by Jim Harrison
When school started again she joined the volleyball team to spend more time with Marcia and being tall she quickly learned how to spike the ball with brutal speed and to feel the tranquillity of exhaustion. She joined the track team and ran the eight hundred meters or half mile. Beginning in February the track team worked out in a wealthy rancher’s horse arena which was larger than the school gymnasium. The girls’ team ran in circles on a mixture of sawdust and dirt for an hour each day. They ran as fast as possible to keep warm because the arena wasn’t heated. Sarah liked it but not as much as running outdoors. The good part was that in the first ten minutes of running you would rehearse your mental problems and after the ten minutes all of the problems would drift away. She quit her Bible Club sham which anyway no longer fooled the older boys who badgered her. One day while she was talking with Marcia in the school hall the goofy son of the local Baptist minister passed her a note that read, “Can you take seven inches?” Sarah passed the note to Marcia who slugged the boy knocking him to the floor.
Sarah got up at five A.M. and studied and read. She then fed Rover and Lad and took Rover for a short walk. Unlike at her home down the hill Rover would come into the cabin and he slept at the end of the bed which kept Sarah’s feet warm. For protection against the unknown she kept Tim’s pistol under her pillow. Frank had helped her build a shed for Lad next to Tim’s porch. Hay was expensive but Terry would swipe it from his dad in pickup loads and haul it over with Marcia. Terry and Marcia were Sarah’s only social life except for an occasional weekend visit to Terry’s mother Tessa to borrow books. Tessa had Sarah reading George Eliot, Henry James, and Stendhal. She liked Stendhal but the others were too claustrophobic.
One Sunday afternoon while she was playing Schubert Frank came up to make peace and offer a compromise. He said that Lolly thought she had driven Sarah out of the house and Sarah said, “She did.” Frank asked if for his sake Sarah would have dinner with them at least twice a week and Sarah said yes mostly because she was tired of cooking all of her own meals. Then Frank entered an area that startled her. He had been talking to his sister Rebecca down in Tucson about their family problems and Rebecca had sent a ticket for Sarah to come down for a visit and see if she might like to attend the University of Arizona. At first Sarah said no because she had intended to use spring vacation to do a reconnaissance on Karl over in Meeteetse. She changed her mind and said she would visit her aunt because she wanted to ride on a plane and she could always skip school when the snow melted and it would be easier to investigate Karl’s environs.
Part III
Chapter 11
1986
Frank and Lolly drove her all the way to Bozeman which was three hours because Lolly wanted to shop for things unavailable in Butte. At the airport Sarah’s mind was a whirling dither and she seemed unable to take a full breath. Unlike in her home area the cars pulling up to the entry were new models and clean and shinier and inside many men wore suits and ties and had the general appearance of being rich though she knew that was unlikely to be true. These men were fresh-faced while the big ranchers back home might own thousands of acres of land and several thousand cows but were weathered and battered by their life in the elements.
Once in her window seat Sarah found herself humming a song taught to her by Frank’s old father Antonio who had died when she was five. She remembered his wrinkled face next to hers on the piano stool as they sang together, “Off we go into the wild blue yonder, flying high into the sky . . .” She had loved this old man who always seemed to be laughing compared to her father Frank.
The takeoff is shocking indeed for one who has never been on a plane but then she was quickly enmeshed in the somewhat cryptic design of the landscape below remembering a line in a poem, “Where the water goes is how the earth is shaped.” The man in the trim suit next to her was reading the Wall Street Journal and the smell of his aftershave was so strong it was enough to gag a maggot. She idly wondered how anyone could sleep with a man who smelled like that. For inscrutable reasons the mountains below her called the Spanish Peaks reminded her of Terry’s teasing to the effect that she was far too austere and prematurely old. She knew that this was also true before her attack and her consequent decision to kill Karl. Terry would mockingly say that she had “her lid screwed on too tight” and that she was a bit of an ideologue like her father. After that contretemps she wept on the way home in her pickup, lamely trying to excuse the obvious truth by the fact that Terry was drinking too much. She had gone down in their wine cellar when his mother was visiting Boston and she questioned why on earth anyone would want that much wine. There must have been thousands of bottles but then Terry said that Tessa averaged two bottles of wine a day.
The plane ride was causing other unexpected thoughts as it does to many people, a free-floating anecdotage. On the way back from antelope hunting on Route 2 they had turned south on Interstate 15 in Shelby, then stopped in Great Falls for something to eat. Terry had been drinking wine and insisted that they try to get into a strip club he’d noticed. Occasionally Terry had the snotty boldness and sense of entitlement of a rich kid. He sent Sarah and Marcia ahead of him through the door. They made it but the bouncer wouldn’t let Terry in. In the brief moment she was in the club Sarah saw a pretty stripper rubbing a patron’s face into her pubis while the patron’s friend cheered. The sight so shocked her that it was a minute before she would flee. Outside Marcia laughingly told Terry what they had seen and he was angry having missed it. In the spring as a practical joke Terry had given Sarah a very naughty Erskine Caldwell novel which had itemized such behavior and once in Missoula when she and her dad were having lunch with other vegetable growers an old Italian at the table said that he wanted to kiss the waitress’s pretty ass. Frank spoke sharply to him but he hadn’t noticed Sarah and apologized. Sarah was reading Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy at lunch and pretended she hadn’t heard him to save him from embarrassment. It was clear to her on the plane that Karl wasn’t the only animalistic man and obviously there were women taking part. Suddenly she questioned whether shooting Karl would make things even but after a pause thought that it would.
