Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  In one of the kitchen cupboards, there were several more cans of apricots. Each had been punctured and the fruit inside was spoiling, as Fred had committed, inedible should anyone be tempted. I did the super a favor, collecting those cans and tossing them in the trash myself. I also didn’t want anyone to be tempted.

  The morticians let me see Fred when I got there. They didn’t want to but when I explained that I had already seen him, they eased off a little. I had seen some of him but not all. He was semi-covered in a sheet when I went there and they had done some surgery on him, checking out what was left, determining a cause of death, that kind of stuff but really I didn’t see why they had to cut up his belly when it should have been obvious that half the top of his head being missing was a pretty clear cause of death if there ever was one. I wondered if they had found fermenting undigested apricots in his belly, if he had done it before his body had begun absorbing their inherent bad luck.

  The morticians had cleaned him pretty well but there was really no disguising what the bullet had done. I had not seen anything like that since we’d gotten back but I knew the look. It was always kind of weird any time we saw one in that condition and aside from this being my best friend—and that is a pretty big aside, I know—Fred didn’t hardly look different from all those guys we had seen go, over there. From one angle you could see everything, the way the bullet spreads out on impact before its fragments knock the cap off your skull, and from another angle, it just looked like a photograph, where some of it has been ripped off, the skin, bone, hair, everything, just stopping abruptly along a jagged line.

  I touched Fred’s arm, the place I had pushed him and punched him joking around for so long and it wasn’t really cold like people say about touching the dead. You always hear that but it isn’t true. They are only cold compared to what you are used to when you touch someone. They aren’t cold like from the fridge—more they are like furniture, a piece of wood, a table, a desk, a windowpane, a door.

  I handed the clothes over, and told them I would go shopping for some shoes and bring them back shortly. They said I could do that if I wanted, but they added, politely, that he really didn’t need shoes.

  “I suppose it’s not like he’s going to get cold feet,” I said, and they smiled, again, politely. I don’t guess morticians joke too much with their customers, even if they’re invited to. I smiled back and I said I would be back to pick him up the next day. In the parking lot, I reached for my keys and felt that other thing I had brought with me in my pocket and I ran back in, but strangely, one of those men in the black suits was running to meet me at the same time like he had known I had forgotten this one thing.

  “Mr. McMorsey, I’m so glad we caught you,” he said at the same time I said, “I forgot this.”

  “He no longer needs that, sir,” the man said, looking into the folded paper towel I had given him, walking me back to the room where they were keeping Fred. “The entry wound was through the mouth. I’m so sorry, but really, there was little left to which this could even be mounted.” He tried to hand it back to me.

  “Well, it belongs with him, anyway,” I said, refusing to take the partial plate from the man and he nodded once, indicating he heard me. I suspicion he might have just thrown it out after I walked back through that door but maybe he placed it with Fred in the casket.

  “We found something in the clothing you left that might be important. It could always wait until you return to retrieve the cremains, but I am happy we were able to catch you before you left.”

  “Cremains? Is that what y’all call them?”

  “Yes, sir, we do.”

  “Well, okay, sounds kind of funny, but that’s your business. Anyway, what was it you—” I began and then I saw what they had found. It was resting on the tabletop next to the shirt. I recognized it immediately but that was probably because it was my own handwriting on the envelope. I flipped it over. Fred had never even opened the birthday card. I knew that was what it was because he had written on the back of it. His cursive said this was a pale-blue shirt, which was true, and that me and the boy had given it to him for his birthday the year before, which was also true.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Have you—”

  “Yes, sir, there were others, as well,” he said, handing me the sealed envelopes with similar information on them, from the pants, undershorts, and socks boxes.

  “Thanks again,” I said.

  “We’ll see you tomorrow, sir?” one asked, leading me back out the door I came in.

  “Yes, tomorrow,” I said and headed to my motel. There was a pool there and kids screaming as they jumped in it. Never quite understood why they felt a need to scream. The boy would never scream if he jumped in a pool. He was just not the kind.

  I brought the boxes in and laid them all out on the other bed and went through each and every one of them to discover the same damned thing in each. The first box contained a full set of towels still folded exactly the way they fold them at the store. The ones I had used at his place had been threadbare beyond belief—I had to walk around the place with the windows open and air-dry, really, they were so useless—and when I was taking these boxes out I didn’t even see a single towel other than the one he had thrown on the floor.

  In the next box I found two funny things. The first was a pair of pajamas, which seemed damned odd for Fred, but who knows, I guess he could have been a pajamas kind of guy. But I have gotten pajamas, a robe, all that kind of craziness as gifts in the past too. People who maybe don’t know you, have never seen you get ready for bed, these people think pajamas are safe gifts; they think everyone uses these kinds of things. The second thing I found was more interesting. The handwriting on the front of the envelope I recognized immediately and I did not at all need the confirmation on the back that this gift was from Shirley Mounter. I couldn’t take something she had bought to a thrift shop, couldn’t allow it to be lost forever.

  Every gift anyone from home had sent to him, he had given up every damned one of them, like they were for someone else, someone he no longer was. He had put names and dates on the back of the cards’ envelopes, who it had been from, what it was, and when they had mailed it. I guess maybe he figured if he ever ran into the man he used to be, he could pass them along to their rightful owner.

