by Jim Harrison
The reality of the day wasn’t shaping up very well, I thought. It was clearly time to row the boat, but then halfway down the hill I saw Laurie on her way back. She was teary because the harbor water was too cold to swim. I told her to come with me because Au Sable Lake would be warm enough and she could swim while I rowed. Her tears went away and she cheerily sang the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” as if I weren’t there. She helped me launch the boat and I rowed about a mile west down the lake where there was an unoccupied cottage and a nice beach. She got out of the boat and stripped to her undies throwing her T-shirt, sandals, shorts, and bra into the boat with me. She didn’t mind me looking because of her happiness over swimming so I went ahead and looked, amazed at the pinkness of her nipples in the hot sunlight. She swam off straight across the lake toward the dunes so I rowed in another direction not wanting her to think I was crowding her. I rowed in a big circle and after half an hour she headed back to the beach and so did I. It was too boggy near shore so she waved her hands at the insects and waded back out to a shallow sandbar where the water was only a foot deep. She was shivering when I approached and she said, “Come on in.” I took off my clothes except for my underpants, got out of the rowboat, and pushed it toward shore. I sat down in the water next to her and began to rub her shivering body, quite startled to feel how solid her body was when she looked so soft. She straddled my lap facing me and hugged me for warmth. I was sweaty from rowing but then I thought so what? In my rubbing I was avoiding her breasts and bottom and she teased “you’re missing the good parts.” I slid my hands under her panties and felt her cool solid bottom and then I passed my thumbs across her pink nipples. She stood up abruptly and took off her panties. I leaned forward and planted a French kiss on her pubis and she laughed and sat back down on my lap. “We don’t have a rubber so you’re going to have to pull out,” she said matter-of-factly. She guided me and at first I couldn’t get in but then suddenly I could. The sensation was so startlingly warm that I had to push her backward because I was instantly coming. “Look, thousands and thousands of babies,” she said pointing at my semen in the water. She rinsed the head of my penis and got back on and this time it took a lot longer before I flopped back to disconnect us. I lay there half-submerged with my heart pounding and she looked around the lake and said, “I’m hungry.” By the time we dressed and I rowed back to the truck she was dozing. She fell asleep in the truck and in town after I bought her hamburgers to go I put one under her nose which partially woke her up though she tried to eat it before it was unwrapped. She sleepily admitted that Mrs. Plunkett had made them stop playing their Mississippi blues records at four A.M. and they’d gotten extra energy by taking the last of their diet pills which I assumed to be Dexedrine.
Fred wasn’t at the cabin and there was no sign of Donald and Cynthia. Fred left a note for me to meet him at the tavern. I put Laurie to sleep in my room but then she didn’t want me to go. She was teary again and I lay back next to her wondering what was expected of me. The cabin was very warm and she had taken off her clothes but I found her tears antisexual. I still had something left of the good feeling of no longer being a virgin but this was being lost in her tearfulness. She hugged me so strongly that I nearly lost my breath and then she fell asleep. A scant half hour later by my watch, she was awake and we were making love again. I was worried because I wasn’t sure if I had withdrawn quickly enough. She went back to sleep but I was starkly awake leaning on an elbow and memorizing her body, confident that my good luck wouldn’t last and I would return to my state as a lonely prig.
I heard Fred come into the cabin and I dressed and slipped out the bedroom door but Fred caught a glimpse of Laurie’s body on the bed. His eyes widened but he graciously said nothing. He unpacked a bag of groceries and started to cook dinner. It occurred to me that we would be late and I should call Mrs. Plunkett. Fred announced that he had “tapered off” with a few beers at the tavern but hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours. He smelled so sour I moved away from the stove where he had discarded the uneaten pork chops and started a fresh batch. Laurie smelled sweetly of fresh lake water and the odor of sun was in her hair. I asked Fred what happened to Robin. She had taken off with a college boy late the night before so he had gotten drunk in sheer relief. He would visit his relatives up at the Club tomorrow then go back to Ohio and return to his books with joy. “You can only take so much reality,” he said. I offered to trade my Ford for his pickup but he said I’d be getting a raw deal and that we could simply switch for a while. I couldn’t imagine my parents allowing me to buy a pickup but I needed one for my rowboat. I wondered what had happened to the dog and Fred stomped on the floor and yelled “No,” explaining the dog hadn’t liked Robin so had dug a tunnel under the cabin for a retreat. The dog appeared at the screen door and when I let it in it shot for the garbage bag and rooted out the old pork chops. Fred decided not to notice and poured a chopped onion and a jar of baked beans over the chops in the frying pan, the kind of meal a famished bachelor makes with an air of culinary victory. It didn’t look appealing so I went in for a nap sliding onto the bed quietly in hopes of not waking Laurie.
