Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  Liza Jean came on home a little while later like we expected and she went to packing a few things she said she’d forgotten when we were first getting ready, putting them neatly in one of the empty boxes I kept in the pump house, acting like this was why we had come back to the house in the first place. Anytime I tried to put something in the box, though, thinking that might be a useful activity, she would smack my hand away and whatever I had held dropped to the floor. I almost wanted to go get one of those little Lladró porcelain statues she kept all about the place and see if she would be knocking that one out of my hand if I tried to put it in, but that day did not seem like a good one to be pressing my luck.

  I went outside and tended to a few things out there that really didn’t need tending to but it seemed like a good idea to keep busy out of the house while she did whatever she needed to do on the inside. No amount of straightening out the yard, though, was going to build me some armor to survive the trip. I could only hope for the best and pray the summer was going to work the magic on her it usually did.

  I was not for sure where the boy disappeared to but hoped he had enough sense to make himself scarce. He had a good skill of turning himself invisible and it had served him well there on the reservation in that little while he was with his daddy, being one of the more obvious mixed bloods with that name. It had been a long time since then, though, and he had just gotten accepted to some college in the east. Said he was going to take up acting, which is like lying, so in some ways he is maybe more my son than Fred’s, but, well, acting, that was supposedly Fred’s profession when he used that revolver like a Whitman Sampler of bullets, so maybe in some ways we were equally his daddy after all. He was planning on going from invisible to totally visible. From the sound of things that day, while I moved benches from one spot in the flower garden to another, he decided it was no longer time to be unseen.

  “How could you keep this from me, boy?” she asked. “After I took you in, raised you like my own, is this the way you repay me?” By then he should have been used to her questions that were not questions but started to answering the one question he for sure should have passed on.

  “He took me in, not you. You just accepted the package so you could be married again, so you could have him again under your terms,” the boy said, and I had to cringe at that one. He was getting to be big, though, and if those were the choices he was going to make, then he might as well get used to living that life, I thought, because it was going to be a hard one with that kind of attitude.

  “That’s not true. We were dating long before you came along, but I was willing, Lord I was willing, because I loved that man,” she continued, getting a little louder, or maybe it was because I was creeping toward the screen door with the things I was moving in the gardens. “ We probably weren’t ready to get married so soon, I’ll grant that, but we did it for you. You seem to have forgotten that.”

  “Maybe that was true for you, and I appreciate that, Momma,” the boy said.

  “Don’t call me that anymore,” she said. “I’m not your momma. Your momma left you at a house of drunks, away from your real daddy, just so she could get child support money to drink on. And that’s the truth of the matter. Tommy Jack thought you shouldn’t know that but it’s the truth. I bet you don’t even remember living with the drunks. He said you were in such a sad shape when he went to pick you up that he would do near anything to get you out of there. He said you were falling over drunk at the table, the day he picked you up, and when I heard that, of course I said yes to help him out, and you.”

  “Helping some kid isn’t a reason to get married. And it wasn’t your only reason, either. I saw those pictures from your first marriage that you have, those put away ones. You just needed another man to complete your perfect portraits from Sears. I know the real reason he married you,” he said. There was a pause there, and yes, I know I should have stepped in, but I think I had used up any bravery I might have had, making it through all those nights over in the jungle, sharing a plastic poncho all night long, hoping to wake up and hoping not to wake up every damned day we were over there.

  She continued to say nothing, afraid any word would cause him to continue but it didn’t matter. He had already crossed that line.

  “He asked you to marry him, because he finally figured out she was already married,” he said, all quiet-like, but I heard it just the same, and of course, so did Liza Jean. “The woman who really loves him. He asked me to keep quiet, that they knew it couldn’t work for them, that they’d met at the wrong time. I had to keep quiet. I saw her eyes when we left. It was a look I have never once seen you give him, in all these years. I couldn’t tell you about her, because I couldn’t do that to her, or him.”

  The first crashing sound might have been easy to ignore. It could have been any number of things and the way the wind is in West Texas, it even might have been somewhere down the road, but the neighbors are so far away, it was surely not from any domestic dispute and all you had to do was open your eyes and look to see no cars for miles around. By the time I could no longer ignore the realities and headed for the door, the fourth and fifth shattering had gone by in rapid succession. It was like those NVAs, trip wire- detonating our claymores, lighting up the night with their exploding bodies.

  In the dining room, the boy stood near the far wall, haloed by lopsided family pictures on the wall, with the glass smashed out of them and surrounded on the floor by small broken figurines like some of the body fragments we would see over there after a mine went off. She was shouting by that point, crying words I couldn’t understand around her sobbing as she heaved another one of the figures.

  There was something in there about “goddamned Indians always sticking together, like a bunch of fucking cockroaches.” She yelled as the figurine exploded around him and other things too. I had never in our marriage heard words like that come out of her. This was a very expensive fit on her part and there was no reason to make the day even worse in losses.

