Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  “He of course was not at home when I called him, having no idea I was in town or anything, but his momma told me where I was likely to find him, once I told her who I was. She laughed and said the little boy carrying my name was fast asleep in her bed, and my picture was up on her wall, and I remembered the picture he had sent her. Jangle, this guy we had known over there, had taken it for us in one of his less paranoid moments, with the camera setup Fred had bought.

  “ We were both sitting on top of the sacks of sand we had lined the bunker tops with, practicing who could keep a semi-full can of beer on his head longer. Fred had the thickest hair and he could just about screw one of those beer cans on, but I was determined to win, just once, so I had dented the bottom of his can, first, and handed it to him, opening it. Jangle was in on this, and the goal was to catch a picture of Fred with the Schlitz toppling and spilling the can’s contents all down his cocky face. He thought Fred called him Jangle just a little too often. It was not a name he was fond of.”

  “What did that nickname mean?” I asked. It seemed to be an invitation, since he had used it several times in just a few sentences, with no explanation.

  “Not important,” he said. “At least not important to this here story. The point is, it didn’t work. Fred could even hold a dented can in that dense head of hair, so there we are sitting on the sandbags half a world away, him smirking and me frowning, and I guess we were now on his momma’s wall, big as life. He said he always sent her pictures because she believed that old Indian gig that a picture captures your soul, so he said he was sending his soul back home airmail anytime he could, one piece at a time, and it made her feel he was safe, somehow. She laughed some more into the phone and said that since she had a part of my soul in her house, she supposed the rest of me was welcome there as well.” I had seen this photo up at T.J.’s grandmother’s house when I interviewed her years before.

  Strange how I had not connected it to those photos of Fred and the red-bearded man we used to have in an old shoebox in our city apartment. Also strange, as I looked at him now, that I had known his face for almost my whole life. Though my mother talked about him sometimes when I was a child, and I had been free to examine those photos any time I wanted, I had never connected her stories of the funny man with the man in nearly every photo of Fred that we had from his war pictures. It would seem to anyone else now that I was an idiot all these years, but when the puzzle you’ve been given has a few substitute pieces in it, and no one acknowledges it, you try to find ways to make them fit.

  “He was right where she said I would find him, at the end of the bar at the Circle Club, sitting next to an older white guy I would soon meet as his daddy, and a young woman who would change my life to this very day—yes, your momma was sitting at Fred’s side, and I met her within minutes of arriving in Niagara Falls for the very first time. Of course, I didn’t know Mounter was her married name, then, but I don’t think we got much beyond the pleasantries of first names that night. We had other things in mind than genealogy.”

  “She knew you, then,” I said.

  “No, she didn’t know me at all, but I knew her. I pretended that I didn’t, that I’d never heard of her and such, but I knew many things about her that a stranger wouldn’t know, not even a casual friend, really. Fred used to tell me stories about her every night once we got settled in the poncho tent for a few hours, during NDP.”

  “NDP?” I had to clarify constantly with him. He seemed to have little awareness that these memories of his were not universals. His use of the war’s internal lingo was casual and automatic, as if we had both been there and he was merely asking me to remember.

  “Sorry, night defense perimeter. Just what we did at night when we were out on patrols. The way we slept in the jungle. Anyway, in some ways, I had maybe fallen in love with her before I ever laid eyes on the real woman, just from Fred’s stories.”

  “But you said earlier that your wife now was the only woman you could have imagined being with then,” I said. He was a tough one, but he needed to know that I was just as tough, that no fabricated side trips were going to wash with my analytical skills.

  “No, that’s not what I said. I said Liza Jean was the only woman I knew that I could picture myself with. Your momma, I didn’t really know at all then, and the women a soldier could dream up in his head while he was under enemy fire were most often for sure not at all like the women who existed in the real world. Fred must have known her pretty well, though, because when we finally met face-to-face, she was all I had imagined and more. As I said, I pretended I didn’t know anything about her, didn’t want to make her feel at a disadvantage.”

  “She knew about you,” I repeated.

  “No, we already went over this. She—”

  “She knew. How much, I couldn’t say, but she certainly knew what you looked like. Fred must have been working both directions, because we had pictures of you in our apartment the whole time I was growing up,” I said, picturing some of our shared history I had inadvertently stored in my childhood memory.

  “Well that’s not too surprising. We did take some when I would visit, but before that night I met her—”

  “We had pictures of you from the war, with Fred,” I said.

  “Hmm, well, that might change some parts of this story from her end, but I don’t guess the events will unfold any differently, so I will just tell you what I know. As she sat at the bar that night, your momma was grumbling about her old man being out on a drunk for a week that day, and she had gone to the Circle to see if he was there, and, running into Fred, decided to have a couple with him to celebrate his safe return. She said nothing about being married to her old man, so I figured it was a casual thing when I asked her to dance.

