Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  When we had come home with that “Over the Threshold,” she had a present for him, too. Everyone from around his way, back in the east, had always said this one plastic Indian was his daddy, and the wife had gone to great lengths to get it for him and surprise him. I’m still not for sure how she did it. Back then, she had always taken a general disinterest in the junk business and seemed to pay less than half an attentive eye whenever I was doing some negotiating or on the trail of some elusive item. He had run into the house, holding the tiny just-married couple behind his back, and she had been standing in the kitchen, holding her arms behind her back too, the aroma of homemade macaroni-and-cheese casserole surrounding her. They both pulled out at the same time and the boy almost dropped that bride and groom, himself, when he saw that little plastic daddy of his in her hand. From that point on, it never left the top bookshelf above his bed, until around Memorial Day, the year he left.

  “Tommy Jack! Where did you ever find it!” she said, memories flooding in, her old voice back for a minute, as she ran to the figurine immediately. “This must have cost you a small fortune.” Then her tone changed, quieted. “It was always my favorite. But it’s not going to change what happened between us. We just can’t be together anymore. Really, you shouldn’t have.”

  “I didn’t,” was all I said, and it was enough. She paused, thought for a minute, then set it down and looked at me again.

  “That was him, this morning, wasn’t it? On the phone?” This was also not really a question. She spoke a lot of these, over the years, but this time, I answered, anyway.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Back to your old ways? You must have acted pretty fast to try and pull this off. Well, like I just said, you really shouldn’t have gone to the trouble, because it won’t make any difference.”

  “No, I am not back to my old ways, damn it! He called and said he was down at Prime, so I went.”

  “Well, what did he say? Was he gloating that you had finally told me all the things you never had?” I expected something other than this from her, while not for sure what, or even what I was going to make up in an answer, but this was one question I could answer.

  “He said he wanted to see you, so I arranged that, and let him make his own decision. I guess seeing you was enough. He said he wanted to leave something for you, too. This must have been it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. No, he also wants to read that letter his daddy wrote, you know, the letter.”

  “You gonna show it to him?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t say much that he hasn’t probably already guessed, but I suppose he deserves to see it. I told him it’s at the house, and that I had to go pick it up. I imagine he’s anxious. At first I was going to tell you that dispatch had called and I had to go. All bullshit. But it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m going. We can sort through this another day. It’s not like we’re in any hurry, is it?”

  “No, no hurry. Nothing is going to change the direction we’re going,” she said, shaking her head. “Truth be told, we’ve been going in this direction for a long, long time.” I didn’t know what her next sentence was going to be, and this lack of certainty was an odd sensation for me. Just then, the phone rang, and we both looked up. I hadn’t put it back on the hook when we’d left for the casino.

  We both knew who it was, but I was not taking the initiative this time. Though he hadn’t called our numbers in over two years, the boy always said he’d like to come back. Whenever we’d get those calls and he’d sat there or stood there all still-like on the other end of the line and I could hear, beyond his breathing in the pay phone, the buses and cabs sliding by around him, we’d wait, him and me, until the wife spoke. Each time, she’d said something about the weather here, how the dust from the windstorms mats up the cat’s fur, how the air-conditioning had been running for four days straight, how the cotton was going to give us a poor yield that year without the rain—whatever she could think of until he passed on some news about the weather up there, letting her know he had heard her shut the door and lock it one more time. She stared laser beams at me and her stare was like one of the forest fires that scorch through here in drought season. You could almost tell how mean they were going to be from the first few lines whispering out over the sky.

  I remained where I was, and eventually, she picked up the phone.

  “Hello,” she said, in a quiet, timid voice, not at all her usual phone voice, the one she used to fend off telemarketers and errant adopted sons. Even from where I stood, I could hear him, and she nodded, as if he could see her.

  “Momma? I’m home.”

  It wasn’t always like this. When he was young, you could never speak a cross word to that boy without her getting her fur up and raking you sideways afterward. I should have just thrown out that letter when it came our way, those years ago, just noted it and touched a match to it. The boy was certainly all ours—mine initially, but eventually ours—fair and clear, and I had never hid his beginnings from him, either. But I had to do right by Fred, and who could have predicted I would wind up on national TV and start this mess a-rolling all over again almost twenty years later? The boy even talked to his real daddy on occasion back then when Fred made his own long-distance collect calls. So I never thought anything about bringing the boy back there for his daddy’s funeral. I thought he should likely be there anyway to say good-bye proper but I never really thought of what might happen when we arrived, what would be reawakened in me, and then all the other things beyond—one stupid domino hitting the next and getting things rolling, slapping on down your future.

  I did not think he should be going with me on the long haul that young and I for sure do not fly anymore. Nearly a part of every one of my days in the war was spent in the damned air, chopper up and chopper down, and once I landed back home after my discharge, I said I was never getting back into another. The sight of planes is not too bad and every once in a while when I am over to Lubbock on a local run, I go and park down to the airport, eat me a sandwich, and watch them come in, shifting in the winds like they do, reminding whoever’s on them that they could still be dropped out of the air in a second’s notice. That’s what I always felt every time we went up.

