by Jim Harrison
Magdalena drank a great deal and after dinner Lillian teased her into a parlor trick, perhaps hoping she’d fall down. J.M. put on a Mexican polka tape and Magdalena bounced around the room in a squatting position, kicking out one leg and then another in the manner of a Russian folk dancer. The sight was more grotesque than attractive. If this weren’t enough, she began chewing several sticks of bubble gum at once while she did dishes with Lillian. I was pondering a graceful exit when she sat down on the couch in the too narrow opening between myself and the grandma, who laughed at everything she did. Magdalena put her face too close to mine and asked for help with her English grammar which was plainly atrocious, then blew a large bubble that touched my nose before I ducked backward. After that I bade everyone good night without giving her a reply.
*
At dawn I am greeted by the dogs, to whom my stone fence is no barrier. My head, like John Clare’s, is pointed to the north and a warm breeze blows up my body and nose, redolent of pine and the trees J.M. said are black oak. My fraudulent grackle is doing its versions of howling. It’s unthinkable a single bird makes that kind of noise. Wearing my underpants, I fetch the dog biscuits. The dogs don’t think it’s peculiar that I’m sleeping outside because they do it every night. This time I make them take their snacks gently, worming them out from my partially clenched fists.
The morning immediately presents its first pratfall. I can no longer do a single pushup, when a year ago I began the morning with an even dozen. It is the grim result of atrophication — at age fifty even a head cold is a memento mori. There is a brief vision of myself as a grown-up thalidomide baby trying to escape a house fire by the strength of its flippers. The fact that I had been offered a partial-disability pension also came to mind. I had accepted an early sabbatical at half pay with no substantial promises other than another hearing this coming spring. This is tantamount to dismissal. My full sabbatical, to come in two years, would have been a complete year in London, living in a small flat within two blocks of Hampstead Heath. When that professional consolation disappeared, along with my twenty thousand in cash savings to a bumbling lawyer, I totally lost heart. Our college offered none of the employee assurances of major universities where my shoddy treatment would have been met with protest, perhaps near riot. It was paternalistic to the nth degree, and with tenure it was assumed you were safe until you were buried in the Boot Hill overlooking the athletic field, of all places. This has become a society of so many raw issues that no one can be thought to behave well.
This bit of emotional recidivism put me in a funk but there was a quick boon in noticing I no longer had a watch at my wrist. I struggled to accomplish a single pushup.
“What are you doing? Screwing the ground?”
It was Magdalena on the chestnut horse, peering over the fence. I hadn’t heard her approach because I had been listening to my worthless thoughts.
“I see you’re also a voyeur,” I snapped, though rather wanly. There was no way to cover myself with dignity.
“I think that means ‘window peeker.’ I’m not seeing you through no window.”
“Any window,” I corrected, lying on my stomach and feeling absurdly vulnerable.
“I’m not seeing you through any window,” she screeched. “You look like a piece of roadkill.”
“Thank you for finding me attractive,” I said in desperation.
“Just wish I had me a camera. That’s all.”
“Just wish I had a camera,” I corrected again.
She stepped off the horse directly onto the stone fence, then jumped down within inches of my face. She stooped and ran a strong hand down my bare spine so that I shivered. “You poor old dog. You’re not dead yet.”
I squeezed my eyes shut waiting for further insults, but then off she rode. If this was indeed a courtesan, a prostitute, a puta, the fabled heart of gold was not apparent. Even so, my mother lacked a heart of gold. With my father’s insurance settlement she had bought a shabby restaurant and renamed it Florence’s English Diner, quite the success before urban renewal demolished it the year before her death. She was charming and very British with her customers but an utter shrew with her employees.
My eyes moistened then at the memory of my rebellion. Miriam, my first love, had come into the diner for the first time and with a group of friends our age. I had been caught sorting a platter of silverware in a wet dishwasher’s apron, the single most embarrassing moment in my life; thirty-five years later I still cringed. When I told Bob this story he quoted Dostoyevsky: “I maintain that to be too acutely conscious is to be diseased.” Bob was never without an appropriate quote. He’s on another Fulbright year, in Marseille, and I can imagine him at this moment taking a late afternoon stroll along the waterfront in his expensive trench coat, ever knowledgeable and alert for what life grudgingly offers.
I rose to my knees and a mile or so away I could see Magdalena and the horse making their way up the umbrous mountainside. At that instant I realized that there was no actual connection beyond my permission between my five senses and the world. This gave me a lightheaded sense of freedom that immediately lapsed into the troubled thought that this was the reason three billion people had three billion different versions of reality. Little consensus was possible, and less so every day. My personality, my consensus, had pretty much evolved from a job that had vanished. This was akin, in biblical terms, to worshiping graven images. It was apparent that people had to ritualize their existence or go insane.
