Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  You would have no way of knowing but Harris died this year, which wasn’t a surprise to anyone around here. What was a surprise was that he lasted as long as he did, what with the way he treated his body all these years. He was bad to everyone, himself included. So when it happened, most just nodded and went back to whatever they were doing. My kids all came home for the funeral, and it’s a good thing they did, or the funeral parlor would have been pretty empty. Most of them are scattered around the country, and doing pretty well, I might add. The middle three have gone and settled down with families of their own, and I get school pictures every year, and some visits. Just about everyone comes home for the National Picnic, you remember that, where you played Fireball with Fred just before you left with the little boy. Did he play that night? I couldn’t see him on the field, but then when you got hit, he was right there to help you. It’s always so dark you can never really tell who’s playing and who isn’t. I assume the players must be able to keep each other straight, though.

  My oldest boy, Royal, is still here, but he and his wife have split, for good this time. He’d spent an awful lot of time at my place after his dad died and his wife left but maybe that’s to be expected. He and his dad had gotten close toward the end and that’s where his dad came to die, to his place. I think that might have been it for Royal’s wife. Suzy was always the spooky type and she was never such a big fan of Harris to begin with and I think she had a hard time getting into the same bathtub he had died in. Can you blame her? I sure can’t. But then I’ve always been a little spooky, myself. So, when Royal asked me to come and live with him, I did. You wanna know what was hardest about that? Giving up my phone number in the city. Remember that coaster I gave you? The one with my number written on the back of it? You know, I was poor a lot through some of those years, but I never let my phone service lapse. I was always afraid I would lose that phone number, and then when you went to call me, you would get that operator, saying you had reached a number no longer in service, and then how could you call? Pretty stupid, I know.

  My youngest is still here, too. You probably don’t remember her, but maybe you’ve even heard little Tommy Jack mention her sometime when you’re talking to him. They both work at the college. Can you imagine that, one of my kids, a college professor? You raised that boy right, Tommy Jack, the way he came back here to take care of his grams before she passed on, when she’d hardly looked at him all those years you had him, and then to get a good job like that on top?

  Anyhow, this is going to be my last letter to you. I have written a ton of them over the years, but this one I’m going to really send. Don’t worry, I don’t expect anything from you, even a letter back. I know you have a different life, now, and when you were here before, back when you and Fred first came home from the war, I had a different life then, too. But there’s no use crying over spilt milk, isn’t that what they say? Though maybe in this case, it’s like the whole dairy truck, but spilt milk is what it is, regardless of the amount. My new address is on the envelope, if you ever have the desire, but the phone is in Royal’s name. It’s listed.

  Anyway, I better get going here. I was wondering if you still had the blanket. Just curious. Nice to visit with you.

  Love, always,

  Shirley

  Annie Boans

  There was so much to ask and almost no one to answer. The best place to start was with the man sitting next to me, driving me back to his home in West Texas. Two different sets of questions have taken turns prioritizing themselves as first in my mind during the last half hour, when Tommy Jack McMorsey had agreed to our compromise and showed up back in the casino parking lot more or less when he said he was going to. T.J. planned to wait somewhere in the upper canyon, where he could see their cabin, and was going in to speak to McMorsey’s wife alone. He was probably knocking on her door now, walking in, perhaps sitting at the kitchen table. I wondered about the conversation they were about to have, what had transpired all those years ago that neither he nor McMorsey was willing to talk about, but that was also none of my business. I had enough of my own future awkward conversations to attend to. If T.J. ever got into a sharing mood, I imagine I’d be the first candidate for listening. Perhaps I’d even share my own story with him, though somehow I doubted it.

  McMorsey unlocked the pickup’s door when he pulled up and got out to help me with my bags, but I threw them in the backseat and tossed him the feed-store cap. “You want it? You can have it. I got plenty more,” he said, as if we had known each other for years, instead of hours. I shook my head and he shrugged as I had seen him do on television and then he set the cap on the backseat.

  “So why are you here?” he asked. “For me? For him? Your momma? What is it you want? ’Cause I’ve been wracking my brain since y’all showed up this morning, and for the life of me, I still have no idea why you’re here.” He continued to maintain that air of defiant mystification that I’d seen on the television. I wondered if this were the general way he operated in the world. It seemed unlikely, though. My mother had, as far as I’ve known, suffered only one rigidly confrontational man in her life, and he slept forever in Calvary Cemetery over on the reservation’s Torn Rock, along with Fred Howkowski and our other collected ghosts.

  “Why did you do the things you did?” I asked, which seemed like a simple enough question to me and it made me feel suddenly powerful asking it, but his silence drained that feeling almost immediately. The smallish aging man sitting next to me, no matter how blustery he tried to be, didn’t exactly align with the insensitive lout I had conjured. Even seeing him on television, I had still been able to cast him as some horny pig who was trying to unzip for any woman who might look his way with even the mildest of interest. Here, in person, he was somehow different.

