I dug out the card of that trooper who took my statement. He’d given it to me in case I needed to do any follow-up or some damned thing, who knows. Maybe he knew. I was no longer in North Dakota and Minnesota would be out of his jurisdiction, but I had to start somewhere and he seemed as good a place as any. It was too late to do anything else. I sat with her for a couple hours, until my bones, and really, the rest of me, couldn’t take the ache anymore. “Hi, this is Tommy Jack McMorsey,” I said into my cell phone as the sun came up in her wide-open eyes.
CHAPTER TWO:
Signal Fade
“Based on a True Story . . . or Not”
(Associated Newspaper Syndicate Entertainment column, May 24, 2002, byline—William Donaldson, Syndicate TV Critic)
How many times have you heard that phrase? More than you can count, most likely. From claims of Bigfoot sightings to unauthorized and thinly veiled celebrity biographies, “based on a true story” has become a catchall for a wide array of the outlandish in contemporary culture. How much would you be willing to bet on the validity of that statement, for any document you have seen invoking it? Would you be willing to wager your life away? One young woman, Nuriko Furuta, did just that. The complexity of her actions, and the actions of those who encountered her, finally gets a network treatment this evening, not one of the big three, but a network just the same.
TZON, or the “T Zone” as the network has branded itself, has made its reputation on classic and obscure reruns combined with a parade of contemporary tabloid journalism and the boom of reality TV’s popularity. In a classic case of the right time and the right place, the network jumped from a small independent station in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex to a nationwide network with affiliates around the country in less than fifteen years, with this ratings-winning formula.
One of T Zone’s signature shows, Prime Hours, uses the structure of one part taped interview, one part reenactment, and one part live interview. Prime Hours has been accused of soliciting the desperate for their subjects. The live interview is always stacked against the interviewee, but Prime Hours representatives consistently assert that all interviewees have signed releases before going on the air. While it’s not quite the chair-throwing spectacles of other tabloid shows, a guest spot on Prime Hours is almost never a positive turn in the lives of those appearing in the hot seat. Usually, they agree for reasons of their own, believing their voices need to be heard, no matter the personal cost.
Tonight’s television highlight is a belated postscript to one of last year’s strangest news stories. In a year that will be remembered for the worst terrorist attacks on American soil, and the subsequent deluge of media coverage, the quiet tragedy of Ms. Furuta’s passing generally got lost in the shuffle. While her name may not ring any bells for you, if you were watching news coverage late last November (and really, who in this country wasn’t?), you probably remember the unusual circumstances of her death.
Ms. Furuta was the thirty-three-year-old Japanese woman who apparently took her life savings and set out alone from Nagasaki to Minneapolis and then into North Dakota, in search of the million-dollar ransom featured in the cult crime-drama/farce Fargo, then died of exposure, allegedly watching the Leonid meteor showers, mere yards from a group of cottages, outside Detroit Lakes, Minnesota.
When she was first discovered the day before, Ms. Furuta was wandering around a landfill behind a truck stop outside Bismarck, carrying a crudely drawn map. Authorities were unable to find anyone who could speak Japanese, and given the young woman’s minimal grasp of the English language, they were also unable to convince her that the ransom did not exist. News coverage at the time claimed she was released because she had not been engaged in any illegal activities, and already overworked authorities chose not to hold her because “fuzzy thinking is not a crime in this country.” She then took a bus to Fargo and hired a taxi to take her on an hour-long ride out to Detroit Lakes, where she died, surrounded by cottages.
Media sources generally would have tended to eat this story up, for all of its inherently ironic nature, but last November, we were not very receptive to irony. Though a number of unsettling questions presented themselves at the time the story broke, this strange set of events received little airtime and then quietly disappeared, much like the young woman herself.
The live segment of tonight’s episode of Prime Hours (Channel 33, 10:00 EST) is dedicated exclusively to these events, where we get the first in-depth interview with Tommy Jack McMorsey. You have not likely ever heard his name before, either, even if you had paid attention to the story as it unfolded. Mr. McMorsey is the truck driver from Lubbock, Texas, who initially reported the woman to authorities in North Dakota and who was also, later, the last person to see the young woman alive.
Among the segments, Prime Hours will recap the original November news coverage of Ms. Furuta’s death, and the brief period in which Mr. McMorsey was considered a potential suspect in the case, before authorities ruled the young woman’s passing a “death by misadventure.” Following that, Peter Haskell interviews Mr. McMorsey, who makes the claim that the news reports from the time were inaccurate. Authorities who interacted with Ms. Furuta are also interviewed and asked to address the truck driver’s claims. The last segment includes further responses, from the news media sources local to the story, whose assertions Mr. McMorsey is refuting.
Is this story a stinging indictment of the way in which our news sources handle the smaller tragedies of our world, further dehumanizing us, or is it merely a continuation of exploitation disguised as probing news? Either way, it should make for interesting and engaging television. Be sure to tune in.