Cynthia and Donald showed up around ten-thirty just before dark. I didn’t hear them enter and Cynthia caught us making love. She shouted and laughed and I covered my face with a pillow for want of anything else to do to handle the situation. Donald had wanted Cynthia to meet his cousins so they had driven over to the Chippewa reservation near Brimley to the east toward Sault Sainte Marie. Donald had to get home for work the next morning and Laurie got her things to go with them. Cynthia sat on Fred’s lap and told him about the reservation while smoking a joint. Donald was intrigued by the idea that there were black Indians and Fred loaned him the book. I walked out to Donald’s car with them thinking that Laurie might wish to kiss me good-bye but she didn’t.
5
When you’re sixteen your world is small and events easily conspire to make it even smaller. You have glimpses of greater dimensions but this perception easily retracts. Eros enlivens another world but not the simple world of masturbatory trance. Laurie lacked the simplistic charm of a magazine photo. In fact I had quickly consented to my own thought that she was as complicated, maybe as fucked-up, as I was. Naturally during the act of love you’re undisturbed by reality, a grace note I also found in trout fishing, but then lovemaking and fishing don’t manage to dominate your life like you wished they could.
When we got back to Marquette at midmorning the next day I had my first real quarrel with Fred. A year later he would dismiss this falling out but it was a stomach churner. On the way home I had halfway agreed to drive up to the Club with him for his annual overnight visit, but then my preoccupation with Laurie overwhelmed me and I couldn’t bring myself to go. Fred kept a suit of clothes at our house for this occasion and he stood there in my bedroom looking idiotic in a Haspel summer suit, rep tie, and button-down shirt angrily trying to change my mind. I had actually gotten dressed but then was suddenly covered with sweat at the idea of seeing all of those people, including my parents, that I didn’t want to see. Fred stomped off leaving the dog with Cynthia who in turn left the dog with me. I decided to walk out to Presque with the dog but it decided to stay with Mrs. Plunkett who was chopping garlic in the kitchen. I called Laurie who said “I can’t talk now” and hung up. The dog and Laurie made me feel abandoned.
On my walk toward Presque Isle (with a lump in my throat) I made a minor impulsive move that was to figure large in my life. I turned down a street on which Glenn’s shabby house stood thinking of my mother’s list of approved dogs which didn’t include the Labrador I wanted, only small yappy breeds, and saw Glenn and his dad loading equipment. They were surprised to see me because I always called first, another pointless sign of good breeding that had been drummed into me. There wasn’t a nitwit male alive that I wouldn’t call “sir.”
Glenn’s dad was a small-time cement worker and contractor. They were headed over to Iron Mountain to do curb const
ruction for a month or so. Glenn’s dad, named Herb, was a little leery of me because of our difference in background but said jokingly he was a shovel man short of a full crew if I needed work. Glenn ticked off the rivers we could fish in the evenings. I found myself saying that I would know by first thing in the morning if that was soon enough. Herb gave me the number of the tourist cabin in Iron Mountain and off they went.
