Dalva

by Jim Harrison

  I find myself staring at the ceiling as if in momentary regret that I can read. It had been so long since I had read Sandoz and others that it was an effort to remember who Touch the Clouds was. I checked a reference text and discovered that this man with the curious name was the medicine man in whose arms Crazy Horse died. He Dog was allowed to visit his friend during the last few moments of his life. I turned from the desk, sensing I was being watched, to find the geese at the screen door waiting for dinner. Perhaps they were hoping for another bag of Frieda’s corn chips. My wife and daughter had shared the affections of a nasty little toy poodle who preferred fried chicken livers. This mutt had shit in my shoe and I fed it a teaspoon of Tabasco in punishment. The dog had done a precise little aerial flip and begged for more hot sauce.

  I walked toward the house, trailed by geese, just as Dalva came out the door with a pail of feed. The birds rushed her with their peculiar wobble-trot. How could I understand the past when I couldn’t comprehend geese? I thought. Dalva looked rested and spiffy in a pale-blue summer dress and sandals.

  “Can I do it? I’m trying to make contact with terrestrial creatures.” She handed me the pail and I flung handfuls of grain around the barnyard with a light heart.

  “I hope you had a fine time at the luncheon club. Naomi said it went well though you got a little irascible.” She said this almost shyly and with inappropriate gravity, then began to shake with suppressed laughter. I threw myself on the ground in an imitation of a girl who had a bad time at the prom, kicking my legs and shrieking. The geese fed on, being accustomed to my behavior. Dalva continued laughing, then leaned against the grape arbor for support. I crawled over and bit her foot.

  “Some day at some time somewhere in the fucking world I’m getting even,” I spoke to her toes.

  She served me a drink in the den, a big person’s drink, having decided that I was working too hard. She was amazed I hadn’t been to town except with Lundquist on Saturday, and with Naomi this noon. She said she was taking me to a horse affair at the fairgrounds the next day. I admitted that I’d thought of going to town but didn’t know the way, which had her stopped. If you drive north you hit the river, she said, and if you go south you reach town, because that’s the only place the roads go around here. This was an amazing piece of information. I became a bit manic then, describing my afternoon’s work, and wondering if I should go on immediately to the second trunk of journals to get perspective.

  “They were going to ship Crazy Horse to the Dry Tortugas,” she said. “It’s an old prison in a fort about seventy miles off Key West, in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s hard to imagine a Sioux warrior at sea.” She became a little morose and sent me off to get ready for dinner. Naomi’s nature boy, Nelse, had rearrived and she wanted us to come to dinner, but Dalva wasn’t up to an evening with someone new. We were driving to the next town for a steak and hopefully the motel, but I wasn’t pushing my luck by bringing up the subject. While I dressed I began to think of Crazy Horse in the tropics, then pushed the subject from my mind with a cheapish look at Karen’s photo.

  We drove in a car with a top—Dalva’s Subaru—listening to a merry tape of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. I loathe country music but what Dalva called “Texas swing” seemed different and put us in a light mood. Most of this part of Nebraska is distinctly Western, and we paused by the side of the road to watch four cowboys herding cattle down a gravel road—two of the men were on horses, and two on small motorcycles. Cowboys have taken to wearing baseball-type caps, though in the evening they return to the Stetson shape. I was so bloody hungry that I asked Dalva to describe the menu. She answered in an affected Sand Hills drawl.

  “You have your basic beef in many shapes, and your basic varieties of Jell-o, and the foil-wrapped potato that just might be yesterday’s, and those great big ole drinks you favor.”

  “How about wine?”

  “Only the sugar-added variety!”

