Key Grip Read online

  “She expected you to ask if you could use her father’s phone,” explained Arturo, when we stepped outside. “White people do that. They butter her up then bum the phone.”

  I shrugged and nodded. But I wasn’t happy that we had landed in this place. The sun was now just over four hands above the horizon, which my wristwatch confirmed as half past five.

  “Let’s get there,” I said. “I want to go up the hill tomorrow.”

  We drove east from the store until we came to a hand-lettered sign that read END OF THE ROAD. We turned left and bounced along a narrow, heavily rutted driveway, past some skinny palominos and two slapped-together houses. At a clump of cottonwoods the ruts deepened. I had to drive up a steep embankment, then accelerate downhill, gunning the poor Honda through a section of thick mud that would have challenged a tank.

  Then suddenly we were there.

  We stopped in front of a brown house with aluminum siding—one of those wide-load prefabs you see taking up too much of the highway on a flatbed semi. Just to the left of the house sat a pine cabin, Depression era, probably. Next to the newer house it looked sadly askew on its cinder-block footing. A brood of puppies appeared from beneath the cabin, their bodies wagging ambitiously toward us before they changed their minds and retreated into the shade.

  “The whole family was raised in that cabin,” said Arturo.

  I killed the engine. What had I imagined? Not a tepee, but not this either. The front yard was strewn with junk that looked as if it had been lying there for years, half buried in the mud and overgrown with weeds. A ragged upholstered sofa and a single metal folding chair sat directly beneath the gutterless eaves, just to the left of the front door. Broken tricycles, bicycles, plastic toys, rusted chain saws, useless carburetors, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, dented tire rims, busted wrenches, scattered drill bits, a crosscut saw, old sweatpants caked with dirt, soiled Pampers, a Yankees cap stuffed into the spout of a dented five-gallon gas can, a beat-up Toro lawn mower missing a rear wheel. Between the house and cabin, more trash, and beyond that—to the west—a clothesline weighed down with bright laundry. Curtains hung limp in the windows of the house; the front door lacked a knob. A dust-covered Buick with a broken windshield sat baking in the sun.

  “That’s my dad’s car,” said Arturo. “Good old rez car.” He told me to back my vehicle away from the house so his mother would have room to park her Pinto. I let the Honda roll back down the driveway until it stopped. We got out.

  Arturo pointed toward a domed heap of sun-faded blankets surrounded by tall weeds. “That’s the sweat lodge,” he said. “You’re gonna sweat tonight.”

  A dilapidated blue trailer sat on cinder blocks in a field across from the house. The sun dance grounds were partially visible on a knoll several hundred yards to the east. From where we stood they looked like a small-scale version of Stonehenge—a circular affair constructed of vertical pine poles and partially roofed with pine boughs.

  The rest was wide-open plains, spreading out in all directions—undulating and resonant but, to my eye, not particularly hospitable.

  Arturo started removing his personal stuff from the back seat. I began unlashing the carton containing the new chain saw, which had made the trip on the roof of my car. I had just freed it and hoisted it off the rack when I noticed someone walking toward us—a wiry guy, about five feet ten, wearing beat-up cowboy boots, oily jeans, and a greasy brown T-shirt with a cigarette pack rolled up in the sleeve. He sported dark glasses and a Chicago Bulls visor cap. A lit cigarette dangled from his mouth. What I could see of his face looked dark and leathery and deeply lined. He shuffled along the stony driveway like an old man who had just got out of bed. But he wasn’t old. If I had seen him coming on a New York sidewalk, I’d have crossed to the other side of the street.

  “Hey!” he said, still thirty feet away. The word issued from his mouth like a growl, and I felt sure we had stopped at the wrong house.

  I tapped Arturo on the shoulder.

  “That’s my dad,” he said.

  Immediately, I set the carton back on the roof, ducked into the car, and grabbed the can of Bugler from the passenger’s seat. I stuffed tobacco into my left pants pocket as fast as I could and stood up in time to see Arturo shaking hands with the man.

