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CHAPTER TWO:

Signal Fade

“Based on a True Story . . . or Not”

(Associated Newspaper Syndicate Entertainment column, May 24, 2002, byline—William Donaldson, Syndicate TV Critic)

How many times have you heard that phrase? More than you can count, most likely. From claims of Bigfoot sightings to unauthorized and thinly veiled celebrity biographies, “based on a true story” has become a catchall for a wide array of the outlandish in contemporary culture. How much would you be willing to bet on the validity of that statement, for any document you have seen invoking it? Would you be willing to wager your life away? One young woman, Nuriko Furuta, did just that. The complexity of her actions, and the actions of those who encountered her, finally gets a network treatment this evening, not one of the big three, but a network just the same.

TZON, or the “T Zone” as the network has branded itself, has made its reputation on classic and obscure reruns combined with a parade of contemporary tabloid journalism and the boom of reality TV’s popularity. In a classic case of the right time and the right place, the network jumped from a small independent station in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex to a nationwide network with affiliates around the country in less than fifteen years, with this ratings-winning formula.

One of T Zone’s signature shows, Prime Hours, uses the structure of one part taped interview, one part reenactment, and one part live interview. Prime Hours has been accused of soliciting the desperate for their subjects. The live interview is always stacked against the interviewee, but Prime Hours representatives consistently assert that all interviewees have signed releases before going on the air. While it’s not quite the chair-throwing spectacles of other tabloid shows, a guest spot on Prime Hours is almost never a positive turn in the lives of those appearing in the hot seat. Usually, they agree for reasons of their own, believing their voices need to be heard, no matter the personal cost.

Tonight’s television highlight is a belated postscript to one of last year’s strangest news stories. In a year that will be remembered for the worst terrorist attacks on American soil, and the subsequent deluge of media coverage, the quiet tragedy of Ms. Furuta’s passing generally got lost in the shuffle. While her name may not ring any bells for you, if you were watching news coverage late last November (and really, who in this country wasn’t?), you probably remember the unusual circumstances of her death.

Ms. Furuta was the thirty-three-year-old Japanese woman who apparently took her life savings and set out alone from Nagasaki to Minneapolis and then into North Dakota, in search of the million-dollar ransom featured in the cult crime-drama/farce Fargo, then died of exposure, allegedly watching the Leonid meteor showers, mere yards from a group of cottages, outside Detroit Lakes, Minnesota.

When she was first discovered the day before, Ms. Furuta was wandering around a landfill behind a truck stop outside Bismarck, carrying a crudely drawn map. Authorities were unable to find anyone who could speak Japanese, and given the young woman’s minimal grasp of the English language, they were also unable to convince her that the ransom did not exist. News coverage at the time claimed she was released because she had not been engaged in any illegal activities, and already overworked authorities chose not to hold her because “fuzzy thinking is not a crime in this country.” She then took a bus to Fargo and hired a taxi to take her on an hour-long ride out to Detroit Lakes, where she died, surrounded by cottages.

Media sources generally would have tended to eat this story up, for all of its inherently ironic nature, but last November, we were not very receptive to irony. Though a number of unsettling questions presented themselves at the time the story broke, this strange set of events received little airtime and then quietly disappeared, much like the young woman herself.

The live segment of tonight’s episode of Prime Hours (Channel 33, 10:00 EST) is dedicated exclusively to these events, where we get the first in-depth interview with Tommy Jack McMorsey. You have not likely ever heard his name before, either, even if you had paid attention to the story as it unfolded. Mr. McMorsey is the truck driver from Lubbock, Texas, who initially reported the woman to authorities in North Dakota and who was also, later, the last person to see the young woman alive.

Among the segments, Prime Hours will recap the original November news coverage of Ms. Furuta’s death, and the brief period in which Mr. McMorsey was considered a potential suspect in the case, before authorities ruled the young woman’s passing a “death by misadventure.” Following that, Peter Haskell interviews Mr. McMorsey, who makes the claim that the news reports from the time were inaccurate. Authorities who interacted with Ms. Furuta are also interviewed and asked to address the truck driver’s claims. The last segment includes further responses, from the news media sources local to the story, whose assertions Mr. McMorsey is refuting.

