Give Me Some Truth

by Eric Gansworth

  Inside, the only sound was a squawky radio pumping Hicks-in-the-Sticks Music, but I could hear voices from another bay. In the distance, three guys in blue work chinos stood around, one holding out a light so another could spark a cigar. “So where’s the Loser?” the cigar guy asked. “You guys finally fire him for spoojing in your locker room shower?”

  All three of them laughed low, dirty chuckles. Cigar guy looked familiar. Maybe like so many guys around here, he just seemed familiar. Trucker cap, work boots, a big loop of keys, and a pale blue shirt with a name patch was a pretty common sight. Jim. That name wasn’t going to narrow anything down for me, but I swore I’d met him somewhere.

  “We just don’t let him use it anymore,” one of them said, grinning.

  “He banked some hours the last couple weeks,” the last man said. “Told us he wouldn’t be in today and tomorrow. Had some things to do, for his band? Some school thing?”

  “Tried to get us to buy tickets,” the first one said, and they both laughed.

  “Like I’d pay to come back here after I punched out,” the other one said.

  “Guys’d be better off if you just got rid of him. Little fucker can make people disappear.”

  “I ain’t worried,” the guy with the lighter said.

  “Telling ya,” Cigar man said. “My nephew was just messing with him a couple years ago, boom! Suddenly, my sister had to do all kinds of shit ’cause that Loser had convinced those assholes in the principal’s office that he was getting harassed.” On this last, he raised his voice, like a little kid’s, the same way I’d made fun of Lewis in the past. “Fucking candy ass. Little bit of advice, you guys? Always watch out for a smart Indian. There aren’t too many, but boy …” He trailed off and puffed on the cigar a bit to get the ember hot again.

  Was he talking about Evan Reiniger? I looked closer at this guy’s face. Behind the bushy mustache, I could see a resemblance. They had the same intense eyes, like someone on the hunt. Evan was the guy who’d tortured Lewis in junior high, torpedoing his Brainiac status. I hated to admit it, but Evan had given me the first window in what it meant to be a ChameleIndian.

  For some reason I never found out, Evan hated Indians. I never mentioned anything about where I was from when we first met, so his eyes ran right past me, and once he found Lewis as his everyday target, I just decided to keep my invisibility. Some people you knew were dangerous, even after one conversation, and Evan had that craziness in his eyes at all times. I knew Evan had gotten thrown out of school at some point, but I never knew the details and I sure wasn’t asking Lewis.

  “I like my Indians young, dumb, and looking for fun,” he added, streaming nasty stogie clouds. He opened his mouth a little and flicked his tongue quickly. I’d seen guys do this to girls at bars and some drinking parties. Did that ever work? What the hell was wrong with them?

  “Careful where you’re sliding your dipstick,” Lighter Man said. “Don’t forget the ‘wild’ in ‘Wild Child.’”

  “I ain’t worried. When they say ‘she went off the reservation,’ you know what they mean?” he started. He shaped his hands like a pair of parentheses, and lowered them to belt level. “She went off the reservation!’” He humped his hips forward a couple quick thrusts, jangling his keys, like the first guy. “It means she’s willing to go all batshit crazy with you.” Off the reservation? I’d never heard this phrase before in my life.

  “Still, pushing your luck, Jim. At least be less obvious. Pinstriping? Jeez, like mounting a twelve point rack on your car to announce how good a hunter you are.”

  What were they talking about? They laughed the Dirty-Joke Laugh middle-aged Rez men used at parties to tease guys like me. It was strange to enter this world that Lewis and Maggi knew all the ins and outs of. For all my New York City dreams, and thinking I was all smooth, they knew the white world way better than I did, the world “Off the Reservation.”

  One of the guys headed to an industrial sink, scrubbing his hands, and spotted me. “Help you?” he asked, coming toward me. He wasn’t running, but there was a sense of urgency. This world was more rigidly controlled than I’d thought.

  “I’m looking for Lewis?” I said, uncertainty in my voice.

  “Ain’t here. But, kid? See that sign? Authorized personnel only.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and turned to leave.

  “Kid? Not that way.” He pointed me to the main door. “That way.”

