Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  Any song could have come on the jukebox, but I had put on “The Name Game.” She thought it was so I could goof on her name and I never corrected her but back in those dark jungle nights, her name was the line, the connection to home that made me want to keep going. Fred had that little boy’s picture but all I had were glimpses of this woman and the rhythmic way my tongue moved, mouthing her name over and over until I fell asleep for a few hours.

  “Okay, great, Mr. McMorsey, what we’d like to do is conduct some establishing shots here, maybe have you take us around the house, the backyard. This is a fascinating place you’ve got here, like some of those buildings out back. Our audience might be interested in those kinds of things,” the reporter said, once he’d gotten the nod from some of the technicians.

  “Well, those buildings—” I started.

  “Wait, sir. What we’d like to do is get some of this footage and transmit it back to the station today where they’ll edit it, neaten it up for the broadcast tomorrow night, to use as an introduction of sorts. But what we’d really like to do, I’m sure you’ve seen our show—”

  “On occasion.”

  “Yes, well, we’d like to do the real interview live, right from your living room, tomorrow night. It’s one of our hallmarks, as you know. If that’s all right with you,” the reporter said. I didn’t know, never did watch that much TV, but this seemed like the right idea to me, everything live, no chance for these guys to change and rearrange the things I say, since as soon as they leave my lips, my words will head on out across America.

  “Sure, that’s totally live? As I say it, it goes out?”

  “There’s a brief signal delay, a few seconds’ transmission from here to the network and then transmission back out across the country, but yes, other than that, totally live, sir.”

  “Okay, and what is it you want to do today, then?”

  “We’d like you to walk around the grounds here, we’ll shoot you, walking around your property, you and me talking. We’ll use some audio here, but mostly, these shots are just to give our viewers a context for who you are, so they’ll be ready to receive what you have to say with a minimum of introduction tomorrow night and then we can get right to the story America is going to want to hear. Would you mind if we started outside?” They all stood up without waiting for an answer. Apparently they learned the same kinds of questions Liza Jean knew so well. What could I do? I went outside with them but this time I guided them through the back door, the proper way.

  Someone who called himself the segment director yelled out instructions to the people scurrying around with all this equipment. Every time I looked up at them, the segment director would yell out to me to act natural, just pretend they weren’t even there, as the reporter and I walked out through the back deck, the little pond I had built the year before. How are you supposed to act natural with a cord tied to you, running down the inside of your pant leg and several folks swarming you armed with electronics and screens and lights?

  “You have a really nice place here, Mr. McMorsey. Peaceful.”

  “That was my goal. I like to meditate, not in any kind of fancy way, just be alone sometimes. I sit here by the pond a lot. There’s fish in there, but the water’s too murky to see them. These plants are supposed to clean it up some but I don’t care if I can’t see them. I know they’re in there. You make the best of where you are. That’s pretty much what I have always tried to do, anyway. A lesson I learned from my best friend a long, long time ago.” The reporter walked the little bridge over the pond with me, and I wondered how those cameramen were keeping their reflections out of what they were shooting.

  “You’ve constructed most of these buildings yourself ?” the reporter asked, gesturing to the outbuildings on the property, the pump house, the Yorkston house, the seed barn, the others.

  “Me? No, I’ve had them built. I don’t have the time or skill to do this work. This is the work of some very good local laborers. Sad to say, there’s a lot of underemployed men in this town, so their labor rates are competitive. It’s a good gig. These guys do the backbusting work for me that I don’t have the time or body for anymore, and some of these families around here, they get to put better food on their tables. I probably couldn’t fund it on my paycheck leftovers, but estate sales, and now those online auctions? I have turned a lot of junk into a lot of cash over the years.”

  “He has one very good eye,” Liza Jean said, stepping forward.

  “Two decent eyes is more like it,” I said. “When I don’t have trips, sometimes there are some slow periods in driving a rig, I do the interiors, some, and smaller restorations, furniture and such.”

