Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  “Think I’m gonna grab a shower,” T.J. said, taking his shirt off, after we locked the room’s door, “unless you want to go first.”

  “No, I’ll do that later, after the program. Go ahead.” I watched the television, not looking up, as he began undressing before entering the bathroom. He turned on the showerhead and left the door open, and I only hoped he would not attempt what he had during that first conference we had attended in New York City, the first time I had ever been there.

  “Let’s go out tonight,” he said then, after the first day’s sessions. “I lived here for a while, in the early nineties, and it can’t have changed that much.” I was terrified and excited in equal measure. “I’ll take you around the Dakota. As close as we lowlies can get, anyway.” I had always wanted to see it and that was the tipping point. “All right, why don’t you go get ready and come up to my room. I’ll leave the door unlocked, just come on in.” When I entered a little while later, he casually left the bathroom, toweling off nude, as if nothing were amiss. I looked out the window.

  “No big deal,” he said. “I had to do a few nude scenes while I was working here. Hair, Oh! Calcutta! Even a really experimental version of Cuckoo’s Nest, where we all had to wear hospital johnnies that only came down to your navel. Like scrubs, but only the tops. Not for sure what that was all about, probably just another way to sell tickets. But anyway, once you’ve stood naked in front of a Manhattan audience for six nights a week with two matinees, it’s kind of like an immodesty inoculation. The novelty of embarrassment wears off for good.” He had looked, though, from under that towel, to see if my glance had lingered, even surreptitiously, on him. He stood behind me, even as I looked out at the Empire State Building, watching our reflections in the glass as he dried himself. In retrospect, the scene had some humorous phallic relationship, but at the time, I was not laughing. He eventually gathered his clothes, and dressed on his bed. “Would you braid my hair?” he asked, tying his shoes.

  “You know how to braid your own hair, quite well,” I said. That was that and we saw the Dakota and its gated entryway, and in the years since then, neither of us has mentioned it, even in teasing.

  Now, when he went under the spraying water, I pulled out the letter my mother had given me. She had said I was welcome to read it. I neatly opened it and there was nothing magic in it, no doorway for me to this other life, to this stranger who would be my father. It was more of a doorway into my mother’s life.

  I kept trying but could never hear her voice right in my head. I only heard the alternately stern and critical or closed and protected voice I usually received. If I could reconstruct the voice she’d used when I had confronted her this afternoon, I might get the tone of this letter, but I had almost never heard that voice. It was hard to maintain it in my head, having so few words in it stored. The voice kept reverting back to the one with which I was most familiar—the one she used in trying to persuade me of something. It didn’t matter what: that I should grow my hair back; get a summer job with Doug at the shop; stop talking about dead people in public; and most frequently, that I should stop this city nonsense and come home.

  The woman who had written this letter knew how to risk everything. The one I knew risked almost nothing in her life unless she had five backup plans. This was a woman who had harbored possibilities for many years, who dreamed of a different life, knowing it was not possible but still investing in it. This was a woman I had never glimpsed in my mother, even once. This unfamiliar woman was a stranger in love with a man who was even more of a stranger.

  In a few minutes, I would see the man who had found this woman hiding inside of my mother. This man had magic that caused her willingly to endure a thirty-year mockery, to disregard her whole community, and to lie for my entire life, for his sake. There was more to this story than I’d ever glimpse, but the next doorway I would get to that world was about to open and I had the key in my hand, the small black plastic remote control unit to this motel television set.

  A part of me wanted to shut the television off and close that door before it opened even a crack. What kind of wind was going to blast through it? Would I hear an evacuation siren over his voice filling my ears for the first time? Would I find shelter? I had given up the possibility of tossing that key in the trash, though, when I agreed to accompany T.J., knowing he would not miss this broadcast for anything. What could this man possibly have that would invoke such dedication from three people who should have no affinity with him whatsoever?

  The shower stopped a minute before the program with Tommy Jack McMorsey began and as T.J. stepped back into the room, he wore a T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts, and he squeezed his hair in his towel, then efficiently braided it and sat on his bed. I stayed on mine and watched the television while the opening credits scrolled. I held on to the remote in one hand and the bedpost in the other, wondering if I were ready for what might come abruptly for me over the air.

