Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  And then, you see her, and no matter what you have seen before, you have seen nothing like her, and you have nothing to compare to the way she pleads in silence with you. You cannot see her life, only things you have imagined badly for her. You cannot see the family that doesn’t recognize her ideas are just not right. You cannot see that they think a good therapist and some new antidepressants are going to work just fine, so fine in fact that they take her to the airport, themselves, because she has made so much progress in her stability. You cannot see that they think this is the right thing to do for their daughter because they love her and they want to fulfill her dreams. You cannot see that her family loves American movies like she does and that they’ve maybe even vacationed here, themselves visiting Snoqualmie, Washington, where Twin Peaks was filmed, or maybe they looked for Anarene, Texas, where they think The Last Picture Show was supposed to take place, not finding it because it is really called Archer City, but they do not realize what Fargo is to their girl, and you cannot see how they let her leave, not to visit the city but to find the ransom. You cannot see how they could not think this was like going to Devils Tower, Wyoming, hoping to find a giant spaceship. You can see, though, the way she was willing to deal with terrible environments to get those things she dreamed of. You can see it was not really about money, at all, because though she didn’t have a million, she had plenty enough to be comfortable. You can see she didn’t want that last criminal to get out of prison and get it, and you can see she didn’t want the cheating husband to get it, either. You can see she thought she had a better plan for it, maybe a school, maybe a trust fund, maybe a museum; these are things you cannot see. You can see that, for her, the phrase “based on a true story” absolutely meant something else, and that there was something imperative in that pronouncement, a responsibility for her to do something noble with that million dollars, for her, a great disservice to humanity—perhaps if she’d had the million dollars, she could go back in time and visit those scientists at Los Alamos and tell them they should stop working on the atomic bomb, encourage them to give it up, and if she offered them the cool million to do that, to walk away and retire somewhere warm and beautiful, maybe they would have, and we would not be here right now.

  You can think all these things, in the space between someone clipping a microphone to you and the record heads engaging on the tape machines as the lights are fired before you, but you think these things in images, sounds, smells, full moments reconstructing themselves in your head, quilting themselves together with the thread of your lifeline, but when you open your mouth, you are still a redneck from West Texas with a correspondence course master’s degree and a lifetime of memories, and the vocabulary of a pretty sharp seventh grader, and this is what they record, because they can only record what you give them, maybe even something less, but certainly nothing more. They can only see the face you make when you remember these things that are forever burned into the back of your head like so many frayed patches of clothes that had seen better days.

  “I don’t know why she did those things. Maybe she was, you know, plain and simple, just nuts,” you hear yourself saying. “She didn’t say, and I understand she was on medication.” Even as those words come out of your mouth, the image of her flat wide-open eyes drying out in Minnesota’s November winds begins to fade from your brain. Maybe, if you say these things enough and to enough people, you can stop thinking them. Maybe, then, they will erase themselves from your brain and you can stop seeing the things you do not want to see anymore, the way Liza Jean turns away when she smells an unfamiliar perfume on you, the look on Shirley’s face as she helps you empty some things from your suitcase so you can take the blanket you always make love to her on, when you leave for the last time, the way Fred’s face stopped mid-forehead the last time you saw him, or the thing you saw roll out of that last fireball someone made when you were back in Vietnam and the dubious things that object said about all of you there, and that was how I arrived at the end of the interview, standing in my living room, telling my wife things I had always thought, but had never said, on live national television.

  “Yes, the second suicide,” I repeated to the reporter, a couple seconds after the first time I said it.

  “Some people, you just can’t save,” Liza Jean went on. “Tommy Jack even went so far as to raise this fellow’s boy as his own. Well, we both did, eventually, but it was Tommy Jack at first. Gave him every opportunity in the world and he just threw—”

  “That is none of your concern, either, Liza Jean,” I said. Only I didn’t just say it, I shouted it. “And if you hadn’t been saying I wasn’t home when Fred would call us collect, when I was only outside in the yard, he might still be alive today. You didn’t think I knew you did those things? You know, not everyone who calls this house calls for you. I know you have the need to think that, but it just ain’t so. Mostly I can overlook some of the shit you’ve done, but you leave my best friend out of your little story of how much better you are than a lot of others!”