  “Tommy Jack, this is not their work,” Liza Jean added. “It’s yours. These are your ideas. They just do what you instruct them. You should take credit where the credit is yours.” Then she turned directly to the camera, waited for it to focus on her, and said, “He’s had the idea to build this place up to look like it might have a hundred years ago, when the first settlers arrived here.”

  “You started these places from scratch?” the reporter asked, as one of the cameramen crossed his lenses over all the outbuildings.

  “Well, no, this here house was called a saltbox style, because it resembled the old-timey salt boxes, which would be obvious if you ever saw one. This was out in a cotton field, a few miles from here and families of hands lived in it over the years, but it had been abandoned by about the time I was a little boy. The family that owned it, the Yorkstons, ended up owing my daddy money right up to the day he died, and they offered me the house, I guess, as sort of settling old debts of their conscience. And since Liza Jean and I have been collecting antiques for so long, and running out of room in the house to put them—”

  “And not wanting to part with anything,” she added.

  “I thought this might be a nice way to store and display our collection. So we looked into how much it would cost to move the building, and saw it was feasible, and we did it. The interior restoration took about three months of straight work, and most of the replacement boards came from other old buildings of the era, to make it as authentic as I could, and, and, why am I telling you this? What has this got to do with anything?” I finally asked. Funny, sometimes, we get schoolkids out here on field trips to check out the old buildings and I do this routine with them and here I was, rattling it off for these cameras, almost forgetting they were there.

  “Please, this is very interesting, Mr. McMorsey. I’m not sure what they’ll use and what they’ll leave out, but who knows, there might be enough here for two stories. A human interest story on your hobby, pursuit, here seems like a natural. Now, what about this burned-out foundation? Do you have plans for that?” he asked, as we got closer to a patch of my life I try not to see too much.

  “No, no plans. An old cook shed used to be there, but it’s long gone.”

  “No desire to rebuild or use the slab as a foundation for something else?”

  “Nope, no desire. Now, this building here, next to the pump house, this is what they called a granary, or seed barn, where a farmer would keep cottonseed for the next yield, oats for the horses, cattle feed, and—”

  “What is Fireball, Mr. McMorsey?” the reporter asked, acting all innocent, bringing me back not to Vietnam, because I really do not like to think about the last game there, but instead back to the time in New York. Liza Jean knew I’d broken my nose in a Fireball game, and that I never got it fixed, but she didn’t know why, and she didn’t like to talk about it much either.

  “Come on,” Shirley Mounter said, that summer. After that first evening at the bar, somehow we had made it back to her apartment. Okay, yeah, I had a part in persuading her we should go back there for coffee to sober me up before I drove back to Fred’s place on the reservation. The one thing I had hoped for had led to another, and suddenly, it was months later and we were deep into a routine of encounters, falling in love along the way. I had already begun to fall for her over in the jungles, s
o really these times were her catching up to where I was.

  Oh, it was always early of a morning when she would wake me. I’m a pretty early riser, in general, but she was dragging my ass out long before the sun come up. I think there were still crickets chirping it was so early. This time was to be one of the last encounters I would ever have with her, but we got a lot of experience fit into a few short months, here and there. Every morning was like this one. She would shag me out and I would make it back to Fred’s momma’s place for a while, catch another couple hours of sleep before he got up, and then we’d be off, doing something or another. “I’ll see you tonight, at Fireball,” Shirley said, kissing me in the dawn.

  “Okay,” I said, and she seemed all disappointed that I didn’t ask what it was, but I already knew. I was for sure it would be different from the way we played it at the firebases but did not realize how different it would be until that night.

  “Wait,” she said, reaching around my neck. I thought she was going to hug me, but she grabbed the chain of my dog tags and lifted them off of me. “Can I keep these, until tonight?” She reached down the front of my shirt to get the tags themselves, her fingers running through the hair there. I wanted nothing more than to go back into her apartment for just a little while longer but that was definitely out, as far as she was concerned.

