Key Grip Page 2

  “Do people ever die on hanblecheya?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about lightning?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The first night we pulled into a rest stop in western Ohio. Arturo slept in the car; I slept on the ground under a tree. In the morning I discovered him walking backward around my Honda, holding a metal plate filled with burning prairie sage. Mumbling incantations, he wafted smoke at the tires. A small old-fashioned leather suitcase lay open on the hood of the car. Inside I could see what looked like medicine man paraphernalia, including a colorful ceremonial pipe. When Arturo finished smudging the Honda, I asked him why he had been walking backward around the car. In my reading about the Lakota I had learned of the heyokas, the so-called contraries, who conducted sun dance ceremonies in which they did everything backward. They were said to have visions and dreams of lightning and could immerse their hands in boiling water without harm. They were known to read minds and see right through people. Their ceremonial function was to expose social and spiritual hypocrisy and to poke fun at traditional ceremony. Even in everyday life heyoka medicine men were thought to be eerily powerful and, because of their unpredictable behavior, terrifying.

  I could not have articulated, then, why I found it so unsettling to watch Arturo walking backward around my car, smudging it, and mumbling prayers. Perhaps it was the seemingly nonsensical combination of the bizarre and the intentional. Watching him, I remembered many years earlier having seen a magician in Central Park, a young fellow dressed all in black and wearing white face makeup, who was performing in front of a sizable audience. In one continuous gesture he had rolled up both sleeves and produced out of thin air a full deck of cards. Those were my drinking and drug-taking days, when I was accustomed to altered states and felt capable of staring almost anything in the face. But when this magician turned his blank gaze toward me, I felt caught in his snare. He fanned open the deck of cards, closed it, and fanned it open again. Each time he repeated this gesture, the size of the deck got smaller, until eventually it seemed no larger than the wing of a moth. Suddenly he opened his hand, and the deck was gone. My whole body shuddered; the blood drained from my head.

  Not that I was about to shudder or grow faint in front of Arturo. But I did ask, trying to conceal my anxiety, “You’re not heyoka, are you, Arturo?” He didn’t answer me. I asked if his father lugged medicine around in a bag like that.

  “He doesn’t have to. People come to him,” said Arturo.

  “How old is your dad?” I asked.

  “Forty-three,” said Arturo.

  I did the calculations. “He had you when he was eight?”

  Arturo said nothing. Annoyed, I stopped asking questions.

  The second night, we stopped at a rundown motel near the Nebraska border. In the morning, I sat outside my room and composed a letter to my daughter, Trellan, using a portable Smith Corona typewriter. It felt oddly comforting to pound away on the same machine I had used when she was a baby, as if by doing so I could restore the relatively short-lived sense of family that had existed at the time. I told her where I was and where I was going, and then I wrote “I love you” and signed it “Dad.”

  I also practiced pronouncing the Lakota words mitakuye oyasin, which I had been told would be essential to utter when entering the sweat lodge. Arturo had warned me the night before that if I was to go up the hill the following day, we must rise with the sun and arrive at his father’s place “six hands before sunset.”

  He emerged from his motel room, perfumed and pigtailed, at ten o’clock in the morning.

  We drove to a Wal-Mart, where we bought four cans of Bugler tobacco, six cartons of Marlboros, ten shopping bags filled with food, four gallons of milk, boxes and boxes of Kool-Aid, gifts for the family—one for each of Arturo’s seven brothers and sisters, ranging in age from three to twenty—and a twenty-four-inch chain saw for his father, to help prepare for the sun dance. Arturo perused the western-style shirts while I paid for everything with my credit card. He arrived back at the car just in time to watch me lash the last of the stuff to the roof rack.

  “First thing you do,” Arturo said, jumping in the front seat, “is give my father the chain saw. Then, the next chance you get, offer him a fistful of tobacco, with your hand turned down like this. If he takes it, tell him you want to go up the hill.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” I asked.

