Extra Indians

by Eric Gansworth

  The side of the moon I used to see in the jungles has followed me here. This isn’t the right moon for Los Angeles. It’s closer. It’s falling and one day, it will just land in the ocean and that’ll be that. I keep watching the nightly national news to see if anyone else has noticed, but no one has. I’m sure the government knows and they’re just not telling anyone. I mean, really, if they wouldn’t tell the truth of all the things we had to do and the things that were done to us over in Vietnam, they sure weren’t going to tell America that the moon was going to destroy us in a couple years. In the meantime, before it collides, it’s trying to pull me out into the ocean again, trying to steal what little I have, like it did in China Beach. I lost that stupid ring my dad made me wear all those years at China Beach and I knew he’d look for it on my finger when I came home. That moon made me be who I am, embrace my skin like I never had before and that is one powerful thing that cannot be denied.

  I think someone is dead next door. It’s not just that the yelling stopped a few days ago. I can smell it coming up from the vents. At first I thought it was maybe a rat in the ductwork, but even rats don’t have exactly the same smell as a dead human body. I knew I had heard a bear snuffling and what did I do? The same thing I have done all my life. When I don’t like the words I hear, I just find some way of delivering different ones. This one was easy. All I had to do was turn up the volume.

  That little boy’s nose won’t be bleeding anymore and I don’t have to worry about losing any more teeth to my neighbor. They took them both away today, the boy in a bag, the father in cuffs. I could have stopped him, could have spoken to the super, the cops, any number of people. The bears sure came home and did it up right this time.

  That little boy keeps talking to me through the ducts. I tried sealing the vent up with tape but it didn’t help and now I just keep the TV on, blasting the snow when the TV is on a channel with no signal. That works most times, but I can still hear him a bit. He says the bears showed him how to do it and he said it was so much easier on that side. He gave me a couple options. He said I might go home or just head on over into the ducts with them. I thought about those things, even called people at home a couple times, my mom, Shirley, even tried to get Tom to come back out and see me, thought maybe he could help me, but it seems like those doors are gone, and all that’s left is to slide through those slats in the vents and disappear down the ducts. I was holding out to hear on that speaking part but we all know how that turned out.

  Time to write those letters.

  Tommy Jack McMorsey

  They read in the porch light, bugs swarming and mosquitoes like to carry you off if you don’t watch out, but they both read, each holding the spiral-bound opened. “Daddy, he doesn’t mention it here, but you said it often enough, about you saving him and that was how I got my name. Can you tell me about that?” the boy said, closing the notebook. I knew they were just going to ask more questions, and I guess it was finally time to answer what I could. He deserved answers because he is my son, and I suppose she deserved them because, like it or not, she is probably my daughter. And who is left to harm at this point except me, and maybe that’s about the way things should be, considering all the hurt I have pushed out over the years. I decided I would answer any questions, but they had to figure out which questions to ask.

  “Yeah, I’ll tell you. But maybe in the house? I am getting eaten alive out here,” I said and walked in. They could choose on their own which door they were ready to open, their car or my house. I figured I should probably start from the beginning, which kicked off, as so many things in my life did, with a letter.

  We all knew what it was, as soon as the envelope came. It’s not like the Selective Service was in the business of issuing invitations. At first, though, I thought for sure the draft notice I got didn’t really mean anything. My daddy was confident, given his support of our local elected officials, that something could be done. In the meantime, we knew I had to tell the woman I was planning to marry.

  “I need to see you,” I said to Liza Jean over the phone, after my momma and daddy and me got our wind back.

  “What is it, Tommy Jack?” she said, more annoyed than concerned. “Can’t it wait? You know how I’ve got my standing appointment with the beauty operator.”

  “ You’re gonna want to cancel this one. I need to do this in person,” I said.

  “Supper?” she asked, her voice sliding up a few notes as if the words were greased. “Is there something you’re going to ask me tonight, Tommy Jack?” Like most folks in Big Antler, hell, most of West Texas, she’d gotten it into her head that being coy was what a young woman did when she was talking with a man who was interested in her. It didn’t matter that we’d known each other forever and were already settling down to our lives in the same workplace. The nurse’s office was just down the hall from my classroom, and most had turned a blind eye when I’d slip down there during my prep period. We had both come home after college, and she took her expected place when Mrs. Moose retired from sticking thermometers up kids’ butts to reduce the number who tried to fake being sick just to get out of school. I was a new history teacher with a fresh degree, returning to my old school. I would probably eventually coach JV football, and the like, or I would have, before getting that letter in the mail.

  “Sure, supper,” I said. “Sportsman’s Club all right?”

  “You can pick me up at six. I’ll be ready,” she said. This meant, more or less, that she would be decked out in pink with a fuzzy sweater on and no jewelry, so as not to conflict with whatever I might want to put on the ring finger of her left hand. I got there at six and, uncharacteristically, she was ready. She was not, however, wearing pink, had left on her old rings, and the look on her face told me that word had traveled fast in our little town. Only about half the houses had phones, but only the cattle didn’t know I was leaving for basic training in a couple days.

