A year goes by remarkably fast sometimes, for sure, and suddenly, I’d been home a year and it was the next July and there I was, lying on Shirley Mounter’s floor, where I had just about taken up residence for a part of most months that whole year. We had gone to the National Picnic together that second year. The first year, I had gone with Fred and had only met up with Shirley at the Fireball game that night, just before the lights had been cut. I don’t know what we were thinking the second year.
There were some white folks who came out to the reservation for the picnic but not too many and mostly they stuck together and did not socialize with any Indians. It was clear they had not really known any and had just come down to see what there was to see, buy some beadwork or feathered headdresses for the kids, stuff like that. Kind of like the Indian zoo, I suppose. Fred and I had stuck out that first year, hanging around together. Their world on the reservation was not unlike the small towns of West Texas, everyone knowing everyone else, but there were differences. Their kids seemed vastly more independent than the kids in Big Antler, wandering free at very young ages like every adult in their immediate area was looking out for their well-being. Another strange thing was the way they interacted with adults, as if their opinions counted with the same level of believability, and as I watched the adults respond, that seemed to be true enough. The whole reservation moved back and forth between a place I could easily recognize and one almost as alien as Vietnam had been.
That second year, I had mostly gotten used to the way things operated on the reservation but maybe had just turned a blind eye to the ways I didn’t fit in, wanting to fit anywhere as desperately as I had. While I only had eyes for Shirley that second year at the picnic and probably didn’t notice the stares and glares we must have gotten, we for sure must have stuck out even more obviously than Fred and I had. She and I paraded around the picnic grove filled with carnival booths on Friday night like any other couple who had come down to share the weekend together. We’d done the penny pitch and the tomahawk throw, had some cotton candy, fry bread, that weird corn soup they serve, and were about full to the point of busting a button, and had watched the Fireball game for the second time, as played by the experts.
“Do you think you could play?” Shirley asked, that Friday night, laying her head on my chest. Her hair still smelled of the kerosene smoke that filled the air, long after that ball had died out and the parking lot lights came back on and everyone pretended we didn’t live in a world where people we knew died left and right, all around us, one day, and the next day, we saw men proving their strength by picking up a flaming ball and heaving it across the night sky. Those changes in the places I lived were not that fast, I know, but it seemed like it. Shirley put up with a lot that year, as I would wake up almost every night at least once, jumping from her floor, shouting after my M-16 for a few minutes until I saw her, lying there, drowsy, pulled awake by my leaping, and I made my way back to this place. But that night, I just lay awake and thought of her question.
“I played, already,” I said finally, toward morning, and she roused some. I guess she had finally dozed, waiting on my answer. “Over there. Fred showed us how, told us that it was a medicine game, that it would get us through the night. Funny, no one knew we were playing since we did it at a firebase. The bases were supposed to be hidden, so the snipers and launchers couldn’t get a clear bead on our location. Fires were, of course, frowned upon, and we must have put ourselves and others in danger, but the funny thing was—”
“No one ever saw your game fires, did they? Aside from the people playing and the people who were supposed to be watching?”
“Well, I don’t know about that, but we never once were fired on, any of the times we played, except for that very last time, and, well, that was a different circumstance, I think. Things had changed.”
“That’s part of the medicine. Only those who are using it right get to see it, get to be a part of it. Sometimes, people have invited others, you know, like you, white people, out here to watch the games, and they must not be intended to be a part of it.”
“The players just don’t play if the wrong people are there? That seems, well, a little odd, don’t you think?”
“No, the games always go on. But something happens. No one knows what, could be they need to get back to a babysitter, or someone needs to use the bathroom and they don’t want to use the roughing-it kind we have here, but I’ve heard there have been people who’ve tried to watch the Fireball game for years and it never, ever happens.”
“You don’t believe that hoodoo, do you?”
“Hoodoo do you?” she mocked me, in a fakey West Texas accent, and we laughed silently for a minute in the dark of her apartment. She felt so sweet, her body bumping just light and warm against mine, like she was knocking on the door to my heart, you know, and I was running for the door as fast as I could. We were silent for a minute, then she brought her face up to mine and smiled, those white teeth picking up any light in that darkened room. “So what happened, then, that last time?”
“Nothing important,” I said.
“You’re lying to me, Tommy Jack.”
“I never claimed otherwise,” I said, and switched positions, climbing back on top of her, gently, letting my belly rest against hers but keeping my knees on the floor, so I wouldn’t squash her with my weight.
“I think you’re ready to play here,” she said and craned her neck up, like she was going to lick on my ear and I confess, I lowered my head a little to give her a better angle but all she did was whisper. “Tonight, you have to play,” she said.
“What makes you think so?”
“You saw the game last night. It’s time.”
“I saw it last year too.”
“Then you’re overdue,” she said as her hips rose to meet mine and we didn’t say anything more for quite a while, probably not until the sun came up and I got my clothes all gathered up and headed back to Fred’s house.