Is this story a stinging indictment of the way in which our news sources handle the smaller tragedies of our world, further dehumanizing us, or is it merely a continuation of exploitation disguised as probing news? Either way, it should make for interesting and engaging television. Be sure to tune in.

Annie Boans

Before Commencement, my regalia still cloaked in a garment bag for another year, I stopped by my office mailbox where a new interoffice mailer held the morning paper’s back section. An article was circled in red marker, a note attached to the upper corner with a paper clip. The rigid, formal, and stiff penmanship was my former mother-in-law’s. It was a note of very few words, each one counting, as if letters were being rationed and Martha Boans were down to her last few.

My world changed in that moment, within her oddly constipated script, as if I had donned glasses for the first time, or had been suddenly fitted for a hearing aid after years of reading lips and deciphering the intended meaning of dull consonants and vowels. The vague whispers I had heard perpetually throughout the reservation suddenly came into sharp, piercing distilled sounds, like swords drawn. For years, I had been so close to knowing the information held on this scrap of paper, and even as close as I’d come, my mother never flinched, answering my questions with the nonchalance of telling someone what was for dinner. I should have followed my usual rule.

Every year, I purposefully avoid my campus mailbox on this day. I don’t want to be tempted to bring work with me to Commencement, sneaking glances at letters, calls for proposals, invitations, as the kids walk across the stage. Instead, I daydream my way through Commencement. You can only hear so many “It’s a Big World Out There, but if You Are Determined, You Can Make a Difference” speeches and still be moved by them. I turn the volume down on the Potential Futures of Our Graduates speech, drowning it with future lectures, grocery shopping lists, favorite songs, harvested from memory.

I always try to appear attentive and smile at the graduates I had known. Any time I think of using a sick day for Commencement, I remember walking across the stage, seeing professors who had made a difference in my life. I have little faith that I’ve changed students’ lives, but this was the only chance for some. Entering, they had been one step away from fast-food franchise assistant manager and they still might take my next Value Meal order.

My own time in college was spent nearly leaving those halls for good, almost every day. The only thing keeping me there for the first year was my mother’s potential daily glower if I had stopped going. That I studied art merely attenuated her stares. She still scantly believes I talk about art every day and receive a two-week paycheck she wouldn’t have seen over the course of two to three months in any given year. My students’ faces share the same will to stare down doubting parents, and that kept me at Commencement while colleagues had already switched over to gin and sailboats and “good books.”

Though my grades were in a week before, I’ve continued inhabiting my office even beyond finals week. Some nights my apartment seemed emptier than others. Most evenings, I enjoyed coming home to clean silence. Up to a year ago, before my husband and I separated, every night would have been my ex-mother-in-law’s combination of Jeopardy and smoky haze. During finals week, in past years, Doug would make my favorite dishes, have a bath waiting, and a good film from the little rental place a half-hour drive away. It was the only place you could get decent films without computer-generated explosions or surgically altered couples falling predictably in love, awash in a Top 40 sound track.

This year, finals week was pizza or Chinese delivery “for one” and whatever was on cable. Once Commencement is over, I want to be anywhere with people, though I frankly have no idea where. My old socializing was with Doug and our families. My colleagues had gradually stopped inviting us to their parties a few years ago. As much as I’d wanted my own space, lately the apartment offered only sterile discomfort. Maybe T.J. Howkowski, sitting next to me on the stage, would want to do something, I had thought through the ceremony.

I had helped him get his foot in the door, almost eight years ago when he’d come home to the reservation for good, and now we were at the only junior college in all of New York with two faculty members who could legitimately check the “American Indian” box on the human resources form, an improbable situation at best and thus frequently problematic. Though my scholarship research specialized in Indians in American film, every time I admired beadwork for its beauty and craft, the artists thought I was working on a way to turn it into a lecture and make millions talking to fascinated white audiences about their work. The life this reservation has invented for me is far more glamorous than the one I have in reality.