  “Then you’ll have to turn around and drive home. Alone. Got it?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  The option of turning around and heading home was beginning to appeal to me. I missed Angie. I had met her and asked her to move in with me during the nearly yearlong hiatus that followed my first contact with Arturo. And my relationship with her had begun to represent the new start I had been seeking after Cop Land. It would have taken little effort on my part to decide that this trip to visit Arturo’s father was nothing but an errant and risky detour. That I didn’t suggests I may have had less choice in the matter than I thought.

  …

  The speed limit in South Dakota is seventy-five miles per hour. I kept the needle at ninety. Hot air whipped at the open windows, pulsed in my eardrums. My left elbow cooked in the sun. My pen burst, bleeding black ink onto the dashboard. The oppressive heat, the broken air conditioner, the monotonous highway—it all seemed to conspire with Arturo’s moody silence. Every time I glanced at him his eyes were closed. I envied him, really.

  We had traveled entirely on interstates through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and seen the same American inanity all the way. The topography had long since given way to the replica world—replica restaurants, replica gas stations, replica malls. I had hitchhiked through here in the mid-1950s, before the interstate system existed, when each state differed radically in character from the next. No boundaries anymore, or so it seemed.

  Arturo sat up and looked around. “Turn here,” he said, pointing to an exit sign.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Turn here,” he demanded.

  I cut close in front of a tandem semi and hit the exit ramp at seventy. We came to a halt at an intersection off U.S. 83. It was two o’clock. It felt good to be off the highway, but I realized with some dismay that I wasn’t quite ready to leave the tedious security of the interstate. I felt relieved to see a McDonald’s a few hundred yards to the right. I could call home from there, check my messages one last time before entering Indian country, grab a predictable meal. I had eaten nothing since early morning.

  A mockingbird landed on a section of busted snow fence. Arturo studied the bird and thanked it for giving him directions. Then he pointed to the left.

  “We’re late,” he said.

  “I’m hungry,” I said. But I turned left anyway and headed south, away from the replica world.

  …

  The Lakota Sioux live on seven large reservations, located mainly in South Dakota. Arturo and I had planned to take I-90 all the way west to Rapid City and cut south through the Badlands into the Pine Ridge Reservation. This sudden change of plan, which now took us through the Rosebud Reservation, was oddly unnerving. I hadn’t said any final goodbyes. I had packed a cell phone deep in my luggage, but it didn’t feel appropriate using such technology on a trip whose theme was essentially spiritual. What if something happened to me out here? Who would ever know how far I had gotten or what my state of mind had been? What would the crew and cast of the film I was scheduled to work on in August make of my disappearance?

  Huge thunderheads gathered in the west. The gently undulating terrain on either side of the two-lane highway gave off an electric glow in the filtered sunlight. Things did grow here—prairie grass and sage—but they grew tenuously. An inexplicable dread began to take hold of me. This wavelike landscape felt claustrophobic compared to the flat route described by the interstate. I could no longer make out where we were headed or see beyond the next rise. I wanted wings and visibility.

  The highway had no gu
ardrails, even where the land fell away from the road. Aside from some dilapidated cattle fencing, the only hint of civilization was the occasional diamond-shaped road sign that asked, WHY DIE? Arturo explained to me that one of the preferred methods of suicide on the reservations was to get shit-faced and head-on another car.

  “Oh, good,” I said.

  Arturo laughed. “No seat belts on the rez,” he said, unbuckling his. He took out his Nikon and snapped my picture. I shot him back with my Olympus, which I kept handy in the glove compartment. Apparently energized by this spontaneous interaction, he donned his headband and a pair of goggle-like shades, then slithered out the passenger-side window to sit on the window ledge, his legs the only part of him still in the car. I slowed down, but he hollered at me to go faster.

  “Okay, asshole,” I yelled.

  The needle hit seventy, and I held it there as we crested the next knoll and dipped into a shallow valley. I imagined him hanging on to the roof rack, defying the wind. It reminded me of the times I had ridden the wings of biplanes when I was a skydiver—hanging on for dear life, my jump suit whipping in the wind, my heart pounding. The sheer exhilaration of it came back to me in a rush of memories.