I continued on to the tip of Presque Isle then circled around the west side of the peninsula and back toward home, a three-hour walk loaded with sappy feelings about Laurie, the kind of emotional schmaltz that makes country music so sodden. I made a detour to avoid passing the Baptist church what with the odors of the sin of fornication on my skin, not a small item after a year that included baptism, prayer meetings, and my prolonged and devout study of the Bible. I consoled myself by thinking that fooling with girls didn’t seem high on Jesus’ agenda of the forbidden, and while St. Paul was doubtless a good man he tended toward dreariness. This sort of waffling is typical of young fundamentalists looking for an angle in which they may behave as they wish. The true ethical question was whether Laurie was of sound mind, let alone me. There were all those common idioms dealing with sanity—was someone dealing from a full deck, or did they have both oars in the water? Both Laurie and Cynthia, though fourteen, seemed older than me in all respects, but with close contact some doubts had arisen. They both belonged to the raciest crowd in high school, young people who by virtue of their character were popular, the sons and daughters of the prosperous, successful athletes, and the very attractive whether male or female. So-called old money was in a rare category by itself, with two friends of my childhood being sent away to Groton and Kent. Both Cynthia and I threw major tantrums at the merest suggestion that we might be sent off to boarding school.
I admit that every few months I had doubts about my own willful behavior, especially since I got “religion.” I even discussed the problem with Cynthia who made no pretensions toward being fair-minded but in this case paused ten minutes, putting down her Jane Austen, and talked it over. “Of course we’re hopeless. What else could we be? We come from a long line of snotty criminals on both sides. Dad’s an alcoholic pervert and mother’s a goofy pill head.” I said righteously that we didn’t have to be like them and she agreed because she had no intention of being like them. There was the idea, she added, that our willfulness was part of our character, and it made the people in our family what they were, and would make us like we wished to be and hopefully that would be better than our “worthless” parents. This conversation had taken place only the month before and I was startled at the time about her sharpness on the matter no doubt gotten from the maturity of her reading which contrasted with her errant behavior. Cynthia was clearly the leader of the “bad girls,” the free spirits in her crowd, despite the fact that she had just finished her freshman year and others were older, and some of them seniors.
When I reached our front yard Laurie and Cynthia were there sitting on the lawn dressed for a party in the skimpiest of clothing. This was the age of the miniskirt. Laurie merely nodded at me and then Donald pulled up in his car with Brad who was headed to Michigan State in the fall as a football recruit. Laurie and Cynthia got in the car without so much as a backward look. Twenty-four hours before Laurie had told me in the hot cabin that I was her “all-time love” and now I was there shuffling my feet in the grass with the dog No barking at me from the front porch as if I were a stranger.
I went inside, packed my duffel for Iron Mountain, and had a glass of a red wine called Cribari with Mrs. Plunkett. The wine tasted syrupy but the aftereffects were pleasant. I played double solitaire with Mrs. Plunkett who for reasons about which I didn’t inquire wore elbow-length white gloves. I cautioned myself against a second glass of the red wine not wanting to fall into the family trap of habitual sedation. Mrs. Plunkett seemed as distracted as I was that evening and must have drunk a half dozen glasses in an hour before she burst into tears telling me that I shouldn’t have Laurie for a girlfriend because there was an outside chance I was related to her. I didn’t believe this because I didn’t want to. Of course my father was a renowned philanderer but when I had asked Jesse about a gossip item years before he had said ninety-nine percent of all gossip was speculative. My parents were of an antique age, in their early forties in fact, but Laurie’s mother had had her son who was in the air force at fifteen, then had Laurie after she was married at twenty-one. An amazingly high percentage of girls in the Upper Peninsula managed to get pregnant before marriage, and if marriage wasn’t an option simply had the babies anyway. Abortion wasn’t a popular option in the mid-sixties in this area, and since so much of the U.P. is Scandinavian and French-Canadian there wasn’t the social onus on pregnancy found in many parts of the country, say in the Bible Belt.
I went to bed early, at ten, fairly stewed but able to dismiss Mrs. Plunkett’s familial gossip. Laurie’s brother owned a conceivable resemblance to my father but not Laurie, whose mother at thirty-five would dress up to look like Marilyn Monroe for New Year’s Eve parties, and every male in the region felt called upon to express his desire for her at one point or another. Laurie’s father was an “outsider,” a professor at the college, and likely free from hearing much of the local talk about his wife who was originally from the neighboring town of Ishpeming.
