Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  I held him there, that night, my hand inches away from his mouth for hours, until we got the sound from the previous watchers and we got up to do our watch duty. I knew I could keep my mouth shut, but I had no idea what his capacity for restraint was, and I wasn’t taking any chances. Throughout our watch and after we woke up the next shift, my hand stayed within grasping distance of Fred’s mouth. We came in together, and I intended to make sure we finished our tours together. I don’t know why. There were some more rounds of fire, and occasional flares.

  “Some beginning, huh?” I whispered in the dark.

  “Could be worse,” he whispered back.

  “How do you figure it could be worse?” His stained fatigues were still visible, even in the dark hooch.

  “We’re still alive. We just have to stay that way for three hundred and sixty-four more days. You and me? I think we might be able to accomplish that. So where you from? South somewhere, by your accent.”

  “Big Antler, Texas, population seven hundred and thirty-nine, I guess seven hundred and thirty-eight at the moment—”

  “It’ll be thirty-nine again, this time next year,” he said. Whatever urge to scream he’d had was gone, like I had somehow discharged it from him with that one punch to the stomach. I’d heard bullshit bravado before, every fall Friday night in Big Antler, where most boys talked it on the football field and most men talked it right back from the sidelines, remembering their own days on the field. There was not a trace of it in Fred’s voice. We talked through the night, quieter when we could hear others snoring. How they were able to sleep in that danger-filled night was beyond my comprehension. I was happy for the company, because I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be sleeping again until I was back home in my bed in Big Antler.

  I told him about Liza Jean, minus the fact that she was probably already moving on, told him about my momma and daddy, and in return he told me about his momma and daddy and brother and the girl back home who was going to have his baby soon. At first, it seemed like he didn’t know about the deferment he could have gotten with that baby on the way, and at first I thought it best to keep quiet. I eventually mentioned it anyway, and he clarified that they weren’t married. He added that it wasn’t such a big deal on the reservation to have a kid without being married. People just raise their kids, sometimes together, sometimes not. To him, the deferment loophole being blocked to him was just another way the United States did not recognize the separate cultures. He then noted that it wasn’t like they were going to hand it over now, anyway. Hours passed. It wasn’t the worst thing we’d see over there in our time, but it was bad enough for the beginning.

  “ You cherries see anything interesting your first night?” one of the old-timers asked as we broke camp in the morning and began the next day’s hump. All the others who had sent us out in that direction smirked, waiting for us to bitch or whine.

  “Nothing to write home about,” Fred said. We had wiped as much of the nastiness off as we could with foliage, and tried to wipe it from our minds. To this day, I don’t know if those chumps set us up to get us in tune with life around the firebases or if we just got lucky. If they did, we passed their test, but only by working together.

  Even as we bedded down the next night, when we were back to the firebase, in a hooch, I wasn’t all that eager to sleep. I saw that poor rotting fucker every time I closed my eyes, and Fred wasn’t too eager, either, so we spent most of that night listening to the sounds of gunfire and occasional flare shots.

  “You know, the first chance I get,” he said, “I’m going to write home and tell Nadine that we have to name the baby Thomas John if it’s a boy. She’s probably already had it by now and I just haven’t heard.”

  “You and your girl already picked out names. That’s real nice,” I said. “What did you pick for a girl’s name?”

  “No, we didn’t. I want him to be named after you.” I had no response. What are you supposed to say to something like that? When too much time had passed in silence, I said the only reasonable thing I could.

  “That’s not my name. You gotta remember, Big Antler is in the state of Texas. My birth certificate, hell, even these here dog tags will tell you, my legal name is Tommy Jack.”

  “Okay, Tommy Jack it is, then.”

  “You like redneck names, do you?” I said.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Did you not hear all the shit I got about my name through basic? If I thought I was a smart college graduate, they let me know that I was pure West Texas redneck deluxe, in and out. We didn’t know each other then, but surely you could hear them.”

