Dalva

by Jim Harrison

  I had lain back on the rock pile like a desert father, fatigued by breakfast, walking, my almost portentous thoughts, with the jacket balled up for a pillow, and had my first dream ever about Indians, who (in the dream) were apparently buried under the rock pile with their spirits rising upward as invisible smoke. There was something moving under my chin and I awoke screaming, surrounded by snakes. I somehow propelled myself forward like a launching rocket, turning to see that the rock pile was covered by black snakes sunning themselves. There was a loud noise that turned out to be my yelling, which I managed to do while running backward. Son of a bitch, but I was so frightened I almost dumped in my pants! I am not by inclination a nature buff, and this experience cinched my dislike of its tooth-and-claw world. I stood there soothing my frantic heart—I am under medication for high blood pressure—thinking that, were I a well-equipped soldier, I would lob a grenade in the middle of the bastards, Indian ghosts and all.

  I set off for the sun, the direction of the house, at a sturdy pace, plunging through two more windbreak barriers before it occurred to me that the sun moves, or the earth moves, I had forgotten which, and I had lost my bearings. I came upon a creek and recalled that the aggressive geese of the morning were dithering along a creek, but was it the same one? This was becoming a problem that a dozen years of graduate school hadn’t prepared me for. My stomach was growling and my mouth was parched, but I doubted the purity of the creek water. The stomach growl meant unreliably that it might be noon, but this was a situation where the time of day wasn’t very helpful. I made an almost successful leap across the creek and discovered a faint trail, which I followed for several hundred yards: here and there were piles of scattered brown pellets the size of marbles, a mystery until I picked one up, smelled it, and deduced it was animal poop, and that the tiny sharp footprints were probably those of deer or goats. Goat tracks would lead me to a farm but deer tracks wouldn’t. There are deductive limits. I remembered from boyhood stories that there was moss on the north sides of trees, but the local trees had arranged their moss haphazardly. I stepped near a pheasant and was met by a bowel-shaking squawk. I knelt, discovering I had stepped on one of a dozen or so eggs she had laid. I mentally noted the location in case I should end up having to eat the eggs. The creek emptied into a larger creek and I became mired to my knees in the muddy bank for a few moments, losing one of the handmade brogans purchased in London years before. I loved these shoes and now I had only a shoe, so I stuck a fallen tree limb in the bank to mark the spot. My skin crawled when I remembered Dalva telling me how cows got fatally stuck in quicksand. A comforting plane passed far overhead, but between the plane and myself large birds, perhaps buzzards, were circling, without doubt waiting for me to lose my will to live. There was a visibly larger trail on the far side of the creek, so I plunged across, only to find that the water clarity was deceptive, the creek deep, and I had to swim. I gulped a little water, damning the bacterial consequences. I followed the creek downstream until I found a sandy, scrubby area at the edge of the woods I refused to enter, fearing either more woods or yet another damnable alfalfa field on the other side. I sat down on a pile of sand, noting the remnants of charred wood where some Indian must have built a fire. Just inside the thicket were large mounds covered with a tangle of vines, shrubs, and small trees. Hanging from a tree limb and attached to a thong was a bleached animal skull. I felt a helpless anger. This is 1986—June 6, to be exact—and this fucking place is disturbing me. I would have left immediately but the sandy area offered a little comfort and a glimmer of memory of myself as an infant in a sandbox and, later, amusing my daughter in a sandbox. I turned away from the white skull that swayed in the breeze, curled up, and took another nap.

