Quarry leaned out the window. “You remember to bring some ID with you?”
Fred climbed in the truck, took out his wallet, really two flaps of leather hooked together with rubber bands, and slipped out an ID card. “White man’s way of keeping tabs on us real Americans.”
Quarry grinned. “I got news for you, buckaroo. Old Uncle Sam ain’t just watching folks like you. He’s watching all of us. Real Americans like you and the ones just renting space here like me.”
From the paper bag Fred drew out a bottle of beer.
“Damn, can’t you wait until we’re done before you suck that down?” said Quarry. “I don’t want to ever see what your sorry liver looks like,” he added.
“My mother lived to ninety-eight,” Fred replied as he took a long drink and put the bottle back in the bag.
“Yeah? Well I can pretty much guarantee you won’t. And you’ve got no health insurance. Neither do I. They say the hospital has to treat everybody, but they don’t say when they do. Been over the county hospital mor’n once lying on the waiting room floor with the fever and the chills and the heaves so bad I think I’m gonna die. Two days go by and then some kid in a white coat finally comes out and asks you to stick out your tongue and wants to know where it hurts while you’re lying on the floor with your stomach coming out your ass. By then you’ve pretty much lived through it, but some damn drugs would’ve been nice too.”
“I never go to hospital.” Fred said this in Indian. And then he started talking fast in his native tongue.
Quarry interrupted him. “Fred, I don’t have Gabriel here, so when you start going full Muskogean on me, I’m lost, man.”
Fred repeated it all in English.
“There you go. When in America, speak the English. Just don’t try to go to the damn hospital without an insurance card. I don’t care what language you’re talking, you’re screwed.”
The truck bumped along. Fred pointed to a building in the distance. It was the little house that Quarry had built.
“You do good job on that. I watch you sometimes while you do it.”
“Thank you.”
“But who did you build it for?”
“Someone special.”
“Who?”
“Me. My vacation home.”
They drove on.
Quarry pulled out a bulky envelope from his jacket and passed it across to Fred. When Fred opened it, his hands shook slightly. Stunned, he looked up at Quarry, who was eying him from under bushy eyebrows.
“One thousand dollars in there.”
“What is it for?” Fred asked, as he hacked up some phlegm and spit it out the window.
“For coming back home,” he said, grinning. “And for something else too.”
“What?”
“That’s why you needed your ID.”
“And why do I need my ID? You never said.”
“You’re gonna be a witness to something. Something important.”
“This is too much money to be a witness,” Fred said.
“You don’t want the cash?”
“I did not say that,” the man replied, the heavy wrinkles on his face deepening as he spoke.