Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  Some artists I’ve had to coax in order to get them to speak passionately and earnestly about their work, because so many people in their personal lives had laughed at them. When I did artist profiles, I was often the first person these artists had met in their lives who had taken their work seriously enough to attempt engagement in real dialogue, and once I got those doors open, it was frequently nearly impossible to end the interviews. They had that much to say about the work that they’d kept silent on for so long. At that moment, I didn’t know if I wanted Tommy Jack to keep talking or never to speak to me again, but it seemed like I had hit the button that closes the door. I tried something new to get it back open.

  “Fred kept saying you saved his life. So much so that he named T.J. after you. Would you mind telling me what that was all about? It’s okay if you don’t want to go on. I understand,” I said, lying. It was not okay, and if he didn’t want to continue on his own, I was willing to prod a little, though it was growing more difficult with each small piece of himself he revealed. “Earlier, you guessed that Brian Waterson was the cousin who helped T.J. How?”

  “That one’s easy. When I moved him out here, I made some contact with his grandma, found a cousin who was around his age. Got them to be pen pals, so he would have a connection to home if he wanted.”

  “You know, you are truly a puzzle to me. When I got here, I wanted to hate you, tell you off, get my DNA sample and get the hell out of here. I guess I found it hard to believe that you had legitimate good qualities, earlier, and now . . .”

  “I’m not the boogeyman you wanted me to be?” he said, smiling. At first I thought it was a smirk, but even my eyes would no longer lie to me. It was a smile, nothing less.

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “Your momma’s choices weren’t all disasters, were they?”

  “Enough of them were.”

  “Why don’t we go into the house and take care of this box with the boy. I am sure you’re both anxious, and then we can go from there,” he said, not stopping, totally in control of the situation. He believed he was prepared to show me what frightened him most, and what frightened him deeply at that moment was the unexpected. He could accept what he was going to tell me about Vietnam, was willing to relive that experience for me and for T.J., to relive the countless dead bodies of anonymous humans. In some way, though, our sudden presence frightened him. The ways T.J. might view that box, or the ways I might complicate his life, those things caused Tommy Jack McMorsey great anxiety, and perhaps the unknown variable of my mother’s continued life in New York did as well.

  He promised or threatened to be as graphic and as blunt as he knew how on so many things. But as we sat at the counter with Fred’s box, I knew what frightened him was his own heart. Only when it came to the intimacies he shared with my mother did he demur, edit, riffle through a thesaurus in his head to conjure softer words than usually find their way running out of his mouth. The shapes of those words were unfamiliar to his tongue, but he had thought them, silently, for years, solidifying the memory of his encounters with my mother. He was a man still in love thirty years later and I don’t think he even knew it.

  We brought Fred’s box in and by then T.J. had finished reading the letter Tommy Jack had given him and he was nodding though no one had said anything. We set the box on the counter and I blew the dust off and lifted the lid. On the very top was a stack of photographs. “Boy, I wondered where all these pictures went when I came home that June,” Tommy Jack said. They were all of a younger T.J., often with Tommy Jack and his wife. T.J. shrugged his shoulders as Tommy Jack flipped through them, grinning. Immediately, though, his grin stopped and he pushed me away from the box.

  “Whew, careful, there’s likely a vinegarone in there,” he said, getting a big wooden spoon and some paper towels. The sharp odor of vinegar emanated from the box and filled the room. I had been afraid of that. “Don’t stick your hand in there.”

  “Vinegarone?” I asked.

  “Whip scorpion,” they said in unison. “We’ve both had enough experiences with those little buggers,” Tommy Jack said, “and you don’t want one in the house. They could move like a crazy bastard, and you’d never catch them, and just keep getting stung every now and then, and if it was a female with babies, I hate to think.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “It’s called vinegar syndrome. It happens to acetate film that hasn’t been properly cared for.” I pulled the canister from the box and dusted it off, tape curling around the label’s edges. “If it’s not in a cool, dry place, the film itself sweats out acetic acid inside the canister, in essence, eating itself. I was afraid of this when you told me where this box was.” I opened the canister and touched the film in the reel. It looked almost corrugated and sounded brittle as I rubbed my fingers over its edges. “So, this is it. Do you have something to show this on?”

