Some of that stuff about Fireball they brought up the other day was kind of a sudden jab though I sort of expected it. I figured they had probably gone around town asking questions before they got to our house. Any smart news crew would. I’ve seen those shows where they burst into the guy’s office and he has no idea what to say and runs on out into his car while they chase him with the cameras. Well, no chases were going to occur here. They were going to ask their questions, I was going to deliver my answers, and then Liza Jean and I would watch them leave down the grid and maybe we’d watch the tape we were recording of ourselves that very minute before we headed off to Cascabel in the morning.
“Mr. McMorsey, your usual driving route takes you through the southwest—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. How did you happen to get the route through Bismarck that night?” The reporter kept smiling, and was watching me as carefully as could be, trying to see if he was getting himself a big scoop, but there was nothing to tell.
“I put in for it. I do the long hauls from time to time,” I said.
“ Yes, we noticed that. Your manifests going back a number of years suggest there’s some sort of pattern here. Mid to late November, that seems to be the consistent ‘from time to time’ that you mention.”
“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “My manifests?”
“And the records from the place you stayed in Detroit Lakes, Kwitchurbeliakin Cabins, a virtually abandoned set of summer resort accommodations in the middle of nowhere, clearly document that you made your reservation weeks in advance. This was obviously not a last-minute decision. Why did you want to be isolated? Did you plan to pick someone up to join you? Anyone in particular or didn’t it really matter?”
“I’m sorry, what are you asking?” I said. Liza Jean was still holding my hand, but her nails were beginning to dig into my palm. This picture the reporter was making, cutting up pieces of the truth and moving them around, was one she was already willing to believe herself. She was just waiting for someone else to tell her the pieces. Other than her nails, though, she said nothing, just kept on sitting there. I tried to gently pull away, but she dug deeper for a minute, letting me know she wasn’t letting go, no matter what.
“Mr. McMorsey, you went to the newspapers, and the police, with a story that had enormous holes in it. You couldn’t really agree to an interview and not expect to be asked questions about these significant gaps, could you?” This was another one of those questions that aren’t questions, I could tell. “Why don’t you tell us what really happened with Miss Furuta that night. You obviously had some need to tell it to the public or you would not have agreed to this interview in the first place. So, shall we?”
“I went to the newspapers because they got it wrong before, and I didn’t think this poor girl should have been made out to be even more troubled than she obviously was. You’ve done your investigation. Don’t the things I am telling you match up with the police reports and not the news stories?” I said.
“About those trips, sir. Comment?”
“I go out to see the meteors,” I said, “once a year, when they come, in the early winter.”
“The meteors?”
“Yes, the Leonid meteors. I thought with y’all’s crackerjack research team, you would have known that.”
“Actually, we did. But why all this . . . ritual? You’ll forgive me, Mr. McMorsey, but you don’t seem like the stargazer type.”
“Well, I guess you don’t know everything, then, do you?”
“That’s why we’re here, sir. Now, back to the meteors and this young woman. Did you purposefully take her to see them?”
“She went with me. Like I said to the papers, I was giving her a ride to Fargo, ’cause that was where she said she’d wanted to go, then when we got there, she wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t get out of my rig. That’s all in the statement I made and it was all confirmed by the statement they later took from the night manager on duty at the Mainline Motor Inn that night.” She wanted to hear all about Fred Howkowski, but even then, talking to someone I was sure I would never see again, I still couldn’t tell it all. Maybe if I had done with her what Fred had taught us to do that night at the firebase, things would have been different. She and I could have soaked a ball of rags, all those things she had brought with her from half the world away, into some diesel or gasoline, sparked it up, kicked that flaming ball all over those frozen fields, melting paths as we went, but aside from teaching the boy, and the time just yesterday, I never played since that time on Fred’s reservation, when I got my nose busted.
“Why do you travel all those distances every year, Mr. McMorsey? Why is it so important to you to see an astronomical event?” The reporter was certain he was going to get something here. He leaned forward, nearly ready to fall off the chair Liza Jean had offered him. The answer I was going to give him wouldn’t amount to much, I suspect, but this was as good a time as any, since it seemed like my plan was never going to work out the way I wanted it to, every year, anyway.
“I wish on those meteors, those falling stars,” I said. “Figure if I wish on enough of them, maybe my wishes will come true.”
“And what do you wish for?”
“If you tell, the wishes never come true.” Does no one know this ritual? Where have these people grown up, anyway? “I never took much stock in that belief until I was in the war. In Vietnam, we didn’t see them so often, the stars, I mean. The skies were foggy, clouded over, most nights. We’d be mortared all night long, sleeping under those ponchos and staring up at the stars, knowing our people at home would be looking at different stars. Between mortar fire, things would be so dark a lot of those nights that you could only tell where the jungle ended and the sky opened above you, in those patches where you could see a few bright spots, millions of light years away. Some of the darker nights were so filled with those red flares the NVA shot off, hoping to expose us in the light, those fireworks were like a thousand dangerous falling stars coming our way, so you got to cherish the few real ones you ever got to see.