  Arturo started to crawl out onto the hood, camera in hand. Holding on to one of the wipers, he lay down on his right side and shot some weird angles of me through the windshield. I returned the favor, half expecting to see him blow off the hood like a leaf or butterfly. Watching him out there, his cheeks buffeted by the wind, his pigtails flapping, his maniacal war-whooping self grinning at me, I began to buy into this foolishness and started swerving the car from one side of the road to the other. Twenty years ago it would have been me out there on the hood—drunk, perhaps—egging the driver on.

  The clowning around didn’t last long though. Now that I was older, I knew better. Macho behavior had long since ceased to produce enough adrenaline to sustain itself for very long.

  I motioned for Arturo to get back inside. He crawled up over the windshield to the roof rack and stayed out of sight for a while. I held our speed. As I waited for him to slither back through the window, I realized that in a few hours I would be standing in front of his medicine-man father, who, if he really was forty-three, couldn’t possibly be Arturo’s father, but would be fourteen years my junior. At age fifty-seven, I would be begging the man’s permission to participate in a ritual that was originally intended to turn boys into men.

  …

  I questioned whether it was an eagle or a turkey buzzard, but when Arturo said that the bird soaring high above us was a good omen, I played along. I gave him the good old thumbs-up, punched in a tape of Eric Clapton’s Unplugged, and turned up the volume on “Layla.”

  “Getting close?” I asked.

  Apparently we were. Arturo was now communicating with any raptor in sight—and there were many, both in the air and perched on utility poles. I contented myself with reading the occasional road sign. We had left the Rosebud Reservation, driving west on U.S. 18, and had passed through prosperous farm country—white owned, probably. It wasn’t lost on me that I breathed easier when I saw silos and farmhouses; all I had seen in Rosebud were cinder-block huts, rundown shanties, and rusted trailer homes.

  “White farms,” said Arturo.

  The thunderheads in the west had vanished, easing my anxiety. I felt slightly wiggy from all the driving and anticipation, and I barely noticed when we entered the Pine Ridge Reservation.

  The land looked fertile. An old Buick, filled with Indians, flew by us in the opposite direction. The driver waved.

  “My father will probably ask you why you’ve come,” said Arturo.

  “You haven’t told him about me?”

  “Not about you. He expects me to arrive next week, for the sun dance.”

  “You mean we’re just showing up here with no warning?”

  “He’ll ask you why you want to go up the hill. Be ready for that.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Arturo, you mean you haven’t even told him about me?”

  “That’s for you to do.”

  I wanted to grab Arturo’s braids and smash his head into the dashboard. What a pitiful generation! I thought. But I drove on into the sun, trying to think of a clever answer for his father. I figured I would need to say something with special import, or I would be sent packing. “I have come to your land to pray” might do, but I couldn’t say such a thing with a straight face; I knew nothing about prayer. “I have journeyed here from afar, these many days, to find myself.” Nope. “Life is long, but time is short . . . How, brother medicine man! . . . Hoka hey! I have come to your reservation to seek a vision!”

  It was hopeless. Why had I come? Because the film business had proved to be an empty, soulless detour from what I considered my higher purpose? Yes. I remembered a dream I had had decades earlier, a puzzling dream in which I hit an exhilarating home run on some ancient playing field but failed to touch first base on my way home. A psychotherapist had suggested that the dream perfectly described my intuitive nature: I had no trouble reaching a conclusion, he said, but struggled constantly to know how I got there. Quick to see the ending of any given project, I rarely felt the need to finish it. For a writer, he cautioned, this spelled trouble. True, but how could I explain that to a medicine man? It was too long a story. And what could a medicine man know about writing anyway?

  I decided to say, simply, “I’ve come here because I’ve always known I would.” That had a certain ring of truth, and it seemed to shed a little light on the inexplicable nature of this trip—admitting to a degree of powerlessness on my part. Yet it also maintained a modicum of authority appropriate to a man of my age and experience. This answer had a certain dignity I could live with.