  He smelled of cologne and soap. The skin below his beard was a little pink. He had shaved before coming back to pick me up. He had neatened himself in that short while. It was a funny gesture, but somehow endearing. I didn’t want him to be nice. I wanted him to be the cracker I had created, but that picture was getting harder to maintain. Perhaps he could help me keep him in that light, with his own words. Though there was a chance this would not be the case, I was here and so was he. It was time to ask.

  “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, but not for the reasons you think,” I started. I was trying to keep up my own front here, not wanting him to get even a little edge on me. He couldn’t just start acting conversational on me and get away with it. There was much he had to explain. If he thought he was done being interviewed once that broadcast was over, he had better reevaluate what his next few hours were going to be. I engaged the one skill I’ve learned to use effectively during my post-college life. Any time someone thought he was going to get cocky on me, I offered the gesture I had learned from my mother. I reminded him that I was probably better armed than he was. “I’m an art . . .” I started, but chose to not fill in the rest of that sentence with the title I usually used. To acknowledge that, like this man, I was also a historian would give him some kind of relationship with me that I had no intention of revealing. In no way did I want him thinking his existence had any impact on my life, other than the obvious potential one caused by his trysts with my mother. “I study T.J.’s father’s career as part of my career.”

  “Not much, is there?” he said, delivering this as a statement.

  “No, there isn’t. And his family, what family that’s left, they’re fairly closedmouthed.”

  “Can you blame them?”

  “No, of course not. My family’s on the quiet side too. I have four older siblings who probably could pick you out of a lineup, even today, but not one of them has ever spoken a word about you, at least to me. Nor have they spoken about Fred, and I imagine they know even more about him than they do about you, but I can’t force them to do things they don’t want to do. You know how stubborn members of my family can be when they want to be.”

  “Yes,” he said immediately, but was no more
forthcoming.

  “That leaves T.J. Howkowski, who has probably by now shared every scrap of memory he has left, real and imagined, I suspect, and after him, there is only one other person who ever even sort of knew Fred Howkowski.”

  “Maybe you can tell me,” he said, hatching an idea that second. “How did the boy get to New York, all those years ago? Do you know? When he left home for college?” I had no idea what to make of his question but thought I could answer it in a bland way.

  “One of his cousins. You wouldn’t know him.”

  “Brian Waterson?” he asked, immediately. I don’t know how he could have possibly known that, and I considered lying, but then committed to the truths of this trip.

  “Yes. Brian. How did you know?”

  “I just remember a few folks from there. Thought that was the likeliest candidate. Thank you.” He continued driving, saying nothing at first. We descended from Cascabel in silence and eventually out of the mountains altogether before he pulled over at a roadside park and got out to stretch his legs a little. “Pretty out here. I like it like this, no houses, no people, just land, wide open. The road can be an attractive place.”

  “Yes, it can. No one to question what you’re doing, who you’re talking to, who you are . . .” I said. There was more, of course, but I wanted to see where he went.

  “I didn’t do anything to that girl. The things I said on the television, that was the truth. You believe me?”

  “Yes, I do.” And that was true. I’d had my own experiences with the media, of course, curating visual art shows and film festivals. If you let them get the slightest foothold, they would use their reviews of your work as showcases for their own smug self-importance. One of the highest-profile reviewers at home insisted on using every review he wrote as a vehicle to brag about how he had met this famous actor or that high-profile director during the press junket he was afforded. I had allowed myself to be made a fool of once, while I was being interviewed about one of my earliest curatorial gigs. I had assumed the reviewer asked the questions he had asked out of real interest in the work, only to find myself looking like a moron with out-of-context quotations in the Sunday edition of the paper. That article was problematic in the tenure process. By that time, I’d had a stronger, more solid career, but a smudge is still a smudge.

  “Okay, that’s a start, then,” he said. “And we have to start somewhere, I guess, but I can tell you, there are fewer paths than you might think there are.”

  “I think T.J.’s going to want to hear anything you have to say about his father, so we should wait on that until he joins us.”

  “Okay, but this is a long trip from—”

  “Tell me about meeting my mother,” I said. It seemed like the most logical starting point to me. If ever I was going to learn about the circumstances of my birth, this was the place. I closed my eyes to listen, to hear every nuance this man was willing to offer as he drove us back to him home.

  “Your momma? Okay, I guess that’s as good a place as any to begin, at least for me and you. I didn’t know she was married, when we first got together, for one thing. That came out wrong. I am sorry. It’s sounding like I am blaming your momma and that is for sure not at all even remotely the case. It was a different time, then, and I was a different person, and probably she was, too. Well, it goes back further than just meeting her.”

  He stopped, as if deciding on a point of origin for this answer before he began again. “When I got back, I had gone through the sketchiest debriefing process, Fred too. No exaggeration, one day, sleeping five to a hooch, rain tapping on that tin roof all damned night long, gut-punching anyone who dared to fart inside the walls, and having the job of lighting the big barrels of shit just a few yards away from where we slept. Man, I hated that detail. I was able to avoid it for the most part.”

