Читать книгу Extra Indians - Eric Gansworth - Страница 10

CHAPTER THREE:

Bit Part

October 31, 1967

Dear Tommy Jack,

I am writing to you between the kids coming for tricks-or-treats. Their costumes are always the cutest little things you ever did see. Some of the little boys, though, they are dressed up like soldiers, and if I see them coming down the drive, I ask Momma to give them their candy. It makes me too sad to see them. One of them had a little burnt cork mustache, and after you said you’d grown one now because your face is breaking out there, well, that little boy especially made me think of you, over there, fighting for us. I’m glad to hear your memory skills are being put to work and that being the radioman makes you a little bit safer than the others. You didn’t mention what a “Romeo Sierra” or a “Whisky India Alpha” is, but I suspicion you’re not supposed to tell me anyway. Your description of Lubbock from the sky, like a giant patchwork quilt, well, I don’t know if I’ll ever see that. I don’t think I was made to be the flying sort. I’ll have to take your word for it.

I know I should have told you this in person, when you were home, but I didn’t want you spending your last free time at home upset. It wouldn’t have changed anything between us anyway, so I thought this was better. This maybe is just me, trying to make things up for not having been able to tell you in person, but I’m telling you now. I am sorry, Tommy Jack, for any bad feelings I have caused for you, or disappointments. Part of it is my daddy’s doing. When you got that draft notice, I know he went down to the draft board with you and your daddy to try to get you a hardship deferment, but at the same time he went looking for other suitors for me. I guess he didn’t want to see his little girl a spinster or a widow. Those are his words, Tommy Jack, not mine. You know I would never say anything like that.

But I have to tell you, because I always want to be honest with you, that after he said those words to me, they got me to thinking, and I sure didn’t think I could bear that heartache at the age of twenty-four. I know it’s nothing compared to what you are going through and I am not trying to make that heartache any smaller by saying that, just speaking my mind, the way you and I always have, over a vanilla shake or a Coke float. You know, it was funny, no matter what I ordered, I always wanted what you ordered as soon as we got it, and you were so sweet, always letting me have some, or even switching with me, whatever I wanted. I always thought that was darling of you, Tommy Jack.

Daddy says the war might be over soon, and you’ll be back safe and sound, and will be able to get on with your life. He even thought he could possibly swing a job for you when you come home, teaching history at the junior college, what with your high school teaching experience, if you make some agreement that you’ll finish your master’s in a year. But he said that’s future thinking and we need to concentrate on the present and those things that are best for us. Which brings me to why I am writing you, now.

I am sorry I couldn’t take that ring, Tommy Jack. I did think it was pretty, if that’s any help. Well, that shouldn’t be a surprise. Even though you didn’t present it, you would have had to be an idiot to not know which one I liked, since I pointed it out any time we walked by the jewelry store display. I know it was the one you would have offered if I’d given you the chance. I could tell by the look on your face that you had not even thought I’d leave my finger unadorned that night, and I could understand your disappointment, but Daddy says I have to look to my future, as well.

I’m glad you have found a friend there. An Indian from New York. Who would have imagined such? And what is this business about you saving his life? Did that really happen? It is good to have people to talk to when difficult things come your way. I have a new very good friend, too. His name is Paul Montgomery. Maybe you remember him. He is a very nice man, and I bet the two of you will be fast friends when you come home. He’s supposed to be the gym teacher at Big Antler Elementary, but really he’s varsity football coach, so the boosters make his life a little better. We might be going to state this year. He drops off lesson plans for his “helper,” the real gym teacher, and then he drops by my office when he is on his free period. He’s been awfully good to me, making sure I didn’t get lonely while you were away, keeping my mind off those terrible things they report on the news each night, going to evening prayer service where we pray for your safety, and the safety of all of our other boys who are with you overseas.

I imagine you know what I am leading up to here, and you have always complimented me on being plainspoken, so here goes. Paul has asked me to marry him and I have accepted his proposal. I have tried to write this letter in many different ways, Tommy Jack. I have even used up most of this year’s stationery but it is coming close to the holiday season, so I want to make sure my momma has reason to give me this gift. It is not so dear, so her savings account won’t suffer so greatly, and it is something I use. Our church has given us the names of other GIs who might want letters, that the Red Cross had given them (I guess not everybody has someone at home to write to them), and there is a big letter-writing campaign throughout the school. Isn’t that the most darling? Maybe someone in your grouping or platoon or whatever it is will get a letter from one of our little boys or girls, and you can tell them all about life in Big Antler, Texas. Won’t that be a hoot? I am writing some letters too, but I wanted to write this one to you first.

