by Jim Harrison
Before noon he was standing on the hillock overlooking the harbor with the gin in a paper sack and studying the weather which was discouraging. It was still warmish with the wind from the southwest but way out there hours and hours away there was a bank of darkness to the northwest above Lake Superior. As a student of weather he knew that it could be the last Alberta clipper until mid-October, wherein the temperature borne by howling winds could drop forty degrees in minutes. Two fishing boats were speeding back into the harbor having noted the oncoming weather.
Gretchen pulled her Honda up beside his pickup, all smiles in blue shorts and carrying a flowery suitcase. There was certainly no point in discussing the weather with her.
“This is the biggest step of my life,” she said, cozying up to him on the seat of the pickup.
“It sure is.” She likely knew that her blue shorts would prime the pump as it were.
She had brought along his favorite sandwich, liverwurst and onion with hot mustard, and a hummus-and-lettuce for herself. They ate while he drove and had a modest wrangle when he contended that when she became pregnant she should eat lots of meat to make the baby grow in her stomach.
“It will be in the womb, darling.”
“I meant the general area,” he said, backing away. “I just know that Rose took on the wrong fuel when she was carrying Berry.”
“I’m charmed by your concern but I’m thought to be quite smart.”
They pulled into the campsite and she floated around in a state of delight while he took her flowery little suitcase out of the pickup bed. He suspected that the contents wouldn’t be on the money for the coming weather.
“Let’s get the show on the road,” she said, kneeling and crawling into the open tent.
“Maybe we should have a little drink first,” he said, unscrewing the gin bottle. He felt butterflies and needed liquid courage.
“A small one. We don’t want to subvert your motility.”
He had no idea what she meant but knelt at the front of the tent and poured two drinks in paper cups. She waved the syringe drawn from her big purse.
“That’s a bulb baster like I use for roasting a turkey.” He backed into the tent beside her.
“It’s not for cooking. It cost seventy bucks.”
“Wonderful.” He wanted to say, You paid the equivalent of thirty six-packs for that fucking thing, but held back.
“Just take out your penis and get started.” She sounded a little floaty like she had taken a tranq.
“I thought this over. I’ve never whacked off in front of anyone. You’re going to have to do it and also show me some skin for inspiration.”
“Do you have a glove?” she laughed.
“I don’t carry gloves in May.”
“Well, anything for the cause. I did this for a boy after the junior prom and he shot all over the place.” She opened her blouse and slid down her shorts revealing bikini panties. She grabbed his penis and paused.
“You don’t shoot like you did in high school.” His voice was quivery as he stared at her body and she began to pump his penis holding the bulb of the syringe near the head. It didn’t take long and she caught most of the fluid.
“Turn around and close your eyes.”
“Okay.” But he didn’t. He couldn’t help but peek as she slid down her panties and injected the fluid. She caught him looking.
“You cheated, you fucker.” She scrambled out of the tent giving him the rear view he so desired. “We’ll wait an hour and try again.”
He lay there in his depleted postcoital state thinking that this was almost as good as the real thing. Sort of kinky and fun.
They took a slow stroll and then walked down to the river where he gave her a first fishing lesson. She was well coordinated and after a little while could make a modest cast. She checked her watch.
“Let’s get down to business.” She hadn’t noticed that the wind was picking up in the ridge across the river and that the sky was getting fuzzy. She crawled into the tent and stayed with her head and shoulders toward the back. “I need to be near the source.”
This time it took longer and the view of her cocked legs and tiny undies so close to his nose beat the hell out of any Hawaiian sunset. He groaned but it certainly wasn’t heartbreak.
“You didn’t do as well this time,” she chided.
“I can only do so much.” Without asking permission he took a glug of gin. He was disappointed when she covered herself with her light summer sleeping bag to make the injection.
They napped for nearly two hours waking to the roar of wind and Gretchen had trouble locating herself.
“What the fuck is happening?” she pouted when she heard distant thunder.
“A little storm.” He took a wake-up swig of gin and prepared the fire to cook supper before the strongest part of the squall was upon them. She poured herself a drink and looked fearfully at the sky. It didn’t take long to cook the brook trout and a can of beans. She wolfed her food as if already pregnant or, more likely, frightened at the rolling thunder in the west. B.D. knew the rehearsal having been caught by such storms a number of times in the Upper Peninsula in spring and fall. It could be real ugly if you were a couple of miles from your car. First came a driving rain and then the wind got colder and it would snow. It could go on for three days in the fall but in the spring it was usually only a matter of hours before it cleared.
They had barely finished their meal when there was a slash of lightning on the ridge across the river and a monsterous crash of thunder. She shrieked, dropped her plate, and burrowed into the tent. B.D. piled an armload of wood on the fire as the first sheets of rain hit.
When he got back in the wind was buffeting the tent and Gretchen was sniveling. He hugged her while listening to the rain pouring heavily onto the tent, knowing where the main leaks would begin. As if on cue he felt water dripping onto his face. Despite the closed flaps there was enough twilight in the tent for him to see the leaks nearest them. He shone the flashlight down the roof line and detected some major problems just as lightning sizzled the air and there was a hollow, raspy crash of thunder.
