The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

  I found myself hoping that Derek wouldn’t stay overnight. Perhaps he sensed this and didn’t. Of course, it would have been less grievous than her kissing a golf pro. Before he left he delivered a tirade I wish I could have taped though it verged on the incoherent. It started with my mother telling a fib in her slurred, late-night Judy Garland voice. She said my own sense of the injustice of life, which she felt deeply for unknown reasons, had come about while I was in the Peace Corps in Central America. I had spent time there but hadn’t made it past the first “psychological” interview for the Peace Corps in Washington, D.C., when in a mood of irritation in an especially small, dirty, green office I admitted an inclination for chasing pussy, taking various forms of drugs, and the lost art of fist-fighting. It was the close quarters that made me do it and the slightest mention of the organization over the phone made me a member in my mother’s addled brain, which had at least showed a few signs of clearing up during the evening.

  Anyway, Derek chided my mother, saying justice had always been an accident of birth and that democracy was no more than a hoax for the bottom half of our population. The rich and the upper middle class were now seething with resentment over protecting their position and were demanding an enforceable mono-ethic which was gradually turning the country into a fascist Disneyland. My mother was still upset over this when Derek left so I gave her a warm hug which she insisted was the first she could remember.

  In the morning I tried to leave without calling my sisters which my mother viewed as a duty every time I stopped by home. Lucy was easy. I caught her at her Washington, D.C., office where she worked on some sort of antipoverty program, a decided improvement over her music groupie period. I ineptly suggested that she have a baby at which I got an ear-burning lecture, including the fact that I as a hopeless sociopath should avoid giving advice. I unluckily got Marianne who lived near Lawrence, Kansas, with what I suspected was an honest-to-God girlfriend though my mother didn’t have an inkling of this. I was on a roll so suggested a baby to Marianne which only drew forth a long silence, not counting barking dogs in the background. Finally she said, “Oh fuck you” and suggested if I finally was in the mood to help the family I could try to retrieve the two hundred grand that mother had lent to her art dealer buddy, adding details. This took my breath away and I lamely asked how? She said since I’d always been good at violence I could “threaten to drown the cocksucker.” I said I didn’t have time today but would think the project over.

  After I picked up my green truck with the lightning strokes that didn’t look as good as they had the morning before, I drove past Derek’s gallery in an old, restored part of the city. I parked and sat there trying to think of where to store the five grand cash I’d gotten on my idiot truck deal, also what to do about Derek. I went into the gallery which was being watched over by a homely young woman with an excellent build that easily dispelled the homeliness. I fanned the five grand under her nose and said I’d buy a painting for my sister if she made me a cup of coffee. She went into the back and I stepped through the opening of an office cubicle on the side and made off with a big Rolodex that was perched on Derek’s grand mahogany desk. The whole matter nauseated me but I thought the amount Marianne had mentioned was a high payment for companionship and that I might somehow correct the matter.

  Ground zero. I’m early and take a stroll along the Elkhorn, avoiding a dense swale that looked tempting but then I wanted to appear presentable. A farmer sees me and slows his pick-up. Probably his land so I raise my binoculars to a distant raptor and the farmer picks up speed. Fat cows graze and I keep a wary eye on a holstein bull. For some reason dairy bulls tend to be more hostile than those from beef herds. I think of the farmer regarding my harmless pursuit of birds and how nature obsessives in hard-headed America are often referred to as tree huggers, or better yet, prairie fairies. One thinks in despair of the deeply imbedded theocratic notion that God gave us the land to scalp and destroy after the nasty business of exterminating the Natives, thus nature lovers are thought to be kooks.