  “Tommy Jack,” he said, quietly, frowning. “Yeah, I suppose I remember hearing something along those lines. I don’t think I can call you that. That’s a little-kid name, and brother, after this night, we are definitely not kids anymore.”

  “I’ll agree to that like lightning.”

  “Just the same, I’m glad to know, and that will be the name I write to Nadine.”

  “I don’t think that’s probably such a good name for an Indian baby from New York.”

  “You saved my life, Tom. I may get the chance to repay you while we’re here, probably will. But in case not, I want to honor your act. That little baby might not have ever had a father if you weren’t so quick thinking. We’re done talking about this,” he said, but still insisted on showing me the letter before he mailed it off. I discouraged him, but it disappeared into the mail drop.

  “So that’s how you got your name,” I said to the boy. “But you know, as I said before, I didn’t do such a good job after all. It’s amazing, the horrors that could bring people together, and sometimes all it took was just plain old loneliness.”

  “Thanks, Daddy. I’m also wondering, though, since we’ve come to this place, if you would also tell me what it was like, finding him that second time, in L.A.?” the boy asked.

  “Is that really what you came all the way down here for?” I asked. I had made that silent promise that I would tell them what they wanted to know, but I suppose I wasn’t prepared for them really to ask.

  “I can’t speak for T.J. here, but I’d like to know, too. If you can’t, I understand,” the girl said, as she had a number of times, but this moment, her voice softened for the first time. I could finally hear what it might be like to talk to her when she was not getting ready to give an ass-chewing the size of the Metroplex. “It is partly why I came,” she added. “The other part is diminishing. I understand what he saw in you, enough, anyway.”

  “I said to myself a while earlier that I would answer whatever you wanted to ask. Both of you,” I said, looking at her, letting her understand that no matter what she thought of me previously, I would go all the way to the end for her now. I would discuss whatever I had to about Fred and where he and I had been together. “This too, as you know, started with a letter,” I said, and then paused, and decided to open that door explicitly. “Two letters. You’ve just read the one for you,” I said to the boy.

  Fred and I used to joke about just whatever we could while we were over and even later when we got back, but I guess Fred could find nothing to laugh at in his final situation. Things had somehow gotten that grim for him. Even in shooting himself, he didn’t make the tabloids—passing without a smudge of national ink, lying in some little set of rooms, in a small corner of Los Angeles. Fred wasn’t one of your better-known Indian actors in Hollywood. I think there was maybe one, then, maybe two. What I am saying is I never would have known had I not received the letters. Naturally, I immediately hopped in our sedan and drove as fast as I could. I wanted to believe, even as I drove from Big Antler, through El Paso, Phoenix, and finally into L.A., that this was some joke of Fred’s, that I was going to get there, and he would jump out, say surprise, claim this was the only way he was going to get me to visit a second time, because he always knew what a stubborn son of a bitch I was. Of course, none of that happened, and I had pretty much faced that by the end of the long drive, but hope c
an be a strong presence when you need it, and for those hours I made that long stretch, I needed it.

  I called the authorities when I got to L.A. and waited out front. When they arrived, I showed them the letter and handed over the key Fred had included in the envelope. They let me come with them, since someone had to identify the body. They asked why I hadn’t called them as soon as I had received the letter, and I didn’t have a very good answer for that, either. I guess I wanted to be there when they opened the door. I didn’t want Fred to be dead with strangers even though that was the way he lived.

  As we rode the elevator, strong odors of cheap cooking and other things came through the doors at each floor, until we reached the seventh, where Fred’s apartment was, and I knew he was dead for sure. The hallway smelled like something I had tried to forget since we’d gotten home from the jungles. Though there was some other odor, one that was vaguely familiar, the overwhelming smell was that of death, and the smell of death is one you don’t soon forget. It seemed impossible that no one else on this floor noticed; it was as if they chose to ignore that damned odor. Nearly a week’s worth of newspapers were stacked in front of his door. How long was that paperboy going to keep delivering until he said something?

