Julip

by Jim Harrison

  Sad to say, later I had an argument with J.M. in a Mexican café. We drank several beers while I ate two bowls of menudo, a tripe soup the grandma often made and which I found delicious. Along with the tripe, calves’ feet are also put in the pot, an item that is readily available in Mexican butcher shops. All I did, idly enough, was ask J.M. if on the way home we could drive by where Magdalena lived with her boyfriend.

  J.M. virtually exploded on the spot. The upshot was he knew I had slept with Magdalena because she had told Lillian. How could I do such a thing? He knew she had worked as a call girl in Phoenix and Tucson and now she was involved with drug people, of which there are thousands along the border. I was told I knew nothing, unlike himself, about the world of evil, and perhaps Magdalena had slept with the dope assassin whose modus operandi was to dash out of an alley and bury an ice pick in an unsuspecting skull. I was a gentleman and professor, an intelligent man — how could I bring shame on myself and family by screwing such a woman? If she showed up again at his home he would kick her out pronto, and if Lillian forbade it he would leave himself, adding for a punch line that Lillian had even loaned Magdalena a chunk of their savings. When J.M. finished, the dozen or so people in the café were silent but staring at us, neglecting their drinks and meals. Then an old man piped up, “Why don’t you shoot the bitch,” and everyone laughed.

  *

  The yellow warbler is now the Delphic warbler. The previous name was as absurd as “blackbird.” We show our contempt for creatures by allowing the unimaginative elements of the scientific world to name them. It is perhaps a job for those countless M.F.A. poets crisscrossing the land, wheedling bullies carrying their Hermès briefcases. I decided on “Delphic warbler” because their song is bell-like but attenuated, bursting the notes so that the seams of the music cannot contain it, much like Sappho.

  I am back to my fencing despite the accident a week ago. What a wake-up call! After dinner last night Lillian took off the bandage and we stood side by side in the bathroom looking in the mirror. She frowned. It wasn’t pretty but neither am I, the pinkish ridge from the dissolving stitches leaving an irregular Maginot Line down my face. “Care sat on his faded cheek,” I quoted Milton.

  Of late my sleep has been disturbed by a spring Mona had discovered by scent. The weather had turned warm in early April and we had taken to leaving at dawn. Mona always stays in any grassy area where I drop the reins, so I was surprised when she trotted off. I hurriedly followed because there were some dark clouds sweeping up from the south. To tell the truth, I felt like I was being abandoned by the most reliable person in my life, though she was a horse. She traveled a scant two hundred yards over a hillock and up a narrow gully too thick with varied shrubbery for me to stop to identify.

  I heard the trickling of water, then the gulps of Mona drinking. There was a miniature rock pool of cold, clear water and I let it settle before drinking myself. Unlike most of the local water it was untainted by the effluvia left by the gold and silver mining back at the turn of the century. I stood there a long time leaning against Mona, listening to the disturbed birds come alive again. There were too many of them and I didn’t want to upset them by getting out my guidebook. There were literally dozens of species flitting around, including inconceivably colored hummingbirds feeding from the flowering bushes. Mona had discovered a bird gold mine and it made me giddy. It wasn’t so much the immense weight of my dream project, the puniness of language in the face of this splendor, but that the birds made me feel that I understood nothing, nothing at all. It was partly the energy of their otherness, the sheer mystery of our existences together in that tiny arroyo. There was a shudder as if I were going to take leave of my senses. I took Mona’s reins to lead her away. A warbler unknown to me, but likely a Lucy’s warbler (see what I mean!), sat on the pommel of the saddle, staring at me. I stared back until she began to shimmer, her outlines beginning to blur. Horse, bird, rider: it became uncountable. The sky swelled black and blue, making me wet but joyful.

