Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  Anyway, when I spoke that second time, this lady came on over, opening up this rucksack thing she carried on her back, pulling out a sheet of notebook paper, like the kind you rip from a spiral-bound, raggedy teeth blowing in the wind. The sheet might have flown from her hand, but she kept a firm grip on it. There wasn’t a damn thing on it except for a straight line and something that might have been a tree or a stick of some sort, both drawn in pencil. Inside that bag, she was pretty well stocked with cash, though, and that was about when it was clear she was not American.

  “Miss? You might want to keep that there bag closed,” I said, not wanting to reach for it, but if she kept flashing that stack around the Oasis, she was not long to have it. I won’t try to repeat the things she said to me, not because they were outrageous, or anything like that. Well, they were outrageous, but not in a nasty way. She just did not seem to have a very good grasp of English, you would say. Her peculiar version of the language sounded almost like she maybe got it from watching movies on TV through bad reception. It seemed logical, considering all that eventually happened.

  I assumed I didn’t understand what she was saying because the idea was so darned way-out-there. I was sure she was joking on me, like Candid Camera was hiding in those trees at the landfill’s edge, just to see what I would say to an Asian lady who could barely speak English telling me she was looking for the ransom buried by some character in a movie. Well, I showed them.

  “First,” I said, “you ain’t even in the right town. Why don’t you come on in, with me, get a little warmed up, have something hot to drink, and we’ll go from there.” I reached for her hand but she acted like I wanted her map and pulled away, just enough to let me know she was not being led anywhere.

  I was wishing Fred Howkowski was with me. He would have known the ins and outs of whatever she was talking about, even with only her passing snag of English. I remember the story of Fargo, but just barely. I must have been missing something awfully important that this girl saw. Fred would have been able to tell me right off what I lacked. He knew all the movies, used to talk about them, compare everything we did together to movies. How he saw that damned many is anyone’s guess.

  A lot of shows, he watched silent from the back fences of the drive-in movie places where he grew up. He’d hitch a ride out from the reservation to those neighborhoods when he was young, get dropped off at a gas station or whatever, then wander around. When it was dark enough, he’d make his way over to the Star-lite, or the Auto-vue, and watch them play out through holes he had carved, himself. I asked him how come he never just jumped the fence and watched from the concession stand where they had speakers mounted on the outside walls.

  He liked it better speaking his own dialogue, making up the stories to suit the things he saw up on the screen. Sometimes he would do this after we’d gotten to know each other in Vietnam, when we were back to Camp Hockmuth near Phu Bai once a month at the rear. In the mess hall of an evening, they mostly showed us wholesome-type, inspirational movies. Who needed that nonsense with the things we were witnessing and participating in daily?

  Those jokers inside the hall would be eating that bullshit up, Doris Day and all. Fred and I would be outside the back windows, sparking a joint if no one else happened to be around. He would make Doris say all kinds of things to her leading men, and the things they would say back, man, I was sore from laughing most nights by the time we went to bed. He was just crazy about the movies. Listening to him there, or in the nighttime fields, talking about his favorites, was sometimes all that kept me going. His voice, in those sweaty jungles, allowed me to forget things were crawling into the poncho we used for a tent when I would doze on patrol nights.

  English was not an option with this girl, so I tried any kind of sign language I could conjure up. I’d thought I’d gotten somewhat handy with it in the war. I could only remember a few real phrases now, “didi-maow,” “boo-coo,” some others, and generally mispronounced them so bad that the locals there had no idea what I was saying. I was reduced to hand signals: “let your fingers do the walking”; “how much for this”; “do you have anything to drink”; “anything to smoke”; rubbing my hands together and blowing on them for cold—my toolbox of sign language was pretty limited. Eventually this lady recognized one of my attempts. I held an invisible cup of coffee, then pointed to the building. Finally she let me put my arm around her shoulder and we went inside. The light skeleton beneath her jacket felt on the verge of breaking apart so I lifted, floating my arm an inch above her real body. She mostly just warmed her hands with the cup of hot chocolate I bought her. My cell phone was not getting any reception inside, but I didn’t dare leave her where I couldn’t see her, so I called the state troopers from a pay phone.

  “Uh, hello, hi, my name is Tommy Jack McMorsey, and I drive for Martin Romero shippers, out of Lubbock, Texas,” I started.

  “Yes sir, how may I help you?” the dispatch said, her voice flat, thinking this was just another call from a holy roller driver, complaining about the lizards. I hate those guys. They’re not getting any—by their own choice, I might add—but they don’t want anyone else getting any either. They’re always filing formal complaints, particularly about those ladies falling in the fourth category. Those really aggressive ones tap on your passenger-side passing-mirror window and show you a little skin before they try the door to see if you’ll unlock it.

  “Well, you see, I’m calling from Oasis, on eastbound I-94, just out of Bismarck, and—”

  “Yes, sir, I know where you’re calling from, how may I help you?”

  “Well there’s this young lady here, and she—”

  “Has she asked for money in exchange for services, sir?”

