by Jim Harrison
Within a few days she thought she was in love with Charles, though in discomfiting moments he struck her as a more complicated version of her father, perhaps a long-lost uncle who had entered her life for the purpose of making it both interesting and unnerving. She guessed that he had a ready supply of money because he didn’t speak of having a job and had driven all the way from Georgia to have his dog’s bad habits corrected. When she asked him how old he was, he became confused and checked his wallet, discovering that he was forty-five. His only apparent interests were the natural world, hunting, and fishing, though he bore no resemblance to the hundred sportsmen she had met. Outside of sex he seemed to deal with life with a detached melancholy. Julip imagined that he had a wife and family stored somewhere but she had not considered it her business. Still, her instincts told her to stop the brief affair as soon as he left, but there were daily phone calls. When plane tickets had arrived for Key West the weather in Wisconsin had been cold and rainy, she was lonely, and she said in the bathroom mirror to her eventual regret, “What the fuck, why not?”
*
She passed Dr. Wiseman’s house within the subdivision speed limit, glancing at the neat bungalow that looked like it belonged somewhere in the North rather than in Florida. The doctor was there on the lawn with a woman his own age, both of them staring up a tree with a plump yellow Labrador sitting beside them, also staring up the tree. Julip became faint-hearted, but then she thought, Fuck it, and turned around. For some reason she remembered her precise thought when she boarded the plane in Duluth to go south to visit Charles: I’ll never be the same, but then I never have been.
*
Five hours later, on the way back to the motel, Julip suspected she had used a whole box of Kleenex and the question had become whether her brother was worth saving.
It had started awkwardly with Dr. Wiseman’s wife, Mildred, acting rather cool and cynical as if a young girl couldn’t have any real problems. Later she told Julip that it was only that everyone’s neuroses tended to devour their life — she was in the same line of work as her husband but in private practice. She made all the ardent college-age feminists Julip had met look like Mary Poppins.
The object in the tree turned out to be someone’s pet guinea fowl. It glanced down at them, then away in goofy displacement, releasing a scattering poop which the dog sniffed, then lapped.
“Yoong!” Mildred yelled, or so Julip thought, though the dog’s name was Jung. Julip pointed out that Eskimo dogs eat human poop, then was embarrassed. Wiseman and Mildred stared at her, digesting the information with amusement, then delight. “Astounding,” Mildred shrieked. Then Wiseman paraphrased Yeats by saying that Love had pitched her palace unreasonably close to the place of excrement.
“Potty mouth,” Mildred said, pinching his ass. “Time for soup. Come, Yoong!” But Jung wouldn’t come, so Julip made the whistley hiss of a red-tailed hawk and the guinea fowl flushed from the tree in alarm, shooting through the hedge toward the wild thicket of a vacant lot. Wiseman sprang to catch Jung’s tail and wrestled the dog into submission.
“That dog could use some work,” Julip offered.
“No shit,” the Wisemans said in unison.
*
Supper turned out to be chicken soup with a whole chicken in it, which was new to Julip. Wiseman opened a bottle of Pommard that she recognized as one of Charles’s favorites. While Wiseman carved the chicken, Mildred touched Julip’s arm and jaw line. “The bastards must be on your case day and night. You’ll never know the pain of being homely and intelligent.”
“Mildred, may I remind you I have a professional relationship with her?” Wiseman said. “You have no right to infer that Julip is not intelligent.” He looked up from ladling broth over the carved pieces.
“I’m talking about myself, asshole. Homely and intelligent.” This made them laugh and Julip glanced around nervously at the strangeness of the house. They were eating in the kitchen, she supposed, because the rest of the house was stuffed with books and art, mostly abstract. “I was summa and he was only magna” Mildred stated to Julip, who was beginning to wonder if there was going to be a proper time for her questions. She looked down at Jung, who was resting his chin on her knee under the glass-topped table. Charles had asked her in Key West to sit in the nude on a glass-topped table with him peering up from underneath. He referred to this activity as “fighting boredom.” She hadn’t minded at the time because she was engrossed in a mystery novel. Besides, Marcia had told her that older men do strange things to get their peckers up.
