Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  For a while, I stopped seeing it when I worked on changing that humidor into a curio. Stripping it down was tough. When I’d get a layer of varnish loose with spirits, it would rub off in these clumpy sheets, like the layer of fat just below that bear’s hide. But when I had gotten it down to the wood, I rubbed and rubbed oil into it, making it glow, rejuvenating it. That kept the bear away for a while, but it came back, showing up everywhere again. Eventually, there was one thing that grabbed onto me, pulled me back here long enough to stay here for good, to leave the bear behind.

  “That one thing was your mother,” I said to the girl, and though she did not look up, she knew I was talking to her. The boy didn’t say anything either. Finally, I think he understood that your life is your own, and no other person can know all of it. There were parts of his father that were his, and I guess parts that belonged to this girl and her world. Maybe he was finally okay knowing there were parts that were mine, and mine alone.

  “Y’all are welcome to stay the night,” I said, knowing in my heart that they wouldn’t. “Plenty of room. You know, I might make it up to New York, sometime,” I added, and though I doubted that, the picture of Shirley Mounter sitting in a window, sewing herself a new blouse, that had a powerful draw to it. I guess that was why I couldn’t go back.

  “Don’t look me up,” the girl said, and the boy laughed.

  “ You can look me up, Daddy,” he said. “ You’ll always have a place to stay if you decide to come north.”

  “Could you tell me one last thing?” the girl said.

  “I’ve told you all I’ve got,” I said. “If there’s something more, I can get in touch with you, but there just isn’t any more.”

  “I’d like to know about the blanket. Is it here in this house? Can I see it?” she said.

  “What blanket?” the boy asked.

  “No,” I said. She waited for more.

  “We better get going if we’re going to make Fouke tonight,” she said, finally, which I knew was a lie. Fouke, Arkansas, was a good eight hours from Big Antler, easy. I know. I’ve done that haul. That’s the little town where Bigfoot supposedly lives, where they made that Legend of Boggy Creek movie about him, years ago, but I didn’t see much in that rinky-dink spot on the map except a couple barbecue places, a mini-mart, and a gas station. Her momma must have told her that was the movie we took all those kids to see at the drive-in, like a regular old family, that last weekend I ever saw her. If I’ve got my math right, the girl would have been too young to remember, but I’d bet a dollar she was among that tangle of kids in the back of my rented pickup that night. I hear they’re gonna open up a little Bigfoot museum there in Fouke, sometime soon. Maybe the girl had heard the same thing.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “ You drive safely.” They started pulling out, and I shined my light at my feet while they turned around in the driveway. As they reached the bar ditch, I ran up to the passenger’s side, flashing the light their way to get their attention. The boy pressed on the brakes and the girl rolled down her window.

  “Boy, you just sit tight, I want to talk to your friend here,” I said, and being the good boy he is, he just put it in park, so she could get out. “Why don’t you come with me and get that letter for the boy,” I said as we stepped into the house. If she hadn’t been on the inside of that door, she might have just walked. But there we were, and she understood, even without reading, what I was offering to put in her hands. That it held some answers for the boy he was probably not going to want to know.

  “As much as I want to read it, I imagine there’s a reason you think T.J. shouldn’t. I think there’s something in here that you believe should be buried. Are you really changing your mind about what you want and don’t want to share?” she asked. She finally understood that gaining knowledge is a state you cannot reverse.

  “Well, you both came down here for answers, didn’t you? You got yours, such as they are. I guess I’m not what you expected.”

  “I had no expectations.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “Why don’t you want the boy to see that letter? I know why I don’t think he should, but you of all people, I should think, might understand these pointless questions he’s asking. No matter what’s in there. I’m not going to tell you. You have to decide on your own if he should read it.”

  “Why is it my decision?”

  “Because you’ve learned what happens when you find some answers you weren’t exactly expecting,” I said.

  “What do you think T.J. would gain?” she asked. “He thinks he knows the way things are, and he does pretty well. Some people need to believe in things. He believes there’s something in that letter, something that will clear up some itch for him, and perhaps there is. But I suspect there aren’t any real answers for him there, only more questions, more itches. Or you would have shown it to him. There’s a reason you’ve hidden it away.”

  “I’m not going to tell you. That’s just the way life is.”

  “Do you truly believe T.J. will find meaningful answers on these pages?”

  “Who’s to say what a meaningful answer is?” I said.

  “I can’t give this to him,” the girl said, snapping the envelope back down on the telephone table. “It’s yours, for one thing, like this notebook. Some people have too many questions in their lives. More questions, more itches. If you want him to have that, you give it to him. I have enough unanswered questions, still.”

  She was of course talking about the stuff from her mother that I kept in the pump house, along with another hundred other similar-looking boxes. No one else would be able to tell it from any of the other junk, but I could spot it, and did, every time I walked in that door and pulled that light cord. And since Liza Jean thought she got rid of it the year the boy left, she didn’t come a-looking too close of my stuff anymore. I supposed there was no need to hide it, now. In a few minutes, I could walk out to the pump house and just bring it in here, opening it like I did Fred’s box. But what might happen inside me, when I touch those things? Fred is gone for good, but Shirley, that’s a different matter.