They never see lectures where the honorarium doesn’t cover costs or see conference presentations where the panel is relieved that there are more people in the audience than there are on the stage. They also don’t see that I’m working at a very small college where there are no courses specializing in media studies or popular culture or even American studies. I am the art historian, period. I can do the research I want, but in the classroom, I had better represent the Renaissance through postmodernism, or it is poor-evaluation time for me. The luxury of a large University, where I could really devote my time to the study of Fred Howkowski and his impact on the roles of Indians in film, is really more a dream than anything else, a way to not make myself crazy repeating over and over again the significance of the first Italian perspective painters or Pablo Picasso’s break with form, or Cindy Sherman’s own ironic take on Hollywood.

T.J. at least got some response as the chief in Cuckoo’s Nest around the country in the summers, if not from his students. Half the time I’m not sure the audience listens as I lecture through a slide show, the only ways of documenting our culture that I have. He’s also got the advantage of being a poster boy for Indian men in America—slick braids, hawk nose, thick sensuous lips, and the stoic look that just won’t quit. I’m not sure he would get the same stares with a flattop or even a regular haircut but those braids are unstoppable.

Those same looks drive the Indian men around here as crazy as they do the women. That he is part white and raised by a white couple seventeen hundred miles away doesn’t stop their wives and girlfriends commenting anytime they see him. Even Doug, when we lived together, carried on a running monologue about everything wrong with T.J. whenever someone mentioned him. When T.J. had a small speaking part last year on Justice Scales, Doug was insufferable. He’d even brought home one of the countdown calendars Mason Rollins had printed, with T.J.’s face, but not to mark the days until the broadcast. Doug’s El Marko had given my colleague a pirate’s eye patch, missing teeth, warts, the works.

I wonder if Doug still has it. He probably took it down last spring when I moved back to the city—the only home I had ever known. I’m convinced Doug had put it up, trying to brew tension, as if his mother’s seven-year presence with us hadn’t been enough. The whole time I’d lived on the reservation, people whispered behind my back, though about what, I never knew exactly. I thought maybe it would stop when I left, but they blamed the breakup on me, the city-Indian woman with the degrees, and not on the hardworking smoke-shop-clerking rez-born and -bred husband, and certainly not on the chain-smoking, soap opera-game show watching, invasive and pervasive mother-in-law who had lived with us since we moved to that trailer.

It hadn’t been my fault her house burned down, and after seven years, I couldn’t take one more day of that life, not knowing how much longer it would go on. I thought I’d be rid of her for the most part after I moved out. I felt safe living back in the city while she remained in my old trailer on the reservation. It was strange at first not to wake up to Doug snoring, and I had been surprised to discover that in the time I was on the reservation, I had acclimated to its otherwise quiet nights. I guess I missed the place.

“Did you know about this?” I whispered to T.J., as the students began their march across the stage. I revealed the article from the sleeve of my regalia, passing him the newspaper. He’d glanced, nodded, and handed it back to me. “It’s not every day your stepfather gets on national TV. How come you never mentioned it?”

“Adoptive father. I don’t know, didn’t think it would be all that interesting to you. You know how that show is. I don’t know what he’s thinking. And besides, it’s not like he’s going to be talking about your favorite subject.” Some days T.J. was willing to talk for hours about his real father’s brief time home and then in Hollywood before he committed suicide, and some days he wasn’t. Fred Howkowski’s career was the major thematic core of my research, but I had to deal with my source material on its own terms, and that meant waiting a lot of the time for people to feel right about their relationships to him. I like to think that the slight reservation animosity to T.J. is what brought me to befriend him. When he showed back up here, he was so desperately looking for a community, and most people would have little to do with him. So, I did what I could, became his friend, helped him get a job, but he’s also bright enough to know that part of my interest is his connection to Fred. I wish I could say it was different, but we both know the truth of that reality, and we just don’t explore the topic unless he’s had enough prodding. Then he reminds me in no uncertain terms.

