Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  I wondered if these interviewers were going to make us up, or if that was just for the stars and not for someone you are trying to get dirt on. They could try all they wanted. I’ve got nothing to hide. That girl didn’t want to get saved. It’s just that way with some people. Fred tried saving our squad one time with Fireball, toward the end, but they turned it around on him. I can still see the look on his face when he realized what they’d done that last time. They’d taken his medicine game and turned it into something else.

  We pulled bunker guard duty on Firebase Tomahawk, so it was just us around. This could be the most boring part. Toward cycle’s end, some guys would get antsy, looking for any kind of distraction they could find. You went crazy sometimes looking into the thick brush, seeing nothing, but trying just the same. You could see movement where there wasn’t any, or watch plants change into men in the right wind. By the few seconds it took you to get your M-16 up, the potential sniper had become an elephant’s ear plant again. You could not watch passionately for that long and not start inventing something to see.

  “Howkowski,” Reggie Hughes said, leaning against some sandbags and lighting a cigarette, “you must feel pretty at home, here on Tomahawk, huh? I mean, being an Indian and all, right? What kind of Indian name is Howkowski, anyway?” Hughes knew the answer but some guys liked to break up the boredom with hassling other guys, forcing them to be the entertainment. Donut Dollies, USO, and EM clubs being so scarce out this far, we had to make our own entertainment. That day was Fred’s day to provide it.

  “It ain’t,” he said. “My dad’s white. Doesn’t matter, though, nobody from home has those ridiculous names you hear in the movies. Mounter, Page, Waterson, Boans, Natcha, Gunderson, Tunny, Martin, those are the kinds of names we have.”

  “Don’t sound very Indian. I bet you’re making that whole Indian stuff up,” Hughes continued. More guys gradually drifted over, hoping for a fight. It was a slow day. “Show me one thing that’s Indian.”

  “Go get that propellant over there and let’s see who’s gonna donate some rags,” Fred said, sitting up.

  “Here, use these,” someone said, tossing Fred a bunch of old sandbags that had seen better days. They were supposed to go back for repair the next time I radioed Romeo Sierra, but these bags would not be making resupply. Fred knotted and tied a few in a bundle and then tossed it and other bags to someone else, who had to add to it.

  “What are we doing?” Hughes asked as he added to the wad.

  “You’ve got eyes. Use them. Join in or step aside,” Fred said, taking Hughes’s wind out. We were being introduced to the game called Fireball that Fred tried to save us with. It was funny to see him get more involved in the squad. Usually, sharing was limited to one or two buddies, and in our case, it was the two of us.

  We had an exchange, kept each other alive. There are all kinds of ways of doing that. Splitting C rations, sharing anything that might come from home, one keeping an eye out while the other slept, all through the night, knowing that sometimes guys pulling night patrol duty got a little lazy on the job. Fred and me, while we did all those things, we also had something else. Neither could take charity but we knew exchange really well.

  At the rear, you got your fatigues washed and cleaned, nice and neat, they were yours, and my shirt had McMorsey embroidered onto a patch sewn on the right breast pocket, but in the jungle, on patrol, you just took whatever was dropped from the chopper. When we’d get the call, we’d run to the closest spot that resembled a clearing, given the day’s firing patterns. They would fly in, dump for our squad, and in the twenty minutes after they resupplied the other squads, they swung back to pick up whatever we sent.

  The drops were clean clothes, ammunition, C rations, big rubber jugs of fresh water that we had to chase down the hillsides so they wouldn’t bounce beyond our reach, and firearms replacements if we had asked for some. In the time before the chopper got back, we’d strip down and stuff every stitch of dirty clothes into those bags we’d just pulled the clean ones from. I pitied whoever was washing those things. Sometimes we’d been wearing a set for two weeks straight. Then we’d grab whatever clothes might fit us okay and put them on. You don’t want to be standing naked on a hilltop all pink-skinned and sweating, glistening in the sun, begging a sniper to pick you off. Some weeks your clothes fit better than others.