After a brief layover and changing planes to a bigger jet in Salt Lake City, Sarah was thinking that though there was a lot of anti-Mormon prejudice in the West they certainly lived in a grand place. One day in the future she hoped to ride Lad around in the Escalante area of southern Utah. After only a couple of hours of her trip everything seemed brand-new and she was forgetting where she was from. Montana might be huge but it was also confining. Now, finally, the world was opening its windows for her. She had memorized an Emily Dickinson sentence that was au point, “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” When her family had come west five and a half years before and crossing South Dakota she had looked over her father’s shoulder and had seen the dark, immense shapes of the Black Hills in the distance she had decided not to believe her eyes. To a flatlander from Ohio the first mountains are mentally not quite acceptable.
Now in the Tucson airport with her aunt Rebecca approaching she was back in a slow-motion dreamscape. Rebecca shook her hand and hugged her and looked down at Sarah’s hands which were calloused and there was a raw spot from a rope burn she got from helping Marcia pull a calf.
“You’ve been working, I see,” Rebecca laughed.
“Well, I work in the garden, split wood, and the other day we pulled a difficult calf.” Sarah was embarrassed because Rebecca’s hands were soft and smooth compared to her own which were the hands of a workingman. They’d had to pull hard or they would have lost both cow and calf and when the calf came out suddenly she and Marcia had fallen backward. It all reminded her of mouthy Terry saying that nearly everyone in their area except the big ranch owners were actually peasants in the old European sense. They weren’t called peasants because it was a democracy but that was what most locals were.
Rebecca had a four-wheel drive with the same name as Sarah’s dog and explained
she needed it to get up the steep grade to Kitts Peak Observatory on the occasional icy nights. They drove nearly an hour to the southeast of Tucson to the crossroads village of Sonoita. When Rebecca stopped at a corner store to get cigarettes Sarah heard two dark men in ranchwear speaking Spanish outside their pickup and decided she was in a foreign country. She didn’t know that there was a local saying that all of the territory south of Interstate 10 was mostly Mexico.
Rebecca had a pleasant, sprawling adobe house on ten acres. There were two large Labs she called Mutt and Jeff in a kennel that were drooling nitwits when released. It took Sarah a while to comprehend the house which was built to welcome the outside rather than to keep it at bay. There was an inside, roofless patio with a fair-sized cottonwood growing in it. Sarah wandered around, then unpacked her clothes while Rebecca started dinner. The Labs sniffed her luggage and asked with looks, “Where is the girl dog?” By looking outside her bedroom and through the patio she noticed a small grand piano in a sunroom which delighted her. On the wall by the door there was a small map on which Rebecca had scrawled “you are here” pinpointing Sonoita and the surrounding mountain ranges, the Rincons to the far north, the Whetstones and Mustangs to the east, the Patagonias and the Santa Ritas to the west. To the south forty miles was all of Mexico. What a place to ride a horse, she thought.
At dinner Rebecca made a proposal that at first angered Sarah because of her uncommunicative father. Frank and Rebecca had been talking and there was the idea that if Sarah would go to the University of Arizona Rebecca would finance it because Sarah could also house-sit. Rebecca was going to be spending a lot of time in Chile with a consortium of astronomers designing a new observatory facility. Sarah mellowed with a glass of wine and was startled when Rebecca said how much she disliked Lolly. “Lolly was always wicked and she and Frank were fooling with each other when they were only thirteen and now she’s got him. With women my brother is lame. I don’t see how you stand her.” Sarah told her that she had moved up the hill and was living alone with Rover and that she had rigged Lad’s corral so he could look in the window. She asked if she could bring them and Rebecca said of course and that half the people in Sonoita had horses in their yards.
That settled that and Montana began to drift away. The sense of an idyll was broken in the middle of the moonlit night. She was trying to sleep facing east but the moon was enormous and not looking particularly friendly. She got up and drew the curtains but they were thin and only slightly diffused the light and actually made the moon look larger. Her life had been comparatively uneventful and now it was too eventful. In the dark she could perceive that what we have is the life of the mind and now it was whirling and humming like an old-fashioned top that you pumped. These so-called big decisions like coming to Arizona were essentially out of her control and had been made for her by Frank and Rebecca. Of course she could refuse but what were her options? She could wait for news of a full scholarship to Missoula or Bozeman. The principal had said there was a good chance but she had the feeling that she had painted herself into a corner in Montana. And maybe if she headed south the image of Karl would fade. And her disordered mind had its own sound effects. Wherever she drove with Marcia she was forced to listen to Patsy Cline and Merle Haggard on the eight-track tape deck. In the nighttime she could hear Cline’s clear voice singing, “I Fall to Pieces” and “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me” and some Haggard line to the effect that the singer had turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole. Terry was always saying that our bodies were our prisons. What if she spent her life in a real prison for shooting Karl?