  “What you come here for so early?” said his father.

  “We’re gonna help you get ready for the sun dance,” Arturo said, taking a step back.

  “I was wondering what those two red hawks meant,” said his father. “I seen ‘em earlier. You see ‘em on your way in?”

  Arturo seemed inordinately nervous and signaled for me to give his father the chain saw. Obediently I took the box off the roof again and held it out. Arturo’s father stared at the Sears brand name, letting me hold the box out to him just a few seconds longer than necessary. For a split second I felt like one of the three Magi bringing an offering to the manger. It wasn’t a comfortable sensation.

  Finally he took the box and passed it to Arturo. “Put this in the house,” he said, “and go tell Mike Junior to gas it up. We gotta go for wood. We’re gonna sweat tonight.”

  And off ran Arturo, as eagerly as a little boy, in the same exaggerated way he went about his work on a movie set, ducking low as he ran, as if under fire. His father chuckled at the sight, the sound erupting from deep in his throat. Then he called to Arturo, “Hey, Dances With Wolves! Bring me and your friend here a soda pop too.”

  “Mister Little Boy?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he growled, working his lower jaw and pouting his lips. I realized he was toothless. “Mike Little Boy.”

  “I’m Dusty, from New York City.” He held out his hand. As we shook, I dug into my left pocket, came up with a huge fistful of tobacco, and offered it to him, with my hand turned down. Again he hesitated just a touch too long, staring at me from behind his glasses, still holding my right hand in a loose grip.

  When finally he accepted the tobacco, I blurted out, “I want to go up the hill, on hanblecheya.”

  He nodded, took off his sunglasses, and hung them from the neck of his T-shirt. I saw now that his eyes looked mean, maybe even cruel. No kind old medicine man, this guy.

  “Why?” he said, putting the clump of tobacco on the car hood.

  “Why what?” I asked. Suddenly I had forgotten how I was going to answer the all-important question.

  “Why do you want to go up the hill?” he asked, gesturing that I should feel free to just spit it out, but looking at me with undisguised impatience, perhaps even contempt. My well-rehearsed, meaningful, urbane answer had deserted me entirely. This toothless, weather-beaten Indian— this junk yard dog, I thought—had completely unnerved me. Would he even be able to understand a sophisticated answer? Probably not. In any case he was waiting for a response of some kind. I could see by his no-nonsense expression that everything hinged on it. Yet I couldn’t come up with a thing.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The sun bore relentlessly into my neck.

  “How long you thinking of going on hanblecheya?” he asked.

  “Four days and four nights,” I said, trying to infuse my response with warriorlike resolve. But I didn’t put enough breath behind the words, and my assertion lingered in the air like a pop fly. I felt completely weakened.

  “One day,” said Mike. “Maybe.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I’ll let you go up the hill for one day—maybe. We’ll have to ask the spirits in the sweat lodge tonight.”

  “Hey,” I said, pointing at my license plate, “I came a long way for this. I’ve got to go up for four days.”

  “Nope,” he said.

  “What?”

  Arturo returned with two cold cans of Coke. I declined. Mike snapped open one of the cans. “Get a knife,” he said to Arturo. “Go cut five chokecherry stakes for your friend here. He’s going up tomorrow morning, coming down tomorrow night.” Arturo went running off again before I could ask him to intervene for me
.

  I had told Angie that I would be going up the hill for four days and four nights. I had made it sound—hinting at the substantial physical risk and inflating the spiritual dimensions—if not exactly heroic, at least exotic. I had done the same with my daughter, my brother, my sister, and anyone else who would listen.

  When I was in my thirties and living alone, I used to leave cryptic notes on my kitchen counter before taking any kind of road trip: a stanza of poetry, say, that would hint—in case I failed to return—that I had foreseen my death. Not a suicide note by any means, but a hedge against fate. Something that would allow my death to draw attention to my otherwise unremarkable life. It had always felt strange to return home, alive and unscathed, and then have to read those cryptic notes. I felt a similar letdown now. I would have to tell everyone that my hanblecheya had been like a picnic on a hill—that I had been turned down for the real ordeal.

