The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

  I know a great deal but not very much. My chest swelled but I couldn’t get enough breath. When I reached my truck I thought I might simply drown in personal bilge. Mixing creatures and plants I could name thousands but there was an urge to take a ball bat to my new truck parked there in the weeds. I had so much to get rid of before I could function again without mixed bullshit. Breathe deeply. Hike with a clear head. Chase the mysteries of the natural world with my old intense curiosity and a light heart. If I had a journal I would have been witless enough to write them down. I was going to see J.M., and then my mother in Omaha to ask her some questions. Then I would go west and see my actual mother, and then in the fall I’d go further west and find Ralph. This sort of planning was alien to my nature but I could see no way out of it save falling into a petrifying slump, something I was already verging on. One thing I’d noted over and over about men my age in my lost journals was the sense of their free-floating pissed offness which was still of indeterminate source to me. And I was unlikely to find out by chanting my vocal tranquilizer of hundreds of names of birds, flowers and other plants. My immediate solace as I neared the freeway was that my tormented family wasn’t there and I hoped to hell I wouldn’t see them down the road.

  She wasn’t there. This had not occurred to me as a possibility. I stood there like a feeb while the bouncer, a pleasant monster, repeated it three times, then said, “You need a drink,” and got me a whiskey. The words “she’s not here” were not quite comprehensible. I waited for Lolly, J.M.’s friend, to finish her routine and her name gave me a boot backward into prehistory. Lolly. Jesus, not something you could repeat ten times. The loner pops in out of the dark into darker. Lolly hurried over only to say that J.M. had abruptly decided to go home for a few days because her father was quite ill, giving me the slightest of winks to indicate the information was bogus in case the manager two tables away might overhear. Lolly made childish burbles with her straw and cola belying her outfit which nearly didn’t exist, the tits that became pink eyes in my air-conditioned brain. I left so quickly she chased me to the door with J.M.’s farm phone number and two college boys yelled “Lucky dog” at me as I pushed through the door. Lucky ape looking for the hoped-for mate. What in fuck is love that hollows the chest thusly, and makes the brain stutter?

  I found a motel on the east side of town and simply didn’t give a shit about my claustrophobia as I sat down by the phone and misdialed twice, getting her mother, Doris (not her real name), on the third. It was late, she said, eleven o’clock, but there was a tease in her voice as she called J.M. to the phone. Her voice was too small and the laugh was quite shallow when she said that someone had told her husband about seeing her in my truck. He had thought it over for days, then this morning confronted her in the kitchen and she had said, “I was with my lover.” He knocked her to the floor and now she had a black eye. Her mother wanted her to press charges but J.M. had said no. I found myself speaking in the monotone my father spoke in when he was angry. I said, “I’ll take care of it.” She said, “No, you fool, this is my door out. Don’t go near him or you’ll ruin it.” She wouldn’t see me the next day because she felt trembly but the day after would be fine. She gave instructions which I couldn’t listen to carefully because my brain was humming, and then she said, “I’m just glad you called,” and hung up.

  I waited awhile to hang up as if pretending to further the conversation. A professor once said that reality is when you peek through a keyhole and someone sneaks up behind you and kicks you in the balls. The room began to get smaller as I knew it would. Sometimes I slept out in a woodlot near the Lincoln dump when the wind was right. Nearby was a large skeet range where I won money in college. My father quit pheasant hunting after a partner kicked a bird dog so hard it had to be put down. I was pleased not to be there as I doubt if I could have been constrained. A jungle gym had been installed in the backyard to rid me of excess energy and though I was only fifteen at the time I’m sure I would have pounded on the jerk. Anyway the wind through the window was from the southwest which made the dump woodlot out of the question and the ambient city light made the stars hard to watch.

  Quite suddenly I was interested in how small the room would get. The sweat had begun to pop from my skull. J.M. could have certainly helped me get through it but then she was a hundred and fifty miles away. When I thought of her butt the room began to resume its shape. I had been mildly vertiginous but had cured myself over a few days of cliff standing near Moab, Utah. There were ants near my feet and the deer in the valley straight below me looked like ants. My Zen girl’s uncle told me there was a sect in northern Japan that stood on cliff edges to keep attentive, the only interesting thing this bald dickhead ever said. Jesus, being irked shrunk the room radically and made breathing difficult. I felt like a not very smart mammal that had fallen through the ice, survived, but spent a life being terrified of lakes. I tried the television for thirty seconds but that made it worse. I’m worthless at television and movies and have to avoid them because there’s too much movement. It jangles me.

