The Highway Kind(66)

The red Hummer in front of him started to move, and the Bronco rolled. It seemed like the start of a really slow and sad parade. Jeff pointed with his right index finger, steering with his left hand. Ten miles per hour.

“I think I have an idea,” she said.

When she finished talking, Jeff turned to her and said, “That’s not an idea. That’s an errand.”


Five days later, Jeff drove the 1970 Bronco out of LA and long into the Arizona desert on Interstate 10.

He took off the truck’s bikini top, tied a blue bandanna on his head, and cranked up the Eagles. He wasn’t really into the Eagles but enjoyed them ironically with all the cactus and sagebrush whizzing past.

At Phoenix, he took Arizona State Route 87 north to Payson, where he turned east onto the 260, but sometime after midnight, right around Show Low, he took a wrong turn and ended up not knowing what was up or down, north or south. A billboard promised big winners and comfortable beds.

It was late. What the hell? He followed the pointy arrows.


Nine hours later, Jeff lay by the pool of the Hon-Dah Resort and Casino reading an old paperback, Louis L’Amour’s Hondo. The cover showed a white man knocked on his back throwing over an Indian brave wielding a spear.

“Kill the Indian,” a young girl said. “Save the man.”

She’d snuck up him. “Excuse me?” Jeff asked.

“That’s what they told us after they rounded us up,” she said. “Forced into boarding schools in the East. Don’t believe what the white men have to say, the brave cavalry and cowboys. The American genocide of the Indian was much admired by Adolf Hitler.”

“It’s just a book.”

“A racist book,” she said. “Don’t let anyone else see you reading it here.”

The girl was very pretty and very Native American. She had dark skin, black eyes, and high cheekbones. Her hair was past her shoulders, slick, black, and shiny. A beaded choker wrapped her throat while she wore a resort uniform of a navy golf shirt and tiny khaki shorts. “Would you like to order something or just keep drinking cheap beer?”

“A club sandwich would be nice,” Jeff said. “On wheat if you have it. But no bacon.”

She wrote it down and looked back to him. “How’d you get here?” she said. “Or did you get lost?”

“Just passing through,” Jeff said, trying to sound like a cowboy.

“Really?”

“Okay,” he said. “I took a wrong turn.”

Jeff wore his aviator sunglasses on top of his head. He had three tattoos on his forearm: the words Carpe Diem, the Chinese characters for strength, and the head of a grinning Cuckoo’s Nest–era Jack Nicholson.

“Lost in the White Mountains,” she said. “Just where are you trying to get?”

“St. Louis,” Jeff said, pointing to the other side of the purplish mountains. “I started off in LA.”

“The rez is a long way from where you’re headed.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Maybe I’m supposed to be here.”

“It’s because of the movie,” she said. “Fort Apache? Subconsciously, you want to be John Wayne, like all white people.”

“Or play blackjack,” Jeff said. “Or hit that world-famous buffet. You have nice signs. Very colorful. Did you grow up here?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m White Mountain Apache. On the rez my whole life.”

“How old are you?”

“Tomorrow is the final day of my coming-of-age ceremony,” she said, not really answering. “That’s when I will become a woman.”

“Why aren’t you there now?” Jeff said.

“I’m covering my sister’s shift,” she said. “She has a hangover. Too hot by the pool.”

Jeff nodded, squinting into the sun.

“At dawn I will be blessed and dusted with pollen. It represents my emergence from the womb. Would you like fries or fruit with that?”

“Fruit,” he said. “And some sparkling water.”


The deal had been for Jeff to drive his movie-star brother-in-law’s beloved Bronco to St. Louis. The brother-in-law was shooting a werewolf-cop show there, The Arch, and really missed his truck. He told Jeff he’d give him a thousand bucks plus expenses to bring it out. Jeff hadn’t published a novel in five years, not since his supposedly bold debut, West of the World, about a suicidal hedge-fund manager who learned about life through surfing. His latest failure was trying to bring a miniseries to HBO about the life of silent-film comedian Fatty Arbuckle. He was shut out for months despite attending pitches in period clothes. Driving for cash sounded good.

The whole way from LA, Jeff had kept the soft top down and hadn’t touched the AC, liking all that hot wind through the desert, sweating through his V-neck T-shirt. As soon as he’d hit the desert, Jeff started to drink beer from his Yeti cooler, a gift from Winona Ryder’s half sister, and had run through two packs of Marlboros. The mountains were different. Cool, almost chilly.

At first, he believed stopping off at the casino had been a stroke of luck. The girl had been right. He loved that movie. Henry Fonda. John Wayne. One of John Ford’s very best. But within three hours of getting a room at the hotel, long after he’d left the pool, Jeff had lost all of his pocket money and drained his ATM card. He got to his room, thinking they might decline his debit card, and called the brother-in-law to tell him that he was stuck at an Apache reservation in Arizona.