  “ Yeah, I guess I know who I am, if I get lost,” I said. “And there’s less chance of a sniper out here.” I felt naked and missing something once they were gone, kept reaching for them in the few months following, but eventually, I guess you grow into the feeling of absence and I have never since worn anything around my neck.

  That first year I saw real experts playing it, shortly after Fred and I got back from Vietnam, I just watched. The parking lot lamps around the field were switched off and the only light we got was from the flaming ball and goalposts. With Shirley guiding me, my sideline commentator, I studied the dark field filled with men chasing this blazing clump of rags across the grass toward opposite goalposts. Some picked it up with gloves and threw it, some didn’t even bother with gloves, some jumped to block a shot with their chests, heads—the crazier the man, the louder the cheering. At the firebase, we had played it like a friendly game of soccer. These men were in it for keeps, as if their lives depended on what they were doing out there in the dew and kerosene smoke.

  That next year was a different story. Shirley and I had spent a lot of time together by then. I had gone back to Texas in the middle of the summer, got my truck-driving-school certification, and started taking the long hauls, from Texas to New York—that was my standard route for that whole year. It was a year for me to get used to living back out in the flats, the barren areas around home, where the only trees were the pecans and mesquite around the place my daddy had set aside for me, while I was over. In his own way, he was trying to believe I would come on back. I was also trying to get used to another idea Fred sprung on me one night while we were lying out by a bonfire in his momma’s backyard, drinking and watching the stars, our usual habit. He fired up a joint and passed it to me, just like we used to do on patrol. That night, it was just the two of us. For whatever reason, everyone else was busy, and Fred had told me when I pulled in that Shirley’s old man was back in town.

  “Hey,” he said, after throwing down another log. The sparks shot up and disappeared among the stars.

  “What?”

  “I want to ask you something.”

  “How come I can take a bigger toke than you?” I laughed.

  “No, I’m serious,” he said.

  “Then you shouldn’t have passed this,” I said, laughed again, and drew another big lungful, watching the embers creep closer to my fingertips. He didn’t laugh. “Okay, okay, I’m serious, too. What?”

  “The kiddo? I want you to take him. Not right away, maybe next year, this time, when we’re both on our feet. You and me.”

  “Take him? Like to come visit me in the summers or some shit like that? The road is probably not such a good life for a little kid like that, and I think he would get bored and wanna come home after a week of hanging around my momma’s place. There is not a lot to do in the flatlands of West Texas. Why do you think I’m here?” I propped up and looked at him across the fire, trying to see what he was getting at. His face was blank, like it got sometimes in the jungles when he saw things he didn’t want to sink through the surface.

  “No, I mean take him, period. I’m getting out of here. I had to come back for something, some purpose, Tom. And this is what I think it is. I’m going to Hollywood. All those Indians die on the screen up there. If I could survive Vietnam, I can surely survive Hollywood. It’s the one thing I’ve wanted to do, in my whole life.”

  “ Yeah, okay, pack the boy’s bags and throw them in the rig right now. Come on, Fred, what the hell kind of talk is this?”

  “This is the kind. If I stay here, I’m going to be dead, five years, tops. Man, I just can’t do this. My liver’s going to be shot. I get up in the morning, every morning, with a hangover. I don’t remember what it feels like to not have one.”

  “Well, then don’t drink every night, simple as that,” I said, though I knew for sure it was not nearly as simple as that. The thing keeping me sober was the road. I didn’t have to look at those faces from home asking me how I could kill someone, even in wartime, and then come home and eat a hamburger at the drive-in, big as life, as if I had never shot someone in the head. I never did, as far as I know, but it’s possible. You get shot at, you shoot back, and eventually, the person shooting at you, he stops. Either you got him, or he’s moved on. I nearly know someone is dead on my account, probably a lot of someones. We found bodies at times, others not, and who could ever say whose bullet had blasted the top of some VC ’s head off like a popped piece of bubblegum?