  “I found ‘The Name Game’ on the jukebox, and played it for her, so I could sing Shirley, Shirley, bo-birley to her.” Funny, Doug and a number of others still call her Bo. I wondered if his doing that at the Circle Club was the origin of her reservation nickname. “I can’t sing worth a flip, but she laughed, slapped me and called me a goof, but when I held her closer than a casual dance would warrant, a little later in the evening, she did not move away. In the john, Fred told me her man was only the first week into his drunk, and he generally spent them up in Quebec, on a reservation up there, and they also never finished in under a month, sometimes not even in two. I couldn’t handle all that happened to me in those few short days home, and I had to find some warm arms to embrace, and there she was, your momma, dancing with me, my dream woman come alive in the middle of a bar in Niagara Falls, treating me like I was something special. I had never had that feeling before, from anyone in my life, except for maybe Fred, when I’d save his ass, but in country, that feeling fades, and saving someone’s life becomes the everyday, the mundane. Fred gave me the address and directions to his momma’s house, on a napkin, and told me there would be a sleeping bag on the floor in his room upstairs if I got in before the sun came up.

  “That night I did not make it back before then. I had to get up and out just about as the sun came up. Your momma and I had slept on the living room floor of her apartment in the city, wrapped in an old wool Pendleton, but she shagged my ass out the door while the peepers were still calling, telling me her kids would be getting up in a little while. I hadn’t even known any kids existed in that apartment, just thought she had something for sleeping on the floor, or maybe no bed, or who knows, I hadn’t asked a lot of questions undressing her a few hours before. Sorry, you probably didn’t need to hear that.”

  “I didn’t think she had gotten pregnant by osmosis,” I said. It would have been easier to imagine that route of pregnancy if Martha Boans had never written the note she did, or to assume she was mistaken, or taken with reservation gossip, which is about as abundant as commodity cheese at the beginning of the month. By now, I had to accept this man was at least possibly the man who had gotten my mother pregnant for the last time, and moving faster into the category of probably. I felt m
ore and more stupid as the miles trailed out behind us, revisiting snide comment after snide comment at home, doing the math for the first time. I didn’t know what I wanted at this moment. And I kept being brought back to Royal’s question. Did I want to be ditched by two fathers?

  I am guessing now that the stories my siblings told about our father, their father, never being around might have just been a lie, a story told for my benefit so our childhoods would match, as if I didn’t notice how my mother never got pregnant again, and how that alone should have suggested there were discrepancies in their story.

  “So anyway, that morning I got out and sat in my car for a little while, found a diner to get me some breakfast, and got ready to meet the kid who was not even born when it was decided he would be named after me. We weren’t together for very long, her and I, and each morning, as I left her place before sunrise, I was afraid her old man would show up sometime and that would be it. Loving her was like being in the jungle again. Some parts were bad, for sure, I saw things I don’t ever want to see again, but some days were peaceful, out there, away from the firebases and the rear, and all the bullshit orders and regs. Some days, we would find these beautiful little lakes, drop the gear, and I would just swim like I was in one of those holes back home, learning to not be aware of the moccasins swimming around below us or the snipers above us, maybe checking out that funny splashing sound. Her old man was like those moccasins. You could never count on even the fantasy of being safe. Unless you wanted to get yourself bit along the way.”

  He was silent for a while, and suddenly we were back in West Texas, oil well pumps and little else dotting the landscape, the hours vanishing in the way he told his story. I was kicking myself for not bringing a recorder along. These were questions I had been hunting answers for my whole life, and it seemed like experiences he had been waiting much of his adult life to tell. Though even if I had recorded the conversation, what would I do with it? Play it for my mother? “Thank you again,” I said. I think I had enough information to sort through about him and my mother, at that point. I wanted a break to let it all sink in, hoping it would make more sense in retrospect, the way he told it. We still had a while to go, so I turned my thoughts back to my own special preoccupation, the place I went when the rest of the world stressed me out. I went back and forth in my mind for the rest of the trip, thinking out all possible scenarios, and in the end, I decided the direct approach was the way I had to go, even if directness was not a trait I inherited from either parent.

  “I would like you to do one thing for me,” I said, as we approached the patch of land where all his buildings slept. I had many of the answers I’d come for, regarding my mother, but there were a few more things I needed to do before T.J. got here. I imagined he would not be that far behind us, perhaps even more anxious than I was to see what would unspool before us, so that clock was ticking.

  “Sure, if I can,” he said, as we pulled into the driveway. Those worry lines were back in his forehead, but he didn’t hesitate, despite not having any idea what I was about to ask him for.

  “Okay,” I said. We went into the house, and I walked directly into the den and his desk, which was kind of nervy, but I didn’t have time to explain. I handed him his scissors and an envelope. “I would like you to cut some of your hair, here, just a little and put it in this envelope and seal it for me.” He shrugged, and tugged at some of the hair hanging down across his forehead.

  “Okay, you want me to wash it first?” he asked, taking the scissors and riding it up the lock an inch or so in front of him.

  “No, that’s fine the way it is, thanks.” I took the envelope once he sealed it. “Also, sign the seal, here?” I said, setting it on the counter and pointing to the place he had just licked closed.

  “Voodoo doll?” he asked, laughing.

  “Sort of,” I said, not laughing. “Blood tests might not have been conclusive, back then, but DNA is.” He nodded.

