by Jim Harrison
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I had a late-evening dinner in Socorro with a love from twenty years back, the wife of a now dead mining engineer for Phelps-Dodge. We liked each other a great deal at the time but like my mother she drank far too much for me to be comfortable with her for long. She was still on what Dalva humorously refers to my “rose list.” Perhaps absurdly I still send roses to a dozen ex-lovers on their birthdays. I couldn’t say quite why I do so, but then why so readily discard parts of the past that had their wonderful days?
The evening wasn’t that pleasant, partly because she was a poor cook who claimed to have “special touches” and good cooking requires a specific humility. She made much of her reduced drinking but it was easily perceivable that she had had quite a warm-up period before I arrived, what with a faint Judy Garland burr to her consonants. That in itself wasn’t irritating compared to the drama she was attempting to create about our mutual past, especially a trip we had taken to New York City, the main thrust of which had been wretched. We simply weren’t remembering the same world. The peripheries had been gilded and her shrieking at a room-service waiter covered over, also falling asleep while attending a Eugene O’Neill revival, which she denied when waking, saying that her eyes had been closed the better to listen, and this without a single comment from me. She also fell backward into the arms of a maitre d’ when he was helping her with her coat. But then I still liked her and suspected her ex-husband could have driven anyone to alcoholic desuetude. Perhaps the sidebar here is my mother and father again. How many of us actually have the resilience to survive a cruel lover, even if the cruelty is slow and accretive rather than directly violent?
I begged fatigue and escaped to my motel. She insisted that she would make breakfast for me in the morning but I felt confident she wouldn’t remember. When we kissed at the door there was the mildest urge to prolong the caress for reasons that aren’t clear to me beyond her past innovativeness in bed. Dalva had early guessed that I had a tendency to collect wounded birds. I thought she was unbearably shrewd at the time. When a young woman sees you so transparently you’re knocked off your pins.
Back at the motel I felt relieved, safe and secure. My final thought about Kolya was that it certainly wasn’t my fault that I was the bully’s son rather than the victim’s. John Wesley had beamed with pride as he ate his fresh hamburger while I was quite naturally choked with tears and couldn’t touch mine. My father didn’t notice when J.W. slipped mine into his coat pocket for his dog. My father downed a large glass of whiskey, wiped his mouth and advised his miniature sons that it was often better to hit a man openhanded, especially across the ears, because that way you avoided breaking your knuckles. How could one forget such grim wisdom?
I had a verbal scuffle at dawn with an officious motel clerk who insisted I take my receipt though I paid cash. I asked, Whatever for? He acted as if I were trying to get away with something criminal. I joked that I couldn’t touch a receipt for moral reasons and he treated this as an insult. I began to turn to walk away and he tried to throw the machine-extruded receipt at me but then it is hard to throw paper. I judged that he regretted entering the transaction in the ubiquitous computer as he could have pocketed a cash payment. I’ve often had the feeling that as I grow older the country is becoming more primitive, certainly more stupid and impolite. One certainly notes it with airlines, the government, restaurants and hotels and among doctors. You are forever dodging the invisible shrapnel of free-floating contentiousness. You are frankly suspect if you don’t act appropriately dead within the market-driven mono-ethic of pay and shut up. People yap about the bottom line as if it existed anywhere but in hell.
Luckily the moment I left the motel office the landscape made the soul clap hands and sing. I love the sun-blasted, bleached and baked small mountain ranges of the Southwest, the rather foreboding sky islands, most of which I’ve visited on foot. Even where there are conifers they lack the convincing greenness of the better-watered north. I’ve often thought how this landscape must drive painters quite batty though they keep trying, tripping over the thousands of delineations of shadows in a single arroyo. Painters do succeed more apparently than photographers, most of whom seem witless to know that a camera is a crude instrument compared to the human eye. The best photographs succeed as art but it certainly isn’t the way anyone sees. Now I sound like my father!
I paused on my way south to recheck the map to be sure there wasn’t a road untaken in the area. No such luck. When Nelse visited in the fall we drank a good deal of fine wine one evening and I gave him a marker and had him trace his routes on a large map of the United States on the wall of my den. I fell asleep on the couch and when I awoke and went to bed a few hours later he was still at work. At dawn when I arose to walk the dogs early because it was going to be a hot day Nelse was asleep on the couch, his handiwork completed, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles of dark tracery. There was very little east of the Mississippi except in the far northern Midwest, an area I had difficulty with because of the density of trees, the truncation of any view. I had once tried teaching for a spring semester at Michigan Tech in Houghton which owned the specific virtue of being the hilliest area of the state but still not enough for me. And there were still patches of snow on the ground in May, my landlady beaming with tearful eyes at the appearance of a crocus. When the temperature reached fifty after six months of winter students began wearing T-shirts. A confident girl rode her bicycle through campus with her skirt blowing up to her waist with hormonal young engineers and geologists staring dully from the sidewalk, some of them blushing. On the beaches of Lake Superior I found chunks and shards of ice beneath sand and rock the day before I left on the Fourth of July.