Annie Boans
Before Commencement, my regalia still cloaked in a garment bag for another year, I stopped by my office mailbox where a new interoffice mailer held the morning paper’s back section. An article was circled in red marker, a note attached to the upper corner with a paper clip. The rigid, formal, and stiff penmanship was my former mother-in-law’s. It was a note of very few words, each one counting, as if letters were being rationed and Martha Boans were down to her last few.
My world changed in that moment, within her oddly constipated script, as if I had donned glasses for the first time, or had been suddenly fitted for a hearing aid after years of reading lips and deciphering the intended meaning of dull consonants and vowels. The vague whispers I had heard perpetually throughout the reservation suddenly came into sharp, piercing distilled sounds, like swords drawn. For years, I had been so close to knowing the information held on this scrap of paper, and even as close as I’d come, my mother never flinched, answering my questions with the nonchalance of telling someone what was for dinner. I should have followed my usual rule.
Every year, I purposefully avoid my campus mailbox on this day. I don’t want to be tempted to bring work with me to Commencement, sneaking glances at letters, calls for proposals, invitations, as the kids walk across the stage. Instead, I daydream my way through Commencement. You can only hear so many “It’s a Big World Out There, but if You Are Determined, You Can Make a Difference” speeches and still be moved by them. I turn the volume down on the Potential Futures of Our Graduates speech, drowning it with future lectures, grocery shopping lists, favorite songs, harvested from memory.
I always try to appear attentive and smile at the graduates I had known. Any time I think of using a sick day for Commencement, I remember walking across the stage, seeing professors who had made a difference in my life. I have little faith that I’ve changed students’ lives, but this was the only chance for some. Entering, they had been one step away from fast-food franchise assistant manager and they still might take my next Value Meal order.
My own time in college was spent nearly leaving those halls for good, almost every day. The only thing keeping me there for the first year was my mother’s potential daily glower if I had stopped going. That I studied art merely attenuated her stares. She still scantly believes I talk about art every day and
receive a two-week paycheck she wouldn’t have seen over the course of two to three months in any given year. My students’ faces share the same will to stare down doubting parents, and that kept me at Commencement while colleagues had already switched over to gin and sailboats and “good books.”
Though my grades were in a week before, I’ve continued inhabiting my office even beyond finals week. Some nights my apartment seemed emptier than others. Most evenings, I enjoyed coming home to clean silence. Up to a year ago, before my husband and I separated, every night would have been my ex-mother-in-law’s combination of Jeopardy and smoky haze. During finals week, in past years, Doug would make my favorite dishes, have a bath waiting, and a good film from the little rental place a half-hour drive away. It was the only place you could get decent films without computer-generated explosions or surgically altered couples falling predictably in love, awash in a Top 40 sound track.
This year, finals week was pizza or Chinese delivery “for one” and whatever was on cable. Once Commencement is over, I want to be anywhere with people, though I frankly have no idea where. My old socializing was with Doug and our families. My colleagues had gradually stopped inviting us to their parties a few years ago. As much as I’d wanted my own space, lately the apartment offered only sterile discomfort. Maybe T.J. Howkowski, sitting next to me on the stage, would want to do something, I had thought through the ceremony.
I had helped him get his foot in the door, almost eight years ago when he’d come home to the reservation for good, and now we were at the only junior college in all of New York with two faculty members who could legitimately check the “American Indian” box on the human resources form, an improbable situation at best and thus frequently problematic. Though my scholarship research specialized in Indians in American film, every time I admired beadwork for its beauty and craft, the artists thought I was working on a way to turn it into a lecture and make millions talking to fascinated white audiences about their work. The life this reservation has invented for me is far more glamorous than the one I have in reality.
They never see lectures where the honorarium doesn’t cover costs or see conference presentations where the panel is relieved that there are more people in the audience than there are on the stage. They also don’t see that I’m working at a very small college where there are no courses specializing in media studies or popular culture or even American studies. I am the art historian, period. I can do the research I want, but in the classroom, I had better represent the Renaissance through postmodernism, or it is poor-evaluation time for me. The luxury of a large University, where I could really devote my time to the study of Fred Howkowski and his impact on the roles of Indians in film, is really more a dream than anything else, a way to not make myself crazy repeating over and over again the significance of the first Italian perspective painters or Pablo Picasso’s break with form, or Cindy Sherman’s own ironic take on Hollywood.
T.J. at least got some response as the chief in Cuckoo’s Nest around the country in the summers, if not from his students. Half the time I’m not sure the audience listens as I lecture through a slide show, the only ways of documenting our culture that I have. He’s also got the advantage of being a poster boy for Indian men in America—slick braids, hawk nose, thick sensuous lips, and the stoic look that just won’t quit. I’m not sure he would get the same stares with a flattop or even a regular haircut but those braids are unstoppable.
Those same looks drive the Indian men around here as crazy as they do the women. That he is part white and raised by a white couple seventeen hundred miles away doesn’t stop their wives and girlfriends commenting anytime they see him. Even Doug, when we lived together, carried on a running monologue about everything wrong with T.J. whenever someone mentioned him. When T.J. had a small speaking part last year on Justice Scales, Doug was insufferable. He’d even brought home one of the countdown calendars Mason Rollins had printed, with T.J.’s face, but not to mark the days until the broadcast. Doug’s El Marko had given my colleague a pirate’s eye patch, missing teeth, warts, the works.