One of Rebecca’s Labs, she couldn’t tell which, came into the bedroom, jumped onto the bed, and curled up next to her hip. Putting a hand on his chest and feeling his heartbeat calmed her as it did with Rover. She began to sleep fitfully but then after midnight when the moon had moved away from her window she awoke sobbing and screaming and the dog began barking. She was having a nightmare where Karl was eating her bare left foot and leg and the white bones were sticking out. He was moving upward in huge ripping bites. Rebecca came running and turned on the overhead light. Sarah was now weeping and thrashing around on the bed with her eyes wide open but not seeing. Rebecca dragged her off the bed into an upright position and walked her up and down the room until she recovered true consciousness but, doubting that it would work quickly enough, led Sarah from room to room in the house turning on the lights as they went, backing out of the darkish but moonlit patio when Sarah stiffened.
It was the piano that worked and perhaps the sunburst color of the walls and the many potted desert plants. Rebecca put Sarah on the piano stool and asked her to play some Schumann.
“Schumann’s too scary. I only play him in the daylight,” Sarah said, beginning to play Schubert. She played at least an hour by which time Rebecca and the dogs were asleep on the sofa. Sarah put an afghan throw over Rebecca thinking that she wished Rebecca were her mother but then it was too late to have a mother.
At midmorning they drove to the Desert Museum. For an hour Sarah was startled enough by the flora and fauna to forget everything else but what she was seeing and thinking which was that maybe game biology or botany might be better to study than the safety of dry, cold metallurgy.
Rebecca had to teach a seminar about the mathematics of astronomy so Sarah wandered around the U of A campus thrilled at the number of Asian, black, and Latin students she saw after being raised in ethnically monochromatic Montana. The buildings were intimidatingly big and grand and she questioned why they needed such expensive buildings to learn. She walked sleepily up to a noodle shop on Campbell and ate a bowl of duck soup which would have been better with the wild mallards Tim used to shoot. After the nightmare and the piano she had only dozed with the bed lamp on rather than chancing the continuation of the nightmare. She read some from Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream and didn’t much care about the story but loved the descriptions of the Gulf Stream. She couldn’t fathom why Terry was so fond of Hemingway when she would rather read Faulkner or Steinbeck or dozens of others. Some books crossed her teenage intemperance. She wondered why the heroine of Madame Bovary didn’t shoot herself or take a boat to America.
On the way back to Rebecca’s office she saw a big ungainly boy who reminded her of Karl. It occurred to her that if she got caught for shooting Karl she wouldn’t get to identify all of those bizarre desert plants she’d seen near the museum. This contrasted bleakly with the fresh urgency of shooting him after the vividness of the nightmare.
Back at Rebecca’s in the late afternoon she slept for several hours waking at twilight to hear a number of voices in the distance and the piano playing Stravinsky quite well. She had awakened with confused thoughts of normalcy, the perhaps imagined normalcy seen in other people. There was a family story about Rebecca’s marriage which had lasted only a week. Her hot-tempered young husband had hit her after they returned from their five-day honeymoon in New York City. He had wanted to go to Miami. She immediately went to the police with her black eye and pressed charges. The parents of both families tried to talk her out of the divorce or annulment, Sarah had forgotten which. They said the husband deserved another chance to which she replied, “No one deserves to hit me even once.” Rebecca was thought to be eccentric in the old neighborhood because after the parting with the wife beater she went on to get a PhD at MIT, a far reach for a girl with a truck-farmer father.
Sarah thought about the story in the shower looking down at her rough hands which didn’t go with her smooth and supple body. What was the point in being attractive? With the shower off she could hear a beautifully done Villa-Lobos piece. She hurriedly dressed and met three of Rebecca’s friends in the kitchen, two male astronomers and a female artist, but was in a rush to get to the pianist who turned out to be an exchange professor in botany, a Mexican about thirty-five from Guadalajara named Alfredo. He had a soft, lilting, accented voice and seemed to be gay, she thought, which certainly was the last thing that mattered
to her. He began teaching her a four-hand piece (Schubert’s Fantasy in F Minor) and they played for nearly three hours breaking briefly for dinner. This was the first man in her life that thoroughly captivated her short of Montgomery Clift in The Misfits. That night, not surprisingly, she heard Schubert in her dreams. Alfredo had to teach in the morning but would come out in the afternoon to take a walk and play the piano. He was bringing some botany books and said that if she studied them hard, he would get her into an advanced course of his in the fall. She was crestfallen when he said he would be in Tucson only one more year.
The next morning at breakfast Rebecca teased her a little which wasn’t welcome. Sarah alternated between feeling dreamy and antsy. She wanted to ask Rebecca about Alfredo but was too timid.