“It’s only about that Japanese woman. Didn’t you read the article?”

“Yeah, what happened with all that, anyway? Did he ever say?” A colleague sitting in front of us turned and gave us the shut-up frown, so we waited for the students to move their tassels and get on with their lives. As we recessed from the auditorium, T.J. vanished, but then reappeared in my door a little while later.

“ You all set?” he said. We walked to the lot in silence, the warm spring breeze rolling across the nearly empty lot. As we reached my Blazer, he said, “I’m thinking about going down there.”

“Really? When?”

“I don’t know, soon. It’s been a while. Why?”

“I’d like to go with you.” I could not believe those words had come out of my mouth. I panicked and then he offered the perfect recovery.

“ Yeah, he might have a lot of useful information for you, and it would be nice to have some company,” he said, staring at me from the passenger’s seat. “When do you think you can go?”

“As of ten minutes ago, I am free for three months. Why don’t we leave tonight?” I laughed and started the Blazer.

“Are you serious?” I wasn’t sure myself if I were really committing to this idea. Maybe I was serious. So much had changed since this morning and it was true—I was free for three months. I had three lonely months of that apartment staring me down.

“Well, I should let my family know, so they don’t worry,” I said, finally.

“Okay, I don’t have anything holding me here, and I’ve been meaning to make this trip for a long time. If we can get ready by five, we could make Cleveland before the TV show comes on.”

“It means you have to come to my mom’s with me, so I can let her know I’ll be gone for a while, and I want to stop and get gas at Royal’s shop, too.”

“Your momma’s all right.”

When we arrived, my mother’s eyes passed over us, trying to decide if I were really going to ask her the things I intended with T.J. in the room. This was the way she dealt with confrontation, a posh salesperson—politely and discreetly showing you the price of your desire. You might not have the necessary down payment, and she waited, wondering if you could hear the question being asked. She was wrong this time. I’d come with enough to pay in full and to answer forcefully and clearly.

“Your TV working, Ma?” I asked.

“About as good as it ever does,” she said. “Depends on the wind, season, trees, whatever.” That was also part of her translation key. She could complain without ever technically doing so.

“T.J., why don’t you climb up on her roof, see if the antenna is secure. Maybe it’s just some loose connections or wires exposed on the line in,” I said. He clearly hadn’t any idea how he might implement such changes. So much for the improv skills of this professional actor. How had he ever managed to get even off-Broadway roles? “Here, I’ll show you where the ladder and the duct tape are.” I walked him out to the shed behind my brother Royal’s trailer. “There’s plenty of things that might need addressing on that roof.”

“Uh, okay. Annie?” he said, puzzled.

“I’ll call you when we need to get going,” I said.

“Ma, let’s go in your room,” I said inside, my eyes adjusting to the shadowy midday light.

“No one else is here,” she said. “He can’t hear.” She kept the blinds drawn and the curtains half-drawn, as she always had when we lived in the city. There, it had been for privacy. If you left any blind open in our old place, you were bound to catch some old pervert sitting at his window in the next building over, waiting to catch a glimpse of anything we might be up to. It didn’t matter if it were washing dishes or vacuuming. You could see the fantasies they were cooking up, even as they watched you sweat across the alley. Back here on the rez, my mother no longer needed the privacy. Her nearest neighbors would need to have Superman’s eyes or a really decent set of binoculars to catch her at her quilt-making but she was taking no chances or merely had grown accustomed to her darker life. T.J.’s shadow floated by us, just beyond the living room window.

“Come on,” I said, sitting in the plush chair near her bed. She turned on the television, sat on the bed, and skipped though the few channels her antenna received.

“See, it works fine. Those are all the channels you get without cable or one of those dishes like they have the next trailer over. How much does the dish cost?” On the screen, images phased in and out like the badly spliced educational films they showed in high school, the sixteen-millimeter projector whirring and clacking from the back of the room, all but obscuring anything the people on the screen said.