  If you watch television near a window you note that life doesn’t move all that much outside unless you’re near a highway or crowded city street. You keep making subliminal primate adjustments to all that fast action on television and end up with a scrambled mind that takes a while to regather itself. Your accomplishment is that you’ve quite literally killed time. Movies are a bit different. About twice a year when I get the urge to see one I call my sisters for a consensus. They are sophisticates who follow the work of certain directors. However, the movies replayed on television are too small and you can’t get all the way into the screen where you belong.

  Bed. Front windows looking out onto an overlighted parking lot. Toilet and shower room. Sink area. Desk. Luggage rack. Closet with folding door. A print of freaky-deaky ibises by someone who has never looked at one closely. It’s squeezing closer to a locked shed. The air is burned spaghetti from the restaurant vent next door. Bible by Gideon in the bedstand drawer. Since the room is physically obtuse and can’t move a micrometer I’m going to deal with it. I’m not covered by dirt in a ludicrous ritual. I sit down at the desk and try to draw a picture of J.M. but it looks more like the head of a bluestem prickle-poppy, a flower I’ve sketched in my journal. Why bother as I can shut my eyes and see her? She is beside the truck, fully clothed, showing me how high she can jump.

  Out of fear I wrote down the names of two women, one seventeen and one thirty, that had brought me closest to this condition before. How had I messed up my other approaches to love that had at least a portion of this energy? Everything is not my fault. I’ve been told that this attitude is as hopelessly self-sunken as to think you’re right on every occasion.

  All I really seem to have is consciousness. This ordinary possession will have to be enough to win out over a bullshit phobia, though indeed I’ve used it to my advantage. My ears and sinuses begin to clear and my head stops humming. The mild hyperventilation stops. This is a start. L.G.’s hands were always chapped. She was the daughter of my hero, my mentor, my high school biology teacher who had been a POW in Korea. She was the middle of five children. Her parents were from Chicago and thought to be politically radical, members of the Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers Party though the mother was Jewish. My mentor was also versed in history and literature, rare for a science teacher. He was so brilliant and his students did so well when they moved on to college that his politics were overlooked by the community. He was treated by the powers that be as a harmless and beneficial oddity like a cranky beloved poet on a college campus tolerated because, though he was somewhat beyond their ken, there was a suspicion that his unorthodoxy held something of value.

