Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  Several walls in the house were jammed with photographs of strangers, some formal, some informal, some candid. T.J. was not in a single picture that I could tell. There were plenty of group shots and I scanned them closely, but he was nowhere to be found. The only picture that was a fairly decent candidate was mounted in the hallway that divided the house in half. The photo showed a much younger Tommy Jack standing in front of his truck, leaning against the grill, and a small boy standing next to him, wearing a cap that was too large for him. The foreground was darkened by the shadow of whoever was taking the picture. While I looked at the photos, T.J. walked around the front yard, touching the fence, throwing a few stones off into the mesquite trees across the road.

  In the laundry room, a stack of neatly folded clothes sat on a table in the corner. I turned the washer on and went for our dirty clothes. Pulling a couple of softener sheets, I discovered the dryer was still full. I loaded its contents into a basket, all men’s clothes: Levi’s, T-shirts, boxer shorts, and white socks with the stripes at the top. I held up one of the shirts, a horizontal striped one, the kind Charlie Brown or Dennis the Menace might wear, and it seemed larger than I would have guessed from the images on the television. The pairs of Levi’s were all thirty-six by thirties, and that seemed to fit more of what I was thinking. Doug was a forty by thirty-two, and T.J., I could see from the jeans I’d just put in the washer, was a thirty-six by thirty-four. I folded the clothes and stacked them with the others.

  A baseball cap hung on a hook above the table, clearly worn, broken in. The logo BIG ANTLER TRACTOR AND FEED, BIG ANTLER, TX, was silk-screened across the front, along with an image of, I presumed, the famous antlers. This close, the scent of fake banana, cocoa, and sweat hung in the air around me—sunscreen, of course—his life soaking into the cap’s band. As fair-skinned as he appeared to be, he would burn easily in this sun. He was in a lot of the photos on the walls, and in almost all of them, he wore some sort of cap, hiding his hair. His copper beard shimmered in the sun. There he was, playing a pickup game of softball, putting on a Santa Claus outfit, digging in a Dumpster, buying something at a garage sale, any number of other things. The only photo with his hair visible was the one of him and the child in front of the truck. A copy of his truck-driving-school certificate hung with the photos, along with a high school and two college diplomas.

  “He went to college?” I asked, when T.J. finally returned.

  “Yeah, he got the degrees. I think he either got a job teaching high school or was about to when the army decided his number was up. After he got back from the war, he said he didn’t have the heart to teach kids who were lining up to get shot to death half a world away. Sometime in the same period he refurbished the curio. He disappeared on and off then too, and came to the reservation, probably other places as well. I think that was when he found he liked doing the long hauls and signed up for trucking school when he got back here.”

  “You’re not in any of these,” I said.

  “I’m in some.”

  “Where?”

  “Probably in the albums.” He looked around, spreading his arms as if there were thousands of photo archives in the room. A variety of things filled the shelves, and some of them might have been photo albums, but somehow, I had my doubts.

  “Is this one you?” I asked, pointing to the one in the hall.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling and nodding. “Well, you can sleep on the pullout here,” he said, patting the sofa, “or you could stay in my old room.” I had expected more about the photo from his expression, but he was not talking.

  “This is fine,” I said. “Where is your room?” He led and I was not especially surprised to see a room decorated like all the others: interesting antiques, tastefully arranged, contemporary bedding, and not another trace of T.J. Howkowski anywhere in that room either.

  “ You wanna watch some TV after your shower?” he asked when we’d stared at his room, devoid of him, for an awkward, silent moment.

  “Sure, that’d be fine. Do you know how to use that thing?” I asked. The giant satellite dish in the side yard looked like it could take a pretty complicated negotiation to anyone unfamiliar with it.

