The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

  We had a fine time on the long road home and as a joke I took out my steno pad to record any birds Nelse might see at sixty miles an hour or over.

  60. The sound of my horse’s hooves in thick grass

  61. seeing a fish underwater while swimming

  62. sound of horses eating oats, the crunch

  J.M. said she wanted to teach because nearly everyone she had met in her life was dumb, a direct enough motive. Nelse said primates in general only learned enough to feed themselves which irritated J.M. and she asked him to go a whole month without using the word “primate.” I said that one of my favorite authors, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, wouldn’t mind being called a primate but then in addition, he was also García Márquez. “The same with Mozart!” J.M. shrieked. Nelse in defense said that he had never implied that anthropology was the “be all end all” of human life to which J.M. whispered, “Bullshit.” She shoved in a Carlos Montoya tape which seemed to suit the landscape between Almeria and Brewster.

  There was a comic episode when we passed through our county seat. I was appalled to see that my very old Subaru was still on the car lot of the dealership where we had traded it in on the new pickup. My beloved car looked lonely behind rows of spiffier models so we stopped and I bought it back. I was even offended at the low price though the speedometer had turned over once so that the total mileage was one hundred and seventy thousand, and there was some corrosion from Santa Monica’s salt-air mists. I don’t think this was reverse snobbism but a simple emotional attachment. I had once overheard our high school coach refer to me as a “rich bitch” but this was the same man who had snuck into the girls’ locker room when I was alone and demanded to see me naked. I still occasionally dealt with the ethical question of whether I should have tattled on him, which I didn’t, but then I knew his wife and kids who were nice if not overly humble under the domination of this dickhead bully.

  I felt rejuvenated driving the old car back home as if I could drive far enough into the past to be fully well again, perhaps find a new job and a new lover and we would carry each other nimbly into our old age. The latter fantasy quickly became beyond my powers of imagination but not the idea that I might retrace my path to, say, last summer when my life had reached fruition. This would include, of course, going to the doctor when I felt odd in early December when my disease was likely still at “Stage I” and after surgery I might reasonably expect to live five more years and perhaps have a grandchild or two. I suppose these collective idiocies were comprehensible and it was hard to let them go but then I saw Nelse and J.M. in the rear-view mirror and returned to the present, possibly a suspicious notion in itself.

  I already knew that Ruth would be at Naomi’s and rather perfectly Ruth, Naomi and Paul were sitting on the broad front porch. She fairly ran out to greet me as she had done when I came home from the university and she was still in high school. She embraced me lightly as if I were fragile which I was. I asked about her current gentleman friend and she said she had had to “let him go.” She was still hearing music she couldn’t find on earth. I looked toward the porch where Naomi and Paul were standing and thought they looked like my parents would have if my father were still alive. This gave me a good feeling and I waved.

  When we were all in the living room I said that I had no intention of dragging all of this out for more than a day or two and asked Naomi if she could also ask Lundquist for dinner. I could see by looking at them directly that this would be the hardest part. There’s really no way to minimalize your love for others and you wished terribly you could stay with them so they wouldn’t be hurt. I asked Ruth to play the piano to dispel my nervousness. Naomi brought me a glass of lemonade and everyone wept while Ruth played some Chopin I had especially liked, and then Ruth took me upstairs to my old room where we talked awhile with James Dean staring at us from his poster.

  After a disturbing nap where in a dream I actually saw all the horses and dogs of my life, I slipped out of the house, waved to Naomi, Paul and Ruth who were standing out in the garden, then drove over to the old place. The pick-up was parked out by the bunkhouse and I didn’t want to disturb Nelse and J.M. in whatever they were up to so I went into the house to do a few things, stopping in the pump and storage shed to cut an ample piece from a webbed hammock which was harder to do than I thought with simple scissors. When I passed through the kitchen Frieda was sitting there at the breakfast table staring at the rose-patterned tablecloth which I didn’t care for but she thought quite beautiful. Her face was swollen with crying so I gave her a pat and sat down for a cup of coffee and a chocolate pie with three inches of whipped cream on top which she had made for Nelse who had the metabolism she had always been waiting for. Frieda lacked her father’s profound religiosity and stared at me, saying, “It’s not goddamned fair.” That was that except for the ticking of the clock and a meadowlark out beyond the grape arbor.

  Upstairs I packed a small suitcase with hot-weather clothes and a ten-pound smooth stone that I had retrieved from the bottom of the Niobrara and had always used as a doorstop. I opened my little safe that Grandfather had kept behind books in the den with its elaborate combination, one-two-three, and took out a fair-sized thicket of cash, but also looked long and hard at a photo of his great love, Adelle, Neena’s older sister. I then left the safe open to avoid problems for others.