  “Tommy Jack, we are on the TV, what in lands sakes are you thinking?” she said, starting to get up off the couch, upset, but I didn’t care, anymore. “What is everyone going to think?”

  “What is everyone going to think? Is that what you said? They’re gonna think the same thing about us that they think about anyone else they see on these kinds of TV shows. You don’t think they’re looking for hard news now, do you? They’re gonna think, ‘Look at those sad fuckers. Aren’t we lucky our lives are so much better than theirs?’ And just why are you on TV? You haven’t tried to save a single person in your life, except for yourself. That wasn’t me who ran off and got married to that flat-footed nitwit while I was in Vietnam. That was you, not me, Liza Jean, you, not me. You just better look in your own hamper before you start to digging in mine.” This time it was me who held on, and I didn’t need manicured nails to keep our hands locked together.

  “You know what?” I said, turning back to that reporter. “My wife here wanted to redecorate this room, just so you fuckers would be impressed. How fucking sad is that?”

  “Mr. McMorsey, please,” that reporter said, but I could tell this was what he’d come for.

  “Please what? You wanted a freak show, or you wouldn’t have come out to this shit hole in the first place. Don’t fuck around with me! You sniffed around for a story, and now you’ve got one. The story of an idiot. She wanted me to move this here curio cabinet out of the living room because she thought it suddenly didn’t go anymore. That it would look bad on TV because it had clearly been something else at one time and I made it into a curio. It was a grocery store humidor, yes, I know it was a humidor! No matter how you cut it, that was what it started off as, but sometimes things change permanently, and they are never going to be what they were before, and you have to fucking recognize that! This curio saved my life, have you forgotten that, Liza Jean? Saved my life. You asked me one time if I knew what the barrel of a gun tasted like.” I stopped for a second and she stared into my eyes, waiting for the answer she had never gotten before, no matter how much she had tried to weasel it out of me for years.

  “Well, you know what? I don’t! Because restoring this curio, stripping off all the abuse people had committed on it for years, that was how I filled my time when I first got back from Vietnam, while you were off getting fucked every night as Mrs. Paul Montgomery in your first marriage bed, all the while waving to me like we were strangers if we happened to run into each other in town. That was what kept me from the taste of a gun barrel. But you want to know what else? This was the last thing in this house that was truly mine, anymore, and you have made it pretty clear just what you think of it. Maybe other options wouldn’t be so bad.” She broke loose from me at that point and tripped on her microphone wire, bumping into one of those big lights.

  That spindly light pole vibrated briefly then toppled, the bulbs exploding across the floor. The room went dark, filled with the sounds of sobbing and regret.

&
nbsp; CHAPTER SIX:

  Broad Cast

  “Rebuilding History, One Board at a Time”

  (article in Small Town Texas special interest newspaper,

  September 1986)

  If you’re taking a Sunday drive on the outskirts of Big Antler, Texas, and you think you’ve come across a very small unmarked ghost town, you’re not far from the truth. You’ve just experienced your first glimpse of McMorseyville, as over-the-road truck driver Tommy Jack McMorsey’s neighbors teasingly began calling the northern patch of Mr. McMorsey’s property a little over a decade ago, when he started his unusual and delightful project.

  “Tommy Jack has always been a little bit different,” his wife Liza Jean said, holding on to his arm as we strolled the buildings and grounds with the charming couple who are clearly suited to one another. “That’s what I have always loved about him,” she said, smiling and kissing the red-bearded cheek of Mr. McMorsey, who seemed a little embarrassed at all the attention.