*
After dinner Mildred lit a cigar and Dr. Wiseman did the dishes. Julip began to feel at home with them, especially when Mildred quizzed her on how to train the dog. Julip pointed out that you had to be consistent with four commands — sit, stay, come, and heel — and you couldn’t do much with an animal until these commands were ingrained. Mildred showed her the dog’s quarters, a spare bedroom, and it was there that Julip perceived the nature of the problem: the room was an elaborate mockery of a child’s nursery, with toys and cushions, even dog posters on the wall. “Very nice,” Julip said, having run into the syndrome with dog owners before — a dog is not genetically designed to be a surrogate child but to fulfill its nature as a dog.
Back in the kitchen it was suddenly all business. Dr. Wiseman sat at the table with a notepad, coffeepot, and cups. He asked Julip if she minded if Mildred joined them, as her point of view might aid the proceedings. Julip felt her scalp itch and a lump arising beneath her breastbone as she nodded in agreement. She had already told Dr. Wiseman on the phone that her intent was to spring Bobby, and he began by saying that he agreed and would do all that was possible to facilitate Bobby’s release. However — and this was a long footnote — a number of questions came to mind, and it was difficult to know where to begin.
“Marcia?” suggested Mildred. She peered at Julip closely over the top of her glasses. “Naturally, as old married fucks we discuss each other’s cases. My advanced graduate work dealt with the relationships of fantasy and psychosis. I need to know if the bear, the pig, and Marcia are actual entities.”
“I don’t know about any bear,” Julip said in the slightest of whispers, though somewhere in her brain she began to hear a noise. A bear noise. Also her mother screaming.
“But the others. The pig and Marcia?” Dr. Wiseman asked, doodling on his notepad in what appeared to be concentric circles, beginning on the outside and swirling to the center. “Sometimes your brother tended to be playfully delusional and it was difficult to separate fact from invention.”
“The pig was a pet wild piglet. Its mother got shot and Bobby and me tried to raise it but my mother found out and had my father get rid of it. He carried it out to a swamp but he was drinking so he didn’t go very far. By this time the piglet was tame so it followed Dad home and a male Labrador killed it and ate it right in front of us. Bobby said then that Mother must be sacrificed by pushing her off a cliff.”
“Where did he get that idea?” Mildred bore down.
“He liked to read books about ancient times from the school library.” Julip had begun to cry and wanted them to say that it was horrible what happened to her piglet, but then she supposed that wasn’t part of the procedure. Charles’s friend Ted, who also had become her lover, had been having his mind analyzed for twenty years and told her about it. Ted was always having what he called “breakthroughs” and she rather hoped she might have one herself.
“Bobby said that right after the pig died he became officially married to someone named Marcia. His first cousin, in fact. Is this true? I don’t recall how old he was at the time.” Wiseman’s face was knotted in puzzlement.
“He was eleven, and me and Marcia were twelve. I was the vested virgin preacher. That’s what he called me, anyhow. It was really Marcia’s idea, but we were always up to no good when we were together.”
“Was the marriage consummated?” Mildred asked.
“Pardon?” Julip was thinking
about the white dress she wore when she married them. The ceremony took place on a dock on the duck pond. A curious alligator had drifted by, which Bobby announced as a good omen straight from the gods.
“Did they make love at that age?” Mildred repeated the question.
“All the time. Quite a lot. It’s always been Marcia’s favorite thing.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t get a clear picture from Bobby of the men, your lovers, that he shot — other than that they were older rich men who took advantage of you.” Wiseman raised a hand to cut off a question from Mildred.