So that night I played, there, on the reservation, for the first time. There were no real rules about who got to play, other than the side you were on, Young Men if you had no kids and Old Men if you did, but there was that unspoken rule about only men from the reservation or who had some real connection with it being able to play. Shirley and I had waited on the sidelines until the lights had been cut and then she pulled a pair of gloves and a bandanna from her purse, putting them on me to protect my hands and hide my hair. This seemed pointless to me since there was not one other person on the field with a red beard and I would be visible even in the minimal light offered by the flaming ball, but if this was what she wanted, I would do it.
I ran out and joined the Young Men’s team since I didn’t have any kids. I kept looking for Fred on the playing field but he disappeared when the field went dark. He should have been on the other team and I still thought, long into the game, that he might have been there, it being so dark and all. About midway through, I was out of the game, anyway. I ran with the best of them, kicking the ball when I could, getting kicked by other players, getting tripped, these guys all played for keeps but I was okay with that. I knew how to trip someone up too, if need be, so I was holding my own until I ran afoul of two men who disappeared right back into the black night of shifting legs and arms.
One of them dropped under me and his ribs connected with my kneecaps as I tumbled straight on over him. My face met the chest of someone else standing right behind that guy. He took my head, wrenched it sideways, and gave me three direct knuckle punches to the nose, wham, wham, wham, then he helped me straight along in my free fall, shoving my head into the grass. The world was spinning around me. I was as visible as I suspected, even there in the minimal light.
By the time I got up, most of the game had passed me by. I wandered off to the sidelines and waited to get my vision straightened out. I pulled up the belly of my T-shirt and held it to my nose. My mustache was already matted with blood and it wasn’t showing any signs of stopping. I tried holdi
ng my head back to stop it but that just kept me choking on the coppery taste of blood sliding down my throat. I pinched my nose shut and saw some of the brightest stars I ever have seen. It felt wrong, like one of those noses they attach to the glasses with the funny eyebrows but I could not bear to move it.
The lights eventually came up and Fred found me, took me back to his place, and got me cleaned up.
“I guess some of Harris’s cousins must have been playing. Maybe I should have warned you but you seemed to really need to play again and I didn’t think it was my place to stop you,” he said, wiping a warm washcloth through my mustache and beard, then rinsing it out, turning the water a dull pink.
“Harris?”
“Harris Mounter, Shirley’s husband. I told her she shouldn’t bring you to the picnic, that you should have come with me, but that was the way she wanted it.”
“Husband?” I asked.
“Yeah, he’s gone right now, but that doesn’t mean he don’t have eyes here. And fists, from the looks of things. We better get you to the hospital. I’m pretty sure that’s broken,” he said, touching my nose a little. I jumped back, couldn’t help it, it hurt so bad, and he just nodded away. “Come on, they’ll fix you up.”
“Husband?” I repeated.
“You’re not telling me you didn’t know. Where did you think all those kids came from, the stork?”
“Well, everyone always just called him her old man—you, even. Man, what do you think, I would just . . .” It was the same feeling I had when Liza Jean had left me with nothing but neatly looped cursive letters on that stationery her mother always gave her for Christmas. I suppose I must have known they were married, but after all that had happened in the war, I had gotten pretty good at telling myself lies. You had to, in Vietnam, or sometimes you would just go crazy. Some of that shit was not meant for humans to do or see.
“Like I said, they never were a good fit. Remember? How many times have you been here when he’s even been around, twice?” I nodded. I always called before I showed up, and once, one of those kids answered the phone and asked their dad when their mom was coming home, so I hung up the phone quick. The second time, he answered. It was funny to hear his voice. He became real in that moment, not real enough to keep me away but real enough to keep me cautious. I know, some people would say I only got what I deserved, but there’s more to it than that, and somehow, knowing this was not just someone she had grown comfortable with, but instead someone she had walked down a church aisle with, someone she had shared a honeymoon with, all those things I had never done and had dreamed of doing with her, it was all gone when I found out Mounter was her married name.
“Doesn’t change anything,” Fred said.
“It changes everything,” I said. “When are you leaving for California?”
“I could anytime, I guess. Was kind of waiting until you were ready to take the kiddo.”
“That should for sure not have been your biggest deciding factor. What if I changed my mind?”
“You wouldn’t have. Even if I left, you’d be back here for him in a little while, on your next trip to see Shirley.”
“Well, this is it. I’m leaving tomorrow, and I’ll take him with me then. If you want, you can come along and we’ll take you as far west as Big Antler. Might be kind of nice for you to help the boy settle in with me, but if you can’t do it by tomorrow, you’re gonna have to do this yourself. I won’t be back.”
And so that was how we left, without much of a word to anyone. When I had last seen Shirley, I pictured her single with that bunch of kids. At that time, I didn’t want to see her again, knowing I would remember her face as a married face instead. I am sure that doesn’t make any sense to anyone, but to me, right then and there, it did. That feeling faded in time but things were different when I eventually saw her, those couple years later. She did have a married face then but so did I. We were somehow equal in what we were up to then.