  Rather than snakes, this time I awoke to church bells—oh, blessed Angelus! Actually the bells were a surrealistic kick in the balls. What were bells doing in this half-tilled wilderness? It appeared to be early evening, and as a backdrop to the bells there was an incessant whine of mosquitoes, many of which had fed on me during my sleep. My body was tight and sore from the day’s exertion but I felt curiously well rested (not surprising after circa five hours of outdoor naps). I would have given anything for a couple of fingers of Paddy whiskey and a pint of Guinness stout, which was my reward for a longish walk on Saint Stephen’s Green during my months in Dublin. Added to the thirst was the wildest hunger I have ever known. I’m a bit of a food snob, but the places my daughter dragged me off to when she was a child—Burger Chef, McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken—now seemed wonderful. I’d take her off to Golden Gate Park on Saturday with a bucket o’ chicken, some Pepsi, and the newspaper.

  I walked as fast as possible on one shoe toward the far-off tintinnabulation of the bells. When the bells paused for a few moments I desperately sped up in the direction of the echo’s source. I fairly popped through a row of trees, bruising my foot on a log. There in the distance, seemingly miles away, was a farmhouse from which the bell sound came. Now I was in a waist-high wheat field and I readily admit there were copious tears of relief in my eyes. The relief was leavened somewhat when I saw a group of a dozen horsemen bearing down on me from the left at top speed. Jesus Christ, I am to be hanged for trespass, I thought. They thundered to a halt in a circle around me, a mixture of mounted cowboys and farmers in bib overalls. One huge fellow jumped off his horse and lifted me as if a big feather to the back of another’s saddle. He said they all thought I had “got nailed by a rattler,” the idea of which filled me with nausea. No one had advised me there were rattlesnakes in the area.

  The upshot was that the farmhouse was Naomi’s and when I had stayed away so long she had assembled this ragtag posse to find me. There were additional men leaning against pickups and four-wheel-drive vehicles in her yard. Some were drinking beer. The big fellow lifted me off the horse and into the embrace of Naomi.

  “Beer,” I croaked, and I was handed a cold, opened can, which I quaffed in a single long draft, and was handed another. Frieda was there and asked—inappropriately, I thought—what had happened to the jacket she had given me. I felt called upon to deliver a speech of thanks to the crowd, but my throat was quavery, so Naomi filled in. Then she led me to the house, though I couldn’t help waving and bowing from the porch, which elicited a cheer.

  Naomi drew me a bath and fixed me a giant drink. Lying in the tub I imagined Dalva in the same tub as a girl, soaking off a day on horseback out on the range. This brought on a hard-on, which disappeared when I rehearsed my god-awful adventure, which I knew would bring Dalva a great deal of amusement, the bitch. In high school I had worked as a busboy at the local country club, which, in addition to the usual golf course, included a horse barn and an arena for equitation and an outdoor course for jumpers. I noted at the time that riding had a fine effect on the girls’ fannies in their riding habits, as if jouncing and bouncing on the saddles kneaded their bottoms into graceful proportions, made their thighs strong and supple. That was certainly true of Dalva. After so many lumpy, petulant college girls, she was a piece of almost unendurable good luck. She was so nonchalant and withdrawn about my efforts to impress her that it was a shock when she asked me to stay the night. The hard-on rearrives. It is curious, though, that her descriptions of her mother and grandfather’s farm were so modest, almost childish. I suspect this is because the way anyone grows up becomes quite ordinary to them, their senses adapted to a child’s-eye view of physical surroundings. I grew up in a cramped row house, lived in cramped dormitories and small rooms in America and foreign cities, married and lived in a tiny apartment, then moved on to a small duplex, to a dollhouse with two ten-by-twelve bedrooms. This bathroom is larger and better furnished than any living room I’ve belonged to, but, then, the bath and drink are too good for this to occasion a snit.

  Naomi rapped at the door and said that dinner would be ready in fifteen minutes. As I dried myself and put on a robe left for me I thought of my sorest point with Dalva, which was her effervescent streak of irrationality. Ac
ademic reality tends to be shared, consensual, perhaps a little closed, cloistered to what is thought of as the outside world. One pleasant evening on the balcony in Santa Monica she wondered at the extremely low incidence of cancer among schizophrenics. I said bullshit, but she found the documentation in a reliable book. This is the sort of thing that nags at the mind. To further bait me she said there was a Menninger Clinic researcher who knew a Shoshoni medicine man who could cause lightning and thunder. After I vented my rage she smiled and said it really didn’t matter if either of us believed it. Then she said that being with me was like riding a bicycle where moment by moment I was trying to maintain balance, consciously or not.

