Indian Jones Without His Tail

I keep thinking there must be some significance to the extraordinary coincidence of Ceiling Fan Man having started his YouTube channel on the very same day that my own ceiling fan was destroyed by poltergeist activity, so I watched the latest CFM show even though it’s nearly three hours long and kind of goofy. Much of it was devoted to not-very-convincing examples of the Mandela Effect. One of these was that Curious George supposedly used to have a tail, but now he doesn’t. (He never had a tail. Anyone who had actually read the books a million times as a kid and copied out the illustrations would know that.)

Later the same day, I happened to notice a small Curious George doll in one of my wife’s tchotchke cabinets, wearing a T-shirt with his name on it. Seeing that name made me think of Leo’s “more George than Jones” dream, and I idly wondered if there might be any Jones I could associate with this particular George.

The tail-or-no-tail dispute provided the link I needed.

When one of my brothers was very young, he used to play with a collection of “yarn men” he had made. There were five of these that I can remember: three small white ones named Chopped Celery, Minced Onions, and Red Radish; a big blue one named Big Boy; and a big brown one named Indian Jones (sic). For a long time, Indian Jones had a “tail” formed by some yarn that had separated from one of his legs. Later this was repaired, and he was ever after known as Indian Jones Without His Tail. That became his name, and his enemy Big Boy would say things like “I’m gonna get you, Indian Jones Without His Tail!”

Many years later, as a sort of challenge, I wrote Indian Jones Without His Tail into a William Alizio story. Alizio had an elderly colleague named Jones who was full to the gills of Indian lore and responded to just about any situation by telling some rambling story about Indians. People called him Indian Jones, and he was also called “the yarn man” because of his propensity for spinning the same. Like Tim Powers, I created this entire character to lay the groundwork for one line of dialogue: one of his colleagues saying “Indian Jones without his tale” in a way that clearly means something impossible or incomplete, like a day without sunshine or a home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat. (Aside from this, Indian Jones was also intended to be recognizable as a real person of our acquaintance, an elderly man who loved to hold forth on the history of the Erie Indians and who was known not as the yarn man but as the joke bloke, anti-humor jokes being another passion of his.)

So in this George-and-Jones pair, united by their brown color and uncertain tail status, George is known for his curiosity, while Jones is known for telling stories. This is ironic because in Leo’s dream, Bill hopes I am “more George than Jones,” while the real Bill wants just the opposite: less open-ended curiosity and more telling stories about Indians (or Lamanites anyway).

Note added: I was looking for a photo of yarn men of the type my brother had, so as to give the reader an idea of what they looked like. This is the best I could find:

In searching for that image, I found that many of the results for my prompt (yarn doll) referenced a novel called Esperanza Rising, in which yarn dolls are apparently important to the plot. I thought the name sounded familiar and that I remembered seeing it on one of my wife's bookshelves. I found it shelved very close to Indian Captive, reinforcing the Indian Jones connection.