“I was used to the skies here, which, as you saw last night, are as wide open as can be, nothing but stars and the moon, as far as you might want to look in any direction. Back then, every falling-star wish I had was the same, and it ain’t too hard to know what that wish was. I wanted to go home so bad, sleep in a dry bed, hell, sleeping without my boots would have been a treat, almost anywhere. I wasn’t wishing for much, just to make it home alive, and maybe my wishes came true. Maybe they added up, finally. I made it back, relatively intact. A lot of guys didn’t.”
“And a lot of our boys who made it back were changed,” Liza Jean said out of nowhere. “Why, one of the men from Tommy Jack’s unit told me himself in this very living room that he has tasted the barrel of his own gun a time or two, and Tommy Jack’s best friend made it back here only to go and kill himself a few years later, and you had to go and deal with that mess too,” she continued, turning to me at the very end, like I had somehow forgotten that had happened. The second cameraman, who had been looking bored most of this time, was suddenly up and zeroing in on her.
“Liza Jean, that is no one’s concern,” I said.
“This is the second alleged suicide you’ve been involved with, Mr. McMorsey?” the reporter asked. “The odds of that seem rather unusual.”
“Yes, the second suicide,” I said.
This guy Liza mentioned, George, and of course Fred, those were about the only two from my squad I kept in touch with, after I got back. Man, I thought I was a redneck, but George was about as big a cracker as you would find anywhere. He came and stayed with us for a couple months a number of years back, stayed in what used to be the boy’s room, and he and Liza Jean got on just about as good as you can, and when she told him to make himself at home, he surely did. At night, we’d be watching the TV, and he would come on out in his white skivvies and a T-shirt and make himself a sandwich and sit down on our couch, just like that, to watch the TV shows.
I thought Liza
Jean would pitch a shit fit, seeing as she’s always been so particular about our living room, but she never said one word except to offer him some chips to go with that sandwich. He’d come around and ride the short hauls with me, during the day, but at night, he usually talked with Liza Jean while I caught up on the logbook, and they buzzed away like a couple bees in the living room, but just below the point where I could really hear what they were saying above the action on the TV.
“Tommy Jack, what did y’all do when you were over there in the war?” she asked me one night after he’d gone to his room and we were climbing into bed, tossing to the floor the eight million pillows she kept on the bed when it was made up. I could have answered her any number of ways, that being a pretty broad question and all, but I think I got the gist of it.
“Not for sure what you’re wanting to know about,” I said, regardless. Lying has always come easy to me, and this one was no big one, just the same one I had been telling for years. You can’t really talk about that kind of thing with someone who wasn’t there.
“Well, George in the other room has been telling me he knows what a gun barrel tastes like. And while you never said how Fred Howkowski died, I can put the figures together. Do you know what a gun barrel tastes like, Tommy Jack? ’Cause if you do, you are going right on down to the VA in Lubbock, and get you some help first thing in the morning.” She was lying on her side of the bed, but propped up on one elbow, like, giving me the third-degree eye she rarely gives. Ever since she gave it to our boy that one year, and got an earful of confirmation she did not want to hear, she rarely administered this look to anyone other than the knocked-up girls coming into her office at work. I could see in her eyes, even in the dark of our bedroom, that fear of being alone she has. I supposed it was time to tell her then, though I never would have dreamed she would introduce this information to the whole damned country.
How do you tell these secret parts of your life to a camera? They’re not secret because you need them to be, but secret because they are the moments you share with one other person, and here on the camera everything about you is at least once removed. Their machine keeps rolling magnetic tape from one spool to another, copying your image over and over again, but they never get it right. No matter how closely they try to document your moves, they only ever get one angle, the one they’ve chosen for you. Though your words are not smooth when you try to talk to these others, try to record the realities, you know you fail because you see different things.