  Naomi helped me out to the porch—my left foot was so sore as to be inoperative—where she had set up dinner on this warm June evening. She had assumed I would be hungry, so had roasted a barnyard chicken with a fine sauce that had a hint of fresh tarragon, potatoes, a salad of new greens from the garden, and two bottles of chilled Freemark Abbey Chardonnay. She had turned off the porch lights and lit an old oil lamp with a white flowered globe. She had a slice of breast and a single glass of wine, and I polished off the rest of everything, down to the last drop and morsel, accompanied by the sort of light chitchat that works with good food. There was a slightly errant note in the enormous quantity of bugs that had collected on the porch screen as if trying to get in after human prey, but Naomi assured me that the bugs, some of them big, were benign. And thus went my first day on the job. I was tucked into sleep in Dalva’s room and bed; the last memory the poster of James Dean in a red jacket, smoking a cigarette, staring listlessly from the wall.

  Lilacs, and coffee, and a cowgirl with her back turned. Dalva in jeans, boots, a checked shirt, the sprig of lilac on the tray with the coffee. No newspaper. She held an aerial map, then looked down at my exposed and swollen foot. I wiggled my toes and she looked at me. She pointed to a chair on which rested my loaned jacket and lost brogan, now polished, plus some of my clothes from the other house.

  “You made quite a first-day splash. I didn’t know you were a hiker. Here’s where you were.” She sat on the edge of the bed and traced her finger across the map, pushing away my hand on her leg. “It actually was quite a walk. Here’s the rock pile and over here is where you lost your shoe. Old Lundquist took out his little terrier this morning and found the jacket and shoe. Never give him more than one drink in a day. He’s eighty-seven and can’t handle it.” She again brushed the hand away that I placed against her bottom. “Not in this room. I’m going to teach you to ride a horse. Horses always know the way home.”

  I dressed and hobbled down the stairs, unable to get my shoe laced up. I was confused by the resurgence of a dream of an Indian college student I knew in San Francisco sitting on my snake-covered rock pile. He was a Nez Percé from up in Washington, the only bona-fide Indian I have ever met. My wife had been badgering me about doing some nasty yard work, mowing the lawn, trimming the shrubs. As a youth I had been forced into such work for pocket change and vowed never to do it again. On the bulletin board of the Student Union I found a three-by-five card that said “Native American, Clean and Industrious, Will Perform Inane Chores for Much Needed Cash.” I should have been tipped off by the word “Inane” he was a wild-eyed poli-sci major, a Kropotkin anarchist who was doing his senior paper on the Nechaev Affair and the roots of the Russian Revolution. He was the most contrary bastard I’d ever met but possessed an intricate and goofy wit, so that I actually helped all day with the yard work. I had awakened a few moments at dawn wondering what he was doing on the rock pile. While we were raking he said, “You can’t feel like an Indian in the Bay Area without getting real drunk.”

  After a marvelous breakfast, accompanied by a four-day-old copy of the Sunday New York Times, Dalva took me off to the bank for a first look at the family papers. Rather than using her dusty and mud-spattered Subaru in the driveway, we went out to the barn and drove off in an ancient aqua-colored convertible. The top was down because there was no top left, but the car appeared to be in fine mechanical shape and the engine had recently been replaced. I was a little appalled to discover it was considerably faster than my BMW—because of the distances they are heavy-footed in Nebraska. We slowed down passing her Wesleyan Methodist church, then stopped at the country school where she intended to teach the coming year. It all reminded me of an America I had supposed to be vanished. Through the window the single room glistened with recent varnish, and the spirit of McGuffey hovered over the oak wainscoting. Near the back door was an iron railing for tethering horses. She said some of the children still chose to ride cross-country to school. I wondered aloud if there was an irony involved, whether children did this naturally, or if they had learned from television that it was admirable to be picturesque.