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he said, walking his scissors back to the desk.

  He brought two other envelopes back with him—they’d been sitting in the same drawer with the scissors, where he said he has always kept them. “These are the letters. Fred’s letters. To the boy, and to me. I can copy them for you if you like. Be happy to. Well, not happy, but you know what I mean.” He set them in my hand, and I didn’t know which to read first. Since I knew him less than I knew T.J., that one felt somehow more private, and I couldn’t read it. I read the letter written to T.J., several times, sitting on the kitchen stool where he’d said he always ate his breakfast when he was young, as Tommy Jack waited in the growing dark. “You want a light on?” he asked, as I started reading it again. I set it down and looked at him.

  “Do you have the stuff he shipped you?” I asked eventually.

  “He didn’t ship me anything but the key to his apartment, those letters, and the written right to take it all, with specific things for the boy. Didn’t you read that?”

  “I only read the letter to T.J, but that’s what I meant, the things listed here. You have them? Here?” I had to calm down. I had never anticipated, first, that this box existed, and, second, the potential research treasure housed within.

  “Yeah, they’re out in the pump house. In a box. Why?”

  “Can we bring it in here, look at it?”

  “Well, I guess so. Figured you would want to spend more of this night talking about your momma, before he gets here. Also kind of thought you’d want to wait until he was here, since that seems to be a big part of his trip. Thought he could read the letter and then go look at the things mentioned there that he wanted, you know.”

  Headlights suddenly filled the room. It would be T.J., about on time. I suspected there was another story to be told, when he walked in the door. “Looks like your time alone is up, miss, sorry, Annie.” I didn’t say anything, but he took Fred’s letter to him and slid it under the phone book, as T.J. walked up the back porch and came in.

  “How did things go?” I asked.

  “The porcelain’s still in one piece, or it was when I left.”

  “That’s a start,” Tommy Jack said. “Here’s that letter you wanted,” he said, passing the single envelope to T.J. “The rest is out in the pump house. I’ll go get it,” he said and I followed him out. I went to the Blazer and retrieved my mother’s letter from the glove compartment and then caught up to him.

  “Here it is,” he said, blowing dust off a box from among twenty or so on the shelf.

  “How do you know it’s the right one?”

  “I know.”

  “This is for you. She wanted you to have it,” I said. He nodded and slid it into the back pocket of his jeans. “She told me I could read it before I gave it to you, and I did.”

  “Did it give you any more answers than I did?”

  “Not sure,” I said. He set the box of Fred’s belongings down outside the door and in the fading light pulled the envelope out of his pocket and gave it a quick once over, first the RETURN TO SENDER stamp. “In a town as small as Big Antler, it’s useful to be friends with the postmaster. When I asked him to put that RETURN TO SENDER stamp on, he just gave me a wink and a nod then happily stamped it and threw it into his out bin.” He blew into the end I had opened, slid out the letter, and read my mother’s trained penmanship that was so perfectly neutral, it could only have been the professional sample they used in schools or her handwriting. “No one else on earth could make my name a work of art, but she could,” he said, smiling and sliding the letter back in the envelope.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Just because she gave me permission doesn’t really mean I should have read it.” I had no idea what else to say. The world is never as easy as it seems, and this situation was no exception. I had wanted him to be evil, a bastard, someone who had used my mother and walked away, but he refused to conform to my version of him and transformed himself before my eyes, slowly, imperceptibly. It was like trying to watch the hour hand of
a clock go by, or the opening of a flower. You could try and try and though you saw no movement whatsoever, the petals had transformed from bud to blossom, or a day had gone by and you still sat there staring.

  “No big deal,” he said, but I felt like it had been, just the same. The violated envelope said as much about me as the letter itself said about her, and the stamp said about him. I was in this, as much as I had believed I wasn’t.

  “Here, wait,” he said. “Come back here with me.” We went back to that wall of shelving and he reached down on the third shelf, pulling out another box. “I never look in this, but I can feel it, and if it wasn’t here, I would know for sure, would sense it the minute it had disappeared. As it was, when the wife took off with it, I had to call in some favors, used up a lot of them, having a buddy of mine on the Big Antler P.D. trail her and snag the sack of stuff after she’d dumped it. She had dropped it in the car-wash Dumpster and I got it from my buddy a few days later. See that your momma gets this, please,” he said, passing me the beer coaster with my mother’s old phone number on it. He hadn’t even needed to look. He could reach in and pull out exactly what he had wanted.

  “I will. What blanket is she talking about in her letter? Is it the one in your den, that old fake Navajo?” I asked.

  “No, that business is between me and your mother. Just because you might be connected to both of us, that don’t make you, what’s the word, that means you don’t need to know everything about our lives. Some things are only supposed to be known between two people. Sometimes those two people are man and wife, sometimes not.”

  “Okay. Fair enough,” I said. “Shall we take this inside?” I stood, tapping the box he had pulled the coaster from. He shook his head, knowing that I wanted to see the rest of that box of things from my mother, but I was sensible enough to know that he shared something big in even showing me where it was.