  “I didn’t know anything except they loved each other and I wasn’t supposed to say anything about it! I was a kid!” the boy kept shouting back to whatever it was she was saying. Maybe she was more coherent sounding when she pitched the first one at him. She was one powerful force when she wanted to be and by the time I had her buckled into the car with her box, my arms were killing me and I had sweated my clean shirt right on through. That last figurine she threw, “Over the Threshold,” had cost me a couple hundred when I brought it back for her five years before.

  “I’ll be back to help you before summer’s up,” I said to the boy as I ran out the door before Liza Jean could reconsider. “You got my credit card and you can use the other car here, just be good, boy.” This was the last thing I said before I climbed in the car and made my way out into that cold, silent summer. I did not want to walk out on him standing there in the mess of our obliterated dining room, small cuts on his arms and face from the tiny porcelain fragments, but choices here were of a limited nature. It might have seemed like a choice to him, since his memory would tell him he was in my life before she was, but that would not be fully accurate, so there he was, my boy, in the rearview mirror, as I left West Texas and our lives together that Memorial Day weekend. He and I had always talked about going to New York one Memorial Day after he graduated from high school to visit his real daddy’s grave and maybe lay a wreath, but the odds of that happening grew abruptly long that day.

  All that drive back to Cascabel, Liza Jean mentally sharpened her scissors, but it never happened, not for me, anyway. She stopped talking about the boy, period, as if he had never lived with us, like he was some International Care kid, a kid in some exotic and uncivilized place we paid a dollar a day for someone to feed a hot and nutritious meal, a kid whose picture we had, but with no sense of who he might be. Maybe he felt that way, too. I tried calling him from time to time on the ride out to Cascabel, drinking Coca-Colas all along the way so I would have an excuse in needing to piss at every re
st area there was a pay phone. I tried off and on that summer, but from that first afternoon on, I only got the answering machine. The machines were new things then and by mid-June, I could not even leave messages, anymore, having already filled up the tape with my apologies and encouragements and vague promises to get back there as fast as I could. The credit card bill came and the only charges on it were those we had made in Cascabel.

  I was always doing short-haul work from Cascabel and the wife knew that if I went back to West Texas, it was going to be to see the boy who did not exist anymore, and throughout that month, she kept those scissors at the ready, right next to the photo albums over on the bookshelf. I had asked the dispatch house if they had any haul assignment that would get me to Texas for a little bit, but their regular route was all tied up. One of the guys got sick and dispatch cut me a break if I was willing to leave right that moment and get the load there before sunup.

  I took it and was relieved to see my other car there in the driveway when I pulled up the next morning. Inside the house, though, nearly everything about the boy was gone. He had cleaned up the mess Liza Jean had made of her figurines, and he had even spackled and painted the wall. It was a little whiter than the rest of the walls, but only because we had not painted in a very long time.

  The pictures were back up but with no glass and they had curled and buckled some in the heavy sultry summer air around here, and though he had left all the pictures of me and Liza Jean and our various family members, every picture of him we had on the wall was gone but the one of him and me that Shirley Mounter had taken in New York. I had always told Liza Jean that Fred had taken the picture, but she probably knew better then. The boy’s first-grade picture with the flattop that matched mine at the time, up to the thick braids he sported in his graduation picture, they were all gone, the holes also spackled and painted over, as if they had never been there in the first place. Everything in his room evaporated, as well, but the one thing he left was in the curio cabinet where she kept the figurines.

  Little spots of lighter dust coatings surrounded the remaining figurines and in one circle, he had left her the little plastic Indian she had given him, and the Baby Snookum I had given him. I always have to wonder if that was the last thing he did before he left. I never had the nerve to ask him about that month, or even how he got out without my help, but he always was the resourceful sort. I played back all my messages, hoping one of them would be from him, telling me something, anything, but I just stood there in the cleaned-up dining room of my house in West Texas, smelling the fresh coat of white paint and listening to myself beg forgiveness of the son we shared until the tape ended and rewound itself, running left sprocket to right, back in time.

  But anyway that was years ago and maybe now the boy has even found her, his real momma, and maybe she was ready to love him the way we did and the way I still do. That boy, well, even though it had all been different for many years, the wife used to think he just hung the moon for sure. Even later, when he left us only memories, a dusty toy, a picture, and occasional random phone calls, she would just talk and talk, as if he was supposed to walk in the house at any minute, throw his stuff on the kitchen breakfast counter, the way he always did, and leave his jacket dangling on the back of one of the counter stools, showing steel ribs through the material. But that boy she talked about was the one in her memory, not the one who continued to grow and who sometimes saw and said things she didn’t take to at all.

  In that first year, we got a few calls from him where we actually talked, a bit. Sometimes, Liza Jean would get a hang-up call and I imagine those times were him, too, but I never asked him. I figured those were his choices to make and I respected them. His calls were always short and informational. He would let me know he was eating, passing his classes, and so on, and then he would be gone again.

