The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

  We were sitting in the parlor twiddling our thumbs when the sheriff called late in the afternoon to say Dalva had stopped a few minutes ago at the jail and he had her car keys in his possession. Naomi talked to Dalva and remained admirably calm. I arranged for her to stay with a family to whom I had sold a ranch at a fair price right after World War II, then I called Hackleford to arrange a ride. Naomi was so relieved she permitted herself a glass of wine and a tear or two. She teased, “If you are going to die in October you have less than a week,” and I said, “I’ll make it” and she became terribly upset. She was quarrelsome over having the doctor come out so I said I’d shoot him at the door. “What will we do without you?” she said. “You have Paul who is far wiser. He’ll keep an eye on all of you.” She repeated, as always, some of her confusions about money and I told her that what you do is spend some, or most, then save the rest.

  Just after dawn it looked like it would be a fair day so I called Hackleford and requested his old Stearman biplane so we’d have an unencumbered look at the country. He thought it might be a bit cool but I insisted, a decision that damn near finished me off early in the trip. In fact we were flying low over the Carter ranch north of Springview when, despite being bundled up, I passed out from the cold a few minutes and never really got warm until we were on the ground a half hour in Chadron. The sheriff met our plane and I picked up Dalva’s car and fetched her from the ranch up north of town. She seemed glad to see me and I was fearful enough of the onset of dizziness to ask her to drive. I thought, Jesus Christ, I don’t want to die on the drive home so we headed the two hours up to the cabin at Buffalo Gap so I could rest up. For some reason I thought it would be appropriate that Dalva would meet Rachel and when we arrived I spoke with Rachel in my pidgin Lakota to keep her discreet on the subject of Duane. Dalva took off for a ride on Duane’s buckskin and I told Rachel I was going to die pretty soon and she said, “I know it.” I slept on the couch for five hours or so and then we left off for home. Before we departed and when I awoke I heard Dalva on the phone telling Naomi we should be home by midnight and I said an actual prayer to an unspecific god that I’d make it. My granddaughter had enough problems without me kicking the bucket, a phrase I’d always found amusing. He kicked the bucket. And spilled out, or somesuch.

  We had a fine drive home, and though she protested I had Dalva put the top down. We stopped in Valentine and had a quick dinner with Quigley and talked about bird hunting. He was gracious enough not to express concern but I saw his alarmed look. My flask had run dry and we stopped for whiskey. The radio became beyond the range of a good station and I had Dalva sing to me, and I sang her some World War I songs that seemed to amuse her. “Here’s to the Kaiser, he’s on his last hitch/We’re after his ass the damned son of a bitch.” That sort of thing.

  The twilight was radiant with the landscape suffused briefly in a yellow glow, and we heard hundreds of meadowlarks trilling good night. I awoke at home and Dalva tucked me in with my whiskey which, though I might wake with a hangover, now seemed to be keeping me alive. Before she left Dalva brought in Sonia to keep me company. Somewhere toward morning with a predictable headache I reached out toward this warm body thinking it might be Neena, and Sonia, who didn’t like her sleep disturbed, growled. It’s certainly not all in the mind but most of it is. This is as much as I can say.

  It is five days later and I’ve had a few bad moments with this whole death experience, not exactly having prepared myself until this past year. What did I think would happen, how did I think it would end and where do I go next, if anywhere? Naomi came with the doctor this morning, and Paul is on his way up from Chiapas, down at the bottom of Mexico. I nearly told the doctor that I never actually made love to his wife but then he said my heart was “kaput,” a rather homely expression, so I let it pass. I also have pneumonia and my general dreaminess can be accounted for by the fluid in my lungs. Thank God for big favors. When the doctor leaves in a concealed huff I tease Naomi with the fact that I know she sometimes refers to me as Lord Byron when out of my earshot. She reddens at this. I found this out from Lundquist who heard her and wondered what “Lord Byron” meant and I said he had been a fine gentleman who wanted to be buried with his dog, which sounded reasonable to Lundquist. The ex-governor who had tried to help the Rosenthals stopped by and we bid our adieus, and Rachel has come down from Buffalo Gap.

