Extra Indians. Eric Gansworth

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.