It was only at this precise point there in the cabin yard that I realized the extent of the nervous collapse I had suffered. I might have pitched down a well of despondency but a noise I heard was not yodeling dogs, it was sirens coming up the long driveway to the ranch. I dressed hurriedly, watching the arrival of two squad cars and the pale green Border Patrol vehicle. With my monocular I could see Roderigo talking to J.M., and four policemen milling around the hired men’s quarters, going in and out, checking the tack and equipment sheds. Then one of the policemen headed toward me, growing larger in my spyglass.
*
We have experienced the thrill of a modest dope raid. Verdugo’s two cowboys had been caught at dawn trying to bring marijuana across the backcountry border with pack horses, and the police had hoped to find a cache of narcotics at the ranch itself. For some reason I was made irritable when the policemen who interviewed me did so with profound boredom, as if I were too senile to be effective or dangerous, but then it occurred to me Roderigo might have told them I was a visiting professor. I had the brief notion that I was a living cliché as the cop took a desultory peek in the closets.
When the policemen left I went in to have coffee with the Verdugos and Roderigo, who had tarried. From my own viewpoint it was quite a tonic to deal with an actual event. The minimal legal problem was that one of the cowboys was an illegal alien, making J.M. culpable for hiring him, though Roderigo was sure he could “heal” that matter.
Lillian was angered when the two men speculated on whether Magdalena was somehow involved. Had she ridden off this morning to meet the culprits in the mountains, unaware that they had already been arrested? She knew both of them well, but she had only been brought to the ranch because she’d had the “crap” beaten out of her. The connection began to seem slight to the two aspiring gumshoes, but then a far more dire problem arose. J.M. was short two hands and his roundup, less than a third done, was running late. He had gambled on “late grass” which hadn’t eventuated and now the cattle were short on feed. J.M. said that my son-in-law’s father, though he hadn’t shown up in five years, was a real bear when it came to the accounts. I tried to imagine owning such a lovely place and not bothering to visit it. I had certainly read about such people years ago while flipping through Marilyn’s fashion magazines.
“Perhaps I could be some use,” I offered with a not very strong voice. J.M. merely stared at me in his angst, but then Lillian chimed in, saying that Magdalena could also earn her keep, adding that she was as good a
s any man, probably better. Thus it was that I became, with due regard to accurate semantics, not so much a cowboy or a cowhand, but a cow helper. Within days J.M. admitted gracefully that I was better than nothing.
*
It is three weeks later, somewhere in January, and has been raining for days (I torched the calendar on the small barbecue grill I bought myself for Christmas). One doesn’t think of this sort of relentless, cold rain in southern Arizona. On two of the last three days Lillian hasn’t been able to reach the country school. The creek bed that crosses the driveway which was dry when I arrived in December is now engorged with water. I stood at its edge this morning with the dogs, watching an entire cottonwood tree float by at an alarming pace, also a dead rattlesnake washed from its winter nest. Lillian has assured me that these vipers sleep the season through and aren’t a matter of concern until late spring. The baloney bull stood across the rumply flood, bellowing at me as if he were lonesome.
My bones ache and my body is bruised. We trucked the last of the cattle to Tucson three days ago, barely making it across the creek. I have been paid five hundred dollars for the over three weeks of work and the amount, though absurdly small, has thrilled me to no end. I keep it in the Gideon Bible I swiped from the Tucson motel where I stayed at Christmas. It struck me as inappropriate to take part in the family’s Christmas, so I fibbed and said I had been invited to spend the holiday with an old friend in Tucson. This white lie angered Deirdre when she called the Verdugos on Christmas Day and I was absent. The Gideon Bible had been my only reading material at the motel, and anyone who has read Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno as often as I have knows this material can become tiresome. I did, however, find myself amazed when I discovered I had never gone to the trouble to disbelieve in the Resurrection of Christ. It certainly seemed more plausible than our space ventures or the Republican Party. When I drove back from warm Tucson in the open Jeep I had even prayed briefly during an ice and snow storm on the highway north of Sonoita.
I’d give myself a C-minus or less as a neophyte cow helper, or perhaps an Incomplete. The fact that I was better than nothing is meaningful to me. J.M. might have found extra help because he is well liked in the area, but his position is similar to a tenant farmer’s, and they are not his cattle, so no one is interested in making the rich owner richer. I rode Mona, a mare of the ripe age of twenty-three years. She was one of Lillian’s personal horses and had been retired for two years. According to Magdalena, who is quick to point out the negative, in horse terms Mona was older than I am, and that I was riding a grandmother. She was, however, willing to show me how to do a better job with the cattle.
Oddly, I thought, Mona understood and performed ninety percent of her job without the least human prodding, and worked excellently with the dogs in getting the correct cattle headed in the right direction down the mountain from the three different BLM (Bureau of Land Management) and Forest Service leases. It is commonly known, though I didn’t know it, that ranchers receive rather economical leases of public lands for grazing, somewhat on the order of food stamps or other entitlements. Years ago one particularly unattractive writer friend of Marilyn’s had brayed from the podium that he was the last member of the free-market economy and the rest of us were slobbering at the public trough.