  Rachel chants for me in Lakota as my mother had done for my father. I am charmed at this continuity though I have difficulty staying awake and my dreams are full of birds. I saw Mexican jungle birds, quetzals, that I hadn’t remembered for a long time, also a sharp-tailed grouse flapping in a coyote’s mouth up near Springview.

  Paul is here and we talk about nothing until I am suddenly overcome and beg his forgiveness again for striking him to the ground. He kisses my forehead. Frieda Lundquist arrives and is kneeling outside my window, praying loudly. Paul helps me to the window and I give her a wave.

  I’ve made it through another night and wake to find Rachel and Paul sitting beside my bed. I sleep again and hear those billions of birds again. Christ, what a grand noise. Dalva comes in and kisses me and Ruth says matter-of-factly, “I’m sorry you’re dying.” I ask my dear Lundquist to put away this journal. I want to sit on a hay bale against the barn as I did so often as a young man when the morning sun against the barn slats would warm your back though your belly would stay cool. Hail and farewell.

  II

  NELSE

  Don’t you hear your mother’s call

  In the north wind’s frightful howl?

  —Anna Akhmatova

  June I, 1986

  I was pretty sure I felt the earth moving beneath my back. The sensation happened several times within an hour or so. The stars were wiggling a bit and intermittently blurred, my vision addled by fever: Virgo with Spica, Leo and Regulus, Boötes less defined except by overwhelming Arcturus.

  Maybe I did and maybe it was an illusion. I can’t say much for the difference which is a fine point we primates are always trying to transcend. It isn’t a case study and neither am I. I was checking a kingfisher site on the remote banks of the Niobrara (seasonal employee, Migratory Bird Monitoring, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). I had stopped in Lincoln a couple of days before to file my field notes with my boss who had been promoted beyond actually having the time to study birds anymore except in his backyard. The irony of success—you are promoted from the outside into the inside. We discussed the spring fire a farmer had made of frozen sandhill cranes over near Fort Kearny. An error in phenology as some arrived too early and were caught by a blizzard. He said I was an enviable nomad as he popped three ibuprofen.

  That chore done I called J.M. and we met at a bookstore. She warned me on the phone that she was just getting over the flu. I bought her an Octavio Paz as she must account strictly to her husband for the money she makes at a polite, harmless, ultra-clean strip club. She wishes to teach English and also has a minor in dance education. Her husband, a ponderous oaf from Sioux City of Norwegian heritage, has been working forever on his doctorate in anthropology. I remembered him slightly from when I was an unsuccessful undergraduate over eight years before. She told me he tries to talk with his pipe in his mouth. Inevitably some graduate students attempt to look like eccentric older scholars. They are prone to chuckle rather than laugh. Am I belittling this man because I’m fucking his wife? Probably.

  We had a brief drink at the Zoo Bar and I looked at her closely. She was ever so slightly drawn from her bout of flu but I was heading for the Sandhills by dark and we didn’t want to miss the chance. This was our third rendezvous after I had caught her show at the strip club in April where she had jumped into the air and landed in splits. I was a bit over-revved like a diesel engine, tossed her a hundred-dollar bill and left. The next afternoon by glorious luck and a minor search I saw her walking toward the campus with her gym bag. I drove a block ahead and let Ralph out to pee. He’s now among the missing and writing his name clutches at my
throat. I suspected he was part springer and part Labrador though there’s no evidence, having found him as a pup in a field near a campground outside of Clayton, New Mexico.

  She paused when she saw me, then smiled at Ralph who approached and gave her a good sniffing. She looked at my ten-year-old pick-up with camper shell, then critically at my clothing.

  “I should give you your hundred bucks back but my husband knows I made it. I don’t think you’re actually a big spender.” She stooped to pet Ralph and I caught the flex of her inner thighs before she tucked in her summer skirt. This flummoxed me and amused her.

  “For God’s sake you’ve already seen me almost naked. What do you do anyway?”

