Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  “Bigfoot?”

  “You know what I mean, just, well, that guy, Tommy Jack, he’s got a different life, there, and he might not be too happy to have you show up in it. Your buddy, there, he’s part of that life, and I don’t know what you and him got going—”

  “Nothing,” I said. The truck driver switched his dome light off and opened the door, climbing down from the cab and waving to me.

  “Well, none of my business, but your buddy has a place in that life. You don’t. You might not like what you’ve gone looking for.”

  “Listen, I have to go,” I said to Royal, and palmed the pepper spray. “I’ll keep you posted.” He started to say something but I couldn’t hear it, as I put the handset back into the receiver and moved toward my Blazer.

  “Ma’am? Miss?” the driver said, not picking up his pace any, as he approached. He was big, heavy, solid-looking, and if I couldn’t get him with the spray, I might have far more on my hands than I had thought. Damn! Why hadn’t I waited for the next day to go to Fouke? “Do you need some assistance?”

  “Not the kind you’re thinking of,” I said, reaching my open Blazer, the can ready to emerge from my purse the second I needed it, the bat within reach.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Not every woman out late at night is looking to be swept off her feet into the back of an eighteen-wheeler.”

  “I guess I don’t follow you, ma’am. You looked like you might have been calling for some help and I was gonna put up for the night in Texarkana but thought I would see that you were okay, first.”

  “You weren’t thinking I was, you know, looking for action?”

  “Action? Now, I don’t know where you got your ideas about truck drivers, ma’am, but I can tell you right off, I don’t go in for that sort of thing. I know that some do, and that’s their business, but it seems a shame to me those ladies need to find their lives in that way.” He seemed sincere, but I kept my hands on the spray can.

  “Or the men. It isn’t just the women who are engaged in funny behavior, now, is it? It’s not like those women have access to the truck cab, themselves, now, is it?”

  “I reckon you are correct there, ma’am, but as I said, I don’t go in for the likes of that. My wife would about string me up by the jewels if I did, but that ain’t the reason. It just ain’t . . . listen, you wanna get a cup of coffee? I know a nice place in Texarkana, real easy to get to, you can just follow me. Got the most terrific cherry pies you have ever tasted. Just like that guy used to say on Twin Peaks, amazing cherry pie and a damn fine cup of coffee. I promise, coffee and pie is all,” he said, holding his hands out in front of him, as if their emptiness illustrated that his intentions were good.

  “I had better get back to my motel. I have a long day on the road tomorrow,” I said.

  “Yeah, me too. If you don’t mind my asking, what were you doing out here? I know it’s none of my business, but I know there ain’t no hotels in Fouke, so I’m assuming you’re staying in Texarkana and there’s plenty of pay phones there.”

  “Just wanted to come here, see what it was like, but I had better get going.”

  “Afraid you might hear Bigfoot out here by yourself once the sound of my truck disappears?” he asked, smiling and walking across the road.

  “Afraid I might not,” I said, and he frowned a little, nodded, and got on his way. His taillights disappeared down the highway and I sat in the gravel parking lot for a while longer. This sleeping town was so much like the reservation, a place so quiet and remote that nearly any dream was possible. There might be a large hairy man living along the banks of sloughs and creeks, and there might be an Indian boy who learned to cope with life watching the movies who believed he could just wander into them, like Gumby with his magical powers to enter books. How many people in this town sleep with a window open and a bare foot exposed? Not many, I bet. Just before I started the Blazer to head back into the city and my sleeping friend, I heard some unusual sound off in the distance, but who could say what it was? I couldn’t, not with any certainty.

  “There, that’s it,” T.J. said, pulling off Interstate 84 before we reached the actual town of Big Antler, onto some road that only had letters and numbers identifying it. He pointed to a patch of growth and buildings on the horizon, silhouetted in the setting sun. By the time morning had come, he’d forgotten all about heading into Fouke, or perhaps he was just anxious to get to his old home. In any case, we’d risen early and gotten immediately on the road, even eating breakfast from a fast food drive-through window.

