by Jim Harrison
Marybelle was dozing with her feet up on the dashboard. The Taurus air conditioner was on the blink and with her legs up they caught the window breeze. “Cliff,” I said to myself, “You be careful. This isn’t Heidi or Mary Poppins sitting next to you.” Marybelle had mentioned that she had phases when she was a tad “bipolar,” one of those terms I had seen in the modern living pages of the Detroit Free Press though it only made me think of the Arctic and the Antarctic. I wasn’t too worried because she said she carried medications. Vivian had told me the year before our split-up that if I developed some mental problems I might be a more interesting person. My mom used to say that dad had mental problems but before she died she admitted that dad just had too much life in him for one body.
NEBRASKA
There is the idea that I might dip Marybelle’s cell phone in the toilet or a full sink while she’s asleep. It has me fit to be tied. We spent a fine day driving south from Lemmon all the way to Nebraska with a specific kind of grandeur to the landscape, truly the Great Plains, a subtlety to rolling hills and rocky escarpments that doesn’t suit people like Marybelle who want snow capped postcard mountains. On the Standing Rock Indian Reservation I wandered off the main route and saw three Indian boys riding hell bent bareback heading off cows near Thunder Butte. It was breathtaking, sort of an old timey image of days gone by. This was a wonderful world without the eyesores of ski resorts or golf courses. When you’ve spent your lifetime teaching and farming up in northwest Michigan, a high-end summer and winter resort area, it can wear you out watching people have fun at top speed. Hardly anyone rows a boat anymore. It’s big motorboats in the summer and snowmobiles in the winter, the noise of which used to drive Lola daft, not to speak of me.
Meanwhile rather than the landscape Marybelle was staring at her cell phone to see if enough power for a signal might arise. She finally picked up reception when we crossed Interstate 80 near Kadoka and consequently had to sit there for an hour. She could tell I was becoming irritated when I walked off toward a diner to have a piece of mid-afternoon pie and coffee. She claimed she has some “issues” to resolve with her Minneapolis friend. At the diner I got to wondering about cell phones and also Vivian’s email binges with her mother in Carefree, Arizona, and also our son Robert in California with whom she daily exchanged whatever. I was amazed to discover that they also could send photos over the computer. Robert had sent one of he and his boyfriend who had gone to a party dressed up as ostriches. This was the boy who liked to hoe the garden with me and even enjoyed pan fishing though I had to bait his hook because he couldn’t deal with earthworms. I was a little irked because I had promised to call Robert who would inevitably give me news of Vivian. My thoughts were interrupted by a comely waitress standing on a stool to fill an old time coffee urn. My dad had been on the bum out west for a year right after World War II and told me that on the road he had favored waitresses because he was always hungry and waitresses smelled like beefsteak. He was part of our armed forces that liberated Paris and he said when he got back on our shores he hadn’t eaten a good beefsteak in two years. Ever after he was partial to beefsteak and could eat two pounds of cheap round at a sitting. He also sprayed Tabasco on about everything except dessert and mother said this was because he chewed tobacco (Redman) and needed the hot pepper bite to taste anything.
When I got back to the car I paused at the tailgate because Marybelle was still on the phone and heard something to the effect that perhaps she was orgasmic with me because she was subconsciously resolving issues with her father with whom she still had a ruinous relationship.
I thought this one over while feeling a twinge in my knees from our dawn workout. We woke early because we were both asleep by nine. Marybelle came out of the shower at first light in the lightest pale blue summer robe covered with tiny red roses. She pulled on fresh undies and her bare butt under that robe was akin to touching an electric fence. I murmured a question about how she kept in such fine shape and she answered “my Pilates tape.” I barely had a sip of our motel coffee before she sent me off to the office to get a tape machine to hitch to the TV. The google-eyed night clerk joked that it was “a little early for porn” to which I didn’t respond. Within minutes I was trying to keep up with Marybelle who was making violent movements in unison to a black man and a room full of ladies in L.A. It was too fast for me and when I sat down Marybelle teased that she thought farmers were strong. I lifted her up on my shoulders and in the mirror the top half of her body was cut off and my stiff wanger was sticking out of my briefs. Her head tapped the ceiling light fixture and my chin took quite a pounding on the bed. When I took a shower I found myself humming the Christmas carol with the line “while shepherds watched their flocks by night” and remembered the Christmas morning of his eighteenth year when Robert told us he was gay but then we had already guessed. There were tears and embraces.