  The morning after Shirley and I had made love that first time, I lifted her panties from the blanket and asked if I could take them.

  “Don’t you want a clean pair, handsome?” she’d asked, sliding a man’s T-shirt on and stretching, her nipples rising in that cloth unfamiliar to her shape. I didn’t really think of it, but that shirt must have belonged to her currently missing old man. “I wore those all day, yesterday.”

  “That’s why I want them,” I said, holding them up to my face, rubbing them against my beard. “I want to be able to smell your scent when I’m back on the plains. Be with you until I can smell you for real again, and who knows when that might be.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said, and walked me to the door as I slipped them in my back pocket. “How long are you in town for? Maybe we could get you hooked up with some other memories of me to keep you warm on those lonely plains nights. You know, I’ve never been there. What’s it like?” she whispered, all the while guiding me down the stairway in her apartment building.

  “Flat. Not the way I like things,” I said, reaching up to cup her breasts loose under that T-shirt.

  “Not out here,” was all she said, and I behaved, no questions asked. I walked out without answering her other question, and she didn’t ask it again. Each time we’d been together, we traded a little something with each other and the last time, it had been that blanket.

  It was what she had decided to give me, in the final few minutes we’d ever spent together. We’d made love on it and slept under it, that whole weekend, and nearly every time before. Just as me and the boy were leaving to take the rental car back, she folded it up, told me to take it. I didn’t have the room, though I wanted to take it bad. Something of us would be on it forever. Essence sounds corny, but something like that. She was crying by then, holding it out in the air, and her arm, I bet, would have stayed like that, su
spended. I took it, kissed the fingers holding the wool, and opened my suitcase. I left some clothes behind so I could stuff that blanket into the case and when we got back to West Texas that blanket went straight into my sleeper cab and it had stayed there until November of last year.

  After I called the police from Detroit Lakes, it took the medical examiners forever to get to the cabin. They finally took the Japanese girl away by about ten o’clock. They had to ask a million questions of me and wanted me to stick around, in case they needed any further details, which I knew translated to “in case we decide that you killed her.” I told them I would be in the Twin Cities for a few hours but that I would be back that night, to the same place. They wanted to know my route, and destination, and they let me go, but mostly, I think, because, like I said before, it is pretty damned hard to hide one of these big rigs.

  When they lifted her out of my snow angel, there was not one impression of her in it, just mine. Her prints led up to it, but that was it. The snow and the wind had picked up again sometime in the day, and by the time I got back that evening, even the angel was gone.

  That night I watched the meteors from the plate glass window of the cabin. The newspapers and all that mess came later, after the coroner’s office had decided on an official cause and had released the story to the press, after her folks had flown in from Nagasaki, had her cremated in the Twin Cities, and had flown back to Japan with her. The medical examiners eventually said there was an unusual level of antidepressants in her toxicology report, but that overall, she had died of exposure, and I believe that to be true. They can say they meant it with regard to the weather, but to me, it was an exposure to this country and all of its crazy, casual violations of the soul that really did her in.

  “The blanket your momma asked about in her letter was a Pendleton, and it did have Indian designs on it. She had given it to me and I had given her a set of my clothes. Not really an even trade by anyone else’s standards, but it worked for us. Our collecting of things from one another had begun the first night we’d been together, and sort of ended on that last night.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Maybe that satisfied her. Maybe not. Whichever, it was close enough to the truth for her, even if it still left some of her spaces empty. If I gave her anything, it was the knowledge that sometimes, spaces are okay things to have. They make the other things tolerable. It must have nearly killed her to set that envelope down and walk out the door, but maybe not. Maybe the seventeen-hundred-mile drive was worth the effort. Maybe it takes that long a distance to know if you really want something, and to know what it was going to take to get it. I hoped she and the boy didn’t find the drive to Fouke, or to home, one where they knew their spaces more sharply. Maybe she would learn to stop picking at other people’s scabs, and maybe she would learn to stop picking at her own. I wondered how long it would take for that new spot to heal for me. The place where Fred’s box slept all these years was bleeding out into the sultry night. I thought it would be easy. I hadn’t looked at it in years, but to know it was gone was like losing him all over again. Maybe I should thank them for waking me up.

  EPILOGUE:

  Credits Roll

  Dear Tommy Jack,

  Enclosed please find one key to let you into my apartment. I know you’re gonna hate me for this, but I’m asking you to come back to Hollywood, one last time. You’re thinking there isn’t a thing in the world I could say that could get you back here, but I bet you’re wrong.

  Remember that game I taught all of you, when we were in country? Fireball? Of course you do, you even played when you came out to my reservation, got your nose busted, as I remember it. Man, you should have gotten that fixed, but I always thought you were a little crooked anyway, and now your outsides match your personality. Isn’t that a good one? I bet you don’t remember that I didn’t play, that night. You want to know why? Do you really remember what happened the last time we played in country? It was almost like the first time, but only almost.