  I looked out the side window and saw that Nelse and J.M. were now in the barnyard talking to Lundquist so I started out to join them. Halfway down I stopped in the stairwell where there was a small Davis landscape and pondered again this young man’s falling off the cliff near Durango in Mexico. My semi-quarrel with Paul about the memoir came about when Paul wouldn’t quite accept the fact that Grandfather’s loss of both Davis and Adelle had left a violently deep hole in his life. When I first read about Davis my mind errantly came up with the joke about life being short but very wide. Out the back door I stopped again seeing J.M. sitting in the warm dust with her back against a fence post of the corral trying to pet both Roscoe and Ted at the same time, but Roscoe wouldn’t accept democracy and kept snarling at the much larger Ted who cowered. I seemed to be in a half dozen parallel universes at once with a physical ache that the pills couldn’t dispel so that there was a universe of pain, plus an image of Davis drowning a toothache with tequila, climbing up the mountain and falling off, plus the coldly abstract thought that maybe all of these questions I pose to myself about the meaning of life are simply none of my business, that God or whoever is a fascist as big as Betelgeuse and mortals aren’t entitled to raise questions except for a few small gods disguised as humans. The rest of us can only bark out our ultimate puzzlement like half-human dogs. I liked dogs enough so that this concept didn’t strike me as all bad.

  Nelse helped me saddle up Rose while Lundquist gave a curious lecture to Roscoe about being more pleasant to Ted, but then Roscoe was such a hard case he was beyond even Lundquist’s reach at the moment, staring down at the earth as if he wished to bite it. I sensed that Nelse had doubts about my going for a ride but limited himself to a single, “Are you sure?” Ted didn’t want to go along because, Lundquist explained, Rose had nipped Ted when he tried to steal a bite of her oats.

  Nelse’s doubts were justified. I wanted to show I was right in getting on Rose so I made it through the first dense shelterbelt but halfway there both mind and body were crackling with a blue light of pain. I dropped the reins short of the big rock pile, and slid off, falling backward on my butt. Rose acted appalled at first, then began grazing, ignoring the human foibles of her rider flopped there in the grass. This certainly was a hundred-percent reconfirmation of my plan. It was clearly impossible for me to live on an earth where I couldn’t ride a horse. I lay there until my pain subsided enough for me to lead Rose back to the corral and barn. I was thankful that no one was there to witness my embarrassment.

  I went into the house, took two of the new whopper pills and called Naomi but no one answered. When I went back outside Ruth drove into the yar
d, not seeing me yet because I had gone out the front door and I was standing by the tire swing. I walked over and startled her because she was listening to the end of a Stravinsky tape and couldn’t hear my footsteps. “Oh, it’s you,” she said and we laughed, then drove down the narrow gravel road to the Niobrara. We sat there on a grassy bank for nearly an hour with her arm around my shoulder, saying virtually nothing because the sound of the red-winged blackbirds in a nearby marsh and the sound of the river flowing were quite enough.

  Our good-bye dinner was nearly unendurable but I knew it would be. Everyone was at their gracious best but there was really nowhere to go with any concept of behavior. They were all quite pale with effort and I kept hearing my heart thump as you occasionally do when you suddenly turn over in bed, and then quickly move again to avoid the sound. Only I couldn’t move beyond pouring myself some wine and lifting a fork. I had brought over several of Grandfather’s best bottles but their contents were scarcely touched except by Lundquist who normally thought of wine as a papist plot. He sat on my left and Naomi on my right and I held his hand under the table when he began shaking.

  When we finished our scant eating I delivered a little speech I hadn’t really prepared because my mind was no longer able to focus itself for a sufficient time. This is what I feared most, that the admixture of pain, drugs and sheer mammalian desperation would reduce my mind to a gape-mouthed howl. It was time to go and that was that so I told them my plan and the reasoning behind it. I said why should I suffer and make others suffer watching me? With my plan I was being logical rather than brave. I had received my sentence but I was still capable of dying on my own terms which I now viewed as the blessing left to me other than their presence here and that we were all able to embrace our farewells. I asked Nelse and J.M. to spend the night at Naomi’s because if I saw any of them again I might fall apart. I finished by saying that I’d send back my little journal in which all of this is written or at least write a good-bye letter from where I was going. I went around the table and kissed them good-bye and it was as if we all had palsy.

  I kissed my mother and my son for the last time and tried to memorize the feel of their skin on my lips. I left then without looking back, driving down the gravel road toward home with blurred eyes but a lighter heart. I got Ted in from his kennel and curled up with him on the grand leather couch in Grandfather’s den. I felt a bit brain-dead from grief and didn’t like it that way so I leafed through a long book on Winslow Homer before I slept.

  I was up at first light, fed Ted a hearty meal and was off. When I reached the corner where our gravel road met the county blacktop Nelse stepped out from a grove of trees and crossed the ditch. We kissed good-bye again through my open car window.

  St. Louis, Missouri—May? I don’t know the date.

  Who cares?

  I made it here after sixteen hours of not very skillful driving. The illusion that I could drive all the way to the Florida Keys now amuses me at midnight. It was pointlessly willful and my mind drifts enough so that I’m a bit of a menace if I don’t rest every two hours or so. The Subaru has also lost some of its compression, perhaps by sitting around, so that when I floor the gas pedal the car still has difficulty reaching sixty. I am in a ghastly motel near the airport, the kind that Nelse professes to hate. It is warm and muggy so I turned on the air conditioner and when I awoke in the middle of the night I turned on the television to make sure the world was still there though this is scarcely bona fide evidence. It is dawn now and time to get myself over to the airport. I will leave the keys in the car and hope some unfortunate soul swipes the car. I’ll put a little money in the glove compartment as a reward.

