed over his leather shirt and his breath suggested he'd enjoyed a liquid lunch. We had met one or two Indians back at Gordon, handsome men with high cheekbones, cowboy kit, dark ponytails and perhaps a thin necklace of wampum beneath the open necks of cotton shirts. Sid didn't have their figure, but he had the broadest face I'd ever seen off an Inuit. There was no doubting his ancestry. He admired our topof-the-line modern machines, which were clearly beyond his wildest financial aspirations, without even a tinge of envy.

‘Evolution engines,' he nodded, referring to our motor units, a marque introduced comparatively recently. ‘They as reliable as folks say?'

‘We've come all the way from the East Coast and they haven't missed a beat.'

Sid shook his head and I inquired about the travelling tribe now weaving its way into town.

‘Sioux nation pow-wow,' he announced with pride. ‘Starts tomorrow. Folks'll be gatherin' from all over. North Dakota, Montana; Iowa even. Plenty here already.'

We parked the bikes and ambled across the street with him to the yard of a wooden building where four young girls in full tribal regalia were being quizzed by a group of female elders. Neither Roz nor I could make head or tail of the proceedings. I turned to ask Sid, but he had bored quickly and split, leaving us on our own in a small crowd of local onlookers. The girls seemed to be giving résumés, after which they were cross-examined on what appeared to my mind the most banal issues.

‘They're being assessed for the Queen of the pow-wow,' a midrange voice spoke up from my elbow. Looking down, I found myself pressed against a well-endowed Indian woman of around thirty. She looked me in the eye, paused, then continued, ‘To be selected is an honour.'

This fine-looking lady promptly introduced herself and started to fill me in on her experiences on the back of various motorcycles, complete with intimate details. When she picked up the fact that Roz was there too, she turned from me and started work cutting her down to size. Roz's Spitfire-pilot father, her childhood in the caravan at the end of the runway, the ‘Clergy Daughters' public school and the heavy-duty motorcycling suddenly sounded excruciatingly middle class when our friend announced that although she had rarely left Pine Ridge, she had taken full advantage of the educational opportunities offered to Native Americans and had a degree and was daughter to one of the tribal elders. What clinched her superiority was being the great-granddaughter of one of the young chiefs who forsook the white man's imposed reservation. They had chosen instead to live free with Crazy Horse in those dangerous years leading up to the annihilation of General Custer in the summer of 1876. Together with Rain in the Face, Black Foot and a number of other sub-chiefs under Sitting Bull, these warriors are among the most charismatic men in American history, but their triumph was so inevitably brief that few of them survived to see their ancestral hunting grounds turned into wheat-fields. The Oglala Teton Sioux chief, Red Cloud, managed an uneasy compromise, persuading his people to subsist on the Pine Ridge Reservation, but Sitting Bull was ultimately assassinated and Crazy Horse lost his life in suspicious circumstances. In 1890, Black Foot was cut down with hundreds of his unarmed kinsfolk, many of them old men, women and children, in the determining massacre by the US Army at Wounded Knee.

All this remained in the back of my mind as the young lady worked out that ours were the two bikes parked over the road. Turning her back on the beauty queen competition, she took my arm and asked in a matey sort of way for a lift to the field on the edge of town where the pow-wow was apparently gaining momentum.

‘You have to be there,' she was saying. ‘Big party, music, dancing, and great conversation. You can pitch your tent by the teepees.'

Roz expressed an understandable ambivalence at this offer.

‘Isn't it just for Sioux?'

‘The pow-wow is for anyone feeling the spirit move them,' responded our self-appointed tour guide serenely, leading the way across the stream of traffic to the bikes. From the safety of air-conditioned cars, RVs and virgin four-tracks, passing tourists stared at the Indians, but few made the move to come out into the open. It crossed my mind that perhaps they all knew something I didn't, but it seemed churlish to refuse this enthusiast a lift.

‘You two go ahead,' Roz said, unconcerned, ‘I'll follow on behind.'

I reorganised my kit somehow and the girl, no mean weight, hopped up on to Madonna's buddy seat. She hugged me around the waist as I kicked the bike into gear and opened up for the West End of town. I could see Roz in my mirrors, a light and a yellow flash. She was a long way astern.

By the time we reached our turn-off, the way my passenger was pressing into my leather-clad back was hinting that perhaps a pow-wow was one of those affairs where ‘anything goes'. There's no doubt that bikes do things to some women and unfortunately a Harley engine, even a smoothed-out Evolution version, can act like an overpriced vibrator to anyone straddling the buddy seat. Fearing the worst, I held back, willing Roz to give it some throttle, but she had disappeared temporarily from my field of vision and the girl behind me was raring for action.

