by Jim Harrison
Quite suddenly she was back in the car, deciding that her home and dogs were enough to fill a life. If something else good came along, that was well and fine. If not, not. The weight of her father, brother, mother, seemed to have gone westward with the crows. Also the weight of the Boys waiting in Key West, no doubt now in a dither about her arrival.
She didn’t know how much they had come to depend on her, more in spirit than in presence. The fact was that more than her supposed attractiveness, her vividness, she was so ordinary that she reminded them of the value of life aside or beyond work and exhaustion. She was totally without their distortions and had grown tired of drawing them out of the hundreds of little funks that success is heir to. It did not occur to them to feel any particular responsibility to her, mistaking her ordinariness for a free spirit, and by and large in their world one felt no responsibility beyond one’s family and the work at hand. In short, outside of their work they didn’t quite know what they were doing. When camera, paintbrush, and pen were put aside, they were right out there in la-la land with the Bloomingdale’s teenyboppers wired on speed. Only their sporting life held them on earth, and its seams frequently burst. The arrival of Julip would put a top back on the world. They didn’t want her to be like them, and she wasn’t. They scarcely understood that with sufficient exposure she would be doomed to falter, to hand over her life to tracking ghosts like they did — the long, dead wait for something that could lift them out of the average messes they had made.
She started the car with the sure and certain strength that she knew when to bail out of the burning plane, which was, of course, after she bailed her brother out first. If he wanted to escape to Mexico or wherever with his childhood wife, they would be well out of the way. She smiled when she imagined the Boys trying to figure out the reason she was coming, and which of them she might prefer, or why she insisted on talking to them separately.
*
She reached Key West in time to cool her heels in the judge’s outer office, hanging on the wan hope that the sympathetic smile he had given her after the trial meant something, also his quiet advice that she return to Wisconsin and “steer clear of those playboys.” Her heart sunk, though, when the judge bustled out of his office at one-thirty with two men in summer suits bent on lunch. He waved away his receptionist, glanced at Julip, not stopping until he reached the door and looked at her again, then came over, his face a mask of abrupt pleasantness.
“Why hello, Miss …”
“Julip Durham, sir.”
“Of course. Sam Hinckley called from up in Starke. A fine lawyer. He said your family wished to reopen the case of your unfortunate brother. I’m certainly agreeable and I suspect the prosecutor will be agreeable as long as the youngman is confined to a mental facility and receives proper care. I assume Sam told you that under Florida’s victim law there can be no change in status without due consultation with the victims. While they certainly don’t have the final word on your brother’s release to another facility, their feelings on the matter must be considered.”
“Of course, sir.” She was enchanted by his resonant baritone and wouldn’t have minded sitting on his lap and talking about the weather. The other two men had drawn closer and were looking at her appraisingly with a predator’s fake grin. The judge made the slightest of bows and they were gone. She heard them chortling out in the hall but simply didn’t give a shit because things were finally going well. She couldn’t believe the luck involved in the drunken lawyer with the limp noodle actually doing what he said he would do.
She checked into a cheapish motel up near Dennis Pharmacy, where she had her favorite Key West lunch of black beans and rice, safe from discovery by the Boys since none of them would conceive of eating in a drugstore. She spoke in pidgin Spanish to the plump Cuban waitress who seemed glad to see her again, then bent her head low as one of Charles’s previous girlfriends passed by. Or was it Arthur’s, or Ted’s? It was hard to figure out, but the same girl had congratulated Julip in the Full Moon Saloon, on her first trip two years before, for being that year’s “lust slave.” The girl was sincere, if a bit daffy, though the Boys were uneager to answer any questions on the matter.
Back in her motel Julip dressed in a sleeveless blouse, white shorts tight across her bottom, and sandals, putting a dab of lavender scent on her neck. The outfit and scent tended to send all of them into a hormonal trance. She called Mildred as promised, chatted briefly, with Mildred closing on a poignant note of advice: “Go for their nuts.” Julip said she’d do her best, though at the moment she was anxious to see them, in the same way one checks a watch and looks out the window waiting for an old friend. She certainly didn’t know that over the past twenty years three of the house fräuleins, or lust slaves, had eventually died, though that may not be an odd statistic for the girls that yearly stream into Key West for the sun and other possibilities.
On the walk to Martello Towers and the pier, she was struck again by the dazzling sun and heat, the flowering shrubs, the sheer number of mangy guard dogs within fenced yards, the dank quiver the un-picked-up garbage full of rotten shrimp shells caused in the pit of her stomach. It was a town where until evening it looked like everyone had just got up. She wondered again, while she stared at a rottweiler with a scarred face, how Bobby had managed to follow them around for a week without being noticed by her. When she asked him in jail before the trial, he whispered that he was “the hero with a thousand faces,” another of his favorite books. He had waited to commit his crime until after Charles took her to the early morning plane. Now the rottweiler got up and wiggled toward the fence but she continued on, having read they had been misbred into unreliability like pit bulls. A client had stooped to a friend’s springer and bared his teeth in a smile and had got the tip of his nose bit off. Strangely, she thought, the asshole still thought he knew everything about bird dogs except how to keep from getting his nose bit off.