  The officers removed some of those little masks they wear in surgery from a package they brought with them, and handed me one. It didn’t help all that much, but we wore them anyway as they opened the door. Fred’s apartment had gotten bad, even in the time since I had been there before. The furniture was all busted up, and the weird things Fred had collected the last time I’d seen him were all piled in one corner. The couch I’d stayed on was now saturated with piss and sat lopsided, one of its legs missing. I found it later in the bathtub, stuffed into the drainpipe hole. Copies of Daily Variety lay all over the place, some stacked and some randomly, specific pages that must have been meaningful to him folded over. Fred’s right foot lay in sight, on the edge of his bed, as I walked by the bedroom door. There was a blanket covering some of him, but the foot was poked out, and I didn’t go any farther in to see the rest.

  The television was on, broadcasting snow and hissing, though it was midday. He must have turned it to a nonworking channel.

  “You mind if I turn this off?” I asked them.

  “Sure, go ahead, but try not to touch anything else,” they said, entering the bedroom. The on/off/volume button was missing, and Fred had clamped a small pair of vise grips onto the recessed prong where the button had existed. I pushed the grips in and they dropped to the floor, coming loose from the internal piece.

  “Mr. McMorsey, apparently we didn’t need you here, after all,” one of the officers said, coming out of the bedroom, and though he still had that little mask on, I could swear he was smirking beneath it. He passed me a copy of Fred’s picture, what he used to call his head shot, the thing he sent out to casting directors on those movies he wanted to be in. “It’s definitely him,” one of them said as they walked me out the door, locking it behind us. “Is there anyone you know of we should call? Next of kin? The coroner will be by later, and things’ll get taken care of.”

  “I’ll make the calls, if you don’t mind. I have his momma’s number,” I said, trying to remember if I had thought ahead enough to put it in my bag.

  “She’ll have to call us, for final arrangements. We understand you have this letter for his belongings, but a dead body of this type has different rules. We can be reached at this number,” one of them said, handing me a business card. “Is there any particular funeral home you want to use, Mr. McMorsey?” he asked.

  “I don’t know a damn thing about Los Angeles. One is as good as another, I imagine. Would you mind if I—could you let me inside?” I asked. “I’m sorry. I promise not to touch anything, I just want to see him, you know, make sure it’s him.”

  “It’s him, all right. Are you sure you want to see this? It’s not pleasant.”

  “We were in Vietnam together,” I said, and I guess that was good enough. They unlocked the door and one came in with me and escorted me to the bedroom. One full look told me Fred was not having an open casket—that was for sure.

  So I called Fred’s momma and she did what she had to do, and had me make some arrangements out there in L.A., asking me to have him cremated and shipped back to the reservation. I offered to drive his ashes myself, really wanted to in fact, but she wanted them as soon as she could have them. I wasn’t flying and besides I had to pick up the boy back at home in Texas to take him to the funeral and I asked her if she could wait until the end of the week for the services. She said sure, and I guess she likely kept him somewhere in her house until we made it.

  By the time I got back to the apartment, the coroner, medical examiner, whoever, had already come and removed him. They let me in and said it was okay to take care of what he had asked me to do, to grant his last requests and deal with the mess he left behind.

  Several pairs of nearly useless shoes lay strewn all over his floor, like a bunch of small dead animals that had been left to rot alongside a road. I could not imagine why he wouldn’t have just thrown them out. The dresser drawers were more of the same. They were filled with clothes but most of them were dirty, smelling of piss and long days staying on the same body, just jammed into every damned drawer, as if you’re supposed to put your dirty clothes in the dresser and somehow they were just going to clean themselves while they were stuffed away. Every dresser drawer was filled. There seemed to be some logic to it, which was kind of weird, but these clothes were threadbare and stained beyond belief. He should have told me he needed some new clothes when he’d called those times. I’ve never been what you would call rich but I could have afforded to help him out some. All I was spending money on was the junk-store business. I could have spared it, and would have spared anything, for him.