  L.G. was so intense it unnerved all other young men though she was thought to be attractive. She dressed more poorly on purpose than her parents were. I loved her in my senior year of high school though she didn’t love me, not a unique story. She thought my mother’s station wagon vulgar and certainly would
n’t have gotten in my father’s Lincoln Town Car (a partner’s cousin was a dealer and the firm got discounts). I had wrecked my old Jeep for the third time on a weekend trip to the Sandhills to see the aftermath of a blizzard, saddened that it had missed Omaha. L.G. once had gotten arrested for demonstrating against nuclear arms outside the fence at SAC headquarters. She was alone and twelve at the time. I admired her guts with fervor but she didn’t love me. At her house we ladled out goulash from a pot on the stove, moving sprawled books on the kitchen table for a place to eat. Everyone talked at once. She only tolerated my company for a couple of months. I asked her to the prom and she laughed directly in my face so I didn’t go either. I got drunk, took speed and smoked pot with some other malcontents the night of the prom and slept in L.G.’s yard. It got down to the mid-thirties that night and her dad retrieved me at dawn when he let out the dog. The dog peed on me which became a family joke. Even I thought it was funny. She said she loved my bird and botanical mind though she thought anthropology had warped me. She read Virgil to me in Latin and St. John Perse in French. She was at all times a captious pain in the ass. She told me her secret love was our black football star and he liked her but didn’t want to mess up his life with a white girl. She was bitter about this but accepted it with understanding. I don’t mean she was harder on others than on herself. She was hard on everything, right down to slamming doors, and scrubbing the linoleum in their kitchen. I made love to her once—I can’t say she made love to me—and that was when I returned from Absarokee, Montana, just before we both went off to college. She was a National Merit scholar and had a full ride to Northwestern near Chicago, her father’s alma mater. We ate a pizza and went to a pathetic movie. I felt squirrelly in the theatre and left halfway through, walking down to the Missouri on a hot late-summer evening. The Jeep had been repaired but I was to get my graduation pick-up the next day. When I returned she was looking at one of my bird guides with a flashlight. She glanced up from the book and said she was ready to make love. I had long since given up the idea in despair and was dumbfounded. We drove north a half hour until we reached a suitable two-track in a cornfield near the river. I was so jittery I almost failed, not that she was much help. It’s impossible in a Jeep so I spread out a not very clean blanket which she decided unworthy so we leaned against a fender. She tugged at me too firmly and I told her to ease up, then I couldn’t get it in. She even said, “We’re going to get it in if it’s the last thing we do.” It was apparent to me that she didn’t want to go off to college in a virginal state. I tried to go down on her, something I had read about but hadn’t done, but she screeched, “Nothing doing.” She didn’t have any lotion in her purse but settled on Chap Stick, working on my dick as if she held a crayon, with strokes which were a bit harsh. This made me come off all over the place but I stayed firm enough, and we settled down on the blanket for a while until she actually cried out “Uncle.” We both laughed hard at this so the evening ended without melancholy for her though I was a mud puddle of yearning. In the Jeep she checked herself out for anything that might be noticed by her brothers and sisters or parents. It was very erotic under the beam of the flashlight as she wiped her thighs with tissue. I wanted to continue but she said, “Are you kidding?” so we drove home.

  I slept an hour in my clothes having decided the plug-ugly room wasn’t going to crush me, but then awoke with a sweaty jerk after a dream about a Ponca from whom I’d gathered a few coyote stories, an informant they call them. I still felt bad about the whole experience though not for the professor’s reasons. I was an arrogant young pissant collecting wonderful stories in exchange for two bottles of Boone’s Farm wine. We met three times on successive days, though on the third he mostly gave me the Ponca names for a couple of dozen birds I’d seen at the Bazil wetlands nearby. He had warmed up when he learned that rather than using the local motel I had merely flopped on a hill in a sleeping bag. He asked me twice in a teasing way if I had a little skin in me which I denied (you’d scarcely admit to a Ponca your smidgen of Sioux if you wanted information). He’d tweak the hairs sprouting from a wen on his chin and try to pass off a story on how Coyote learned to play hockey on the frozen Missouri. It was as if I was gathering stories from an absolute alien in our culture when it was we who were aliens. I took him to a small cafe in the town of Niobrara where he ate three orders of deep-fried chicken gizzards admitting he hadn’t had much to eat in a couple of days. I was nervous when a large smirking cowboy approached but he only offered twenty bucks if my informant would trap the raccoons that were bothering his wife’s garden.

  Of course the point is that he shouldn’t have told me shit but then he was first of all a friendly human being with a breathtaking sense of humor. I think at last count in my absent journals I had encountered at least a single member of thirty-seven different tribes. I never wrote much about them, probably out of the modesty my dad passed on to me. The bookstores are chock full of serious treatises on human behavior, including that of Natives. I’m discounting self-help trash. After quite a bit of exposure to Natives, though, the scholarly texts I had read as a student and the quasi-serious books I had read afterward didn’t seem to jibe accurately with my experiences. I clumsily accounted for this by thinking that though the books may have represented a lot of field work they were written elsewhere, say in a college town or in Washington, D.C., where people, no matter how fresh to the job, are only in touch with themselves.

  Power and money rule the level of discourse and no other considerations are seriously considered. But I could read K. Basso on Apaches and confirm it in my own wanderings because he still hung out in the area. How can anyone else, including me, present definitive conclusions without being fluent in the primary language on which the Native sense of reality is based? This all began to be quite funny in the shit-sucking beige motel room with its moving walls and ceiling. It isn’t always better to run for it, I chided myself. What’s the point in pretending you know more than you do? I couldn’t seem to bear down on this life I was living but was lost in the arena of vague intentions. There was no question that losing Ralph had something to do with this not-very-free-floating anxiety about making some solid moves. I even began to miss the flea markets, fairs, rodeos, the diners I regularly visited until about a year ago, or the evening I stopped without irony at a Nazarene church to check out an event billed as Puppets for Jesus. It is fascinating how people will grasp at figments that assure eternal life. On a seven-day solo hike you occasionally have to remind yourself you’re part of the human species no matter how many of the avian and mammalian species you’ve seen that could very well have reminded you.

