by Jim Harrison
She remembered. Old Martha was an Anishinabe woman who lived in a shack a mile down the road from their farm in Wisconsin. Julip would bring her small baby food jars of her father’s whiskey and Martha would make blueberry pancakes using wild rice she ground up for flour. They were the most delicious pancakes in the world with Martha’s homemade maple syrup. Bobby was her favorite, and when she died when he was eight he brought violets to her grave in the Indian cemetery until, as usual, his mother forbade him to do so. It was Martha who gave him the arrowheads.
“What did you do with the rest of that stuff Martha gave you?”
“Hid it on our farm.”
“It’s not our farm. It’s Mother’s.”
“Nope. She wrote and told me she gave it to us. Half yours. Half mine. It’s not worth much anyhow. If you get me in a nut house, I’m going to escape and go to Ecuador. You got to pay me half what the farm’s worth for a grubstake.”
“She never told us the same thing.”
“You’re right there. I was remembering when Marcia and you did all those sex experiments on me. I could use some of that now. It would be kind if you’d sneak me a peek of tit.”
“Bobby, I’m your sister!” Julip hissed, flushing with blood and anger.
“It didn’t matter then, why does it now? And if you don’t want to, don’t do it. I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why did you fuck those old guys?”
“I liked them. They were more interesting than young guys I knew. I got to go places.”
“That’s a good answer. Maybe they didn’t defile you after all. You got your own free will. Tell them I promise not to shoot them again. I’ll swear it on my Modern Library Giant edition of Friedrich Nietzsche. My problem is that I’m a rope dancer.”
The Nietzsche was a new one to Julip. Bobby’s capacity to find fresh bibles to live by had been going on a long time. If pushed, she thought, she could remember a dozen or so figures, including Ayn Rand, Hesse, Hemingway, the New Testament (a brief phase), and a Tibetan by the name of Trungpa. Bobby’s schoolteachers all thought that if he’d had an ounce of good sense he could have gone far, wherever that might be. At least, she thought while getting up to leave, he didn’t drink. Bobby considered alcohol to be the “water of weakness,” a notion that probably came from the same place as her “defilement.”
“I love you, Bobby. I’ll do what I can.”
“If you loved me, you’d show me a tit,” he crowed, leaping straight into the air from his chair in a single fluid motion.
She blew him a kiss and fled.
*
There was a long delay getting on the turnpike near Wild-wood. She stopped at a Burger King — it was nearly three and she had forgotten breakfast and lunch. Two ambulances raced toward the turnpike on the road’s shoulder and she took out her diary to catch up during the delay, then dripped a glob of mayo from the Whopper onto the diary. “Motherfucker!” she shrieked.
“Did you call me?” said a boy in the next car.
“No. I made a mess. Excuse my French.” Julip noted he was good looking but too young. She backed her car over to the corner of the parking lot for privacy.
I’m in the thick of things. Homesick for Wisconsin already. Too fast like the Boys and my clients who always want a biddable dog. Tick-tocks I call them. Tick left, tock right. Like the thing on a piano, metronome? That’s because everyone’s in a rush and the dogs can’t stretch out and find birds. A dog following its nose can’t be a machine. So they want shock collars and I say fuck you and your shock collars. Bobby was pretty nice today though a tad nuts. He did not get any training at all when younger! I didn’t get much either but I don’t have mental problems (that I know of). My heart goes out to the insane, like that braindamaged setter I couldn’t heal. Vet said a brain parasite. I could fix Wiseman’s dog in a day or two though I doubt they’d be consistent. I should have answered the Boys’ letters this year but I was sick of the whole thing including them. They all said they were sorry when they were the ones who were shot. That must be the victim stuff you read about in the Modern Living page of the newspaper. No one grows up, they just get tired. Or few indeed. No stopping for dead animals on the turnpike. Too dangerous.