  “So I guess you’ve already heard,” I said, letting her into my passenger’s seat and closing the door as she nodded. “Good news is like a brushfire around here.” We made our way to the Sportsman in silence, her hands making busy little adjustments to her skirt for the half-hour ride. The flatlands rolled out before us, interrupted only by the occasional house or mesquite.

  “It’s only two years,” I said, when we were seated. “And usually, just one of them spent over there.” Fortunately, no one in Cee City had heard yet, so the waitress just gave us the usual teasing she does, looking at Liza Jean’s fingers for any updates. “I haven’t talked to the principal yet, to see if they’ll hold my job. Might be getting too much ahead of myself. Daddy’s looking into what options we have. Maybe I won’t have to go at all, what with having a necessary job here in town. Or they could station me somewhere close, if I absolutely have to go.” Liza Jean’s daddy held a lot more influence than mine; our whole cotton crop could fit inside just one of the nine patches he had all around Big Antler. She still said very little, nodding slightly. I guess they’d already had the conversation about how far Mr. Bean was willing to go to keep my ass out of Vietnam.

  “When are you supposed to leave?” she said, finally, after moving the catfish strips around on her plate some.

  “Have to be in Abilene to catch a plane the day after next. I think they don’t give you much notice so you don’t have time to plan some kind of escape. Basic training is, I think, something like two months, and then maybe more, depending . . .” I could hear in my own voice that I was already accepting this as my new life. Four years of college, and here I was, after a year of teaching, thinking they had surely passed me over, that I was beyond the point of snatching. They mostly wanted men who were eighteen, not so set in their ways. In my mid-twenties, I was already pretty set in concrete. People in town thought of me as a man instead of a boy. Hell, I even wore a tie to work every day.

  “Depending on what, Tommy Jack?”

  “I don’t know. I do not know any of this stuff. I thought I was off the hook, t
hat I could be done worrying about this. You know, I was planning our life,” I said, reaching across the table to touch the hand that held the friendship ring she’d picked out for me to buy when we were still in high school. Even then, she began looking away.

  My plane to Fort Ord left Abilene at 5:45 AM, so I had to get a room in town. And though she came with me to Abilene, agreeing to take my pickup back to my daddy’s and leave him the keys, she stood at my room door in the early evening light and said her good-bye then. I thought, seeing it was my last night, we would have shared some time after supper together. She hugged me and turned from the motel balcony, not looking back until she was safely behind my pickup’s windshield. Watching her taillights disappear on the horizon, I guess I had known she wouldn’t stay. She still had that sense of privilege that came from being the daughter of the county’s biggest landowner, and though we were over a hundred miles from home, she couldn’t have anyone noticing that she’d taken me to a motel and not returned until the next morning. Vietnam or no Vietnam, it was not the appropriate action for a daughter of Marcourt Bean.

  I’d never seen much of the country, so watching the sun rise over unfamiliar territory was at least a little pleasant. Heading due west, we stayed in a perpetual state of early morning for a couple hours. Shadows faded, grew, faded again as we passed time zones and state lines. Most of the others on the plane were quiet, some drinking coffee, some reading the papers. Most, though, were like me, not riding voluntarily. It looked like several guys wore the same “I got my draft notice” face I saw in the mirror all the time, and others, men and women, hunched, as if hoping not to be noticed. The only people flying in planes that early in the morning are those who are stuck with no other options. They had to get where they were going with no eye to pleasure.

  See, my daddy could not do a thing for me, except get me a couple of days home between basic and advanced. Liza Jean and I went out for a date then too, but like the last time, it was more a dinner than anything else. She was different already, probably because I had been assigned back to Fort Ord after basic for advanced infantry training, which pretty much guaranteed I was going over. Almost nobody made it out of Ord and got a stateside assignment. I’m guessing she was maybe dating the Giant then, or at least considering it. This tall dork was the gym teacher and varsity football coach from the school. When that man was running, you could hear those flat feet slapping the floor across town, like a clown on the basketball court. I wondered if he had somehow busted his own arches just to keep his ass out of the draft. People do the funniest things in desperation.

  All the time I was in basic, my daddy wrote to senators, representatives, anyone whose campaign he’d donated to, trying to pull me some strings to get my ass out of there, a deferment, anything. All these people around Big Antler looked at me like I was already a dead man. Everyone kept saying there was no politics in who had to go over, but there were lots of oil boys and rancher boys my age wandering around town, still holding hands with their girlfriends, even having the balls to smirk at me, in that last day before I had to leave. Lord, I did not want to go to Vietnam. At one point in basic, they had asked me if I was a conscientious objector. I said I was, and they had such a fit, telling me I should have said so a lot sooner than five weeks into training. They slammed phones and file cabinet drawers so hard that I said never mind. They had me convinced that I didn’t want to make trouble for anyone above me. I wonder how many men they pulled that line of shit on, and of those, how many came home.

