The English Major

by Jim Harrison

  We went out back and Bert began yelling and cussing. A neighbor’s cows, mixed-breed Brahmas, had gotten through his fence and were standing in his tiny pond. There were several of them and their feet must have torn up the pond liner because the water was draining away and the fish that Bert said were tilapia were flopping around. Bert beat the cows with his cane and they ran for the back fence breaking it down. Sandra fetched a bushel basket and she and I waded in to gather the fish but we got stuck to mid-thigh in the mud. Bert went for his garden tractor and a rope and pulled us out. “There goes my fish crop,” he said.

  We walked back to the house and Sandra said her first sentence, “The fish will stink.” Bert hosed us off and within fifteen minutes the first chihuahuan ravens began to arrive. We sat under a tattered awning drinking a cold beer and within an hour I counted seventy-three ravens out at the pond gobbling fish and screeching at each other.

  Bert showed me to a spare room that had an old air conditioner in the window buzzing away. I was relieved because the thermometer on the porch said it was a hundred ten degrees. It was siesta time but I had a hard time napping because of the strangeness of it all. I leafed through a picture book on cacti and watched the ravens out the window. They’re a bit smaller than our northern ravens but behave the same. It occurred to me that Bert as an independent scientist rather than an academic one lived and acted more like an artist or poet. Such people came up to northern Michigan in the summer and the anthropologists and botanists were often as whacky as painters. While we were watching the ravens and drinking beer I complained about the heat. Bert sent Sandra for a map and he showed me a mountainous area near the Mexican border about seventy miles away that would be ten degrees cooler and I decided to head that way in the morning. I asked him why he was using a cane and he said that last year after he came home from our class reunion he had gotten nailed by a diamond-back out by his mailbox. He had his own anti-venom in the refrigerator but still lost a lot of flesh and the strength of his left calf.

  I slept until early evening and when I came downstairs Bert heated up some coffee and set a bottle of tequila on the kitchen table. Bert was always handy at the stove and was stirring a pot of menudo which is tripe stew. We heard a pistol shot from upstairs and Bert yelled, “Sandra cut that shit out,” adding to me Sandra was likely shooting at coyotes that were eating the rest of the fish out by the pond. He told me that Sandra was from Uvalde, Texas, and was a bit gun happy. He had rescued her during a drug seizure outside the Congress Hotel in Tucson a few months ago and she showed no signs of leaving.

  At dark Bert set up a spotlight and we sat on the porch watching the snakes glide around chasing rodentia. Sandra walked among the snakes but they were bent on rodentia and ignored her.

  “You can’t keep a dog or cat alive around here but Sandra thrives,” Bert said, pushing a snake away from the bottom step of the porch with his cane. The snake struck the cane with a thunk and broke off one of its fangs, then crawled away with perhaps a toothache. I picked up the fang for a keepsake and when I turned I was alarmed to see Sandra take off all her clothes and flop into the hammock. She said, “Tequila,” and Bert nodded so I went into the kitchen for the bottle, taking a gulp to calm my nerves. When I brought the bottle I looked away in modesty.

  “A woman in a hammock is always faithful,” said Bert. “It’s a question of physics not morals.”

  The spot and porch light were catching Bert’s face just so making him look older than he was, though I supposed this was partly due to nearly forty years of wandering in the desert. He had taught at the local university for a while but then had been “liberated” into being a private scholar by inheritance. It was then that I imagined that I probably also looked old to him. When you spend most of your lifetime outdoors you’re not likely to look as smooth as a television newsman. A few years back Viv had bought me some skin care products but I told her I couldn’t go to the diner for lunch smelling like a whorehouse. It was hard for me to admit that I had started my little fandango with Babe at the diner well before Vivian’s downfall at the class reunion. One day after Babe’s lunch shift she asked me to fix her sink trap in her apartment upstairs. It took a full hour and I was there on the kitchen floor yelling out that she shouldn’t pour bacon grease in her sink when I turned around and there was Babe in a silly purple nightgown. She put a furry slippered foot on my shoulder and said, “Let’s go for it, big boy.” All those years of fidelity went out the window. My friend Ad said that marital fidelity is part of the social contract and that the human mind is a cesspool of errant sexuality. Any Lutheran knows what Jimmy Carter meant when he talked about “lust in the heart.’ Of course civilization would be destroyed if everyone simply followed the smallest cues of lust but then it’s also hard to imagine that the God of Abraham and Isaac is keeping a weather eye on our genitals.