  Mr. McMorsey, a Vietnam War veteran, said a series of converging events was the impetus for his lifelong project, constructing a group of old houses and other period buildings on the property he had inherited from his parents. He and his wife had been avid antique collectors since they were first married, and they were running out of room in their house to store their continually expanding collection.

  “It seemed a shame to just pack the stuff away,” he said, as they had no desire to stop collecting, nor any desire to dispose of the things they had already gathered over the years. They had learned to do small restoration projects on their own years ago, Mr. McMorsey teaching himself the skills on a magnificent general store humidor that he transformed into a lovely curio cabinet. The couple eventually branched out from furniture and tried a remodeling job on a cookhouse from an earlier era behind the family house they continue to live in, and though this was a small-scale project, they proved to themselves that they could do it.

  As sometimes happens, fate stepped into their lives in the form of the Yorkston family, also from the rural community surrounding Big Antler. Knowing Mr. McMorsey’s love of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century items, the adult Yorkston children donated their deceased father’s abandoned house to the McMorseys, if they were willing to move it from the cotton field where it had sat empty for more than fifty years.

  The McMorseys took the Yorkston children up on their generous offer and the rest, as they say, is history. They moved the house and gradually restored the dwelling to its former state and began moving period-appropriate antiques in, to furnish the home. By the time they were finished, the refurbishing bug had deeply bitten the McMorseys and they moved on immediately to doing the same kinds of work with other buildings, at times recreating whole places with only photographs, imagination, and again, period-appropriate lumber, taken from other abandoned structures around the county. The McMorseys explained that new lumber would be apparent if it were used in the construction, and they wanted the whole place to look as if the small community merely continued unchanged from the previous century. “It would be like cheating to not use the real thing,” Mr. McMorsey explained simply. They have allowed for some modern modifications like electricity, but rustic still rules the day here in this little hamlet, where an outhouse sits behind a one-room schoolhouse on the northeastern corner of the property.

  “It’s just for show,” Mrs. McMorsey said, winking, saying they have indoor plumbing and offering it if we needed to freshen up. Mr. McMorsey laughed and told us some of the migrant workers who helped him work on the structural elements were unaware it was not supposed to be a functional latrine.

  When time allows, the McMorseys give group tours of their little village to school and church groups, and if you happen to catch them right, ring the doorbell and you might get your own personalized tour. They welcome guests anytime and enjoy showing their collection. We asked Mr. McMorsey when he planned to stop, and he spread his arms out across the expanse of his property and, smiling, said: “When I fill all my spaces.”

  “Y’all come see us again,” the McMorseys offered as we pulled out of the driveway after a cool glass of sweet tea prepared by Mrs. McMorsey. We just might have to.

  Annie Boans

  “Well, I told the authorities, when I found her the first time, that she was an odd one, and when they just let her go, I couldn’t see her trying to make it on her own, since I was going to Fargo, anyways,” Tommy Jack McMorsey said, from the little speaker on the bracketed television across the room, “and these roads can be a little dangerous.” I touched the arrow button on the remote control mounted by an anti-thievery umbilicus to the nightstand, and his voice rose. The hue seemed a little off, but the basic remote in the room didn’t allow access to the menus that adjusted elements that technical.

  “I assume he’s not really that green,” I said.

  “In what sense?” T.J. asked. We laughed a little, but our eyes never left the screen.

  The man before me on the screen was smaller, more slight than I had imagined, sitting on a sofa in a tastefully decorated living room, which was filled with antiques. An enormous curio cabinet filled one whole wall in the room, but seemed to be a natural fit, as if it had been built specifically for that space, though it clearly had come from an earlier era. A woman sat next to him, not saying much, but her hand never left his, as if he were a tethered balloon, and would float off into the atmosphere if she accidentally let go, for even a second.