  “Uh, well, no, she has her own money,” I said. “Look, could you just send someone out here? I think she needs help, and I am pretty sure I’m not the one she needs it from.” I gave her my tag numbers and told her I had to go, that the young lady had just wandered out the front doors and I wanted to keep an eye on her.

  The odor of landfill is its own special rot, and I could smell it before I caught up to her. The only thing it reminds me of is that industrial sauerkraut they used to keep in the stainless steel flip-top buckets at the drive-in movie concession stand. The condiments were nastier than the roller-dogs, those orange hot dogs that spun and spun inside the glass case. It is truly the only smell that landfills remind me of. That, or maybe the lingering odd smell in the air after someone sneezes and you are unlucky enough to be nearby.

  This girl didn’t seem to mind it, though. The nasty steam crept out of those white PVC pipes releasing gases from all that waste dissolving into who knows what below us. She pointed to these pipes and she would walk around them, shake her head, point to the presumed tree on her sheet of notebook paper, and head on off to the next pipe. I followed her to every damned one of them, trying to figure out what she was looking for, holding my coffee up to my nose and hoping for the best. This is the way the troopers found us when they eventually got there.

  “Mr. McMorsey? Tommy Jack McMorsey?” the first trooper called, from the lot. Even in the gray, his holster hand was plain to see. It was near dark by that time, and for a minute I was not for sure who was calling my name. The girl’s belief was so strong that I examined the damned exhaust pipes with her, for some discriminating features, believing I could see differences in them, and I had no idea what she was even looking for as she touched their lips, rubbed their sides, studied the perimeter around them, decided against them, and moved on. I’m not saying I was deluded enough to think we were going to find that Fargo ransom and be set for life, but there was something about her belief that somehow the act of looking was enough to keep her going for at least one minute more. And sometimes, what more can we ask for, right?

  I’ve seen that look a lot in my life. Out on the reservation Fred Howkowski came from, it was on practically every other face I looked at. He had that look most of the time I knew him, first along the fireba
ses and out on patrols in the war and then home, when he’d headed out to Hollywood trying to join those movies he loved so much.

  “Yes, that’s me. I’m the one who called.”

  “This the woman you reported?” the trooper asked as he came closer. He looked tired and wanting to get out of the cold and only in seeing his face did I realize how cold I was, how my bones ached. The time we had been out there at the fill had got by me.

  “Well, I wasn’t exactly reporting her, more concerned is all,” I said. He stepped up between us and spoke to the girl. Her eyes opened wide when she saw the North Dakota emblems on his uniform, and she showed him the map right off, I guess not afraid he was going to take it from her.

  “We’ll handle it from here,” he said, taking away the fact that she was a person, just like that. She was another situation, another incident. They took a statement from me, how I’d found her and such, but then they strongly suggested I go back about my business and I know what a suggestion from someone in authority means. They took her away and couldn’t get much out of her either, I guess. They said they were going to look around town for someone who could speak her language. I have been around Bismarck and I have not seen too many a Chinese restaurant even, let alone one of those sushi bars like they have for the yuppies in Dallas. They dismissed me pretty clearly. Though I waited outside for a while, an eighteen-wheel rig is not an easy thing to hide and they came out, asking me to move along.

  I headed back to the Oasis and sat in a window booth. It wasn’t all that long before she reappeared and sat back down with me. You don’t see a lot of people paying a cab to get to the stops. Even the lizards catch rides in some other way, either hitching on the entrance ramps or even walking to some of the stops, but the Oasis is pretty far out from where anyone might live. This is where the official story gets all lost, even though I was about as clear as I could be when they asked me questions. According to the troopers, they couldn’t get her to change her mind in looking for the ransom, or get her to understand it was just a movie, that no money existed. She kept insisting, as I understand it, that the movie opens saying it is a true story, and she was sticking to that.

  All her papers checked out, passport, visa, whatever, and they must have gone through her purse to see she had enough money to at least survive a reasonable amount of time in the country, and they did try to do her a favor, I have to give them that. They took her to the bus station and showed her how to buy a ticket to Fargo. Even as messed up as she was, she knew certain things to be true. Among them is that a Greyhound is not going to stop along the highway from Bismarck to Fargo so you can go treasure hunting, no matter how much you might ring that emergency bell. And if they did, they sure as hell wouldn’t idle there long so you could dig around in the snow.

  A cab couldn’t have been too hard to find. There’s usually a bunch of them around the bus station, taking home people who do not have loved ones to come and pick them up from wherever they’ve been wandering. She came right in and tried to get me to go back out with her to the landfill, but I’d had enough of her nonsense. I have had to be out on a cold night, waiting for the tire guy if I’ve gotten a blowout somewhere along the way. As a general rule, if you’re not out there when he gets to your truck, he just moves on along to the next rig with a blowout. There’s never any shortage of us around. So you stand and wait and flag him down and once he starts to working, he keeps asking you something or another, dragging your ass back out into the cold. He figures if he’s got to be out there on your account, you’re going to be out there keeping him company. Since I had no official business with this young woman on the fill hill, I wasn’t stepping through those doors until it was time for me to get my ass back on the road.