“Ma, today, Martha left this morning’s paper in my mailbox at work,” I said. My mother would not make eye contact with me, staring instead at the people arguing on her television, ghosts of them crossing one another in T.J.’s adjustments.

“ Well, that was nice of her, wasn’t it? She probably had to hire one of her kids to drive her all the way out to the college, to get you that newspaper. What are you complaining about?” she said, finally, pretending she had no idea what I was talking about, or perhaps just hoping that I had no idea what was really in the morning paper. Surely she must have known what would cause her best friend and my ex-mother-in-law to make that special trip, but my mother would never resent Martha for anything, always looking the other way. What kept those two together was the meanness they inflicted on one another over sixty years, keeping each other going, pushing every day forward with new bitterness.

“She left a note with the paper, too. That was how I knew it was from her. I recognized her handwriting. Have you seen it?”

“The paper? Early this morning, probably before you were even up,” she said. I tossed the entertainment section across the room to her. It fell about a foot short. She didn’t bother to pick it up.

“The note was clipped to an article about that show Prime Hours tonight. Did you see it?”

“I don’t watch that show, or that channel even,” she said, waving her hand as if she were being bothered by a fly. “I never went in for the The Twilight Zone or the The Outer Limits or In Search of . . . like you kids did. And that show? What they do to people is just pitiful. If I want to see people behaving badly, I’ll just walk down to Moon Road. I don’t need to see it on my TV.”

“You wanna know what the note said?” I took it out of my purse and read it aloud in my best Martha Boans snippy fashion: “‘You might want to watch this show tonight, if you want to see your real father.’” I flashed the note in front of my mother so she could also see that, indeed, it was Martha’s handwriting, and then folded it back into my purse. We both knew that the reservation was consistently very closed-mouth about suspicious parentage, but only to the child in question. Otherwise, everyone was gossipy as hell with each other. I’ve known of other people who reached adulthood confident in their parents’ marriage, only to discover at the age of thirty or so that they are not exactly who they thought they were. I just never suspected I might be one of those people, but I don’t imagine any of those who’d been zapped before me did, either.

“You know, I had always heard people talking, making vague suggestions just within earshot, at Community Fair, the Feast, Culture Night, National Picnic, all those places, but you know how people gossip, and they never offered anything other than innuendo.” People on the reservation have also talked nonsense and believed it as truth forever—aspects of the culture that outside scholars tag as cute or charming or quaint. Those scholars have never had to convince an adult that a Tin Man, like that character in The Wizard of Oz, did not live below the hill, lurking around the picnic grove at night. When I became the subject of gossip, myself, I should have been thankful for the Tin Man, but he must have moved on, replaced by the smart girl who could not add two and two.

“What’s that, innuendo?” she asked. She was a whiz at cross-words, keeping a dictionary by her bed, but she never remembered the words for longer than it took to box them in to Five Down, or Four Across.

“Vague words, with double meanings, suggesting something without really saying it. So I went to see Royal at the pumps, and I asked him to tell me the truth. I had asked him a long time ago, years ago, in fact, and back then, he said he didn’t know anything, had no idea what I was talking about.” If I had gotten a useful answer, I might not have left out that I had gotten him drunk to do it.

“Oh,” my mother said.

“So when I asked him today, do you know what he said?”

“I don’t know what you asked him.”

“I asked him if Dad thought I had a different father from the rest of the kids. If that was why he left. You know what he said?” The fear in her face, as she grimaced and stared at the TV, told me she had no idea what he said. Maybe he truly didn’t know anything about that hazy period.

“He said, ‘If you need an answer to that question, then you better go ask Ma.’ So, here I am. Am I the reason Dad left for good all those years ago?” There, it was out, the one question I had practiced in front of mirrors, on dark roads, on top of the dike, anytime I was alone, for years. Even the cat I left behind with Doug was tired of hearing that one, usually glancing at me for a second before returning to grooming itself in the sun.