  My heart was eating my stomach this close to J.M. I can think of myself as generally a fine person but there have been too many big fuckups and I desperately didn’t want this one to be included. Given the specifics of my background it was hard to present myself to parents as a golden opportunity for their daughter, though by some definitions I was one. All of my radical theories about money and my proven contempt for it were loosening under what anthro nitwits call the mating drive. As I circled back toward the truck there was also the discomfort and confusion of my twenty-four hours at the home-place. I tried to dispel this by gazing at the lovely farm I was trespassing on. The tilled fields were set back far enough from the Elkhorn to allow a sizable riparian thicket. The pastures were judiciously grazed so there had been no invasion of weedy species like spotted knapweed. There was a pang from my early youth when for a few years my dad would haul me off to Sunday school at the Lutheran church. We little boys were taught by a gawky young railroad worker to pray for our heart’s desires and I had prayed mightily that our family would move to a farm by a river in the country. Here it is, I thought, though I’d prefer to be further west.

  When I got in my truck the farmer returned and pulled up alongside me, a real ham-armed grain-belt monster. I hurriedly fibbed that I thought I had seen a goshawk and, before he could say anything, I asked directions to J.M.’s parents’ farm at which he smiled and pointed up the road. “Three miles,” he said, waved and proceeded on.

  If I had known what a gut-churner I was in for I would have delayed my visit but I never do. My premonitions have generally been inaccurate enough to totally ignore them and making my way slowly up their long drive I was experiencing what mammal students call displacement. Under threatening circumstances you yawn and pretend to be interested in something elsewhere.

  J.M.’s ancestors had chosen a site on the wrong side of the road if indeed there had been a road then. Rather than the lush, fertile flatland along the Elkhorn they were on the other side in a rumpled landscape of hills and gullies, with rather makeshift patches of corn, oats and barley, a smallish dairy herd in a pasture adjoining the barn. There were two older Farmal tractors near a gray shed, a corn-picker in reasonably good shape, a thresher rusting in a lush patch of burdock.

  The driveway curved around a tall grove of lilacs, a row of half-dead Lombardy poplars, and there they were sitting on the porch, the three of them, a small, terribly unhappy family. I parked next to a gray pick-up older than my own, a decrepit Subaru, and J.M.’s Mazda. From a hundred feet I could see J.M.’s plum-colored face, her father glaring straight ahead, her attractive mother staring down at her own lap.

  I never made it past the porch. The lump in my throat grew as I approached them, and tears welled at J.M.’s appearance as she seemed to be looking just over my head and then her father reached out and put his hand on her arm as if to restrain her but maybe to comfort her. Her mother spoke in a low even voice, nailing my head to the air where I stood.

  “You said you had a friend who was a lawyer. Well, he’s not your friend. He works for this big firm in Omaha. I know about it. He says there’s no charge. I want to know how and why you’re paying for this. How is this any of your business?”

  “I love your daughter,” I croaked, not the voice I hoped for.

  “You don’t have a job. How do you aim to get by?” her father asked, leaning forward, drilling me with his eyes. “She had one asshole. She sure doesn’t need another.”

  “I can get plenty of good jobs,” I insisted though I’m sure it sounded lame.

  “We want her to finish her education and that’s that.” Her mother got up and passed through the screen door, followed by her father who first glanced out and saw the yellow lightning bolts on my truck, shaking his head.

  J.M. came down off the porch and walked out to my truck without looking at me. In addition to the purple and yellow hematoma she looked nearly haggard. I followed and when we reached the tru
ck she allowed me to take her hand but turned away from a kiss.

  “I want to kill him,” I said.

  “That’s a goddamn stupid start if you want to see me again. Why did you lie about having a lawyer friend? It was embarrassing. Dad said you’re just trying to get me to be your whore.”

  “Let’s go get married now,” I barely whispered.

  “I’m already married. Fuck marriage for the time being. My husband came over this morning with his parents who drove all the way from Sioux City and Dad wouldn’t let them out of the car.”

  A wet mongrel came up the driveway approaching J.M. apologetically. She stopped and began picking burrs off his coat.

  “How are you paying for that lawyer?” She was insistent.

  “It’s just a guy from my dad’s old office. It’s only a favor.”