  *

  Mona pulled up lame so I’ve been walking with my tools and guidebooks in a daypack. She neighed mournfully this morning, wanting to go along, her injured foot lifted like a dog’s paw. I broke off a chunk of Snickers bar which she gnawed with pleasure with her worn teeth. The poor old girl doesn’t know that her life grows short. She makes me think of the part of Leaves of Grass about animals, of which I only remember one line: “They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.” One Sunday we came home from church with Florence all teary about the poor and hungry in Toledo. My dad was having a morning beer and reading the newspaper. Apprised of the problem, he suggested that she and her fellow church members “get their dead asses” across town and feed these people. I have neglected Whitman since graduate school, thinking him painfully sentimental like Dickens and Dostoyevsky. Maybe I’ll take another look.

  I dawdled around the barnyard applying liniment to Mona’s ankle (J.M. calls it a pastern), and then Lillian arrived with the mail and groceries which meant it was Saturday. There was a letter from Bob in far-off Marseille, quite apologetic as he had only been sending the stray postcard. When he left in late September I wanted to make him feel good, so I had said I was going to London. He was more than a little overexposed to my problems at that point what with his own lifelong mental difficulties. His father had been one of the most successful black lawyers in Chicago and Bob had been found brutally wanting in his love of literature. Bob wrote that he had corresponded with “that pile of offal” Ballard and suggested that I accept the disability pension. What’s more, there was a part-time position available to teach two courses in American literature to French adults that was mine for the taking. Bob had decided against returning to America himself and hoped I might join him. I could live nicely there on my modest teaching pay plus my pension. He would even search out a handball court.

  I was touched by this, however unlikely the idea. Perhaps I could teach the fall and early winter semester in order to be back here in plenty of time for the songbird migrations. I would also have to do a little research to check if the Marseille area had forests and walking room. My eyes teared when I thought Mona might not be there for my return. One of the cats that lived in the tack shed rubbed against my leg and I stooped to pet her. The dogs growled, jealous of my affection, but dared not approach as I had swatted them before for chasing the cat.

  I looked over and Lillian was standing under the cotton wood tree near the back door, her arms folded in evident concern. Why is it, unless they are furious, must you ask women what is wrong? I walked over, praying that it was nothing to interfere with my upcoming hike, and was left sweating and stuttering in moments.

  “What’s wrong?” I naturally asked.

  “My sister needs to see you, and J.M. won’t allow her around.”

  “He seems to have ambivalent feelings toward her,” I wattled.

  “J.M. doesn’t understand that when Mom died Magdalena was fifteen and she didn’t get proper mothering.”

  “I don’t know where she lives. How can I see her?”

  “She’s over at your cabin. She snuck up the creek. She was going to wait there all day and then I caught you still here. Don’t tell J.M. or he’ll go crazy. I wouldn’t mind myself if she moved to Alaska, but I love her because she’s my sister.” Lillian had plainly reverted far from her education and normal composure. I shrugged and headed for the cabin like a gunslinger, though in truth I felt my bowels might let loose.

  *

  There she was, big as life and death, sitting at the table and inspecting the contents of my wallet as if that were what one did on a visit. Thank God she hadn’t found my beloved Miriam’s photo or I might have lost control. I noted that her foot cast was gone.

  “You only have thirty-five dollars,” she announced.

  “I use the bank,” I lied, noting she hadn’t had the inclination to check the Gideon Bible where I had accumulated nearly two thousand dollars with my roundup plus my fen
cing pay (five dollars an hour). She was wearing a white sleeveless dress perhaps to denote her purity.

  “I’m pregnant. I need fifteen hundred dollars to go up to the clinic in Tucson. The cops are after my boyfriend so he took off. Besides, it’s your fault.”

  “You mean I’m the designated father?” I had the tremors and tried to be ironic to quell them.

  “However you want to put it. The timing is right. Perhaps you want to make love to me right now?”

  “No,” I said, the most outrageous lie of my life. The mere sight of this depraved creature sent my depleted hormones spinning, but this was akin to being mugged.

  “Just pay up and I’ll always be ready for you.” She smiled, not her best gesture, and held out her hand.

