Chapter 1

Princess Pony-girl did not like being called Pony-girl and she hated her signature ponytail that showed off her high cheeks so drastically that she could be easily identified as being an American Indian girl without much confusion about the subject. It could also be said that the pretty young thing was not overjoyed at being called Princess. In her mind, if she was going to be royalty, she felt she should at least be ranked as a Queen.

The small girl with the classic bone structure wanted everyone to simply call her "Pony" because it was short and sweet and fitted her a lot better than the other silly name. Her friends didn't see any problem with that solution to addressing her but her enemies were mean-spirited enough to keep calling her Princess Pony-girl just to rattle her cage.

Pony was not born on the reservation and she only moved there after her father was killed in some country she never heard of before on the other side of the world. There was some difficulty with the distribution of the insurance money from the military due to the Indian wedding ceremony which was recognized by the tribe but not the state department of licensing that refused to put their stamp of approval on the paperwork without federal approval. That was the reason that Pony was sent to the reservation along with her arthritis-crippled mom and three other brothers all younger than she.

The pretty teenager was sweet sixteen the year they sent her to the reservation and now she was almost nineteen and old enough to make up her own mind. Of course, she stayed with her mom and three brothers in the depressing surroundings because her mom depended on her for almost all the housework chores due to her crippled hands. Fortunately, other than that handicap, her health was quite good and she was able to look after herself with little difficulty. It was the brothers that took a lot of Pony's time because they were constantly getting into trouble and making her life a veritable hell of constant cleaning up and setting things straight.

Her schoolwork suffered because of her need to constantly do chores and tend to her brothers but she didn't complain to the teachers because it was a familiar refrain on the arid and bleak reservation where it seemed everything was "barely adequate" due to constant budget cutting. She had heard all the stories from the "old-timers" who repeated the refrain that she was lucky to not be on the reservation when things were really bad. She was beginning to doubt those stories because in her mind that saw things simply, it couldn't get much worse than right at the moment.

Pony had a real interest in History and she tried to read every book she could get in the library on the way "The People" had been slaughtered like animals in the big push for something they described as "Manifest Destiny" in the textbooks. All she could think was that the words seemed more Indian than White Man and it was just an excuse to take the land from the American Indians without paying for it. Her private thoughts were somewhat confused because she was at heart a patriotic person and she thought the United States of America was a shining light on a hill except for the fact it was actually on a reservation in the middle of the desert.

The school on the reservation was similar in many respects to the school she had attended in Texas. The subjects were the same, the challenges were the same, and even the topics of conversation were the same. The primary difference was that her fellow students were lacking that basic drive of developing competition from sports to academic achievement like in her old school. After giving it some thought, Pony decided it was because most of the other students had lost their spirit of hope for a better world or at least a better place for them to live out their lives just like the non-reservation citizens of the U.S.A. The feeling that they were truly "second-class citizens" had been driven deeply into their sub-conscious like some communist country form of brain-washing so subliminal that they barely knew they were already indoctrinated.

Their allocated living quarters had been recently vacated by a single mother with a pair of grown children who had succumbed to the scourge of drugs and overdosed in the middle of the night alone in the dark because the electricity had been shut off for non-payment of the basic fee. Her two sons were already in a State-run facility for wayward youth because of their habit of stealing automobiles right from the driveways of the affluent whites in nearby neighborhoods.

Apparently, the previous occupant was considered "bad news" by most of the neighbors because of her besmirched reputation of supplementing her income with money for physical favors of a kinky nature best left unstated in front of delicate ears.

The doublewide mobile home was not that old and, at least, the roof was not leaking. The primary problem was the fact that it was not hooked up to running water and they had to bring all their water in from the spigot on the corner right next to the fire hydrant. The water pipes were paid for by the Federal government who managed to supply ninety percent of the cost of providing water and sewerage for the reservation leaving the final ten percent up to the local governing authority which balked at spending any money or raising taxes on the hard-working citizens of the county. The resident American Indians were told by the Tribal Council that they would match every dollar the resident raised to meet the three thousand dollar "hook up" fee required by the county to connect to the water lines. That would mean each housing unit needed fifteen hundred dollars in cash to get their water piped straight to their sinks and toilets. Of course, living from day to day and with no savings, the reservation Indians found it easier to stay with the "old ways" and simply carry the water to their homes like they had done for almost one hundred and fifty years of reservation life.

The stinky outhouses were a pain in the butt in cold weather and in the summer, the flies were atrocious. On the other hand they didn't cost them a single thin dime.

Pony was used to it now but she questioned the wisdom of not upgrading to the new ways of doing things since the water pipes were so near and yet so far.

There were only a few "outsiders" working on the reservation in the head office and in the school but Pony felt a bit closer to them and their way of thinking than to her "set in her ways" mother and the older residents who remembered the "old days" with a sense of fondness that she found difficult to muster. The newly appointed science teacher, Mister Johnson, used to be a minister of a reputable church but had taken the job on the reservation because of some issue with getting too close to the teenaged female students with submissive natures. Most of them were inclined to sit still and let him show them the way to salvation pretending ignorance of the error of their ways. Fortunately for him, they were all over the age of sixteen and he was able to convince the sheriff that each of them had fully consented to his explorations into their hidden feminine secrets. She liked Mister Johnson and his ever-present smile and he seemed to sense a kindred spirit in Pony because she was so interested in the study of science and the miracle of the universe.