  Lower Sugar Loaf Key, a nameless day and

  date in my life’s history!

  I am at a pleasant lodge. I love this place. Too bad I don’t feel well enough to stay longer even though it’s dreadfully hot and humid. I was feeling captious when I checked in late in the afternoon and paid for two weeks in advance. I drove around for a little while after I washed up but on Big Pine Key I couldn’t find the little encampment on the tidal creek where Grace and Bobby Pindar lived in a shack and Duane in an old Airstream, and the makeshift tiny corral in back where the buckskin stayed. The horse had looked fairly good at age eighteen though missing a hoof. It loved to swim in the creek. But I couldn’t find the place and stopped at a diner out on the highway after leaving the general area where I knew it had been, which now looked like a subdivision in Lincoln if you turned away from the water. In the diner an old commercial fisherman told me the tidal creek had been diverted into a dredged canal for the subdivision and Bobby and Grace Pindar had long since moved over to Louisiana.

  That evening I got an envelope from the desk to mail this journal back home. Earlier, when I had returned from Big Pine, I stopped at a marina near the lodge but it was six and they were getting ready to close. A young, corpulent gentleman of at least part-Cuban descent asked me to come back in the morning after he had thought over my request which was for a small seaworthy boat with a reliable engine, new or used, to puddle around in for a few weeks. I also bought a navigational chart of the immediate area. There was one on the wall in the lobby of the lodge but I needed to study it. On the way back I noted a few boats passing back and forth under the highway bridge near the lodge, and up in my room I was excited to see that Bow Channel that led out toward American Shoals on the Atlantic side of the highway was quite close. This was a stroke of luck because the authorities had figured, and a few witnesses had corroborated, that Duane had ridden the horse on the road’s shoulder from Big Pine down toward Lower Sugar Loaf, rather than simply in the creek on the swift outgoing tide. Those who don’t really know horses are ignorant of what massive strength their musculature offers.

  When I got out of the shower I put my large stone in the hammock webbing and knotted it, then ran an old concho belt Paul had given me through the webbing and secured the belt around my waist. It would work. This was an undressed rehearsal! I was bold enough to look at a full-length mirror for the first time in a month or so and was idiotically surprised at how much weight I had lost. At this rate I would waste away to nothing in a few months. All I was doing was beating my body to the punch. I took off my suicide equipment, put on a robe and went out on the balcony to watch a glorious sunset over the dozens of mangrove keys to the east. There were flocks of birds flying everywhere and I thought that Naomi absolutely must visit this place. I went down and had a hamburger at the bar not wanting to sit in the brightly lit dining room. The evening news was on the television, portraying a world which I had doubts about. Was anyone familiar with this pictured world of lightning-fast tic-tac-toe over the skin of earth? The hamburger was good though I could manage only a few bites and the bar was too dark to read the only book I had brought along, an anthology of American poetry about which I now had doubts in terms of a traveling companion. I was dealing with quite enough consciousness of my own, and anyone else’s at this point seemed senselessly invasive.

  * * *

  I was up and about early, bought my little boat in trim shape with a twenty-horse engine, a notion that has always bothered me. How could this sorry little engine be as powerful as twenty horses? I paid what was probably an unfair price, far above what a sensible man would have forked over, but then cash was scarcely a problem. A pleasant young man, a Cuban in a mechanic’s outfit, took me for a trial run and his instructions were simple enough. He sternly warned me not to go out when the waves were over two feet but luckily the seas were very calm. The engine was on idle and we were drifting with the tide as he gave me instructions. I thought I saw a large shark but he said it was a tarpon. I was absurdly pleased when he flirted. I offered him a hundred-dollar bill to show me Bow Channel, saying that I used to fish out there. He refused the money saying that it wasn’t very far away but I leaned over and stuffed it in his pocket. It was very hot while we were drifting but when we sped out toward the channel the breeze was delicious. We changed places at the
channel entrance and he was my passenger on the way back to the marina where I dropped him off, then proceeded toward the bridge, went under it and tied off at the lodge’s dock.

  Up in the room I nervously addressed the envelope home, sticking all my money in the back of the journal, saving out only enough for postage. I was still somewhat exhilarated by the boat ride but dreaded the long wait until evening. But then why wait until evening? Duane’s timing was surely accidental. He had to wait until I was asleep and then also he could find his way in the dark. The ocean would feel much better in the brilliantly hot noonday sun. I’ve quickly packed my beach bag with my Niobrara stone, the piece of hammock, and the belt I will take with me on my long voyage downward. Nothing else but my body and the fresh pill I had just taken. I send a kiss and a good-bye to those I love so much. Naomi, Paul, Lundquist, Nelse and J.M. I hope I am going to join my lover.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For research help, I’d like to especially thank John Carter, Jack Turner, Lawrence Sullivan and John Harrison, also Charles Cleland, Roger Welsch, Bill Quigley, Vergil Noble and Matt and Adrian Kapsner.