  It was getting late. I helped Bert set up a fine meshed framed screen along the bottom steps of the porch so when he got up at night he wouldn’t be surprised by a snake crawling up the porch steps. Sandra had been singing nonsense syllables in the fashion of my brother Teddy, then laughing, then drinking and crying. Finally she slept and Bert sent me into his den to get a sheet off the cot. I covered her and had thoughts about the wondrous physiology of women.

  We tried to talk about Iraq but gave up with fatigue. Bert thought that nearly everyone in politics was a chiseler and I had had frequent bad thoughts about our boys being sent over there with bad equipment that doesn’t do what it’s designed to do. What good is armor if you end up in pieces? We were practically dozing in our seats, and then Bert lifted his pant leg to scratch his wizened calf. We agreed that most politicians were the rattlesnakes of the human race and then we said goodnight.

  ARIZONA III

  Here I was at dawn on the Mexican border near a little village, really only four houses, called Lochiel where there was an official customs crossing no longer in use. I shared the stupendous view of a broad valley surrounded by mountains with the rising sun which had a grander perspective but mine was plenty good. Nothing can compete with the sun, or so we were told by my second grade teacher who liked to scare the shit out of us to keep classroom control. She said that one day, perhaps soon, the sun would blow up and the flames would devour the earth. We didn’t always get top grade teachers at our little country school.

  I stood there by the car wondering whether or not to take along the war surplus canteen Bert had given me. I had the intuition that I should carry the canteen but then I had never had an accurate intuition. Bert had wakened me at 3 a.m. with coffee saying that it was time to get started. The upshot is that a true desert rat does his exploring in the early morning hours before the summer heat comes on. He was pretty giddy because there was a chance the monsoons would begin that afternoon. We sat in his den drinking a coffee and talking about the old days while watching the Weather Channel. He said he never slept for more than an hour at a time and that was why his sleeping cot was in the den next to all of his books. He walked me out to my car with a huge flashlight so I wouldn’t get bitten by a rattler. We saw a couple with big lumps in their tummies from swallowing rats.

  Meanwhile on the border my insides were tickled pink by gazing into a foreign country. I set off walking east along the border fence delighted with the strange bird calls and the sounds in my memory of the singing of the blind Mexican girl who was Bert’s first love. When she would do the “coocoocooroo” part of La Paloma Bert and I would shiver. I also remember that way back in college when I looked at the map of Mexico I was thrilled at the idea there was a close by country far from the banal torments of being an English major and where I wouldn’t have to spend the entirety of a beautiful October walk trying to read Edmund Spenser’s endless Faerie Queene.

  I was so excited by where I was that I walked too fast for an hour or so and when I slowed down my legs felt a bit wobbly. Act your age, I thought. In the distance, perhaps a half mile or so, I saw a dozen people scurrying along the edge o
f a beige mesa then descend into a wooded gully. They were doubtless migrants from the south looking for better wages. The floor of the valley was rolling grasslands but a little higher in elevation where I was walking there were patches of oak and juniper. I knew from my map work with Bert that the mountains to the east were called the Huachucas and though they looked close enough it was an illusion and I wouldn’t be able to reach them.