“He was never at home much,” she said. Royal had mentioned that sometimes our father would live in other cities for a year at a time—Detroit, Cleveland, New York—wherever they needed buildings erected. “Even before you. I don’t know why he would leave. We gave him all the freedom he wanted, and the kids adored him. He just wasn’t a happy person, I suppose. I tried dragging him out of other women’s apartments, at first, but then he would just leave, altogether, for longer periods.”

“He used to come back, every now and then, before I was born. But whenever I saw him anywhere, he always looked through me like I was glass. How come?”

“I don’t know. He just did.”

“When he died, I was the only one who went with Royal, none of the others, to go clean up that little apartment he kept down in Buffalo. I found his address book and calendar. You know all the birthdays and anniversaries, and all that, they were all neatly entered, as recent as Joanie’s kids, and one of them hadn’t had a birthday yet. But one date was missing, Ma. My birthday. Any idea why that was?”

“I bet my birthday wasn’t in there, either, was it?” She stopped me dead, there. I hadn’t looked, had randomly flipped through the pages, and judged it to be otherwise complete. “I went to that apartment before you and Royal went. I saw that book first, and I put it back. I knew you would look for your own birthday. You know what? I considered writing it in there. I knew how to forge his handwriting, had to learn to years before, just so I could get some money to feed you kids out of that account he kept. I figured if you wanted to look in that book for answers, though, you deserved to find them.” She frowned at me, there in the dark, her face nearly disappearing in the shadows for a minute, reappearing when T.J. would move something on the roof, then her features softened.

“It’s okay. I knew you wouldn’t look for my birthday,” she repeated, for emphasis. “You weren’t the only one who became invisible to him, and there, you got off lucky. When we were first married, in the winter, I would get up before him, warm his clothes on top of the kerosene heater, and cook him a big breakfast, eggs, bacon, toast, coffee, everything. I’d call him to get up when the table was set and the clothes were warm, and he would come down, already dressed in a different set of clothes, tell me he didn’t want any of that Oo(t)-gweh-rheh, and go out the door, sometimes until after work, sometimes until a week or more had gone by. I didn’t cook breakfast for him long.”

“Why was he that way?”

“I don’t know, I told you. He just was. His ma and dad spoiled him, told him he was better than me, and I guess he believed it, but I don’t know why he wanted to get married in the first place, if he thought that.”

“But he always came back in those days.”

“Yes, eventually. I would wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, startled, because he had climbed in and was snoring next to me, and sometimes I just found him in the morning, drinking coffee in front of the stove, like he had just slipped from our bed before I had stirred, to surprise me with a fresh pot.”

“So why did he stop coming back after I was born? Why did he disown me?” We were getting to it, then, the harder questions, the real ones. My siblings always said our dad was never around, but more and more, I was getting the feeling that was only partially true. I had continued to hope that if I had primed my mother, used Socratic teaching method, she would begin freely discussing this forbidden topic, but she was like my students, fighting me all the way with silence and misdirection. I was prepared, though, had trained a very long time, as I had for my orals to complete my dissertation.

“He just did,” she said again.

“Did he think I was someone else’s kid?”

“He was just an unhappy man, I told you. He always thought funny things about people.”

“Did he have reason to believe I might not be his?” Would she confirm here that he really did treat me differently than he did the rest of the kids? I held my breath for a moment, waiting it out, this time, asking it without asking it, that tightrope.

“He was coming around less and less in those days. There was a man, a very nice man, and almost everyone out here liked him,” she said.

“Am I this man’s child?” I asked, finally.

“He was a very nice man,” she repeated, “but also very free. I thought by that time the old man wasn’t coming back, and I figured, since he had been around so much with who knows who all, my keeping company with this man wouldn’t do anyone any harm. The man lived in Texas, anyway, and it wasn’t like he would be back much. He used to joke, said if we ever had kids . . .” She stopped, changed direction, slightly. “We both had red hair, but his was lighter than mine.”

“Am I?” I repeated. It was surprisingly hard to repeat the entire question.