Before I went to bed I made a pass around the den thinking of breaking into the cabinets, or into the desk where all the drawers were locked except the innocent top drawer. I knew my father owned some pornography from my early poking around but then I liked pictures of nude women excluding those pictures of men fucking them. I knew there were ledgers and journals in the cabinet beginning with those kept by my great-grandfather and eventually I would break in and make copies but that could wait. Right then I was feeling like a drunken young crackpot rather than a man with a chosen destiny. After all, in trying not to spend my life thinking about myself I had become more self-involved. And while beginning my project to uncover the evil in my family my own behavior had some question marks. There was the idea that even if making love to Laurie wasn’t a dire sin, but merely the resolution of a biological urge, when you rubbed two young people together you had a real mess on your hands. Clarence and Jesse listened to a country-music station while having midmorning coffee out in the work shed. I never cared for the music but it was impossible not to be haunted by Hank Williams singing “Lovesick Blues.” Older, sensible senior boys headed to the prostitutes in Hurley, Wisconsin, and avoided local messes. Not me.
It was about three A.M. when I awoke from a heavy, half-drunken sleep and sexy dream to find my penis was being sucked on, and simultaneously smelled Laurie’s scent mixed with a warm lilac odor from an open window. I was instantly angry with her and made the weakest effort to push her head away but then I had never experienced this daring physical act. Afterward I could smell my own semen on her breath when she whispered that we would always be “secret lovers.” At first light, soon after five, I got up to go to Iron Mountain, quickly dressed, and then looked back at Laurie nude on her tummy in the tangle of sheets. I quickly made love to her without taking off my work clothes but she gave no indication of being awake. The idea that I could think straight had never been more remote.
I wanted to get away very early before Fred arrived back from the Club and changed his mind about the temporary swap of my Ford for his pickup. He would anyway be in a bad mood. My mother always bird-dogged her “little brother” around the Club during his annual overnight visit in order to placate any quarrels he started. Unlike Fred I had already figured out that the proportion of absolute assholes remained constant in any social class. Fred loved to bait Republicans but in relatively subtle ways. He told me that the year before my father and a group of men had gathered sitting before a fireplace in someone’s twelve-bedroom “cabin” with their snifters of old brandy talking about Tom, Art, Kim, and Bob. They always used first names for Thomas Dewey, Arthur Vandenberg (a former senato
r), Kim Sigler (an ex-governor), and Robert Taft from Ohio. Given enough to drink there would be stories about the bizarre sexual tastes of the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson. Fred had interrupted with an absurd and lengthy lie about how he himself had made love to Angie Dickinson who was a devout Episcopalian in her backyard in Beverly Hills and how they had been viciously attacked by her pet peacocks. I was amused thinking it would be far simpler not to go to the Club in the first place, but then Fred had lost most of his immediate inheritance in his divorce over his affair with the black woman in Chicago and had to depend somewhat on the kindness of relatives. I know it goaded him that he couldn’t figure out how to be totally self-supporting.
By noon I had located Glenn and his dad Herbert in a run-down cabin near the Menominee River a few miles west of Iron Mountain. The river was big and slow and we launched my rowboat and tied it to the small, rickety dock. We sat on the picnic table sorting through our trout flies and ate a sandwich made of Italian cold cuts. A lot of the miners around Iron Mountain are of Italian descent, people my father referred to as “guineas” (Irish were “micks” and since there were very few blacks in the area except out at the Sawyer Air Base they were largely spared his language).
We left Herb sleeping off a hangover on a lawn chair and drove over to the Fence River northeast of Amasa and Crystal Falls. Midday isn’t normally a good time for trout fishing but the weather was warm, still, and cloudy. Brook trout are simpleminded so it’s always best to walk a distance from an easy access. I had heard about this particular stretch of the Fence River from John Voelker, our only famous Marquette area resident, who was a Michigan Supreme Court justice and had written the novel Anatomy of a Murder. Jimmy Stewart, Lee Remick, and Ben Gazzara starred in the movie version which was directed by Otto Preminger. Out of curiosity I had gone to a reception at the Club to meet these people with my parents and when I shook Lee Remick’s lovely hand my insides had jellied. I knew that Judge Voelker disliked my father but he didn’t hold it against me and gave me many trout fishing tips.