“That’s where he’s wrong.” Julip was a little pissed, not knowing where to start. “We didn’t have much money when I was growing up. Even when I got to visit Marcia her family paid for the tickets and they always sent me her leftover clothes which were real beautiful. When I was a girl I had this list of all the places I wanted to go, like tropical islands, New York, and San Francisco. So when I helped Charles with his dog and we fell in love he sent me tickets to visit him in Key West which is a tropical island. One down, I thought. Charles takes pictures everywhere in the world for magazines. He makes an honest living but his wife is rich — and it isn’t his fault. He gave me the car sitting out front. Arthur has been married quite a bit and you might say he’s kinky but so what’s new? Sometimes he gets fifty thousand dollars for a painting that only takes him two weeks. He sent me first-class tickets to San Francisco and it was fun to sit up in front where everyone is polite. Ted writes novels and stuff for Hollywood. He has mental problems but I was used to being around mental problems in my family. He’s always saying that his heart is an interminable artichoke. That type of crazy thing. He gets in these moods where he can see underground to the roots of trees and deep in the ocean. When I met him in New York he told me he was going to become a creek. You must know about that kind of nuttiness? So I made love to them.”
“All together?” Mildred was insistent.
“No. They didn’t know about each other until after the trial. I mean they’re close friends but I saw Ted and Arthur in other places. I didn’t know Bobby was spying on us.”
Suddenly Julip remembered the bear and began weeping in earnest. It was when she was four. The bear hung around their farm in Wisconsin and her dad used to catch fish and put them out on a stump for the bear to eat. They would watch from the porch of the farmhouse except for her mother. The bear stopped by every evening just before dark for a snack, whether it was a fish or a lesser meal. Her dad said the bear was young, maybe a year and a half old, and probably only recently had left the company of its mother. Julip’s mother was sensibly angry about a bear so close to the house, and her father said this summer was it, and they wouldn’t feed the bear the next year when it would be too big anyway. Her dad said it now was about sixty pounds, the size of a fourth grader in school.
The best thing was when the bear came out of the alder swale and flounced around the stump as if it were dancing. Then one July evening it was still very hot and Bobby was on the couch because he had a fever. Her dad was supposedly off looking for a lost setter but probably was at the tavern, her mother said, and there was nothing on the stump for the bear. The twilights are long that far north and it was after ten-thirty when Julip heard a rifle shot out near the mailbox on the gravel road. She went to the open window where she had dead June bugs lined up in a row in hopes they’d fly off again. There were two more shots and she saw car lights and a spotlight out on the road, then the car took off in a shatter of gravel. There was just enough light for her to see the bear dragging itself down the driveway, dragging itself quickly by the main strength of its forelegs and making a howling sound, which trailed off in gurgles before the howling would begin again. Julip ran downstairs and Bobby was screaming, too, with their mother restraining him on the couch. She yelled, “Don’t you dare,” but Julip grabbed the flashlight and went out on the porch, shining the light on the bear’s face. The light made the bear’s eyes as red as the blood coming out of its mouth. In the kennels in back the dogs were all howling like wolves. The bear crawled under the porch and Julip rushed down the porch steps and knelt shining the light on the bear, who had crawled to the far corner, the dirt matting on its bloody hide.
Now her mother was at the door yelling for her so she went up the steps and tried to calm Bobby down so her mother could call on the phone. Her mother couldn’t find her dad at three different bars so she called the game warden, then she turned on the radio real loud so they wouldn’t hear the bear but they could still hear it over the symphony on the public radio station. Then the bear stopped squalling and her mother turned down the volume, and then the game warden came and dragged the bear out, and Julip didn’t get to watch that part though she saw him lift it into the back of his pickup. He came into the house and washed up in the kitchen and she heard him say to her mother, “Poor little girl,” meaning the bear. Julip somehow thought the bear was a boy. At dawn she looked out the window and her dad was asleep in the car.
“They must have been very cruel to you. Is that what you’re thinking about?”
Mildred was patting her on the shoulder and Julip came back to consciousness of the room with difficulty. The nasty aftermath was that she, Bobby, and her mother drove off that morning for a week with her grandparents, abandoning her dad to the farm. When he came to get them, she heard him say to her mother that he had joined AA though it didn’t stick.
