There There: Part II: Jacquie Red Feather (2) Summary & Analysis

Jacquie and Harvey are in Harvey’s Ford pickup, riding through the Arizona desert on their way to Oakland. Harvey doesn’t like silence, and chats endlessly at Jacquie, who sits quietly and listens. Harvey tells a story about getting stuck out in the desert, once, when he was young. He and some friends—Navajo twins—got drunk in the desert and wandered out into the brush, but then got lost. Jacquie muses about how people in recovery love to tell drinking stories—she herself doesn’t have any funny stories about drinking, as the act always felt like a chore to her.

Harvey continues his story, explaining that he woke up freezing in the middle of the desert, disoriented and alone. He began walking, and eventually spotted two “very tall, very white guys with white hair” and wondered if he’d been drugged by the twins. Jacquie says that Harvey’s memory must have been a dream, but Harvey insists it was real, and that when he looked up “tall white guys in the desert in Arizona” on the internet years later, he found other people’s stories of similar encounters with strange pale beings—aliens, ostensibly.

Jacquie’s phone buzzes in her pocket—it is a text from Opal. She opens it and reads it: Opal has written to her to confess that when she was a girl, “before everything happened with Ronald,” Opal herself found spider legs in a lump in her own legs. Jacquie feels sad for Harvey and Opal, the two of them with their ludicrous stories. Jacquie, feeling suddenly exhausted, leans her head against the car window and falls asleep.