“I don’t know. It’s possible. Dad’s shit-ass sister talked him into forcing me to get a blood test when it was clear I was pregnant. She was always convinced I was trying to get at his money. Hah! What money? I had this man’s dog tags, he had given them to me one of the last times I had seen him, but he and Dad had the same blood type. The same you have. The only ones who knew were the three of us, and Martha. She was the one who took me. Back then, the agencies didn’t chase for support like they do now. I think that’s why your friend T.J.’s mother eventually just handed him over to someone else. The bother for her wasn’t worth it.”

“Am I really yours?” I had to ask. If everything I had ever believed was now up in the air, why not that, too? It seemed like everything was possible, even that Tin Man, lurking just out of sight all these years, hiding in the picnic grove restrooms during rainstorms to avoid rust.

“Of course you’re really mine. When Dad said he wasn’t going to claim you, the last thing I said to him when he went out the door that final time, was, ‘Okay, she’ll always be my baby.’ And the rest of the kids, they didn’t treat you any different, you were everybody’s baby. Especially Royal, he took you everywhere with him.”

“I remember,” I said, which was why I had believed if anyone were going to tell me the truth, it would have been him. “Didn’t you think I was ever going to ask?”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t. I was hoping it wouldn’t matter to you, hoping we had loved you enough that it wouldn’t matter.”

“It isn’t a matter of love, Ma.”

“It’s always a matter of love. I thought you would have at least learned that by now.”

“What’s the man’s name?”

“Do I have to tell you?”

“Don’t you think I deserve to know? Is that him in this morning’s paper? Is he the man you used to talk about, sometimes, when we were all little kids?”

“Yes, that’s him. He’s a very nice man. Could make me laugh so hard, was so free, willing to be goofy, but the real man, the one inside the goofy one, well, he was shy, sweet, and had the most beautiful ears. I still don’t know for certain which one is your father, could be either. You’re as dark as the rest of us and that man was very fair-skinned, but you do have such pretty ears, too.” She reached over to touch my ear. I moved away, just an inch. It was enough, and she lowered her hand. “It doesn’t surprise me to know he was trying to save that woman from Japan. That’s how he was.”

“He didn’t seem to help you too much,” I said.

“He doesn’t know. When the tests came back with no clear answer, Dad and your aunt never pushed it. I suppose they could nowadays, but Dad’s dead, and your aunt, thank goodness, is still busy chasing money somewhere else.”

“So he has no idea I even exist? He didn’t bother to find out?”

“He wondered. The last time I saw him. He asked if there was anything in my life he should know about. I told him no. He had married that woman by then, so there was no sense in stirring up things that couldn’t be. He wasn’t going to leave and come up here, and I wasn’t going to leave and go down there, so we decided to love each other one last night, and leave it at that.”

“When was that?”

“The last time we were together. Fred Howkowski’s funeral. When he brought the boy back, your friend out there on the roof. We had that one night, while you and the rest of the kids and that little boy slept in the back bedroom. We took all you kids to the drive-in that night, hoping to tire you out so we could have a few hours together, some awful Bigfoot movie, as I recall. You wouldn’t remember. You were just a baby, then. After we put you all to bed, we tried to get a lifetime’s worth of loving into one night and hoped we could make it last.”

“But you can’t just decide to stop loving someone, suddenly one day. It’s a gradual thing, or it doesn’t happen at all.” For me, it had been a gradual thing with Doug. Perhaps something still lingered there, something I could find when I would run into him at the National Picnic, or even at the grocery store, but it wasn’t much and it faded fast as soon as I pictured Martha still smoking and sewing and spreading and smoothing her criticism like a quilt.

“Don’t you think I know that now?”

“Which part?” I asked.

“You decide,” she said.

“So I’m half white. My whole career has been a lie.”

“Our life together, here, there, in the city, wherever—it’s not a lie. You’re my baby, the baby of all of us. You are who you are.”

