by Jim Harrison
We drove a half dozen miles on a logging road through a canyon road up into the mountains and then parked in a little glade under some oaks. I realized I had dreamt about that Goya drawing that Laurel said was called La Cocina de las Brujas and that had furthered my unrest. I wasn’t listening too carefully to Nestor who by coincidence was describing Laurel as a possible witch. He insisted that some women were more than women and you had to avoid those who were too close to the animal world. “Of course I never have,” he added.
Nestor gave me a canteen to attach to my belt and a sturdy walking stick to help me up steep places. He showed me how he would rig a noose at the end of his walking stick to pull the remaining pup from the den. “What will you do with it?” I asked, worried that if caught the pup would have the same destiny as its sisters. Nestor said that in his own private religion it was okay to kill a mountain lion or jaguar or deer but unthinkable to kill a wolf. In his day pack he showed me a bag of machaca for our lunch and a jar of goat milk, explaining that the pup wasn’t weaned and at this moment was probably starving. He looked off to the southeast and shrugged at the storm clouds which were obviously coming closer in the vast landscape.
It was a rigorous two-hour hike to the lobo den fraught with those mood changes that victimize a boy of twelve. At one moment you presume to be a full-grown man climbing the rough mountain trail into your first true wilderness, and the next moment you are an academic waif, really the same as an army brat, and you are lonely for your mother and wish to be with her listening to the Texaco Saturday afternoon opera in the kitchen while she makes you both a hot Mexican chocolate and when your father comes out of his study complaining about the noise Mother says, “Please go away.”
Near a tiny spring or seep coming out of a crack in solid rock Nestor showed me a set of jaguar tracks. I was frightened and he patted the big pistola he wore on his belt, saying that all the jaguars within a hundred miles knew his scent and avoided him. I was unsure of the truth of this but then I knew that even house cats avoided certain people for undetermined reasons. Nestor said that we soon would reach the den and my stomach growled in foreboding, perhaps because the dark clouds split by yellow lightning were approaching ever closer from the southeast and I could feel the thunder on the boulders I grabbed for handholds on the steep trail. Finally we reached a small plateau and Nestor rigged the noose on his walking stick and crawled through the bushes to a small cave. There were bones and pieces of deer hide here and there. I crawled after Nestor and we could hear puppy weeping noises. Nestor had a small flashlight which he shone into the hole then quickly dragged the pup out with the noose around its neck.
The pup looked woebegone, near death and did not resist as Nestor made a slurry of goat milk and machaca rubbing and mashing it into the pup’s mouth, then as I held its jaws open Nestor poured it into the pup’s mouth and down its throat. Nestor explained that canines processed protein very quickly. We sat there staring out at the impending storm and at the end of perhaps a half hour the pup struggled to its wobbly feet and Nestor pronounced that it would live. I took the pup onto my lap and scratched its tummy as I had little piglets on the Bozeman ranch. Nestor said we had to get out of there before the coming rain had a chance to cause a flash flood on our trail. He tied a piece of rope on the back of his belt for me to hold on to during the descent. I cuddled the pup against my neck and we started down the trail but barely had traversed a hundred yards when lightning struck a tall pine near us. It was shattering, deafening, and the top of the tree burst into flame. My legs went dead and I sat down hard on my butt and the pup sank its teeth into the soft flesh of my neck. I yowled and Nestor tried to detach the pup who wouldn’t let go and Nestor’s strong hand finally broke its neck. Nestor stuffed the dead pup into his day pack saying they would have to determine if the pup had rabia which meant rabies.
Part II
I Am at Large
Looking back nearly twenty years or so at a few scraps of paper my first diagnosis was “congenital erythropoietic porphyria,” or Gunther’s disease, determined by a subtropical hematologist named Alfredo Guevara in a hospital in Chihuahua, a disease leading to scarring and disfigurement but so rare that only two hundred or so people on earth at any time endure it. After death, under a black light the bones of the victims glow. But enough of such pathetic details. The important thing was that I wasn’t a victim of rabia, fearsome because a kid in our Alpine neighborhood had gone through the long series of hypodermics in the stomach to prevent death by rabies.
