Jimmy Two Bulls was driving Sophie’s Citroën C6 fast but not well — he kept missing third gear — and each time he did it, Sophie would make a little intake of breath that, in other circumstances, he once thought cute. The dark highway was slick with greasy rain that filmed the windows and beaded on the hood. Oncoming headlights appeared with less and less frequency. The car was new and belonged to her husband.
“Do you know where we are?” Sophie asked. The car smelled of damp flowers and her scent. The drying blood on his shirt smelled ripe and metallic, reminding him of a deer hunting trip he once took with his uncle in the rain.
“No.”
“I can see Paris,” she said, gesturing toward the massive orange smudge that defined the horizon and was always out there in the dark, looming, the band of light closed tightly on top as if by a kettle lid of storm clouds.
“So can I. But every turn I make seems to take us farther away.”
“Maybe we can stop and ask someone how to get there. We took a wrong turn somewhere.” Lovely accented English, filled with those swooping little girl squeaks sophisticated French women used, which sounded like erotic baby talk.
“Have you seen anyone to ask? I haven’t.”
They’d left the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show forty-five minutes before. He was still wearing his quill breastplate.
He ran over something in the road that rattled the windows and made the steering wheel jerk. Whatever it was, he’d glimpsed it at the last second in the headlights, but not in time to steer around it. The object had been dark, long, tube-like, sodden.
“What was that?” she asked, alarmed.
“Don’t know,” he said. “A tree branch maybe.” Or a cat.
“A tree branch?”
“Maybe,” he said, grinning despite himself, “a human arm. It kind of looked like a human arm. My bud Fred Sitting Up ran over an arm once on the road back from a Valentine, Nebraska, beer run to the res. He didn’t remember it until two days later, and by the time he said something about the arm, we found out a dozen other cars ran over it, too. It looked like a flattened dead snake by the time the cops found it. Never did hear who it belonged to.”
“What are those lights ahead? They don’t look like streetlights.”
“They’re not.”
“What, then?”
“Fires. Burning cars.”
“Shit!” she said, her eyes wide as she stretched back in the car seat, pressing her feet against the floor as if applying the brakes, the fine ropy muscles of her calves and thighs defining themselves on her long bare legs.
“It always cracks me up,” Jimmy said, flipping his braided hair over his shoulder, “how when things go to hell you people say ‘shit’ in English. ‘Shit’ was Marcel’s last word.”
“You’re scaring me, Jimmy.” She pronounced it Jee-mee.
He looked over at her and laughed bitterly. “I’m scaring you?”
She screamed, “You must turn around, Jimmy! Jimmy!” Jee-mee! JEE-MEE!
It was lyle bear killer, Jimmy’s cousin from Pine Ridge, who’d been the one who convinced him to come over with promises of good wine, good wages (the Wild West Show needed authentic natives for the nightly 6:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. performances at Disneyland Paris), good food, and beautiful French women who wanted to have American Indian babies. Sure, Jimmy’d heard the stories but he had trouble believing them. French society women? Married French society women? Just for showing up in traditional dress, acting inscrutable and a little mystical, they’d take you home or to a hotel and fuck you all night long? How could this be possible?
So Jimmy applied for a Warrior-Wrangler job online even though he’d never been to war or ridden a horse except for a gray-white swayback on his grandfather’s South Dakota ranch. He used the money he’d saved as a teaching assistant at Black Hills State to buy the handsome porcupine quill breastplate, outlandish fringed and beaded buckskin leather jacket, moccasins, and butter-soft deerskin pants at the Prairie Edge store in Rapid City, all the time feeling a little embarrassed, keeping his head down, the same kind of feeling he’d once had buying a package of condoms at the 7-Eleven along with a copy of Indian Country News he’d never read and a package of gum he’d never chew. He read and reread the emails from Lyle describing his sexual exploits in sophomoric, pornographic prose. Lyle claimed he had three illegitimate children he knew about and four “in the oven.”
It took a month for Disney to send a lady out to interview Jimmy and others, to assess their authenticity, show him where to sign on the employment contract and strict Disney behavior agreement. She was enthusiastic, said, “They’ll love the name ‘James Two Bulls’! It’s a wonderful name!” Even though by “they” she meant “Disney,” he replaced it with the words “French women” in his mind. That night, he broke up with half-white, half-Lakota Jasmine, master’s degree in women’s studies, who seemed to coil up while he told her and then strike suddenly, calling him a contemptible gigolo, among other things that didn’t sting as badly as he imagined they would.
“But,” he said slyly, “I’ll be doing some women studies of my own.”
“They don’t want you, you bastard,” Jasmine spat. “They want a brainless dark-skinned buck! They want some child of nature!”
“It’s just nice to be wanted,” he said.
With his authentic American Indian garb in its own suitcase (along with some medicine wheels, feathers, beads, and other totems Lyle said they liked over there, and two rolls of Copenhagen chewing tobacco for Lyle and the Wild West crew), Jimmy flew Northwest Airlines from Rapid City to Minneapolis to Amsterdam to Paris in February. Lyle was at the airport to greet him.
Lyle introduced him around to the other Indians at the show, some fellow Lakotas from Pine Ridge, a few Montana Crows, a gaggle of Wyoming Shoshones, a few too many damned haughty Nez Perce from Idaho, as well as the white cowboys from the same states plus Texas and Colorado. Most of the cast were ridiculously thankful for the Copenhagen, which was unavailable in the EU. Jimmy was assigned to feeding and cleaning up for the horses and buffalo in the stock area outside the auditorium during the day, and he did bit parts in the moodily lit religious ceremony as well as manning the chute gate for the indoor buffalo stampede. He learned to paint his face. Everyone admired his beaded buckskin jacket, even the actor who played Buffalo Bill. Since everybody wore costumes, Jimmy felt comfortable in his.
He met Sophie in March.
They worked five nights on, two nights off at the Wild West Show. Every performance, every night, was sold out with French families who wore cheap straw cowboy hats, ate chili, drank beer and wine, and whooped and hollered on cue. Jimmy shared Lyle’s flat and paid half the rent. During the long gray days of winter they slept late, shopped, cooked, read, and showed up at the Wild West Show mid-afternoon, in the back, where the stock was kept and the dressing rooms were located. They usually came even on their days off, because it was the only place they knew where everyone spoke English, although a few of the Montana and Wyoming cowboys were on their second or third two-year contracts and had married French women and were learning the language. The dressing rooms for the American Indians were kept dark by choice, and either traditional flute or gangster rap played on individual CD players. The Crows smoked marijuana, having somehow convinced Disney personnel that it was part of their religion, which infuriated a couple of the cowboys who insisted, in vain, that Jim Beam was part of theirs.