‘Come on!' she urged, breathing in my ear, leaning forward and nudging my right elbow with a helping of unmistakably female chest, ‘it's just at the bottom of this hill and across the field.'

Filtering in from the side, an endless convoy of ponies, trucks and ancient cars, mainly American, was lurching down a long, steep slope, rutted and deeply muddy, towards a water-meadow studded with trailers, tents and a handful of tall teepees. Slipping the clutch and riding the back brake judiciously to stop the heavy bike sliding from under us, I hung on as we jolted down the slope. The V-twin growled sexily as I blipped the throttle to avoid a series of potential collisions. The frame responded with its wicked high-resonance shudder. I dreaded to imagine what the monster was doing to the ancestral hormones.

At the bottom of the incline, we set course for a group of teepees on the far side of the wide pasture. By the time we got there, any semblance of tread in my road tyres was crammed with mud and the traction was reduced to zero, but the chief's great-granddaughter was getting a bang out of hollering to her chums. If we'd collapsed in a greasy puddle I don't think she'd have minded one bit.

As the pair of us dismounted, I peered anxiously astern for Betty Boop, feeling like a wagon train survivor praying for the cavalry. To my exquisite relief I saw Roz riding precariously through a crowd of appreciative but well-oiled young braves. Not only was the Sportster still on her feet, despite the abysmal going but Roz's arrival lifted me from what had all the makings of a diplomatic disaster.

There was no sign of the elders keeping a lid on the action. The teepees were empty, the trailer crowd was ripping into the firewater and heavy metal music was reverberating around the valley from hidden speakers of major proportions. Despite the carnal attractions of my passenger, I had been hoping for some serious discussion about the life of an Indian in today's United States, but fate and the bottle seemed to be conspiring against such enlightenment. Roz searched for a patch of ground hard enough to support Betty's side stand as I tried to engage my passenger in meaningful exchange, but she had lost interest and was proposing a lift back to town. Perhaps this was because of Roz's persistence; more likely, I thought, my presence was no longer required now that she had made her triumphal arrival on site. Whatever the reason, I was persuaded to mount up, pop her on the back once more, and drop her where I had picked her up. Roz muttered something about seeing me there. As I hacked away across the boggy field with the Indian girl's powerful thighs once more clamped around my hips, I reflected that I'd have been much better off with Laverne's trail bike than the heavy, skidding Heritage. Despite the non-event now subsiding to its anticlimax, I couldn't help speculating disgracefully on the potential outcome had I been a lone rider. But that was one thing I'd never know. The dark-haired beauty hopped off at the gas station, awarded me a warm, wet kiss and was last seen deep in conversation with Sid Half-Head over a can of Coke.

I waited five minutes for Roz. After ten, I was seriously worried and had just started the bike to go look for her when she arrived from around the corner covered in mud. Seeing her reappear from those direst of straits made me realise how much I loved her, but she was not in a mood to be told. Instead, she indicated for me to follow, opened her throttle and blasted away eastwards across the plain at an unprecedented speed, ground-up dirt spitting from her tyres. She didn't falter until we were twenty minutes outside the reservation. Only then did she stop on a swell of the sunset prairie, miles from anywhere.

‘Sometimes I really wonder about you,' she said, her eyes steely. ‘The first sniff of a girl and you gallivant off into some God-forsaken jamboree with me tagging on like a spare part.'

Still filled with admiration for her nerve, I tried to remonstrate that to refuse would have been rude, but this was no acceptable excuse.

‘And then you leave me in what looked like a World War One no-man's-land surrounded by drunkards. The bike was totally bogged down. If she'd gone over, God only knows what would have happened. I've strained my back holding on to Betty, so I'd appreciate the fanciest berth in Dakota for tonight. I need a hot bath and a comfortable bed.'

Ten miles on we pulled in at the tourist joint we had turned our backs on a week before. Travel had been a tough option that day and, as a mollified Roz pointed out, tourism has its place in a secret corner of every journey. We parked our filthy Harleys among the polished motorcars and tucked into a proper dinner surrounded by vacationers from everyday jobs. These were the people whose faces we'd seen peering through vehicle windows that afternoon. The following morning, I chatted with some of them in the lobby and was not really surprised to discover that they were ordinary folks from Middle America out to see their country. Their Pine Ridge experience had been dramatically different from ours. Many of them were now pressing on to the Little Big Horn battleground, or into the Black Hills to visit giant statues of the heads of Washington, Lincoln and other presidents at the Mount Rushmore monument. Sturgis was being avoided like a plague city. Since no one seemed interested in Wounded Knee, we decided to go there.