  “A screen?”

  “A projector. What is this?” I looked, flipping the canister lid over again. “Sixteen millimeter. I’m sure you don’t but—”

  “I do, actually. Got it when the school the next town over got swallowed up by ours. They had a going-out-of-business sale.”

  “Sound?”

  “ Yeah, pretty sure, yeah, got some movies, too, played ’em, some, mostly Laurel and Hardy type stuff. They’re all in the basement with the projector. Boy, you wanna go get it?” They went down and hauled up an ancient A /V cart, wheeling it straight out into the yard. We could have set the projector up in the kitchen and watched the movie on the front of the fridge, but I thought if Fred’s movie were finally getting a screening, it should play where we could experience it in the correct dimensions and scale. The only surface big enough was Tommy Jack’s garage door.

  While they linked an umbilicus of extension cords, I got the film up on the reel arm and waited to thread the leader. “You’re hooking that up like a real pro,” Tommy Jack yelled, snaking the cord through a cluster of potted cacti, trying to avoid the constellations of needles. “Liza Jean was always bitching about threading the leader when she showed the hygiene films up to the school, but that was a part of her job, so I taught her how on this old machine.” It seemed not to occur to him that I would have done this professionally for years, but then, I never did clarify for him exactly what I do for a living. Once they established power, I had the leader on the uptake reel in a few seconds.

  “Don’t expect much,” I said, and despite my efforts at appearing excited, fatigue was setting in, and the film’s condition led me to grave doubts about what we would find. I suppose I almost didn’t want to turn the machine on. “There’s not a lot here, it isn’t going to be long, and the stock—”

  “Just turn it on and we shall see what we shall see,” Tommy Jack said. “I’m kind of curious myself. Don’t know why I never thought of this on my own.” He killed the outside lights as I flipped the projector switch. The film fluttered a bit as the numbers counted down on this West Texas garage door. They beeped loudly, like Morse code pocking out concentrically into the night sky. I adjusted the lenses and the numbers blurred and sharpened before us. We saw a slate, from back when they still used actual slate, and hands holding it, Fred’s name in faded chalk on the bottom half. Then they moved away and suddenly Fred stood in front of us, a giant, his face filling most of the garage door. I was surprised at how different he looked from any of the actual photos I had, or that T.J.’s family had shared with me. Certainly no publicity shots were produced in this era. I had always hoped to find a head shot, but one never surfaced in my research. Other braided men and women milled about near him, and he was practicing looking and not looking at the camera.

  Fred looked like those last few music videos Queen made, when Freddie Mercury tried almost anything possible to disguise the path his life was charting—beards, wigs, masks, postproduction effects, kids playing the parts of all of the band members. They tried anything they could, even one video where the band did not appear at all, what they called a concep
tual video. “I hope he doesn’t have to smile wide, here,” Tommy Jack said.

  “Not likely, given the era of the stoic Indian,” I said, “but why do you hope that?”

  “His missing teeth would show, for sure. This is pretty much what he was beginning to look like the last time I saw him.”

  Fred Howkowski looked kind of white, almost blue, they all did, like ghosts wandering back and forth in the driveway. We heard some word that I imagine was action but it was so garbled, had you heard it under any other circumstance you would not have been able to isolate it. Fred suddenly came to life, filling the door, and I would have believed anything he said. He could tell me that he never really did kill himself and in reality, he had cashed in right and was now one of those secret film producers, the Sundance moguls who finance risky ventures because they believe in the work, and that he didn’t want to blow his cover. He opened his mouth.

  He sounded as if he had somehow learned to breathe underwater and was speaking from there, a voice like air bubbles popping on the water’s surface, maybe the voice of a drowning man, nonsense words, that desperation just before the last held breath leaves his lungs. I tried adjusting the sound qualities, but this machine was fairly limited and it was no match for the decaying film. It never got any better in the three minutes he said whatever it was he was saying before the tailer came off and flapped around the uptake reel. We sat in the white light bouncing off the garage, listening to the clacking sound until I shut it off, and then we sat there some more.