  So when me and the boy made that trip to New York we took the train, a long, long ride, and then those rental cars that cost so dear but my ass stayed planted right where it was supposed to, nearly three feet off the ground and little more. Me and the boy, we drove all through that reservation. Even in the couple years since I had been up there visiting his daddy and Shirley, the place had changed, lots. I showed the boy the place where he had been born. The old house like so many others there burned down a year before and all we could see were some charred boards sticking up from the brush where the earth was taking back its own like blackened bones reaching to the night.

  A lot had happened in two years’ time. His momma’s new address was tucked into my wallet where I keep my secret phone numbers and we drove by it slowly but I never spoke to him about that matter. A young lady hung some wash on a line as we glided by, little jumpsuits in faded colors, like headless, faceless kids, but I wasn’t for sure if it was her or not. Could have been, from the girl I remember, but those Indian girls, you know how lots of them look so much the same and even if it was, it seemed pretty clear she had moved beyond whatever the boy might have meant to her, breeding different kids in a different time—kids she thought she had a chance of raising right. So we came on home and didn’t think too much about what we saw.

  It was just me and the boy before Liza Jean finally grew tired of the Giant and called me up one Friday to see if I wanted to invite her out for dinner like we used to. She pointed out that she was still the woman I had first intended to marry. I had been with a few women since returning from the reservation with that boy but after my first time with Shirley Mounter I didn’t really want any other women except maybe Liza Jean Bean, or Liza Jean Montgomery, as she was then. Sure,
I went to bed with a few, you know, but there was never a one I wanted to settle down with.

  Liza Jean had offered to let the boy stay with her and the Giant that time I went out and visited Fred in Hollywood, and maybe she was testing life with the boy and had decided she could love him after all. She left the Giant shortly after I got back from California and then beyond that first Friday night, she would have us over for dinner a lot, always making something special for the boy, some kid food, and she would serve us up something fancy. More times than not, I would have preferred the macaroni and cheese or fried hamburgs she was serving him but I usually know when to keep my mouth shut.

  There were all kinds of pictures on her walls but they were mostly of her with the other half of the picture cut out, and there were some of her family where one person was carefully and neatly cut out of the picture and the blank cardboard backing showed through, a total absence where someone had once been. She was mean with a scissors, I learned that early on.

  That boy was playing with fire, here, on the other end of the phone line, but at the cabin, we only had the one line. It was him and her, but I guess he was ready to pick up the flaming ball, just like his daddy used to. The last time he lighted this particular fuse was in Wanda’s, when all the shit started.

  We had been at one of the other places I used to sell junk at, that afternoon, before it closed and Prime opened up, and I had been complaining that I was running out of stuff to sell. That’s kind of the way I get sometimes—itchy, even when I really don’t have any reason to be. One of the biggest garage sale weekends of the year was coming up the weekend after, it was Memorial Day that year, too, and this was the way I always jazzed myself for such things. We had just blown into town from Texas, escaping the hot summer that was frying itself up, over there, and the itch for change began its creep on me like it did every year at the end of May.

  I was saying how I was going to have to start filling the pump house with junk again for my next big garage sale when we got home. The shelves along the pump house’s walls were gathering a film they were so empty. You know me, laying it on thicker than a dust storm covering a newly washed car just looking for an excuse to hit every garage sale in town and even some out of town. My holiday weekend was planned out sweet when the boy mentioned those two boxes of stuff sitting low on a back shelf behind some old tin advertising signs. He didn’t know what was in them, mind you, but he knew they were there and once that was out, well, there were lots of questions flying around that table and Liza Jean, she did not even finish her strawberry glaze pie and that alone should suggest how grim the rest of my day was, but mine was not nearly as grim as the boy’s.

  All the way back to the house, and I mean the house in West Texas—yes, she made me pack us up and head on back, right then, needing to see what might be in those boxes before I had the chance to get one of them gone—she asked the same questions as many different ways as she could, trying to catch me in answers that didn’t match up perfectly, and that was not too hard a thing for her to do usually. I don’t know why I lie about all kinds of stupid little things, and she catches me nearly every damned time, but maybe it’s because when I need to lie, when they really count, and she doesn’t catch me, she gets thrown off.

  So for the five-hour drive back to Big Antler, I recited the story of how the boxes were just pictures of the guys who were in the airborne with me, the can I had dented for Fred’s head was in there, and the NVA flag I had saved, splitting the contents of one of those boxes, and making up other stuff, just to fill that second box in my head with anything other than what was really in there but none of that was filling the real box covered in dust we were driving toward. The boy listened, all excited, imagining that one I was making up in my head just then, wanting to go through it.

