Chapter four
As luck would have it, while he was in the trailer his friend Sean showed up. The first words out of his mouth were, “what the hell are you and your mom up to and don’t give me that shit about going to the doctor? Where the hell have you been anyway? Christ John, the sheriffs been around asking all kinds of questions. Hell, I think he suspects me of something.” He sure don’t act like he believes my story about the night you guys left me at the trailer.”
When Sean slowed down enough for John to speak, he said, “I can’t tell you where we are Sean, and please don’t tell anyone you saw me, especially the sheriff.”
“John, you have to tell me what’s going on. After I told the sheriff I was at your house, he made me go out there with him. He questioned me about what was missing and acted as if he thought I took your stuff. Look John, I’ve had a couple run-ins with the sheriff that I never told you about. If I can’t explain myself I could be in trouble here.”
After drinking three of Sean’s beers and a lot of yelling on both sides, John said he would explain if Sean promised never to tell. After all Sean and him had been best friends since the first grade. If he couldn’t trust Sean, who could he trust? Besides, he was sure if the roles were reversed that Sean would confide in him.
At first Sean thought John was just making up a ridicules story to avoid the truth, but after awhile John hatched a plot to prove it. He told Sean that the next day his mom and he were going to Roswell shopping.
“You go to Roswell early and park in McDonald’s lot. When we come by follow us. When you get a look at my Mom you’ll know I’m telling the truth.”
“Why can’t I just drive out to the ranch and knock on the door?”
“Are you kidding? If my Mom finds out I told you she’ll kill me.
The following day, when Sean returned from Roswell, he walked into his sister’s room and said I’m going to make you walk again. She looked up from her wheel chair and said, “Yeah sure and pigs will fly, right?”
“I’m going to do it you just wait and see.”
“Sean, I wish you wouldn’t even joke about that.”
“I’m not joking, you just wait and see.”
Sean’s sister had been in a wheelchair since she was ten years old and Sean blamed himself. Although he was in fact responsible, it had been an accident and he had been a child himself when the accident occurred. That fact did nothing to allay his guilt. Sean had been riding since he was eight and considered himself an excellent horseman. He was thirteen when he decided to take his little sister for a ride. They were racing across the dessert with Molly begging him to slow down when the horse stepped in a squirrel hole. Sean was unhurt but his sister Molly had landed on her head. She broke her neck and the doctors said she would never walk again.
Sean had to leave his sister in the desert while he went for help. The horse had broken his leg and lay kicking and screaming a short way off. Sean had not brought a rifle with him so there was nothing he could do about the horse. When he discovered that Molly couldn’t move her legs he was beside himself. He knew that he shouldn’t move his sister but that was a moot point anyway, they were at least a mile from home. Sean couldn’t have carried her that far under the best of circumstances. He was distraught about leaving her in the desert alone, but had no choice. He ran all the way home. When he had finished telling his dad, he had taken a canteen, a rifle and ran all the way back to his sister. He was soaked in sweat when he got there. He shot the horse and sat down by his sister to wait. She was lying on the ground quietly sobbing with her eyes closed. She may have only been ten years old, but she was well aware that life as she had known it, was over.
After awhile Sean got up and went over to the horse. He needed to do something, so he unbuckled the girth and removed the saddle. The task of getting the saddle off a dead horse wasn’t easy, especially in midday heat, but he was determined and finally succeeded. He took the bridle off and laid it on top of the saddle. He then went back to wait by his sister.
They didn’t have a phone so his father would have to drive to Roswell since that was the nearest place with a hospital or rescue squad. It was over an hour before the ambulance arrived. Molly was very thirsty and Sean had tried to give her some water, but she had started to choke, and it scared him half to death so he quit. It was in the nineties and Sean was scared that dehydration would make her condition even worse. He tore the sleeve off his shirt, soaked it in water and had her suck on it while he stood over her to create shade. When the ambulance arrived, they could see the dust cloud for ten minutes before it got too them. It seemed like forever.
Sean had nightmares for months about the accident. Night after night, his subconscious played back the horrific scene at the hospital when they told his parents that Molly would never walk again. His mother wailed and carried on until they had to sedate her. For a long time after she was sedated, she sat by Molly’s bed and quietly wept. That was when Sean had promised his parents that no matter what, he would see to it that Molly was taken care of for the rest of her life.
Sean Wayne Proudfoot was brought screaming into this world by a midwife, at home, on the Indian reservation. His mother who could neither read nor write named him Sean because she thought it sounded modern. The irony of the name being extremely old, and foreign to boot, was completely lost on her. All she was aware of was that the name was popular on the television. John’s father hated the name because he considered it not only a white man's name, but also an eastern “citified” white man's name. He called him Wayne because it at least sounded to him like a western name. Sean had been a thin sickly baby, to the point his parents hadn’t expected him to survive his first year, but survive he did and by two was a robust child.
Molly, in contrast to her brother, had come silently into the world and had been chubby and healthy from the onset. She was a quiet child that rarely cried and never complained. After the accident, she seemed to accept it as her lot in life and took it in stride.
Sean’s father disliked all white men, but detested eastern “citified” white men the most. Due to some twisted thought process, he blamed the easterners for the Indians’ loss of dignity. Even more so than ones that had flooded onto Indian land. This could be because the cowboy movies of which he was fond. The cowboy was often depicted as sympathetic to the Indians plight. Moreover, the plot often showed the powerful easterners in cahoots with the government to eradicate the Indians.
At any rate, he had raised his son with an attitude of distrust for white people. He believed that although it was at times necessary to work with whites, it wasn’t wise to mingle with them on a social basis. He was unhappy that his son chose to be friends with a white boy. A fact of which he was aware even though Sean never brought him too their house or mentioned him, for that matter.
Although Sean chose to be friends with John, he never trusted him as much as he did his Indian friends. He was at first unaware of this difference of how he related to people, but was increasingly aware as he grew older. All that aside, he was now so angry with John that he could hardly contain himself. All he could think of was that although John held the power to heal his sister, he had failed to offer. He was certain that had they all been white John wouldn’t have hesitated to help.
There were quite a few things that Sean had wrong about his friend John. He had never talked much about girls with John and assumed that John would be upset if he saw him with a white girl. The truth of the matter was that Sean was imbuing John with his own prejudices. Although John was well aware that his friend was an Indian, he no more thought of him as Indian than he thought of his mother as Swedish. Sean however, would never believe that, nor would he have understood even if he had known.
Sean had vowed that whatever else he did in life; he would always take care of Molly. Now he had found a way and nothing would stop him. If he had to hold Matt at gunpoint to get what he wanted he was going to see to it that Molly walked again. He wasn’t about to let his friendship with John, or anything else for that matter, stand in the way of his goal.