I’m rarely pissed off but became so when we entered Nebraska and took a look at the Niobrara River Valley south of Merriman. Nebraska appeared as a dreamland and I saw a small farmstead near the river that made my mouth dry and my heart begin to ache at the swindle I had experienced. My mother-in-law always said that I was due 25% on the eventual farm sale for working it all these years. How precisely this became 10% I’ll never know. My alcoholic doctor friend, Ad, asked me if I had got it in writing and I said no. I said that if you can’t trust your wife, who can you trust? In that he had had three wives and was courting a possible fourth he thought this was funny. When I sounded sad on the phone Robert had offered me his ten percent which I refused. He said that he and his “significant other,” sometimes called “lifetime partners” though there have been a number of them, had just bought a condo overlooking a place called the Presidio for more than a million bucks. I was stunned. I could imagine a farm being worth that much but not an apartment stacked on top of other apartments. My idea was to get a little retirement farm but I couldn’t do that on a grub stake of a hundred grand except maybe in the Upper Peninsula where last deer season I had looked at a 40 acre farm with a small house and barn for forty grand. I mean I needed something leftover to live on.
When we reached Valentine and the Rain Motel (free fly swatter) I called Robert who was busy on two other lines so our confab was brief.
“Dad, dad, dad, DAD, mom thinks Fred is CHEATING on her and he already WANTS to borrow some MONEY.”
I thought this was funny and said so and Robert said I was full of sour GRAPES. He said he had also sent his hundred grand back to my bank account because he had recently made a bundle. When I got off the phone Marybelle stood with her cell phone poised against her left tit and asked if I was sorry that my only child was gay. I said nope, everyone is who they are.
I forgot to say that I tossed the yellow South Dakota jigsaw piece off the bridge into the Niobrara. Nebraska is the Cornhusker State, the western meadowlark the state bird (the same as North Dakota!), goldenrod, considered a noxious weed in northern Michigan, is the flower, and the ordinary “equality before the law” is the motto. Of course this was never quite true any place. Before we turned south in Martin, S.D., there was an ominous road sign for Wounded Knee. One year I tried to teach my seniors “Crazy Horse” by Mari Sandoz. Even the dullest, uneducable student can get cranked up about injustice. The hardest item was that there were two mixed blood Chippewas (Anishinabe) in the class who were embarrassed about discussions of injustice toward Indians but even they laughed when our star quarterback bellowed at them, “You should have shot us when we got off the boat!”
I was sitting on the Taurus tailgate listening to the muffled chatter of Marybelle through the screen door of our motel room when I thought, “Fuck it, I’m going downtown” just as I had as a boy. I thought, “She does her thinking out loud,” about Marybelle, maybe a new development in our culture just as twenty-five years ago when I quit teaching I could see the onslaught of the new culture where everything including education had to be fun or amusing.
Marybelle had had
her Minneapolis friend look up a food website which told us that in Valentine a place call The Peppermill was the place to eat. I wrote out a note to say where I’d be and stuck it in the door catching a glimpse of Marybelle on the bed chattering with a hand on her crotch itching or something else. During an antic moment in the middle of the night I had said, “Fee, fi, fo, fum, who is sitting on my head?”