When we reached the camp in midafternoon after having to wait out the plunging rivers of water on our mountain trail, a virtual flash flood, the camp was in disarray. It had become sunny and hot with the storm heading north toward the distant Rio Grande. The four birdbrains had managed to get their vehicle stuck and had to walk “two miles” back to camp though their vehicle was clearly visible about a half mile to the south. The problem was what they referred to back in Montana as “gumbo,” a substantial rain making a dirt road impassable what with the clay and sand turning into goo.
Meanwhile on our arrival Laurel had me sit in a camp chair and stretch my head over the back so she could doctor my wounds with a basic medicine kit. She couldn’t get anyone’s attention except for Nestor and Celia what with the four birdbrains still buried in their perilous experience. Laurel actually had to shake my father by the shoulders to get his attention. He looked over my wounds with his usual “why have you done this to me” attitude. He was all for getting in touch with my mother and having her retrieve me because he had important work. I had told Laurel about my pride and pleasure in my mother getting the Radcliffe grant so she merely stared at my father as if he were a maggot and announced that she would drive me up to Chihuahua as soon as the roads dried a bit. Her husband George was upset with the plan but she merely glared at him.
Off we went in the late afternoon with the air fresh and golden from the rain. I was laid out in the back seat of Laurel’s Land Cruiser in a blanket because despite the hot weather I was already shivering from a high fever. My wounds pulsed with a life of their own which indeed they did have. The wolf pup was on the floor and I petted its dead body having so much wanted a dog since I could remember, and now that I’d owned a dog creature for so short a time my young heart swelled mournfully at its death.
I was a full week in a hospital in the city of Chihuahua lapsing in and out of consciousness with my extreme fever. I did have a few of my senses about me on the second day when I asked Laurel and Dr. Guevara who were in my room to please give the pup a proper burial, say under a cairn of rocks outside the city. Later I doubted that they did so but it seemed right at the time.
After the week in Chihuahua we drove to El Paso for three days of outpatient work with an old hematologist who had been Dr. Guevara’s mentor in his medical school days. When they had parted I’d noted that Laurel and Dr. Guevara lingered on their kiss good-bye and I had natural suspicions. It is completely impossible for some to resist sexual temptation. Laurel had told me that she and her husband George had been grade school sweethearts but by the time they married after college they were not much more than spare parts for each other’s convenience. George was pleasant enough alone with her but around other men he preened and pouted and became the falsely hearty blowhard. I described my parents’ marriage and she said that it’s puzzling what we become when love has fled.
This chat took place in El Paso where I had a small connecting room to her hotel suite. I was still too weak to have rejoined my absurd and perpetual desire, but then the second night I dreamt of Emelia and how sometimes on weekends we’d wander by the schoolyard and teeter-totter, a form of play usually limited to those younger than us but we seemed to like the metronomic almost autistic feeling. Then the dream continued with Lawrence and Dicky window-peeking in the neighborhood with me in tow. It was slim pickings and we resorted to spying through Emelia’s mostly closed venetian blinds. It pissed off Lawrence and Dicky that Emelia had her own room
and the door was always locked. There she was on the bed naked from the waist down listening to the Beach Boys rolling back and forth with a large teddy bear between her legs. Dicky whispered, “What the fuck is she doing?” and I fled.