  “Maybe there’s a script in the box,” Tommy Jack said, after we’d sat in the dark for a while. “Or maybe we can try it again, on a different machine. Or maybe even have it restored.”

  “It doesn’t really matter what words he spoke,” T.J. said, all quiet, still sitting and staring at the darkened garage door. “It was cut, anyway. It was a glorified screen test. I always believed it was something more than that. You know, something they might put on a bonus feature, when they finally release a DVD, or director’s cut, or whatever. I don’t know what I expected to find here. Maybe I wanted the last few things that really belonged to him, something, some trail to follow. I wanted there to be some reason he found this more worthwhile than raising me.”

  “Some people just aren’t meant to be parents, boy, and he tried to put you where people would take care of you, like your momma and me did. We did our best, but you know, even there, people mess up, they just do. It’s in the nature.” Sometimes it was good to be in the dark, and it was good at that moment.

  “I still want to take it back with me,” he said, hanging on.

  “Sure, boy.” Tommy Jack was visibly glad to have something to do, and I rewound the film and handed it to him, and then he walked back to the house.

  “Daddy?” T.J. said, as we followed him in through the door, dodging the cacti, “was there more to that letter?”

  “No,” Tommy Jack said.

  “Was there another letter?” he asked after a few seconds.

  “Yes, boy, there was another letter, but it’s mine. It was written to me, not you.”

  “Does it say anything more about—”

  “I know you came a long way for something that didn’t turn out like you wanted, but that other letter, that’s to me, boy,” he said. T.J. nodded and turned to walk out, taking one of his bags. The film was fragile looking, even worse after we’d watched it. I packed the box up as best as I could, given the limited archiving materials he had here. Bubble Wrap is hardly ideal. I supposed carrying it with us into air-conditioned hotels was the best plan, and maybe when we got home, I could get in touch with some of the art preservationists at the university and persuade them to do a restoration. I’d probably have to apply for an NEH grant to accomplish that.

  We loaded it into the back of the Blazer with the rest of our bags. Tommy Jack kept shining what seemed to be an industrial-strength spotlight all over the grounds, making sure no local night-life wandered up to get better acquainted.

  “Daddy, you’re really not going to show me the other letter, after I came all this way?” T.J. said, leaning against the back hatch.

  “Boy, it seems like you are intent on taking that stuff with you. It’ll be funny not to have it here anymore. I guess there’s a lot I’ll have to get used to not being around here,” Tommy Jack said. “If you want to come back inside, though, I think there is one more thing I can show you. And then, if you are really dedicated to getting Fred Howkowski’s story straight, I’ll tell you everything I know.” While perhaps not wanting to admit it, Tommy Jack didn’t want us to leave him there in that house, alone.

  “Here,” he said, reaching into the back of his truck’s king cab, pulling out a backpack that had been with us the whole time. “I’m not for sure if this gets things straight for you, or if it just muddies things up further, but for what it’s worth, I found it with the rest of his stuff. I tend to keep it with me. It reminds me of where we all go wrong sometimes.”

  CHAPTER NINE:

  Head Shot

  Excerpts, notebook entries, Fred Howkowski,

  Los Angeles, 1970-72

  This town is a harsh environment, everywhere I look. The first thing I have to do is get a permanent place. The residence motel address I give at any central casting office, they look at me and the address doubtfully and I’m certain that my application goes into the trash before I’m out the door. I hear from some of these other vets that there are places that aren’t so great, but the rent is decent and they’ve agreed to introduce me to the person who can get me into one, or at least on the waiting list. I’ll use this feeling if I ever get a role as someone who’s been displaced. In the meantime, they’ve also taken me down to the soup kitchens with them, telling me I need to start saving up for rent. I feel a little guilty not revealing that I have some savings with me, but it won’t last and I’ve got to think about my future here.