I am looking forward to your coming home and us all being the best of friends. I am sure it will all work out. I won’t write to you again while you are over there. I suppose there is the possibility that you won’t want to be hearing from me for a while, anyway, and don’t you worry, I am not mad at that. I can understand it perfectly. I guess I will sign off here, as there is school tomorrow, and October is the beginning of flu season, and that means the beginning of the busy season for the school nurse. Please look me up when you get home, Tommy Jack. I am not sure where we’ll be living, but definitely it will be somewhere in Big Antler and we will be in the telephone book, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Montgomery. Just give us a ring to let us know when you’ll be coming a-calling, it will be so good to see you. Well, here comes one of those little kids from the school. This one is dressed up like Batman.

Best to you,

Liza Jean

Tommy Jack McMorsey

Yes, that was the letter that started it all. Funny that when I got home from North Dakota and the Big Antler Daily would run that story on me and the Japanese girl, I would be getting the same kind of looks around town I got when I returned from Vietnam thirty-three years ago to see my high school and college sweetheart married to someone else. I could have let it go with those original newspaper stories, where my name wasn’t even mentioned in the syndicated story, but some old boy down at the Big Antler Daily had to read a little more carefully and recognized my name in the full wire service report.

This time, it wasn’t just “Guess who your girl is married to, Tommy Jack?” or “What kinds of things did you see and do over there, Tommy Jack?” their looks were saying at me. This time, the Morse code they were blinking at me with their eyes, even as I bought my quick picks and my dailies and my weeklies, had a different feel, similar, but just different enough. “How come you didn’t save that girl, Tommy Jack?” “Was she another one of those ladies you make time with on the road, Tommy Jack?” “Did you do something you didn’t want her talking about, Tommy Jack?” That last one was probably the one that got me the most. So I just wanted to get it all out in the open, that I tried to save that poor young woman, but then that stupid article got this whole other ball rolling.

Who would have ever thought anyone read the Big Antler Daily besides the folks living in this pissant town, anyway? I never realized the larger syndicate works both ways, and once a story gets out there, well, it carries on. All I wanted to do was stop those people looking and whispering again, like they had over thirty years ago. A small town like this, it has got one big and long memory. I’ve never totally been the shy type, generally willing to do whatever it is that needs getting done, but I have also never gone much out of my way to draw attention, either, and those stares were working my nerves, all over again.

You know how it is, they knew you probably killed some people in the war, and they just applied that knowledge onto you all the way around, even though they weren’t remotely involved. They never had to do and see the things I did and saw. They were sitting back home, watching the TV, maybe some of them even writing to me, because some of them did, hi-how-you-doing-get-back-safe kind of stuff, but what did they really think we were doing in the jungle, throwing mud balls? Pushing each other in the water? Maybe punching someone in the head if things were particularly bad? They were all well and nice when I made it home, even invited me to the occasional party they were having, once they realized I was back, but the looks were there. Did I do some of those things that were being hinted at in the newspapers and magazines, cutting off ears and wearing them as necklaces? The answer is no, but they thought what they wanted, anyway. Soon enough, this country will be at war again, with that crazy new president. Lord, did he have to come from this state? Seems like he’s trying to drag Iraq in, but no matter where it is he wages war, those young men and women are going to come home to some of those same looks, and I do not envy them one bit. The draft might be gone these days, but I don’t imagine any rich man’s son is eagerly signing up for the military right now, and anyone signing up now, you know that bastard has no other options.

I returned to U.S. soil the very night I zeroed out, left the jungles, arrived back into the shipping depot in Oakland sometime later but it’s hard to remember those things—not because they were terrible or anything, just the opposite, but a jolt is still a jolt, however you cut it. The day before we zeroed, we had been out on patrol, and had been for a month. I had nearly forgotten I was scheduled to be coming home. This was unlike me, as I had been a day counter from day one. That was one of the last times I ever participated in a Fireball game and it was for sure the last time Fred did. He declined to play when I went to visit him at his reservation in New York. Though he didn’t think I noticed, I always pay attention to stuff like that. Just like I could remember everything that happened with the Japanese girl and was getting ready to tell it all and stop these looks around town.

“Tommy Jack, they’re gonna be here soon. Are you dressed? I left a shirt and tie out for you, on the bed,” Liza Jean said the morning the TV crew was scheduled to arrive, coming from her bathroom, where she had checked her makeup for the thirtieth time since she put it on an hour or so before. That bathroom’s off our bedroom, but I was banished to use the one down the hall, years ago, because of splash concerns and poor aim. But in the hall bathroom, I can leave out my floss and sunblock and whatever magazines I want, and if there’s a little splash now and then, I don’t care. It cleans up.