  You guys were always asking me to do a rain dance, and then later a stop-the-rain dance, asking me tips on tent-making with those damned ponchos, all that stupid shit you thought an Indian was supposed to know. Well, I wanted to show you a little bit of the real life—“like we didn’t have enough reality,” I bet you’re saying. When I gave you guys a version of the medicine game, told you it was like soccer, only the ball and the goals were on fire, I figured that was good enough for you guys, give us something to do in the downtime, and give us a little medicine to go around.

  That last time? Sure you remember how George said he was going to make the ball that time, use some special stabilizer for the bundle of rags. I imagine you remember what his secret ingredient was. He just laughed and laughed when the rags unraveled and that VC head rolled out from the middle, its jaw hanging sideways. I could never play again, after that. Not because that sight moved me, or anything. Just the opposite. For a second, I saw a human being who probably had a family somewhere not far from where he died, maybe looking up at familiar stars, even as his eyesight failed and he died, and then, someone laughed, probably George, first. Once someone started, everyone else joined it, me included.

  I laughed right along, and so did you and Jangle and everyone else who played that day, both teams. And when we took a break? You remember that, too? Warming cans of C ration meat over the remains of that ball and eating from the can, not a yard away from that crooked head, with the broken jaw and the caved-in temple where someone had given it a good hard kick before everything had come unraveled. That day, I thought I had become an animal, eating because I was hungry, not caring what else was around.

  You remember how I divided us up? Young Men and Old Men, those who had kids and those who didn’t? Well, I know I went on the Old Men’s team, but I was lying. I did the math, added up the months after the kiddo had been born, and I was seeing Nadine, his ma in those months, but we hadn’t done anything then, not until later, so I don’t think he could be mine, unless he was a preemie. I guess she turned out to be like some Donut Dolly but on the going-away end of the war effort, a last piece of reservation ass for anyone who got drafted.

  Anyway, when I got that picture of the little guy, I hung on to it, made him mine, and he was what got me through, even in that period of not feeling anything, like that day in the chopper when Hughes turned to give me a little advice and that bullet rode up through the floor and straight up into the back of his helmet. Remember that? His face was there, and then it wasn’t, and we just threw him in the back and held on while the pilots got us out of there as quick as they could.

  You remember that bear? That one we skinned the month before, to save Hughes’s ass after he had called it in WIA? You know, that bear blew bloody snot all over me, one of the last things it did, while I was lifting its head and you guys were cutting through. How long do you think its brain went on thinking while we carried it back to the rear? Do you think it saw its body, all blue veins and pink, bloody fat strings hanging off those thick muscles? I do. My ma’s dad was a bear, did I ever tell you that? Not a real bear, of course, but his clan. I bet I did, one of those nights we spent under the poncho holding on to each other, silent in fear, hating the dark and the rain and those bugs, hating ourselves and holding on just the same for all we were worth until the sun came up. My clan was snipe, still is, for that matter, but not for long. I guess it’s a good thing you take your clan from your ma and not your dad, because that little guy you’re raising now, he would have no idea what clan he was supposed to be, if it was up to his dad’s side of things.

  No idea why Nadine picked me for the father, maybe she thought my ma would be a good babysitter. Who can say? When I got back, saw the possibilities from the other rez guys who made it home, I decided I wouldn’t argue, and keep him, since he brought me home anyway. You take good care of him, Tommy Jack, just like you did me, because this time, I’m not coming back.

  I just got word from one of the editing crew on that movie, you k
now, the one I had the speaking part in? Of course that one. Said he wanted to stop by for a minute. You’ve seen my place, I couldn’t have that, so I met him in the lobby, invited him into the visitors’ lounge. They shot me, all fine and nice, weeks before. I had rehearsed my lines, as few as they were, until I had them perfect, exactly right. You know what he brought me? A little can of film from the work print. The star, that nice guy, that up-and-comer who treated all the extras like they were real people, he decided it needed to be cut. Since when do the actors make those decisions? Since now, it looks like. He said I was messing up the tone of things, that I didn’t look enough like the other extra Indians, like somehow they could see my dad was white, even though I’d already legally changed my last name to Eagle Cry.

  Every one of the movies I’ve been in, they cover me in this orange dye, to make me darker for the screen, and it looks like blood every night when I try to wash it down the bathtub drain, like we had sometimes washing off us in those showers at Phu Bai. I feel like that bear, every night, scrubbing that stuff off until I am myself again, peeling my skin off me, layer by layer, and I don’t have one inch left to call my own anymore. If I have to scrub it one more time, I think I’ll look in the mirror to discover I’m not really there anymore.

  I’ll try not to make a mess, try to get it right on the first bullet, like Hughes did, but I have to warn you, my place here, it isn’t in very good shape right now, so don’t be shocked. I’ve left a few things here for the kiddo and you should take whatever you want except for those few things I noted. I know we used to fight over that NVA flag but it’s yours now free and clear.