by Jim Harrison
She had me follow her a few miles toward her house, stopping well down the road. I used my binoculars as she pointed out her mother’s house at the bottom of a hill, a reasonably nice place with a few horses and a chicken pen, and then her own reddish brown adobe well up the hill. I couldn’t come in the front way but there was a two-track off a county road behind the hill that would bring me within a few hundred yards of the house. I was to arrive just after dark and if the back-porch light was on the coast was clear. She gave me a peck good-bye and I drove around to the other side of the hill, found the two-track and did a hasty scouting foray on foot. It seemed simple enough so I drove back to my campsite and gave myself a good scrubbing in a creek, singing a little song to Ralph about how I was going to get laid and he wasn’t. Ralph is particularly drawn to very large female dogs and is often punished when he tries to be flirtatious.
Anyway, the first night went splendidly and so did the second and third. I was in love and it was obvious that I had to rescue her from her evil family. She was frankly quite savage in her lovemaking and I began to wonder when I was going to get a rest. The house seemed peculiarly cultured for a narcotics family and a locked door led to her criminal brother’s den, or so she said. My suspicions arose when she asked me to fetch her a tequila and soda with lime, and I hobbled out of bed to the kitchen. I found everything except the soda and opened a closet door, taking a bottle from a case there. I also noticed a stack of framed photos behind the broom, mop and dust mop. They were sideways and I tilted my head to see the top one, a gringo in a hard hat being handed an award from a man in a suit. I heard her bare feet padding up the hall toward the kitchen and quickly closed the door.
It was just after dawn and flies were already buzzing in the room and at the back-door screen when I got up to take a pee. It occurred to me that the house wasn’t very secure for a drug lord. There was a simple hook for the screen door and the inside door had a loose knob and no dead bolt. Mixed in with the rooster’s call from down the hill I also heard a canyon wren, an impeccable piece of music. It was very lucky that I had undressed in the living room because the sound of a pick-up roaring up the hill overwhelmed both rooster and wren. Carla screamed from the bedroom, “Run. He’ll kill you,” and I did.
I stopped a hundred yards down the hill in a grove of scraggly juniper and hurriedly dressed. I had lost a sock and both feet were painfully bone bruised. I reached the truck and didn’t stop until I made Albuquerque a couple of hours later, and by then had begun to wonder about the photo of the man in the hard hat in the kitchen closet. What else was in that stack of framed photos and what was really behind the locked den door her son had tugged at, screeching his lungs out? I still loved her but as a major league fibber myself I was beginning to think she hadn’t been honest with me any more than I had been honest with her about my background. Since I had made extra money working for a contract archeology group up in Utah I checked out the Yellow Pages at a service station and stopped at a private detective who had a crisp little office in a shopping mall. I made up an elaborate story about an extortion attempt at which he yawned and asked for two hundred bucks in advance. I walked across the mall parking lot for breakfast and when I returned in an hour he gave me what he called the “goods.” Real banal stuff: she wasn’t enrolled locally but had graduated from the Las Cruces branch of New Mexico State University. She worked part-time as a legal secretary and her father was a respected loan officer at a local bank. She was married to a graduate of Texas A&M who was an oil geologist who spent a lot of time on the road. She had no brothers and neither she, her husband, or anyone in her family had any criminal record.
I sat there for a minute like a mound of ground beef with the detective concealing his amusement by arranging papers. He was trying to let me retain some pride. There was no charge beyond the original two-hundred-buck retainer. On the wall there was a reprint of the old White Rock beer calendar of a girl kneeling beside a spring with long hair and lovely breasts. I glanced at it overlong as if to stem the rush of blood in my face, the prickly embarrassment. I said thanks and rushed out, heading south for the Bosque del Apache where I watched birds from a camp stool for several days, the soles of my feet too bruised for hiking. Every time I put my feet down for a few steps Carla arrived in my mind not all that pleasantly. It’s probably been several hundred thousand years since we could run barefooted over rocky terrain.
At first light with sparrows walking in the bushes outside the window I took a shower and had a momentary touch of fear that J.M. might also be involved with disguises. I hoped I had accumulated enough knowledge about women to avoid a major pratfall. My dad always made a large item of learning from the valuable lessons that life taught us, but then he appeared to have a much less than total comprehension of my mother. Human beings make for confused lessons. At Carla’s adobe there had been long shelves of mystery novels, the reading of which seems to make people’s lives more interesting. I knew from watching the Corvidae, especially ravens, that boredom tended to create random behavior. When nothing is happening, make something happen.