  “Listen, Mike,” I said, “I come from New York City, but I’ve spent a lot of time in the wilderness by myself. I’ve spent weeks alone camping out. I can handle it.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s different here at my place. You see up there?” He pointed in the direction of a sparsely wooded hilltop, about half a mile to the north. I hadn’t really noticed the hill before, which seemed odd now because it looked quite ominous from here, where the low angle of the sun highlighted some scraggly hilltop pines, accentuating their shadowed side.

  “I see it,” I said.

  “That’s a sacred hill,” he said.

  I stared at Mike. Nothing in this man’s face indicated to me that he knew what sacred meant; in fact, he seemed all too acquainted with the profane. Clearly life had bitten him; you could read it in his eyes, and in the fight scars on his face. I had seen pictures of famous medicine men—Black Elk, Lame Deer, Fools Crow—and they were always old men with weathered faces and wise, sardonic eyes. They were men you could trust. Sacred hill because you say so, I thought. Sacred because it’s on your property.

  “It’s different than what you read in books,” said Mike. “A lotta guys can’t even stay up that hill for two hours—even Indians. They start to see things. When you come to me, it’s not like up in Bear Butte where they tell any white guy who comes along, ‘Okay, do four days, take water with you, whatever you want, you wanna be Black Elk, we’ll make you Black Elk.’ That’s not the way I do things.”

  “I can go four days,” I said.

  “Maybe,” said Mike, nodding. “But what if you can’t?”

  It had never occurred to me that I couldn’t, just that I might die trying. But I didn’t want to tell him that. Suddenly it seemed pathetically naive that I hadn’t even acknowledged the possibility that I might fail to go the distance.

  “It’s like this,” said Mike. “Maybe I say, ‘Okay, do four days and four nights,’ and then in the middle of the first night you change your mind because some coyote comes up behind you and says, ‘Yip!,’ or the lightning gets real bad, or a rattlesnake wants to curl up and have sex with you, and then you come running down the hill, screaming, and bang on my door, waking up my wife and kids. ‘What happened, Mister Little Boy! Help me! Help me!’” Mike was whining in falsetto now, and distorting his toothless mouth, like Popeye. “‘What the hell happened to me up there? Why didn’t you tell me that was going to happen?’ You see? And then the word gets around and people start to talk about you because you said you were gonna do something, and you didn’t do it. It’s no good when people start talking about you like that. You see what I mean?”

  I said I did. It was like when I was teaching skydiving and a student would go up in an airplane with me and then decide not to jump after all. I knew what Mike meant. I didn’t want to be seen as some failed wannabe around here, or when I got home.

  Then, as if he had read my mind, he said, “I don’t mean people around here,” he said, “or your friends back home. I mean the old ones, up there.” He pointed to the hill. “The spirits know who you are.”

  “Spirits?” I said

  “They come to you,” said Mike. “You’ll see.”

  I had always assumed that the notion of spirits—humans taking animal form, or animals taking human form—was meant metaphorically. But as I looked at Mike, I didn’t see any evidence that he was using a figure of speech, or that he was even capable of such a thing. I backed off a little and signaled my acquiescence—and my disappointment—with a shrug. Whatever, I thought.

  A slight breeze kicked up, bringing with it a rotten odor—garbage or rattlesnakes, I couldn’t tell which. A naked child appeared on the front steps of the house, turned sideways to us, and peed into the dirt. I could see Arturo, down by a little creek, bent over and hacking away at a chokecherry sapling. The drone of a television set emanated from behind the front door; a police scanner crackled behind a curtained window.

  I had driven eighteen hundred miles in just over two days. My body was still buzzing from the long drive, and already I wanted to head back.

  I glanced at the so-called sacred hill and started to unlock the trunk of my car. “We brought some food,” I said to Mike. Two hundred fucking dollars’ worth of food, I thought.

  Just then Mike touched my arm. His knuckles were black with grease, a mechanic’s hand. I pulled my arm away.