  “We’ll see, I guess,” he said as I went to shower. He opened the bathroom door and I cursed myself for not locking it, but it shut again a few seconds later. A bright green shirt sat on the counter when I got out, the Quaker Steak & Lube logo screened onto it, like the emblem I had seen on that cap a little while before. A small note resting on it said “nightshirt” in T.J.’s sprawling handwriting. The shirt billowed as I opened it. The size tag read 2X. What was with these guys that they didn’t seem to know sizes at all? I put it on and it hung down past my thighs.

  “You like it?” he asked. “I bought it when you went out to the Blazer. Remember? When I said I was going to the john? One of my old girlfriends in the city used to wear oversized T-shirts as night-shirts, so I thought you might like that too.”

  “I was wondering about the size,” I said. “Thought maybe it was some weird thing with you and Tommy Jack.”

  “What? Oh yeah, Daddy always liked T-shirts way too big, who knows why, I guess he still does.”

  “It would appear. So, did you get the satellite working?”

  “Well, no. I switched it on, and pressed some buttons, and the dish outside grinds and moves direction, I went out there and looked, but not much happens here. I switched over to the antenna, but this far out, all you get is snow on most channels and I think one Spanish channel from Lubbock fading in and out.”

  “Why don’t you just call Tommy Jack and ask him? I’m sure it can’t be that hard. You’re probably just doing one little thing out of sequence or something,” I said. He stood there and played with the box some more. The snow on the screen would turn to blackness but then nothing else. He stared into it as if that would make something appear there.

  “They have no idea you’re coming, do they?” I said, looking at his reflection in the dark screen. He shook his head back and forth. “How do you even know they’re there?”

  “I know.”

  “This should be an interesting day tomorrow.”

  “Well, there’s some tapes, here,” he said, squatting in front of the entertainment center. “Fargo?” he laughed.

  “Sure, why not,” I said. He turned on the VCR, ejected a tape, and inserted Fargo. The snow from the airwaves cut off and the digital snows of the northern United States spread across the screen along with the opening credits. He was asleep on the sofa not long after. I had forgotten there was an Indian actor in this movie, too, but he had almost as few lines as Fred Howkowski might have had in any movie he was ever in. At least this guy definitely looked Indian, which was kind of a dubious compliment. His primary role seemed to be to savagely beat someone with a leather belt. Some things don’t change. I inched the volume down to nearly nothing. I could almost see Tommy Jack McMorsey, the man I had the strong sense was indeed my father, trying to help a small Japanese woman across the long anonymous stretch of snow-covered, frozen earth, in the ransom-money scene. I could almost force the pixels to change in my mind, one color dominating the other two in every small fiber of the image, creating him in small colored dots, shifting and moving across the screen before me.

  I quietly got up and went to his desk in the den. It was odd, going through someone’s private belongings, someone you knew of but didn’t know, really, forming new opinions with every revelation. A stick of Black Jack gum, probably years old, a fingernail clipper, strips of one- and two-cent postage stamps, a pocket-size bottle of Germ-X antibacterial solution, an accumulation of used and bent staples still in the jaws of a staple remover, brassy tokens that looked like they would be used in a video game arcade, neatly cut out pictures of blankets from catalogs, a small copy of the same photo with him and a boy in front of the truck’s grill, and hundreds of twist ties. What do these things add up to? Who was this man who would be my father?

  I found the things I need
ed: a small pair of scissors and a tube of superglue. In the bathroom, I reached to the underside of my bobbed hair, where its dense layers would afford some invisible sacrifice, and I cut a small patch, gathering it on the counter. In the living room, T.J. still slept as the VCR had run through the film, rewound, and shut off, leaving the blank airwaves to refill the screen again with shifting snow. The curio door opened quietly with the gentle lift and pull I had seen T.J. perform earlier. I removed the Snookum, took it to the bathroom, swabbed its bare head with superglue, and lay the strands of hair across it, then returned it to its place in the cabinet.

