Alo was half white and half Native American. His name meant “he who looks up,” he said. Normally he lived in Ventura, a small surfing town north of Los Angeles, but on holidays he came to South Dakota to visit his mother—a cocktail waitress from Nevada who worked at the Prairie Wind Casino. She had married and divorced a Sioux man with a drinking problem who lived on the reservation and got in trouble. Alo didn’t say how, but I gathered he was in jail.
“Oh my God, we, like, share so much!” I exclaimed, forcing a Valley girl accent. “I totally live in Los Angeles also. I mean that’s where my stuff is while I travel around.” It was the first time the Greater Los Angeles area had given me something in common with somebody else.
“That’s cool. I escaped South Dakota when I was your age, but it was too far away to get anywhere. I had to wait a few years before things got fun.”
“Oh, I’m not a runaway. My parents know I travel. They’re bohemians.”
I didn’t know where my proclamations came from but I felt they were sending me in the right direction.
We were the only car on the interstate. The full moon was rising in the sky. I had never seen such a gleaming ball of light. Everything in America—even the moon—was bigger. We pulled off the highway onto a winding dirt road that led into the woods.
“Where are we going?” I asked after another swig of Jack Daniel’s.
Alo leaned toward me and wrapped his hand around my neck, half petting, half caressing my hair in a way that was supposed to be reassuring but had the opposite effect.
“I think Moira is very happy. She has never seen someone from France.”
“Italy,” I corrected him with a low tone of voice. “Who’s Moira?”
“My car.” He smiled and patted the dashboard of the pickup with the palm of his hand like a proud father. My eyes fell on the vagrant bottles of whiskey on the floor and the ashtray brimming with cigarette butts.
“Where are we going?” I asked again, sniffing the stale carpets.
The moon crept up higher into the sky, obscured by a row of thick pine trees that curved in toward one another, forming a natural tunnel for our crossing. When we reached a plateau in the forest, Alo turned off the engine and the headlights and let the truck roll down the other side into the darkness.
I tensed up, but he said not to worry. He did this all the time. He knew the road so well he could drive with his eyes closed. And that’s what he did. He shut his eyes and let the truck go. I grabbed the steering wheel but could not see. The truck coasted downhill, picking up speed through the black sea of trees. There were no sounds except for the thumping tires on the loose gravel, repeating their cycle at a faster and faster pace.
“Stop!” I screamed. “Turn the lights on.”
We zoomed down until the pine trees became sparser and the moonlight began to trickle back in. Moira shot us at full speed out of the dark tunnel into an iridescent wide-open prairie below.
We had landed.
Alo stopped the truck and let out a long laugh, releasing adrenaline. I got out of the truck and started walking as far away from it as I could, into the light of the field.
“Oh, don’t be mad. I told you I had it under control,” he called after me.
The grass glowed under the moon. It was then I realized we were back at the Wounded Knee burial ground. Alo caught up with me and handed me a blanket and his bottle of whiskey. We treaded through the field. A drumming sound came from the hills.
“Lakota.” Alo signaled for me to hush up. “It’s their purification ritual to bless the land. They come here on horses every winter from different parts of America as a spiritual journey to heal their ancestors’ souls.”
I felt a pang in my heart. My poor mother, with her ragged white lingerie and cyclamen bulbs, was right then. She was in tune with the Lakota people who flocked in from all over the country, migrating on horses in arctic weather.
We walked toward the drumming sound, hiding in the long-stemmed grass.
“They asked me to join them the first year, ’cause my dad is Lakota, but you’re supposed to spend months preparing with sweat lodges, meditations, and vision quests. I couldn’t swing it. You basically starve yourself, then walk aimlessly in the wilderness for days until some kind of spirit guide or animal appears to you and shows you what the purpose of your life is. Not something you can do in Los Angeles, unless you want to go into the ocean and get eaten by sharks. Plus I like whiskey too much.”
We walked further and found a large group of men, women, and horses gathered around a cottonwood tree, close to the burial site. We tried to stay hidden in the shadier parts of the field. Alo unfolded the blanket and sat down. It was freezing.
The tribal drumming intensified and a stout man with face paint started speaking Sioux to the other members.
“Enjoy the show,” Alo said while he loaded a pipe. He took a long hit, then passed it to me.
“I feel like we shouldn’t be spying on them.”
“It’s okay.” He cuddled me, trying to be romantic or reassuring, succeeding in neither attempt. “They know we’re here. They’ll let us hang out as long as we don’t bother them.”
He passed me the incandescent pipe again.
I inhaled deeply, the way Henry taught me back at the vintage store. I kept the smoke in my lungs as long as I could, then spat out with a cough. Alo offered a sip of whiskey to warm up. I downed a quarter of the bottle and almost choked. The alcohol flushed through my throat. An unfamiliar burning began in my stomach. I was suddenly aware of the exact consistency of the liquid. I felt the thick malt condense inside me, and all the way down. I began to see the precise molecule formations that made up whiskey drift into the air. They slid into my esophagus, burning my insides.
I got up in a panic screaming about fire. Everything was burning.
Alo took my hand and sat me back down.
“Chill out or they’ll send us away. It’s okay, breathe. I just sprinkled a bit of peyote with the weed. Relax. You won’t even feel it, I promise,” he said as an insidious red dragon made its way out of his throat. I opened my mouth hoping to extinguish the fire burning inside me with the cold air outside, but it got worse.
I was high.
A woman’s voice inside my head—the Virgin Mary’s—told me to keep breathing and not move.
“Still fires eventually extinguish themselves,” she said.
“As long as the wind doesn’t blow them elsewhere,” replied another voice inside.
I stayed paralyzed.