*
By the time she reached the Palm Beach exit it was evening and she was soothed though exhausted. The beautiful country between St. Cloud and Fort Pierce had been a comfort, and she guessed that was the way Florida looked years before — palms, savannahs, swamps, palmettos, sawgrass, clouds of birds, a gorgeous, deep green, funky smell. She was down to only four tapes she liked and alternated between Jim Pepper, Neil Young, an old Grateful Dead called The Wake of the Flood, and her single classical tape, a gift from Arthur, Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Other than being absorbed in the music and the landscape, she had been half singing, half chanting the names of the favorite dogs in her life, nearly seventy in number. It was at least five more hours to Key West and she was tempted to go for it but there didn’t seem much advantage in arriving wrecked. But then she remembered she was supposed to call Marcia, so she checked into a Best Western, pleased that the air conditioner was already on, also relieved that the desk clerk had been a senior citizen reading a Bible. Just to be on his good side she asked him to remember her in his prayers, which delighted him. Methodists were always doing that, and she hoped the gesture would help her credit card clear. It did.
When she called Marcia she got a succession of three voices, one female and two male, with Spanish accents, before Marcia’s throaty drawl came on.
“Jewel baby, where are you?”
“Hee-Haw Junction.”
“It’s Yeehaw Junction and you’re not there. Don’t fib.”
“I’m here. At a motel. Bobby says he’ll see you but there’s a small catch. He wants nude photos. You ought to have a drawerful.”
“Not on me. Can I go up there tomorrow?”
“Suit yourself.” Julip was too tired to run on at the mouth and steadfastly refused Marcia’s invite to go to a party for Argentinean polo players, which was scarcely what she needed that night. Marcia, however, insisted she stop by to say hello, so Julip gave her the address off a matchbook. She drew her warm bottle of white wine from the suitcase, was too lazy to go for ice, and flipped Dickinson open at random, for counsel:
Witchcraft has not a Pedigree
T’is early as our Breath
And mourners meet it going out
The moment of our death —
Too scary to be of use, she thought, stripping for a shower and sipping the wine. A joint was better after a long day’s drive but she didn’t want to get caught on the road and add to her difficulties.
In the shower she sang her dog names, almost merrily, but her throat stopped at Zeke, who followed Blossom, Kate, Jessie, Jack, Punch, and Mack. Her father had sold Zeke, a high-powered English pointer, to a Japanese for use as a foundation stud for twelve thousand dollars. Julip was thirteen at the time and Zeke was her favorite to take on long walks up in Wisconsin. She had been bitterly angry at her father, who had used the money to buy a fancy step-side pickup rather than to pay debts, paint the house, take her mother on a promised vacation to New York. It was, in fact, the single occasion she could remember when she had been sympathetic with her mother. Julip mourned poor Zeke’s flying off to Japan, then one evening stole the new pickup, taking three setters in the cab with her and three cans of Franco-American spaghetti as a special treat for the dogs. Early the next morning she was found a scant dozen miles away, mired to the axles on a swamp road, by the same game warden who came out after the bear was shot. Her father apologized for selling Zeke which, she noted, did nothing to get her beloved dog back.
She was toweling off when she heard Marcia at the door. Marcia threw a package on a chair and busied herself opening a bottle of Meursault she had swiped from her host’s fridge. Julip remembered a summer evening in New York when Ted drank three bottles of the wine with dinner, then had fallen out of bed on his face.
�
��You got any Valium?” Marcia was edgy, strung out as if she had been doing coke.
“I never have any Valium.”
They went through this every time they met. Once when Marcia visited Key West, she had stolen Charles’s pills, which pissed him off, though he forgave her when she slept with Arthur so athletically that Arthur missed a day of fishing, out of exhaustion. Ted had moped when Marcia shrieked at him, “Who needs your fucking mind games.”
“Get a load of this one.” Marcia pulled out one of her special five-paper bombers, lit it, and dragged deeply. “Jamaican primo.” She coughed, letting out a billow of smoke and passing it to Julip. “Maybe I’ll just stay here, and leave to see Bobby early in the morning. Is that okay?”
“Sure. I guess so. I mean, I’m tired so you can’t jabber all night.” The joint and cool wine were beginning to make Julip feel dreamy. She observed that Marcia wasn’t looking all that good beneath her tan. “What you doing down here, anyway?”
“Fucking off. Remember Enrique? A long time ago?”
“The worst asshole I ever met. A real whiner.”
“You bit him.” Marcia shrieked with laughter.