*
Only a few blocks away from the strolling Julip, Charles stood at the edge of the pool, looking down at the big bodies of Ted and Arthur circling in a dog paddle.
“You guys look like manatees,” Charles said. “We’re trying to save the manatee and I guess we’re succeeding.”
It had been a tough day since Charles had wakened them with the news of Julip’s imminent arrival. They had gone fishing for a half day anyway, staking on the Lavinia Bank off Cottrell Key, with the early visibility grotesque, the light flat, sweltering, and gray so that it was difficult to tell sky from water on the horizon. They saw several schools of tarpon, perceivable only by the wake through the water, a stray caudal fin, but blew the casts because the lead fish were generally deeper and completely invisible, the whole school surging off the flat when the fly and fly line hit the water. Around mid-morning there was a slight breeze from the southwest and the rippling effect on the water’s surface made the fish more visible. Charles hooked and jumped out a smallish tarpon around fifty pounds, breaking the leader, as always, after a few minutes so the fish wouldn’t become exhausted and susceptible to sharks. Over the years they had caught hundreds of tarpon and never killed one, believing that to mount a fish was a vulgar display.
By eleven the temperature was over ninety and they had finished their single gallon of water and split the only bottle of pop in the cooler, experiencing a horrible thirst caused by an involved Oriental meal they had made for two schoolteachers from Atlanta the evening before: dry-fried beef, a hot-and-sour crispy fish, shrimp with ginger and jalapeños, a Thai chicken-and-noodle salad which was far too hot for the schoolteachers, and “Taipan,” a poached fresh ham with spinach. The teachers got very drunk, and they all went nude swimming after a few lines of their postdinner wake-up powder, cocaine. But then one of the teachers, who had a bad sunburn, kept shrieking “You guys are wild!” and puked in the bushes. Her friend took her home. The friend promised Arthur she would return but hadn’t done so.
By late morning the thirst had become unbearable, which led them t
o the unbearable topic of Julip. “Maybe she’s going to shoot us, one by one, in broad daylight,” suggested Ted, never one to hold back an errant thought. “I’m not going to be surprised if I’m dead before dinner.” He hopped up on the bow and brayed out across the water, “Today is a good day to die.”
The ugly fact, discovered when thirst drove them in early, was that their hippy-dippy maid hadn’t arrived and there was the crushing chore of unmade beds and filthy dishes covered with pissants and flies. Arthur busied himself counting exactly thirty-seven dirty glasses and kept yelling “Thirty-seven” as a litany until Charles drowned him out with old Carla Thomas-Otis Redding duets on the stereo. They felt virtuous, like sturdy peasants, cleaning up the mess until Ted discovered the maid had been there just long enough to find their Ziploc of cocaine, hidden inexpertly in the freezer under a pile of ginger and Chinese sausages. Ted, of a deeply paranoid nature, was the only one to mention the year before that some weirdo in a number of disguises had been following them, the weirdo turning out to be Bobby up there on the bridge, bapping away with his .22-caliber semiautomatic.
Back at the pool, Charles was ready to go meet Julip, then decided to fix drinks first. When he came back outside Ted was singing “We’re heading for the last roundup,” which irritated Arthur, who disliked beginnings and endings. They anxiously accepted their vodkas at the pool’s edge.
“You know what deer are like in the summer?” Ted began to ruminate. “Maybe they’d kill themselves if they knew what was going to happen in the fall when they start getting shot. After that comes the winter when they die by the hundreds of thousands from starvation and disease. Just in case you guys don’t know it, at our age we’re living in November. It’s all over but the bad part.”
This spiel might have impressed Charles and Arthur had they not heard something similar several times a day. Ted looked at them and screamed, “I love her! I’m going to drown myself!” and he let out his air, sinking to the pool’s bottom in a stream of bubbles. Arthur’s eyes got misty as Charles made his way to the gate. Arthur called out, “Tell her I’ll marry her,” to which Charles responded, “Tell her yourself. You’re next.”
In previous times more slack would have been cut for this threesome, but this is an age when not much slack is cut for anyone. However otherwise accomplished, they were rounders, and we have always had rounders with us — probably every country club on the continent had a half-dozen members who behaved worse. “They all know we’re assholes,” said a writer friend of Ted’s, meaning women. And it was the rock-bottom puzzlement of life and time: there is an ideal woman who will return to you the kind of sexual life you could have had at nineteen but didn’t. That this was not meant to be for man on Earth did not stop millions of fools from looking. It was puzzlement, pure and simple. A thousand dollars in the wallet wasn’t proportionately more pleasurable than a ten-spot. Honors were dreary, the mail and phone calls were to be avoided. The horizon was as invisible as it was when they were nineteen, but now its nature was deeply sensed. An actual surprise would have astounded them now that their time was sliced so precise and thin. They were unquestionably kind and generous men, polite in mixed company, loaning money in bulk to less fortunate friends, still flipping books of poems open at random, hoping for secrets. And they all knew that in a traditional culture they would be busy by now learning how to be Elders. But this was America and you weren’t supposed to stop the generalized churning until you announced retirement or, more simply, the lights were turned out.
