by Jim Harrison
We were fed large bowls of a peppery stew, a bit too hot to the tongue for my taste, full of hominy and pork, over which you sprinkled chopped onions and radishes and a variety of parsley called cilantro. Marilyn used to grow it in her herb garden and I always thought the flavor quite foreign — appropriate, as this location was infinitely more exotic to me than England or France. As I ate I tried to make sense of the rapid-fire Spanish being spoken, having learned both French and Italian, and thinking the verb structure of all Roman languages to be similar. I can’t say I picked up a single word, and instead stared out the window at the tarpcovered swimming pool and burlap-wrapped rose bushes of the main house perhaps a hundred yards distant. At that very moment I had the peculiar sensation that my brain was melting. It wasn’t just the pepper sauce that Verdugo had pushed my way but a sense that my thinking process, my brain itself, could no longer bear up under its discriminatory pressures. The radio was on a station in Mexico, a country only twenty miles south. The radio in my cabin could get only Mexican stations because of the mountains to the north. I had the sensation that my melting brain was making me as dumb as a child who doesn’t quite believe in the world except for the one directly in front of him. At that instant I regretted that I had flushed all my medicines down the toilet.
Verdugo tapped my arm — my reverie apparently disturbed him and his cowboys, who stared at me intently. I looked into my empty bowl and the old woman filled it again, tweaking my earlobe with a laugh. I was saved from further embarrassment by the sudden appearance of Mrs. Verdugo coming home from school. She was breezy as she always seemed to be and this evidently was not a matter of putting on a good face. Then Verdugo asked me if I wanted to ride up with him to Tucson with the load of cattle and I found myself saying no, that I had work to do, when I would have given anything, God knows why, to ride in that immense truck.
“Oh, I thought they’d let you go,” Verdugo said before he could catch himself.
“You’re probably writing another book,” Mrs. Verdugo chimed in, then rushed off, returning with my Economics of Madness book. “Deirdre gave this to me.” She passed the book to the cowboys and they handled it gravely.
“Maybe your next trip,” I said, now trying to save face for this woman who had tried so hard for me. Then I bolted from the house, tipping over my chair in the process.
*
I did not get up from my bed, where I lay face down like a distressed girl. I listened to them load the cattle truck and heard it roar off, feeling a specific remorse. My father drove a similar truck around Toledo and environs, carrying on a flatbed trailer a crane he operated, and I had ridden with him several times. Quite suddenly I remembered the bull in the yard — when I returned from lunch I had forgotten he was out there, and it occurred to me I might have been ambushed. I got up and looked out the back window. The gate was broken off its hinges and the bull grazed serenely in a small orchard some fifty yards away. I opened the window and gave him a loud hello, at which he snorted and shuffled farther down the creek bed, turning his big bottom toward me, I suspect to make me disappear.
The missed truck ride still gave me a twinge of regret. I thought of lying back down but was fearful that the meltdown that had begun in my brain might continue and that if I dozed off I might awake with a skull full of putty. I started a fire, pleased at how aromatic the wood was, found a cutting board in the kitchen to use for a writing table, and pulled the rocker up next to the fireplace to make notes — on, I might add, nothing in particular. I’ve been making literally cartons of notes since my book was published just short of twenty years ago. I daresay many of my notes are brilliant but I lack the ability to connect all of their disparities. The vaunted “negative capability” that Keats ascribed to Shakespeare is a curse to a scholar who is then liable to delay his conclusions to the grave. We catch ourselves frozen and stuttering in incertitude. As an instance, I agreed over a year ago to provide an introduction for a paperback edition of a selection of John Clare’s poetry. So far I have come up with “Clare was Clare” on a three-by-five card. What has held me back is the recurrent image of Clare throwing himself into any available body of water, not for the purposes of suicide but because, as he said, it “felt better.” This appears to be a noteworthy example of his insanity but then, at base, why shouldn’t a person throw himself in the water if he wishes to?