But Nelse’s map gave me a sharp pang for the unlived life. I thought I had been a wanderer, and I had been, compared to anyone I knew, but Nelse had far exceeded me in a matter of ten years. Carlos, my male Airedale who is not very bright, kept watch over him from the far end of the couch. Carlos is an anal compulsive who is upset if someone sleeps on the couch. If I have houseguests and it’s late in the evening Carlos tries to herd everyone to their bedrooms, such is his rage for order. He had doubtless watched Nelse carefully during his mapwork and now looked at me to make sure nothing was amiss. I invited him out to join his female cousins on the patio all agog for their morning walk. They prefer sleeping outside while Carlos is a bit frightened of the dark and roars and bays at something as simple as the cry of the roadrunner, or a nightjar in an Emory oak. The females bully him and once when he killed a javelina they wouldn’t let him share in the eating. He is far larger but they have him totally buffaloed. When they snap at him he looks hopelessly to me for defense. When I left with the dogs I looked back at Nelse, saddened that I couldn’t read his stolen journals. I had put out a reward through an acquaintance in the criminal element in Nogales but thought their return to be unlikely.
Thinking about my dogs made me homesick indeed though I knew I’d reach them by early evening. There was snow on the tops of the Black Range of the Mimbres Mountains so I couldn’t cut over through Silver City. When I worked there during the war I’d taken a business trip to Washington, D.C., where I was called out of a meeting and told to phone my father immediately. I did so only to find out that John Wesley had died in Korea. The meeting had been at the Pentagon and had dealt with metals critical to national security. I hung up the phone and walked out to National Airport and found a pilot at a private aviation company to fly me home to Nebraska, abandoning my luggage at the Mayflower, also my job, and vomiting in hysteria into the Potomac. I still can’t hear or read the word “Washington” without a slight tinge of nausea. O my brother, I loved you so.
When I turned off in Hatch to take the shortcut over to Deming I saw a Mexican family having a picnic off the road’s shoulder, eating from the tailgate of an ancient station wagon with two little girls playing a version of hopscotch in the gravel and a little boy, a perfect miniature of his father in a straw cowboy hat, m
erely watching them, while the father ate his sandwich looking off at the shallow and muddy Rio Grande flowing through the chile fields. Not having any children of my own except the remote chance of Duane I tend to study families closely. I’ve helped raise a dozen or so children, mostly at a distance, but sometimes quite closely. Several have been the rather woebegone children of ex-lovers, and at least a half dozen Mexican orphans. Because of my mother I have too much money to think of this sideline as generous. What would I save for? My most current ward, Roberto, is at a military prep school which he loves in Roswell, New Mexico. I wish he were inclined otherwise but given his suffering in Los Angeles it is understandable. As the Natives imply you have to close up the metaphoric hole in your stomach somehow. Ruth and Ted’s son, Bradley, also insisted on the military background, the Air Force Academy, after his parents’ divorce which came about when Ted wished to live out his own true character which was homosexual. Early last spring when Ted and I were having dinner in Los Angeles discussing Dalva’s multifoliate problems, including her alcoholic historian, Michael, and her losing her job, we ended up the evening skewing Toynbee’s adversary theory of history. I’ve had a number of gay friends in my lifetime who became improbably successful in their fields though not as preposterously as Ted, and I wondered aloud if having to keep their nature secret so many years had made them hyperalert and attentive. Given intelligence, success in any area has always struck me as a matter of the level of attention, excluding the arts, of course, which seem to be involved in a mystery known only to their practitioners, if, indeed, they know themselves. You can read a Chekhov story, a Shakespeare sonnet, or listen to a Mozart sonata a dozen times and you’ll still be left twiddling your thumbs in mute admiration. Ted didn’t want to agree. He said it was like simpleminded Midwesterners thinking Jews were rich, then going to Brooklyn and finding out otherwise. I called that an asinine cheap shot and he laughed. Then I said both gay men and feminists find it unbearable when straight men try to say anything about them. Mystical experiences might not be transferable but ordinary human behavior is knowable, given the time and attention. He brought up the idea that in former times lapsed Catholics made especially good writers, then compromised by saying that possibly all the early energy given to deceit was good training for the world we live in. It gave a mastery for all the attenuations of irony and made one a student of the subtlest reactions of people. You had to build yourself antennae that ordinary people are lucky to do without. Ted teased me with the idea that the best seducers of women are simply the best listeners, supposedly one of my main virtues.