  The next day, I picked up the little gray box they’d put Fred into. It seemed funny that he was reduced to something so small, but there was the evidence, in my hands. I wondered how intact the partial plate was, but not enough to open it and go through the stuff. Someone told me once almost everything is turned to ashes because the heat needed to be so intense to burn the heart down to ash. They said it was the toughest muscle but that didn’t seem to be accurate to me. Hearts aren’t so tough.

  I bet there are all kinds of shards and things in the ashes, or the cremains, as seems to be the right word. I also wondered if Liza Jean knows that one, if it was in her crossword dictionary. Fred rode with me in the passenger’s seat, all the way back through the route I had taken, L.A. to Phoenix to El Paso, and then I overshot Big Antler and headed on into Lubbock.

  I could have just as easily sent him back to his place from any of those other airports but I wanted it to be Lubbock, something like home for me. It was strange, putting him on a plane in his condition. I couldn’t bear to ship him UPS or through the mails, though, and there was probably even something illegal about that anyway.

  “That’s it, you know the rest. He went home, and we went to see him off.” What I didn’t say was that as I headed home to get the boy ready for his daddy’s funeral, mostly I got myself ready to see Shirley Mounter again for what I knew was going to be the last time, and I wasn’t even for sure how I was going to walk away.

  They both sat, looking at the counter, which was still a little dusty from Fred’s box. They thanked me again, though the boy asked not one word about the letter to me. Maybe he had changed his mind. Maybe he’d heard enough.

  “Mr. McMorsey, Tommy Jack, ma
y I borrow this?” the girl asked. “I promise I’ll take very good care of it. The place where my resources are, that would be the optimal place to study this journal of Fred Howkowski’s last days,” she said, the pleading leaking out, even as she still tried to sound professional and personal at the same time. She was right. That was indeed what the spiral-bound was, the journal of Fred’s last days. “The glimpses I caught in my quick read indicate there’s a lot more to his story than I had ever imagined—and I had imagined much over the years. I know what he means to T.J. here, and I have a little better understanding of what he meant to you, but his story also could be an immeasurable contribution to Indian artists of the present and, more importantly, for generations to come.” She paused and the boy raised his right eyebrow and lowered the left, giving me that little look he used to give when Liza Jean was talking crazy talk with us, trying to rationalize buying one of those Lladrós. This story was not going to be a contribution to any artist’s career, except maybe the girl’s Professor of Obscure Indian Actors career.

  The girl noticed my pause, took it as a doorway, and then, more quietly, said, “The thought of filling the rest of my summer with Fred Howkowski in my apartment offers some comfort when I picture the emptiness awaiting me when I return home.” She ducked her head, kind of delicate-like. “My husband and I have recently separated.”

  “I’m sorry. No. It never leaves me, hasn’t in the last thirty or so years since it came into my possession. I’m sorry. I will make a copy of it for you, though, if you would like. That I can do.” It sat on the table, an old red cardboard-covered stack of notebook paper, dog-eared and veined with creases from all the travels we’ve done together. I suppose the boy could have laid claim if he wanted, and grabbed it away from me right then and there. I didn’t really like the idea of someone else even looking at the notebook, that someone else was sharing the history that only I have known for so long. Maybe it would be a relief at some point but just then, it only felt like a violation. To share even with them, given my long-held silence, might be the right thing, particularly in light of our complicated history. I had read every one of those entries. I knew Fred Howkowski had grown a bunker crop of odd ideas before he finally decided to harvest them. Sometimes the sharing of knowledge merely increased the burden. That book suggested the possibility of missed responsibility, the possibility that one could have made a difference. Maybe it could make a difference for some other lost kid out there, trying to find himself, or as here, herself.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Did you know?”

  “No,” I said immediately, then regretted it. Lying came so easily that it took easily five times the effort to tell the truth. “Maybe. Well, I don’t know. I really don’t know. Most of the letters he sent me? They didn’t sound like the notebook. They sounded like your average guy, maybe frustrated, clowning to ease some tensions in his life. I guess if I had read them more carefully, maybe I would have seen what was there.” I said that, but I have known some other people who’ve encountered suicides in their lives, and the one thing I have noticed is that we always question the act, even when we are given concrete answers. The one thing that remained constant with Fred was that he always took the path of least resistance. He didn’t go to Canada to dodge the draft because he thought it would be controversial. He just accepted that being drafted was part of his life. I suppose it was part of why we got along. We were a lot alike in that way. I don’t know much about Hollywood but what you see in the supermarket papers, but I never thought he had even one chance. He was not a cutthroat enough person to make the headway he would need out there, but who was I to tell him that he couldn’t chase a dream, wish upon a star?

  “What are these bears Fred keeps referring to?” she asked.

  “You know, I have no idea,” I said, but of course I knew. The way they crept into Fred’s letters and notes to himself, like sneaky spirits he had been unaware of. They were that way for me too, but I had found a way to get rid of them. Maybe if I had told him what I did, I could have brought him back. “Well, he did talk about the one bear we had a real encounter with in his last letter to me too.”