What the fuck did I know, anyway, outside the natural world where my antennae are truly operative? This was getting quite tiresome and when I stopped at a diner for breakfast it hit me quite directly. I had some time to waste in that it was six A.M. and my mother was never functional before nine A.M. In the diner a group of codgers was listening to a replay of a presidential news conference about Irangate, as they called it. Over pale eggs and pathetic sausage I listened to the words falling on the air as if it were sprinkling dogshit. What I couldn’t specifically figure out because of my failures of perception outside the natural world was why the language of both the president and the questioning reporters struck me as babble compared to Bartram, Thoreau, Beston or even The Wind Birds by the contemporary Matthiessen. I knew there had to be an obvious answer but I lacked any of the specifics. I strained to recall what a young English professor had said about Foucault, a Frenchman, and levels of discourse but I couldn’t remember the main points other than power controls discourse. At the time it only meant to me that the environmental movement was screwed because they were forced to do their dealings in the language of the enemy camp, the government and developers. There was the idea while I concentrated on the edible fried potatoes that I might sit still for a few months and simply read which is hard to do on the road because of fatigued eyes. J.M. seemed to read widely and she could probably give me a hand in literature. When I reached a camping destination I stuck to reading up on the natural peculiarities of the area. I knew that when I was reading clumsy texts in any area I could see my skull at work, laboring over the words, but then with good stuff the skull disappeared and you read with your whole being.
Back in the truck there was a slightly desperate urge to lighten up, a possibility in the company of my mother if you weren’t raised by her. When my sisters were around the three of them laughed a great deal but then I was described as the thorn in her flesh, a peculiar idiom from Saint Paul. After my younger sister learned I was only a stepbrother she became aggressively fond of me, including climbing into my bed naked. This was unnerving to the point that I installed an inside lock on my bedroom door. My parents noticed the way she mooned around me—she was thirteen and I was sixteen at the time—and took me aside for a discussion on the matter. My mother’s mind doctor had described this as a phase, an expensive way to find out nothing. Anyway, my parents hoped I would treat the situation with adult good sense. We were driving north of town for our talk and while they were droning on I was pleased to see a rough-legged hawk, comparatively rare in the area, and I said that I had enough girls to fool around with without tampering with my obnoxious sister so don’t worry. My dad fairly screeched off the road onto the shoulder and they turned to me with red, angry faces. I was thinking you can’t win, and speedily assured them I didn’t go all the way with my girlfriends and they seemed relieved.
I had never asked my mother why I had seen her nec
king with the assistant golf pro on the eleventh green early one morning. I was bird-watching in a nearby thicket with a friend who thought the whole thing very funny but then he was cynical because his parents were divorced. I told him not to tell anyone or I’d pound the living shit out of him. The selfsame assistant pro was later released for being a seducer, or so went the gossip. I don’t think I was especially troubled at the time, age ten, but instead filed it under incomprehensible in my very young brain. Later, when she was trying to bully me, I was tempted to bring up the subject but my father had taught me politeness too strongly and I held back. At the moment I was inclined to think everyone on any given day is vulnerable to anything at all.
When I reached Omaha I pulled up at a dealership with a huge lot of new and used pick-ups. I spent a half hour wandering around, waving aside two different salesmen who approached. I didn’t care for my own new truck, a gift from my mother after the other was stolen. The new one was insufficiently modest. It was garish and smelled of prosperity, plus I was only six hundred bucks ahead in the world and my tentative plans didn’t leave time for earning any more. In a back row I found a green ’82 Ford with a small yellow lightning stroke painted on each of the doors and was drawn to the daffiness of it. I beckoned a salesman who was tracking me and asked how much I could get for my new Chevy. I was treated like a nut case in the office when we talked it over with his boss. My papers looked clean to them and I could see greed beginning to seep in. They doubted my general reliability so I gave them the name and number of my father’s law office partner, also my mother’s home to let me know when it was all clear. I was losing a bunch but would have five grand to try to get J.M. to run off with me. We’d go find Ralph and whatever. Stop and see my actual mother. Go see the ocean. Camp in my favorite spot near the Seri Indians on the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. Climb trees. Go to Veracruz for the immense hawk migration. I had a fair amount left in my sister’s care from a life insurance policy my dad left each of the three of us but it never seemed appropriate to touch it. My mother had a bunch before she married my father, including the home that came from her own mother. I suppose her family was technically rich. I have nothing against money except that it mitigates against leading an interesting life in my terms. I know my terms are limited but I’ve never known a rich person, including all of those I grew up with, who leads a life I could bear.
* * *
When I reached home the house looked a little smaller with the shrubbery larger as it always does when I return, usually once or twice a year. My mother’s new housekeeper at first wouldn’t let me in but I told her to check the photos in the den, which she did, then reappeared, squinting at me until I flashed my driver’s license under her nose. She was a fine mixture of the servile and snarky and said that my mother was out for a morning walk with her boyfriend who I figured must be her art dealer pal, Derek. I had met him the year before and liked his gentle nastiness about the world. My mother had gone to New York City a number of times with him and the trips drew her out of the fairly long depressions she had experienced after my dad’s sudden death.