  “Try to consider how much time your mind wastes figuring out how to make such asshole comments,” she responded.

  “I just thought it was a valid consideration.”

  “A lot of them love rock music, go to the movies, and some grow their own dope. They also feed the stock, help butcher pigs, join the 4-H, and ride horses. Where’s the irony? I know rodeo cowboys who blow half their winnings on cocaine but they still love horses.”

  I blushed. All I was trying to do was be witty, but, then, academic wit is by nature derisive. I didn’t, in any event, like being looked at as if I were a dead frog in the middle of the road. There was the additional nervousness of going to town and being in public view after yesterday’s dismal fuck-up. She read the nature of my moroseness.

  “Don’t worry about getting lost yesterday. They’re all quite pleased and they’ll talk about it for years. They think that’s what happens to brilliant professors. There might be a small item in the weekly newspaper, ‘Scholar Loses Shoe.’ We got a call from town this morning asking you to speak at Rotary Club lunch next Wednesday.”

  “Should I do it?” I had an image of ample drinks and joints of rare beef.

  “Of course you should,” she said with a twinkle that I wish I had recorded.

  She suddenly looked so lovely that I wanted to suggest a trip out into the weeds but didn’t dare. For some reason I mentioned the Nez Percé student on the rock pile in my dream. I suppose I wanted to make her less intimidating. In these semi-angry moods or after she had a few drinks she owned the edge of a predator. It must have come down through her father, because Naomi had none of these qualities.

  “That’s an interesting dream,” she said. “Maybe dreams are in the nature of the landscape? When I was in England and France I dreamt of knights and warhorses and I never do in America. In Arizona I dreamt of melon patches trailing all the way from Oraibi down the Sierra Madre in Mexico, which is where they think the Hopis came from. Here I dream a lot about animals and Indians, and I never did in Santa Monica.”

  This threatened my scholarly integrity so I made a speech right there in the hot, muggy schoolyard, beginning with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, with sidetracks into Otto Rank and Karen Horney. In the interest of winning the point I overlooked those irrational mushmouths Carl Jung and his contemporary camp follower, James Hillman. She laughed when I began to pound an imaginary lectern. Then she hugged and kissed me.

  “You’re an absolute living, fucking bookcase. What a marvel.”

  The wind in the topless car was too loud for talk the rest of the way to town, so I had time to refuel my intellectual grudges. Our very first quarrel had taken place near the end, fortunately, of a fine meal she had treated me to at the puckish Chinois on Main in Santa Monica. To be kind I’ll call it “Dalva’s airplane theory.” The upshot was that from an airliner the entirety of the United States, except for a few spotty wilderness areas, looks raked over, tracked up, skinned, scalped—in short, abused. I said, I see human history with a dignity, albeit tentative, and your vision is infected with a girlish infatuation with Wordsworth and Shelley. She said, Let me finish. What I mean, she said, is that in out-of-the-way places there’s still a certain
spirit, I mean in gullies, off-the-road ditches, neglected creek banks and bottoms, places that have only been tilled once, then neglected, or not at all, like the Sand Hills, parts of northern Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, or the untillable but grazed plains of Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, the desert, even the ocean in the middle of the night. She was excited to the point of breathlessness about this matter. Just where did you get your degrees? I asked. She was stunned and simply got up and walked out of the restaurant. I sat there a little upset with myself for being so acerbic and wondering how I was going to pay a big check with thirty bucks and an expired credit card. I left my wallet with the waitress and went outside looking for her. She was leaning against the car and I couldn’t see her expression in the darkness. I got down on my knees and begged her forgiveness, telling her the semi-fib that I had read something similar to her notion in Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. I buried my face, snuffling, in her skirt. Two passing teenagers yelled, “Go for it.”