*
I must get the rest of the soiled details out of the way. After my collision with the mime troupe was put to sleep I was able to regain my balance for a couple of weeks, until one Saturday, after our handball game, I was sitting in Bob’s den with my six Watneys, letting them warm up, listening to Purcell’s “Come Ye, Sons of Art,” sung by Alfred Deller, the renowned countertenor. Bob’s Saturday habit was a bottle of Sancerre — he had taught in France as a Fulbright exchange professor and was as much a Francophile as I was an Anglophile.
As Purcell ended and Bob changed the disc to Esther Lammandier, he made the announcement that a student of his had seen Dean Ballard smooching with Elizabeth (Reed’s “squeeze,” as Bob put it) in a Chicago jazz club. This was startling news indeed. I was amazed that Ballard was foolhardy enough to gamble his career, as our little college was in the forefront of the recent move to ban all such relations between students and professors and administrators. In fact, Dean Ballard chaired the original steering committee on the subject. Bob surprised me by saying he felt somewhat envious of Ballard. Occasionally Elizabeth will shed her used-clothing disguise and wear a miniskirt and a soft cotton T-shirt with no bra, which causes no little local confusion. I’m sure it’s at Reed’s instigation, as he preens around the campus with her, cupping her bottom and breasts with a satanic leer on his face. All the English faculty have remarked puzzledly on why our most brilliant student must be our nastiest.
The upshot of the news about Ballard’s misbehavior was that I drank my six Watneys too fast and didn’t eat much from the cheese board that Bob had set out. Privately I don’t care for the fetid odor of goat cheese but I wanted to humor Bob, so I nibbled it. Anyway, on the five-block drive home I was fuzzy and inattentive and I nicked the rear end of a car at a stoplight. As it happened, the car was being driven by the basketball coach, several of whose students I had flunked, and he alerted the police from his car phone with relish. The two policemen gave me a Breathalyzer and I narrowly passed with a .08. Two more hundredths and I would have gone to the hoosegow. The policemen were repelled by the odor on their instrument left by the single bite of goat cheese I had taken, and jokingly asked if I had been dining on dog poop. I cautioned them against getting fresh, and drove on after exchanging insurance information with the coach, who appeared disappointed that I hadn’t been put in chains.
This experience in itself would have been enough to send any man into disarray, but I had one more nightmare coming that evening. I took a long nap in my commodious apartment on the ground floor of an old Victorian house, and was awakened by the first big thunderstorm of spring. I thought I heard Mrs. Craig’s cat mewing and scratching at the back door for the usual snack or perhaps to come in out of the storm. Mrs. Craig lives upstairs and cooks me dinner five nights a week for a fee, unimaginative slop but the deal is too convenient to break. I’ve bought her dozens of cookbooks but she has failed to take the hint. Even her meatloaf falls apart, leaving crevices similar to those in photographs of the human brain.
Anyway, I opened the back door to the warm blustery rain and called for the cat, who owned the ridiculous name of Tabby. No cat, so I stepped out on the back porch wearing only my underpants and continued to call. Suddenly an ill wind blew the door shut and I was locked out. I covered myself as well as possible, which was very little, climbed the back stairs to get a key from old Mrs. Craig, forgetting that she was in Indianapolis for a funeral — going to funerals being a habit she has developed into a sport. No relative is too distant, no friendship to vague, for Mrs. Craig to indulge her mourning.
I banged loudly at Mrs. Craig’s door,
in haste to get out of the rain that had now become a deluge. A tall, lumpish woman appeared at the door, obviously not Mrs. Craig (I later found it was her niece from Benton Harbor), and before I could say “key” she began her bloody screaming and slammed the door under the ludicrous notion that I intended harm. Even if I had stepped up onto a footstool I could not have achieved parity with this hysterical Amazon.
I retreated to my parked car in the driveway below, for want of a better option. I noted by the car clock that I was missing my NPR program of Scottish and Irish folk ballads. Soon enough the police arrived and I allowed them to wander around in the rain awhile before I beeped the horn. One of them was so startled he actually drew his revolver, and I could see how in contemporary America even the most minimal event could lead to violent death. As luck would have it, the police were the same pair that had arrived after my minor accident. I was asked to clasp my hands and they drew me out of the car by the wrists, observing to each other that it was unlikely my underpants hid an effective weapon.