“I’m supposedly smart so why does this scare the piss out of me?” she said clutching him closer. She craned her neck up. “My feet are getting wet.”
“Everybody gets a little scared. Delmore says it’s the ‘thunder beings.’” He could see in the flashlight glare that they were fucked. The tent was leaking everywhere. Also through the front tent flap he could feel the temperature dropping precipitously. “Just a minute.”
B.D. burst out of the tent, trotted to the pickup, and grabbed a big trash bag from his catchall box in the pickup bed. He stooped and shoved the big pile of wood closer to the tent entrance. When he got back in the water was falling everywhere. He shook open the Visqueen bag.
“Get in here. You’ll be dry and warm.”
Gretchen got out of her wet summer bag and wiggled into the plastic container. Quite suddenly the rain let up but not the cold wind. In the remaining twilight he could see the driving snow through a crack in the tent flap.
“This is already working,” she said, curled deep in the trash container.
B.D. leaned out and stirred the remaining fire coals and heaped on a pile of pine branches for quick kindling, then cross-piled bigger sticks of hardwood. He shed his soaked clothes.
“Got room for me?” He had left the other trash bag in the truck hoping for companionship.
“If you behave,” she whispered peeking out of the container.
He slid in and grabbed the gin taking a couple of quick gulps. She took a few sips and rubbed his nude chest to warm him.
“We’ll be snug as two bugs in a rug,” he said.
“Of course, dear, if you say so.”
They lay there and then the fire caught and the wind subsided. They were rubbing each other and she parted the flaps to watch the snow falling thickly on the fire. It was dark and the fire’s eerie orange light in the falling snow look
ed lovely to her. Now that the thunder was gone she was feeling better with the help of the gin. She took another slug and passed him the bottle. She slid her hand down feeling the closeness of his erection.
“We could have a third session for insurance. We should stop on an odd number. Three not two.”
“Fine by me.” For the first time he was being allowed to run his hands closely over her body which was warm and damp.
She abruptly made a decision. She slid down her shorts and panties and turned her back to him, arching out her bottom and thinking wistfully that this was the way all mammals get their babies. He was thinking immediately that this was the grandest moment of his life. He attacked his job with affectionate energy. Afterward they dozed for a while and then he opened the flaps and studied the scene. The world was quiet but the snow was still falling thickly. These storms rarely brought more than half a foot of snow but he couldn’t be absolutely sure they wouldn’t get stuck there if the snow mounted to a foot.
“We best get the fuck out of here. Sit tight.”
He pulled on his wet clothes and boots and walked to the pickup, starting it and wiping the wet snow from the windshield. He would come back the next day and pick up his gear. Despite his wet clothes he was still warm from his exertions. When he turned around she was shining the flashlight on him and half out of the bag.
“Stay inside. The pickup doesn’t have heat.”
He picked her up in the bag and carried her to the pickup. It took nearly an hour to make their way along the log road to the blacktop that led to town. Off to the east the blackish clouds opened and the moon shone through. She was snoring lightly within her cocoon. He had the absurd feeling of a reverse Christmas in May and remembered the holiday line, “The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow.”
The little village had never looked better and when he knocked on the motel office door he could see the bright lights and the snow-covered cars parked in front of the Dunes Saloon. The new owner of the motel looked at him askance but was pleased to take his cash. Early May was slow in the Great North. He carried her into the room like they were newlyweds. She sleepily got out of the bag and under the covers of the twin beds, getting out of her clothes under the sheets.
“You sleep there,” she said, pointing at the other bed.
“It wasn’t that bad, was it?” He smiled.
“It was bearable but I’m not intending to do it again. I got this feeling I’m going to be pregnant.”
“I did my best. I’m heading down the street for a few drinks.”
“Suit yourself, darling.”
His heart was light with pleasure as he walked toward the tavern, turning around once to look at his tracks then flopping down in a vacant lot to make a snow angel. It was a fine one and he smelled Gretchen’s sweet-smelling sweat on his hands. Somehow the big trash bag had been the perfect place.
* * *
The Games of Night
* * *
Part I
I Am Afflicted
There was a bit much of me to stay in one locale for very long. I was too heavy a rock to sit on any shelf as country people used to say about especially difficult individuals, no matter that my problem was systemic before it was behavioral. However, I do not favor the posture of a victim.
My parents were both unsuccessful academics, my mother with a master’s in classics and my father a doctorate in ornithology which he finally acquired in his early forties from Cornell after a twenty-year struggle with his colleagues and superiors. My mother was of Quaker inclination and grew up on a small farm near Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and my father was raised by Unitarian parents in Dowagiac, a small city in southern Michigan near the Indiana border. They shared the reality of their parents being disappointed in them and tended to be remote from their families. Both of my parents as academics tended to think that life was in the effort to understand it. Given this background it is peculiar that I became a hunter though only on two nights a month and I went unarmed.