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  Live Feed

  Dear Tom,

  When are you gonna come back down? Or is it up from Big Antler to L.A.? I had to get rid of my compass a while back. Or I thought I did, but it wasn’t really the compass talking to me. I only realized after I had already dismantled it to see if there was a secret Army device inside trying to send me home, and all I saw was what I guess you’re supposed to find inside a compass. But since I didn’t know how you were supposed to put it back together again, I decided to get rid of it. Don’t worry, it won’t be telling anyone else any of the things we saw over there in the jungles. I was very careful to collect all the pieces and put them in a plastic bag with scraps from other things, a couple old alarm clocks, even little tubes from inside my TV that didn’t seem to affect it too much, and then I filled the rest of the bag with dirt, and buried it in the undergrowth in a park a few miles from here, so even if someone digs it up and tries to put it back together, they’ll be thrown off wondering where all those extra parts go. Pretty good idea, huh? Just like what we used to do in the jungles when we got some of those nasty C rations nobody wanted. Remember ham and claymores? What was that shit? Lima beans? Oh man, gives me the shivers now, even to think. I never got hungry enough to eat that nastiness, and remember: “nobody eat the apricots.” That sad motherfucker Hughes ate the apricots and bought it not ten minutes later. Never eat the apricots, Tom, no matter what you do, never eat them. I bet maybe the bear was looking for apricots. As bad luck for bears as for us, those apricots were. Also remember, you have to puncture the cans when you leave them behind because even though you don’t want to eat them, you also never want to feed the enemy. They can try if they want, but the punctured cans in that heat, mm mm good, isn’t that what the Campbell’s Soup kids say? I think it is. Okay, anyway, I better get going here.

  Not eating the apricots in L.A.,

  Fred Howkowski

  Tommy Jack McMorsey

  That letter has never left me. It stayed in the back of my head all the time. Even there, on live national television, it continued to play, as it always did when things stress on me. Like the Japanese woman, the letter from Fred was a constant reminder of my failures in life, so there I was, thinking about Fred and talking about that young woman, again. The interview was going fairly routine, about as I expected but how do you describe someone going insane on you? It’s a gradual process and one day, the person you used to spend every waking hour with is saying the craziest of things, and you are left trying to carry on a conversation with him in this world when he has clearly moved on to another. It’s a little hard to notice when there is the language difference between English and Japanese, but even in English, just a thousand miles’ distance can change the sharpness of observation until it is too late. When I received Fred’s letter, I thought he was joking, a way to goof and get me to come back.

  Fred was always asking me to come on down and visit him, and the one time I switched routes with one of the other drivers and did just that, I knew for sure that I would never want
to get myself back there again. Some people like that kind of driving, but me, I’ll stay in the countryside. Small towns are, for the most part, good enough for me. I don’t mind the long hauls, but those eight lanes of freeway are just dangerous, plain and simple.

  “Hey, let’s go out and catch the high tide,” Fred said, as soon as I had got myself situated at his place. He decided we should do this after I’d given him the eye about some of the really odd junk he had crowding in his little room at that housing project where he was living. I mean, I liked junk and all, made a pretty good side living off it, all this time, buying, selling, trading, auctioning, but what he had was real junk, the kind of stuff you’d pass right on by at the curbside, because you knew nobody in his right mind would want it, no matter what kind of price tag you might tie to it. Lined up on one shelf was a lunch box thermos with no cap, the overflow plate from a terra-cotta pot, an old grape Nehi bottle with a chipped lip, the filter half of an old coffeepot, a shuttlecock without the weighted rubber head, crazy shit like that.

  “Remember that R & R we took at China Beach? I had to borrow some boxers from George just so I could swim,” Fred said, as we walked the beach here. The sun was setting and his ribs were showing in the new shadows. He’d lost a lot of weight since he’d left Texas.

  “I didn’t care a thing about swimming. I just took that blanket from the hooch and didn’t want anything more than to catch some sleep and not worry about getting shot,” I said.

  “The water was nice, nicer than this. It never really gets all that warm here, no matter how warm the air is. Back there at China Beach, I could swim for hours,” he said, walking along close to the water so it brushed up against our bare feet, swallowing our prints as we made our way.

  “As I recall, you did.”

  “Yup, man, I almost lost everything. That tide crept in on my stuff and before I knew it, my things were passing me by in the surf. Had to move quick to get it back. I got almost all my belongings, but I lost a few things to the tide that day.” He picked up something that washed ashore before us and stuffed it into his shorts pocket.

  “What was that?” He looked at me like he had no idea what I was asking of him, like I had not just seen him pick up a piece of trash and put it in his pocket.

  “I always try to learn from the world, Tom, and the tide and the moon taught me to be more aware.” I could never quite understand some of the things he said, and on those occasions I would nod and let him believe whatever he wanted.

  “The tide here washes all this stuff in and you have to look at it as a gift from the man in the moon. It still kills me, the way the moon makes people nuts once a month and pulls something as powerful as all the earth’s oceans, by doing nothing but hanging in its rightful place in the sky. This is an astronomy lesson, Tom. First we check out what the moon offers us, and then, the other heavenly bodies.” I thought he meant we were going to hook up with some of those fine Hollywood women you always see on the TV and in the movies, but instead, after touring the trash-strewn beach, we walked on down in front of that movie palace where all the stars are in the sidewalk.

  “This is the one, man,” he said.

  “The one what?”

  “The one that’s gonna have my name on it. Soon, man, very soon. I can feel it.”

  “Have you gotten that speaking part yet?” I asked.

  “I’m working on it, man. They’re supposed to let me know any day now, any day now.”

  “Maybe you’d get a speaking part faster if you got your teeth fixed.” He ignored my comment and kept walking. “So how are you losing them, anyway?” I asked after a couple blocks.

  “It happens.”

  “What do you mean it happens? Teeth don’t just fall out of a man’s head.”

