Extra Indians. Eric Gansworth
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