The Highway Kind(67)

“How much did you lose?”

“Don’t ask.”

“I have to go,” he said. “Do you know it takes two hours to get me back into the werewolf suit? After they put on the head and face, I can’t speak. I have to loop all the dialogue.”

“Money?”

“That’s your problem,” the brother-in-law said. “Did you ever hear anything about Fatty?”

“HBO passed,” Jeff said. “They called Roscoe’s weight issue off-putting and said that the sex I’d written in the script was grotesque even for them. Come on, man. Just this one time.”

“Too many times.”

Jeff hung up, took the elevator down to the casino floor, the world buzzing, whirling, blinking, and twirling while he headed back out to the parking lot and the Bronco. The young Native girl from the pool was there, leaning against the shiny hood and smoking a cigarette. “I heard you lost big,” she said.

“Isn’t there more action going on here than just me?”

“Maybe.” The young girl tossed the cigarette down and ground it out with the heel of a clean white tennis shoe. “But I know how you can make it back.”

“Okay.”

“Ever fight an Indian?”

Lots of Apache had come in for the next day’s ceremonies, parking their battered pickup trucks in crooked rows up on a dusty hill. It was night and cooler than he expected for Arizona. The air warmed up as the bonfire crackled to life. A boxing ring had been set up in a clearing in the tall pines, a row of metal folding chairs for old people and Indian leaders who wore suits with their straw cowboy hats.

“Okay, white man,” a leathery old man said. “You ready?”

They wanted him to wrestle a girl, a grand champion by the name Faby Apache. Jeff was told Faby wasn’t a true Apache, just a professional from Mexico who liked the costumes. She was big, taller and broader than Jeff, wore a singlet made of buckskin, and stuck feathers in her hair. When she saw him before the match, she started to laugh.

“All my debt is gone if I beat her?”

“All your debt is gone if you stay in the ring for just one round,” the old man said. “We’ll even give you back the money you lost in the casino. Faby’s a role model to our young women here. Did you know tomorrow is the last day of the puberty trials?”

“I thought it was called a coming-of-age ceremony.”

“It has the same meaning,” the old man said. “I am a medicine man. We take the girl through her four steps of life, from infant, to child, to adolescent, and on to womanhood, and we prepare her for the final passage, death. It’s a very good time for us. Especially the men who just watch.”

“What do the girls have to do?”

“We put pollen all over their bodies, and then we smear clay in their faces and make them run.”

“How far?”

“Not far,” the medicine man said. If Jeff were writing a script, he’d cast Chief Dan George as the old man, although he was pretty sure Chief Dan George had died about thirty years ago. He’d just type out Resembles Chief Dan George. The smart people would get it. If they didn’t understand him, those kid readers at CAA, then screw them.

Jeff stood up, bare to the waist in handmade Japanese blue jeans and no shoes. He let the old man put a navy cavalry hat on his head, and he told him to march to the ring. He felt like a poor man’s version of Billy Jack.

“One piece of advice,” the medicine man said.

Jeff looked at him.

“Protect your nuts,” he said. “Faby usually heads straight for them.”


EXT. WHITE MOUNTAIN RANGE APACHE RITUAL NIGHT

A handsome young man is led into the ring by the chief of the tribe. He’s introduced as LT. THURSDAY while Apaches boo and throw bottles at him. A muscled woman warrior follows, hands held high, to the shouts and cheers of fans. She walks to each corner of the ring and pumps her fist to the crowd. Jagged purplish mountains surround them on each side. Somewhere in the distance, a drum begins to beat.


CHIEF

The cavalry has returned once again to burn our village, rape our women, and scatter us to the wind. Their leader is a man twisted with lust and hate. Lieutenant Thursday.


THURSDAY

Come on, man. Jesus Christ.

More beer bottles flow onto the stage, break apart, and scatter across the canvas. A young Native man hops up and knocks off the bottles with a push broom. He gives a thumbs-up to the chief. A beer bottle narrowly misses Thursday’s head.


CHIEF

There is but one hope for your people. A girl, now a woman, who has the strength of many warriors. She is Faby Apache.

The crowd goes crazy. Little girls hold up hand-painted signs. Old women begin to cry. Young men watch the gorgeous warrior as she paces the ring, side to side, like a caged tiger.


THURSDAY

(Leaning in to whisper to the chief)

This is all an act, right? Just part of the show?


CHIEF

Sure. If you say so.

Jeff met many Apaches that night; one even handed him an ice pack for his head. They offered him Mexican beer from coolers in the backs of their pickup trucks and warm shots of mescal. He accepted, although he felt bad about drinking with Native Americans. He’d read countless stories in the New York Times about drug and alcohol abuse among indigenous peoples. But his head hurt a lot. It wasn’t from the beer bottle that had hit him between the eyes; it was from Faby Apache using one of her signature moves (although Jeff didn’t know it was famous until after he’d come to), the Hurricanrana, in which the wrestler wrapped her legs around her opponent’s neck and drove him headfirst into the mat.