  After I had walked a full two hours I sat down under an oak for a breather. Two hours out and two hours back would about be my limit. It was half past eight in the morning and already getting warm. Sad to say after having one of the nicest cigarettes of my life I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until ten when it was really getting warm. I was parched but had left the canteen back in the car. O well. I was only fifteen feet from Mexico which was across a few strands of loose and rusty barbed wire. I crawled through the fence so I could say to myself I had been in Mexico. I stood up and did a little fandango, really a few polka steps, and slipped back under the fence into the United States easy as pie.

  I headed back west at a slow pace to conserve my waning strength, I should have had a proper breakfast, plus weeks of driving had weakened my legs. At my age you have to walk an hour every day to keep in tune. Suddenly a green and white Border Patrol SUV came over a hill and jounced toward me at top speed. I put my hands straight above my head in the universal sign of surrender. A uniformed young man jumped out of the vehicle, his holster unsnapped but he didn’t draw.

  “I was watching through binoculars. What were you doing back there?”

  “I was doing a little mid-morning dance.” I couldn’t think of what else to say. He didn’t seem sure of what his next move should be. He actually sighed.

  “You committed a felony by illegally entering Mexico and another felony by illegally entering the United States. I need to see your identification, sir.”

  “How am I supposed to know where Mexico is?” I asked, handing him my Michigan driver’s license.

  “Assholes take down the signs.” He turned back to his vehicle where his radio was squawking. He leaned into the car and talked into a microphone but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He tossed me my license and took off at top speed. He was already a quarter of a mile away before it occurred to me that I should have asked him for a drink of water.

  I walked another half hour until I fell dizzy and my legs made out of sponge. I would have paid top dollar for a sip of water. Now it was hotter than a two peckered goat and I sat under a juniper and wondered if I was going to make it. Cliff, I thought, you got your ass in a sling. All of those beers and tequila I drank with Bert were coming home to roost. I touched my tongue and it was dry as dust. I realized I had been hearing a distant sound from the gray mountains in the south in Mexico, sort of like artillery fire in a war movie but had been too worried about my thirst and weakness to dwell on the noise. Now it was louder and I swiveled my ass around the oak until I was staring at the mountains. They seemed to be getting bigger and I perceived through my blurred vision that there were dark clouds emerging that were the same color as the mountains, and also some enormous lightning strikes. The storm was still maybe fifteen miles to the south and I began to pray that it wouldn’t move in the wrong direction. Wherever else I looked the heat was shimmering above the ground so that the actuality of the landscape wavered. I began to doze but then sensed that something was looking at me. I opened my eyes a wee crack and there was a roadrunner about fifteen feet away giving me a goofy look-over. I had seen one behind Bert’s place but it was racing through the desert a hundred feet away. I felt lucky that this one was so close. I had read in bird books that the roadrunner was the largest member of the cuckoo family. Its name was one I would leave untouched in my project just as I would leave alone godwit, avocet, and phalarope. It would no longer be “Wilson’s phalarope” because birds shouldn’t suffer the indignity of being named after people. I wanted to say hello to the roadrunner but I didn’t want to scare him or her and anyway my mouth was too dry to talk. The bird approached within two yards of my outstretched feet and it occurred to me that she might think I’m dead. I had decided she was a female. Absurdly enough I remembered that I had read about a one ton bird that lived far back in pre-history. That would be about the weight of an old style Volkswagen. It would have been nice to see one. It was said that the bird couldn’t fly. I imagined chasing one over hill and dale like trying to catch a draft horse, or perhaps it would chase me. I thought that maybe this roadrunner had come across a Mexican dead of thirst. Bert had said hundreds of them died of thirst in the summer heat and on my hike I noticed many empty plastic cartons they used to carry water. Now the roadrunner crouched down like a nesting chicken which made me sure that it thought I was dead.

  I fell asleep and awoke in an hour by my pocket watch to ripping thunder. It crackled and tore through the sky about a mile south of me and there were lightning bolts in the black sky that looked like maps of river systems with splintery little creeks coming out from the main bolts. It was preposterously beautiful in contrast to a nightmare I had just had about Vivian and her friends having one of their canasta parties where they would sing along to very loud Broadway songs. It was Karaoke straight from hell. I’d go out to my shed workshop with Lola and turn on the radio.