“A tie? What the hell for?” I asked, tying it anyway, knowing this was another argument I would lose if I chose to engage it.

“Well, why are you doing this in the first place? I mean, Tommy Jack, if you want people to just go on believing something happened to you out there in Minnesota, then you might as well just call up those reporters and cancel this altogether, and we can get going to Cascabel now.”

“And you’re thinking this here tie is going to change minds in ways that my speaking the truth doesn’t?”

“Well, is it going to kill you to wear a tie?”

“I’ve got it on.” She came back through, straightened it, kissed me on the cheek, then licked a paper towel and wiped her kiss from me. She ran through the living room, fluffing pillows, moving figurines an inch or two to the left or right, or forward or backward. I had no idea what she was doing, while I stuffed into jeans and tied up a nice pair of brown Rockports with both of the laces matching. She sat on the sofa, going through five or six positions, locking her knees, tucking her legs under, crossing them, leaning one arm on the sofa pillows, one over the cushion, watching her own reflection on the big-screen TV, imagining what she would look like when they finally broadcast this here interview. She was going to break a sweat before they even set up if she didn’t watch out, and it was likely to be hot enough under those lights without doing somersaults on the sofa.

She has been arranging and rearranging the furniture, even the pictures on the wall, ever since that TV news show called me up about a month ago to see if they could interview me about that Japanese girl. I had to tell Liza Jean to relax when she started in about getting new curtains, just for the show. She could act like it was the Home and Garden channel coming to visit us all she wanted, but that was not about to change the fact that this concerned Detroit Lakes and nothing else. I wasn’t for sure why they thought it was interesting enough, but TV makes things way more real for some people than a newspaper clipping, so I understood a way to stop the clucking hens of Big Antler. And yes, secretly, I hoped the boy would be watching, and yes, even more secretly, I wished Shirley Mounter would, as well.

“They’re here, Tommy Jack, are you ready?” Liza Jean said, looking out a side window as this van with a big satellite dish on top of it came down the road. One nice thing about living here—there are no ways for a sneak approach, not like those jungles where you might meet a bullet around the next set of bushes. West Texas is about as flat and wide open as you can get, like God just decided to iron this big patch in the middle of the country. They were still two roads over, riding the grid to the house, but they kicked up a rooster tail of dust that was visible for miles. They wanted to come a day early for preliminary work, which I nearly knew meant that they were up to something, but I agreed anyway. I had come this far, I might as well go the whole of it and see what we would see. “Do you think they’re gonna want some sweet tea?”

“I don’t think it matters much to them,” I said. “They’ve probably got their own, but it might be nice to offer.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so before?” she said, heading into the kitchen with one of those Tommy-Jack-you-are-using-up-my-patience sighs she gave me more and more often as the years got on.

“Well, then, don’t. I don’t give a shit,” I said. And I really didn’t. I thought she wanted to make the sweet tea and was looking for some kind of agreement. Damn, I never get this right.

They knocked on the front door a few minutes later, though I thought it was clear from all the potted plants out front, crowding the stoop, that we generally only used the back door. Maybe that was only clear to those who knew us. They shook hands all around and the reporter took some tea while the technical people set up equipment and started testing places, asking if it was okay to use outlets or if we needed them to use their generator, asking where outlets were when I said it was fine to use them—that kind of stuff. The enormous lights heated the house up fast when they tested them for a few minutes before we started.

Fred Howkowski always said the worst part of being before the cameras was sweating under the lights, knowing your makeup was washing off and they would be coming around to touch you up again, just before filming. He said the makeup was thick and heavy, like the air during a Vietnam monsoon season. When it wasn’t raining but still about a hundred degrees, the sultry air was like a woolen blanket around you. Some guys wore as little as was safe, it was so nasty. Flak jacket, fatigues cut to shorts, boots. Being from here, I could wear a full set of standard issue and be okay, but the heat always troubled Fred.

I wondered if these interviewers were going to make us up, or if that was just for the stars and not for someone you are trying to get dirt on. They could try all they wanted. I’ve got nothing to hide. That girl didn’t want to get saved. It’s just that way with some people. Fred tried saving our squad one time with Fireball, toward the end, but they turned it around on him. I can still see the look on his face when he realized what they’d done that last time. They’d taken his medicine game and turned it into something else.