“If they were physically abusive it’s still possible to prosecute.” Wiseman, fueled by Julip’s tears, had become angry and began pacing the room. “Occasionally I’m ashamed I’m a man,” he added.
“You should be,” Mildred chimed in, then gave Julip a hug, offering her more Kleenex.
“It’s not that …,” Julip began, her face in a wad of tissues, begging time while she thought of something to say. She didn’t want to talk about the bear that had reappeared from so long ago. If this was what Ted called a breakthrough he was welcome to it. “They were mostly kind, harmless. I like them, mostly.” She stared into the darkness of the wet tissues. There was the image of her dad asleep in the car with flies on his face, then waking, stumbling out of the car to kiss her goodbye, the whiskey coming out of his skin. She had whispered, “Can I stay with you?” But he either didn’t hear or pretended not to. She now said, “It’s been nearly two years, and every day I think about my dad committing suicide.”
“What do you mean?”
She pulled the Kleenex away and Wiseman was sitting next to her with a fresh dose of concern on his face.
“I mean my dad killed himself. Up in Minnesota.”
“Who told you that?”
“My mother. What do you mean?” Julip had begun to think she was dealing with the Mad Hatter.
“How did she say it?” Wiseman was insistent.
“She said, ‘He did himself in.’ Over the phone. We never had a funeral.”
“That’s not true. Your father was in a sleeping bag in a picnic area up near Fergus Falls in Minnesota. Some drunk teenagers ran over him in their car. I want to know why your mother would say such a thing.”
“I’m not sure — she always just rattles on,” Julip said. “But probably because she feels guilty. Bobby probably told you she went off to Virginia with the man she cooked for …” Julip’s voice trailed off with the enormity of it all. She felt a lightness bordering on the dizzy, and tried to focus sharply on Wiseman’s face. She turned to Mildred, whose own face was contorted.
“How utterly horrible. That inhuman bitch!” Mildred hissed.
“This all should make you feel better,” Wiseman said, sighing, actually an exhalation meant, unconsciously, to expel the evils of the world. “What I mean is, it’s very difficult for a young woman to get over a father’s suicide. And it’s very important for you to give up any idea that you could have saved him. Do you understand?”
“Was he drunk?” Julip sensed the relief of her father asleep, being run over rather than shooting himself or whatever.
“A little. A point-oh-five if I remember. I secured and tried to show your brother the autopsy report to erase his notions that your father is alive.”
“I don’t understand why Bobby didn’t tell me it wasn’t suicide.” There was the tonic of a rising anger against her brother.
“I suspect it was a misunderstanding. And you hadn’t been in contact to speak of. Your mother only told him your father had been run over by a car after he escaped the alcohol rehab clinic.”
Jung had begun digging at the living room rug for private reasons. “Yoong, no!” Julip said sharply, and the dog rolled over, quivering as if poleaxed.
*
On the way back to the motel Julip screamed “Motherfucker!” a dozen times, which at least was different from her ordinary sadness over her family. She tried the radio but some asshole was singing that his girlfriend had always been the wind beneath his wings, and Julip cocked a foot, kicking the volume dial off the radio face. This pleased her beyond reason.
Before she left, she had taken a walk with Mildred and Jung. Wiseman had begged off due to fatigue over human folly. Julip walked Jung on a leash over which he struggled mightily, though he was no match for the trainer. If anyone had been out walking in the neighborhood that warm summer night in Tallahassee, the assumption would have been mother and daughter, with the mother keeping up with the girl and unruly dog only with effort. They managed to talk once the dog was schooled into compliance. Mildred asked if she had enough money for the mission to Key West, and Julip said she had a credit card, though she wondered privately how much juice was left in it. She asked Mildred why older men were so fascinated with younger women. The question came out of her diffidently but Mildred made a full stop under a street light where Jung snuffled the dead insects gathered there.