Admittedly Mona wasn’t the sort of dashing horse that J.M. or Magdalena rode. Her age and good sense made her a plodder. At the foot of small box canyons she’d sniff the air, then thread her way gracefully up through the trees and around the boulders, seeking out the stray hiding cow. As I said before, these cows were wild creatures and lacked the placidity of dairy breeds. Mona was not above giving them a good bite if they failed to move along.
If it was a coolish day I’d start a fire to accompany our lunch which was packed along in Mona’s saddlebags. Once during the first week I had nearly forgotten the lunch, after which the grandma put it in the saddlebags herself when we got up an hour before daylight. Twice I saw our baloney bull, who proved capable of trotting up an incline that would be difficult for all but the most accomplished mountaineers. He was not alone in being obstreperous — some few of the cattle were deemed so obnoxious that they were left to run farther up the wintry heights of the range. In this situation J.M. admitted that it would have been different if he owned them himself. He grudgingly said to me that Magdalena was a sight to see on a horse. Her legs and bottom were so strong she sat on the saddle lightly, a technique she advised to me when I complained about my chafed and purple hinder. During difficult maneuvers she didn’t sit on the saddle at all, but crouched on tensed legs as the horse whirled and pitched after cows, both horse and rider decidedly mammalian.
One bitterly cold day I built the lunch fire against a boulder to further reflect the heat. While we drank our coffee J.M. prodded me to tell my woeful tale and I rendered a shortened version. Both he and Magdalena demanded additional details to determine guilt between Reed and Ballard, and though Reed had obviously blackmailed Ballard over Elizabeth, J.M. and Magdalena held to the belief that Ballard, as “boss,” was the biggest culprit. I did not bother telling them that Elizabeth’s father was funding Reed’s literary magazine for paving the way for his daughter’s graduation — though I, of course, had written the necessary thesis. Ballard himself was destined to be the next president of the college.
“You should have cut his heart out,” Magdalena said, so softly I asked her to repeat it. “I’ll help you. We’ll get him to Chicago” (she said Cheecago) “and I’ll seduce him and make him drunk. You come out of the closet and stab him, then we throw him out a high window.”
J.M. was less sanguineous but he readily agreed both Ballard and Reed deserved to die horribly. (I reflected briefly on what a gory mess colleges and universities would be with these two afoot!) He cautioned me to not poison my life on schemes of vengeance. He himself had always wanted to kill his own father for abandoning his mother, older brother, and sister down in San Carlos, just north of Guymas. His mother’s first husband had died and she had lived with an American for a few months by the name of James Monroe, who left when she became pregnant.
“But wouldn’t you care to meet him?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“I went to Los Angeles when I was nineteen to look for him. He made my mother so unhappy I was going to kill him. I don’t know if I would have done the deed but that was sure enough my intention.”
*
Many of us shrink from life, thinking that this in itself might offer us some protection. That attitude of humble correctness hadn’t done me any good in the months in my dark apartment. I had been right, and that had held my minimalist world together. One member of the board of trustees, a prominent attorney from Pittsburgh, had sensed something was amiss despite all the circumstantial evidence against me. It was he who insisted I be given the fillip of a half-pay sabbatical until the air cleared instead of outright dismissal under the aegis of “moral turpitude.” We met only briefly while looking out a window of the administration building during a break in my hearing. “What a squalid little place,” the attorney said. “You have a fine mind. Pick up a law degree and I’ll give you a real job.” That was that. Not a reassuring prospect but it was kind of him not to treat me like the degraded fool the others had.
An absurd consolation was that I got to make three trips to the Tucson cattle yards in the immense truck which was unalloyed fun. On the third and last trip both Magdalena and Lillian squeezed into the capacious truck cab with us, and after we unloaded the cattle we went to an Old West-type steak house for dinner, drinking, and dancing. Magdalena tried to get me to dance with her but I was far too shy. If there is anything worse than self-consciousness, I don’t know what it is.
I started smoking again. I had quit up in the mountains one day after I fell off my horse when the cinch gave way and I dropped my cigarettes. For several days there seemed no point in starting again — until, that is, I watched Magdalena doing her dance floor fandangos with several cowboys including J.
M., who was an accomplished dancer himself. I finally shuffled around in a dark corner with Lillian, at her strong insistence, recalling Marilyn’s willful abandon when we had gone to dances as graduate students in Ann Arbor. It occurred to me then that I should have married someone like Lillian, but that’s not how it happens, is it? We are selected by mates during a phase, and the phase frequently passes. We were getting dizzy from the smoke, rare meat, and margaritas, so Lillian took me outside. When you haven’t noticed the stars all that much since childhood they give you vertigo. (Is there another word for this dizzy unease with reality?) What in God’s name is happening up there? Lillian tried to teach me the Spanish names for the constellations but all I remembered in the morning was Osa Mayor (Great Bear) for what we called, unhandsomely, the Big Dipper. Lillian also warned me to be careful because she suspected her sister might be setting a trap for me. That item seemed so far-fetched it brought me to momentary consciousness which lapsed into thoughts of how primitive peoples could trace a bear in the stars.