  “Context?” she asked, back to her professional voice.

  “Huh?” If I could do one thing for this young lady, it would be to get her to understand that sometimes all probing does is start up the bleeding again. Scar tissue might keep you together but it doesn’t make you like Superman.

  “Why was he discussing that encounter, even as he was considering his final act?”

  “Well, shit, I don’t know. You read his notes. Does that sound like someone who is seriously thinking about the subjects of his letters?”

  “Yes, it does,” was all she said, and then she just waited, knowing I would come forward.

  “Okay, yes it does,” I said, finally.

  One time, a group of us had gotten away and stripped bare-ass naked in a stream to swim, like I was telling you we did of an occasion, forgetting for a little while that we were probably giving ourselves the worst cases of jock itch and ringworm, and every other nastiness you might want to think up, but we did it anyway.

  We were only in for a little while when we heard a sound we were all too familiar with. Right quick after we heard a trip wire claymore go off, we grabbed our clothes and caught our asses up with the company again. Those mines, ball bearings and plastic explosive, would fuck up whoever had tripped them, and that person could just forget about survival for however many more minutes he had to live. Sometimes, though, even bleeding and in pieces, those NVA fuckers would still be trying to fire, or hold a grenade pin long enough to mess up whoever got close enough to inspect.

  As soon as I heard it, I was back into my boxers and flak jacket, as were most of the others, and we made our way quietly up the hill to see what we could see. This time there was nothing for Jangle. For sure this one had no gold teeth. Bears rarely did as far as I knew.

  Whenever we got a resupply, we’d sort out the things we liked from the things we didn’t, making trades, back and forth, things like cans of chili, barbecued meat, ham and eggs. We called that last one ham and claymores because when you slid them out of the cans, they looked just like the trip wire mines we laid all over the hillsides. The worst was ham and limas. Everyone hated that. I used to like canned apricots before I got there, but some guy from our base, shortly after we were in country, had been shot in the head just after eating canned apricots, so from then on, everyone thought they were bad luck and no one would eat them. We didn’t want the enemy to get ahold of this stuff, either, though—you don’t want to be feeding your enemy—so we would puncture the cans and leave them to rot from the inside out in that sultry air. I am sure that was what attracted the wildlife we sometimes ran into.

  This bear must have been five hundred pounds, and one of those bright guys in my company decided to skin it to give the skin to some higher-up and try to get a better deal. We were close enough to the worst, as near as any of us wanted to get to the DMZ, the demilitarized zone, where supposedly nobody’s military was, but both sides were crawling around those hills, firing at each other, all the damned time. Every one of us wanted to get to any other base, but transfers almost never happened, unless you were being shipped out. I tried to tell him this but he said this bear was going to die anyway, which was more or less true. It couldn’t survive the mine blast, but it didn’t need to die the way it ended up dying. That guy, and jeez, I can’t remember his name now, decided the dying bear was going to be his ticket out. He started to work on slicing that hide off, and the bear went to growling and moaning.

  Some joker who’d had the radio while I was swimming thought he was going to be funny, called in a Whiskey India Alpha, a wounded in action, when we saw that the bear was still alive. Well, the base is nothing to fool with and we had to explain that there really wasn’t a Whiskey India Alpha at all. They then ordered us to kill the bear, hack its head off along with the rest of the skin, and carry it back, which had been pretty m
uch decided anyway. Though he hadn’t come up with the bright idea of benefiting himself, that day’s radioman got the honors of the lug and he was soaked in bear blood by the time we got back. The guy who received the call? He was the smart one. In order to forgive the paperwork, we had to give the skin up to him, and he was the one who got the better deal, and the rest of us, well, we got to see this bear, veins throbbing as we ripped its skin off, and we got to hear its last breaths gurgling out, as we slit its throat and worked our way deeper into its neck to sever its spine.

  I didn’t want to be thinking about those things, had not spoken of them for years, to almost anyone. It was like I was back there, suddenly. I could still smell the fear and panic on that bear as we killed it to save the stupid ass of one of us from being punished by regulations made by a bunch of idiots pretending there were rules and orders to be followed in a jungle where a bear on a walk gets wiped out by a C-4 charge, and then is tortured to death by a group of scared kids not wanting to get into trouble.

  I saw lots of things over there that I didn’t want to stick in my memory, and I think I probably got off lucky in wiping out some of them, but that bear, it would never leave, I think, because we were so much like it. Every day, I felt half dead, waiting for something worse to happen, waiting to be stripped alive, and then have some other inhumanity heaved onto me. I guess Fred must have felt that way too.

  When you see that, every night, for months after, even back in your old bed where you know the springs that poke at you, almost taking comfort in their regularity, you try to find something to pull you back to the place you thought you lived, anything you can find. Even after I got home, I could still see that stupid bear, its eyes looking at us, not believing what we were doing to it, moving its mouth up and down and trying to growl, choking on its own blood in those last breaths. I would see it all over Big Antler, in shop windows, on my momma’s TV, and everywhere else I went that summer, drifting through the country, but mostly behind my own eyelids.