“I’m going with T.J. I’m going to meet him.” I had made the decision the second T.J. seemed even remotely interested, but I had to come here first, ask that question before I set out on the road. The idea of that other man, that other possibility, had long lived in my mind, growing, becoming more real, but the face was always a blank, like those fake life-size cutouts you can stick your head through and become Santa Claus, Scarlett O’Hara, or a bathing beauty, but as soon as you step out from behind the plywood, you are yourself again, and that body is empty, waiting for the next identity. This man, though, living somewhere in West Texas, trying to save random delusional Japanese women, he was real, made of bones, muscle, hair, teeth, tissue, and deeper—and more importantly—DNA. Blood tests might have been inconclusive back then, but that was no longer the case. I could find a more definitive answer for myself, though it would take more than dog tags to do it.

“Well, you do what you want. Don’t be so sure this place will be the same when you get back. Things change, people eventually fill in those rips that get made in their lives—Dougie, for example. I don’t know what you hope to gain from doing this,” she said, having always had this strange attachment to my husband, perhaps because he treats her better than her own sons do, but who could say with her, what she thinks being treated well and not so well are, where she makes those distinctions?

“Have you filled your rips in?” I turned and walked out of the room. “T.J.? You ready?” I asked out the window, gathering my purse.

“Yeah, just about,” he said, climbing down. “You had a couple frays on the wire, Mrs. Mounter, where it had rubbed up against the aluminum over the years. There are some parts where the roofing’s coming loose too. I covered the bare wires and I taped the whole connector wire in place, so that shouldn’t happen anymore in the future. I hope that’ll work. But that roof, you should get someone to look at it pretty quick. I taped it for now, but that won’t last. Maybe Floyd Page will be willing to do a side job, off the books.” He shrugged his shoulders.

“I’ll be back, eventually, Ma,” I said.

“When?” she asked, never a fan of vague words except when she was the one using them to shroud some information.

“Eventually,” I repeated, and we neared the door. That was when she tried to draw me back in.

“Does he know you’re coming—” was the final thing my mother asked. She’s always been this way. She knows the kind of small phrase to use regardless of the occasion that once it is out of her mouth it grows, and continues on, spreading out from inches to miles across our lives.

“He will, soon enough,” I said. “Besides, I have got to get away from here for a bit,” I said.

“So you said.” My mother picked up her needle and threaded the eye, letting me know our conversation was coming to a close.

“You have no idea.”

“I think I might. Just that some of us can’t pick up and leave whenever we feel like it. We have to deal with what’s in front of us.” She reached for her glasses. She was supposed to wear them all the time but only picked them up for delicate work, maybe preferring the world fuzzier around the edges, as if everyone she eyed had halos or auras. Perhaps she just had no fondness for clarity.

“It’s probably just for a couple weeks, maybe less,” T.J. said. He eyed the newspaper, making us appear guilty of something in which we were definitely not engaged. He always looked this way when we appeared together in front of my mother or anyone else from the reservation for that matter. I think he liked the idea. “I have some things to take care of down there,” he added and for a second I was nearly certain I had been the one to speak.

“I bet,” my mother said. As we headed for the door, my mother went back into her bedroom. “Annie?” she called from her screen door a few seconds later. I sat in the driver’s seat, letting her know I was not changing my mind.

“Come and get this.” I got out and walked up the steps to her porch, where she reached a hand out the screen’s frame, holding a letter. “I always keep copies, anyway. This one came back. You can read it, if you want, but I want you to give it to him.” I didn’t know what it was, at the time, but I had an idea. The RETURN TO SENDER stamp was smudged but clear enough, and the address was a post office box in Big Antler, Texas. I set it in the glove compartment. I didn’t want to read anything that would potentially change my mind. The letter could be safely read once we were on the road, once we had committed to the destination.

T.J. and I left the reservation long before the sun went down. As the reservation disappeared in my rearview mirror, I noticed my ears, to which honestly I have rarely given a second look, except to try on earrings. These ears I had inherited apparently had little functionality. Who did I inherit that selective hearing loss from? I had asked for amplification and clarification at my mother’s place. All the while, I wandered around this community, harboring only a vague suspicion of what others no doubt openly mocked me for. I was waiting for someone to creep the volume up on me, rather than turning the dial myself. Waiting for a clearer signal.