  “Am I supposed to think about spending my life riding around in a pick-up truck? I want to teach school.”

  “I’ve been thinking about settling down.” I got down on my knees to help with the burrs but the dog turned and growled at me.

  “Oh bullshit. When and where?” She was at least smiling now. “Did you think I’d run off with you today even if I wanted to? Maybe I want to but I’m not doing that to my parents. Give me some time to think things over. Write me letters, then come back and see me in a month. Do you write letters?”

  I was stopped by that and tried to invent a fib which she read through and laughed. We looked up to see her mother coming toward us with a glass of lemonade which she handed to me.

  “We’re not rude people. This had been a hard time,” she said, looking at her daughter for a clue of what may have transpired. J.M. dropped my hand and took her mother’s which was clue enough and her mother had a trace of a smile.

  “I’m sure it’s been hard. It happened to my youngest sister.” I left it at that, of course, not wanting to talk about my reaction in that incident.

  She nodded and I gulped the lemonade. J.M. took the glass and said, “Keep in touch” and they walked back toward the house, pausing out of my earshot to talk about a flower bed. The dog stayed for a few moments as if to make sure I was leaving. When I got in the pick-up I gave my head a good crack forgetting the door jamb was lower than the new one I had traded in.

  A scant hour down the road I’d rehearsed the scene a hundred times, a process so confusing I had headed in the wrong direction and had to double back to get Route 14 up through Verdigre to Niobrara, a small town near the confluence of the Niobrara River and the Missouri. I was slightly fearful because my head seemed a bit scrambled by the thunk it had taken and I couldn’t quite isolate the pain at the base of my neck from the pain of seeing J.M. in that general condition. I became too confused to drive well and turned off on a small gravel road for a mile or two, parked, and walked off across a pasture to what looked like a consoling thicket.

  Actually I sat down against a tree and wept. Why lie to myself? You’re not obligated to be manly when you’re alone. For a change I didn’t even identify the tree I was leaning against. I was close enough that I thought I’d look up my old Ponca informant of ten years back who was only a half hour away. He wouldn’t be as comforting as another Native friend, an Omaha who lived over near Bancroft, but then I didn’t want to be comforted as much as I simply wanted to talk to someone not drowning in their own mental septic tank. My Ponca informant used to piss me off by asking me to identify a bird, tree or plant at which he’d yell, “Bullshit, that’s not what it calls itself.” But then I know he had talked to anthropologists a number of times before and delighted in confusing white people. Was everything food for words? What did I really have if I said “maple tree”?

  My weeping stopped and I tried to rebuild my time with J.M. moment by moment from the periphery inward. By ordinary standards the house needed painting. Her father’s forearms were scarred. Her mother’s black hair was striking. The screen door had a tuft of cotton to keep away flies. The yard smelled of mint and ragweed, also milkweed. The lilac bushes were covered by dead brown blossoms. J.M.’s jeans had a hole in the left knee I wanted to kiss. She smelled like coffee. I didn’t get to embrace her. Now I heard an oriole, a sweet sound for so small a feathered throat. How can I write letters when I never have except to Grandpa way back when. “May I come up there and live with you? I don’t like it here. Everywhere you go are just houses. Your grandson, Nelse.” That was when I was thirteen and had spent a summer with him after a friend and I tried to grow some marijuana plants. My sister told on us. All summer we dug a new foundation under their old cabin, raising it with hydraulic jacks, and laid new courses of cement blocks, then lowered the cabin. We fished for brook trout in streams, or for bass and pike in a lake every evening and sometimes early in the morning. My grandmother was sick and sat in a rocking chair in the yard and watched us. I also weeded her garden. She died the week before Thanksgiving and it was a cold white world when we all drove up to Minnesota for the funeral.

  I picked up a couple of bottle of cheap, sweet wine in Verdigre and the clerk asked me if I was okay. I was honest and said probably not, that I had bashed my head on the door jamb of my pick-up. I was getting a few of those blank moments when the world stops and I don’t quite recognize anything. That’s what happened after the football injuries when I was Nail instead of Nelse.