  Arturo ejected my Eric Clapton tape, tuned in the local FM station, KILI, and turned up the volume. The speakers exploded with the high-pitched warble of powwow singers accompanied by a thundering drum. A chilly spike of fear shot up my spine. Arturo told me to turn north on BIA 27 rather than continue into the town of Pine Ridge. I didn’t protest, but I wanted to. Perhaps it was just my hunger—I don’t know—but the dread had returned in full force. I suddenly felt completely powerless. Or maybe “beyond help” is a better way to put it. Arturo had made it clear we were now out of cell phone range. My presumably lofty decision to come here had quickly morphed into the hard reality of actually being here. An approaching four-wheel-drive police car slowed down to check us out. Two uniformed Indians eyed us from behind their sunglasses as they passed. No one lived along this road. The shrill music evoked visions of the scalp-taking warriors in the western movies of my youth. As a child I had always sided with the war-whooping Indians who ambushed the cavalry. But westerns weren’t about the Indians in those days. It was the life of the cavalryman you got to know—the blue uniform and the gold scarf and the romance and the danger of it all. And it was the seduction of belonging to the winning side that won out in the end. Now, that treble war whoop made the roots of my hair sting. I thought of the heyoka again.

  “Your dad’s not heyoka, is he?” I asked, turning down the volume. Getting no answer, I assumed the answer was no.

  “Tell me his name, at least,” I said.

  “Little Boy,” said Arturo. “Mike Little Boy.”

  “But your last name is—”

  “I earned that name,” said Arturo, curtly. “It’s a warrior’s name.”

  I had no idea what that meant but decided not to pursue the subject for fear of encouraging Arturo’s annoying grandiosity. “Do I call your father Mike?” I asked.

  “That’s his name,” said Arturo.

  “You’re a nasty fuck,” I said.

  Arturo laughed. We came to an intersection marked by a small sign that read WOUNDED KNEE.

  “Pull over here,” Arturo said. “I’m gonna pray.”

  I pulled off the road and negotiated a rutted car path that traversed an overgrown hillside, atop which sat Wounded Knee Cemetery. It looked pretty much l
ike any overgrown graveyard, which, given its history, made the place particularly chilling.

  Arturo grabbed a fistful of tobacco from the Bugler can between his legs. “Wait here,” he said.

  I got out of the car but kept a respectful distance while Arturo stepped inside a gated chainlink fence at the monument’s perimeter. He held the tobacco up to the four directions, mumbling some Lakota words.

  In this place, on December 29, 1890, approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children were senselessly slaughtered by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. I remembered reading the shocking fact that ten soldiers had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for their cowardly deeds that day. The massacre coincided with the beginning of reservation life for the Lakota people. Black Elk, who had witnessed the aftermath, called it “the end of a beautiful dream.”

  From where I stood I could see hundreds of faded tobacco ties hanging from the low chainlink fence. I could make out some of the names etched on the south side of a small granite obelisk: Chief Big Foot, High Hawk, Ghost Horse, Wounded Hand, Scatters Them, He Crow . . .

  I looked around. Down by the road a lone Indian was snoozing behind the counter of a makeshift arts-and-crafts concession, sound asleep in the shade of a cottonwood tree. I tried to imagine the massacre—the frozen ground, the bodies dismembered and ripped to shreds by Hotchkiss cannon fire—but I couldn’t. In the stillness of the midsummer air I felt overwhelmed, not by the heightened resonance of this historic site, but by the full force of its anonymity. It could have been a modest cemetery anywhere in America. Its seeming lack of grandeur mirrored my own feelings of insignificance. Suddenly I missed New York City. I leaned against my Honda and took a leak.

  Arturo returned to the car. “If I die on hanblecheya, that’s where my father will bury me.”

  “And if I die on hanblecheya?” I asked.

  “It depends,” he said. “They’d probably just toss your body in a field, like a dog.”

  Mike Little Boy lived three miles east of the Porcupine Trading Post, a general store with a single gas pump that constitutes the entire commercial center of Porcupine, South Dakota. Porcupines have a way of warding off the curious, and the town appeared true to its name. The windows of the little store were boarded up to prevent theft. The young woman behind the counter seemed remarkably hostile. I paid for a tank of unleaded and looked around at the selection of edibles—potato chips, candy bars, canned Spam, ketchup. “Have a good day,” I said to the girl. She responded with a sneer.