Julip thought of it as her ugliest sexual experience. She was only thirteen and her mother had sent her off to Washington to visit Marcia in hopes she would “meet a better class of people.” Marcia’s stepmother was a rail-thin society woman who had sent them off to a junior dance at a South American embassy where their young host was Enrique. Even among a group so young there was a lot of drinking.
Enrique had taken her and Marcia on a tour of the house which, to Julip, was a palace. They ended up in the cold back seat of Enrique’s father’s bullet-proof limousine with a bottle of brandy. Enrique took out his very large penis and Marcia began playing with it, then sucking on it. Enrique begged Julip to try it and she thought why not, since the brandy made her feel sophisticated, but then Enrique held her head too far down so she gave him a good nip, whereupon he screamed and began crying. “It’s not even bleeding, you little chickenshit,” Marcia said, and then they fled after Enrique said he was getting his father’s bodyguards. Marcia’s stepmother was upset when they returned home so early, so Marcia said Enrique had tried to rape Julip. “Boys will be boys,” said her stepmother. “I trust it didn’t come to anyone’s attention.”
Julip recovered from this unpleasant reverie by swallowing a full glass of wine and taking another hit on the joint, this time a big one. She dropped the towel she was still wrapped in and put on a summer robe.
“You don’t deserve better tits than me,” Marcia said, unwrapping the package she had thrown on the chair. It was the cheapest model Polaroid camera and Marcia studied the instructions, laughing. “We got to get Bobby’s pictures before we’re too fucked up.” She handed it to Julip, who had taken hundreds of dog photos but never anything else. Marcia shed her cotton dress and stood braless before the mirror on the bathroom door. “This is too funny to feel sexy,” she said, fiddling with the TV clicker. She rejected MTV in favor of an Oral Roberts sermon, for “contrast.”
“I think Bobby likes tits,” Julip said, looking through the viewfinder. The camera jiggled because she was laughing at the sheer daffiness of it all. There were apparently normal girls — and a very few in Marcia’s category. Julip thought she herself was kind of in the middle.
Marcia was vigorously rubbing her breasts in front of the mirror. “I could use a bicycle pump.”
“They’re fine, dear. Not your best point but good enough.”
“Fuck you.” Marcia took off her panties and sprawled on the bed, trying to move sensuously to a hymn on the television. She caressed herself. “Start shooting, I haven’t had an orgasm in years except by myself.”
“You’re bullshitting again.” Julip shot away, deciding to come closer to fill the frame.
“Last time was with your brother when we were seventeen. That’s four fucking years. Maybe I’m a lesbian.”
“You’re just sort of single-minded,” Julip said, finishing the film and looking at the stack as their clarity emerged. “Then how come you sleep with so many men?”
“Because I’m stupid and aimless. I must have fucked a hundred morons, with no luck except Bobby. How about you?”
“I always have a great time, but then I’ve only had six. Johnny in high school. Frank, my kennel hand, when he broke his foot — to make him feel better, you know. The county agent in March …”
“A drug agent?” Marcia put her panties back on in general despair.
“No, a county agent. He advises farmers on agricultural problems. I planted some buckwheat to draw in Canada geese but it didn’t grow. I seduced him. And then the Boys.” She reflected that the rubbery lawyer didn’t really count.
“What about Bobby?” Marcia said with a trace of cattiness.
“That doesn’t count. We were only thirteen and you made me do it. And how’s anyone supposed to know what’s wrong if no one tells you?”
Now Marcia was sniffling. She relit the joint and downed another glass of wine. “I think I’m going to shoot myself if Bobby rejects me. I want to marry him when he gets out.” She began to sob and Julip sat beside her on the bed, giving her a hug.
“You can’t get married to your first cousin. It’s illegal. That’s what I heard, anyhow.”
“I already checked it out. You can do it in Arkansas and Mississippi. Or in Mexico where we won’t tell anyone. If he won’t marry me I’m going to shoot myself.” Now she was shaking with sobs and Julip held her in her arms.
Besides being a little stoned and drunk, Julip poignantly felt the duty of getting Bobby out of prison or her dearest friend on earth would shoot herself. “Even if I get him out he won’t be free. He’ll have to go someplace where they can work on his mind. You know, a hospital.”