  Of course I had thought J.M. might sail off with me. I’ve noted that I have no control of the world beyond my skin. Here I am standing on the sidewalk in Verdigre on a hot afternoon struggling to focus reality. There’s a pay phone fifty feet away and I remember I should call Derek and make my threat. I don’t suppose my mother is actually rich though the cut-off there is uncertain. Maybe it’s when you don’t have to work to live well or what they think is well. My dad used to say, “Life is work.” In my terms I can’t say it did him much good. One trip through J.M.’s yard served to remind me that I don’t know shit about money. A full tank of gas and a few hundred bucks and I was flush. I was bored with prosperity because that’s how I grew up and it ran counter with anything I was interested in. So what? Others must be more bored with the struggle of poverty. I’ve watched it on the road a thousand times and it’s not the same because they have no shield at all save religion. The prosperous have so many layers of shields that they’re blind as human bats. Even their language excludes all other considerations except their own. I don’t want to talk the language of the enemies of my heart.

  I called Derek’s gallery and got my coffee-making lady. Derek was very upset, she said, and I said tell him to give my mother back her money or I’d write everyone in his Rolodex and tell them he’s a crook. She said, “That’s awful,” and I hung up.

  I ended up visiting the grave of my Ponca informant. I know his sister remembered me but chose not to acknowledge it. She said she was a Christian and didn’t want the wine so I left it at his grave which overlooked the Missouri where he told me the Poncas had devised the game of hockey. I stood there so long the afternoon sun moved a few inches, after which I headed west where I intended to talk to my true mother, the only thing left on my vaunted itinerary, other than buying some stationery.

  Dear J.M.,

  Encamped here at the confluence of the Keya Paha and Niobrara Rivers. Longitude 99 degrees, latitude 43 degrees, you’re no doubt burning up to know. This isn’t a great region for stationery but I bought a buck’s worth from a motel lady, the paper older than either of us. Bide-a-Wee is a homespun place and if only you were along we would have stayed there rather than camped. Don’t have a fire as I’m trespassing as usual and am not sure where the closest ranch house is. But I have moonlight, starlight and a flashlight, not to speak of the whine of mosquitoes, my true friends as they follow me everywhere in the USA. Tomorrow I hope to look up my birth mother or whatever she should be called, or at least her mother named Naomi on whose ranch I have permission to do a bird count. I am nervous about this whole thing but as you suggested I better get it out of the way. Naturally I hoped you’d run off w
ith me and I’m trying to understand why you didn’t. Maybe I can as I have proved that pressure is what I like the least. You said or thought I couldn’t settle down but I’m sure I could for you in the right place.

  Love, Nelse

  I didn’t say I was fine because I wasn’t and could see she had small tolerance for my white lies, fibs and just plain lies. It was two A.M. by my star clock and I could only sleep in ten-minute increments before coming back to sweaty consciousness because of an orange light in my brain, deep red around the edges. It had been years since I had seen the orange light, the last time in Utah crawling under an overhanging boulder where there were signs of an ancient basket-weaver encampment. I stood up too fast catching my head on an overhang and then fell to my knees for a while. After I recovered enough to walk I made my way further down the canyon and through a crevice so narrow I had to take my pack off, as per the instructions of a free-floating grizzly bear lunatic I had met up in Montana who had also drawn a map for me of Seri country. Anyway I found the petroglyph under another vast, sheer overhang, and there it was, large wolf prints plus dancing creatures, half human and half crane, also snake squiggles, and a lone humpbacked flute player, Kokopele. I had a modest seizure and stayed there staring at the petroglyph until nearly twilight, too unstable to crawl back to the crevice to drink from my canteen. I was lucky enough to have a big moon for the long, perhaps two-hour, walk back to the truck over the smooth, lunar caprock.