  Something had happened to Fred in the time since I had last seen him and who could say what, really. The bathroom I had showered in a while back looked like it might have been last clean around that time. Now, I am the first to admit my aim is not always perfect, and Liza Jean confirmed this almost any opportunity she had, but how do you miss the toilet when you’re sitting on it? That one, I just could not get. And even then, he just threw a towel over it, I guess hoping that would make it disappear somehow but it seemed like more had been wrong with Fred than he had ever let on.

  I did notice on the shelf in there that he had gotten a partial plate. It was sitting in a glass of hazy water, the fake teeth embroidered with metal and plastic, fake gums. He for sure didn’t need it anymore.

  His bed was maybe the most revealing thing about those last few months of his life. Whoever had taken him away had lifted the blanket off of him and laid it crumpled near the pillow. But other than the bare pillow and blanket, the bed had no sheets, no headboard, not another damned thing. It was one of those bare mattresses and I suspect those little metal buttons all over holding it together had probably pinched him something hard any time he turned over in his sleep. It looked like he had tried sleeping on plastic sheets like storm-window treatment for a period right toward the end but even there it hadn’t helped him out too much. There was shit everywhere, ground into the mattress and spattered on the plastic sheet crumpled in the corner. At first I tried to tell myself it was blood from his gunshot as that had turned brown already against the wall but there is no mistaking the smell of shit. I am sorry.

  I am not given to thinking about such over and over and have been able to ignore lots of nasty things in my life but the thing that kept this exact scene in my head was not the shame of it, the humiliation, and the wondering what I could have done to change these things, but something else instead. I knew I was having him cremated, at the request of his momma and daddy, and though it would be closed casket and all, I was hoping there was something in that apartment to put a decent set of clothes on him before they sparked the burners. I didn’t have much hope of finding anything in the dresser but he must have worn something reasonable to cast
ing calls and I was desperately hoping whatever that was would be hanging in the closet.

  The clothes on the hanger bar were in about the same condition. Above them, though, on the shelf, stacked neatly, in order of size, was gift box after gift box. I lifted one of the higher boxes, assuming it would either be empty or full of the same sorts of things that filled every drawer in the place. There was weight to it, and I carefully pulled it and the boxes on top of it down from their shelf, and set them on the dresser top. Maybe there was something salvageable in them. I was hoping. I opened the top one, and then the next and the next. I took the rest of the boxes, cleared the table in the other room, and spread them out there.

  Each box still contained the exact contents the boy and I had carefully shopped for and packed over the previous year: shirts, pants, jackets, towels, undershorts, T-shirts. The other boxes held things from other people, his momma and daddy, his brother Gary, some other names I didn’t recognize. I took one of the shirts the boy had given him from its box and shook it out but it didn’t want to move. The pins and tissue paper were still in place, the arms folded neatly behind the back and the tags, too, still hung from the inside of the collar. The scent of commercial starch still hung on this shirt in the way those different scents clung to his other clothing.

  I selected a set of clothes and put them aside, figuring I was going to have to get him shoes somewhere in town. Maybe the undertaker would have a suggestion but likely I would see a shoe store somewhere around the city without too much of a problem. The rest I threw into my trunk, assuming I could drop them off at one of those thrift-store donation boxes.

  I took one last look around the apartment before I left for good and the super came to clean up the rest. I had the couple boxes of stuff Fred wanted me to take and I made one last sweep. I guess I was looking for answers, knowing there probably weren’t any, but hoping just the same. Walking through the bedroom door, I caught that familiar odd scent again, mingled with all the others, and looked down. I should have recognized it immediately. An open can of apricots sat on the nightstand, half empty, a fork handle leaning against the can’s lip, its tines resting on the bottom, among the fruit. The few apricots sunk in the syrup were going bad in that stifling apartment.