The fast red road

the long version

"The Fast Red Road, A Plainsong is a novel which plunders, in a gleeful, two-fisted fashion, the myth and pop-culture surrounding the American Indian. It is a story fueled on pot fumes and blues, borrowing and distorting the rigid conventions of the traditional Western. Indians, cowboys, and outlaws are as interchangeable as their outfits; men strike poses from Gunsmoke, and horses are traded for Trans-Ams. Pidgin, the half-blood protagonist, inhabits a world of illusion - of aliens, ghosts, telekinesis, and water-pistol violence, where television offers redemption, and "the Indian always gets it up the ass."" "Having escaped the porn factories of Utah, he heads for Clovis, NM, to bury his father, Cline. But the body is stolen at the funeral, and Pidgin must recover it. With the aid of car thief Charlie Ward, he crisscrosses a wasted New Mexico, straying through bars, junkyards, and rodeos, evading the cops, and tearing through barriers Dukestyle. "Charlie Ward slid his thin leather belt from his jeans and held it out the window, whipped the Cutlass faster, faster, his dyed-black hair unbraiding in the fifty-five mile per hour wind, and the never had to stop for gas." Along the way, Pidgin escapes a giant coyote, survives a showdown with Custer, and encounters the remnants of the Goliard Tribe, a group of radicals to which Cline belonged." "Pidgin's search allows him to reconcile the death of his father with five hundred years of colonial myth-making and eventually places him in a position to rewrite history."--BOOK JACKET.