Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  Table of Contents

  Also by Eric Gansworth

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE:

  ACT ONE: - Lights

  CHAPTER ONE: - Fall Out

  CHAPTER TWO: - Signal Fade

  CHAPTER THREE: - Bit Part

  ACT TWO: - Camera

  CHAPTER FOUR: - Sound Track

  CHAPTER FIVE: - Live Feed

  CHAPTER SIX: - Broad Cast

  ACT THREE: - Action

  CHAPTER SEVEN: - Call Back

  CHAPTER EIGHT: - Voice Over

  CHAPTER NINE: - Head Shot

  EPILOGUE:

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  MORE BOOKS FROM MILKWEED EDITIONS

  Copyright Page

  Also by Eric Gansworth

  Novels

  Indian Summers1

  Smoke Dancing1

  Mending Skins1

  Poetry Collections

  Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon1

  A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function1

  From the Western Door to the Lower West Side

  (collaboration with photographer Milton Rogovin)

  Creative Nonfiction, Poems

  Breathing the Monster Alive1

  Drama

  Re-Creation Story1

  Editor

  Sovereign Bones: New Native American Writing, Volume II

  for the Bumblebee

  at a quarter century,

  flight paths in tandem,

  and for P.B.,

  at the old Bell School,

  gone from there like a cloud’s come up,

  but not forgotten.

  PROLOGUE:

  Coming Attractions

  Dear Mr. McMorsey:

  Enclosed please find directions, and the key to your cabin, “Moonlight Serenade,” and your receipt for two nights in November. It is the off-season for us, but we have had occasional winter requests from other stargazers like yourself. You should have a beautiful opportunity as astronomers say we are in the direct path for the Leonid showers this year. Please come prepared, as we do not have a regular caretaker in the off-season. You may leave a message at the office phone, but if you need anything urgently, we recommend you make arrangements with others before arrival. Enjoy your stay.

  —the Management,

  Kwitchurbeliakin Cabins,

  Detroit Lakes, MN

  Tommy Jack McMorsey

  People are always wishing on falling stars, trying to see them, lying out under the nighttime sky, scanning back and forth, just hoping to spot one, and usually the ones they catch are fleeting, almost out of sight, vague impressions in their peripheral vision. Then they speed-wish, going as fast as they can, the lines they have rehearsed all day, maybe wishes they’ve written on the steam in the bathroom mirror after their morning showers, or on napkins at lunch, ink bleeding their desires away into accidental coffee spills, but they still do it, and try to get it out before the star burns dead away and cancels their dreams on account of their too-slow brains.

  So they don’t win the Mega Millions, or they never get that man or that woman to truly love them, no matter how bad they might want it. After a while, maybe they only whisper that person’s name as they see the trail flaking off into space, believing that might make their wish quick enough. You know you’ve done it. Even if you claim you haven’t, I know you’ve done it. Maybe you wish Earl would quit his drinking on his own before he falls down a serious flight of stairs, or gets the cirrhosis on you and dies long before your lives together were supposed to be over. Or maybe it’s Roberta, and the way she looks directly at you and smiles that one just for you, over lunch, and you wish to lie naked next to her, even if only once in both of your lives, though she talks about “all those jerks in the personal ads, requesting discreet women when what they really mean is they want to cheat on their wives with you.”

  Yes, I have been there. The wife and I have been together for a very long time, more than a silver anniversary’s worth, but there’s a reason silver comes so late in that list. You can build up a lot of tarnish in twenty-five years. My daddy used to proclaim that about my momma, but he was only joking when he would say those things, and she would hit him with the flyswatter and get him another sweet tea from the kitchen, and he would kiss her hand as she passed it to him. Liza Jean Bean, though, was never the forgiving type, and she didn’t get any closer to being one when she took my hand and changed her name to Liza Jean McMorsey, either. I am not building up a reason for doing some of the things I’ve done. I have kept time with some others because they were there. Those women, they have good eyes, and they know when a man is living in a marriage that’s become legal only.

  I’m not for sure when it happened, or why it happened in the first place. Hell, I’m not even for sure how we wound up married, truth be told. I suppose we did it for the boy. Liza Jean and I were just about living together, anyway, so we decided to go ahead with it, both knowing we could always get a divorce if that was what came to be. It was the seventies and divorce was even on the TV shows, so who would care if two kind of lonely folks from West Texas married and parted at some point? And besides, she had already been through it once and said it wasn’t all that bad. It would barely even be a ripple in the coffee cups down at the gas station, where most news gets spread in a town as small as Big Antler.

  Yes, I know it sounds like I was planning to continue finding comfort on the road even as I was getting my funeral suit dry-cleaned for my wedding day, but I wasn’t really. I was even good for a while, and we had a pretty decent life together, but after a couple years, the old itch came back, right around the time Liza Jean was thinking we were not kids anymore, and gradually had worked us into a once-a-week kind of schedule, late on a Saturday night. By then, other aspects of my life had changed, too. I was definitely not going to New York anymore, among other things.