I wonder if Doug still has it. He probably took it down last spring when I moved back to the city—the only home I had ever known. I’m convinced Doug had put it up, trying to brew tension, as if his mother’s seven-year presence with us hadn’t been enough. The whole time I’d lived on the reservation, people whispered behind my back, though about what, I never knew exactly. I thought maybe it would stop when I left, but they blamed the breakup on me, the city-Indian woman with the degrees, and not on the hardworking smoke-shop-clerking rez-born and -bred husband, and certainly not on the chain-smoking, soap opera-game show watching, invasive and pervasive mother-in-law who had lived with us since we moved to that trailer.
It hadn’t been my fault her house burned down, and after seven years, I couldn’t take one more day of that life, not knowing how much longer it would go on. I thought I’d be rid of her for the most part after I moved out. I felt safe living back in the city while she remained in my old trailer on the reservation. It was strange at first not to wake up to Doug snoring, and I had been surprised to discover that in the time I was on the reservation, I had acclimated to its otherwise quiet nights. I guess I missed the place.
“Did you know about this?” I whispered to T.J., as the students began their march across the stage. I revealed the article from the sleeve of my regalia, passing him the newspaper. He’d glanced, nodded, and handed it back to me. “It’s not every day your stepfather gets on national TV. How come you never mentioned it?”
“Adoptive father. I don’t know, didn’t think it would be all that interesting to you. You know how that show is. I don’t know what he’s thinking. And besides, it’s not like he’s going to be talking about your favorite subject.” Some days T.J. was willing to talk for hours about his real father’s brief time home and then in Hollywood before he committed suicide, and some days he wasn’t. Fred Howkowski’s career was the major thematic core of my research, but I had to deal with my source material on its own terms, and that meant waiting a lot of the time for people to feel right about their relationships to him. I like to think that the slight reservation animosity to T.J. is what brought me to befriend him. When he showed back up here, he was so desperately looking for a community, and most people would have little to do with him. So, I did what I could, became his friend, helped him get a job, but he’s also bright enough to know that part of my interest is his connection to Fred. I wish I could say it was different, but we both know the truth of that reality, and we just don’t explore the topic unless he’s had enough prodding. Then he reminds me in no uncertain terms.
“It’s only about that Japanese woman. Didn’t you read the article?”
“Yeah, what happened with all that, anyway? Did he ever say?” A colleague sitting in front of us turned and gave us the shut-up frown, so we waited for the students to move their tassels and get on with their lives. As we recessed from the auditorium, T.J. vanished, but then reappeared in my door a little while later.
“ You all set?” he said. We walked to the lot in silence, the warm spring breeze rolling across the nearly empty lot. As we reached my Blazer, he said, “I’m thinking about going down there.”
“Really? When?”
“I don’t know, soon. It’s been a while. Why?”
“I’d like to go with you.” I could not believe those words had come out of my mouth. I panicked and then he offered the perfect recovery.
“ Yeah, he might have a lot of useful information for you, and it would be nice to have some company,” he said, staring at me from the passenger’s seat. “When do you think you can go?”
“As of ten minutes ago, I am free for three months. Why don’t we leave tonight?” I laughed and started the Blazer.
“Are you serious?” I wasn’t sure myself if I were really committing to this idea. Maybe I was serious. So much had changed since this morning and it was true—I was free for three months. I had three lonely mon
ths of that apartment staring me down.
“Well, I should let my family know, so they don’t worry,” I said, finally.
“Okay, I don’t have anything holding me here, and I’ve been meaning to make this trip for a long time. If we can get ready by five, we could make Cleveland before the TV show comes on.”
“It means you have to come to my mom’s with me, so I can let her know I’ll be gone for a while, and I want to stop and get gas at Royal’s shop, too.”
“Your momma’s all right.”
When we arrived, my mother’s eyes passed over us, trying to decide if I were really going to ask her the things I intended with T.J. in the room. This was the way she dealt with confrontation, a posh salesperson—politely and discreetly showing you the price of your desire. You might not have the necessary down payment, and she waited, wondering if you could hear the question being asked. She was wrong this time. I’d come with enough to pay in full and to answer forcefully and clearly.
“Your TV working, Ma?” I asked.
“About as good as it ever does,” she said. “Depends on the wind, season, trees, whatever.” That was also part of her translation key. She could complain without ever technically doing so.
“T.J., why don’t you climb up on her roof, see if the antenna is secure. Maybe it’s just some loose connections or wires exposed on the line in,” I said. He clearly hadn’t any idea how he might implement such changes. So much for the improv skills of this professional actor. How had he ever managed to get even off-Broadway roles? “Here, I’ll show you where the ladder and the duct tape are.” I walked him out to the shed behind my brother Royal’s trailer. “There’s plenty of things that might need addressing on that roof.”
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