  I lay down for a while on the sofa, not bothering to pull it out, my head against the padded arm where a Pendleton blanket lay. It was an old knockoff Navajo design, by the look. Eventually, I got up, went to the laundry room, took off the T-shirt, and folded it neatly. I exchanged it for one from Tommy Jack’s pile of shirts and stepped outside. The cicadas sounded like a lawn full of rattlers might. I watched the ground carefully all the way to the Blazer, removed the envelope from the glove compartment, and read the letter again. Back inside, I turned on the moon dancer lamps. The Snookum and the fractured couple threw long distorted shadows on the ceiling of the nearly dark living room. By this artificial moonlight and the blue cast of the television, I read the newspaper article T.J. had shown me, over and over. Who was this eccentric man my mother claimed as the love of her life? Eventually I fell asleep in that electronic snow, contemplating Cascabel and all the things that awaited us in a few hours, beyond Interstate 84.

  The six hours to the New Mexico mountain town went by surprisingly fast. Even on winding roads when we’d get stuck behind a slow-moving semi, I didn’t care. I had steeled myself for the meeting in Big Antler, but now it was almost as if we’d already met somehow. To have been in that space, and then left it, changed me, though in what ways, I couldn’t say. I suspected whatever I felt would be reawakened the closer we got, but at the moment, I could have perhaps left, returned home, and never spoken with him in person. T.J., in the driver’s seat, said very little about the time we spent at the house. He walked around the grounds in the morning before we left his old home, and it seemed like he was perhaps taking it in, one last time, but I didn’t ask.

  Entering Cascabel, we passed an old A-frame that had been a restaurant named Wanda’s, but it hadn’t been Wanda’s in a very long time. The signs advertising specials had been so sun-bleached that they looked more like watermarks on fancy stationery than actual writing. T.J. pulled into the parking lot there, peeked in the window, and then used the pay phone at the far end of the lot. After several tries he came back and sat on the hood for a bit, so I got out and stood with him. The morning chill was burning off and a nice day bloomed out of it.

  “My momma hates being woken by a phone, says it scares her witless and shaves time off her heart,” he said. “So for the last few years I was around, she made my daddy take it off the hook just after the news and before we all went to bed, and we couldn’t put it back on until she’d had at least one bite of the toast and one sip of the tea. The recording of the operator asking if we needed assistance would come on and then that whining beep would go on for a minute and then be silent. She begrudged even this brief intrusion so we generally didn’t lift it off the hook until she was already in the bedroom.

  “When she first informed us of the new phone rules, Daddy used to ask, ‘What if there’s been some accident? What if someone’s died?’ She would shoot right back that they are still gonna be dead in the morning when we wake up, and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it. When she gave one-sentence answers, that was pretty much the end of any dialogue.”

  “You could just go up there,” I said.

  “That over there is the Mescalero reservation. You can’t tell so much until you get inside, then you see that certain roads have roadblocks. Only people who have real business can travel there,” he said, as if I had not made a suggestion.

  “You could—” I started.

  “I gotta do it this way,” he said, walking back over to the pay phone. After a few tries, he got an answer and then we headed down the street to an old department store that had been converted into a flea market. The word PRIME had been crudely painted over the old name, but done so badly that neither the new nor the old name was all that discernable. People milled about, buying, selling, but it seemed that the main currency in this store was gossip. Every single person there knew all the others, and it felt like the reservation. Maybe they were all just the dealers, passing time until potential customers came in. A little while later, a red pickup pulled in and I caught my first look in person at Tommy Jack McMorsey.

  When I saw him for the first time, I didn’t really even know what I was doing there. Though I’ll probably never admit it to him, Royal was right. I was driven by two things in collision, my personal life and my professional life. Of course, he might offer me some real information about Fred Howkowski, but what did I think he might offer me as a father? Did I really need to connect the dots in this formal way? Self-righteous abstraction was fine, all the way here, rage and embarrassment driving me half the distance of this continent. This man, though, standing in front of me, the tangibility of him, the way his clothes fit a little funny, the arch of his aging back, the flicker of a smile mixed with anxiety, the sunburn on his pale cheeks and ears—these things defied the cardboard cutout that had ridden the two thousand miles along with me.