  “There’s something you need to know,” he said.

  “Shoot,” I said. I was still pissed off.

  “When you come down from the hill tomorrow night, everything will be different for you.”

  Yeah, I thought, I’ll be on my way out of here.

  “You’ll be changed,” he said.

  Yeah, right, I thought. I remembered a time when I was nineteen. The actor Kirk Douglas flew into the airport in Orange, Massachusetts, where I taught skydiving. He had one of his young sons in tow. I ran up to him and excitedly tried to get him to make a parachute jump, telling him at great length what a kick skydiving was. He listened patiently and then said, “Are you telling me about kicks, kid?”

  Was Mike really telling me, a sophisticated urban man who had been living a fast-paced, cutting-edge life in the film business, about change?

  “The spirits are gonna come, and they’re gonna want to talk to you,” said Mike, “but you can’t step off the blanket when they do. The tobacco ties are there to protect you. You just gotta hold your pipe and pray real hard.”

  “I don’t have a pipe,” I said.

  “I’ll give you one of mine. But you gotta hold on to it all the time you’re up there.”

  This drivel was making me impatient. Was Mike really trying to convince me that spending a single day on a blanket was going to be a big spiritual deal? I toed the dirt with my sneaker, unearthed a small stone, kicked it away. When I looked up I saw that Mike’s expression had softened, and I realized that all this while he had been speaking to me quite warmly, albeit with a warning tone. I recognized in his eyes the same concern I used to project while speaking to student jumpers just before they left the airplane, or to apprentice grips before they performed their first dolly shot on a film set. I urged the beginners to get the most out of the experience, but was careful to remind them of the difficulties and warn them of any inherent dangers. Suddenly I felt grateful that Arturo’s father wasn’t just rubber-stamping my request to go up the hill for four days and four nights without food or water (a life-threatening proposition, at best), grateful that he had cut me down to size. Stripped of my heroic conceit, I thought, Hey, I know what kind of guy this is. He’s not so bad. I see what he’s doing. I’ve been this way with apprentices myself. We stand on equal footing. Thus deluded—blinded by the illusion that I already knew what he had to teach me—I conceded the role of teacher to him.

  “Okay,” I said, “tell me. How will I change?”

  “When you come down from your hanblecheya,” he said, “everything will seem strange. You won’t know how to think about it right away. You might even be scared. When you go back to New York your life there won’
t make sense anymore. You’ll go back to work, and you’ll think about us here when the sun goes down, and you’ll remember what happened to you when you were here. You’ll still have your family and your job and your people, but it won’t be the same. This will be your home.” He indicated the surrounding plains.

  “But that will still be my real home,” I said, pointing east toward New York. The words tumbled out like those of a little boy whose mother is dragging him away from his playmates.

  The sun dipped below the roofline of the Little Boy house, casting a shadow over us. Mike told me that unless the spirits in the sweat lodge said otherwise, I would go up the hill for one day this year, one day and one night next year, two days and one night the third year, and two days and two nights the fourth, in the year 2000.

  “Four years?” I asked, unable to conceal my dismay.

  But Mike had apparently told me all I needed to know for now. Gone was the kindly expression on his face. Once again I was looking at the hard-bitten mug of a man whom I never would have picked out of a lineup as a medicine man.

  That’s when it hit me.

  “Are you heyoka, Mike?” I asked.

  “You bring any cigarettes?” he said.

  I pointed at the car trunk, where I had packed the cartons of Marlboros.

  “Good,” he said, with a throaty chuckle. He jerked his thumb in the direction of his Buick. “I’ll need some gas money too.”

  The front door of Mike’s house opened into the living room, which was separated from the kitchen by a counter. I began lugging the gifts and groceries into the house, two bags at a time. Four young Lakota men sat on a sofa, watching TV, while a fifth sat on the edge of an old easy chair, swatting away the hand of the boy I had seen on the porch. The child, named Wambli (meaning “eagle”), was trying persistently to touch the new chain saw.