  It was only eight in the evening and still light outside, but sturdy folks were already dancing to Leon Tadulsky and the Riverboat Seven. Some of the band wore straw boaters while the others had on cowboy hats. We asked for a table as far as possible from the band and ordered Whopping Big drinks. Several people waved at Dalva but none approached our table. I doubt if she was ever thought to be chatty. The Tadulsky band was playing an odd mixture of Glenn Miller swing, polkas, and country-Western. Couples would take a few bites, then get up and dance, return to their food, and repeat the process. Everyone in the barnlike room was eating steak or roast beef on hot metal platters. This was definitely not Santa Monica. There was a long table of cowboys with their wives or girlfriends, and the men kept their hats on whether they were dancing or eating. The ranchers and business types wore leisure wear, but you could tell them apart, because the ranchers had sunburned or browned arms and faces. We were seated fairly near the salad bar, with its ubiquitous Plexiglas sneeze shield—I noted bowls of Jell-o of every color of the rainbow, cottage cheese, pickles, three-bean salad, all of which were being ignored by the crowd. Dalva ordered the Princess Cut of butt steak while I chose the forty-ounce King’s Cut of porterhouse, designed for the man who really “believes in beef.” I really didn’t but, then, a wag had once said that the best sauce is hunger. Dalva noticed that I was tapping my fingers and mouthing the words to the band playing “Beer Barrel Polka” (“In heaven there is no beer, that’s why we drink it here”). She thought this was amusing, and I replied that if you grow up in an Ohio Valley steel town this is the music of your people. She grabbed my arm and we were out on the floor in a trice, cutting a rug that astounded the locals. The band played several polkas in a row to keep us going, and though I feared for my wildly thumping heart I was pleased to do something that was so widely admired. We continued on until midnight, mixed with eating and drinking, and I confess I’ve never felt so much like a real American since the Boy Scouts. The last dance of the evening was a rendition of the Mills Brothers’ “Mood Indigo,” which I danced with the leftovers of my porterhouse in my jacket. At the end of the song we dipped, then shamelessly kissed.

  Outside, the night air was wonderful, because we were soaked with sweat. In the car we kissed again and I got a hard-on like a toothache, which she gave a couple of squeezes on the hundred-yard drive to the motel. We made love for the first time with our clothes half on and without benefit of a shower. When she went into the bathroom I checked out the TV and was astounded to find a fuck-movie channel sponsored by the motel. I was chewing my steak and shouted for Dalva, who came nakedly from the shower. “Oh my God,” she said.

  We fell asleep to this not altogether fortunate test pattern, both waking at 3:00 A.M. dry-mouthed. I turned off the TV while Dalva let the water run cold; then we struggled with the usual plastic-wrapped plastic glasses, which their inventor should be forced to eat in quantity. We looked absurd enough in the mirror to maintain the good mood, making ugly faces at each other and spilling the aspirin on the floor. I stepped on the steak bone getting into bed, and then we made love again.

  This was a day I should have “stood” in bed, as they used to say, in the safety of that distant motel. The random violence of America struck home, and without the slightest premonition on my part. It was cloudy and cool when she dragged me from bed, handing me a large Styrofoam cup of coffee, a fresh shirt, and undies from her suitcase. She had planned it all. Neither the shirt nor the undies were my own, but they were of unquestioned quality.

  We were off for the hometown horse show, horse sale, whatever it was I’m unsure. There were enough horses at the rainy fairgrounds to last a lifetime. Dalva pointed out a refreshment stand where I might drink myself senseless on coffee, then abandoned me to look at horses with an eye for a purchase. Aren’t four horses enough? I asked no one in particular. At the refreshment stand I ordered coffee and noted with satisfaction that they were putting beer down on ice. These folks are the Mongols or Cossacks of the Great Plains, I thought, constantly avoiding wheeling, backing, lunging
, and prancing horses. A number of men greeted me with “Good morning, Professor,” which made me feel I belonged there.

  I never really saw it coming. An extremely large man approached whom I recognized as the posse fellow who lifted me onto the horse the day I was lost, and who bought me a drink on my Saturday in town with Lundquist. I was struggling for his name when he marched right up, glared down at me, and showed me a nude photo of Karen.

  “Pretty, isn’t she?” I said, wondering what the big oaf was doing with the picture.

