by Jim Harrison
I walked a few hundred yards through stunted trees and heaps of boulders strewn around and covered with snow, confident that I could retrace my steps but turning around several times to make sure. The dogs scooted in circles with mad abandon and I reminded myself to learn their individual names. For some reason the landscape began to give me the severest tremors yet, though my vision was wide and clear, unlike in the cabin. When it occurred to me that my inner trembling might have nothing to do with the landscape, the earth abruptly vanished and I was at the edge of a cliff, or at least a steep slope. Before me was a valley so immense in eastern terms that I drew in my breath sharply.
For a moment I questioned that I was imagining what I saw. Far across the valley was a range of snow-capped mountains I judged to be in Mexico, as the sun was in that direction and I guessed it to be south. I could see no sign of human habitation and this, perhaps, began to make me feel vertiginous. I backed away in fear of being sucked into this beautiful void and made my way over to a big group of boulders surrounded by bushes that I later learned were called manzanitas. I sat down in a dry area under an overhanging rock and was diverted by the idea that the dogs were uncomfortable about the place. There was a slight urine scent and some tufts of hair and I guessed that an animal also used the rock for shelter.
It was at this point that everything let go. The insides of my brain and body quaked and shivered and I began to weep. This caused a total loss of equilibrium and I tipped sideways from my sitting position. For a few minutes I could not tell up from down and tears literally flowed. For the first time I understood how a body could be “racked” by sobs. In retrospect, I could not remember ever weeping before, although my eyes were vaguely moist at my father’s funeral, at Deirdre’s marriage ceremony, and at my mother Florence’s burial seven years ago.
I flopped around weeping for just short of two hours and was tempted to throw away my watch. The dogs were alarmed except for one who tried to comfort me, albeit crudely, by nuzzling my neck and chest and lapping at my tears. I wept so long my feet and hands got cold. My urge to pitch my watch came from those long post-Elizabeth months when in the dungeon of my apartment I logged not sunlight or weather or my thoughts but the clock. There were dozens of pages of notations of what time it was, a habit that didn’t seem alarming to me during that period, though one day when Bob visited he grimaced at my current work, the strings of inane numbers.
There’s a natural hesitation on my part to use so large a word as suffering, but I suppose it was the main part of the experience, lying there blubbering and squirming in some animal’s nest. It seemed that for half a year I had been trying to ignore what was directly in front of my nose and this had further blinded me: my reality had betrayed me, the reality to which I had devoted my life had disappeared. I no longer had control of the world I lived in or a single one of its inhabitants, and I myself was at large. A world that had welcomed me for three decades had shown me the door, and at fifty I owed that world nothing but my contempt, which in itself was too worthless to be indulged. The idea that I was not alone in this experience was just another worthless humanist gesture that would cripple me even more. This was not a barricade I could man with anyone else but the dogs that surrounded me, their faces cocked into question marks.
It was noon, but then who cared? I made a mental note to research time as disease. There are strange things afoot in the universe. Even the obvious fact that I had shown all the alertness of a supermarket mushroom during the long nightmare meant nothing. I was not about to recast my hopes as people make vain New Year’s resolutions. I could not remember a single overnight miracle in the sheer tonnage of fiction and poetry I had spent my life reading. There was suddenly the idea that I had learned nothing from this life. The question was how, if I knew all the best examples of world literature, all the exquisitely drawn varieties of deceit and chicanery, love and death, could this have happened to me?
From my youth I had been a stupendous reader of good books, occasionally sinking a bit to the crime fiction my mother favored, though the best of that genre, Raymond Chandler for example, was very good indeed. Maybe I ultimately read for pleasure rather than learning because any Raymond Chandler hero could have seen my own mess looming in front of him. Maybe not. My profession, my livelihood, served to set my love of books to a rather Germanic marching tune. My profession and its fretwork of rules had given me the boot. Their reality had been a comfortable enough consensus right up to the time I had been excluded. I recalled the punch line of a long, stupid joke Bob told me about an adulterer being caught in a closet by an angry husband, and the adulterer saying, “Everybody’s got to be somewheres.” Bob spent a few of his student years in Paris, and to him this answer was an existential moment, the exact definition of which is lost in the fog of my graduate school years. Here I was, not in someone’s closet but under a rock overhang, shaking now from cold rather than my torments.
