Hooked (2013) got down and dirty into the racism engendered by a romance between Fred, a great girl golfer from the Rez, and Ryan, an upper-middle-class white boy. Head over to Letter Trails for the last excerpt from this tour.The second book in the author’s examination of relationships between the white community and Native Americans on a Phoenix-area reservation. “I can’t believe you’re gonna bail on us this weekend.” It was bad enough that Peter even thought If Peter referred to That Which Shouldn’t Be Named one more time, I was seriously thinking about ripping off a truck panel. I turned away from Peter and focused on the wake of dust that swirled like a minitornado behind us in the darkening sky. If the truck were a hospital patient, someone would definitely be Frankly, I was surprised his old man’s truck could do more than thirtyfive. I shrugged and looked away from Peter, preferring to stare across miles of brown desert and dried tumbleweeds as if it were the most exciting scenery in the whole world.Īs usual, Martin continued to drive like a maniac. Sometimes the biggest places could be the tiniest. Even though the Gila River Indian Reservation stretched forever in just about every direction, it was microscopic, if you know what I mean. “Stop thinking about it.” Peter and Martin were the only ones I’d told, but I was pretty sure everyone on the Rez knew. “Stop what?” I yelled back, tasting a thin layer of dust on my lips. “Stop it,” he yelled over the grind of the engine. Across the truck bed, Peter kept giving me the stink eye from behind his wire-rimmed glasses, even as his glasses kept slipping down his That’s why our legs kept knocking whenever Martin sped like a madman over the washes. Despite being fifty pounds lighter, he was as tall as I was. Peter was another Rez kid and a junior at Lone Butte High like me. Peter and I clung to the sides of the truck as Martin charged up and out of bumpy washes that snaked across the Sonoran Desert. Someone would have already started a campfire and (hopefully) someone else would have brought beer – just a can or two apiece, but that was probably all that anybody could sneak from home.
The sun had already begun to set and by the time we reached the foothills, the sky would be as black as a bruise. Martin’s truck chugged its way along a single-lane dirt road. Going out beat the alternative, which was stay home, watch my grandmother weave baskets on the front stoop and pretend that my heart hadn’t been pulverized into a thousand pieces. When you lived way out on the Rez like we did, sometimes that was as close to real excitement as you got. There was a party tonight somewhere near the Estrella foothills. Martin drove and Vernon Parker called shotgun. My buddy Peter and I hitched a ride in the bed of Martin Ellis’s pickup.
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