  “Sometimes they do. They’ve been bothering me, anyway.”

  “Well, get to a dentist. You need some money to get you to one?”

  “No, that won’t help matters.”

  “You want me to track down old Jangle and get you some of those he picked up along the way?” I joked, bringing the war back into our lives, and he wanted no part of that. Not even one joke from the guy he shared a poncho and a hooch with for almost the whole year we were involved in that predicament.

  Jangle Kirby kept a tiny pair of pliers with him and some little steel rod that came off of something or another, at all times. And any time we came across a dead VC we’d shot, or mined, or that had died in some other ways, Jangle would stick the rod in his mouth, open it wide, and look for the glint of a gold tooth. If there was one in there, he would yank it and drop it into his shirt pocket—said he was going to have a necklace made when he got stateside again. “The older ones are the best. Heads just full of treasure,” he’d say when he came across one. He was skillful with those pliers, if you want to call that activity a skill. He was able to pull the gold tooth out, leaving the old rotted roots of the real tooth behind in the corpse’s jaw. He was proud of showing off his fistful of gold teeth, with not one speck of real tooth still attached.

  He trusted no one, ever, and figured we would all steal his old teeth the second he turned his back, so he even slept with his shirt on and those teeth in the breast pocket, no matter how hot and sweaty the evening got. Every night about a quarter after twelve, if there wasn’t a lot of cross fire going on, and the moon wasn’t so full, you could hear those teeth clanking away from his poncho tent as he took care of his own business. He was a man of regular habits.

  I never had the desire too much when we were there, worrying too much about dying to think about being horny. Some of those guys were shameless. They would take care of business in the firebase latrines, which only had a partition wall that came up chest high when you were on the pot, so all you had to do was take one look at them to know what they were up to. Most times, you just pretended they were invisible. When we would go back to the rear once a month, and get a break from the jungles and the firebases, watching some movies and having some beers, maybe then I’d get the urge and sneak out behind the hooch for a few minutes by myself. Kind of private, I am.

  Some guys in my unit got it taken care of by ville girls, but I was never one for that kind of thing. I have never paid, and never will. But the place in the ville I used to go to get my hair cut, well, I guess they were kind of what you might call a full-service barber. I would be getting a trim in one chair and in the chair next to me the guy would be getting a trim and getting his pipes cleaned at the same time. I wouldn’t have even gone there, but all the places that cut hair offered the same services and there was always some guy in the next chair with his fatigues around his ankles and a ville girl’s face in his lap anywhere you went. Kirby must have never gone for that kind of thing either, and it got him sent home. He was jangling one night and some sniper with good ears got a bead on him by sound, and his right knee was shattered before he finished the job.

  He got sent stateside to finish out his time at a desk job, shuffling papers. They were always calling those jobs “dick jobs,” and I’m not for sure where that title came from, as I would have done almost anything to not be on DMZ patrol all the time, but that was just all the desk jobs were ever called. We loved having a different reason for calling it that when Jangle got that kind of job. You had to find what you could to laugh at in that time. Laughter was darn scarce in the jungles. I thought Jangle would get a laugh out of Fred, but it was not to be.

  “What you could laugh at when you know there’s a gun looking down on you all the time, and what you can laugh about when you’re where you think you should be, those were different things, Tom. You should always remember that.” We kept walking, talked out, so we headed back to the little rent-controlled place he had gotten himself.

  I agreed, but I always sort of wanted to know what happened to Jangle—never enough to investigate, mind you, but curious just the same. I had to wonder, after the years, if he would be hobbling along with a cane, telling his grandkids about that odd-looking necklace he wore,
and how he got wounded in the war. I know he was from somewhere in Iowa, have even probably driven a haul through his town—have done the plains quite a bit—but never bothered to look him up. Not for sure what I would say. Fred was the only one I was ever going to visit but I felt, even as I left him that weekend, that I would probably not be visiting again. I guess he made a liar out of me after all but at such a cost.

  You can say I should have known by the way things had gone, or been able to tell from those letters, that something was wrong, but it’s not always true. The vision is not so clear from the inside, which is sort of what I was trying to get through to this interviewer and the rest of the country we were sending this signal out to.

  I told these television people the same things I told that woman from the Big Antler Daily. It was almost becoming a script for me. I wondered how many more times I had to tell it, but I could also see in Liza Jean’s eyes, as she listened and held on to my hand, that she was lining up all the elements, to make sure I didn’t mess up even one little thing. She would never say anything in the middle of the interview of course, had she heard something, but I would be getting myself an earful later.

  I can’t blame her. I bet she suspects I was up to something with this girl, but I for sure wasn’t. I imagine the medical examiner checked things out just for the record. Maybe for one of the only times in my life, I tried to do something totally for someone else, and this was what I got. The girl was dead, my wife was studying every damned word I said like I was the cryptogram game from the Big Antler Daily “Fun Page,” and I was sweating my ass off on live national television under those blazing lights, and in a tie, no less. I should have kept my mouth shut and let the papers say what they wanted about her, but I just couldn’t do that.