Good Day to Die

by Jim Harrison

  Maybe Joseph stopped to water his thousand horses here while the Cavalry from Fort Fizzle were in pursuit. Fort Fizzle! The actual name. Look it up. Soldiers from Fort Fizzle killed fifty of our wives and children. It couldn't compete with Wounded Knee but then it is difficult to see atrocities racing neck and neck for the atrocity championship. I used to love the Russians and was upset when Katyn forest was pinned on them. I didn't want to hurt anyone except myself, and an observation ward with small paper cups with pills forming a total jewel in the bottom wasn't an interesting alternative.

  “Sylvia, you might go to prison.” Why should she be girlish if I couldn't be boyish.

  She looked up from a rock. “I don't care.” The sun caught her hair and burnished it copper. In the shadow of her face her eyes were very green and happy.

  “I'm not going to any fucking prison.” Tim looked belligerent though the bruise had subsided. The knuckles on his right fist still looked skinned and raw. You dance around with a pretty girl in an absurdly short skirt inciting horny young drunks to riot then you smash in the face of the one who makes the first move. And you do it with enough authority to discourage the others. She's mine, jackoffs. The code of the South, and West. Part of the North. I'd seen many tavern fights with two louts whacking each other's face into hamburger. And Tim's “you'll never take me alive” attitude fit into the same code which was artificially inseminated a hundred times a year by the movies. Sylvia bent over for a stone and we were impolitely mooned.

  “That doesn't do anything for me,” Tim yelled. She turned and thumbed her nose.

  “It does a whole lot for me.” He pulled my ear but gently. I wondered suddenly what he intended on earth. It was obvious that we weren't looking at the same woman. He was liable to call her skinny twice a day though I knew at five-seven she went about a hundred twenty. But such tastes aren't arguable. It was clearly familiarity—they had known each other closely longer than I had been married but with the same lack of success it seemed.

  “Sylvia, he doesn't want you. Let's get married.”

  “You're already married.” She was sorting the rocks for keepers.

  “We can get married now then I'll get a divorce.” I was painfully serious though a good measure of my giddy seriousness was the grass.

  “I don't think either of you are worth marrying.” She stepped out on the bank where we sat and handed me her choices for approval. I studiously turned the rocks over and over then struck two of them together until they had ugly white scars on their damp surfaces. It was pathetic that she was confusing me with Tim in our non-race for her hand, almost insulting.

  “I'll be the best man.” Tim lay back and chewed on a stalk of snake grass. “And I'll give away the virgin bride. She's so good you'll want to cut off her head by the end of the year.”

  Sylvia shrugged and walked over to the car. I calmed down a bit after thinking about what a drag it is to be understood. There was a mosquito drowning in our whiskey bottle and I squinted through the neck at his struggle. If I married again it would be to someone who could support my fishing habits. There's a hole on the porch of our house in Valdosta and we have no money to buy a board. My fly rod is broken and we must spend the two hundred dollars we saved for the baby. The baby will have to be put off. Until never.

  The main problem in Missoula proved to be the air which was acrid and yellow from the huge conical lumber kilns and stung the nose and eyes. It seemed ironical that the town was favored naturally by the confluence of three lovely rivers, was surrounded by mountains, was the learning center of Montana with its university, and still the whole place smelled like a stinking pile of shit which required an absolute mutation of the senses to live with.

  We stopped briefly at a five and dime while Sylvia ran in and bought a key chain to be planted before we escaped. People were bustling around the streets as if they weren't breathing air that reminded one of a hog turd. Tim said it smelled like the remains of a Cong hit with the new super-stickum napalm. He said if the stuff hit you you could jump in a lake and still burn to death. When Sylvia came out we drove around looking for a grain elevator and ranch supply store in order to get the fertilizer and kerosene and the few sticks of dynamite needed to set it off. I reflected dully on how we could adjust to any conditions in where we lived or warred or even loved. Sylvia was chattering to Tim about the songs they used to like and again I was relegated to being a passenger. Spite. You were better off with women if you at least pretended you knew what you were doing. Being oblique and directionless is the least attractive characteristic if you want to get screwed. A moron will get layed a lot if he has the self-assurance of an average ward heeler.