*
Out on the pier Julip was immersed in a delicious breeze that had picked up when the afternoon wind shifted westerly. She was on the lee side of the island and the water was a clear sandy beige near shore, deepening to bright then darker turquoise out farther where the water picked up the wind, and beyond that, the mauve penumbra of the Gulf Stream moving north.
She wondered at the idea that she could be so sunk in her problems that she had forgotten the beauty of the ocean. The first year she came down, Ted and Arthur hadn’t arrived yet so Charles took her fishing for three days, mostly in the backcountry, a wilderness of tidal cuts, mangrove islets abutting the Gulf where she had been transfixed by the cormorants, frigate birds, pelicans, ospreys, skimmers, three rare roseate spoonbills, and the multifoliate sea life that passed under the boat when they were staked for tarpon. One hot afternoon she and Charles had smoked a joint and rubbed each other with mango slices and made love on the rough deck of the skiff, with Charles on the bottom to save her skin. The only bad thing that day, running home from the Gulf side, was the smell of an enormous beached sperm whale. And worse than that, men were cutting the valuable teeth from the whale’s mouth with chain saws, the great domed forehead of the whale making the men look puny.
When she saw Charles way back on the beach coming toward her, she remembered Bobby had told her that she had free will and she became instantly pissed. The only class she’d cared for at junior college had been an introduction to anthropology where a very old English feminist taught them that in nearly all cultures in the history of humankind men had worked to deprive women of their free will. The girls in the class who weren’t dumb as posts seethed with resentment. Several times the teacher had Julip and a couple of other girls over for tea and cookies, and they were all awed at the number and beauty of the artifacts their teacher had collected in a lifetime of fieldwork around the world. She had taught at the University of Chicago and had been on the staff of the Field Museum before coming north for retirement and teaching part time. She allowed that she had even slept with Cree men during a long winter on Hudson’s Bay in the early fifties. Julip felt if she hadn’t been destined as a dog trainer she would have emulated this woman, whom the boys in the class called Old Turnip.
The reverie slipped away as Charles neared in his peculiar rolling gait. He was shy enough to avert his glance as if fascinated with the water he’d spent half his life on. He offered his hand and she took it, then he tried to hold on and she withdrew hers.
“You’re looking good,” he said. “Did you wear that outfit to torment me?”
“Of course not. Have you been sick?” He had aged far more than a year and there was a mottled pallor beneath the tan.
“Caught amebic dysentery in Africa. I was following this tribe called the Tuaregs around. It’s complicated shitting yourself to death when there aren’t any toilets.”
“I bet,” she said. “You always read cookbooks on the toilet. You said it all went together.” He blushed and they laughed.
“What can I do for you? I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t do for you.” He turned away with the curious shyness that affected him when nervous.
She breathed in deeply and spoke in a rush. “If you and the others agree, the judge can order that Bobby be released from prison into a mental place, you know, where they can cure his delusions.”
“Of course. Don’t be silly. Fine by me.”
Her eyes began to tear and she turned away. He put a hand on her shoulder and she shrugged it off. “What do you think the others will say?”
“Arthur will agree. I don’t know about Ted. He’s been hitting it hard. Also, he’s a paranoid.”
“How come when we first fell in love and came down here …” Her voice trailed off because she hadn’t expected to ask the question. “What I’m asking is why didn’t you want me to be faithful?”
“I told you. Because I was married and it didn’t seem fair to you.” It was Charles’s turn again to avoid a glance.
“It’s not normal. I loved you and I didn’t want to be handed away.”
“I had no idea you’d seen them until after the shooting, really not until the trial.”
“I don’t mean just them. To anyone. I felt like a throw-away, you know. A real expensive toy. You paid for the tickets. That’s a lot in some places. And the car, which is a lot more. I got the feeling you didn’t want any responsibility for me. Is that it?”
Charles turned abruptly a
nd walked out to the end of the pier, another fifty yards. Even at that distance she could see he was becoming very angry. One evening on the deck of the Pier House they had had a bad meal and Charles threw the whole table into the ocean.
“Then why did you fucking come back the next year?” he bellowed.
“I thought I’d try again,” she screamed. “You were nice to me! You bought me presents!” She closed the distance, arms across her chest. They’d also had a fine time in the summer when he came up to work his bird dogs, ignorant of the fact that she’d just visited Ted, his closest friend, in New York. Now he stared at her, his anger vanishing.
“Let’s run away,” he said, simply enough.
“To Wisconsin. You can help with the dogs, you mean? I guess we wore out the chance to run away.”
“We could get married if you like.”
“You’re already married. And I’m too young for you.”
“I’d get divorced. When I got too old you could farm me out and grab someone younger.”
“I don’t want to get married or run away. I want my free will. I just want to love someone and not get fucked over.”
There was a long silence while a jet landed at the airport a mile away, wobbling in the increasing wind. She looked away when he wiped his tears on his shirttails. “I guess it’s Arthur’s turn. I’ll do all I can to spring your brother.” He walked past her, back down the pier.