  “I’m a nomad.”

  “I don’t like to be teased. I guessed a construction worker. A few are dumb enough to throw a day’s wage at me. Not often, but it’s happened.”

  “I bet you’re from up around Neligh. Maybe closer to Verdigre.” She blushed a bit. Her voice was far too formal to come from a city and the speech patterns from up that way are traceable.

  “Pretty close, smartass.” She stumbled a bit on the “smartass.”

  Then we stood there a minute or two in silence with Ralph becoming a bit impatient. She reminded me of a snapdragon, one of my favorite domestic flowers, though I wasn’t close enough to catch her scent.

  “Would you like to take a ride? It’s spring.”

  “I already said I was married. You wouldn’t even tell me what you did and who you are.”

  I did a brief, safe sketch, while she looked off studying passing cars. She drew an imaginary X in the sidewalk and said I should be there in two hours and she would have made up her mind. When she walked off Ralph tried to follow her. She turned and said she had a sandwich in her gym bag and I called Ralph back.

  And that was that. It was an ungodly long two hours and when I came back she was already there and got in my pick-up without a word. Within a few blocks she was nervously handling my botany and bird guidebooks, also Olaus Murie’s Animal Tracks, flipping its pages.

  “I won’t go to a motel,” she said.

  “Neither will I. If you want a motel you’ll have to go there by yourself.”

  She laughed at that briefly but her lower lip was trembling. She went back to Animal Tracks and asked if I could track her.

  “Not on a sidewalk. Maybe out in the country.” She turned and looked into the camper at Ralph who was irked that his seat had been displaced. This communicated, he went to sleep.

  I drove thirty miles or so, out past Garland, to a woodlot where I had done a warbler count two years before. It was a warmish day in late April and her lip trembling stopped when we reached the full countryside. When I pulled into a two-track in the forty-acre woodlot and gave Ralph a biscuit for his patience she ran for it. She ran like a hurdler and I was impressed as she disappeared into the spring greenery. It had rained recently so the imprint of her feet weren’t that hard to follow. I moved along at a good pace staring at the ground and then looked up in five minutes or so to find her sitting on a stump with her flower-print skirt held to her breast. There were mosquitoes in the air so I had her stand and I knelt and rubbed Cutter’s bug lotion on her legs and bottom while kissing her sex. She made wonderful noises that seemed to belong in the woods. The first time she merely leaned over the stump. When we rested I identified plants, trees and wildflowers for her. Later, the only difficulty we had was scrubbing the dirt and grass stains out of her kneecaps.

  Our second meeting a week later was problematical. She said she had come to her senses and this would be the last. There was a driving rain and she kicked a radio knob off the dashboard which embarrassed her. She would scream then blush. She was so firm from a mixture of dance, track, swimming, and work on her father’s farm that I felt trapped within her. She put on some of my rain gear and we walked despite the prolonged squall. She had married her husband when she was nineteen, meeting him when he worked on an archeological dig up at the confluence of the Niobrara and the Missouri. He seemed wise and noble compared to the louts in the area and the fraternity boys she had met as a college freshman. That was three years before. She worked as a stripper as did several girls from the university dance classes because in a single evening you could triple what you could make as a waitress in an entire week. It also aroused her husband, a matter which seemed to puzzle her. “I must be an animal,” she said and I said, “Of course,” which pissed her off. It took a full hour to convince her that her admission was admirable. I let Ralph out and he killed a young woodchuck which didn’t help matters. I had to crawl under the truck to get the woodchuck away from him and when I rolled out half in a puddle I looked up my raincoat at her naked bottom, an electrifying sight. I had been around a bit at age twenty-nine but there had been nothing quite like her. She looked down at me, laughed, and knelt on my nose and mouth with the cold puddle soaking my butt.