On the walk over to The Peppermill I speculated on how much more of Marybelle I could take. A kind of free floating fatigue was setting in that recaptured my last year of teaching twenty-five years ago. It was a year from hell with a new principal fresh out of Central Michigan University wearing a PhD. like a lei. She had a relentless smile but was mean as an African bee. She was a virtual evangelist for the new gospel that every young person is “creative” and immediately sensed that I was a non-believer. As a mediocre student and teacher of literature I had seen no evidence of this creative streak in students. I nicknamed the woman Snog for the peculiar snort at the end of her false laughter. The nickname got around and she was enraged when she heard of it, accurately suspecting me. She was top heavy and walked as if she were pumping a bicycle up hill. After she addressed the PTA on human potential parents began to think their children might have a future beyond auto mechanics or getting knocked up and married. These were the same mothers who would say, “My Debbie doesn’t have time to read a whole book.” Anyway, when May rolled around I was so tired of teaching that my whole system went limp as a noodle and on the way to The Peppermill I had to speculate what kind of exhaustion was in the offing with Marybelle. She placed a high value on what she called her “spontaneity” and I had pretty much spent a lifetime of going to bed at ten and getting up at 5:30 a.m. even in the winter when you had to wait two hours for daylight. Acrobatic sex is fine in the middle of the night but ever since Morris, Minnesota, the morning greeted me with a stiff neck and heavy limbs. My friend Ad liked to joke about the frequency of heart attacks in older men having affairs with younger women but that didn’t slow him down. I figured that in a few days after I dropped her off in Bozeman I’d rent a cabin beside a river and only sleep and fish for a week and not incidentally allow my sore dick to heal.
NEBRASKA II
Grave considerations took place during my first drink at the Peppermill. Large ranchers and bona fide cowboys surrounded me, their hat brims stained with sweat, but I was oblivious. It had become apparent that Nebraska deserved two chapters in my trip journal. This of course would vitiate my sense of symmetry but there was an idea that my rage for order came from being an orchard man. When you’re raising cherry trees all of the trees are planted on a specific geometrical grid for efficiency in spraying weed killer and pesticides and for ease in picking. This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade) and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather. If they were out in the pasture Lola and I would stand there counting to make sure none had slipped through the fence. Feed our few chickens and the couple of pigs we kept for meat. Bring Vivian coffee and a sweet roll or donut at eight. Listen to her sing “Dat’s Amore” in the shower because she simply adored Dean Martin. “Boy, would I jump his bones,” she once said. Pruning cherry trees, ploughing, picking, spraying, fence repairs. Go to the IGA in Boyne City at 11 a.m. to pick up the mail (usually none) and the Detroit Free Press to read at lunch. A thirty minute snooze in my La-Z-Boy chair.
It was unpleasant to think about this schedule. I ordered another drink and looked at the cowboys and ranchers around me and figured they doubtless had similar routines. There was an urge to imitate Marybelle’s so called spontaneity and plumb give Nebraska two chapters. Where was she anyway? In bed on the cell phone? And it was obvious that some states deserved short shrift. During a second grade spelling bee I had spelled Rhode Island “Rode Island,” the audience laughed and I fled the stage in tears, thus I felt mean minded about that state. Georgia was also on my shit list because of a girl from Columbus, Georgia, I had dated as a college sophomore while Vivian was busy starving her goldfish over the basketball player who ignored her. The Georgia girl was out of place at Michigan State but she got a free ride because her army officer father taught ROTC. She was obsessed with football. We met in the obligatory Social Science class, a course without an apparent subject matter and within a week I was doing a lot of her school work. She reminded me of an almost over ripe peach and her soft mellifluous voice drove me batty though she wouldn’t go beyond innocent petting. I mean I wasn’t even allowed to suck her tits. I was enough of a horse trader to at least bargain for a look and when I wrote a mid-term paper for her I was treated to a nude interpretive dance on the throw rug in my rented room. She flopped and writhed with vulgar abandon but it was hands off.