We pulled bunker guard duty on Firebase Tomahawk, so it was just us around. This could be the most boring part. Toward cycle’s end, some guys would get antsy, looking for any kind of distraction they could find. You went crazy sometimes looking into the thick brush, seeing nothing, but trying just the same. You could see movement where there wasn’t any, or watch plants change into men in the right wind. By the few seconds it took you to get your M-16 up, the potential sniper had become an elephant’s ear plant again. You could not watch passionately for that long and not start inventing something to see.

“Howkowski,” Reggie Hughes said, leaning against some sandbags and lighting a cigarette, “you must feel pretty at home, here on Tomahawk, huh? I mean, being an Indian and all, right? What kind of Indian name is Howkowski, anyway?” Hughes knew the answer but some guys liked to break up the boredom with hassling other guys, forcing them to be the entertainment. Donut Dollies, USO, and EM clubs being so scarce out this far, we had to make our own entertainment. That day was Fred’s day to provide it.

“It ain’t,” he said. “My dad’s white. Doesn’t matter, though, nobody from home has those ridiculous names you hear in the movies. Mounter, Page, Waterson, Boans, Natcha, Gunderson, Tunny, Martin, those are the kinds of names we have.”

“Don’t sound very Indian. I bet you’re making that whole Indian stuff up,” Hughes continued. More guys gradually drifted over, hoping for a fight. It was a slow day. “Show me one thing that’s Indian.”

“Go get that propellant over there and let’s see who’s gonna donate some rags,” Fred said, sitting up.

“Here, use these,” someone said, tossing Fred a bunch of old sandbags that had seen better days. They were supposed to go back for repair the next time I radioed Romeo Sierra, but these bags would not be making resupply. Fred knotted and tied a few in a bundle and then tossed it and other bags to someone else, who had to add to it.

“What are we doing?” Hughes asked as he added to the wad.

“You’ve got eyes. Use them. Join in or step aside,” Fred said, taking Hughes’s wind out. We were being introduced to the game called Fireball that Fred tried to save us with. It was funny to see him get more involved in the squad. Usually, sharing was limited to one or two buddies, and in our case, it was the two of us.

We had an exchange, kept each other alive. There are all kinds of ways of doing that. Splitting C rations, sharing anything that might come from home, one keeping an eye out while the other slept, all through the night, knowing that sometimes guys pulling night patrol duty got a little lazy on the job. Fred and me, while we did all those things, we also had something else. Neither could take charity but we knew exchange really well.

At the rear, you got your fatigues washed and cleaned, nice and neat, they were yours, and my shirt had McMorsey embroidered onto a patch sewn on the right breast pocket, but in the jungle, on patrol, you just took whatever was dropped from the chopper. When we’d get the call, we’d run to the closest spot that resembled a clearing, given the day’s firing patterns. They would fly in, dump for our squad, and in the twenty minutes after they resupplied the other squads, they swung back to pick up whatever we sent.

The drops were clean clothes, ammunition, C rations, big rubber jugs of fresh water that we had to chase down the hillsides so they wouldn’t bounce beyond our reach, and firearms replacements if we had asked for some. In the time before the chopper got back, we’d strip down and stuff every stitch of dirty clothes into those bags we’d just pulled the clean ones from. I pitied whoever was washing those things. Sometimes we’d been wearing a set for two weeks straight. Then we’d grab whatever clothes might fit us okay and put them on. You don’t want to be standing naked on a hilltop all pink-skinned and sweating, glistening in the sun, begging a sniper to pick you off. Some weeks your clothes fit better than others.

We’d send back misfiring machine guns, anything that weighed us down, and if we’d caught the good company clerk, we’d be sending money back too. In that drop we’d just gotten, there would have been a case of cold Coca-Colas that he’d fronted us if we promised him the money. You might think he would have been stiffed a lot, but he never was. He let you know, he’d do it for any squad if he got the call when you made it. If you ever shorted him, though, your squad was never getting even one bottle dropped from that point on, and he’d let you know why. Everyone always paid up. There is nothing like a chilled Coca-Cola in a 110-degree jungle.

We would hold those icy bottles to our cheeks for a few seconds, snap those caps off, and guzzle them down as fast as they’d pour from the neck. A warm Coca-Cola is nobody’s friend. Cold this way, it was a brief taste of home. For that moment it slid down your throat, you might have been sitting at the picnic tables under a drive-in restaurant’s neon, sharing a frosted glass with your girl, listening to the crickets ticking off the hours until you had to take her home. That company clerk never got stiffed, as far as I know, the whole time I was in country.