  We’d send back misfiring machine guns, anything that weighed us down, and if we’d caught the good company clerk, we’d be sending money back too. In that drop we’d just gotten, there would have been a case of cold Coca-Colas that he’d fronted us if we promised him the money. You might think he would have been stiffed a lot, but he never was. He let you know, he’d do it for any squad if he got the call when you made it. If you ever shorted him, though, your squad was never getting even one bottle dropped from that point on, and he’d let you know why. Everyone always paid up. There is nothing like a chilled Coca-Cola in a 110-degree jungle.

  We would hold those icy bottles to our cheeks for a few seconds, snap those caps off, and guzzle them down as fast as they’d pour from the neck. A warm Coca-Cola is nobody’s friend. Cold this way, it was a brief taste of home. For that moment it slid down your throat, you might have been sitting at the picnic tables under a drive-in restaurant’s neon, sharing a frosted glass with your girl, listening to the crickets ticking off the hours until you had to take her home. That company clerk never got stiffed, as far as I know, the whole time I was in country.

  As sacred as a Coca-Cola out there was, it compared not at all to mail from home. Everything else was flat-out ignored when it came to mail. It didn’t matter how hungry we were, there wasn’t a man among us who opened C rations before he opened a letter with the red, white, and blue striping along the envelope edges. And if there was some news from home, your best friend heard it before anyone else. You might eventually show pictures and whatnot and maybe even read selected passages to everyone, if you were feeling generous, but you shared the whole thing with your best friend first. And that was how Fred Howkowski came to find out that Liza Jean, the woman who all these years later sat beside me before the cameras, left me for a while, ditched me for that flat-footed nitwit in Big Antler.

  “‘Best to you, Liza Jean.’ Best to you, how do you like that? Best to you,” I said, and folded up the letter.

  “Coke?” Fred said, still holding the bottle out to me. I shook my head. Fred got some fry bread in the mail one day and this stuff was hard as a rock by the time it got over across the globe. I could hardly see its appeal until I tried Shirley Mounter’s, after we’d gotten home. I was swallowing something harder than stale fry bread and no amount of Coca-Cola was going to wash its jagged edges down any smoother.

  “Still got my own,” I said. “Was too eager to see what Liza Jean had written.” I had skipped the Coca-Cola for a few minutes to open the letter, but I had wished that envelope had somehow gotten lost across the thousands of miles it had traveled to find its way to me there in the bush.

  “Mr. McMorsey, do you want your wife to be here with you for the interview?” the reporter asked, while a technician clipped a small microphone to me and ran back to some portable machinery it was plugged into.

  “Well, yeah, I imagine so,” I said. I should have known at that point they weren’t planning to stick to just the whole Fargo thing. Something in the way he said it suggested he was trying to let me know that was maybe not such a good idea, but Liza Jean had gone to the beauty shop the day before and had slept with her head all wrapped that night, so she would look good on TV. All of her friends would be watching, so I couldn’t let her down, couldn’t tell her to forget it after all that preparation. Hell, she even picked out my shirt and tie so they would be some kind of match with her outfit. I couldn’t see it personally, but I trusted she could. “Right here, you can fit us both in if we sit here on the sofa, right?”

  “Mrs. McMorsey?”

  “Just call me Liza, everyone does.”

  “Okay
, Liza, would you like a microphone, too?” That technician looked up and started running another line toward us, but Liza Jean held her hand up in front of her and waved it in the air.

  “No, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what I could add.”

  “Well, why don’t we put one on you, just in case,” the reporter said. The technician went back and forth across the room, carrying that little line around with him, trying to figure out whose lead to follow. He eventually clipped it to her collar as the reporter assured her it was a standard procedure for anyone on camera.

  They tested lighting arrangements and Liza Jean held her hand onto mine the whole time. It was the first time, I think, since before I had left for basic, that she held on that tight. When I came home for those few days, between basic and advanced, she was different already. Since I had been assigned to Fort Ord, it pretty much guaranteed I was going over. Almost nobody made it out of Ord and got a stateside assignment.