  I went to my briefcase in the closet and got a Michigan check, filling it out at the table and writing along the top, “Not admitting paternity guilt,” slightly proud of my caginess. She took the check, gazed at it, then tore it into confetti.

  “The clinic in Tucson only takes cash.” She remained cool, stirring the confetti around with a finger.

  “Then why didn’t you cash the check in Nogales? You’re no more pregnant than I am.”

  “Come and see me when you are willing to bring cash.” She wrote down her address and phone number, then kissed me, her tongue probing against my clenched teeth.

  When she left I went to the window, quite astounded when she vaulted the fence. This unfortunately reminded me of an old movie I did like, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Spencer Tracy. It was also unnerving because within an academic atmosphere we grow to think that all people are essentially the same and that the spectrum of behavior, barring psychotics, is quite narrow. Magdalena revived the notion, usually only a scholarly footnote, that there might be demons afoot in the land.

  I had the immediate sense to calm down by wondering what Raymond Chandler might do in this situation. Rather than dabbling with one of his heroes, I wished to enter the mind of the master himself. Was I the putative father? Why did she have to have cash? What was wrong with the check, my “not guilty” notation or something else? Could it be that a check can be traced to both issuer and casher, but what difference did that make? I knew that Magdalena was not a rocket scientist, as the young say, but what did she have in mind above ordinary mischief? The surest way to solve the riddle was to leave it unsolved and completely ignore her. It was difficult to throw away her number and address so I neglected to do so. There’s that time-frayed saw about there not being any fool like an old fool, but then I had taught young people for nearly thirty years and never felt they had a collective leg up on us. Besides, how old is fifty? A question not the less stupid for my asking it.

  *

  Deirdre stopped by for two days, making a detour on the way to San Francisco to meet her husband, who was at a medical meeting. It was definitely a rapprochement and I was pleased to see how delighted she was with my condition, although I wish she hadn’t used the word “progress,” a musty concept at best. She was only mildly upset by my scar, which is understandable considering the daily bullet wounds in her Chicago neighborhood.

  But stop. Reality is so peculiar. The other day I checked an old packet of notes found in my briefcase and discovered that the year has fried a lot of fat out of my thought and language. With your only child, you tend to gloss things over; ergo, in truth, Deirdre was pleased I was no longer shaking and raving. The scar was small potatoes compared to the fact that I apparently wasn’t deliquescing at the speed of the calendar. Her own problems seeped out. The charity clinic she and David worked for was undergoing political convulsions and they were thinking of moving on to a similar operation in Rapid City, South Dakota, a place that sounds exotic to me and probably isn’t.

  Deirdre determined that my grackle is actually a Mexican blue mockingbird blown north by the winter storms. Her bird book is admirably dog-eared and notated, but she had to use a Mexican bird guide to locate this creature. Oddly, my only mental pratfall of her short visit can be directly attributed to birds. She took me to a Nature Conservancy property along a creek bottom some twenty miles from here and the area was dense with birdwatchers. I felt claustrophobic despite the beauty of the riparian thickets, as if I were being sucked back into the black hole of the ordinary. Deirdre joked that if she called the Audubon Hot Line, my cabin would be stormed by hundreds of birders in their crazed lust to add the Mexican blue mockingbird to what is called their life list, a tawdry system they use for keeping count and competing with one another. I was so appalled that I stepped off the legal trail and hid for an hour in a thicket, letting Deirdre continue toting the day’s numbers. By a wonderful stroke of luck I was visited in this thicket by my beloved beige dolorosa. I sat in utter stillness on a log as if I, too, belonged there. The bird came within an inch of my foot, peering up at me as if I might be a tree. I resolved then that there would be nothing expedient or useful in my own renaming of these creatures, certainly no paintings or photos attached to vulgarize or explain away their beauty and mystery. My work would not become more fodder for “the deceitful coils of an institution,” as the poet said. Readers would simply have to imagine what bird went with which of my sonorous names.

