“Hey, watcha doin?” The hitchhiker isn’t too alarmed that the pickup has suddenly lurched to the shoulder. He finds what he believes to be the driver’s irrational outbursts wholly entertaining. He views the waves of rage as one would a performance; with bemused detachment, even when they’re directed at him.

The pickup jerks to a halt just feet from where a roadside stand is setting up for the day. The hitchhiker has to wonder if the driver even realizes that he came close to leveling a group of Indians, a whole family of them, laying out their wares on woven blankets atop wooden crates. The driver steams out.

“I’m goin’ fer a piss.” He takes the keys with him.

It can’t be too long past six in the morning, but there’s something about how there is no real sunrise in the desert during winter –the light just breaks and scatters evenly throughout the dull clouds- that can make a person’s appetite grow rampant, and fast.

The hitchhiker looks on at the Indians’ charred stalks of corn and flattened strips of cured meat: a proper travelin’ breakfast if ever there was one.

“Friend.”

The hitchhiker looks up into the silhouette of a fairly tall Indian. He look be the head of the household setting up the stand. There is no headdress or bow slung across his chest. The hitchhiker figures he must be one of “ ‘em or’nary een-dians”; the kind that still carry that stony wise air, but couldn’t spark a flint fire to save his life.

He appears from out the darkness of the makeshift stand. Linen pants and a leather vest, though it can’t be above fifty degrees, hang off his lithe frame.