JEFF
I want you to have it. Keep the Bronco. You are now a woman.
Faith Spotted Eagle hugs the Man hard as she wipes the clay from her face and dirt from her eyes. She can see!
FAITH
It’s all clear now. I won’t forget you.
The Man kisses Faith on the cheek. A brotherly kiss. She looks at him, holds his hands tight, and looks as if she wants to say more. We see the Man toss his travel bag over his shoulder and walk to the rising sun over the mountains.
In real time, Lorenzo slid off the dented hood of the Bronco, took a swig of mescal, and offered Jeff his middle finger. He looked tall and wavy through the haze of the bonfire, the smoke making him seem hard and important. The women kept on dancing, circling around and around. The morning light had gone from black to gray, a yellow swath of sunlight coming up over the mountains.
Several Apache men gathered, including Lorenzo, and walked toward the teepee. Lorenzo carried a metal gas can. The girls stopped dancing, and a large old woman handed Faith a red hand towel. A basket was set away from the teepee and the girls began to run for it as the men doused the teepee with gas. The fire was lit as the girls rushed toward the basket, running round and round, four times, nearly tripping, one falling to her knees with exhaustion.
Faith ran toward a group of old women with fat arms spread wide, wiping the white clay and cornmeal from her face and dust from her eyes. She nodded toward Jeff, and Jeff ran for the Bronco.
He jumped into the seat, slipped the keys into the ignition, and tried to crank the engine. It sputtered and failed and sputtered and failed.
Lorenzo looked up from the flames and falling beams. He spit in the dirt and yelled something to his boys and they turned for the Bronco. Jeff tried the engine again. Lorenzo pointed and yelled, running hard. Arms pumping. In the narrow slice of windshield, Jeff lost sight of the man until he was ten yards away.
Jeff slammed his fist on the wheel as Faby Apache let out a Mexican war cry and tackled Lorenzo to the ground. She pressed his face into the dirt and held the man’s head between her thighs. Her muscled chest and arms shone with sweat. She looked across the way to Jeff, mouthed the word Go!
Jeff tried the ignition again and the twin pipes growled and joined up with the chanting mountain spirits. All of the girls had found the old women; they were embracing. He smelled the burning wood and corn on the hot morning wind. The sun rose high in the east over a ribbon of blacktop leading away from the rez.
Faith walked down the highway, moving the opposite direction, coated in the white buckskin, her arms disappearing into the buckskin shirt, her face washed clean of the clay. The logs of the teepee fell into a big heap behind them.
She continued to walk, eyes not leaving her path, but this time smiling. A little.
A necklace of mescal seeds dangled from his rearview mirror. Jeff stopped only twice on the way to St. Louis.
THE TWO FALCONS
by Gary Phillips
Present—Four Days Ago
Evening and two men sat slouched on a pleather and chrome couch. They had their legs up on the Goodwill-purchased coffee table and one of the men was barefoot, revealing a little toe missing from one of his feet. Laminated onto the table’s surface were numerous baseball trading cards covering various eras. There were several empty beer cans on the thick lacquer as well as a family-size bag of barbecue chips they’d been munching from steadily. The chips rested on two cards of the stolen-base king Maury Wills. The elder of the two men, the one with the missing toe, was an uncle of sorts to the other one via a long-dissolved marriage. He’d bought the chips and beer on sale at Vons.
A corner lamp threw off weak light in the tidy living room as the two were entertained by a program on the flat-screen before them. It was one of those fact-based efforts that revisited historic and modern-day crimes through conjecture and on-screen re-creations. The men shared a joint while a segment unfolded on the television.
“Get your hands up and nobody will get hurt!” the man wearing a Hulk mask yelled as he underscored his command by firing rounds from his MAC-10 into the bank’s ceiling.
“Whatever happened to him?” the younger man asked the man he still called uncle, referring to the robber re-created on the program.
The older one shook his head side to side, pulling on the joint. “Not sure. I know they never found that money he ganked. Eight hundred grand.”