The Highway Kind

by Patrick Millikin

  Not long after that, I came across that exact car for sale. Hannah Martinez’s actual car. They’d painted it and fixed it all up, but I recognized the burn marks, and they’d left on the ’82 bumpers. It was for sale at a used-car place in Van Nuys. I was buying a car for no reason at all, if you can believe that. Things seemed so great then. I’d just married my second husband and he was making good money, really good money. I had a little Japanese car I’d never liked so he says, Well, let’s go trade it in. I mean, I was trading it in for another used car, but still.

  There was Hannah Martinez’s car, for sale in the lot.

  “That’s the car,” I told my husband. “I’ve always loved that car.”

  He bought it for me on the spot. I had them check it out again, on account of the breakdown, but the best anyone could figure, it must’ve run out of gas. Then after I bought it, I took it to my own mechanic for another look, and he said everything seemed fine. Even complimented me on getting it for such a good price.

  I kept the Cadillac when we divorced. It was the only thing we had left that was worth anything. I’d pawned my engagement ring and my wedding ring a few months back. Sold all my pricey clothes, the jewelry, the nice things for the house he’d bought for me. That made it easy to leave. Didn’t even have to worry about the rings.

  After that, things were hard for a couple of years. I sold the Cadillac eventually and replaced it with a series of inferior cars: lower-quality American models and fourth-hand imports. I always kicked myself for it because I knew I’d never get a chance at a car like that again. But life takes you where it takes you, and you need money when you need it, not next week.

  I did serve a little time here and there, for kiting checks, shoplifting, vice. I tried to make ends meet—around the West, mostly. I spent some more time in Southern California; when that became too hot I headed up to Portland. That was one city I didn’t care for. I like the sunshine. I did okay there money-wise but one day I’d had enough rain and I got in my car and I drove and drove and drove until a couple days later I was in Tucson. Found work in Tucson and had a good thing for a while there. A very nice setup. That resulted in my first real lockup. Women’s prison isn’t so bad, not if you’re a grown woman. The kids fuss and fight but they leave the rest of us out of it. Other women aren’t too bad. Never had such a perfect thing as Tucson again. That was a once-in-a-lifetime deal.

  After I got out I just couldn’t manage to settle down again. Nothing seemed to fit. I’d think I was settling down in one place and then one night I wouldn’t be able to sleep and my blood would be rushing through me and I’d get in my car and drive, and I wouldn’t stop until I was someplace new.

  In Dallas I was in the newspaper because I caused a traffic accident when I stopped short to let a family of ducks cross the street. About six cars played a little bumper-bump but no one was hurt. No one’s car was wrecked. They took me to court for vehicular something-or-other, but then a bunch of nature ladies showed up in court to say how I’d done the right thing trying to save the ducks. Everyone had a lot of fun with it and the judge let me off after the nature ladies convinced him. They even put a little thing in the paper—“Duck Lady Has Day in Court.”

  But then a few days later, who knows what happened, but there was another little bit in the paper: “Duck Lady California Con Girl!” Someone even said the judge should reconsider in light of who I was. So then the paper went to the nature ladies to see what they thought and boy, was I surprised—not one of them had a bad word to say. One woman even said that considering my “background,” what I’d done was even better than it had seemed. I don’t know why but I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t get over how nice that was. Even if it was kind of a silly thing to say, she’d meant it to be nice. Just imagine if everyone thought like that. By then I was in Galveston, which suited me much better. I liked that part of the country, all around the Gulf there. Easy to live down there. Easier, at least.

  I married my third husband in Sarasota, Florida. He was associated with a group called Quest for Wisdom. They were okay, the Quest people. I never got into it; there was a lot of health food and things like that. No smoking. The best part of our marriage was when he was with them. Then when they all fell apart, the Quest people, that was when he got mean.

  Eight years later and I was back on the road again. I bought a good car, a Ford, that I was very fond of. Back then, Ford had a bad rap. All the better for me. I got a good price on the car, and I took it with me when I left.

  I drove around the South for a while trying to get something going work-wise, money-wise, happening-wise, but didn’t have much luck. I wasn’t young anymore. Money was harder to come by every year.

  After a year and a few more days in lockup, this time for simple larceny, I eventually found myself back in Southern California. I hadn’t been there in many years and it didn’t seem very different at all. Just more crowded. That same big sun.

  I had arranged to stay with an old acquaintance but when that fell through on account of another friend getting involved and making a problem, I had nowhere to go.

  I drove around awhile thinking about what I ought to do. I always loved to drive. That’s always been my best friend. I started before they even gave me a license. As long as I had a car I was okay. I certainly prefer a bed, and I don’t mind flying first class, but you don’t need any of that. All you need is a car that runs and a full tank. Then the world really is yours. You can go anywhere you want, driving that car. You got gas in your tank and the car runs, you can be anyone. You can make the story up as you go.

  So I’m driving and driving and after a while I see a motel. I need a place to stay and it looks okay, but as I pull into the parking lot, it begins to look familiar, and after I get out and start heading to the front desk, I realize, Well, fuck me. This is the place. This is the same fucking place.

  So I go to the desk and I tell him I want a room, cash, just tonight for now, we’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. He gets the paperwork out and says, “Sure. What’s your name?”

  So I say, “Well,” I say, “I guess it’s Hannah Martinez.”

  APACHE YOUTH

  Ace Atkins

  JAMMED UP IN traffic on the 405, Jeff’s sister turned to him and said, “You really need to get your shit together.”

  “I like your husband’s Bronco,” Jeff said. “If I made a million, it would be exactly the kind of vintage ride I’d buy.”

  “He doesn’t have a million yet,” she said. “It’s a talent-holding deal, not a series. You know how much money he’d be making if he wasn’t tied to the network? He just turned down a guest spot on NCIS: New Orleans.”

  “He do all this refurb himself?” Jeff said, touching the leather wheel of the Ford. The near-perfect smoothness of the dash. “Damn. Or did he pay someone?”

  Jeff’s sister snorted, crossed her arms over her new and improved boobs, and slunk down lower in the passenger seat. The Bronco was a beauty. Completely restored, show quality, coated in metallic gray paint, and given a brand-new Cleveland 321 engine with dual exhaust and header. The truck was jacked up with a Pro Comp lift kit, Pro Comp wheels, and big, chunky Goodrich tires.

  “LA hasn’t been good for you,” she said. “What you came here for, you haven’t found. You can’t live your life jacking into free Wi-Fi at Starbucks or holding down the corner booth at Bob’s Big Boy. You’re going to be forty this year.”

  “Correction,” Jeff said, “forty-two.”

  “Jesus,” his sister said. “There’s more to life than all this shit. I don’t know how you do it. You’re better than this place.”

  The traffic hadn’t moved ten yards in thirty minutes. The old truck seemed to be on the verge of redlining it, blowing a radiator hose and stranding them until well into the night. Jeff played with the radio, searching for some music that would never be found in the city anymore. He was in the mood for Gram Parsons, The Flying Burrito Brothers, something like that.

  “I lov
e you,” his sister said. “Go. Go, run free.”

  Jeff began to hum the John Barry theme from Born Free.

  “Nothing changes,” she said.

  “Hey,” Jeff said. “Holy crap. I’m doing my best.”

  “I know,” his little sister said. “I know. But maybe this isn’t the town to sell literature? You’ve told two show runners they were illiterate, soulless morons.”

  Jeff shrugged. “One of them called my modern take on Anna Karenina ‘Baywatch with Guns.’”

  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.

  “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 r
ing 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.