I bought some apricots a while ago and I think it’s finally time for me to eat them. Don’t worry, I’ve punctured the other cans so that by the time you get here, they’ll be spoiled and no one else will be tempted to go near them.
I talked to my ma, the other day, using the last of my quarters, before calling her collect to finish things. She said she saw Shirley Mounter the other day, and that Shirley asked after you, wondering when you might make it back. I guess I’m giving you a reason to now. I want to be buried at home, on the rez. Okay? I would really appreciate that.
Have a good life, my friend.
Your very best friend,
Fred Howkowski
Tommy Jack McMorsey
I ran outside, expecting to have to flag the boy’s Blazer down again, but they were still there. The boy sat on the hood, watching the stars, and the girl leaned on it, following his gaze. She was waiting for me to give him the letter, but my hands were empty when I reached them.
“I had forgotten how clear the night skies are here,” the boy said, climbing down. He didn’t ask what we talked about, but he came around. I guess this really was it, for now. I stuck my hand out and he gently pushed it aside, hugging me, and I held him for a while. The girl just got in the passenger seat and waited for us to finish.
“You keep in touch, boy,” I said, and he agreed to. “You are always welcome home,” I added.
“My home is somewhere else, now. The place I came from.”
“This is one of the places you came from, son,” I said, shutting his door while he buckled in, and then I went to the other side and motioned for the girl to roll her window down.
“That blanket,” I said, leaning in, “I don’t have anymore. I used it to cover up the dead girl in Minnesota. Somehow reporters got there before the police did—I could tell they weren’t official trucks as they pulled up, you know, some of them had those little satellite dishes on the top—and I didn’t think she should be seen like that. At first, I put my old coat over her, but she looked ridiculous that way, the coat’s arms stretching out in directions different from hers, and I knew the news stories were gonna have a field day with her anyway, so I gave her what little dignity I could. I ran back to my rig and got the only thing I had with me that I owned that seemed appropriate. I lay the blanket over her and guarded her until the police came, and when the ambulance people asked me if I wanted the blanket back, I said no, that it was hers now. I don’t know what they did with it, maybe they gave it to her family, with the rucksack, and that little pink jacket, in one of those patient’s belongings bags they give you when someone in your family dies in the hospital. For all I know, it’s sitting in some little private shrine in Japan. Or maybe, they just threw it out.”
“She would like to know that. Would you mind if I tell her?” the girl asked, almost shyly.
“That would be nice,” I said.
She reached into her purse, handing me a little business card. “If you decide, here’s how you can find me. I’ll answer,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said and she patted my hand gently before rolling up the window. As they drove out, I shined my spotlight on their Blazer and followed it down my road and then onto the main road of the grid, until they disappeared near the entrance ramp to the interstate, miles away. I shut the spot off and walked back to the house in the dark, deciding I could probably make some selections of the things Liza Jean would want from this house.
That envelope the girl made me seal sat there, where we had left it, on the counter. I started to throw it out, but then I took her card from my wallet, addressed the envelope, put a stamp on it, and left it by the phone. Then I took that old letter Fred sent me and read it for myself one last time. I got a new envelope from my desk, put Fred’s name and my address as the return and my own name, in care of the boy at his address and put a stamp on that one too.
I drove down toward the post office to drop those envelopes in the outgoing mailbox before I could find some reason to back out. Half a block before the post office, the parking lot lights outside the Allslip’s mini-mart shone on the phone booth next to the ice machine, and I swung by there and called information. A few minutes later, Shirley answered the telephone, concern heavy in her voice. She sounded the same, but what would I say? Maybe I could ask her if she would put a bouquet of flowers on Fred’s grave for me. It would be a little late for Memorial Day, but better late than never, am I right? But then what? It was late and I should have known better, so I hung up without saying a word.