  “My little Karen!” he yelled, grabbing my arm and wrenching it. The arm made a dreadful popping sound and seemed detached from my body, just hanging there by itself. Then he slapped me a mighty blow to the side of the face and I fell on my bottom. Jesus, will this never end? I thought, seeing his boot poised to kick me. Then men started shouting and several cowpokes bore him to the ground. The world was turning reddish and there was a nasty grating sound when I moved my jaw. The world turned darker red, with men stooping around me. Dalva came to me and held me. “Oh, Jesus, Michael, what have you done now?” Then I passed out into a painful dream as colorful as all of the Jell-os in Nebraska.

  BOOK III

  * * *

  GOING HOME

  DALVA

  June 15, 1986—Nebraska

  There was a peculiar moment, quite eerie in fact, in the waiting area of the emergency room. Immediately after Michael had been whisked away Naomi turned to me and I looked down at the floor feeling quite faint. She took my arm and we quickly walked out a back door of the hospital. It was an utterly oppressive sense of déjà-vu—the last time we had been in a hospital together was when I gave birth to my son in Tucson thirty years before. It was beyond discussing so we simply stood there a few minutes trying to allow our world to regain its proper shape. Finally we were able to make some plans and went back in so I could call a cab. Naomi would stay at the hospital for the time being while I went off to the lawyer’s to discuss the situation, both dismal alternatives on a late afternoon in June. I peevishly thought I had missed buying the mare I had been after.

  We had flown to Omaha in a Medi-Vac plane after a long ambulance ride down to North Platte where it was determined that Michael’s jaw would require the attention of a specialist. His left arm was both broken and dislocated but the nature of the injury was minor compared with the mandibular fracture.

  Right after the battle of the fairgrounds the sheriff and prosecutor met me at the doctor’s office where Michael was laid out on a table looking not all that good. The doctor was being careful to check for complications beyond broken bones. I discussed the tentative legalities with the sheriff and prosecutor who had taken a statement from Pete Olafson, Karen’s father, at the jail. Would I object if he was released because it was Friday and no judge would be available until Monday? I said I had no objection because I had gone to school with Pete and it wasn’t the sort of crime that would be repeated. There were other thorny problems: Karen was a week short of eighteen and was legally a minor. She would not admit to sleeping with Michael and said he hadn’t taken the photo her mother had found in her room, though the photo had been taken at his request. Their sympathies were understandably with the local man despite the severity of Michael’s injuries. The prosecutor showed me the photo in question which looked particularly banal in a doctor’s office. They were acting on the verge of condescension when I told them I was sure the expenses involved in repairing Michael would bankrupt the guilty party. They gave each other a Mutt & Jeff look and the sheriff said “Maybe he had it coming.” I said that he wasn’t in a position to decide, and added that they wouldn’t want to trade away Olafson’s farm for some ill-considered charges against my houseguest. This veiled threat wasn’t a gamble on my part, but a small plot to buy time. Not very far in the back of my mind I remembered a tenured English professor while I was at the University of Minnesota who had been dismissed for “moral turpitude” (truly underage girls). I naturally wanted to make sure that the news of Michael’s latest adventure didn’t reach his employer in California.

  In the cab on the way to the lawyer’s I reconsidered my involvement with the miserable son of a bitch. He simply in some classic sense didn’t know any better. The idea that a man or a woman could be incisively brilliant in one area, and a grotesque fuck-up in another, was scarcely limited to the academic profession. Most of the bright and energetic people I had known in my life had closeted away secrets that were far too vivid to be referred to as skeletons.