  “Sorry.” I altered my course. I definitely didn’t belong there. What had Lewis learned that I didn’t know? Was I getting a deficiency warning in Growing Up?

  A few minutes later, I was on my way down Snakeline. I needed to tell Maggi about the band news in person. She should have been off of work by then, but there was no sign of life at her house, so I just kept going. Just below the school, I saw a familiar figure walking toward Torn Rock, and pulled over. He got in. Typical.

  “Good,” Albert said, settling heavy. “Now I don’t have to go all the way to your house.”

  “For what? My dad want you to work on something?”

  “Something. I hear you got problems with that Attack of the Bands, isn’t it?”

  “Battle of the Bands,” I corrected. “Word travels fast.”

  “It’s the Rez, man,” he said. I didn’t think this was exactly major Eee-ogg.

  “We were disqualified,” I explained, and he nodded like he indeed already knew. “I can give you a ride home, if you want. I went looking for Lewis at the garage, but he wasn’t there. They said he’d planned to miss today.”

  “Yeah, he ain’t home. Hubie Doobie called the house. Why you disqualified anyway?”

  “My home ec teacher. She failed me today. Said she’d figured out I was cheating and then hinted that she was just gonna let it go until I’d hassled Custard’s Last Stand. That’s the bullshit reason I’m not practicing right now. She disqualified me.”

  “Were you cheating?” He lit a cigarette, even though I didn’t let people smoke in here.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “If you ain’t sure, then you probably cheated and you just ain’t telling yourself, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s just me you ain’t willing to tell.” Technically, I had done everything by the book. My turkey was awesome because we cooked it right. The only thing I’d done was swapped out the frozen turkey because I’d screwed up. Did that really count?

  “Did Lewis maybe cheat too?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. The only things he’d done was come with me to the store, and then keep his mouth shut after, when we walked into class. Was that cheating? I didn’t think so.

  “So then he’s not disqualified. Just you?”

  “I guess, but there’s no band without me.”

  “Lots of people want to think stuff like that, isn’t it? Even if it ain’t true?”

  “But it is true,” I said as I pulled into my driveway. We got out, and I could hear my dad shouting at Derek, as usual. “Not sure you wanna go in there.”

  “Don’t get to choose duty. Ain’t always a matter of wanting,” he said, and stepped up to my porch. I joined him and rattled the knob so that my dad might quit before we entered and became witnesses.

  Maybe because we’d spent most of our younger lives together, Marvin had recently started commenting that I wasn’t around much (in real life too, beyond the naggy Ghost Marvin taking up residence inside my head). Even he, who spent most of his time not moving from the couch and his goofy sixties shows, had finally sensed disturbances in our environment. I didn’t want to leave him completely behind, but I didn’t know what was going to happen after tonight. So two weeks ago, after Jim shared his plans for the Battle of the Bands night, I’d made myself promise that whenever Marvin asked me to do something, I’d do it. Even watching his dumb shows. It gave me an excuse to work on my projects, and he didn’t mind that my lapboard crowded the couch.

  “Here, watch this one,” Marvin said today. It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Battle o
f the Bands day. The night Jim and I would explore who we were going to be. Marvin’s favorite, Lost in Space, was on: the Robinsons who’d screwed up their voyage. They were permanently in uncharted territory, in a tiny, two-deck flying saucer. They were accompanied by “Debbie,” their pet Bloop (a chimp in a fur hat with giant “alien” ears and a sound-effects voice that went “Bloop! Bloop!”). She was a constant for two seasons and then—bloop!—she vanished. You just knew the trained chimp had grown uncooperative so they wrote it out. That’s what happened sometimes when you didn’t fit into others’ plans.

  “Where are they?” I asked. Two characters, Will (Brainiac fourteen-year-old) and Dr. Smith (sneaky, lazy, conniving older-man asshole), squeezed through girders and shifting electronics. I was mildly embarrassed that I recognized they weren’t in the Jupiter 2.

  “Inside the robot,” Marvin said, with complete sincerity. “He wandered through this mysterious gas, and now he’s a giant and it’s messed up his timer diode.”