  The second and last night of Deirdre’s visit we camped out by my secret spring that Mona had discovered. We arrived late on a sunny afternoon and at first a strong wind dampened the activity and I feared I had imagined it all. An hour or so before twilight the wind ceased entirely and the immediate area of the spring became dense with life. Deirdre became so excited she put her guidebook aside and clutched at her hair, her eyes unblinking in excitement. When the dark came it seemed to emerge out of the ground rather than coming from the sky, with undetectable slowness so that we turned with shock to the quarter moon.

  There was a raw moment around the campfire when Deirdre brought up the subject — another euphemism — of Magdalena. I was glad the fire wasn’t all that bright because I blushed horribly over the idea that she and Lillian had spoken of my little fling, though “fling” is a slight word for an experience from which you are lucky to emerge alive.

  “I’ve met her a bunch of times, Dad. She’s not a very nice person. But I don’t suppose that’s what you were looking for. I mean, she’s not exactly a coed.”

  “I agree,” I said with the utmost lameness. Young women these days feel free to comment about their fathers’ sexual behavior. My throat constricted in the effort to say something à point. “It wasn’t serious. I doubt I’ll see her again.” I was suddenly in the thick of regarding my entire use of language as suspect, both past and present. Recently it had lagged so far behind my perceptions that I realized I’d have to make a major project out of changing this language.

  Deirdre was struggling for the words to put the matter to rest when we both heard an odd noise. It was a soft sound somewhere between a chirrup and a cluck and it came from all around and above us. We looked up at the firelight reflecting silver off the leaves of a black oak. We were being watched and spoken to by dozens of tiny elf owls. Each would have fit inappropriately in a vest pocket, their eyes as big as black marbles below small tufted ears. They studied us for a scant few minutes and then, their curiosity satisfied, they flitted away into the surrounding darkness. I was overcome with the sense of feeling at home, whether I deserved to or not. Why should I break my heart wondering?

  *

  Deirdre left at dawn in her rental car. I rode with her the half-dozen miles out to the main road and walked back, discomfited to learn that the two gray hawks that nested in a cottonwood at the side of the long driveway were among only fifty nesting pairs left in the United States. Walking steals away anger but this was a troublesome detail. When I caterwauled about the noxious creative types, Bob would laugh and remind me that too many good writers at one time would knock the world further off balance and flood the insane asylums. Bob’s ability to find bedrock in absurdity always made me envious. For instance, if I think “six miles,” I’m liable to ru
in a part of my walk until I rid myself of the six-mile notion which is nearly as corrupt as the clock. That’s partly what Dostoyevsky meant when he said that two plus two was the beginning of death.

  I detoured at the creek bed, walking west until I picked up Magdalena’s tracks from her visit, following them to where she scooted under a fence to her waiting vehicle. There was a remote urge to sniff the tracks as a dog might, and a lump arose in my throat. If my youthful prayers had been answered, by now I would have lived out a fifty-year-long harp solo with my beloved Miriam, which had certainly not been the case.

  On the way back up the creek bed I came upon a road-runner and followed this bird in an anthropomorphic trance. The bird would trot swiftly ahead fifty yards or so, then stop to regard its approaching enemy, me. When I became too close the bird repeated the process, stopping again, its head cocked in inane curiosity. To break the monotony of this paradigm of my life, I sat down on a boulder and checked the driver’s license: I was indisputably fifty years of age. In the distance the roadrunner waited patiently for my next move, eventually drifting off into a catclaw thicket.

  The boulder had a comfortably sculpted backrest and I couldn’t think of a single reason to continue a life of movement. Perhaps I’d sit there until my expiration date, a novel impulse. Bob had divorced early and his only child, a boy now in his late twenties, lived in an ashram, a religious commune of some sort out in Oregon, from which he sent a letter once a month, beautifully written but full of hygienic pieties. Last year there had been a package, a piece of wood which had been carved in rather ornate calligraphy: “Life is a housefire of impermanence.” Bob had found the sign amusing enough to put it up on our office wall. I didn’t say so but I thought the message a tad banal, though since then life had certainly whirred right along.