So Fred and the boy, they climbed up into my cab that morning as I hurried so as to not break down and go see Shirley anyway. We said good-bye to Fred’s momma and she gave us a bunch of fresh fry bread for the trip. We got on the road and I never looked back, until I had to. Fred stayed at my place for almost a month with the boy. I got him a job lifting down at the Tractor and Feed, and he saved enough to cushion himself when he got out to California, and the boy and I saw him off from Lubbock by the end of summer. I got my route switched to do the locals only, so I was always home for a late supper.
My momma had grown accustomed to watching the boy some when I was on the road during the day and she seemed to really like his company. He didn’t laugh a lot at first but my momma was always a crackerjack talent with filling the time of little kids, and soon she and the boy were doing all kinds of things together. That show on the public television for kids was just coming on in those days, with all those puppets, and she picked up some puppet likenesses of them for the boy. He would put on shows for hours on end for her and her lady friends. They thought that boy just hung the moon, as Liza Jean would come to, for a while.
For my part, I worked hard on trying to forget the sound of Shirley Mounter’s voice, the feel of her skin next to mine, the fry bread she fed me, in little tears from the piece, licking the butter from my mustache and kissing me, the way she would rub my back just a little when I walked by, that feel from her fingertips to the middle of my back—there was nothing like it. Did I ever successfully forget it? No. Not one bit.
Even after Liza Jean came back into my life, things were not the same. We walked down the aisle and all, but she had already done it, before me, with someone else. You think that doesn’t make a difference, though I can tell you, it surely does. She finally took the ring I had for her, which was admittedly not as nice as the one the Giant had given her and she has worn it since that day but my memories never left.
“My wife here, she don’t like to talk about Fireball, too much,” I said, as we stood out in the backyard. “That burnt-out foundation you were pointing at, back there? That happened the only time the game was ever played here, so you can see why she’s not so partial.”
“That was what we were curious about, Mr. McMorsey. A significant number of residents of Big Antler thought Fireball was something we should ask you about.”
“Nosy fuckers. Sorry, guess you can edit that out, though.”
“Not a problem, sir. Now, about this Fireball?”
“Most of those nosy . . . nosy buggers probably weren’t even living here then but the old-timers, they got nothing better to do than sit around the coffee shops and gas stations and tell old stories and that is one of the stories they tell. Why don’t you save me some trouble and tell me what you’ve already heard for yourself and then I can fill in the gaps for you.”
“That’s not the way interviews work, sir. If you’d rather not go into it, Mr. McMorsey, that’s fine, but we’ll probably have to note your reticence in the segment.”
“My what?”
“The way you are not answering the questions, Tommy Jack. Laws, you would think someone with almost a master’s degree would have a better vocabulary,” Liza Jean said, giving me her favorite eye roll.
“There’s no almost. I got the degree,” I said. She didn’t count it, because I did it by correspondence at an extension site and transferred it in, just to be done with the damned thing.
“Well, there was this boy I adopted, my best friend’s boy, and I raised him as my own, at first, and then, when Liza Jean and I married, we raised him together. He was from, I guess what they call now, a different subculture. See, I do know some of those more sophisticated words, and anyway, Fireball was from his world. I was trying to give him a taste of his heritage, but that game, it’s a funny thing. Some people from that part of the world, they say only those who need it, and who are supposed to see it, can be involved in it, at the time.”
“And do you believe that, Mr. McMorsey?”
“Does it matter what I believe?”
I was beginning to think it really didn’t anymore, and hadn’t, since I got that letter saying I was supposed to go get Fred’s stuff, the letter telling me he was dead. I had believed, right up to the moment I opened that envelope, that he was going to really make it, and he would come back for the boy, then, and they would have a good life together. I would miss the boy something terrible, mind you, but a boy should be with his daddy, after all.
“Tommy Jack, you are not playing that game here, again,” Liza Jean said, as I unhooked that microphone and slid it out of my pant leg. She ran back to the house, flipped the switches on the secondary pumps, and started hooking up hoses, figuring I was going to screw up something. She was never all that hot on the way I did things on my own, which stands to reason, given my past.
“The last time I did this,” I said, “was when I brought my best friend’s clothes back, after he died. I brought them here, made a ball with them, and it was a big one, I can tell you for sure. I soaked it to high heaven and dragged it out here into the yard. It was time to teach the boy we both claimed as a son about the medicine game of Fireball. I don’t know what the boy was thinking I was gonna do, he was only a little guy at the time, you know, but it was for sure he didn’t know I was gonna do what I did. I sparked the ball the way we used to, back in the jungles. I had a couple of tokes off a joint, I know you’re thinking I shouldn’t have been doing that in front of the boy, bad role model and all, but he couldn’t tell any difference. I used to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes, anyway. So I got the tip hot and touched it to the ball, and it went up like the well-made fireball it was. I kicked it to the boy and told him to kick it right on back.” I had to stop there for a minute. Liza Jean never much particularly cared for this part, but she watched me tell it.
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