Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  “He was crying, screaming. He could see his real daddy’s shirts as they disappeared into that black smoke, and he let it go right on by and then he started to chasing it. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I had kicked it a lot harder than I had thought and it rolled right on over into that cook shed I had made it in, straight through the open door, and I must have left the lid off the gas can, ’cause a few seconds later a big rumbling fireball pushed its way out that door and then the can exploded, and, well, I had to tackle the boy to keep him from trying to go in there to get those clothes.

  “It was the wrong medicine for him, or the wrong time, or something. I fu . . . I messed up. He wasn’t hurt, any.”

  “You mean he wasn’t burnt, any, Tommy Jack,” Liza Jean said. They saved that in the interview, I am sure.

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean,” I said. I didn’t say anything for a while and none of them did, either, but their tape machine was still whispering on the uptake spool. “You might as well shut that off,” I said to the cameraman. “The only people who can ever see this are the ones who need it. You can try, but when you watch your tape, all you’ll get is static and snow.” They all looked at each other like, who is this crackpot? I could read that one, easy.

  “So,” I said, after some prep, lighting my first fireball in about three decades, “who’s ready for some medicine? Who needs some healing?” I kicked the ball hard the other day and the sparks flew up into the darkening sky to join the stars just coming out. The ball rolled out across the dusty yard and I waited to see who was brave enough to admit on national television they needed medicine and what that segment editor might see when he chose to run this tape through. They watched that ball arc out across my backyard, not a one of them daring to admit what I asked them to. Their feet hesitated. I could see in their eyes that they had done things wrong in their lives, maybe crossed people they’d loved, said things they shouldn’t have, walked away when they knew they should have stayed and tried to work things out. Each of them twitched just a little as the ball rolled by, heading toward invisible goals. This time, the sun was still up and not a one of them was willing to admit there what they might have admitted, had I waited until the shadows ate up our past mistakes. We all watched my one lonely kick and got ready for the live interview that was to come, not even remotely aware of these lost opportunities. They were, well, really, we all were, deeply unprepared for what would eventually arrive.

  ACT TWO:

  Camera

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  Sound Track

  IF THE TELEPHONE ON THIS TABLE RINGS, ANSWER IT. IT WILL BE HIS WIFE ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE. SHE WANTS YOU TO KNOW IT IS STILL POSSIBLE TO TOUCH SOMEONE WITH A RANDOM ACT OF KINDNESS.

  —Artist’s statement placard,

  John Lennon Exhibit, 2000

  Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,

  Cleveland, Ohio

  Annie Boans

  T.J. wanted to hit Cleveland before the news program went on the air at ten, so we had plenty of time. We passed out of Niagara County and merged with the interstate that would take us all the way there, a straight shot once we were outside of Buffalo. The dead and decaying steel plants gave way to anonymous highways, surrounded by equally anonymous dense tree lines.

  Though I hadn’t wanted to, we went on the section of the thruway running straight through another local reservation, our most direct route. Off to one side, an enormous wooden statue of an Indian wearing a Lakota headdress, his skin painted nearly fuchsia, was the only indication we were within an Indian nation. My new life was mapped out, literally, on the landscape—an Indian history abruptly split by two concrete ribbons, asphalt, white dotted lines. Only clichéd codas gave any indication of the lives beyond the thick wild growth. I tried to ignore this display and watched, the markers and occasional green signs announcing the number of miles to Erie and then to Cleveland and the implied places after. Those implications weighed heavily, though T.J. had the good sense not to ask about my silence. Usually, we had no trouble filling our time with discussions of his father, or with laughter or academic discussions, sometimes all three at once.

  “What do you make of that?” he asked, crossing into Pennsylvania, pointing to one of those interstate information signs. The sky, that vague yellow of an old bruise, would soon fully bloom in orange and purple hues on its way to darkness but it was stuck on that sickly yellow. “What can that possibly be?” One of the restaurant options was something called the Quaker Steak & Lube. “Do you get fine dining while your oil’s being changed somewhere else in the building?”

  “The sign says restaurant,” I said. “Here’s the exit. We have time.” I didn’t want to engage in a lot of small talk in the motel room before the program started and was hoping to get checked in only minutes before. The topic of fathers would bring us both discomfort, though he had no idea about my potential unpleasant associations waiting ahead. I have no way of knowing definitively if Tommy Jack is my father or not, but my mother’s reaction put it a lot closer to probable than I had anticipated. T.J. didn’t need to know this potential, though. Maybe after I could say for certain one way or another, I’d tell him. But until that time, what would be the point?

  We imagined so much more than the restaurant truly was. Even when it came into view, it had so much potential. The owners had made the place to look like a garage. We dreamed up tables in pits, where hydraulic chairs lowered diners to table height. The waiters of our imaginations wore dark-blue, ill-fitting coveralls as they took your orders on parts invoices. They wiped dirty hands with oily rags, fingernails hopelessly blackened, their names embroidered on small, oval-shaped chest patches. The salad bar would have thick hoses hanging from the ceiling, labeled bleu cheese, ranch, French, Italian, instead of 10W-30, 10W-40, synthetic, blend, and when you pressed the trigger, an air compressor would pump measured amounts of dressing onto your salad.