*
Nearing the Jeep, I noticed a pale green Border Patrol vehicle parked in front of my own. A darkly Spanish-looking man in uniform was putting gas into the Jeep’s tank from a can that looked brilliantly red against the wintry landscape. He turned with a smile at the approaching dogs but was surprised when he saw me.
“Those are J. M. Verdugo’s dogs,” he said.
“Phillip Caulkins is the name. I’m staying at the ranch.” I offered my hand and he took it after finishing with the gas. He said J.M. was always running out of gas and Lillian, who was his cousin, would call him and he’d have to drop everything if J.M. was real late. He added that J.M. liked running out of gas and getting stuck, which seemed to me to be a curious vice.
“Indeed,” I said.
“Indeed? I don’t get you,” the uniformed man said. “You mean, indeed he likes to run out of gas?” The radio in his vehicle crackled and he trotted up to it. I opened the sack the grandma gave me. I was famished and took a bite out of a bean and meat burrito which, though cold, was delicious. I tore off sloppy pieces to share with the dogs, unmindful of my endangered fingers.
The man returned from his patrol car. “Lillian’s worried about you. It’s four and you’ve been gone all day.”
My watch, an old wind-up model I bought in London as a student, still read noon, which meant I might have set the world record for weeping for a man my age.
“Indeed. My watch stopped.”
“Indeed, it must have.” He laughed but not mockingly. “Real ballsy of you to wander around way back here all day. But you’re Deirdre’s father and she’s a real fireball. You must be proud.”
It was disarming to receive a double compliment when I could not remember a single, though after the fourth month in the apartment Bob said that I was really “sticking to my guns.” My head was scarcely turned because I knew I was ballsy by default and wandered up here irrationally, though what did that matter? Deirdre had inherited my singlemindedness but that could be a mixed blessing, as I was beginning to learn.
“The name’s Rod, short for Roderigo.” He handed me a knit watch cap and I wondered if the message Lillian left included the information that I was daffy. “Follow me until the road forks, then you take the left and I’ll take the right. Pleased to meet you. Feliz Navidad. Put on the hat or your skull will freeze up.”
*
It was embarrassing to be welcomed as a prodigal son. Verdugo, Lillian, and Grandma rushed out in the yard all abuzz with my return. The sky was darkening and I felt a little like my father, who would return with icy clothes from a day’s work in the winter. Verdugo fetched me a beer and I went off for a hot shower to thaw out, puzzled at the sight of someone at their window, or so I thought. There was something white on the face that quickly backed away, as if it were wearing a surgical mask.
I drank my beer in the steaming shower, a pleasant experience, then made the mistake of closely examining myself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door when I got out of the shower. The image was humiliating and tears came briefly. I
looked shriveled, flaccid, ghastly in this, my first total peek since May. I had always walked to work, and that, plus handball on Saturday mornings, had kept me reasonably fit. Now it appeared as if I had just been sprung from a Korean POW camp. My God, could this be possible? Of course, there it was. Smaller than life and nearly ready for a coffin. It was difficult for me to understand how the mind could make the body forget itself. Maybe it was because the mind had forgotten nine tenths of the mind. There was a discouraging glimmer here.
The sun was setting down toward the mouth of the canyon with the treetops ready to burst into flame. Behind me my shadow was specific. My body tingled but no longer shook inside. I turned on the radio and, as I dressed, I listened to a Mexican song I judged to be about love and death. At least I thought I heard “corazon” and “muerte.” Maybe I’d pick up a Spanish grammar, presuming there was a bookstore within the hundred miles or so to Tucson. Then I noticed a small package on the desk with Deirdre’s return address. Inside was a monocular with my name engraved on it and a short note saying that she knew I’d never be caught with binoculars around my neck and this would fit in a jacket pocket. In the waning light I caught my magnified faux grackle in the tree near the gate, staring back rather malevolently, I thought. Perhaps there was an ethical question in whether or not birds wished to be looked at. The dinner bell rang.