The post office was dark. I let myself into the outer lobby, where the P.O. boxes were, and checked my mail. Liza Jean and I had left so abruptly that we’d forgotten to do our summer forwarding routine like we did every year. Just as well, since I was likely to be here. I dropped those letters in the post office’s outgoing slot, sending my keys across the country. They could turn those locks if they wanted to. On the short drive home, I watched the night skies. There was no moon. Maybe it had already come crashing down in the ocean and the tidal wave had just not arrived here on the plains yet. I kept looking up anyway, hoping for one more shooting star, a fireball blazing across the dark, millions of miles away, arcing its way into my life. This time I would be fast enough to connect with it, deliver that wish, and wait for it to come true. I headed home and decided that if the phone was ringing, I would pick it up.
May 9, 2001-January 8, 2003,
Niagara Falls, New York
Author’s Note
A true story: By the time you reached the end of chapter one of this novel, you may have dismissed a major premise as implausible, because this is a literary novel, and the outlandish is not generally considered the best fertilizer for literary novels, or so I am often told. Feel free to Google the most preposterous details and you will discover that sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. In the late fall of 2001, a woman flew from Japan and according to initial media reports, did indeed head out for the wintry stretches of North Dakota and Minnesota, looking for the ransom from the film Fargo, to a tragic end. Google it; I’ll be waiting here.
The day I read the newspaper article, I clipped it and stuck it on the bulletin board above my drawing table. This woman’s experiences awoke in me a better understanding of where dreams become dangerous, and I more clearly grasped the dynamics of this trajectory, having chased some dubious dreams myself. Also, her story triggered an itch in my mind. I knew it meant something to me, but I couldn’t say what, at the time. It seemed to have something to do with some unfinished business from my first novel.
Indian Summers was published in 1998, and I did a fair number of readings to promote it, tending to read one chapter in particular. It was the right length for an audience member’s patience, and the right length for an audience member’s gluteus maximus, teetering on the decrepit chairs used for many readings. It also had the right tone and enough shifts to keep a listener’s attention. I should add that I had a strong feeling of allegiance to this chapter. It was the first short story I’d had accepted for publication, a few years before. It had served me well.
As a novel chapter, though, it was maybe a bit of a cheat. It was largely the story of a character who was dead from the opening sentence. People I’ve met after they’ve read this novel often ask about this character. They want to know what happened to him, and why he did the things he did. I wished back then that I had answers for them, but I didn’t know, myself. The story had dropped like a bomb into my head one day, while I was struggling to write a different novel. I had sat at the computer, dreading that I was going back into a story I couldn’t quite find. I opened up the file, and instead of typing “Chapter Seven” at the top of the page, which had been my plan, I typed “The Ballad of Plastic Fred,” having only the vaguest notion of what that title meant. It clearly borrowed from the Beatles song “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” music I tend to listen to when I am most stressed out.
At the end of that day, the story was done. With the exception of a fe
w editorial suggestions, mostly about word repetition, it was published as written. This was one of those miracle stories I almost never speak about with students, because I don’t want to encourage them into thinking this will happen often. It doesn’t, at least not for me. The year I wrote that story was 1992. A story-bomb like that didn’t happen again until 2004, but that’s another tale.
As for “Chapter Seven,” it never got written. The book died on the table. Somehow, the discovery of Fred Howkowski had shifted the way I looked at writing. The novel I had been writing was a horror novel, my second. The first one never saw publication, fortunately. I came to understand that, in the small story of children trying to understand a hero’s suicide, there were scary enough things in the world I knew. I didn’t need to invent unspeakable horrors. The speak-able ones were bad enough, and worthy enough of exploration, if that were really the place I wanted to go.
After Indian Summers, I continued working, and I began to understand that the story of Fred Howkowski was not over yet. He kept showing up, a ghost wandering at the fringes of my other work, asserting himself more frequently, more visibly, but I still could not find the right door to his life. It took the spark of that strange news story for me to find a way in. Somehow, the misguided passions of that Japanese woman, and the thoroughness with which she pursued them, allowed me to ask that secret part of my brain if it knew what really did happen to Fred in Hollywood.