  “Not bad,” T.J. said as we ate, and he was right. We’d had the right idea, just a bit too elaborate. The tables and booths were nondescript but there were metal lifts, holding restored classic cars above you as you dined. Random antique gasoline pumps littered the room, with small televisions embedded in their innards, airing a baseball game.

  The place fell into that bar and grill category, emphasis on the bar. Rowdier patrons reminded us, screeching and yelling and slapping at each other’s shoulders and backs over the game’s score. The menu had clever, automotive-sounding names for items, beers listed as “lubricants,” but I felt absurd ordering a hubcap of anything.

  We studied the menu and came to the same conclusion. It would be a while before we tasted food from home again. Though it was risky to be a hundred miles from Buffalo and order chicken wings, we did. Most places away from home do a dreadful job, in the same way I imagine a Philly cheesesteak in Philadelphia is likely quite different from the mall food court versions back home.

  “O-ring?” T.J. offered when our order came, lifting one from the plate. A small aerial mounted at its center held the stack of battered onions. He wanted me to bite the onion ring he held, to have his fingers so close to my mouth, to be intimate in ways that only long-involved couples are. The gesture was not the high school crush version of offering your date some food, the implied new sexuality of orifice and extremity. It was the gesture of someone knowing everything there was to know about another’s body, tactile memory. These were definitely memories we did not share, and I had no intention of ever becoming involved with him. It would be inappropriate to encourage T.J. in his belief that we might.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’m good with the wings.” He silently ate what he had offered. These wings were decent. We were at the exact outer edge of appropriate wing territory, where they still called them chicken wings, instead of needing to add “Buffalo” as a modifier. Though I’d never been to Texas, I suspected nobody from there had ever heard of a Texas Red-Hot.

  “What are you thinking so profoundly about?” T.J. asked.

&nb
sp; “Texas Red-Hots,” I said, laughing.

  “What’s that?” he asked. “Sounds obscene.”

  “It’s not, don’t worry. I was just thinking, no, never mind, it’s stupid. Doug used to hate when I would rattle on about stuff like the names for things,” I said.

  “I’m not Doug,” he said, looking right at me and nodding.

  “We should go,” I said and I grabbed the check. He said he had to stop at the men’s room and would meet me at the car.

  We got into Cleveland far ahead of schedule and decided to get a motel on the city’s perimeter, rather than paying downtown tourist prices. A bed is a bed, and as long as the TV had decent reception, I really didn’t care, otherwise. T.J. suggested we share a room, dual queen-size beds, and I agreed, if that were available. I didn’t know how long we would be gone, truly; my finances were not limitless, and I was certain his weren’t, either.

  The room was reasonable, and I kept my things on my side, even in the bathroom, setting lines of demarcation clearly for T.J. He would not succumb to the belief everyone else had about us. We’ve had a certain kind of intimacy, a professional intimacy if there is such a thing, sharing the same strange life of the Indian academic, but that was all it was and all it ever would be. T.J. wanted more but I took great pains to make sure he never got any encouragement. To do anything less only would have been cruel.

  “Anything you want to do?” he asked. It was still three hours until the program started, and he seemed agitated about seeing Tommy Jack McMorsey again, even as an image shot from a cathode ray gun.

  “Let’s go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I think that Lennon exhibit is still up, and I really did want to see it,” I said. “It’s still hard to believe he’s been dead over twenty years, now.” We parked in front of the strange contemporary glass pyramid in less than ten minutes.

  “For a while there, I played Imagine almost every day. My daddy always loved his music,” T.J. said, paying our admission. My family had immersed me in it with almost no awareness on my part. I gradually understood the specifics of artists with their art while I was still young. With songs I loved on the radio, I asked someone older whose song it was, and the answer, almost invariably, had been the Beatles or one of them individually after it was over. When I began buying albums, my first were theirs, and Royal, when he moved out, took his favorites from his collection and left me the rest. Naturally, he took Revolver and Abbey Road, but he left me all of the early stuff and Rubber Soul and Let It Be.

  My mother and I had been watching M*A*S*H on late-night TV, after the news, when we heard of the shooting. I was nearing junior high school age, and New York City was an imaginary landscape I had formed from years of films, television shows, and news stories. It was a place where you might get murdered, turning any street corner, or you might run into a celebrity, turning the next, instead. The odds encouraged certain inevitabilities.

  The TV news that night didn’t show much—police cars outside the Dakota building, lights flashing, people standing around, crying. At first, I wanted to believe he’d been wounded, that he would have a long recuperation period, where thousands of people would send him flowers and cards, and we’d all be aware of the precious thing we’d almost lost and we’d cherish him from then on, though he would never acknowledge anything had ever happened. He would continue to walk in Central Park, still have his picture taken with fans, the only difference being the bodyguards who would stick closer to him than they had before. All those people crying, singing his songs, lighting candles in that cold December night told us differently, though, and my mother had shut the TV off, mid-laugh track, once the show resumed.