  “I’m heading on, going, driving,” I said, eventually. Again, with the hand signals, I wished I had a little toy rig on the table, so I could move it from the salt shaker to the sugar canister, something like that. I settled for the invisible steering wheel and making the rumbling engine noise all boys learn when they play with toy cars. “Driving, yes, driving to Fargo,” and I said this last, slowly, thinking she might catch it. She grabbed my hand and decided it was time for us to leave. I held her for a minute and, given our sizes, she was no match. There was a story about the meteors coming up on the cable news that I wanted to see before we headed out, making sure the initial predictions had not been off the mark.

  Again, you probably already know this from the final reports, and this part, they sort of got right. It was the night of the Leonid showers, those meteors that come on time every year, where you get a chance to see hundreds if you are of a mind to, are in one of the good areas of the country, and can stand the weather. I always made it a point to see them, if I could, no matter where I was, and I was usually willing to travel some distance on the night they were coming through, set an alarm clock, whatever, to see them.

  “When Fred Howkowski made it out there to Hollywood,” I said when we’d been on the road for a bit, startling my passenger at first, “he actually got a lot of work as an extra, pretty quickly. You know, westerns were still pretty much in demand then. I think even John Wayne was still alive and making movies, but I’m not for sure. He’d call me collect whenever he was going to be in a movie. He’s the reason we’re heading where we are. Well, he’s the reason I’m headed where I am, Fred, not John Wayne. Keep trying to take care of one last thing.” Most times, his movies never got out to our rinky-dink movie house back home, which is surprising since we’re in ranch country. You would think the ranchers might like them, but maybe they see enough cowboys on the job that they don’t want them for entertainment, and in Big Antler, the less said about Indians, the better.

  Nothing particularly bad ever happened, I suppose, at least as far as anyone’s still alive was concerned, but Indians and whites just don’t mix too much down there, hardly any Indians at all, I can remember, except Fred’s boy, who became mine when Fred gave him up to me. So, anyway, whenever Fred would call, I would get the Lubbock paper for a few weeks, and when his movie would come out, Liza Jean and I would take the boy into the city, get us something to eat at a nice place, and look for his daddy up on the screen. Sometimes we could see him, sometimes not, even when he told us where he was supposed to be.

  “Well, he got word one time they were making a movie out of some book that was supposedly about Indians. He’s like you, just loved the movies. But like most of those movies and books from what I have seen and what I’ve heard about, they are usually about some white guy adopted by Indians who then grows up and out-Indians the Indians, does everything they can teach him to do but only better. This one was going to be no different but Fred was happy.” The girl continued staring out the rig’s passenger-side window, occasionally glancing at me to let me know she was hearing my voice.

  “Liza Jean was growing annoyed at all the collect calls. Back then, calling state to state was something only the rich or famous could do and we were neither of those things. So I paid those bills out of my junk-business profits to keep the peace around the house. I’d taken to garage sales since I had gotten home, have a pretty good eye, and I’d buy stuff up enough to have one of my own or do it as an estate sale or sell to antique shops and you can turn a pretty decent profit if you pick only the stuff that has some staying power.” By her outfit, it looked like this girl was one of those who watched the fashion shows and made a point of getting new things when they came out. My clothes are a lot like the stuff I hunt for, old and reliable. That trendy stuff just never lasts.

  Once people get bored with little under-stuffed bears, for example, you would be stuck with the samples you hoarded for at least another ten years when interest would somehow just spark up again out of nowhere. I stuck with other stuff that was pretty much guaranteed to grow and grow in scarcity, like real art deco, or art nouveau, no knockoffs, no reproductions. I didn’t touch anything made after 1953, unless it had some of that signature “fabulous fifties” look that was getting bigg
er all the time. So with that cushion, I didn’t mind paying for Fred’s calls keeping us connected, and since Liza Jean never helped me with the estate sales, she never got a say in what I did with my profits from them, either.

  “He got the call from central casting, and with his looks and his list of movies, they even said he had a good shot at some lines. He had his SAG card, he said, whatever that was, and that meant he could do the lines if they offered them to him. He said the star was a young guy, making it big, and was always nice to the extras, letting them hang out in his honey wagon, signing autographs and whatnot. I bet you would like that. Probably be carrying that around in your rucksack there,” I said, tapping her little pink bag. At first she jumped and reached to grab it and then must have thought better, easing off and smiling at me more frequently, but only for a second or two before returning to her scan of the roadside.

  “Fred kept saying he would get me an autograph that I could sell, and such, but he never did. That was the way of it with him.” Even the time I visited him, he kept pretending that he was looking for that autographed picture he got for me, but we both knew it only existed in his head. Finally I said something like, well, it will surface, once we get this stuff cleaned up some, figuring maybe we could get his dump into reasonable shape, if we gave it an honest try, though I don’t think it would have stayed that way for long after I had left. When he saw me off the next week, he said that he’d let me know about his speaking part, that he was supposed to hear back soon.