  When I got over, in country, there were four black men, two Indians, and five rednecks, small-town farm types like me, in my immediate squad. I had never seen an Indian in my life at that point, and there I was, with two of them, all day long. You can’t tell me there wasn’t politics in who got drafted, and who had to go over and who got to serve stateside. I had never felt more alone in my life, and maybe it is that feeling that sends you out to even a remotely familiar face. I had met Fred Howkowski in basic, but we’d never spoken then. He was one of the idiots I went in with, paying a limousine to take us into Oakland. We didn’t know a thing, scared shitless, giving up our own cash to get into the base when a free shuttle just passed us right on by.

  I wondered then if he had recognized me, too, if he’d witnessed my last hope on the plane or if he had seen what I had seen just before we boarded. At the Oakland shipping post, we passed the truck they used to cart the bodies back, Gray’s, I think was the company name—should have been Graves by my reckoning. That truck was mighty full of those special soldier caskets I would later get real familiar with over there, as if we didn’t feel shitty enough, waiting to head on over.

  So among those of us who were stringless, if a familiar face is all you got, that is what you go with. I’m not for sure when Fred and I moved from being friendly to being friends, but it was probably as soon as our second day over. We were out on the patrols. I never quite got exactly what we were supposed to be doing. It seemed like we were just showing other people we could walk around in their jungles, daring them to pick us off. Why they wanted to live there, I couldn’t imagine.

  We were going out on the “old NDP,” which was new to us. The old-timers would just mock you to death if you asked questions. They called it Monopoly—ask too many questions, you go directly home, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. I wanted to go home, all right, but not the way the uninformed usually did. You know, in a plastic bag. We’d been walking all day when the first lieutenant called for NDP. All the other guys in the squad seemed to know what that meant and got to unloading their rucksacks.

  “NDP?” Fred asked one of the old-timers.

  “Night defense perimeter, cherry,” he got back, and the other guy just shook his head at us.

  “Well,” I said, as we stood, “if we’re going to die tonight, at least we’ll know what duty we’re dying on.” Fred was the only one who laughed. I knew who I would stick with.

  “You cherries watch out. Red Legs fired out into the bush all night long last night, and got a lot of enemy return. Might be a wounded VC or two out there. Happy hunting, boys,” one of the old-timers said, as we walked out into the dark.

  “Y’all head on over there in that patch.” We were ordered somewhere along the trail, into the thick brush beyond our sight. “You two, you’ll be up in three hours, then you watch for two hours, and then you wake these two up,” the lieutenant whispered, and gave the same kinds of instructions all the way around. The firebases were made on the sheared-off tops of peaks that bulldozers had cleaned straightaway, but the rest of the mountainsides were as dangerous as ever. The only thing we had going for us was the dense brush we were tangled in nearly every moment of patrol. They said we could always grapple onto something as we fell, if need be, but the practical application of that was just a little different.

  As we got into the shadows where we were supposed to set up our air mattresses and camouflage blankets, some rounds of ammo went off and we jumped to the ground, trying desperately to disappear into the bush. Fred suddenly sunk a lot lower into the ground than I did, almost a foot, nearly losing his balance. This low gurgly moan and a rush of foul air surrounded us. Fred snagged onto me, his arms pinwheeling. My mess hall lunch was rising inside me in that noxious cloud, my tongue thick and metallic, and my hands slick with sweat, but I held us steady. The tiny penlight my daddy had sent along with me showed us what he’d landed in. At that moment, I was wishing the light had been stolen along with the other shit that had been lifted from me by then. We would have been better off not knowing. Fred’s rib cage expanded for one big scream and I clapped my free hand down on his mouth.

  I kept it there, forcing him silent, so no one would hear him and get a bead on us. With one hand locked across his face, I yanked him out, threw him to the ground, and punched him, knocking the wind out of him. We lay there, and though my eyes were closed, I could still see perfectly what he had stepped in. Fred had sunk shin deep into the rotting belly of the dead
NVA soldier buried in a grave under maybe three inches of dirt. His boots were glazed in maggots and dissolving organs, but we didn’t dare move for a bit, until our quiet would cover us again. I hoped the body wouldn’t shift any more and that we’d discharged the last of its belly gases when we’d disturbed it.

  So, we lay there, listening to every sound around us, waiting to hear if there was more fire, afraid to move. Fred seemed spookier than me for some reason. I don’t know if he didn’t realize this was what our lives were going to be like or what. It was a jungle, at night, so there was not a scarcity of noises. Small, big, very big, you didn’t know. Could have been wild dogs, or trained dogs. Lord, I was hoping it wasn’t dogs, because if they can smell fear like it is said they can, we would have been radiating fear scent like a skunk spraying just then. Or boars, or bears. Of course the biggest concern was that it was NVA. Sound in the dark is a disorienting thing, and mystery sounds when you are afraid are even more disorienting.