Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  “Successful enough,” I said. How could he not know? How long had they been out of regular contact?

  “Daddy, I couldn’t find your stuff anywhere,” T.J. said. “You switch the kinds of things you’re selling? Or did the supply of war stuff finally dry up?”

  “The market for war stuff sure never dries up. People change, boy. You ought to know that. My stuff is over there, lot number fifty-eight, same as my age. Guess maybe I’ll be having to change lots in a little while.”

  “Yeah, that’s one of the reasons I came back. I came to be here for your birthday, like we used to.” T.J. smiled, hoping for it to be infectious, it seemed, expecting Tommy Jack to be happy about his surprise, congratulate him for being so clever, but the only response he got from the older man was a slow shake of the head.

  “So, uh, are y’all staying here?” Tommy Jack asked.

  “We made reservations down at the inn,” T.J. said. “Thought maybe we could go and play some slots a little later, if you were interested. Never was very good at the card games, but all you need for the slot machines is correct change and I’ve certainly got that.” T.J. slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans and rattled change. I wondered when he picked that up. It sounded like mostly quarters. “Kind of figured Momma might still not be too interested in seeing me, and I know how she is about unexpected company of any kind, but I thought it was time to clean some things up in my life, and this here place is as good as any. I assume you still have that letter from my real daddy?”

  “I do, but it’s at the other house,” Tommy Jack said, again bowing his head. “I would have to go looking for it. I’m not for sure where it is. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a need to read it,” he finished, but we both knew he could place his hand on it in a moment’s notice. It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you forgot. “Most everything from the war’s in my duffel bag, with my nasty old boots and the one set of fatigues they let us take home, that my old body will never see the fitting side of again, and all the other things from that time. But the letter . . .” he said, looking out toward the rolling mountains of the Mescalero reservation just the next rise over.

  “It’s been years since you read it to me. Did you read me the whole thing or were you selective, Daddy?”

  “The contents of that envelope weren’t addressed just to you, boy.”

  “Does he say in it why he gave me up to you, Daddy?” T.J. tried his hardest to say this in a casual way, but whatever acting skills he had were not active on this day. What he wanted was very clear, even as it changed. His face was like one of those magic rings we used to have, Flickers, where you looked at it from one direction and as soon as you shifted it, the image changed a bit, a surprise. He wanted to know and didn’t want to know. He wanted to be able to hear it and then decide for himself if he liked what he heard or not, and if not, wanted to be able to wipe it clean, shift, forget he’d ever heard the violation. But we all knew the world doesn’t work that way.

  “Coming home has been a long time in the making,” T.J. said. “I want to read the letter. All of it. And I want to see Momma. I have something to give her. It took me a long while to get this right but it’s time. I imagine the two of you have things to talk about as well.” I didn’t know if he were referring to Tommy Jack and his wife, or Tommy Jack and me. Either way, he was a keen observer. “I’m getting the Blazer, and we’re going to follow you back.”

  “So you’ve told him about your momma and me?” Tommy Jack asked when T.J. was out of earshot.

  “Me? He knows more than I do,” I said, watching him. His forehead wrinkled and his mouth pushed out a little.

  “Missy, you think we’re all just going to run to my place and have us a good old conversation?” he said. “Well,” he added, shaking his head, kicking some more stones, and then sighed.

  “I had my own business in coming here. I don’t really know why I had to see you, or even what I expected. Somehow, in person you’re not the creep I thought you must be, but I sure as hell don’t know what my mother saw in you either.”

  “Like I said, before, missy—I’m sorry, what would you like me to call you? I don’t want to be rude.”

  “Maybe you should call me ‘the girl,’” I said, staring at him, watching him come to realize my eyes and his were more or less the same shade of green. I walked over to the passenger side of the Blazer as T.J. pulled up.

  “What?” He didn’t want to believe what I had suggested.

  “Daddy, are you going to lead or follow?” T.J. said, rolling down the window. I knew it was a Southern thing, but the name T.J. chose to call Tommy Jack still bothered me. It made him seem childish, and I was embarrassed every time he used it. “Either way, we’re gonna be at the cabin in under ten minutes.” The air-conditioning blew out and around us, breaking up as it hit the hot noon air.

  “Boy? Will you wait? Maybe tomorrow? I thought you were going to the inn and the casino. Maybe I can, you know, let her know easy that you’re back, let her get used to the idea before you come barging in.” He was asking to buy some time, but I had to wonder how he intended to spend it, once he got it. My guess was he might try to bolt, but where was there to go, at this point?

  “It’s almost noon. You have until noon tomorrow, Daddy. One way or the other, I am going to be on your doorstep this time tomorrow. So, are we going to see you tonight? Dinner and some slots? See you at the High Tide?”

  “I’ll get back to you. Are you already registered at the inn?”

  “No, check-in isn’t until one, so we’ll probably go get some lunch, and then go to the desk. You want to join us for lunch? One of those awesome desserts at Wanda’s?”

  “Wanda’s is closed,” Tommy Jack said, his eyes squinting.

  “ Yeah, I noticed that when we pulled into town. Looks like nothing ever took its place, either. Her last pie special signs look years faded in the windows.”