If you are hard-hearted and hard-boned enough my father’s problems were all in all comic. Simply enough he couldn’t see well enough to be a competent ornithologist. I mean he could read but birds as objects of study are rarely within reading distance. His sight wasn’t disastrously poor but if you’re only right 90 percent of the time you’ll suffer the ridicule of your peers. Poor-sighted birders can be amazingly accurate when they know the songs but my father’s obsessive subject of study was hummingbirds and they don’t sing. They’re too busy eating to feed their furious energy. My father’s main character faults were a free-floating dreaminess and perpetual ill-directed anger. When I was ten years old Cornell let him go from his marginal position as an instructor because of a nasty public fistfight he had with a colleague over a drawer full of sixty-eight Mexican hummingbirds he had hidden in his office from the prying of an up-and-coming hummingbird expert who was an assistant professor and who used his superior rank to bully my father. My mother never forgave him for their expulsion from Cornell which had offered her the only opportunity in her career to teach an actual course in classics literature. She had graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe and taken a master’s in classics from Harvard but had truncated her studies to marry my father. She told me later when I was in my teens that she had loved my father for a scant two years and after that their marriage was fueled by their intricate quarrels. Such quarrels of academic nature take place on the head of a pin what with both classics and ornithology being of severely limited use in our society.
I’ve always taken delight in the accidental nature of their meeting and my consequent arrival on earth. She was reading on an old wooden chair near a fine pond on her family’s farmette near Fitchburg when down the gravel country road came a van full of birders (it’s hard not to think of them as twitchers, the British name) led by my father who could see fairly well back then. He spotted the fetching girl but, more important, a relatively rare Hudsonian godwit wading near the pond’s edge. He asked permission to enter the property for a closer look at the bird and my mother said no, that she didn’t want to be disturbed while reading. My mother continued this habit of outside reading even when she had to bundle up against the cold. That afternoon while she was working a shift at her father’s fusty hardware store my father entered to replace a broken thermos. They began to talk and the fatal tie was made though she wasn’t the least bit interested in birds except those unique to Greece and Italy mentioned in classical literature.
It is pleasantly awkward to think of how close we come to not existing. Without the Hudsonian godwit on the pond’s edge my father might have slowed down but certainly wouldn’t have stopped. And without a broken thermos he wouldn’t have visited Grandfather’s hardware store. I’m only nominally interested in birds and a thermos is a trifling thing but I owe my life to them. If I ever bothered to design a personal escutcheon there would have to be a needlepointed Hudsonian godwit and thermos.
Enough of my parents. A few days before I left for Northwestern University in Evanston near Chicago at age seventeen, I noticed that my mother was packing several trunks and suitcases with books and clothing and a sparse number of bibelots and mementos in a spare room of our rented house in Cincinnati where my father’s academic career had descended to his teaching life sciences at a junior college. This room was at the back of the second story of our house and I’d go in there on warm, sunny afternoons in hopes of seeing the girl next door rubbing lotion on herself and sunbathing. She was homely but her lush, almost tubby body was attractive.
Mother was startled when I entered the room and could not look at me directly.
“I’m leaving when you do,” she said in a whisper.
“I don’t blame you,” I said, surprised that I’d said it, watching her pack her small, green Loeb classics.
“I met a man who’s going to take me to Greece and Italy.” She smiled at the thought of the trip.
And that was that. She taught a Latin course in adult education, her
pay depended on the number of students which was never more than five, and she had met an Italian widower, a retired civil servant in his midsixties who loved Ovid and Virgil as much as she did. At my age it was hard to imagine that a romance had blossomed but I knew little of such matters. The day before we both left I met the man in a park. He was small, courtly, well-dressed, and had a fine sense of humor, the latter a quality totally missing in my father. It was a hot, early-September day and the air stank of auto exhaust and the fetid river. My mother and this man, Armandino by name, walked hand in hand which embarrassed me but I managed to say, “I wish you well.” She was forty at the time and I had no idea what she expected of this man beyond plane fare though they lived in Modena, Italy, with infrequent trips back to the States until he died at eighty at which point she moved to Greece for a number of years before returning to Massachusetts to take care of her ailing parents.
I suppose my mother was an odd duck indeed but then I had no meaningful base of comparison. She certainly wasn’t what we think of as motherly but was a far step up from my father who tended to ignore me. From my childhood on she always spoke to me as if I were an adult.
My most peculiar memory of my mother came from a spring afternoon when I was fifteen. I was morbidly distraught over my love for an upper-crust girl who utterly ignored me. I was in the backyard digging my mother a perennial bed while she sat there reading aloud to me from the Rolfe Humphries translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I was too self-sunken to listen. We were, at the time, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Curiously she was never to see any of her perennial beds come to full flower. She knew slightly of my hopeless love having caught me weeping in the lilacs. I was digging with too much energy and she stopped me with a short lecture: “Samuel, try to imagine you are inside the house looking at yourself out the back window. Loving someone who doesn’t love you is one of the world’s oldest and dreariest stories. Loving someone who thinks they love you can be worse. There’s no guarantees but if you don’t love you’re a coward. So now you’re inside looking out here at yourself. Just who do you think you are? That’s the point you have to work on.”