*
Mrs. Verdugo was wearing a floral print dress and was playing Mozart’s Jupiter on the stereo, though certainly not the best rendition. But then Mozart is Mozart and clearly better than anything else man has made, including penicillin. I had neglected my listening the past six months and the music was nearly too powerful to endure. To calm myself down, I went to the stove where the grandma was cooking a chicken dish. She said “mole” which I presumed did not mean the underground rodent. The smell was as fragrant as the music, though the ingredients were undetectable, certainly a far cry from Mrs. Craig’s habitual slop. Near the stove was an enormous mortar and pestle which Lillian had explained J.M. had found in the mountains and might very well be a thousand years old. I was busy doubting this item but saying nothing when J.M. appeared, fresh from a shower in a pearl-button cowboy shirt — a valid wardrobe, as he was a cowboy. I asked him what his initials stood for. He tightened a bit, almost a flinch, which emphasized his bodybuilder’s physique. However, I suspect, unlike Ballard, he had never touched a barbell.
“James Monroe Verdugo. I’ll tell you the story somewheres down the line.” While he got out two cans of cold beer and a bottle of tequila with a horseshoe on the label, I reflected that he looked somewhat less Hispanic than Lillian, though his mother at the stove looked more so. Thus I deduced a pale-faced father.
“My little sister is here,” Lillian said. “She’s quite a problem.”
I wondered how little her sister could be, as I guessed both Verdugos to be in their late thirties.
“A sister from hell,” J.M. added. “Too bad we can’t parachute her into Yugoslavia.” He handed me a water glass half full of pale gold liquid. “To your health. You sure as hell look better than yesterday.”
“She’s no worse than your brother,” Lillian said. “Her name’s Magdalena. Not after the Bible but the town in Sonora.”
We went to the window as the woman in question came galloping down the driveway on a chestnut horse. It was just before dark so Lillian turned on the yard lights, which made the horse spin and buck. Magdalena screamed and swore in Spanish but held her seat, looking furiously back at the house, a large white bandage glowing on her face.
“She was in a car wreck,” Lillian said weakly.
“Her boyfriend beat the shit out of her,” J.M. said. “When he went to sleep drunk she took a tire iron to him. She got off on self-defense — the judge is one of her gentleman friends. Last year she shot a guy way over in Phoenix. She’s all the time defending herself.” J.M. poured us another drink and gave Lillian a squeeze. She had tears in her eyes.
“Momma was too easy on her. She was the baby of the family.”
Magdalena had unsaddled the horse and turned it out in the corral. On the way to the house she played roughly with the dogs, swinging the largest around by its collar, evidently a game they had devised, because the dog came back for more. She cut a trim though perhaps overmuscular figure in her jeans. When she came in the door she eyed me as coldly as the grackle, then took a deep gulp of the tequila directly from the bottle. She grabbed my proffered hand, studying it critically and apparently finding it flawed.
“The smart guy from the East. Welcome. Try to be careful,” she said, dropping my hand and washing her own at the sink. She itched the bandage, which covered most of the left side of her face where her eye was also blackened. Her hair was frizzy and stuck out in a dark halo, like many of Bob’s students and the renowned malcontent from our past, Angela Davis.
*
That night I had great difficulty sleeping, what with a piercing headache from the tequila and very probably from my prolonged weeping fit on the mountaintop. By midnight (I had gone to bed at ten) I had conceived a hatred for the radium-dial alarm clock. The clock makes us wait. The clock invented the difficult concept of waiting. We are always eager, willy-nilly, for the clock to get on with it.
I got up, dressed, made a stack of Deirdre’s gift books, and opened a fresh packet of five-by-seven cards, my first since May. The small gesture has always excited me with the prospect of a new idea, a catchy phrase to amuse myself. I wrote, “The clock is the weapon with which we butcher our lives,” and felt pleased with myself. From the age of twelve and my huge paper route, the largest in the Toledo area, my life has been strictly circumscribed by the clock. There is scarcely a profession more time-conscious than the academic — outside the obvious trains, planes, and buses — given the classes, appointments, committee meetings, faculty meetings, perhaps “meeting meetings” that are organized to stuff lacunae. Even our annual Modern Language Association convention meetings include schedule items such as “5:10–5:35, Getting to Know Each Other Cocktails.”