  Maybe you’re thinking my falling-star wish is for something steady, or an amazing woman, a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, to come tapping on the door to my rig just once, and keep me company in the sleeper cab, but it isn’t. I wish for the same thing any time I see a shooting star, but I might as well be wishing for something that unlikely as to be chasing the things I am chasing.

  ACT ONE:

  Lights

  CHAPTER ONE:

  Fall Out

  THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

  The events depicted in this film

  took place in Minnesota in 1987.

  At the request of the survivors,

  the names have been changed.

  Out of respect for the dead,

  the rest has been told exactly

  as it occurred.

  —statement from opening credits,

  Fargo

  Tommy Jack McMorsey

  The first thing you should know is that the papers got it all wrong. Well, some of it’s, you know, public record and there is no disputing that she ain’t ever coming back this way again. But it’s the way things happened. That’s what I’m talking about. Yes, I know they asked to interview me, but if words you’ve spoken have ever wound up in a newspaper at any time, or if you’ve found yourself on film or videotape that they’ve cut and rearranged, you already know what I am saying here about the inexact relationship between language and the ways we truly experience the world.

  Even some of the basic things, the papers didn’t get right. I don’t know, maybe they thought it would be weirder or more interesting if she took a cab from Bismarck out to Fargo, or was it a bus to Fargo and a cab to Detroit Lakes? Wasn’t it weird enough that she flew into the Twin Cities and by winding up in Bismarck, she totally overshot where she was going by hundreds of miles? I don’t know, can’t ever remember the way
they tell it, because I know the truth. I was the one who found her in the first place, both times, and maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut the second time. None of these new problems would have started for me, and I’d be living out my life the same way I have for the last twenty years or so, but I had to do it, make my yearly wish, hoping one falling star would come through.

  I could tell right away when I pulled into the Oasis that she wasn’t your average lot lizard. I know that’s not too flattering a name to call a lady who will do all kinds of nice things for you just to share some time breathing the same air you do, but I didn’t make it up. That name is not one I generally use. It’s just one of the many things you learn on the lonely roads of this country. The lizards like to call themselves truckers’ wives. They like the way you maybe can’t tell if that label means being connected to just one trucker or maybe to an undisclosed number. There are men who wander the lots too, looking for the same thing those women are, but drivers use the standard names for those guys and as often as not, give them a taste of fist instead of the body part they’re interested in. I just tell those men no thank you. Who am I to be critical about what you want to do with another person, so long as no one gets hurt?

  But as I was saying, this woman was not like those other women, though. They have a particular look about them. Hers was not that different, mind you, but different enough so’s you’d notice. She was not the type of woman who would share the back of your sleeper cab in trade for conversation, a meal, and a ride to the next place. For most of those others, the “next place” was only a minor matter. They didn’t care all that much about where it might be, and they were grateful if you helped them find their next ride after you. If you let them, they’d spin through your CB dial, like some kind of lottery-drawing emcee, risking nineteen if the others come up dry.

  There’s a lot of good old boys out there. You get to know a man’s disposition on the road sometimes watching the way he eats his biscuits and gravy of a morning. The ones who eat with a smile, give you a nod from the next counter stool, flirt with the waitress, those are the boys you might ask about the weather or any Staties taking pictures from the median.

  But there’s other fellas, too. You can see them at the stops just as often. They blame the cook and waitress if they don’t like the food, but they keep eating on it, grinding that food into nothing—chicken-fried vengeance. If they treat a piece of meat like that, I am afraid to think of how they might receive people. When they’re sitting at the next stool, I let the sky tell me directly what it might deliver and I watch the road myself for unmarked cars.

  If a lady riding with me asks for help finding her next ride, I offer the radio. I let her run through the channels to find her own next rides into the routes. Chickenshit, but I do not want to be a party to sad young women looking for company and meeting the business end of a claw hammer or a tire thumper.

  That’s blunt, but you can ask the wife. I have a certain way with words, Liza Jean says, and her tone lets you know she means the opposite of a compliment. Some over-the-road haulers ask these ladies if they’re riding with someone and then ask to speak to me, like I’m some kind of background check, but that’s not the way it is with me. A lady might fit nicely resting up against my belly in the night, and she might not steal anything when I’m looking elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean she’s not nuts. The only thing that had made me eligible for her talents was eighteen wheels and a full tank. That’s not too discriminating. I’m no troll, mind you, not half-bad, even—but no real prize, either. A man’s looks don’t matter to most of them.

  But this lady was different, right off. I wouldn’t have done anything with her, anyway. There’s two kinds I pass right on by, those who are Asian, and those who look like Shirley Mounter. Some things in your past should just never be awakened. You don’t know if you’ll ever get them back to sleep again. Even if she hadn’t fallen into one of my categories, I still would have not considered her. It was something beyond looks.