  “Almost there,” I said, and couldn’t wait, my eyes fighting sleep, even with the break we took. Staying in Texarkana after that long push didn’t ease the fact that we’d covered nearly seventeen hundred miles in a little over forty-eight hours.

  “So why is this town named Big Antler? I haven’t seen a deer since we left Tennessee.” He sped up, stones and dust from the roadside kicking by us, tracing our progress.

  “Oh, well, you’re in Texas, where a lot of towns are named after either the white guys who killed things when they got here, or the people and things they killed. So, you got your Houston, Texas, and you got your Comanche, Texas. Big Antler got its name during the depression, from a cowboy killing the biggest mule deer on state record by a creek where the town is now located. You know the kind of story. He kills the deer and saves all the people from pellagra with the meat from this one deer, because they were all so niacin deficient they’d nearly eat rats if they could find them. A regular down-home fishes and loaves story.”

  “Pellagra?”

  “Disease from a niacin deficiency in the diet. Pay attention, Mrs. Boans. You should have gotten that from the context.”

  “Dr. Boans, to you.”

  “Even more so, then, that you should have gotten it, doctor.”

  “Shut up,” I said and we laughed, easily.

  “Actually, you’ll be interested to know that corn was originally thought to carry it, because people here in the South got sick with it, after eating a steady diet of mostly corn, and they only discovered it was not the corn by noticing that Indians didn’t get pellagra. The lye method, you know, like for cooking corn soup, changes its structure. Indians knew this on some basic level, and settlers didn’t.”

  “Colonizers, not settlers. There were already people here, remember?”

  “Yes, of course,” he exaggerated. “Anyway, they named him town father and put the antlers up in the town hall when they eventually erected one. There’s even a big sculpture down in the town square, based on the antlers of that mule deer. We can go by there before we leave, if you’d like.” It seemed to take forever, the buildings on the flat, open space an optical illusion, remaining the same distance away no matter how long we drove, then we crossed some train tracks without any guard bars and suddenly the buildings and trees finally took on some depth, vividness, became real.

  “I’ll pass, thanks,” I said and we laughed. “But why do you know so much about pellagra?”

  “My daddy. Well versed in the history of West Texas, American history, period.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” T.J. said. “Well, we’re here,” he added, flying into the driveway, a huge cloud of dust from the road and drive surrounding us. I got out and stretched, wandering over toward the furrowed fields. Their endless flatness looked like a one-point perspective drawing come to life. I had seen little like it outside of coffee-table books at the houses of various colleagues. It felt so good to use my legs again.

  “This is like a compound. Who else lives here?” I asked, though I couldn’t imagine anyone living in the more rustic houses on the lot.

  “No one, just Daddy and Momma, and all their ghosts,” he said, and that was an apt description. There was one contemporary-style house on the southernmost side of the property, the house whose carport we had pulled into, but all the others looked like they could have been reservation houses from around the time I was growing up. It was as if
some small piece of my homeland had been transported out here onto this impossibly flat patch of land where the dust blew and the grass had only a saint’s prayer of getting the shade of green we normally saw. It felt strangely like home and an alien planet at the same time.

  The outhouse behind the furthest north building really made me flash to home. I had always hated going back to the reservation as a kid to visit some of my mother’s friends and our relatives. Whenever I knew we were going, I refused to have anything to eat or drink the whole morning before we would head out. “Please tell me this house has plumbing,” I said.

  “Don’t be a goof! Of course, what are you talking about?” he said, then laughed. “Oh that. Yeah, Daddy likes to be authentic with his reconstructed old town. It’s just for show, but feel free.” He smiled and started unloading things from the Blazer as I wandered out among the buildings. I was still trying to figure out what was so unsettling about the place but it would not come, like an itch somewhere just below the skull, the kind you know you cannot scratch.