  I started to sleep in the bushes in some of the parks, deep enough where the police won’t shag me out but I hear other things. Not sure what they are really, maybe the little people that everyone on the reservation believed protected lost children, or stole them if their parents were not responsible, or maybe there are bears here. The showers at Venice Beach are cold, but at six in the morning there’s no one there to chase you away if you use soap and shampoo quickly, and a quick scrub inside the swim trunks generally keeps me decent enough looking for casting calls, but still the address issue is a problem.

  The rent-controlled place isn’t bad. I spent some of my savings getting a couple of better locks put on, though. The super said it was okay, probably even smart, and though he wasn’t in a position to provide locks for his tenants, he had no issues with us protecting ourselves. He seems like a nice enough guy, said he would invite me down to the VFW post but they don’t let veterans of conflicts in, foreign wars only. He knew it was a shitty rule, because he knew if you were forced to wear a uniform and shoot at people who didn’t share the opinions of those running your country, that sure sounded a lot like a war to him too, but he went along with it anyway. That was his advice. Indeed, a nice guy, which is more than I can say for some of my neighbors. I hear shouting from some of their places.

  I spent some more of my savings on a TV. It was really more than I should have, but I have got to get some sleep and all that shouting from the other apartments gets to me. Hard to believe this is what we were fighting for. Even over the TV, I’m beginning to hear some of what’s going on in the apartment closest to me, and I wish I hadn’t. Maybe they need bears to come and visit them, show them what’s what. That might do it, but some people who need that lecture might need it more than once.

  On the brighter side of things, even lacking sleep, I got my first job as an extra today. I report tomorrow. The casting agent said if I did well on that one, didn’t mess up or get in anyone’s way or stare into the cameras, she could probably send some work my way. She also said I might have a better chance if I cut my hair. That way I could pass
for a white guy with a nice tan. She said in case I hadn’t noticed, there weren’t a lot of roles for Indian actors these days. I told her I couldn’t and that Indians didn’t need to be cast strictly in westerns. She said I could make those decisions when I was casting a picture, then told me to suit myself but that she would also send anything my way that looked like it had a need for Indians. There might be a few things. She said a couple of Westerns were in development and asked how I felt about doing scalping scenes and others along those lines. I told her I had bills to pay and she said okay. You only get one skin and you better respect its properties and values. Bears know that certainly and so do I.

  I am now as brown as I was in the jungles. Not like back home. If only my dad could see me now. All those years he made me wear long sleeves and jeans in the summer. He might have lived in the middle of the reservation but he didn’t want any of his kids looking the part. He so liked introducing me to his friends pale that he would have made me wear gloves and a ski mask in the summer—considering how fast my Indian skin darkened—if he thought he could get away with it. My mom never knew any of this, naturally, always wondering why I never wore those skimpy muscle shirts and shorts she bought. She never knew I had to go through the no-tan test at least once a week with Dad and had to receive my appropriate punishment if I had gotten any darker. He made me wear a ring and on Saturday when she was gone shopping, I had to take it off to show that I had gotten no more tan. Sometimes I forgot and in the week following my forgetfulness, the long sleeves he made me wear covered up more than my relatively dark skin. They also covered those darker patches in different colors, shaped like his knuckles.

  The roles are coming pretty good these days, nothing big but I’m working fairly regularly. I spoke to the neighbor about all the noise and got a busted tooth for my troubles. The guy seemed calm when he answered the door, and I could see the little kid with the bloody nose in the background, pretending to watch cartoons, and when I yelled to him, he turned quickly back to the TV, right around the time his father sucker-punched me right across the left cheek. Calling the cops would probably just get me escorted out of here for causing trouble and I can’t give up this address, so now I have two very good reasons to keep my mouth shut. The tooth was loose for a couple days and I hoped it would firm itself back up, but it never did and I think an infection must have crept its way in, so I took a tip from Jangle Kirby and yanked it myself with a pair of vise grips and then gargled with saltwater like crazy. It eventually healed up okay and I left the neighbors to themselves.