The door opened, and I found my fictional narrative tied inextricably to the singularly odd and sorrowful events of the Japanese woman’s journey. I think I was most attracted to this news story because I have done similar things, myself, just not to the point of flirting with disaster. In short, I could sympathize. When I understood this synthesis was happening, I chose not to research the details of this woman’s death any further, figuring I knew enough for my purposes. The details here are mine, in service of Fred Howkowski’s story. In addition to recasting this story loosely and fictionally, I’ve used actual locations, legal agreements, and historical events as part of this work’s backdrop. Ultimately, though, this is a novel, a work of fiction, not reportage. Names, places, characters, and incidents either are products of my imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This is not based on a true story.
A project of this duration is never accomplished alone. As always, thank-you first and foremost to Larry Plant, co-dreamer from the start, hoping the long haul still stretches out on the horizon. Is there a limit to the number of conversations any two people can have about a project? I surely hope not, as we would have passed that number by now. A tremendous thank-you goes to Bill Haynes, who gave so freely over countless summer nights, revisiting details again and again, without asking for anything in return. We discussed his experiences in Vietnam at length, and spent great hours in the reconstructed and restored turn-of-the-century buildings at his patch of land in West Texas. How anyone was able to perform those miracles of re-creation on a teacher’s salary and eBay profits was beyond me until we sat down and went over it, detail by detail. Thanks also to Robin Roberts of Snyder, Texas, who probably has no memory of the day he spontaneously agreed to teach me about the mechanics and logistics of life in the cab of a long-haul truck. It is not often I meet strangers as generous with their time. This novel could not have been written without these contributions.
Thank you to the following people, who read drafts of this book, in part or in whole, and offered valuable insights: Bob Baxter, Alan Adelson, Susan Bernardin, Gerald Vizenor, and Bob Morris. Thanks to Mark Hodin, for spotting Loaded and Rollin’, and picking it up for me, and for hours of discussion. A particular nyah-wheh to Mark Turcotte, for friendship of course, but also for the geography lesson, and for not letting me forget it, afterward. “Go Bears!” Nyah-wheh also goes to Heid E. Erdrich, for friendship and for the Detroit Lakes souvenir (Kwitchurbeliakin). Thanks to my friend, colleague, and fellow novelist Mick Cochrane, who shared memories of Detroit Lakes. A stunned thank-you to Jim Cihlar at Milkweed Editions, for offering the most thorough and amazing editorial exchange I have ever experienced.
Thank-you to Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, for its support of my work, specifically the Reverend Vincent M. Cooke, S.J., president; Herbert J. Nelson and, later, Scott A. Chadwick, vice president for academic affairs; Paula M. McNutt and, later, Leonid A. Khinkis, dean of arts and sciences; and the Joseph S. Lowery Estate for Funding Faculty Fellowship in Creative Writing. Thanks to the Seaside Institute’s Escape to Create residency program, where this manuscript was partially composed.
Nyah-wheh forever to my family, always offering fireballs to re-ignite the story and particularly to my late brother, Tiff, for coming back to us from Vietnam. The rain is still washing away your prints.
Thanks again to the Jupiter 2, for the ever-rising moon, and to Japancakes, Explosions in the Sky, and Balmorhea, for providing exactly the right sound track music during the writing of this novel. Appreciation to the proprietors of Quaker Steak & Lube, in Erie, Pennsylvania, and the Monster Mart, in Fouke, Arkansas, and the owners of other places like these, who combat blandness in this country’s landscape by following their own peculiar dreams. In addition to offering good food and cool drinks along the road, they have facilitated my passions with their sincere commitments to the odd. Finally, thanks to the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, for remaining faithful to their singular vision, a gift to all.
About the Author
Eric Gansworth (Onondaga) is Lowery Writer-in-Residence and professor of English at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. He was born and raised at the Tuscarora Nation. The author of seven books, including the PEN Oakland Award-winning Mending Skins, and A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function (National Book Critics Circle’s “Good Reads List” for Spring 2008), Gansworth is also a visual artist, and generally incorporates paintings as integral elements into his narratives. In the fall of 2008, his first full-length dramatic work, Re-Creation Story, was part of the Public Theater’s Native Theater Festival, in New York City. His work has been widely shown and anthologized and has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, The Boston Review, Third Coast, and The Yellow Medicine Review, among other publications. His most recent book, From the Western Door to the Lower West Side, is a collaboration with social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin.
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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