  The road was free. I could sit in a truck-stop diner anywhere in the country and eat in peace, no one looking at me and seeing the history he had decided I owned. There was something awfully powerful in that, in being just another grubby-faced long-haul driver with a cup of coffee and a greasy cap. And there was always Shirley to think about too. That seventeen hundred miles disappeared when I knew she was waiting on the other end of things, warming up a place for me in her Pendleton blanket. I knew if I lost my license drinking on the road, my days of seeing her on any kind of regular basis would be at an end and that kept me in line, so I guess I knew the attractions of hangovers as a way of life, too. I just had better incentives than to keep that up.

  “You know how I found him, when I got home? Nadine, his ma, was living over at Bertha Monterney’s house, where all those dancers live? I don’t know. Bertha has a good reputation for keeping her dancers, but maybe they’ve had a rough year, I can’t say.”

  “Dancers? I’m not for sure I know what you’re talking about here, Fred. We don’t have such in parts where I come from, I guess. Like the striptease we saw at that burlesque house at China Beach?”

  “No! Of course not!”

  “Well, I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me what you’re talking about, then? Remember, I am not from around these parts.”

  “Sorry, Tom. Bertha, she runs kind of a house for castoffs, people who don’t fit so well with their families anymore but who still want to be part of the reservation. She takes them in, teaches them traditional dancing, and they have to perform at exhibitions and competitions, mostly Indian Villages at state and county fairs. The prize money helps keep the house afloat. But you know, you can’t change everyone overnight and Nadine, she’s kind of a tough one. When I got to the house, my boy was sitting there, under the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal with water, wearing nothing but a diaper he had shit in, a long time before I had gotten there, maybe even the day before.”

  “Shat.”

  “What?”

  “Shat, a diaper he had shat in. It’s the past tense of shit.”

  “Are you even listening to me, Tommy Jack?”

  “Yeah, I’m listening,�
� I said, but I didn’t want to. I had seen enough nasty things over there. I didn’t need to hear of things just as dreadful on the home front.

  “Anyway, my ma is getting too old to take care of a little guy like that. He’s a handful and her patience is thin. Bertha talked Nadine into giving him to me, or else she was going to throw her out of the dance group. Now Nadine, she’s one of Bertha’s good dancers, steady prizewinner.” He paused, then ducked his head and said, “She does other things well, too, but not that you can get paid for—”

  “You can get paid for those things. Shit, I’ve paid for it.”

  “Well, either way, that’s what’s going to happen to this kid if you don’t take him. If I stay here, I’m going to wind up dead, and he’ll wind up with her. And if I leave, he’s going to wind up there with her. Unless you take him. I checked into it, already. Since my name is on the birth certificate, I can appoint you his guardian, simple as that. Nadine isn’t going to contest it. As I was trying to say, she’s got enough of a problem keeping herself fed, let alone dealing with a kid.”

  “For the record, I haven’t really ever paid for it.” I laughed, but it was a fake laugh, and he knew it. He waited me out and finally, I agreed to do it, probably for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t to save Fred, and that’s a good thing, since you can see how that came out, but he needed something to hang on to and I guess that thing for him was Hollywood. For me, it was something else. I had fixed up a life for myself, all nice and neat in my head. I was going to take Shirley Mounter away from that place, her cramped little apartment in the city, and make a home for her with me out on the plains. The boy seemed fond of her when she came around, and I could picture us all living together: me, Shirley, the boy, even her kids, when I found out about all of them. It was going to be okay, and what was one more kid? And the boy would have some folks from home, too, so that would be good for him. I figured I had a year to work on this before I asked her to unplant herself and move with me to Big Antler. In the meantime, I would get to know this little boy who I guess was going to share my life as well as my name.