  In the second year, occasionally Liza Jean would ask me, in a very bored voice, how the boy was doing, if she recognized by things I said on my end of the line that I had been talking to him. By the time he was in graduate school on a full scholarship, she would even pick up the other extension and say a few things to him and then get off abruptly, saying she had some such thing to do around the house that clearly needed no urgent tending to.

  Eventually she would talk about all the good times, and her voice was filled with all the love it had whenever we would come back from long hauling, but her reflections always cut off the May he graduated. And for the last ten years or so, he’s called to see if the door was open but so far it hadn’t been and now I guess he finally got tired of knocking and was trying to use his own key again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  Voice Over

  September 3, 1999

  Dear Tommy Jack,

  Just been wondering how you’re doing, these days. After all these years, I finally moved back to the reservation. I suppose that is why I’m writing. So you’ll at least have my new address, if you are ever inclined. Don’t worry. I know you’re not coming back, but I would have thought that twenty-five years later, I’d have moved beyond you. I felt fear, though, when I thought you might not have my address, I suppose that is why I put pen to paper, to put off pinching out that last hope like the ember of an unfiltered.

  Also, you seem to be with me all the time, lately. Not sure why being here makes me think of you, of all people, must be that abundance of time you and I spent with Fred here before he left for Hollywood, driving around, building bonfires, listening to you on the guitar. Do you still have it or have you gone and sold it in a garage sale or antique shop somewhere? You know, I bet you don’t read this letter, that you see my return address and my handwriting and throw it in the trash before you leave the post office, and I can’t blame you. Back then, that night we met, I know I should have told you I was married, but it had been so long since anyone had invited me to dance, had wanted to hold me after the song was over, so long since anyone had even wanted to buy me a drink. I hope you can understand how that was so very different from the life I had lived for too long.

  My old man loved the beer, that was so, but for some reason, he never liked me to be in that space with him, never wanted to buy me a drink. If I ever showed up with my friends in the same bar that he had been in with his, oh how that frosted his ass, and we wouldn’t be looking at him, just visiting among ourselves. We’d be over at our own table and he would come running over and cuss me out for ruining his good time. Then he’d gather up his friends, mostly his cousins from the bush, and they’d leave, go to some other place. So to me it was like we really weren’t married anymore, almost like we never had been, like the days and nights we shared before he put that ring on my finger had been with some other man who just looked like him and who never came back, once we had walked that aisle together.

  I’m not crying in my beer here, just trying to explain why it was so easy to be with you and not say anything, to let you rest your hand on me that first night and not move, and why it was so easy to fit into the crook of your arm anytime you came back around. I know we didn’t have much time together in those few years, probably less than three months, total, if you added up the days on a calendar, certainly not even enough time to grow a baby, but those three months, those are what I think about most these days and I have for most of the last thirty years too, for that matter. Those three months were my true lifetime.

  I wish you would have let me pick you up at the train station when you came back for Fred’s funeral. We ended up together anyway and though I had that sweet weekend with you, touching you, smelling you, just feeling that warmth of yours when we lay there, skin to skin on my living room carpet, you know what I thought of, watching you drive away? The things I could have done in those remaining hours. And I don’t mean only those kinds of things, your ears and the rest of you got enough of a workout, ha-ha. I mean holding your hand, feeling that little scar just over your right thumb, where you said you had some shrapnel from the war, smoothing out some of those crooked parts of your mustache,
to reveal those soft lips beneath, smelling that early morning scent of you, before you showered. Those things. I was jealous of your rental car, of all things, that it got to be with you from the moment you arrived here until the moment you left. Can you imagine that, a grown woman having such thoughts?

  You know, I could tell you were always afraid Harris was going to come home, any one of those times we were together, but you want to know something? He left for good shortly after the last time I had seen you. He was gone on one of his usual Canada drunks around the time of Fred’s funeral, didn’t even make it home for that, as I’m sure you recall, and when he showed up, the next month, he was around for a couple weeks but he knew something in me had changed. Really, he hadn’t lived with us for two years at that point, but now and again, he would come and stay for a week or three. That last one, though, was different.

  Before that time, he could always read me, knew as he repacked the bag he’d brought with him each time that I wanted him back and would do nearly anything to keep him around and he loved that I could never figure out what the magic formula was. That night he came home, though, he wandered in sometime in the middle of the night and climbed on top of me, and I let him do what he wanted, until he was done, then I went back to sleep. He knew that I let him do it not because I wanted to keep him so bad but because I didn’t care anymore, that being with him was like any of the rest of my chores, cleaning, cooking, sewing, and nothing more. He didn’t know about you, that my heart had finally moved out on him without giving notice, but he knew something had changed in me, and it was not a change he could accept. He needed to be either loved or hated. Indifference—I learned that word in my crossword dictionary, impressive, huh?—that was what he couldn’t stand. That time, when he packed, he knew it was for the last time. He had already taken his lucky work boots with him, the ones that had saved his feet when an I beam had landed on them. He never got them fixed, said he liked he way the steel peeked out from under the leather toes. When they were no longer in the closet, I knew that was it—knew that he wouldn’t be back.