  “She left town over ten years ago. Said she couldn’t make a go of it anymore. And we didn’t go there, much, after that last time you were with us.”

  “Guess maybe we’ll just eat at the inn, then, and maybe catch a few early-bird slots before check-in,” T.J. said, nodding, and we pulled away into the rushing traffic down the four-lane highway back into town. The small man who was most likely my father disappeared, standing still, in the rearview mirror. I wondered how long he stood there before he took his first inevitable steps in that new role.

  ACT THREE:

  Action

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  Call Back

  Dear Son,

  I am sorry I had to leave like this. I wish I had some answers for you, but I don’t. I know you’ll get lonely sometimes, but remember, your new dad is a good man. He saved me over there, in the war, and I never would have made it back without him. I have some things for you that I’ve asked your new dad to hang on to until you get to be a little older. I know twenty-one seems to be a long ways away, but even though you can smoke and drink and even get drafted to go fight in some other country, you aren’t a man when you’re eighteen. I know you’re too young to read this letter now, but your new dad will read it to you, but Tommy Jack, and yes, I mean you, McMorsey, don’t you let him read the rest of it until he’s eighteen, or until he decides he’s maybe going to try his skills at Fireball.

  The things I’m leaving you, you’ll probably run through them and say, what is this shit, but they’re my things, the things I felt were important to pass on to you. The first is my only speaking part in the movies, though it isn’t much and it never did even make it into the picture. It’s a short reel, but I hope you like it, it’s all I got. The second thing is the first picture I ever saw of you. Your grams didn’t want to send it to me, she didn’t want you anywhere near Vietnam, but I talked her into it anyway. I had to promise to send it right back, but when I saw you there in that little blanket, I just had to keep you with me. It drove her crazy and she asked for it back all the time, but I kept it with me. She b
elieved a part of your soul was trapped inside the picture. She always hung on to some of those old beliefs, but I must have too. Hanging on to your picture, guarding it, that was the one thing that kept me going over there. There were lots of times I would just lay down at night, so tired I almost didn’t care if a sniper or some mortar got me in my sleep, because it would mean I wouldn’t have to get up and walk through that damned jungle one more day, but then I would remember your picture, in the pocket over my heart in the flak jacket, and that would make me just that much more careful. I knew I had to bring you back home, and I did just that. So, nyah-wheh for keeping me going. The other stuff, that’s odds and ends, my draft card, my dog tags, a beer can your new dad tried to play a joke on me with, my call sheets from the movies I worked on, the little parts of the costumes I walked off the set with. Wardrobe wouldn’t miss them. Just throw it out if you don’t want it, probably won’t mean much to you anyway. I suppose that says something about a man, if most of his life can be summed up in a box smaller than a rucksack. That last thing, though, that eagle feather with the beaded and tanned hilt, you should either take that or give it to Hillman, the medicine man. He was the one who gave it to me when I got home, said sometimes I might need bad thoughts to take flight and I could smudge them away with tobacco, let the feather push the bad thoughts out into the sky on tobacco smoke. You can decide if it did any good. If you want it, take it, but if you don’t, return it to him. Your cousin Brian Waterson will know how to find him. They’re related somehow, but I’m not exactly sure in what way. He can tell you.

  I imagine you’ll be going home at some point, even if just to visit, and if you decide to play in the Fireball game at the National Picnic, here’s a little piece of advice. If we all still went the old way, you would have to wait until you had some kids of your own to be considered on the Old Men’s side of things, instead of the Young Men’s, and there’s a reason for that. The Old Men are who they are because they are supposed to accept responsibility. I knew when I got back from the war, when I first saw you, sleeping in that laundry basket, just a little bundle, that I might have been an Old Man because I helped make you, but something changed in me, over there. I can’t even say what it was, but I knew that I should have stayed a Young Man. I ain’t saying you shouldn’t have been born, I love you to pieces, but I knew that if I stayed there, at home, and you stayed with me, neither one of us was going to last long. So, I was looking out for both of us when I asked Tommy Jack to take you away, and go some place different. If you do go back and decide to play, you remember one thing. A lot of people play that game, knowing it’s dark when they’re on the field, and they try to settle some scores they don’t have the nerve to when they’re in the light. That’s their business, but you remember, Fireball started off as a medicine game, one for healing. You play it with your heart, letting the good come out, and you live the rest of your life that way, too. I’ve played my last game of Fireball, past the point of any medicine, and I’m not going to ask you to forgive me, but just trust me when I say I know I made some mistakes, and I am sorry.

  Love,

  Dad

  Tommy Jack McMorsey

  Well, after that interview experience, Liza Jean is going to for sure get her dream come true this year. The road is a lonely place, and Liza Jean Bean never was much for traveling, even after she became Liza Jean McMorsey. She was the school nurse for all of Big Antler, such as it is, and that was a gig she loved a lot, because it gave her the summer off and we could head to our place in the mountains. Let me tell you, if you live in West Texas, you best find yourself a job that lets you get away in the summertimes, unless you want the soles of your shoes melting to the asphalt any time you just want to take yourself a walk on down the road. That’s what it’s like here, anyway, probably from the end of May right up to the beginning of the school year in August, at least. Really, more like Labor Day, and Liza Jean always said as soon as she retired, the one thing she most wanted to do was to stay at our place in the mountains through Labor Day to watch all the summer folks have to head on down to the flatlands while she kicked back on the porch, drinking herself a Big Red.