  So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I got that letter in the mail drop while we were out on patrol. When I read that line, “I know I should have told you this in person, when you were home,” I didn’t have to bother reading the rest, but I did, anyway. I even read it out loud to Fred and he just nodded and didn’t say too much.

  “Too bad you couldn’t teach seventh-grade math,” he said finally, as we set up the ponchos for sleeping that night.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” I said. Though we hadn’t talked at all on the way over, too scared, I guess, Fred had been on the same flight as me, shipping out. Funny, we had seen each other from the first, having gone through basic together at Fort Ord and then in the limo to Oakland. He was one of the idiots I went in with, paying a limousine to take us into Oakland. All those weeks later on the transport, we still had not really talked again, but his face was familiar. The engines were all running and the doors had already been sealed for our flight to Asia when they let a couple of guys on. They were civilian workers, by their look, their suits. One asked if any of us had a master’s degree and could teach seventh-grade geometry.

  I was one semester away from finishing my master’s, but I didn’t know shit about math, had not really passed it myself. I took Math in Modern Living in college, where I learned, for fifteen weeks, how to balance a checkbook and manage a monthly budget.

  “I taught a year of high school just before I was drafted,” I said, hopeful.

  “I’m pretty good in math,” some guy a few seats away from me jumped in.

  “Master’s?”

  “Yes sir, in sociology.”

  “Step off the plane with us, please,” the officials said.

  “I’ve already taught in a high school,” I repeated, louder. They hesitated for a second and one asked, abruptly, what subject. “History,” I said.

  “Sorry, pal,” he said, as they kept escorting that other guy off the plane. All the way to Vietnam, I tried to remember the rhombus, the parallelogram, and I traced all those shapes on the ground as we flew higher and higher, disappearing above the clouds and eventually the ocean. In the waves, I could see triangles: right, isosceles, acute, and obtuse, and by the time we got close to Da Nang, I had even remembered what pi had to do with circles, but it was too late, anyway, and all the history I had filled my head with instead of math was not going to keep me from those dangerous line segments dividing up Vietnam. Maybe that was what I got for studying all these other people dying in wars for someone else. I realized only years later that it had all been a setup and there were no magic words I could have said. They were waiting for that guy to say something, anything, so they could escort him off. Someone had pulled strings for him and he hadn’t even known it.

  “Well, maybe it just wasn’t meant to be, Tom.” Fred would not call me Tommy Jack, unless he was trying to get my attention. He said it was a kid’s name and we were not kids anymore, by any stretch. “Take this friend of mine from home, Shirley Mounter,” he said. It was the first time I had ever heard her name. “She’s got kids with this man, and he seems all right enough, as a guy, but he doesn’t treat her right. They just don’t belong together.” The night was growing dark in the quick way it did over there, so we bedded down as fast as we could in the little remaining light. “Give me that letter,” he said in the dark.

  “What for?”

  “I don’t want you wasting the batteries in your penlight on that nonsense. You’ll have plenty of time to read it over while we’re here. You don’t need to keep reading it now.”

  “I won’t read it.”

  “Give it here.”

  What could I do? You almost never get unreasonable requests from your best friend, and when you do, maybe sometimes you just give in because he holds that funny place in your heart. I handed it over and slid the penlight back in my pocket. He knew I’d had it out.

  “Now Shirley Mounter, she would never write a letter like that,” he said. “She would write, ‘Dear Tom,’ and she would call you Tom because she would know you weren’t a kid, too. So she would write, ‘Dear Tom, I hear things aren’t so well over there, but I want you to know that me and my kids, we’re thinking about you. We’re not the praying kind, as I’m sure you remember, but we think good things about you. We dream you into our nights, bring you home that way, so if sometimes you feel like you’ve been home, when you wake up suddenly over there, you have been. You’ve been wandering around in our heads and in our hearts.’ That’s what she would write.”

  “And how do you know that’s what she would write? Who is this, anyway, your girlfriend?”