  I remembered the day at sixteen that I won the 880-yard run at an unimportant dual meet and with a mediocre time. But there were many students there because it was a fine spring day. I was laved in adoration for a week until my vanity became insupportable. I got bare tit with two different girls on dates—the movies were unnecessary, you just took them for a drive in your 1947 Plymouth. But then I placed seventh in the county meet on a beer hangover and vomited under the bleachers. And the girls whose udders I had suckled at, whose lips I had french-kissed and tasted their Spearmint tongues, would scarcely speak to me. A friend had won the 4-H three bottom plowing contest and had had a wonderful time for a week or two until he failed to qualify for the state finals. Tim had neither the essential brains nor the metabolism to ever question himself. Or from childhood he had never slowed down, thus women were attracted to his velocity. In so many slight encounters wherever we had stopped I had noticed it, whether it was waitresses, whores, bar girls or ranchers’ daughters in Jackson Hole.

  We picked up a small open U-Haul with a tarp at a Gulf station then found our other supplies on the west side of town. Tim stuffed his hair up under a high-crowned straw cowboy hat he had bought in Douglas. We sat in the car for a half hour—he didn't think I looked genuine enough. There was a slight breeze and on this side of town you were almost free from the bad air. I thought Sylvia was acting too gay so I decided I would bring her down a bit.

  “Sylvia, I love you.” The car was very hot and she pushed her damp hair away from her forehead.

  “I believe you.” We kissed very briefly. For the first time it occurred to me that it wasn't just language, that she did believe I loved her. I was mildly frightened. Jesus.

  Tim came out with a burly type following with the case of dynamite and two ten-gallon cans which they filled with kerosene at a pump. We were parked against a cyclone fence which enclosed countless bales of barbed wire. Tim backed the trailer up and the man helped him load the fertilizer at the elevator dock. I stuck my head out the window to catch the sweet grain smell which I loved. I used to like to stand in the wheat in my grandfather's granary in my bare feet. You would sink in halfway up your shins. The mice would be rattling around and swallows would peer at you from their nests along the beams. We reconnoitered in the car and agreed that there was no chance to reach Orofino in time to case the site that evening. But we would have to drive that far and somehow arrange to be there close after dawn so we could figure out exactly what we would have to do.

  At dinner we were all in good spirits. We stopped at a tavern south of Missoula for a sandwich but it was packed and the menu said WE SERVE CHOICE MONTANA BEEF AND REAL BUTTER. It was crowded with a mixture of miners, cowboys and businessmen. We played pool while waiting for the meal and I won twenty bucks. I thought the porterhouse steak was marvelous and aided by the whiskey I wanted to stay there forever. We took turns dancing with Sylvia who was very happy—she even got some scattered applause at which point Tim glared at those who clapped from the barstools. I decided I wouldn't walk out on this one but nothing materialized.

  By the time we got back in the car I doubted our ability to reach Orofino that night and cared less. We had the tape deck up as loud as it would go and were singing with Tammy Wynette's “Divorce,” a mournful song where the husband and wife spell out their words s
o that little Joe, aged four, won't understand that Mom and Dad are going to split. At Lolo Hot Springs we saw the signs and decided to take a bath in the springs. There were only a few cars in the lot and I argued with myself whether I wanted the hot sulfur water treatment or to go to the bar up the road whose neon lights I could see glittering so attractively.