We stood within my open back door and I managed to talk myself out of an assortment of charges, including drunk and disorderly and indecent exposure. One of them returned upstairs and secured my key while the other allowed it had not been my day, to which I agreed. Then he said, and this should be duly noted, that both of the day’s peccadillos would have to be reported to the college administration as was the recent custom. We have reached the point where American higher education is beginning to remind one of the articles one reads about Cuba, where everyone is intent upon spying on one another and reporting it to a committee.
*
I have always dreaded the short days of December leading up to the relief of the winter solstice, when we begin to gain minutes of light. It was only four in the afternoon but looking east it was easy to sense the darkness looming there. I pushed back farther from the heat of the fire, then heard a commotion outdoors and went to the window, picking up a pair of binoculars, on temporary loan from Deirdre in the unlikely presumption that I was going to become interested in the natural world. My quarrelsome point with Deirdre on this matter is that man is nature too, and the study of what man has written must be considered my study of the natural world, to which she answered, “You’re full of shit.” Young women swear these days.
Through the binoculars I could see Mrs. Verdugo yelling at the bull, who was grazing perhaps twenty feet from her back door. She went into the house and came right back out with a broom, ran over, and began swatting the bull in the ass and it quickly trundled off. I admired her bravery, yet I suppose it somewhat lessened the quality of my own. I was surprised that the dogs who were dozing out by the corral didn’t come to her aid but decided they must respond only to Verdugo’s orders and not his wife’s. Then a black-haired girl on a spirited horse rode into view, stopped to chat with Mrs. Verdugo a moment, and continued on the trail toward the mountains to the south.
On seeing the winsome girl I had a ghastly shudder pass over my body, remembering in an instant the girl I saw at the far end of my paper route, whose name was Miriam, and whom I loved with the desperation one is capable of only once in a lifetime, a childhood version of Wuthering Heights. At the same time I made an absurd and obvious identification with myself and the baloney bull — not that I was fearsome, but that after fifty I had been considered somehow worthless and been put out to pasture. If ours was more directly a cannibal culture, by now I would be so much lunch meat.
*
At four-thirty Mrs. Verdugo showed up on my doorstep holding a warm jacket, and asked me to take a walk. I could see the sure hand of Deirdre in this.
“Did Deirdre call?” I asked.
“Why, yes, how did you know?” Mrs. Verdugo only pretended she was flustered and I had caught her off guard. The emotional subtlety of the female compared to the male is boggling. I began to concoct an acid witticism but Mrs. Verdugo was undeserving, so I put on the coat instead. I had been a shut-in for my entire first week in Arizona in hopes that the containing atmosphere of the cabin would settle my mind, but I was unsure of the outcome. Bob had told me during my darkest time last September that the accuracy of the mind weighing itself is questionable.
We began with the Jeep. Mrs. Verdugo unscrewed the bald shift knob and replaced it with one from the pickup that had rubrics to indicate the position of the gears. She patiently rehearsed the moves but I was somewhat inattentive, turning to look at the dogs who had jumped in back. Now that I had become a possible source of fun, their eyes warmed to me and their tails thumped.
Mrs. Verdugo headed the Jeep up the same trail the girl with black hair had taken and I felt a touch of fear over the idea we might see her, so much so that I didn’t hear Mrs. Verdugo yelling over the roar of the Jeep and she had to repeat herself.
“Call me Lillian.” She stopped the Jeep and came around to my side. “Now it’s your turn.”
“I’ll try tomorrow,” I said, refusing to budge.