  “Hey, don’t go too far out that way. It’s getting dark,” he said, “watch where you’re walking. Be careful of the cascabel.”

  “I thought that was the town in New Mexico where your adoptive parents have a cabin,” I said, still not sure what I was supposed to be careful of.

  “It is. The town is named after its shape, the way it lies narrow and long on the mountainside. Spanish for rattlesnake.”

  “Rattlesnakes? You used to live here?” What had been alien beauty to me a few minutes before was filled with invisible threats, every shadow suspect, every small noise the beginning of a fateful warning, just before I would feel the fangs and the venom.

  “You get used to it,” he said, taking our bags from the back of the Blazer. “You just accept the things in your life as they are, or, you know, you get bit.”

  “Aren’t you all Creation Story philosophy,” I said, thinking of all the lectures I’d given on our faith, and how pragmatism is at the heart of Haudenosaunee culture and, consequently, our art. It was always one of the hardest things for my students to get—the idea of being thankful for what you have, not waiting for a reward in heaven. I wonder how those ideas fit into Fred’s scheme of thought.

  “More like rattlesnake country philosophy.”

  “Your gram said, when I interviewed her those years ago, that was the reason your dad didn’t head to Canada. She didn’t say pragmatist, of course. Wasn’t in her vocabulary, I’d imagine, but she said he accepted what he was supposed to do, when he got the letter, no matter how much others begged him to leave and go up to the Six Nations rez.”

  “I guess. I wish I had more answers for you about him, but I can’t really see how I could possibly have learned to be like him. We really didn’t spend all that much time together.”

  “Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” I said, while he peeked in through the garage’s back-door window.

  “Nope, the other truck’s gone. They must have headed out to Cascabel right after the interview.”

  “Do you have a key?”

  “They always keep one in the pump house, since you have to turn the well on anytime you come back, anyway.” He set the bags down on a rococo park bench on the back porch, and then headed into the small building a few yards away. The building was stacked with anonymous boxes and pieces of junk lying everywhere. One of those boxes might still contain letters and other belongings of my mother’s.

  An old-style locksmith’s key carousel sat on a countertop, and he gently spun it until he came to the peg holding a certain key that looked like all the others. He took it to the back door, and it turned the deadbolt lock, easily. He slid the key into his pocket. “Helps to know which key,” he said.

  “What if they’d moved it to a different peg?” I asked. I suppose it would have merely meant another hotel room.

  “Well, I would have tried this one,” he said, pulling a key from his wallet and inserting it in the same lock, where it also turned the bolt. “Some things never change,” he said, turning it back, putting it in his wallet. He returned the other key to the pump house, flipping the power switches so the pump came to life. I suspected he would have tried that key, hidden in his wallet, at some point before we left, to see if they had changed the lock on him.

  “Laundry room’s over there,” he said, pointing with his chin, “in case you want to do some before we head on.”

  I stepped into the house, looked where he pointed, and stood in the dining room while he went around, turning on water valves, adjusting the thermostat, and bringing the bags in. The decor suggested the same style I had seen from the news program, overwhelming antiques, but tastefully arranged, a larger picture emerging from the play among all the items. One of the couple had a real eye. The kitchen counter was high, kidney shaped, with bar stools surrounding it. I could almost picture T.J. eating cereal there in the mornings, all those years growing up.

  The living room was larger than it had appeared in the interview, the weight everyone allegedly gains over the air. A big-screen television dominated the far corner of the room. The curio case I had seen on the broadcast indeed filled one whole wall, and other oddities engaged one another in visual dialogue through much of the space. Professionally, I was impressed with the breadth of their collection and their curatorial and presentation skills.