  The museum was sparsely populated when we arrived and we headed up to the main exhibit, not bothering to look around. Other opportunities to visit the museum would present themselves at some later date. At the entrance to the exhibit, two things caught my eye, though I initially refused to look at one of them. It would have to wait until I was ready.

  A white telephone with no dial sat atop a small white table, next to a stylistically identical white chair. The phone appeared to be live, as a white wire trailed off into the wall. A small wall-mounted description informed us that if the phone were to ring, we should pick it up, as it would be his wife, widow, on the other end of the line. I thought this was a fairly interesting and provocative installation and it did keep my mind away from what I knew I would find in that other small exhibit case a few feet away.

  It seemed strange that the table was not roped off, like so many other parts of the show, and I wondered how many people had picked up the phone to hear if indeed there were a dial tone. Two men about my age, maybe a little older, stood just out of reaching distance the whole time we walked through the rest of the exhibit. One looked bored but attentive to the other, who, it was clear, desperately hoped that phone would ring. The slouched posture of the one suggested they’d been loitering there a while. They were plainly best friends, standing as close as they were, trading quiet, reverent stories—best friends, at least.

  Were people looking at us the same way? I supposed they were. We probably even looked like stronger candidates for couple-hood than those two keeping vigil. In fact, to anyone who didn’t know us, we probably looked more like a couple than I ever had with Doug, even before we had separated. The real reason my ex-husband and I had stopped going to others’ parties was not so much dedication to our families, but that we had each grown tired of the other’s friends wondering what we’d ever had in common enough to bring us together. My colleagues wondered what I was doing with a factory worker, would even go so far as to ask what we could possibly talk about when we were alone. They wondered if I were reduced to fishing stories and stock-car races, laughing dismissively and shaking their heads, asserting that it must be love. Doug’s friends, I’m certain, asked each other over endless ten o’clock coffee breaks what he saw in that bitch who always needed to be right and who could never use a regular word if there were an awkward and secret one handy.

  What Doug and I had shared for so many years was something T.J. and I had little of: a communal history. A thousand things kept us different from our non-Indian friends, the same thousand that had held us together for so long. Those same thousand things had eventually driven us apart as well. It seems odd to be legally separated. Almost no one on the reservation went the formal route. They just quit living together, but few filed the papers. Even as close to the broader world as we were, we knew the difference they never would. It’s easier to forget minority differences when you are part of the majority. Aside from T.J., I was the only Indian at the college, and Doug had been the only Indian at the plant before getting a job at the smoke shop.

  We crossed into mirror worlds every day, where everything was the opposite. Our colleagues laughed about drugging aging parents and checking them into nursing homes while they were addled. They would never laugh during that same parent’s funeral, as we would, resurrecting a joke the deceased had famously told, celebrating their ability to make us laugh, even in our sadness. So we spent years laughing with our co-workers, knowing that we would not laugh about those things at home. We stifled giggles when our colleagues carried stern or grave expressions, knowing we would be in hysterics if the same situation occurred at home. I suspected T.J. did not laugh at all during his grandmother’s funeral and was probably puzzled when so many people did, in the outer lobby.

  Doug knew the fear of a fire siren that rang eleven times the same way I did, the sound of a reservation call. T.J. was startled by the firehouse’s noon siren every day, saying it sounded identical to the tornado warning siren that sounded in Big Antler. When he’d told me that the first time, I asked him if he had not been able to look out the window and see the blue skies. He’d said his eyes knew that, but his nervous system was something else. It jumped alive with that sound, ready to work his body as fast as it could go to any shelter.

  I couldn’t really imagine storms like that, coming on suddenly out of
the sky and ripping lives apart, with little or no notice. We had storms that killed, blizzards, but they did it slowly, freezing you to death if you had been unwise enough to be on the road as the storm gradually got worse, or inducing heart attacks, if you hadn’t paced your driveway shoveling to your own health. Both of these kinds of death occurred only out of stubbornness or ignorance, but if a tornado crossed your path, there was little you could do. Either you would survive its impact or not, with little indication, ever, as to which outcome would be yours.

  Walking past the two men one last time on our way out of the show, I approached the small Plexiglas container, and looked in at what I knew I would find there. Even after all these years, the dried stain across the broken pair of glasses was still very evidently blood. I imagined that the final things on earth he’d seen—doorman, wife, floor—all had a red cast to them before everything went black for the last time. Next to the glasses was a brown patient’s belongings bag with clothing inside, and his name handwritten on it, left exactly the way his widow had received it, after the autopsy. T.J. kept his distance, stood near those other two men until I walked away from the exhibit.

  “I can’t see that,” was all he said and I respected his decision. I didn’t think Fred Howkowski had worn glasses, but he certainly must have left red stains that eventually dried to rust on some things, and perhaps a bag with his clothing in it lay somewhere before us. We walked away, assured the two men would tend to the phone if it rang, and headed back to the motel, with less than a half hour to go before showtime.