  When we got there, she went right to the pump house and brought both boxes into the house and set them on the kitchen counter, not bothering to dust them off, coughing in the years’ accumulation piled on top. Whenever I’d gone through them, I had always carefully removed the tops, so the dust always made them look like they had been sitting for the longest of times. I reached for the first one, the one I knew contained Fred’s things, and when she saw that, naturally, she went to the other box instead. Lifting that lid, she opened up these brief bursts of my life, and she was never going to let me have them back. When she looked in that box and saw lots of nothing having to do with my life in Vietnam, and lots of nothing having to do with the men who were my family then, my squad, she was determined to make the things that were in there just as gone. She pulled the pair of panties out first, like I knew she would.

  “Which one of the guys in your squad wore these, Tommy Jack, and why did he give them to you? Something you haven’t told me about?” Shirley had given those to me that first time we had been together. Actually, I had asked for them. They were still lying on the floor next to that blanket when we had gotten dressed in the dark that morning, so pale they almost glowed there, in that hour before the sun rose. I saw her a lot more in the next months I stayed there on the reservation, collecting small pieces of her to take back with me, which Liza Jean was reconstructing here on our kitchen counter.

  Books of matches I had lighted Shirley’s cigarettes with, a scarf she had worn over her hair one rainy Saturday we chased garage sales all over the county, a napkin she had blotted her lipstick with, her deep-maroon kiss captured for me forever, the guitar pick I used when I tried to teach her “Ode to Joy.” Though she had incredible rhythm beneath the sheets, she never had a drop of it on the guitar. Her phone number faded from the bottom of an Indian Head beer coaster, so old now it seemed not even like one, a ghost from those days before the distribution standard, when phone numbers were issued in exchanges. All these things were bad, particularly the panties, of course, but the worst was the strip of photos.

  “Who is this, Tommy Jack? I don’t remember you telling stories of any big-bosomed Vietnamese women in your squad. Would George remember her if I was to call him up right now?” You know the kind they were. You put a dollar in the booth, and you sit in front of this swirly satin curtain and get four opportunities to be blinded by the flashbulb. Probably was a lot less, then. I can’t remember for sure, but there we were, big as life, our heads together in the first shot, my arm showing around her shoulder, then in the second, me kissing her, but her with her eyes still staring at the camera, and the last two, almost the same, us getting totally lost in the kiss. And in each one of them, of course, since they are taken only seconds apart, is the beard I grew while I was in Vietnam, and the glasses that I only wore after I’d gotten married. Liza Jean reached over to the wall-hanging Princess phone we kept in the kitchen because she loved to talk on the phone when she put away dishes, so I had gotten it installed for our anniversary at a time when it was highly uncommon to have more than one phone in a household.

  I probably should have thrown all that out when Liza Jean and I got hitched, and for sure shouldn’t have added to the collection after, but you know how it is. I probably should not have gone back and stayed at Shirley’s apartment when we were there for the funeral, either, knowing what was likely to happen. But not a lot stops me when I have a drive and I have never been one of your more introspective types.

  “I don’t know who that is, Liza Jean, it was a long time ago, when you were married to the Giant. Remember that? You were the one who left me, who wrote me the goddamned Dear Tommy Jack letter while I was over there, being afraid of getting shot every fucking night.” I was in the clear on this. She put the phone back in the cradle and though I would have to pay for sure and be sleeping on the cold side of the bed for a while, it could have been much worse than it was going. Then that fucking boy spoke up. The boy never was all that smart, never knew when to go along with a lie in just the right way.

  “That woman’s not Vietnamese. She’s from the reservation. Man, I haven’t seen her since we stayed with her, when we went back for my real daddy’s funeral.”


  “We were married, then, Tommy Jack,” was all the wife said to me, all quiet-like, and she didn’t say anything to the boy. The woman in the photo was married then too, I thought, but obviously, that was something I did not say. Liza Jean dumped the box’s contents into a trash bag, walked it out the car, and headed out down the road, I guess, in the general direction of the town dump. I made a quick phone call and then turned to the boy.

  “Big mouth, I should have left your ass on that reservation, with your grandmother and all those others, hooting and hollering. Shit, your liver would be shot by now, and I would not be in this fucking mess. Now what am I going to do?”

  “Well, I didn’t know she was the reason we weren’t supposed to talk about the funeral trip. You told me we weren’t supposed to discuss that because it’s like gossiping about the dead. And I was a little kid. How the hell was I supposed to know you were lying to me, and asking me to lie to Momma on your behalf?”

  “Like you didn’t know I was keeping time with Shirley, back then.”

  “Well, I never thought about it as a grown-up, Daddy, you know, I don’t like to necessarily dwell on my real daddy eating the barrel of a pistol in some nasty L.A. project, and you and I having to go back there to watch them plant him. And back then, you know, what the hell did I know? I was sleeping with three strange kids in a bed in the other room. I guess I just thought you were sharing because there wasn’t any other room.”

  “Well, you just keep your mouth shut from now on, mister, and maybe this will all just blow over. Maybe you should just stay here and get yourself ready for college, and I’ll take your momma back to Cascabel, and maybe she’ll be ready to see you off in the fall, and if not, well, you know, I’ll move you by myself.” That would have been good, had it worked out that way, but this world is never even close to being as neat as we would like.