After three nonconclusive days in El Paso the medical people sent us on to Houston where help in a complete diagnosis supposedly would be available. Laurel was now speaking to my mother in Cambridge, Massachusetts, every evening with a report on our progress. When I picked up the phone I always quickly assured my mother that I was doing well and certainly did not mention my imponderable nightmares and full-body cramps. Mother and Laurel had known each other only slightly at Cornell because graduate students with extra money were in a higher social set. To be frank, other than my sometimes stupefying infirmities about which I had no significant comprehension I was enjoying leading the high life. My life with my parents had been close to the bone and good beefsteak was unknown to us. In Houston we stayed at an incredible hotel called the Alden though I spent at least three days and nights a week at the hospital being probed, punctured, and tested by the tropical-medicine doctors. Laurel explained to me that much of medicine is pro forma and slightly banal so that when doctors find an interesting case they become obsessive about it. Early every morning we would take a fast walk for an hour and then exercise in the hotel’s gym though my system was frequently too upset by the drugs I’d been prescribed for me to be strenuous. Still I was regaining my strength and with it my hopeless, nearly berserk romanticism. Of course Laurel noted my mooniness over her and was chastely remote which wasn’t really part of her nature. Early one morning when I thought we were going to be late for an appointment I went into her room which had a separate living and sitting space. I heard her snoring lightly and looked into the open door where she lay on the bed with her bare bottom exposed. I stood there memorizing her ass for my bank of fantasies. Her breathing changed and she said, “Your eyes are burning holes in my ass,” and laughed. I knew that several times when I overnighted at the hospital she had gentlemen visitors. I met one who was a hideous snot from New York City who had lived near the Frick museum in Laurel’s old neighborhood. Laurel had told me that her obsession with art history came about when as a girl she used the Frick as a daily escape from her “wicked” parents.
We were into our fourth week of my problem and it was mid-July. We took a three-day outing down to Corpus Christi’s Mustang Island while waiting for a final diagnosis that was never to arrive. Laurel thought that swimming in the gulf might relax my tortured musculature whereas the chlorine in the hotel pool had made me nauseous. There was only a single room available at the nicest beachfront motel and my heart jumped at the idea of contiguity though there were two beds. Laurel teased me saying, “Just behave and I will too.” We sat on a veranda the first evening and watched the big moon rising in the east. I was feeling swollen in my head and quite agitated. Laurel allowed me to have a beer which I had often had with Dicky, Lawrence, and Emelia, stealing from their mother’s ample stash.
The surf was quite heavy because a modest hurricane had struck the day before to the south beyond Matamoros. Laurel often drank too much and was fixing herself large tequilas over ice. I went down the steps, shed my clothes to my underpants, and ran into the surf while she screamed, “Don’t!” The rising yellow moon was glittering off the white-capped wave foam and I swam toward the moon. I felt unnaturally strong and hypnotized by the glory of the sea and the moon. I finally turned around and someone was with Laurel shining a strong flashlight toward me so I swam back. The last huge wave near shore flipped me through the air but I landed on my feet. The motel employee with the flashlight said, “Quite a trick, asshole,” and walked away. I embraced Laurel who was weeping drunkenly. I took a breast out of her halter and suckled it. She stiffened, pushed me away, and walked up the steps and back into the room, pausing at the table to pour another drink. She slipped out of her skirt and sat on the edge of the bed looking down into her drink, then swallowed it all and let the glass tumble to the rug. I stood in front of her and pulled down my underpants, then hugged my chest which was sticky with the salt water. “This should help,” she said massaging my penis. I immediately shot all over her chest and she laughed. Of course it didn’t help. A boy just short of thirteen is an overflowing fountain. She stretched to turn off the bed lamp and I was on her. She struggled then gave up. I made love to her many times whether she was asleep or awake. I don’t know what I was thinking because I wasn’t thinking.
This was the first of hundreds of seizures in my life. I’ve often wondered if we metamorphose or only stand more revealed? Memory, or portions of it, so condenses the past that we struggle to reproduce the essence of it in the present. The sliding doors were open to the slow drumming surf and the moonlight. I fed on her vulva with my mouth with the moon shining off her bottom. We hadn’t eaten dinner and I was mounting her like a dog when she vomited up some tequila off the edge of the bed. Before dawn she violently pushed me off the end of the bed and I knocked my head against the coffee table bringing on blessed unconsciousness. At dawn I remember her covering me with a blanket where I lay shivering in the coolish morning air. When I woke at midmorning I was shaking convulsively and she led me to a full hot tub in the bathroom after feeding me tranquilizers and muscle relaxants. Within an hour I was calm enough to go to a restaurant, where I ate an improbable amount of menudo, a tripe stew the texture of which reminded me of her vulva.