“We’ll get married and I’ll live close by.” Marcia’s sobs subsided. “I will never get over my first love. I’d rather die.” She blew her nose on the corner of the sheet and it began bleeding. “That fucking cocaine is killing me.”
Julip got her some tissues, then turned out the lights after drinking two glasses of water. Ted had told her: lots of water before bedtime and you were bound to feel better in the morning. The down side was that you had to get up in the night and pee. Ted traveled with a dozen jars of vitamins, washing them down with whiskey if need be. And what’s more, he knew the reason for every one of them. Marcia asked her to leave the bathroom light on — she hated waking up and not knowing where she was.
They snuggled together on the queen-size bed with Julip reciting, at Marcia’s insistence, both the Lord’s Prayer and Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. This had been going on since they were children. Marcia couldn’t manage to memorize anything — even her own phone number presented difficulties.
“Mother, may I?” Marcia whispered.
“I wish you wouldn’t. Why don’t you grow up?”
“Triple please? Just for a minute. One single minute.”
Julip presented a breast and Marcia nursed on it, an act that had begun when they were twelve and Julip’s nascent breasts started before Marcia’s.
“Time’s up,” Julip said, watching the course of the second hand on her travel clock. They slept with Julip having to push her away only once during the night. Usually it was more.
*
Julip was startled when Marcia woke her to say goodbye just after daylight. There had been a dream of Zeke, the pointer, on a throne in a Japanese robe. So at least he was being well taken care of, though when Marcia whispered “Goodbye, I love you,” it occurred to her that Zeke must be dead by now. In the dream Zeke’s eyes looked slanted, as if he had begun to look like his owners, just like owners gradually look like their dogs. Marcia was out the door, but then came back with a cup of coffee and a receipt from the motel office. She had paid the bill, a unique act of consideration for her. She put the cup of coffee down on the nightstand next to Julip’s head.
“The pictures really suck but I f
eel good about myself for going up there. That’s how people talk nowadays, you know, feeling good about themselves. How the fuck do they manage?”
Julip opened her eyes a crack, then affected sleep. She didn’t feel up to a dawn mudbath. Marcia kissed her forehead and left. The birds were pleasantly loud and Julip was relieved to hear a car start. Marcia had had a theory she reinterpreted from her shrink, that older men liked her and Julip because they were waifs and could readily be taken advantage of by anyone. When she explained this to Julip on the phone, there had been a long silence, and then Julip had said, “Bullshit. I’m a dog trainer, not a waif,” and hung up.
She bit the bullet, sipped the coffee, and reached for the telephone. She called Charles, who said he was up anyway for an early tide. It had been nearly a year since they had talked, though she had heard all of their voices several times on her answering machine. There was politely nervous small talk at the beginning. Charles said Arthur and Ted were in a state of mutiny and wanted to leave town. It was extremely hot and humid, the fishing was good, but they weren’t having much fun. Arthur had taken to spontaneous crying jags in the boat, and Ted was drinking too much whiskey and talking about the world AIDS problem. How was she? “Wonderful,” she said for no reason, then explained she wanted to see him at three on the pier, near Martello Towers, then Arthur at four, Ted at five, then Charles again at six for a wrap-up. Charles was polite enough not to ask why, readily agreed, and closed by saying “I love you,” which caused tremors in her stomach, already weakened by last night’s dope and wine.
*
When she stood next to her car trying to ready herself for the last leg of her trip, she had what she thought later was an out-of-body experience, her first, though it was one of Bobby’s specialties. It was still only a half hour after daylight and the marsh behind the motel was loud with water birds. Overhead, just sprung from their night roost, a grand flock of crows flew westward. She shivered, swept away to Wisconsin where on cool summer mornings before the heat gathered in the woods she’d run a dozen bird dogs at once with whistle, quirt, and pistol to honor a point and flush. Now she was up there beside another marsh, hearing the whippoorwill’s last cry and the morning call of the loon from the pond back in the woods, hearing the wingbeats of the ravens that often followed her, the bells on the dog collars tinkling in the greenery, and her pants wet with dew to her knees, the dogs becoming wet and sleek with the same dew in the waist-high ferns, until she came to rest a few minutes near a partially uprooted huge white pine, and the disused bear den under the roots, perhaps the home of her bear, the “poor little girl.”