Six months of volunteering on the reservation will get you here: parked outside Big Bat’s around 3:00 am while your ex-hookup buddy pukes

on the uneven pavement, you retching and trying to hold it back so you don’t have to go near him in your lowered-tolerance inebriation, watching the rear-end of a piebald horse at the gas pump in front of you and wondering if there’s just one funny thing going on in this situation, or too many to count. Given you’re seeing three of everything anyway, it can be hard to keep track.

Being just out of college and stranded in an ocean of ancient ani-misticysim that still makes more sense than the insular ultra-Catholicism of your virtual-strangers-even-after-seven-months housemates can also throw off one’s perspective. Spending most of your waking hours feeling oversized around kindergartners and their tiny chairs can be a little discombobulating for a 5’1”, 100 lb misfit who’s never been bigger than anyone in her life, but leaving the classroom every afternoon for the driver’s seat of a full sized school bus throws things into an even more Alice In Wonderland kind of perspective. Being out here, a hundred miles from anything like civilization and yet parked at a 24-hour convenience mart, just back from the legion hall dance you crashed with your fellow volunteers, waiting for the teetotal-ling designated driver to emerge form the store with some Cheetos, trying to remember what the hell happened over the past three hours, is mind-fuck-quality surrealism.

And then there’s the horse. Standing there, still as a car idling except for a slow swishing of the tail, right in front of your housemate’s Neon, as if it belonged at a gas station at 3:00 in the morning. Refueling. You guess the rider’s inside, probably also buying Cheetos. People out here love Cheetos. Not the regular kind so much as the hot kind. Not sure why, really, they’re pretty distasteful to you. But people here also tend to eat lemons without sugar, and they love – love – pickles. Who knows. They also ride horses around on weekends and take them to the gas station. It makes sense, really; the reservation has one of the highest drunk driving mortality rates in the world, and while a car will take you right into a ditch if you pass out drunk, a horse will get you home no matter what. Unless it comes across Bigfoot or The Tall Man or some other spirit, which according to the locals happens quite a lot and isn’t always a pleasant experience. But so long as you can keep your seat on the animal, which most of the people around here can, having been riding since they were preschoolers, a horse is a safer way to get around on a long howling-at-the-moon night than a piece of heavy machinery.

The horse’s tail swishes at you again. The sound of vomit hitting pavement from outside has stopped. The obvious mental image of the rider coming out of the gas station, pushing a few buttons at the pump, and inserting the business end of the nozzle into the business end of the horse continues to cross your hazy mind, but it seems passé somehow. Too obvious. Yet you still wish you had a camera. Another wave of nausea is coming over you – you steel yourself against the tidal force of bile. God, you think, I hate tequila. Dammit. You’d promised yourself to take it easy tonight – only drink one kind of beer and one kind of liquor to avoid mixing, but the first shot the now-barfing mass outside the car door bought you was Cuervo, and you got locked into a Mexican binge all night. Never a good idea. Nor is busting into the legion hall of a tiny Nebraska town known for its history of lynching the Indians you’re out here volunteering to teach for a year. It was fun at the time, but…

The back door opens and your ex-lover tumbles in, smiling the relieved smile of the empty-stomached drunk. “So where’s Pete with those Cheetos, dude?” His breath stinks but you’re so close to vomiting already that it hardly makes a dent in your confusion and misery. “Dude, I can’t believe you want to eat. You just puked everywhere.”

“Yeah,” he replies, “more room for Cheetos.” You grimace and turn back to the horse at the pump; it takes a moment, but the blurry double-image your drunk eyes perceive eventually focuses into one. Its tail is swishing. A big-boned Lakota woman is climbing up into the Western saddle, cradling her cell phone between her ear and shoulder – you’re constantly marveling at the skill set of people from the prairie. It’s entirely different than what the city taught you about swiping a Metro Card or avoiding other pedestrians mid-crosswalk in front of raging cab drivers.

Your ex watches with you as the animal trots off down the main street of Pine Ridge, South Dakota and into the wild void of the black prairie night. A dog barks in the distance. “So, hey,” mutters Bryan in the slurred late-night tone you came to know during illegal late-night beer binges at his tiny house in Oglala, “I know it’s been kind of weird lately but, we should really…” he hiccups… “get together again before you leave, you know? For old time’s sake.”

You eye him, curled in the corner of the Neon’s backseat, his hands gesturing clumsily as he talks. The high school girls’ basketball coach, now a member of the paid staff after three years volunteering. The only attractive non-Indian for miles around, and an alcoholic. Go figure. You just shake your head and turn back to the night outside the bright 24-hour lights of the parking area. It’s quiet now. You’re the only car in the parking lot. It’s finally gotten late enough for the reservation night to wind down. The Legion Hall kicked you out almost an hour and a half ago and the drive back was interrupted by Bryan’s several vomit stops. You wonder vaguely how Peter, the constant DD, can stand people like the two of you, who drag all the volunteers out into the night to witness your helplessly post-collegiate debauchery. You wonder how this will be remembered. The night everyone got kicked out of the legion hall? The night Bryan puked for two hours straight? Your birthday party?

Too many options, and the mind begins to spin again as nausea bears down on the backseat. If Peter would just get his snacks and get the hell out of Big Bat’s you could make it home without puking, no problem. Maybe one of his students is working the late shift, in which case you probably shouldn’t go in to get him. The sight of a drunken 3 am teacher from the school is a death blow to the reputation at any school, much less one where 90% of the students’ parents are diabetic and abusively alcoholic.

“I mean,” Bryan continues, seemingly unaware of your unresponsiveness, “it’s not like we had a fight or anything. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. It just went weird, you know? We should hook up again. It was fun.”

You stare at him for a moment. A flash to the night he invited you over to the Oglala pad, the night you decided a year of celibacy wasn’t in your future. A mistake, for sure, but one that could be made again for the sake of satiety. His form contorts as a deep hiccup issues from his throat. You roll your eyes and look away to see the door of the store opening, Peter emerging with Cheetos and Gatorade. “Thank GOD, dude,” you say as he opens the door, remembering a moment too late, as always, about how he views taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Sorry,” you mumble as he hands you a blue Gatorade.

And in a moment, with the car interior reeking of processed flour and cheese powder, Bryan crunching away and hiccupping as you nurse your drink and try to hold it down, you’re off again, into the blackness of the reservation night, rez dogs starting up by the side of the road and fading into the dark, the light of dawn approaching greyness from the East. Back up the hill to the volunteer house that’s not quite a home.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was originally published on Lynsey Griswold's blog.]