  “This is really beautiful,” I said, running my hand along the curio. I had never seen anything like it. It ran ten feet long and stood nearly eight feet tall, clearing the ceiling by maybe an inch. It was a deep rich oak, solid, not veneer, the veins of grain running identical on the inside and out of its three evenly spaced upper cabinets. The dead center section was open, and gorgeous art deco table lamps inhabited the recess, a series of figures dancing against frosted-glass full moons. The cabinets surrounding the dancers each housed other unusual deco pieces behind rippled old leaded glass doors. The items were the kind you might find in a Manhattan antique shop, if you were diligent and were a good enough customer that the proprietor would show you the back room. I had certainly never been in the preferred customer category there, but I had some friends, colleagues who were and who went to New York on buying trips.

  “Daddy’s therapy.”

  “What do you mean? Like a hobby?”

  “No, really, his therapy. He’s never articulated it as such, but that’s what it was. When he got back from Vietnam, and things were so different here, he wandered around lost for a long time. This was all before he and your . . . this was before his trips to New York became a regular thing. He did a lot of wandering around here, Central Texas, too, wherever. He just couldn’t keep still. This taught him how to keep still. He found it in pathetic shape at an old general store that was going out of business around the time the big chain food stores were making inroads, somewhere a few hours from here.

  “It was a humidor and they’d left it out in the rain with just a tarp on it. He bought it and brought it back here, and started to work resurrecting it. I think it took him most of three months, stripping it down to its essence, firming its infrastructure discreetly, and then enriching its skin, saturating its surface with oils, one slow and smooth coat at a time, stripping and starting over if it didn’t have the right sheen for him. He worked on it every waking hour, and one day, he looked up and it was done and he felt like he was home again.” He reached into one of the drawers in the lower half and after rummaging for a few minutes, pulled out a little newspaper in a plastic sleeve. “It was probably the beginning of all this, all the outbuildings, the Yorkston house, everything. Here’s an article on some of it. There’s more to tell. There always is, but you’ll get the essence from this.”

  I took the article and set it on the center open shelf in front of the dancing figures. Something else had caught my eye as T.J. had looked for that newspaper. The curio’s top center shelf was barren except for two items, both of which I was very familiar with. No dust filmed the shelf, as often happened with this so
rt of thing, so the pieces had been lifted and set back in place not that long before we arrived.

  “A Baby Snookum?” I asked. These small, rust-colored Indian baby dolls had been sold at reservation roadside stands and souvenir shops through the earlier part of the century. Wrapped in a small piece of rawhide, they usually had some simple beadwork design on the hide, and their heads were the only visible part of them. This was in pretty decent shape, though it had the problem most surviving examples had, making it less valuable on the collector’s and museum markets. Supposedly, Indian women would buy or trade these small plastic dolls by the gross, and make the wrapping blanket out of scraps left over from moccasin-making, and they would do the beadwork there at the stand while they sold them, charging extra for custom work. The hair on the babies, though, was cut from their own heads, or from the heads of their children, and glued on in little patches. This was usually what was missing from these survivors. The glue was not very stable, and grew brittle, or generations of kids had pulled it off, so these dolls were usually bald and scarred. This one was no different.

  “Hmm, it is still here. I wondered,” he said, carrying two cardboard boxes of nearly identical size into the room and setting them on the couch. They had been in the back of the Blazer, neatly tucked away behind the cooler and backpack.

  “Time to trade,” he said, gently opening the curio’s center glass door and pulling the other item, a plastic Indian warrior, from the shelf.

  “What about this?” I asked, holding the Snookum.

  “That stays. Daddy found it at some estate sale a long time ago, negotiated, got it down to a quarter, then brought it home and put it next to the other figure, and said my real daddy and I were together again.”

  He opened the first of the two boxes and pulled a figurine from it, the same sort that took up the other shelves. It was a groom carrying a bride in his arms. It had been broken at some point, and someone had tried to repair it, but the damage had been substantial. There were gaps in it, where the shadows within darkened it. Not even hot glue had the ability to fit all these pieces back together. He set it on the shelf next to the Snookum, took the packing outside, and wandered to the road, where a small residential Dumpster sat. I didn’t ask.