  “His timer di—”

  “Robot Heart,” he said, cutting me off. “It made him into a giant. That’s the timer diode, there.” He pointed to a giant inflated pulsing vinyl cylinder with a tapered tip. It raised, then drooped, raised, then drooped, stretching the blue and red veins painted on its surface.

  “That doesn’t look so much like a heart,” I said, and started laughing.

  “Shut up!” he said, throwing a pillow at me, but he was laughing. Even he could see that it looked like a Robot Hard, particularly when it deflated a bit. “Thanks for ruining my show.”

  “Wasn’t me who put a giant inflatable guhn-naeht throbbing inside the robot.” He pushed my shoulder. “Is this why you made me sit down? To get a peek at the robot’s, um, unit?”

  “The robot dies for a few minutes,” he said, exasperated.

  “Dies?”

  “The, um, diode timer,” he said, screwing up the name. I had ruined it for him. “They bring him back. And he starts shrinking while they’re trapped inside. The walls close in. Things get more cramped. Don and John and Dr. Smith—”

  “Don? The cute pilot? How does he wind up inside?”

  “Cute?” Marvin scrunched up his nose. “You got guhn-naeht on the brain!”

  “Nothing wrong with saying someone’s cute.” I’d never told Marvin that Don the space pilot was the real reason I’d watch this show. I wished an alien would just eat Dr. Smith.

  “Dude’s like thirty!” Marvin said. Isn’t it, though? Now that he said it, Don the space cowboy and Jim Morgan did share features. Was I contemplating my first step into adult life because of Lost in Space? “He’s gotta be, what? In his forties now?”

  “Who knows what he looks like now,” I acknowledged. “But he sure is cute here.”

  “Just shut up and watch!” he laughed. The characters ran through the shrinking robot. Will would somehow save the day, almost get killed, and his dad would pull off a last-minute rescue. Maybe Marvin needed to see himself as Will (Misunderstood Boy Genius), trapped, silently saving us. Maybe that’s how he got through being stuck on the couch each night.

  “Marvin, I gotta go,” I said as Sexy Don leapt out of the shrinking robot escape hatch. You didn’t see how lame the special effects were, when you’re a kid. In my memory, the escape hatch really shrank as Will worked toward it, not these shoddy swapping-out prop effects. I hoped I’d remember this night of my own accurately, the night to come, when I was older.

  “How you getting to your thing?” our dad yelled. He hadn’t yet retreated to the bedroom. I couldn’t blame him for doing so—our Shack felt like that robot, shrinking around us. Maybe Marvin wanted to let me know he understood. I opened my mouth, but our dad barged in, already shaking his head. “Marvin! Walk your sister. I don’t want her alone on the road anymore.” Marvin shut off the TV and grabbed his coat. “I already heard some Eee-ogg about it.”

  “Sorry,” I said to Marvin as we left. Apparently it took Rez gossip to kick our dad into the Concerned-Parent role. “I know you’d prefer your couch, and see what’s ‘To Be Continued: Next Week!’” I said, imitating the Lost in Space announcer voice.

  “You kidding?” My twin looked at me, then into the darkening trees. “I was planning on coming. Just not this early.” We walked in silence for a bit, and then he went on. “Why are we going so early? Last practice or something?”

  “I hate racing around ahead, any time I have to be good at something,” I said. Of course, that wasn’t the full story. I hadn’t shared everything with Marvin in our fifteen years together. Like I couldn’t have figured that out, Ghost Marvin said. But I usually told him the truth, and assumed he told me it in return. Tonight, though, was something entirely different.

  “How come you guys didn’t ask me to come to that Veterans Day thing?” Marvin asked. “Or Dad? He’s a vet.” Partly (I speculated), he was asking why he hadn’t been involved in that art. The newspaper covered Marie’s beaded trucker caps and Dark Deanna (lover of free advertising) had laminated it for our Vendor Table. Marie’s caps were now a hot item all over the Rez, and Marvin was missing out on the revenue.