  “Daddy,” T.J. said, running up to the man, arms open, but Tommy Jack, it seemed, had a force field around him that deflected our northern world from him, defying T.J.’s embrace with a simple look. Instead, the older man held out a weathered hand and with that simple gesture, T.J. remembered where he was.

  “Boy, what are you doing here?” Tommy Jack asked, almost matter-of-factly, but not quite.

  “We saw you on the TV,” T.J. said, as if that were sufficient explanation for erasing the gap of years between them. T.J. shifted, the cocktail-party-introduction move, and suddenly Tommy Jack noticed me. “Daddy, I want you to meet someone. This here is Annie Boans.” He took my hand and shook it lightly, the way a man of an earlier generation touches an unfamiliar woman’s hand. “She’s from the reservation. Her momma was someone who knew you. You know, the one who—”

  “We finally meet, Mr. McMorsey,” I interrupted. I wanted this introduction done on my own terms. “My mother still talks about you, with some.”

  “With some . . .”

  “People.”

  “Oh, some people, yes, of course,” he said, embarrassed that he hadn’t understood. Then the rest began to sink in. “Your mother?” Though he made it sound like a question, his gaze flickered to T.J.—a brief glint of hostility that he masked almost as soon as it had washed over him. He knew. And it seemed that among the expressions he wrestled with hiding, pleasure was one of them, pleasure that she still thought of him.

  “Shirley Mounter,” I clarified. “She would have been Shirley Mounter, then, too. She was married when she made your acquaintance. This is of course not to say that they ever stopped being married, right up to the point he died.” Were these the things I had come all this way to say? I supposed they were.

  “Daddy?” T.J. asked, maybe trying to ease the situation or totally oblivious. “You still got stuff here?” Tommy Jack nodded and T.J. smiled, oddly transformed into a boy in this man’s presence. “I’m gonna go see if I can find it. I bet you a dollar I can, just by what you’re selling and the prices you put on.” His grammar also seemed to have been transformed by our crossing into the South. He ran into the building, leaving us alone in the parking lot, among the bargain hunters. How he expected to identify Tommy Jack’s booth among all the broken Kewpie dolls and cheap glassware was beyond me, but I had bigger concerns.

  “When I was younger, she used to talk about you, though only on rare occasions, like you were some sacred legend we could only hear about on special days. It took me years to realize that the speci
al days were those when she and I were the only ones around.”

  “You don’t know everything, missy. That was a long time ago. Probably you weren’t even born then, the first time. Your momma was a wonderful woman. Full of life. How’s she doing?” he asked, his voice dropping a little, as he lowered his head.

  “She’s fine. You know, I don’t really see anything so special about your ears.” I smiled, but not a real smile. I wanted him to know that I had more information than just how my mother was doing.

  “Oh, there ain’t.” His head lowered even further, and his ears reddened. I guess there were more ways than one my mother admired his ears. Probably more information than I needed to know, but the upper hand is always useful. “A nice thing about having a beard, though, is that I don’t have to worry about trimming the ear hairs all that much. They just blend in.” He laughed, shuffled around, kicked a small rock from the asphalt and watched it bounce into the weeds.

  “Blending in.”

  “Listen. You’re talking about things that happened, now, almost thirty-five years ago. I don’t know what you expect me to say. I got a life here. Hasn’t the boy told you anything before bringing you out here?” T.J. was working his way back toward us, frowning a little, perhaps having heard us, though we stayed around whisper levels.

  “T.J. is not a boy, he’s an adult, a successful professor and professional actor who—”

  “I only call him that ’cause his real daddy named him after me,” he said, exasperated, unsteady, like he was back in that interview. “And when I got with the wife, we had to make some difference between us, so she could separate who she was calling. I guess it just stuck.” He paused, noticing T.J. getting closer. “In his thirties, man alive. So, uh, he’s successful, huh?”