  Most lizards, when they get to a truck stop like the Oasis, they go to one of three places. There is the kind who sits at the restaurant, not bad looking, revealing leg and cleavage under those bright fluorescents. She is eating something light if she’s alone, a salad or whatnot. The second kind is a little older, a little heavier, or a little skinnier, always a little too something, and these ladies hang around the bar, where the lighting is lower and the men are drunker. The third type is much more random. You could never predict what they would look like. These are the ones the truck-stop owners like the least, because they almost never buy anything if they can get away with it. The owners pretend these women are invisible. Running the ladies off would be bad for business.

  These always come in, order a water, and not that bottled water, just the tap water they give you in the little round juice glasses. They ask where the ladies’ room is, knowing the ladies’ room and gents’ are generally down the hall that leads to the “truckers only” area, with the lounge and courtesy showers. The showers are never a courtesy for everyone and you have to show your license and some rig ID before they give you a key to a shower stall. It’s not a bad deal, six bucks usually, or they give you one free if you fill up your rig using their preferred customer cards. These ladies, they’ll do almost anything for a hot shower, anything, or so I hear. They try to make their way down that hall unnoticed and go to knocking on doors, or just try them to see if any’s unlocked.

  This lady did not fit any of those three categories, so my eye was up in a different way immediately. It ain’t often you pull into the big back lot reserved for rigs and see a woman wandering around the landfill just beyond the bar ditch, particularly not in the November snows of North Dakota. She was looking for something, and since I was running a little ahead of schedule, was just gonna catch some tube or maybe even a shower, I figured I’d help her out. Maybe with two sets of eyes, we would find whatever it was, just a little quicker, and get her out of that relentless wind.

  Out there, the state, or whoever, highway department, maybe, tries to hide the fact that they build landfills around the truck stops. Guess they figure no one is going to notice the smell seeping from them in all the diesel clouds. They try to beautify the fills, planting trees and such toward the edge of the lot. These get used for more than beautifying in the warmer months, but that day, the wind was way too sharp for any two people to be thinking about dropping their drawers for some connecting time, no matter how big an urge they might have. Most prefer the back of the sleeper cab in general, but I’ve seen them in the bushes often enough to know it happens.

  That poor lady and I were the only ones there, among the exhaust tubes jutting from the landscaped hill, sending nastiness in invisible sheets. Her tracks were like the small, hard deer prints I’d seen in New York, all those years ago when I used to spend some regular time in the northern climes. Her tracks came and went in all directions, sometimes crossing each other, sometimes stopping abruptly and heading in another direction.

  “Uh, miss? Ma’am?” She didn’t hear me, the wind being what it was. If the snow had not thawed and refrozen a couple of times before that day, her tracks would have all but disappeared from behind her, even as she made them.

  “Ma’am?” She turned, hearing my shout this time. She was Asian, Japanese, as you know from the news, but at the time I wasn’t sure exactly which variation. I could tell people who were Vietnamese, even half-Vietnamese and half-American, right off, but I always had trouble with others. I could spot differences if you lined some up, but couldn’t say which was which. I can’t even do this at home.

  Now, the wife says she can tell which Texans are Scottish, which ones are Irish and such, and even claims she can tell who is whose daddy and who ain’t but all that’s bullshit. There’s some children she’s looked right at and not recognized who their real daddy is but maybe that’s selective on her part—hard to say with the wife. Liza Jean McMorsey likes to see things just the way she does.

&nbs
p; She’s always been that way. Whenever she demands I cut the damned lawn because of mosquitoes, she says I scared all the birds away with my noisy engine afterward. She suggests we need an ass-kicking push mower, the kind with rotating blades that eat around like really sharp teeth. When I tell her the birds leave because the mosquitoes were their food, she laughs, drinks another Big Red, and goes back into the house to watch for birds from her big old picture window.

  So wouldn’t it just kill her to see the exotic bird I found in the winter dusk of a North Dakota night? The wife was the one who sent me there in the first place, in a manner of speaking. Usually, I do the short haul, local runs only, Big Antler to Lubbock, Lubbock to Amarillo, and the like. Every now and then, she says I’m getting on her nerves again and lets me know it’s time for me to accept one of the over-the-road runs. So this time, things worked out for both of us. She got a break from me and it was the time of year I go out for a few days by myself, anyway. Where I wind up depends on the night skies, so this was just as well. I always try to bring her back something nice. For the longest time, it was those Lladró porcelain figurines that she loved so dearly and put in the china cabinet as soon as I gave them to her but those only dredge up bad memories now, things I do not want to bring back at all.

  I put in for an extended haul with several suggested cities and got an assignment immediately. Who else wants to go up to Bismarck in November? I wanted a vacation from her anyway, so I was glad to let her think she had come up with the idea of me taking the load. She even packed my bag, looking to make sure there weren’t any rubbers in my shaving kit, like they weren’t available in every drugstore and rest area john along the way. Even the idea of someone else looking at me in my boxers gets her crabby and cross-eyed, though she hasn’t had a look for me in them for over ten years.