  I felt double bad because lately Marvin was also losing out on revenue from the little basswood and soapstone people he carved too. He’d begun making them strictly for my own experiments, the projects our mom would never allow at her Table. His items now consisted of terrified little people trying to hang on to a little canoe, screaming in their new loss (scary shit you could never sell to tourists, particularly not honeymooners at the brink of Niagara Falls). I was so busy helping with Marie’s caps, though, that I hadn’t made anything new for his latest crew of figures. His people were like their own lost little family, lying in a sweetgrass basket until I had time to be inspired by my brother’s twisted imagination. And he was doing a beautiful soapstone Lennon profile for the beadwork back cover of Imagine I was making for Jim. The beaded one I’d done wasn’t a good enough resemblance, but Marvin had a great eye for the details of people’s faces. He promised to guide me in doing one of Yoko’s face for the Mind Games one.

  “I didn’t know how things would be,” I said. “Marie never told me about the caps. I was as shocked as anyone else. Don’t know how she was able to hide them.”

  “Seems like people can get good at hiding all kinds of things when they really want to. You know, I’m not going to cover your asses full-time anymore. I got a life too.”

  “Oh yeah? Looking forward to a Lost in Space and Land of the Giants marathon?”

  “Not anymore. Now that I know you’re just scoping out Major West’s tight sixties pants. Is there someone on Land of the Giants too?” There was, actually. Irwin Allen’s shows were all about people trapped in a hostile environment, and they were pretty similar, right down to actors. He loved survivors. Maybe he’d scoped out Rez Life and wrote these shows about getting used to that tension. “Your silence sounds like a yes.”

  “Like you’re not checking out the girls in all their sixties mini outfits.”

  “You think I need the TV for that? If you were ever home anymore, you’d notice I go out too. I just don’t make a big production out of it. I joined the Rez Social singers. They’re always looking for people, and you’re not the only drummer in this family.”

  “Are you serious? That’s great!” I screamed, which felt weird in the middle of the road. A couple dogs barked, but I was relieved they were behind us and not ahead, potentially waiting. Since I’d been home so little lately, I hadn’t even noticed that Marvin had started to come and go. “But Mom and Dad …”

  “They want as much breathing room as we do,” he said, shaking his head at me. “At first, I joined the Social singers to give them some. I wanted somewhere to go, and since you and Marie were out doing your own thing, I figured I better find my own way. Davy Reynolds taught me some songs in the city, and we had plenty of drums at the house … I found my way.” What he’d left off, the without any help from you, was clear enough.

  Before
I could say anything more, Jim’s car pulled up behind us. Our shadows blossomed and stretched out in front of us. As Jim passed by, his Bandit slowed, and he rolled down the passenger’s side window. “Maggi? That you? Need a ride somewhere?”

  So that was his plan (????). The old standby, Incredible Coincidence.

  “Jim?” I said, trying to sound astounded. “Jim Morgan?” I turned to Marvin and raised my eyebrows with what I hoped was a Lucky Break! Face.

  “I can read,” Marvin said, pointing to the Jim pinstriped on the driver’s side door, just below the elbow now leaning out.

  “A guy I work with!” Marvin raised his eyebrows as we ran around to the other side. On the passenger door, I glimpsed that he’d added his personal version of my name, MaggiPie, with a little pinstripe bird, next to it. I got my electric-blue shock wave, a sharp charge from my toes on up, but this time, it held another color—a little red. A touch of fear.

  I opened the door, blocking Marvin’s view as I flipped the bucket seat so he could get in. I did my best impression of shocked thanks, smelling a hint of Binaca below Jim’s cologne. He wasn’t wearing Old Spice or Hai Karate or anything lame.

  We made bullshit small talk on the ride, and Jim pulled over to the shoulder at the first school driveway. “Thanks, Jim!” I said, getting out. “Would have been a long, cold walk. Hope we didn’t hold you up from wherever you’re going.” He winked and flicked his eyebrows at me as Marvin climbed out. We were already anticipating each other’s thoughts, like a real couple.

  “Nice car,” my brother said, grinning. “What’s that air freshener? I don’t see any little hanging Christmas tree.” I kept the door wide, though the wind was blasting in.

  “Called Eau Sauvage,” Jim said. “Aftershave. Doesn’t look like you’ll be needing it for a few years,” he added, laughing. Marvin let it slide. Jim drove off.

  “Oh Savage?” Marvin said as we walked toward the school, twisting his mouth to the side. “Was that guy kidding?”