  “This isn’t really about my mother and you, now, is it?” I said. It seemed the indirect route wasn’t going to work, but I was willing and able to prod as long as necessary.

  “We’ll get there, but for you to understand how things were when I got there, you need to know how I got there. And about the shit detail, maybe that’s where I learned my way of life, trying to avoid the shit detail. We had to put on gloves and drag the half-barrel latrines out into the open and pour the diesel on them, light them up, stand back, and watch that nasty smoke fly out over the mountains. Usually the cherries had to do shit detail, break them in, but somehow I dodged that at first, and successfully stayed away until right at the very end before someone with a ridiculous memory couldn’t recall me doing my part.

  “Everyone tried to make that the shortest job possible, and tried all kinds of things to avoid it, some even pouring the fuel into the barrels while they were still in use, until some idiot was smoking on the shitter and blew the whole fucking building apart. Had third-degree burns all over his ass and the other parts, so there was no way he slept comfortable for the longest time. We went back to the regular way, after that. So I had that detail one day, and the very next day, we were on the helipad watching artillery firing so we could get clean out, firing back, ourselves, from the choppers, and maybe a day and half later, hard to say—time was hazy then—those long flights between Vietnam and here.

  “It was Da Nang to Japan to Hawaii, and then suddenly Fred and I were in Oakland. We had come in on the same day and we zeroed out on the same day. I was feeling pretty good, but then I saw it. They were taking some stuff out of the cargo bay while we were refueling and out of that cargo bay came one of those damned familiar boxes. I thought I had seen my last Gray’s casket, but some poor fucker had flown all the way with us, silent and still, in the hold, making home but in such a fashion.

  “They gave us a big steak dinner and told us there would be a movie later in the evening in the mess hall if we wanted. The next day they looked us over, gave us physicals, a dental exam—I had two cavities filled—then asked us a shitload of questions and afterward told us to pack up, that we were good to go, and that we’d be leaving for home shortly. Early the next day we had breakfast, shook hands, exchanged addresses, and headed to our separate planes, our homes just waiting for us.

  “In El Paso, there wasn’t enough time for me to wander around the airport between flight legs so I just sat there looking out the window, still hardly believing that I was back on U.S. soil, that there was no way this plane was going to be shot at as it took off and I could just sit and watch these people, walking, walking, not running, and it was such an amazing feeling. I must have woken up a million times each night, for all of a year, wondering where my rifle was, and I know Fred was the same way,” he said in one long rush of a story and at that break, he sighed.

  “Thank you for sharing that, Mr. McMorsey,” I said. “I’m sorry. I know this is probably very difficult, but I would like you to go on if you could.” He continued to drive, the muscles of his cheeks jumping beneath his coppery beard as he clenched his teeth and squinted into the afternoon sky.

  “Tommy Jack, just call me Tommy Jack. Please don’t call me Daddy, though. I am not sure I could handle that at this moment.”

  “No worries there, Mr. McMorsey.” I could no more call him Tommy Jack than I could call him Dad or Daddy or whatever diminutive form was the norm in this part of the world. To call him any of those things would require much more from me than I had. I wasn’t sure what substance was lacking within me that I couldn’t make that leap, but the lack was there, as discernable as any other. “And I appreciate your taking the time. Thank you. And I don’t mean to be rude, but while this story is very interesting and will likely be useful in my research, you aren’t answering the question I asked.”

  “Miss, Annie, is that okay if I call you Annie?” I nodded. “Okay, look, I will go through this part as quick as I can, but like I said before, no story begins where you think it begins, and in order to know the story about me and your momma, you have to know this one first,” he repeated, more forcefully, and then paused, as if searching in hi
s mind for the place he had left off when I interrupted him.

  “Okay. And then I came home and saw Liza Jean, that was my former fiancée, now my wife, soon to be my former wife, with that flat-footed giant she had married, the only woman I knew that I had pictured with me all that time in country.” I wondered what that “former wife” comment was all about. They appeared to be fairly happily married in the interview we saw, and in the brief glimpses I caught of them at the casino, they seemed like a comfortable couple who have been together for many years and who know each other very well. Or more, they looked like I imagined couples like that are supposed to look.

  “That ring I’d hung onto since I left for Fort Ord? I put that ring up, at my momma’s, and I hightailed it out of there, heading straight across the state to Dallas, then Texarkana, and then like a bullet up through the country, passing by Memphis and Nashville, Louisville, Columbus, Cleveland, Erie, and Buffalo, until I reached Niagara Falls, and called old Fred Howkowski, pulling from my wallet that creased piece of Red Cross stationery he had put his momma’s phone number on, just as we were leaving that airport in California. He had headed to Buffalo, and I’d gotten back to West Texas through Lubbock. He said to call him when I eventually got up there, so I could meet my namesake, but I bet he was not expecting to see me within a week of our last handshake, pretty sure that was going to be the last time we breathed the same air for a long time, both of us knowing the things space and time can do to your life.