You see a woman who loved you enough to give you her virginity on a blanket in a park one summer night just before your senior year in high school, though she had never touched you beyond a handholding and a hug and a kiss, and though she had never let you touch her beyond that point, either, she had known she was in love and that you were going to marry her one day, and therefore, that night, it was finally okay. You see that same woman smiling through tears and hugging you as you prepare to leave for Fort Ord and what they called “points beyond,” knowing only later that she was already deciding she couldn’t marry you because she could see you dead, bloody, blown apart and fragmented, even as she holds you close that last time. You see her walking down the aisle with that other man, knowing he will discover that night he is not her first, and you see the way she will try to make him feel like he is, anyway, the way she will try to make him feel like he moved her the deepest. You can see these things, these secret things between them, because you can see her, trying to make you feel that same way, that you move her the deepest, in the dark of night, after you don’t die in Vietnam, and after you come home, and after she divorces that other man, and after she later marries you, not before, only after, but you can feel his presence even then. You can see that they made love different from the way you and she had, and that in the time you were sleeping near rotting corpses across the planet, too scared to even think about jacking off, she had learned to move her body in different ways, without you, with someone else. You can see that afterward, in the dark, when you lie there awake in the bed you share with her, still trying to not reach out for your M-16 every night, like you had for that year, she falls right asleep, contented. You can see that to her, the period between your engagement and your marriage no longer exists. You can see that for her, it is seamless, she has always loved you, you have always loved her, and you will always live together, for better or for worse. You can see she meant that only conditionally. You can see there are heavy costs when you cause the “for worse” part of the deal, but you can see the contract remains for her. You can see that she is willing to potentially get humiliated on live national television if it’s revealed you were fucking around (you weren’t, but she has no way of knowing that for sure, given your past) because regardless of the costs, she is your wife. You can see she will continue to love you and stay as you each get older and more peculiar with age, as everyone does. You can see one of you is going to die one day and the other will have to figure out how to go on, how to fill those silences, and if it’s you who has to go on, though you of course do not wish to be the one, you know you can handle it because you have seen some things like this before and in your head, you still do see them.
You see the other woman you have loved, and still love, though you can tell no one. You see her the way you saw her that first night, filling your dreams and fantasies with her reality even better than you had ever imagined it. You see her in the dark of her apartment the first time you remove her clothes, slowly and gently, waiting to see if she is going to reach out and stop you, but she never does, she waits, instead, patiently, as you try to undo buttons on someone other than yourself, getting hung up in the reversal of movements every time. You see her as she awakens you early that first morning, licking your ear, around the edge over and over until every part of you is awake and you open your eyes because you can no longer ignore the needs you have at that moment. You see her smile as she sends you off before the sun rises, knowing you will be back after it has gone down again that night. You see her other smile, the one that is not so wide, the one she gives you when she knows you are leaving town again and won’t be back for a number of days, but it’s still there, because though the days will seem impossibly long to both of you, they will fade the minute her body touches yours upon your return. You see her smile through tears, but a different sort on this face, when you come back two years later, for the funeral of your best friend and to see her one last time. You see her across the grave from you, where she can’t hold your hand, and you can only nod to one another, with everyone else around, and then you see her, later, at the fellowship, where all the people crowd around and tell stories about your best friend, stories you are not a part of, because you knew him in a totally different life. You see her there at a table at the far end of the room, watching you over her potato salad in the same way you watch her over your macaroni and cheese. You see her later, from the parking lot of her apartment complex, where she has been sitting in the dark, waiting for you with the curtains open, just enough to let you glimpse her in the glow of a nearby streetlight, and you see her a few minutes after that, opening the door as you reach for it, and then there you are again, standing with her, after all the kids are in bed, including the one you brought back with you across the country, and she gets that blanket out, and though you know you shouldn’t even be there, because you generally wear a ring on the third finger of your left hand, you stand with her, that blanket around your ankles, and you see her smile open, just a little, as you reach over and undo that top button, and have the same trouble you always have. You see her after it’s all over, and you are packing up the few things you brought with you, and you see clearly her lack of a smile, because that absence looks so unfamiliar to you, but you know the reason she wears her mouth just that way when you leave that time is because she knows you aren’t coming back.
You see your best friend days earlier, lying in shit and plastic, half his head coloring the walls of a low-income apartment, wearing only a revolver, a
blanket, a dirty pair of white briefs, and socks that had no elastic in them. You see his neighbors eyeing you up, knowing he’s dead and that you have the key, wondering what it might take for you to let them in and have a look-see at the furniture before the super comes to clean his stuff out. You see him before that, always making sure you were treated right by those around the two of you. You see him that first time at the Oakland shipping depot, where you and he didn’t know any better and were conned into taking a limousine from the depot barracks to the air-strip, each throwing in ten dollars, and facing the laughter of all the others who were smart enough to wait for the shuttle bus. You see him smile at the little plastic hula girl dancing on the limo’s dashboard, and at the dingleberries swinging from the window frames. You see his dark skin grow pale and know yours must be nearly glowing, it is so white, when the two of you get your orders in Da Nang, and the men stationed there say things like: “Phu Bai, you fuckers better have some good life insurance because you are as good as dead” and “Man, who did you guys piss off? You sad fuckers are right on the DMZ.” You see him close his eyes as you are all loaded onto a chopper and taken out to what you think is exactly the place the others described, the demilitarized zone, but you only see this for a little while because you close your eyes, too. You find out you’re not as close to the DMZ as those guys claimed, but you’re close enough, closer than you want to be. You see him light a ball of rags and make some magic that keeps you both alive long enough to see your zero day in country. You see someone who had walked with you through jungles full of mines and snakes and little people wanting to kill you all the time, and who had made it back safely with you, and who had decided to become a movie star, and who had made it into the movies, even a little, someone who had been able to find all those paths, but just could not find that path back home.
Extra Indians Page 12