  The attendant seemed happy with our business and we separated to put on suits in the dank stalls. Tim poked his head in mine to tell me we were going to wipe out every fucking dam in the whole U.S.A. At the edge of the pool I noticed that Sylvia was wearing her crocheted bikini. Two couples were in the process of leaving and I prayed that I would never get fat and white like the men. We soaked in the springs which were somewhere over body temperature. It was an effort to paddle around and I thought of falling asleep and drowning. Tim didn't like it and got out telling us to meet him at the tavern down the road. He said he had to drive and the hot water tired him out. The springs were open air with the wood bathhouse surrounding them. I floated on my back staring up at the stars, realizing I didn't recognize a single constellation. I swam over to Sylvia who was resting with her elbows on the edge of the pool. She asked me if I thought everything would go O.K. tomorrow and I managed an “of course.” I kissed and nuzzled the back of her neck and pressed myself to her. She turned around and we began necking in earnest but it was difficult to keep above the water's surface so we moved slowly to the shallower end of the pool. The music they piped in was terrible but we ceased noticing it. I knew that she was fairly drunk but then it occurred to me that she might, like myself, be acting more out of control than she really was. I sank in the water and pulled off the bottom of her bathing suit and waved it at her while she laughed. I reached down to make sure I was there and glanced around to see if the attendant was there. I was and he wasn't. I suddenly felt terribly sober. She put her arms around me and lifted her legs. I moved us into the yet shallower water and kissed her as I entered.

  CHAPTER

  16

  WE STOOD in the water caressing each other while I told lies. Then the attendant came and told us he wanted to close for the night, by which time I wanted her again. Walking up the road to the bar I tried to hold her hand but she would have none of it and any questions I asked went unanswered. It all seemed so casual and abortive, so terribly brief and unlikely, and not what I had planned at all. As we neared the tavern I began to get depressed and drew her to me with force. I had guessed that she was crying but that was far away and unimportant: I wanted some signal of permanence to have been made by our lovemaking, no matter how ludicrous it had been.

  “Don't tell him,” she said against my neck.

  “Don't be silly.” I was weighted down then by my own stupidities, the hundred things I had said to her or in front of her that might make her believe that I'd create a joke out of it. “I love you. I won't tell him.” But the word “love” sounded flimsy and childish from my mouth.

  “There's no way to be with each other.” We were leaning against the car and through the screen door of the tavern we could hear Tim's voice, then a pause, then laughter. Her statement was an announcement of fact and there wasn't any doubt in her voice. “You're just like him and I couldn't go through that again.”

  I began to deny this but she turned and walked up the steps and through the tavern door. I smoked a cigarette and felt a kind of palpable sleaziness that I hadn't known in years. Perhaps I was like him. I thought of myself as much smarter but that made no difference to her or to me for that matter. I stood there trying to pull from airy nothing, from the exhaust of the passing cars, some real difference between Tim and myself that I could use to assure her that my love was solid and that I would take care of her. But I couldn't and I never really intended to. I wanted to have her for a year. Or less. Though often in the past few days I believed I couldn't live without her there was the real question of whether I cared about living at all. Now standing there I felt a chill in my head that made all questions of what to do moot. I dreaded facing Tim. A transference of ownership. There were no safe places from her any more than there were safe places from the act we planned tomorrow.

  In the bar I felt oddly murderous. If I got in a fight tonight and lost I would take the .38 from the glove compartment. We sat there on the barstools drinking tequila. Tim had a map of Idaho spread out and I pinpointed the location on the North Fork of the Clearwater in case I fell asleep. Sylvia was acting splendid. Maybe she felt that way but I could perceive in her no sign, no recognition of what had happened. I danced with her clumsily and went into a raving fit when a local tried to cut in. I got an apology but I could see Tim grinning over the guy's shoulder waiting to place the proper boot in the spine. I knew in my drunkenness that I had lost any remnant of control and would somehow merely have to wait and see what I would do.