  That seemed like it would have been a nice dream to me, too. But Labor Day is most like any other day, on the road. Maybe a little more traffic on the interstate, but not so’s you’d remark on it. To the wife, though, that day always looked ugly on the calendar. It meant another full year of sticking thermometers under the tongues of kids who just wanted to get out of a test that day, and teaching the girls how to use one of those time-of-the-month devices properly. Mostly she liked her job but those older girls, the ones who were knowing their boyfriends in special ways before the wife could even explain the consequences, those girls seem to have worn her out, and Liza Jean’s been looking forward to retirement the last few years.

  The end of this summer her dream day would have arrived anyway, and I would have let her have it, but that was three months away, and just then, as always, I would have to get back to the flatlands and she knew it. She always took issue with the fact that my primary dispatch was out of Lubbock and that I could not get as flexibly hooked up in Cascabel. At first she was a little bent out of shape that we weren’t going to be together on my birthday this coming week, but not bent enough to join me on the road. Birthdays never meant much to me anyway, but for sure we have already spent my last birthday together. At first, we’d decided to not head to Cascabel until after my birthday so we could have spent it together, but plans have a way of changing rapidly on you, sometimes. It was the end of Memorial Day weekend, but what I was doing here in Cascabel was gathering my things and by the time my birthday rolled around, we would be parted.

  We didn’t say much to one another after those reporters left. What more was there to say? We packed in silence and I drove us up here, so I could clean my stuff out of the cabin. The few brief conversations we had were about how to do this divorce clean. Yes, I know that sounds abrupt but there are some doors, once you walk through them, that is it, and I walked through a pretty big one on national TV Friday night and we both knew it was time for me to just keep walking.

  She would keep the cabin in Cascabel and live there, as she’d always wanted to anyway, and I would keep the Big Antler house and the outbuildings. She could take whatever antiques she wanted from them to replace the things I was taking from the cabin that were mine. I didn’t care, really, about whatever she might decide to take. I could replace most of it if I found the right things. She knew the curio was off-limits, but I didn’t think I had to make that overly clear.

  The temperature in the mountains was still a little chilly. Memorial Day was just as chilly as the folks we usually rent the mountain place out to always say it is. “Liza Jean, you want me to get the swamp cooler out for the season before I leave?” I asked.

  “Well, yes, of course, I’ll surely be getting a hot spell and then what would I do with no one to set it up for me?” This was one of those times she was asking a question but not really asking a question, like, wanting any kind of answer. “Make yourself useful as long as you’re here.” She sighed in that way that let me know I had wastefully used up some of the few words with her that I still had allotted to me, so I left her to the toast and tea I made for her each morning before she woke up. She was never going to forgive me for the end of the interview and I am sure that it would remain on the videotape she plays back in her head all the time even if I were to erase it from the VHS we made the night of the show. I can’t imagine we will ever watch it. “And you be careful on the road tomorrow, Tommy Jack. The full moon’s coming up and you know it makes all kinds of people get the most peculiar of notions.” She was furious, but she was not letting me get away that easy. I still had a couple years of ass-chewing ahead of me, even if we were splitting up. I can’t say as I blame her. Her place at the table warmed in the faint sun, even in the morning fog.

  Since she was up, I put the phone back on the hook and as soon as it was back in the cradle
that phone started to ringing, even in my hand. I left it there for a second too long, knowing that on the other end could only be bad news. Whoever was calling had been trying for a while. Some of our friends had called after the TV show a couple nights ago, though not really discussing the content, but none of them would be calling this time of day. Anyone who knows us is fully aware of Liza Jean’s opinions on morning telephone calls.

  “Tommy Jack McMorsey, answer that telephone! Someone’s trying to get through! I mean!” She turned her face and stared out the kitchen window at the mist while I grabbed the receiver, stepped into the living room, and mumbled a greeting, stretching the cord, trying to disappear for her.

  “Daddy? I’m home. I saw you on the TV and had to come back and get things to right again. I can see Prime from here. Wasn’t hard to find at all.” I knew the boy was closer immediately—not just because the connection was clearer. The sounds of the city had been gone from him for a few years, no more cabs, buses, ambulances, that fear, but now even the sounds of New York period were gone from him too. It was just him and a few voices—the customers who browse at the co-op flea market I sold junk from to support my outbuilding projects. Nobody believed me when I told them I financed all those restorations selling junk to other people looking for their pasts, and that was fine. It meant nobody else would add to my competition. All it takes is a few little gold mines someone is tossing out with a seventy-five-cent tag on them, to really add up. You just need some patience and a trained eye. And the search gave me something to do with our mistake purchases or just other valuable stuff I found while I was out hunting for my own collection when the haulers didn’t need me so much and Liza Jean wanted me out of her hair.