  The third meeting was when I caught the flu before the trip to the Sandhill. After she warned me on the phone I said I didn’t give a fuck if she had AIDS. This would pass for romanticism in my generation. But this rendezvous was made strange by my other preoccupations and her own. I had been in Santa Monica stalking my mother, stalking in the old sense, and my actual mother not my adoptive one, certainly out of curiosity rather than imagined affection for one I had never laid eyes on. On the way back to Nebraska to one of my lairs to think things over my pick-up was stolen at a truck stop outside of Tucson, Arizona. I had pumped myself a tank, got back in the truck, noted my water jug was low and hurried back into the station. When I returned the pick-up was gone. An attendant said he had seen a young Mexican “lurking” around. I had all my gear plus a full decade of my natural history journals in there, plus a small library, but by far the most important, my friend Ralph. I called and talked to the police, took a cab to a motel and waited there three days for news of which there was none, nor for some reason did I expect any.

  J.M. was melancholy and used the phrase come to our senses again which seemed far off the mark for any problems we might be having. True sexual compatibility had been a rare item in my life and we certainly had that. She felt quite bad that I had lost Ralph but then picked on me for information about the new Chevy truck. I had already told her I lived on the six-hundred-dollars-a-month allowance left to me by a great-grandfather I had never met and knew nothing about. With this and what I could otherwise scrounge up I lived splendidly well below what she observed as the “poverty line.” Since she came from a rather poor farm family she wasn’t very sympathetic to the way I lived. I also didn’t want to explain how I got the new truck. Despite the pleasant, sunny day we had made love only once in the first hour or so.

  “Do you want me to run away with you and help you find your dog?”

  “Of course,” I said and she sat on my lap on the ground.

  “I can’t,” she said. My answer, however, had pleased her when she sensed I meant it.

  But I had to wonder what I was doing, or I had finally wondered what I was doing, just as she had already wondered what she was doing. We were mutual intruders and it was improbable for either of us to admit that anything that had started so accidentally could be of lasting value. We made love again and she gave me to understand that she wouldn’t see me again. Having spent nearly a decade avoiding even the slightest of human traps I should have felt relieved but I didn’t. I had neglected the future for good reasons but I certainly couldn’t accept the fact I wouldn’t see her again, a disappearance as final as Ralph’s.

  On the way back to Lincoln we pulled off on a remote side road and started to make love again and were waved at by a passing rural postman. That ended that. I waved back but she slumped to the floor in a clump of shame. The afternoon further degenerated when I asked why a mailman seeing her tits mattered when she stripped three nights a week? She took this as criticism of her job. It was the peculiar and irrational situation where it suits a woman’s purpose to misunderstand you. She’s trying to be
come angry so she won’t see me again, I thought. She wouldn’t talk but when I dropped her off a few blocks from her apartment she leaned over, kissed my cheek and tried to say goodbye in a voice that was a mixture of a choke and a stutter. I stupidly grabbed her arm, then released it. She walked away behind the truck and I watched her above the OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR rubric.

  What did I have in mind? I hadn’t thought of consequences from the moment I saw her. In the pick-up on the hot afternoon street I felt like a shit-heel intruder. What did I know about her other than a few poignant items: her 4-H Club Charolais heifer had taken third place at the Antelope County Fair when she was twelve. She learned Spanish from her mother who had spent most of her childhood in Mexico where her father had been a mining engineer. Her mother had studied one semester at University of Nebraska before she became pregnant by a farm-boy scholarship student ending up on a mediocre one hundred eighty acres, enough for not very genteel poverty. Her mother viewed J.M. as being in essentially the same fix. Her mother knew she stripped but her father didn’t. J.M. had been impressed at a dean’s reception for doctoral students and the whole house was carpeted. She liked poetry in Spanish but not in English because it was mysterious. Her parts were the most lovely I had ever seen. Given the hyperbole of the age I should compare her perineum to the Sistine Chapel or somesuch. She said her parents hadn’t been able to afford braces for her teeth and was demurely pleased when I said I didn’t care for magazine teeth. This was about it except that she got all A’s, her husband’s favorite dish was sauerkraut and pork which she didn’t care for. I judged her as far more intelligent than she assumed she was. In Nebraska only the strictly functional aspects of intelligence are much valued.