  Suddenly I saw sheets of rain headed toward me and my brain yelled “Praise God.” The rain hit me as if I had been slapped by a wet towel. I opened my mouth wide like a bullbat does for insects. I made a cup of my hands and licked at the gathering water and then took off my shoes so that they would catch water which they quickly did in the cloudburst which was so strong I had to close my eyes. The temperature dropped from well over a hundred to the cool-ish seventies. I gulped at my bad tasting shoe water and then headed west toward the car with my head down but then I could follow the fence. After about a half hour the storm passed, and the sun came out, but I could see another was headed my way from the southwest. My shirt was barely dry across my back when I could see my car in the distance. Never had a car looked beautiful to me but it did now. The world had become too vivid and I decided that rain was the best smelling thing on earth.

  It was twenty miles or so north to the village of Patagonia where I had turned off the highway before dawn but it took well over an hour to get there. I put the Tahoe in low range 4WD and moved along the muddy road barely making it over the steep hill out of the valley, and then there was enough gravel so I could get better traction.

  When I reached Patagonia I went into a Mexican restaurant and drank a lemonade and two iced teas. The water in the canteen I had left in the car had become hot from sitting there but it had been far better than nothing. My drying clothes were crispy from the sweat from my body. The big waitress had said, “You look like shit,” and laughed. At that moment I knew I had truly survived my stupidity because she looked pretty sexy. I ate two full orders of enchiladas and then checked into the motel across the street. There was a wide grassy area in the middle of town and the motel clerk told me it was where they used to pen cattle to ship by railroad. Cowboys drove thousands of cattle over the mountains from the valley where I had walked that morning.

  I had a three hour nap and when I awoke and took a shower it seemed I had never felt better in my life. I went down to the bar in the downstairs of the motel and had a cup of coffee, and then a couple of drinks with four fellows about my age who were talking about how hard it was to live in short funded retirement. I went out to the car and got my road atlas and they showed me some nifty places to see in New Mexico. Some young people came in the bar and played the jukebox too loud so we walked down the twilit street to another tavern called The Wagon Wheel. My companions were wrangling about birds, more especially the bullbats that were sweeping around above us. Some places they are called nightjars and down here a few locals call them “goat-suckers” as they are thought to steal milk from goats. One of my companions who described himself as a “failed writer” told me that in Kentucky authorities h
ad found in the journal of a schizophrenic who had escaped an asylum the following quote, “Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass.” This dumbfounded me and I hit the sack at ten a little groggy thinking about the quote.

  NEW MEXICO

  I left Patagonia at dawn with a glad heart after the same wretched cup of motel room coffee that had been following me around the country. Coffee requires coffee in it. I was just cresting the hill on the road to Sonoita, blinking my eyes at the wonder of the rising sun, when I swerved to avoid a run-over dog on the road. My heart sped up as I slowed down and then backed up on the shoulder to drag the dog off into a ditch. I’ve done this for road kill for years not wanting them to end their existence squashed on the cement or blacktop. I got out only to discover it was a young coyote with his back twisted mortally askew. His eyes barely flickered so I stepped down hard on his neck to send him into the next world just as I would wish to be helped along if I were in that shape. Probably because of childhood books I’ve always thought of other creatures as our brothers and sisters. When Lola died the sobs that emerged from behind my sternum expelled themselves properly as a bark. My friend Ad who has always had a half-dozen dog pound mutts running around his house said that dogs and young children always die with a quizzical glance. Being a doctor he should know.

  I stopped in Tombstone, the scene of gunfighter mayhem, for breakfast. Given the right tools men will always murder each other. There was a young, alternative life style couple seated at the table next to me sniping at each other as they finished their cereal. The young man wore a blue-fringed leather shirt and had a gold ring in his nose. The girl was a little mousey in her shorts and a t-shirt that chastely read, “Fuck Republicans.”