Our relationship ended when she was put on social probation after being caught overnighting in a wing of a dorm reserved for football players. I was dumbstruck with jealousy that she would freely give her ripeness to these louts while denying sensitive me who had recently gotten an A+ for my term paper on Wordsworth’s “Prelude.”
Where the hell was Marybelle? I called the motel from a pay phone and got nothing, then quit my brain work and began chatting with two ranchers about cattle prices and the effect on the mad cow embargo on Canadian beef. We went on to the squirrelly Japanese once again shutting us down and the rancher by the name of Orville said a big freighter headed for Japan had to dump two hundred million worth of beef in the Mindanao Deep; the deepest place in the Pacific, and it was said that ten thousand sharks surrounded the ship gobbling choice beef. Orville had been drinking pretty hard and doubt colored the face of his listeners. These fellows reminded me of the old days, my father’s generation, when stories were told slowly and savored. Nowadays with short attention spans everyone rushes for the punch line.
Suddenly there was a shriek and a sob and we all swiveled in our chairs. It was Marybelle with a deputy holding her elbow. She flung herself weeping into my arms in her too short summer skirt and sleeveless blouse. “I found you!” she shrieked.
The upshot was that she had wandered out of the motel without seeing my note. She was talking on the cell phone to her “sister” in Minneapolis and oblivious to her surroundings. She had walked a long ways out the north end of Valentine then doubled back toward the east and by the time she hung up she had no idea where she was and also had forgotten the name of our motel. A kind old lady weeding her flowerbed had called the police and the cop eventually brought her to the Peppermill. With the courage offered by whiskey I had ordered a three pound porterhouse which turned out to be the finest steak of my long life. To be frank I was thrilled. Marybelle had several gin drinks and made a sandwich out of a dinner roll and a pile of my steak fat.
“I’ve always loved steak fat. We can work it off later,” she said with a lurid smirk. “There’s something about Nebraska that has me sexually wired.”
I thought this over dolefully. My porterhouse had a labial rose rareness and I thought about how things get confused with desire. Never had I felt so absent of sexual desire. It was likely time to fall back on the pill bottle of Viagras and Levitras Ad had given me with the warning, “Take one of these suckers and you’re in for a long haul.” I didn’t even want a short haul. Luckily I had some all purpose steroid ointment in my dope kit that should work for my bruised member. Mom used to say that one of the worst things that could happen to a person was answered prayers. Farm work allowed lots of free time for sexual fantasies or “pussy trances” as Ad called them. Vivian has subscribed to a movie rental company called Netflix and I had watched parts of many movies with her before my bedtime and in my mind’s eye while working I had behaved shamefully with Ashley Judd and Penelope Cru
z. Now that I had a woman on my hands nearly their equal I was ready to parachute her into darkest Africa. I noted while finishing my enormous porterhouse that when Marybelle flounced off to the toilet with an unnecessary and half-drunk wag to her ass the cowboys at the bar smirked then glanced at me with a mixture of envy and sympathy.
On the stroll home I began to think of our motel door as the gates of hell. Marybelle clung to me despite the hot evening then leaned against a street lamp leering at me with the naked face of female lust while singing “Turaluralura, that’s an Irish lullaby” for some reason. In our room toilet I felt sexless as a bowl of oatmeal and dropped one of my potency pills with a feeling that I was facing the gunfight at the OK corral. In the middle of the night she barged into the toilet while I was applying the not so soothing ointment to my weenie. “Your dick is a mess,” she sleepily whispered on the potty. I said that she had been in pretty close contact and she might have noticed before now and then I went back to bed in a huff.
When the stores opened in the morning I bought my first cell phone at Marybelle’s insistence so if she got lost again I’d be able to retrieve her. I also bought a small tent and two light summer sleeping bags because Marybelle thought it might be nice to camp out on the Niobrara River near Norden, the scene of her anthropologist husband’s graduate student dig during the first and only “golden” year of her marriage. Before we left town I leaned against the Taurus and called my son Robert in San Francisco.