I went up to my room, putting a sign on the door saying that I had been driving all night and to wake me at noon. Yet another fib, but then someone had to do something about reality. I opened the whole row of French windows that faced the garden, took off all my clothes and slumped to my bed, my mind buzzing like a june bug against a screen. Above me the ceiling was covered with my old astronomy charts and the walls were papered with bird, mammal and plant photos and posters. The only thing changed in my nine years of absence was a missing photo of Jane Birkin’s bare bottom I had cut out of a magazine but that had been gone for several years, a victim of either my mother or a religious housekeeper. I never inquired though I missed what I thought of as the finest butt in creation.
I had to get up to open the closet door which was closed and I have to have it open, for what reason I’m not sure. Other than ancient suits and sport coats there was a rack holding fishing rods and several shotguns, both my own and my father’s. The shotguns were Parkers he had bought in the early sixties before they got expensive. I went into the adjoining bathroom and took two aspirins, avoiding a glance in the mirror as counterproductive. I got back in bed almost praying for sleep. Just an hour, dear whomever. I stared at the jukebox in the far right-hand corner, not a big one but a jukebox nevertheless, and thought of playing a Charlie Parker tune, one of my dad’s favorite musicians from back during law school, or so he said. The jukebox had an odd origin. By mid-year in the sixth grade my studies had fallen apart and my parents promised me a grand present if I got all A’s which I did, and then I demanded a jukebox. They tried to hedge but came up with one, unsure of the reasons as even then I couldn’t bear the radio or TV. I like live music if I’m way in the back or well off to the side for obvious reasons. I was drawn to the jukebox because you could stand there and watch the intricate way it worked. There was also a happy memory associated with a fishing trip up near Leech Lake, Minnesota, with my dad and grandpa. We were camping but it rained hard for two days so we moved into a tourist cabin near a tavern on a lake. We went to the tavern for dinner and ate hamburgers and delicious fried fish. It was a warm, muggy evening with great bolts of lightning above the lake and the whine of mosquitoes through the screen door. While we ate the tavern filled up with local people rather than tourists and everyone drank a lot including my dad and grandpa. My dad escorted me back to the tourist cabin then returned to the tavern. I waited a reasonable amount of time and then snuck back and watched through a side window along with several other kids, including a big plump girl who smelled of molasses and who kept hugging me. Now the jukebox was very loud and a lot of people were dancing and I was startled to see my father dancing with a blond woman with jiggly breasts. The molasses girl told me they were dancing the “schottische.” I had never seen my father look so happy either before that evening or after. Even my grandpa danced, both alone and with a barmaid. In my nine-year-old mind I connected this happiness with the jukebox that had an orange and purple glow so that when my father’s blond dance partner bent over it to select another tune it made her look very beautiful or so I thought at the time. Consequently I felt it was worth studying hard to bring a jukebox into the family.
I slept and dreamt consciously in my old bed, if that’s possible, though I’d never researched the phenomenon. It had become almost a habit while camping out in some pretty odd places where the prospect of danger was quite real, thus my ceiling covered with man-made stars phased into actual stars including far too many comets and I thought the world was ending before I had a chance to see J.M. again. Even the clock on the wall whirled and I heard J.M. talking, guessing again that she had had a slight speech impediment as a child. What was she doing talking to my sisters Marianne and Lucy when she didn’t know them and they were telling J.M. what was wrong with me using Spanish words I was unfamiliar with. I asked what the words meant and they said, “We’re inventing these words so you won’t know.”
Of course with that I was wide awake blinking at my paper stars, and then my mother knocked, coming in with coffee. For a radical change I felt quite happy to see her. How in hell do we become something else, I thought, as she sat down nervously. She looked better than usual with a tinge of color in her face and her hands less shaky. She still spoke, though, in a dithery rush about news from my sisters, Lucy and Marianne, and why for God’s sake did Marianne have seven dogs in the Kansas countryside. “Why not?” I answered and she moved on, looking away when she said an inquiry had come from someone representing my “biological mother” and that as a gentleman I should look the woman up out of common courtesy, a favorite phrase. “Biological mother” is a simplistic term if you think about all of the strings involved, including the umbilical. A man called from the auto dealership and why was I selling the truck she bought me a month or so ago? Too fancy, I said, it makes me a target for thieves. I didn’t admit the lack of money which was the sorest of points, wha
t with her wish to push it upon me as it had been pushed upon her without questioning the effects. Somehow she caught that I was fibbing again, perhaps because it was also a habit of her own. She still tells people I went to Macalester rather than University of Nebraska, but then both she and my dad went there as did her parents and this fragile continuity means something to her.
“How in God’s name could you possibly think taking a little money would matter now?” she asked, looking up at my stars. “You’re more set in your ways than the oldest person I know.”
“I don’t live on applesauce and cottage cheese. I prefer sardines.” She rolled her eyes at this because one year when I was in Costa Rica and didn’t make it home for Christmas she asked what I wanted over the phone and I had said a case of sardines. It took me three months to see a jaguar up near the Nicaraguan border.