  I had a particular stereotype in mind when I thought of the phrase “truck driver,” the sort from films or on television, or, frankly, at interstate service areas. I have certainly stopped at enough of those, on the way to or from conferences, to have seen the type. This man in a poorly fitting dress shirt and an out-of-fashion wide tie simply didn’t fit that image. His beard was nearer the shade of my hair than my mother’s hair is, but T.J. seemed to not even notice that. The things Tommy Jack McMorsey talked about on the screen were incidental to me, really. Instead of the words he said, I felt the sounds of his voice. He and T.J. had very similar accents, though there was a little something extra in T.J.’s that I couldn’t place. It wasn’t a reservation accent. I was certain of that.

  “Next to him? Is that your . . .” I asked, not exactly sure what he preferred to call them.

  “My adoptive mother? Liza? Yes, that’s Momma. I’m kind of surprised she was willing to do this, but I guess nobody turns down a chance to be on TV.”

  “Why surprised?”

  “Well, let’s just say the history of my daddy giving women rides while he’s on the road is not something either of them likes to talk about much,” he said, again staring straight at the TV.

  “Your daddy and other women, period, from what I hear.”

  “So you know? About your momma and my daddy? The thing they had for a while? I didn’t know if anyone had ever told you, and didn’t think it was really my place. Well, you know one side, anyway, I would guess.”

  “You know things I don’t?” I asked.

  “Probably lots. He kept a box of things he collected from her, hidden away in our pump house for years. Funny, meeting your momma as an adult for the first time, after all these years I’ve been back, that wasn’t an accident, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know. What kind of stuff?”

  “Stuff,” he said, and his vague answer left my imagination to conjure up a highly incriminating box, probably like the one I had found in my mother’s sewing closet a couple years ago, though I had assumed the men’s things in that box had belonged to my dad—her husband, I mean. “You know, I would guess she mailed some of it, letters, pictures, other things, I can’t remember.” The image of a young Japanese woman’s passport filled the screen, while a recording of Tommy Jack’s initial phone call to 911 played in voice-over and a transcript of it scrolled superimposed across the woman’s face.

  “But she did understand English, I’m telling you,” Tommy Jack told some reporter on the screen, who nodded and pr
odded some more. “I was telling her all about my best buddy from Vietnam. He wasn’t from Vietnam, we met over there. He was American, American Indian, in fact. Anyway, I was telling her all this sh . . . stuff, just to pass the time, really telling myself more than her, I thought. And she starts asking me questions about him,” he said, poking a finger on his free hand into the knee of his Levi’s. “She didn’t ask them well, mind you, but enough so’s I could understand her. She knew what she was doing, and she knew what the police were asking. They just pretended to not get her, you know, ’cause then they might have to do something with her, or something for her. I don’t know.” He shrugged his shoulders and continued to talk about a variety of things. They were trying to corner him, and though I had no love for Tommy Jack McMorsey, I felt some sympathy for him because of the way they were treating him.

  His wife started talking and then the interview faded rapidly out to black and stayed that way for a few seconds too long for this sequence to have been the planned progress of the show. Finally, a commercial came across the screen. I wondered what transpired in that darkness, that dead air. When the show returned, the cameras were no longer broadcasting from the McMorsey living room.

  “What do you make of that?” I asked T.J. and he shrugged. It was surprising, though it shouldn’t have been, that he and McMorsey shared the exact nuances of that gesture. T.J. had learned to shrug noncommittally from the man who had adopted him. What else had he learned? The show continued broadcasting from the network, the anchor claiming technical difficulties with their live feed from Texas. They ran some footage of the McMorseys taken at some earlier point. They walked around the house, inside and out, while a narrator gave a brief biography of him, one that decidedly did not mention my mother in any capacity. They concluded with a scene of what I swear was Tommy Jack lighting a fireball. There was no commentary, just that image, fading, before the anchor came on to wrap things up. He promised that next week, they would have highlights of the lost live transmission, and segued into the concluding segment, where officials naturally denied any improprieties of procedure.