As sacred as a Coca-Cola out there was, it compared not at all to mail from home. Everything else was flat-out ignored when it came to mail. It didn’t matter how hungry we were, there wasn’t a man among us who opened C rations before he opened a letter with the red, white, and blue striping along the envelope edges. And if there was some news from home, your best friend heard it before anyone else. You might eventually show pictures and whatnot and maybe even read selected passages to everyone, if you were feeling generous, but you shared the whole thing with your best friend first. And that was how Fred Howkowski came to find out that Liza Jean, the woman who all these years later sat beside me before the cameras, left me for a while, ditched me for that flat-footed nitwit in Big Antler.

“‘Best to you, Liza Jean.’ Best to you, how do you like that? Best to you,” I said, and folded up the letter.

“Coke?” Fred said, still holding the bottle out to me. I shook my head. Fred got some fry bread in the mail one day and this stuff was hard as a rock by the time it got over across the globe. I could hardly see its appeal until I tried Shirley Mounter’s, after we’d gotten home. I was swallowing something harder than stale fry bread and no amount of Coca-Cola was going to wash its jagged edges down any smoother.

“Still got my own,” I said. “Was too eager to see what Liza Jean had written.” I had skipped the Coca-Cola for a few minutes to open the letter, but I had wished that envelope had somehow gotten lost across the thousands of miles it had traveled to find its way to me there in the bush.

“Mr. McMorsey, do you want your wife to be here with you for the interview?” the reporter asked, while a technician clipped a small microphone to me and ran back to some portable machinery it was plugged into.

“Well, yeah, I imagine so,” I said. I should have known at that point they weren’t planning to stick to just the whole Fargo thing. Something in the way he said it suggested he was trying to let me know that was maybe not such a good idea, but Liza Jean had gone to the beauty shop the day before and had slept with her head all wrapped that night, so she would look good on TV. All of her friends would be watching, so I couldn’t let her down, couldn’t tell her to forget it after all that preparation. Hell, she even picked out my shirt and tie so they would be some kind of match with her outfit. I couldn’t see it personally, but I trusted she could. “Right here, you can fit us both in if we sit here on the sofa, right?”

“Mrs. McMorsey?”

“Just call me Liza, everyone does.”

“Okay, Liza, would you like a microphone, too?” That technician looked up and started running another line toward us, but Liza Jean held her hand up in front of her and waved it in the air.

“No, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what I could add.”

“Well, why don’t we put one on you, just in case,” the reporter said. The technician went back and forth across the room, carrying that little line around with him, trying to figure out whose lead to follow. He eventually clipped it to her collar as the reporter assured her it was a standard procedure for anyone on camera.

They tested lighting arrangements and Liza Jean held her hand onto mine the whole time. It was the first time, I think, since before I had left for basic, that she held on that tight. When I came home for those few days, between basic and advanced, she was different already. Since I had been assigned to Fort Ord, it pretty much guaranteed I was going over. Almost nobody made it out of Ord and got a stateside assignment.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I got that letter in the mail drop while we were out on patrol. When I read that line, “I know I should have told you this in person, when you were home,” I didn’t have to bother reading the rest, but I did, anyway. I even read it out loud to Fred and he just nodded and didn’t say too much.

“Too bad you couldn’t teach seventh-grade math,” he said finally, as we set up the ponchos for sleeping that night.

“Ain’t that the truth,” I said. Though we hadn’t talked at all on the way over, too scared, I guess, Fred had been on the same flight as me, shipping out. Funny, we had seen each other from the first, having gone through basic together at Fort Ord and then in the limo to Oakland. He was one of the idiots I went in with, paying a limousine to take us into Oakland. All those weeks later on the transport, we still had not really talked again, but his face was familiar. The engines were all running and the doors had already been sealed for our flight to Asia when they let a couple of guys on. They were civilian workers, by their look, their suits. One asked if any of us had a master’s degree and could teach seventh-grade geometry.

I was one semester away from finishing my master’s, but I didn’t know shit about math, had not really passed it myself. I took Math in Modern Living in college, where I learned, for fifteen weeks, how to balance a checkbook and manage a monthly budget.

“I taught a year of high school just before I was drafted,” I said, hopeful.

“I’m pretty good in math,” some guy a few seats away from me jumped in.

“Master’s?”

“Yes sir, in sociology.”

“Step off the plane with us, please,” the officials said.

“I’ve already taught in a high school,” I repeated, louder. They hesitated for a second and one asked, abruptly, what subject. “History,” I said.