Now I was perfectly aware that I’m not alone in this dire strait but I don’t care any longer about our collective dread. It’s everyone for himself — or herself, of course. Dad used to say that all the world cares about is that you get to work on time. What that means to me at this point in my personal history is that it’s time to reject the world. As much of my life as possible must be sloughed like a snake is said to slough its skin. Visions of anchorites, pillar saints, Buddhas, begin to dance in my head. Under our system each twenty-four-hour unit is subtracted from the end of our lives which further increases the vertigo. Never mind the incipient Alzheimer’s; I have been deeply diseased by time. I have been buggered to near death by the clock.
Deep into the night I fumbled with this material somewhat in the manner of Madame Curie stirring her potions. I even drew several versions of a new calendar containing no less and no more than three to seven days a month. The fools of the world forced me to retain their months, but within these months my deft Montblanc pen opened up an immensity of space. To show myself the seriousness of my intent, I wrapped my watch around the cord of the Big Ben electric clock and dangled them both in the toilet, flushing it a dozen times with the first full laughter I could remember. The damnable watch still worked. I put it on the floor, stepped up on the toilet seat and jumped, smashing the watch to bits.
It occurred to me I was getting a little excitable, so I took the remnants of the two timepieces outside and peed on them to complete the scene appropriately. I reached back in the cabin and turned off the light, the better to see the stars. They were so dense they made the sky look flossy, almost a fog of stars which had drawn infinitely closer to me than ever before, as if my destruction of time had made me a friendlier object for their indeterminate powers. I drank the night air in gulps until I dizzied myself, watching the stars in their dance steps, the swirling that is noticeable to the attentive.
I recalled that I had seen a couple o
f sleeping bags in the cabin closet and quickly brought one back outside, stripped to my skin, and did a jig on the cold dew-damp grass. Despite not having slept outside during a lifetime, I adjusted immediately to the lack of ceiling, staring straight upward into the black holes that astronomers say are up in the heavens.
It was there, with my back tight to the earth, that I had yet another revelation that astounded me, and once again I didn’t care if this peek into the unknown door was useful to anyone else. It began with my thinking, If only Bob could see me now, then moved on to his notion that our populace is fascinated to the point of sickness with gossip about entertainment, sports, and political figures because the very idea of personality itself is in question. The popularity of the concept of personality is merely a substitute for tradition and community. The simple-minded crave news of “personalities” and develop banal symptoms of the same, ignorant of the fact that true personality emerges out of character and work. According to Bob nearly all of what people think of as their personalities are absurdist idiosyncrasies at cross purposes with their lives and happiness. Ergo: I meant to get rid of my personality which insisted on maintaining a world that no longer existed. I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.
Before I slept I wondered what time it was! This was grease that would not easily wash off the hands but I’d give it a try. Meanwhile, there was something in the odor of the grass an inch from my nose that disturbed me. I sniffed it deeply and began to feel sexually aroused and this revived the idea that I might be losing my mind — not a fearful notion when the mind was of insufficient interest to be worth saving. Another sniff raised the image of Magdalena, who, sitting next to me at dinner, left a scent of antiseptic from her bandages mixed with lilac, the same scent as the accursed Elizabeth exuded in the hallway of my apartment. I wondered how I could be fully erect when both women clearly repelled me. Magdalena’s features were overstrong, with densely olive skin, big teeth, a Roman nose, and pitch-black hair. I sensed a mannish cruelty in her eyes. J.M. implied she was a bit of a whore. A puta, he called her. When she laughed out loud at her own spoken memory of a nasty childhood joke she had played on Lillian, she grasped my arm so tightly I winced in pain. Her grip was as strong as a man’s and it came out in conversation that before her totally wayward behavior she broke and trained horses for a living. She also chewed with her mouth partly open.