We spent the afternoon sleeping and swimming in the gentle surf, and in the evening drove south to Riviera Beach where I ate a prodigious amount of fresh seafood. It was still light on the way home and she pulled off on a deserted road and began weeping. She was so sorry about the terrible thing we had done. It was her fault and must forever be our secret. It hadn’t been mentioned all day and I was surprised that I hadn’t thought about it that much in my fatigue as if it had happened in another life.
It was Thursday and there was a vacancy and she had managed to get me a room down the way from her own. She loaned me a Goya book about the horrors of war with drawings of battles and dismembered bodies hanging from trees. At the seafood restaurant I had watched a group of businessmen enter all puffed up as if they were much larger than they were. My mother owned a book of Mathew Brady’s photos of the Civil War and I recalled my incomprehension about the way men rend each other. I walked down the beach until it was dark and the top of the moon began to rise above the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. In the darkness I pulled down my trousers and tried to fuck the wet sand but it hurt. I walked up to the deck in front of Laurel’s room but the sliding doors were locked and her drapes were drawn though I could hear music from her radio and an announcer say, “Scarlatti.” I sat there with my brain seeming to bubble and my muscles clench and unclench. I wondered at my inability to think. A group of seabirds flew across the moon and my skin prickled at the beauty of it. It occurred to me that I could sense beauty even if I couldn’t think other than to be sure I scented Laurel. I whispered through the crack in the door and finally she opened it. She said that we must never see each other again as if in a language I couldn’t understand. We lay down on the bed and she sucked at me several times saying she was too sore. She put lotion on her anus and I made love to her there. She gave me several tranquilizers with a water glass of tequila. She looked at my raw penis with horror. She helped me on with my trousers and pushed me out the door.
At dawn a ranger from the Padre Island National Seashore found me lying facedown at the edge of the surf and thought I was dead. I was so weak and shaky that he gave me a ride the fifteen miles back to the motel. I certainly didn’t remember wandering that far. We passed two policemen talking to a group of campers and the ranger said someone had tried to chase the “weird” stranger away from their campfire. One man had a broken arm and the stranger had tried to drown the other man in the surf. I remembered the incident very well and was amused when the ranger said the attacker had been described as a “great big guy.”
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Needless to say Laurel was relieved to see me. We packed up and drove to Houston. At the hospital they said I had an “acute blood virus” and gave us a big bottle of antiviral pills. We went to the airport and flew to El Paso where we picked up Laurel’s vehicle and then drove to Alpine where my mother was overjoyed to see us. I was relieved to hear my father was down in Big Bend birding but was saddened to learn that Emelia and her family had moved to Albuquerque that morning. Laurel quickly excused herself as if in a slight panic to be rid of my company. Nevertheless I walked her out to her car and said, “I love you,” which brought tears to her eyes. “God help you whoever he is,” she said.
Back in the house my mother said she couldn’t believe how changed I was in a month. She looked at my ugly throat scar and then the prescription on the big bottle of pills and then a page of the doctor’s instructions which were beyond my immediate interest. My own aim was to stay free of doctors after a grueling month of them. We talked for an hour about her grand time at Radcliffe. I wanted to tell her to leave Father but I didn’t have the courage. I felt utterly depleted and went to bed early, quite relieved that the moon through the east bedroom window had no effect on me. Early in the morning I walked over to Emelia’s and looked into the windows of her empty house.
In the ensuing months I was to discover the awful side effects of the antiviral drugs I only took a few days before the moon was at its largest. I was a bright lad and it didn’t take much energy in terms of reading and study to perceive that if the moon had such a mighty effect on the tides of the world’s oceans it could have at least a minor effect on the closed system of our blood.
Late in August we moved to Cincinnati dragging the usual budget U-Haul. I sat in the back seat not exactly savoring our boloney sandwiches and making mental notes on which landscapes I might want to visit when I was finally liberated from my parents, especially the Black Jack Hills of northern Oklahoma, and the tallgrass prairie in southern Kansas.