We finished the evening back discussing Dalva, both fretting over her. Ted first met Ruth at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and when he had come home with her and met Dalva he felt even that first day that he had settled on the wrong sister. Midway through the second day, and this had nothing to do with his final sexual proclivities, he had decided that Dalva was the most violently headstrong young woman he had ever met. Ted is given to the wildest overstatements possible but they’re generally very colorful. He said that he’d danced with Dalva that first evening and became more aroused than he had ever been with a woman, but then had a fearful image of her as a devourer, a killer, and on looking over her shoulder and down at the floor there was an image of a kneecap and shinbone in the morning light, the only thing that would be left of him. Of course this is laughably absurd but there is a microbe of truth to it. Like her father she never had the slightest gift for irony or subduing the primacy of her emotions. The chips were always down. I frequently felt a little sympathy for any of her boyfriends I’d met who had been selected for some temporarily usable aspect, then would be discarded for reasons that I’m sure they were incapable of understanding. She was intrigued by Michael’s intelligence and had been very kind, indulgent and generous with him, then couldn’t wait to send him packing. I used to tease her that she was an emotional robber baron, but then she easily drilled me through the brainpan by saying that it was only that she managed to take all the prerogatives that so-called alpha males believe are their birthright. That shoe fit very well and I was embarrassed enough to put it on, mindful that my own father had helped build this creature. There were some respects in which he was quite extraordinary.
I was laughing when I stopped for gas in Lordsburg and the attendant was quizzical about the joke. I said something quite lame about a huge motor home with a Minnesota license backing into a cement picnic table at the last rest stop. The antics of what are locally called “snowbirds” are the subject of a lot of humor. I couldn’t very well tell him my private story about a strangely painted buffalo skull which is now the startling feature on the fireplace mantel of my den. Many don’t care for it, finding it unpleasantly fearsome. It had been my father’s and throughout my youth I had admired it beyond anything else he owned, including the paintings, the ranch, whatever. When I graduated from Brown he shipped it out to me though he didn’t attend my graduation. I didn’t blame him for that as I’ve always found such ceremonies onerous. The painted buffalo skull had been a gift to my grandfather from William Ludlow who had found a long line of these skulls facing east on his expedition into the Black Hills with Custer in the 1870s. I was laughing because I’d suspended the skull from the ceiling in the quarters I shared in Providence with three other seniors and during a very rainy graduation we had used the skull as a test of character for all the young women we knew who stopped by for drinks. Some merely screamed, some were merely polite, but most were quite curious. Oddly, visiting young men fared less well making much of the “modern world” and how such artifacts are best stored in museums, somewhat similar to those who’d prefer that all grizzlies, cougars and wolves be confined in zoos. But then it was a rainy, somewhat melancholy week with the prospect of entering the “real world” after graduation quite daunting. Many of my friends and acquaintances were eager to join up for World War II which had barely begun by then. I ultimately lost two of these friends after the Normandy invasion. Within the week after graduation, rather than setting sail for battles in France or the Orient, I was ensconced in a blistering hot Quonset hut on a hill in southern New Mexico working for a mining company that didn’t appear to have a much better sense of ethics than the Germans and Japanese. Earlier in this century, during the infamous Bisbee strike, this company had loaded hundreds of workers at gunpoint onto a train, only to drop them off in a distant desert without food or water.
* * *
Just before dark I gave up on the prospect of reaching home that night. It was only a matter of two to three hours more, a trifling amount of time, but the fatigue was cumulative after the night in Limon. My sleeping habits have never really existed. Prolonged sleep is a gift I’ve never had much experience with, though I can nap quite pleasantly even on a horse.
I checked into a motel in the rather charmless town of Willcox which I had always liked for indefinable reasons, then drove over to a roadhouse with the unlikely name of The Regal and ate far too many beef ribs. I’m normally a finicky eater but beef ribs were a piece of sentimentality, a holdover from my youth when I’d cook them for John Wesley at our camping spot way back beside the pond and marsh. One of my father’s sidelines at the time was raising the primest of prime beef which was sent off to a few carriage-trade restaurants in Omaha and Chicago. We ate vast quantities of the beef except for Neena who quite early on had her true appetite killed by alcohol, and Lundquist who was squeamish about eating cattle he felt he knew personally. Lundquist had a presumed level of communication with the creature world that would be the envy of any mystic. I never really doubted it despite my pragmatic training that ran counter to his perceptions.
I had been at this restaurant so often that I could speak easily with the waitresses about their day-care problems. My favorite was a rather sallow young woman from West Virginia who had a flat lilt to her accent and those peculiar Appalachian cheekbones. I had modestly helped her escape a husband who beat her regularly and had financed
her resettlement up in Flagstaff. I hadn’t slept with her though I had very much wanted to, but then with all her problems at the time it would only have been an act of kindness on her part. Her husband managed to track me down on the phone and threatened me but I asked him, “Why would you want to change your life that much for the worse?” and he never got in touch again. I’m not sure what I meant but I was prepared to go the route whatever it was.
I have been strongly questioned and teased by a number of women for such errands of mercy under the notion that all motives are suspicious and questionable. One of them, given to psychologisms, said I’m trying to save my mother over and over. She is an otherwise likable woman and doesn’t try to shield her own foibles. My only reply is that if the result is good the motive is quite meaningless and utterly separated from my difficulties of so long ago. Compared to many men I know I don’t add up to a garden-variety Lothario.