“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.
“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.