  “Nope, just someone I know, a very good friend. I know that’s what she would write because that is the kind of letter I get from her.”

  “You never read a letter like that to me.”

  “You only ever wanted to hear the ones from my ma and my girl, so that was what I read to you.” He rolled over in his poncho and I could see him smile a little, in that last light.

  “You never told me you got any other kind.”

  “You never asked.”

  “So what else would she say to me?”

  “She wouldn’t say any of these things,” he said, “but she’d write them.” He smiled and lit a joint, passing it over once he got the spark going. So that was the way I got to know Shirley Mounter first, under the stars across the world, in that funny half world you live in after the first couple tokes, before the cotton mouth and the paranoia set in, when you are a part of the world, instead of apart from it. The only thing keeping me there, in the tall grass, was Fred’s voice and the first ways I imagined Shirley must look.

  At first, she looked kind of like that Land O’Lakes girl, you know, the kneeling butter girl, you can cut her off the package and fold her around to make her look like she’s grabbing her boobs? Her. She was the only Indian lady I had ever seen on a regular basis. After a while, her looks changed for me. Sometimes she was Doris Day, sometimes she was Faye Dunaway, and sometimes Anne Bancroft. I was James Garner, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman. What changed? Whenever we would make it to the rear for those three-day stand-downs to do a thorough resupply, Fred’s made-up dialogue for the mess hall movies grew into the continuing story of Shirley Mounter and me. Though I liked being Warren Beatty, all smooth and well dressed in that double-breasted suit and white fedora, a wooden matchstick dangling from my mouth, I usually walked away from Fred’s stories long before I would get all shot up on a country road in East Texas. There wasn’t a single way he could make getting fifty bullets in me seem like a good story. For his part, Fred mostly filled the holes left in my heart by Liza Jean’s letter with a new life for me where he came from, with this woman I had never met.

  Every night, he would give me a new bit of information about Shirley. I came to think of this as S rations. She was somewhere, sleeping quietly with her kids, in New York, having no idea I existed, but for me, getting back there, to meet her, kept me from going back to that letter, reading how Liza Jean had already concluded I was dead, even before I had los
t out on teaching geometry to a bunch of kids going fuzznuts.

  From long before the time Fred and I were on that plane back to the States, Shirley Mounter had taken firm root in my head and had filled a lot of those holes. Fred had even gotten his momma to send him over a few pictures of Shirley, guess he was too shy to personally ask, but he got them, all right. When I would get to my lowest, when I would reach for that letter from Liza Jean again, he would pass me one of those pictures to look at for a little while. So she was no longer just the voice of Fred, over the face of some beautiful woman skipping across the mess hall screen. I knew what she looked like, could make up my own scenes by then, where I didn’t have to be some leading man in a pin-striped suit, and I could just be me.

  He had even gotten her pictures laminated somewhere, maybe when he was out on R & R, who knows, but there she was, sealed in plastic, safe from all our day-to-day nastiness. He never once let me keep any of the pictures, always asking for them back as soon as my penlight was off, and in that way he kept her a mystery to me, but one I was going to solve.

  When I got there, to New York, a week after being home, I saw her that first night. I pretended I didn’t know who she was, didn’t want her to know we had been keeping company all that time I was in country—just didn’t seem right—and I allowed myself to be introduced to her and danced with her that night like I have never danced with anyone in my life. She was wearing those stretch pants women wore all the time in those days, the kind that show a little calf. She was soft but muscled, in those flat shoes. She was not the kind who would wear high heels, would never allow any man to catch her off balance like that. The shirt she had on, it was homemade but not in a bad way, more in the way you could see it had been measured, cut, and stitched to fit her body and hers alone. When we danced, I reached around and she let me touch her back, leaned into me, and I smelled her hair, almost the same shade of red as mine. In that hair, there was the scent of rainwater, some basic shampoo, nothing fancy, and a slight hint of a vinegar rinse. She washed her hair like a country girl, as I had known she would, and I did not want to let go, that whole night.