  It’s after three A.M. and I’m feeling stupid. Oh, J.M., why don’t you wake up and give me a call? It’s no fun feeling dumb when the most consistent reassurance of your life is that you’re intelligent. I note that this feeling lowered the ceiling a foot and consequently sweat emerged on my forehead. It was a full hour before I would hear the first birds. Carla, not her real name, always reminded me of a canyon wren, no doubt the musicality of her voice which contrasted oddly with her straight-razor wit. I saw her twice at a Mexican restaurant in Espanola, N.M., with her three-year-old son who was remarkable as the piggiest young eater in creation. She looked Chicano with a few other things mixed in, slender, quite attractive but not overwhelmingly so. She was much more sedately dressed than others of her background and the waitresses deferred to her, picking up her son’s mess with smiles. It piqued my interest that she was reading a psychology text, a subject I could fairly describe as my bête noire. The next time I saw her in the restaurant I was at an adjoining table and her son threw a piece of tamale which landed near my plate. I smiled and said “thank you” and he screeched, reaching to have it back, his eyes glittering with anger. I brought it over and he quickly threw it again while I stood there, leaving a splotch of red chili sauce in the middle of my shirt. Carla dabbed a napkin in a glass of water and tried to wipe it off. She said that I had a nice hard tummy a
nd I said thank you, then she tried to offer five bucks to get my shirt cleaned which I refused. She grabbed her son’s arm as he prepared another toss. He howled and I quacked like a duck which pleased him. She checked her watch and left in a hurry. Two days later while I was still camped near Bandelier—I like the irony that a gorgeous old ruin was so close to the atomic arms factory at Los Alamos—I drove over to the Puye Cliff Dwellings and there she was sitting in the shade of a boulder reading the same text. She acted pleased to see me and the boy was thrilled with Ralph who, unlike many dogs, adored children. She wore the kind of loose-hemmed shorts so that when she was sitting you could look down into a fine stretch of underthigh. My ears seemed to buzz. It’s not all that odd that under a blast of lust, the furze, the stubble of culture, utterly disappears except as a convenience to get you where you’re trying to go. Could I invent chatter that would make her fuck me?

  No, it was evidently for other reasons. She asked enough questions so that it was an interview, or a real-life supplement to the psychology text. How we will grovel before a fine butt and thighs, getting our brains slammed and bruised like young antelope with their first surge of desire. It is so nakedly silly but still somehow poignant to see our feet turn into hooves. I answered all the personal-history questions and she looked into the back of my pick-up camper. The little boy joined Ralph in some dog kibble. Carla regarded my neatly stacked camping gear, my food chest, my small library, my sea chest of clothing with a cold eye. Meanwhile, I hastily leafed through her textbook which dealt with abnormal psychology, a true barrel of symptomatic worms. She said in her musical voice that I obviously verged on being a sociopath, also an anal-compulsive loner, blah, blah, blah. I said, “Oh, fuck you,” which she accepted as a possible suggestion. She then looked off at the grandeur of the scenery and said that it was God’s country. I said she was another xenophobic twit and that I had been to at least a hundred places in the United States that the misty-eyed locals described as God’s country. She said with manic anger, “Don’t call me a twat,” and I said, “Twit is not twat.” I crawled into the camper where her son now was sleeping using Ralph as a pillow and got my dictionary. She was not totally pleased with twit but gave me a hug. My hands slipped down a bit and she pushed me away giving my crotch a deft tickle. She then gave me a woeful tale that her son was actually fathered by her uncle! I was stunned. Her brothers were dope criminals and would beat up anyone who cared for her. She was escorted three days a week down to the university in Albuquerque by an obnoxious bodyguard. If I wished to spend time with her I’d have to be sneaky.