  At the lawyer’s office I was startled to see how old the senior partners had become—all those who greeted me and had known my grandfather, father, Paul, and the rest of us looked near retirement. They put me in the care of an abrasive young man, assuring me that he handled “difficult” problems for the firm. He certainly was prepared: Pete Olafson had been arrested for assault three times in twenty-five years, though the charges were always dropped. Michael had been charged with grand theft (rare books) while at Notre Dame with the charges dropped, three drunk-driving convictions while in graduate school in Wisconsin, and was institutionalized under psychiatric care in Seattle for six weeks, the details of which were not available. The lawyer said he would come up on Monday morning and recommended a compromise whereby any and all possible charges against either party would be dropped. He had been on the phone and the girl in question had admitted to the prosecutor an hour ago that she and Michael had gone “sixty-nine,” which, of course, was a criminal act, especially since she was short of eighteen. This in itself was meaningless, because the girl also had an established reputation for promiscuity, which could be proved in court. This lawyer meant to establish that Michael had “fallen from a horse,” and his insurance would take care of most of the medical expenses. Was I agreeable to the plan? If not, we could get Mr. Olafson at least a year in jail, but some sort of charge would stick against Michael, and possibly interfere with his employment. Quite naturally I agreed to the compromise, and assured him that Michael would sign anything to that effect.

  At the hotel it occurred to me that there was nothing quite like an hour spent at a law firm to make you want a shower and a drink, both of which I accomplished. While I was having my drink Naomi called from the hospital to say that they were going to do the surgery in the evening, which was closing in. There was some concern over Michael’s high blood pressure, evidence of chain-smoking and minor damage in the blood profile caused by alcohol. The surgeon, however, was optimistic, and told Naomi that the patient would be fine except for the inconvenience of having his mouth wired shut for two months. Michael would be out of the hospital in ten days to two weeks and would survive nicely on a readily available liquid diet. Despite the nastiness of the situation there was something quite amusing about the wired mouth and the diet. Naomi would be at the hotel in an hour. To avoid complications she had airily assured the staff she was Michael’s ex-wife and had signed all the necessary papers and had written a check on the account of the NRA Travel Fund, which she thought was funny. His insurance was adequate—the extra check was for an especially “lovely” sort of room that modern hospitals make available for those who can afford them. I told Naomi on the phone that the shitheel deserved the basement.

  That evening over dinner Naomi asked why I had turned against Michael when, given my experience, I must have understood his failings from the beginning. And why had I chosen him for the papers when it couldn’t have simply been out of sympathy? I said I didn’t want a boring scholar who would only produce a boring work of scholarship. The first question was harder; he was exhausting me and, though the recent incident was horrible I felt a guilty sense of relief to not have to deal with him for a few weeks. She said she would be traveling back and forth a good deal with the young man on the project, and why not move Michael to her place for his convalescence and have Frieda take care of him?

  At this point an actual tear fell into my white wine and I couldn’t finish my dinner. I ordered an enormous brandy, reached over and put
my hand on Naomi’s. “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve always been a bit lonely, and I’ve always enjoyed a little bad behavior. You’ve seen so much and I’ve seen so little. I’m sure he would have amused your father.”

  “Are you going to tell him?” I had known for a long time that she had imaginary talks with my father.

  “Of course. I’ve never hidden anything from him. I had a few boyfriends over the years and I never kept anything from him.”

  “I always thought you believed he could see us?”

  “No, that would be too ordinary. The dead just sense and understand our feelings. At least that’s what I’ve come to believe. They are infinitely broad-minded.”

  I looked at her directly a long time, as if I no longer understood the term “mother,” much less “daughter.” “Do you think my son is alive?” I had to ask this though there was an instant pang of regret.

  “I think you do,” she said rather briskly. “I can tell you’re thinking of looking for him too, though you probably won’t admit it to me. I won’t tell you it’s wrong, but I believe it’s up to him to look for you if he so desires. Along with your father, it is the other tragedy that came into our life. You weren’t ready to be a mother even if there had been a father to be found. I finally knew who the father was when you put up a gravestone for Duane in 1972, and I wept for you for weeks and I couldn’t say anything to you. I thought, My poor lovely Dalva, her only husband a crazy Sioux boy dead like my own. I’m sure you didn’t know this but I was proud of your courage in wanting his gravestone next to your own father’s, because it meant you must have loved him so.”