  They woke me up near Kooskia for coffee. My head hurt and I had awakened intermittently hearing the clanking chains of the U-Haul and the loud tape. It was nearly two A.M. on the cafe clock and I figured us to be about sixty miles from the dam which was northwest of Orofino. I was tempted to forget but knew there was no way to get away with it. Tim was impossibly keyed up and it was infectious. We could case the situation right after dawn, then keep hidden during the day and pull our little number in the evening. Sylvia was in a semi-doze over her coffee and for a moment I felt cruel toward her sleepy vulnerability. Wake up. Don't just sit there like a cow until it's over. We had to drive a half dozen miles on a gravel road, then cut off on a two-track before we reached a ranch house. It was an even mile if I remembered correctly from the ranch house to the dam and the small lake or backwater that it created. When I had fished there the owner was up for the weekend from Boise and I doubted that he would be there this early in the season though I knew there had been at least one hand staying there all the time.

  I felt bleary but strangely intent on what we were doing. Sylvia said she wanted to sleep but it was only two hours from dawn and if we got settled in a motel it would cost us another day. It had begun raining when we got back in the car, first small droplets then a steady downpour that made the driving difficult. I sat in front with Tim and while I gave him directions I kept thinking of the rain as a bad omen. Maybe the dam would wash away by itself with this amount of rain added to the melting snow of the spring runoff. How lovely. Sylvia lay curled asleep in the back and I could only see her legs. It was hard to believe that they had encircled me not a few hours before. Our bodies had felt very cool in the night air above the water. Perhaps it had happened last week.

  We missed our turnoff the other side of Orofino and had to backtrack. But after several miles on a gravel road I saw the mercury vapor yard light in front of the ranch house and then the cattleguard and gate. I hoped the gate would be locked and when I unlatched it in the rain I thought of telling Tim that it was locked but turned to see him watching me between the headlights. We drove another mile down the rutted two-track and then pulled over into a clearing near a fence. It was too dark to hide the car but I was fairly sure there was no one at the house. Perhaps a neighbor only kept an eye on the place but I knew there were cattle. Tim was extremely edgy and we were on the verge of arguing several times. Within an hour he had finished four bottles of Coke and dropped two pills. I asked for a pill because I felt like a wet stone sitting there in the steamy car watching Sylvia's sleeping legs. And we had rehearsed so many times that there wasn't anything to talk about until it got light and we could look over the dam.

  “This is great.” He turned and punched me in the shoulder and sorted through the tapes that lay in a jumble between us. “This is really a goddamned great thing we're doing. Shake.” We shook hands and he popped in a Haggard tape that I was sick to death of.

  “Maybe no one will hear it.” I hopefully figured it was three miles from the nearest occupied house.

  “You'll hear this son of a bitch ten miles away.” He slapped the dashboard loudly and Sylvia awoke.

  “Are we there?” Sh
e looked out the wet black windows and then at us. Her voice was bleak.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the lyrics of “I Can't Hold Myself in Line"—the singer was mournfully going off the “deep end” because of love and whiskey. It was painfully accurate and I wanted to turn it off. If I turned away from Tim I was able to imagine that I was fishing and just waiting for the first light to make my way to the river. My father had always liked being near the river for a full hour before it was light enough. He would drink from a Thermos of coffee and smoke cigarettes wondering aloud about the weather and what stretch he might fish.

  “What will we eat today?” Sylvia brought me back to the car.

  “Each other, stupid.” Tim thought this was a wonderful joke. “I bought a bag of junk while you guys were fucking in that hot water.”

  “Timmy!” Sylvia poked him in the ribs but her voice was playful.

  “Don't Timmy me, I saw you. I bought this stuff,” he said lifting a paper bag from the floor and shaking it, “and then came back and went in but you were fucking so I went back to the tavern.”

  There was an awful silence. Though the car was dark and the only sound was the rain and the metallic crackle of the engine cooling, our presences were so luridly real that we may as well have been shouting. Then Sylvia began a sort of dry weeping as if she were having difficulty with her breath. I reached over and gripped Tim's wrist as hard as I was able in an effort to get a message through. He caught.