My day had been full enough, especially when you consider I had spent nearly five months in my darkened apartment except for an occasional hearing. When the bad news finally came in early September, I did not emerge until Thanksgiving weekend when Deirdre dragged me into the open air. I can’t say I was all that unhappy, and had been able to fake normalcy when Deirdre called during my frozen period. I’d chat about the problems I was having with the classes I wasn’t actually teaching. Meanwhile, I’d only seen Bob and Mrs. Craig during the last three months. Deirdre always called at dinnertime, and my deception was at last unraveled when she called the English Department to reconfirm her invitation for me to come to Chicago for Thanksgiving. The department secretary, Mrs. Haines, who is a preposterous gossip, then told Deirdre the entire sickening story. Mrs. Haines has known Deirdre since she was a little girl and it was inevitable that I’d be found out. Bob was sworn to secrecy, which was easy enough for him because he has peculiar theories about mental problems. “When the wine is bitter, become the wine,” he’d say, cribbing from Rilke.
“I’m a teacher too,” Lillian said. “You can’t drive a standard shift, so I’ll teach you. Deirdre said you can’t cook, so I’ll give you lessons. It wouldn’t look good if you starved to death when we’re supposed to be looking after you.”
I told her I was very good at moping and brooding. Agenbite of inwit. That sort of thing. She had parked the Jeep and we were walking up a narrower trail. Above the tops of the pine trees there were troublesome-looking rock formations, the kind one would imagine appearing in local ghost stories. The dogs were careening around bushes but then one stopped on the trail ahead to sniff something. I was dismayed to find that one of Deirdre’s nature-buff types had taken a dump on our pathway.
“How appalling,” I said. “There’s a Sierra Clubber out there who deserves a horsewhipping.”
“Nonsense. It’s just a mountain lion.” Lillian toed the dried scat and moved on.
It took a few minutes for me to digest what she was saying. I’m not normally frightened by wild animals, but then I do not recall coming into contact with any. Since it was such a new experience I had no idea how to deal with it. I peered upward at the reddish cliffs a few hundred yards away and speculated that the lion might be looking at us from that vantage point, just as the Indians did in the movies of my youth. My reverie was interrupted when Lillian trotted back, assuring me that mountain lions are relatively harmless, although one did “nail a jogger” up in Colorado a few years back. I became busy resolving to continue my life, as always, without jogging, when the girl on the horse came cantering toward us, passing by with a merry hello. I was relieved to see that she was lovely indeed but she did not resemble Miriam from long ago, whose tenth-grade photo I still carry in a secret compartment in my wallet.
*
The final downfall came through what Bob called my gullibility. On the Wednesday morning after my weekend police difficulties I was summoned to Dean Ballard’s office for a meeting which began with scant mention of my brush
es with the law. “I see you had yourself quite a Saturday,” said Ballard. Rather than myself, the core problem was Elizabeth, who represented the fourth generation of her well-heeled family to attend the college. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the children of families who can fatten the endowment are catered to. The department’s only classicist, a dear old Oxonian lady, had run out of patience with Elizabeth and had consented to have her position as advisor to Elizabeth’s senior thesis transferred to me. This was a complicated matter of academic etiquette, as our department prides itself on the strictest of standards which also rids us of any riffraff that might be sent our way by the Athletics Department. This includes Bob, who is particularly ruthless with athletes.
Our classicist was well aware that I was the only member of the English faculty as demanding as she was, and this cagey ploy was an attempt to dump Elizabeth out of the frying pan into an inferno. It was all quite irritating, as I had had Elizabeth in two classes and she was a whiner who barely reached the mediocre in performance, other than her silly personality changes. Naturally I understood Ballard’s position which, at base, entailed getting the girl graduated in three weeks, and she could only manage that by completing an acceptable thesis. The fact that I was tenured protected me from undue pressure, but then tenure isn’t what it used to be.
It was at this point I was offered a pact with the devil. My problems with sexism, mimes, anti-Semitism (the Ezra Pound quote), my difficulties with the law, were, as Ballard called them, “ounces,” but ounces eventually added up to pounds. Even these minor missteps would eventually come to the attention of the president and the board of trustees when they made their annual review of the faculty. Anyone with three possible demerits had a red tag on his dossier and the problems were discussed. Of course, Ballard would defend me against the absurdity of the demerits but if they continued to mount up, there was only so much he could do.