by Jim Harrison
Sitting there in my stone nest, I thought of the proscribed limits of my father’s life: coming to manhood in the rigors of the Great Depression, four years of World War II, marriage, learning how to operate heavy equipment, then death. Compared to that, I could finally admit that my own life had been spent on silk cushions in jeweled chambers. The process of getting a Ph.D. had threatened mind and body, but once that soporific rite had been endured there had been marriage to a woman with an ample allowance, frequent trips to England and, as I climbed to the top of the academic ladder, a work schedule that only entailed three courses per semester to small numbers of students. The system was designed to give me time for research and writing but had instead made me somnolent and dreary, albeit totally safe in a world suppurating with tribalism and chaos.
Now I was left with a pension that ensured something less than genteel poverty. I mulled and moped for a few minutes, then realized what with free lodging and a sublet apartment back in Michigan, I had not even touched my half paycheck. I had, in fact, supported myself by rounding up cattle and mending fence. I gave Lillian forty dollars a week for my part of the groceries, which is all she would take, and through Deirdre, her husband’s family had sent along the message that I was welcome to the humble cabin as long as I wished. Perhaps I should kiss the ground as they once did in Russian fiction, or offer up a prayer or two, but I wanted to spare God any additional tedium. He was no doubt busy managing His black holes, one of which was said to be the size of three hundred million suns. It was also inappropriate for me to ask Him to free me of my random and troublesome thoughts of Magdalena, which stirred my loins uncomfortably. During our lovemaking session on the couch the heel of her cast had dug a sore area in the small of my back as if I had been a horse and she had worn spurs. The discomfort of this abrasion had been a nagging wound of Eros herself but I was somewhat disappointed when it went away. I was an expert on the subject of my mind but was still infantile about my emotions.
I tried to distract myself from Magdalena by the pleasurable thought that my life might henceforth be rid of students. Year after year my informal surveys of new students in my classes revealed that few if any had read an appreciable book in the previous year. The worship of the ersatz and peripheral was the norm. They had been so overexposed to the visual image on television they were dull to good art or fine photography. I was less knowledgeable in the area of their music, but I could only recall three students in my career who had cared for Mozart.
All of this suddenly wafted away because I no longer cared for that world and the hideous sense that I was in danger of becoming a premature geezer. The immediate, heretofore unconscious question was whether a toss in the hay with Magdalena was worth fifteen hundred dollars. I knew enough of the world at large to suspect this wasn’t a record, although it might be in my reduced economic category. There was humor in the idea of how much physical work it had taken to save that amount of money. I had inadvertently redeemed my body only to have it presenting me with this problem. If only I knew a winsome middle-aged lady who loved nature and Mozart, but I didn’t. It is an alarming item to think you are sexually dead for a decade only to discover that you aren’t. I had always presumed I understood what Yeats meant when he wrote the line, “The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,” but had no real idea at the moment aside from the sensation of dread and arousal.
*
It was a manic rather than a dark night of the soul. I couldn’t stop talking to myself and my mental language blurred into a passionate gibberish. I got out of bed a dozen times, fingering the slip of paper that contained her phone number and address until the paper became as soft as cloth. I was more in need of a witch doctor than a psychiatrist. The fact that there was no phone in the cabin saved me from bedding down a demon. The image of me racing through the night in an ancient Jeep that topped out at thirty miles an hour was comic. The sensible thing to do was to use the cash I had earned through the sweat of my brow as a down payment on a spiffy 4WD pickup, the kind all cowboys pine for.
My head was buzzing and I began to hear running water, or blood, within it for the first time in months. I nosed around in my briefcase and came up with the papers on which I had kept track of the time back in my apartment: neat lists of my clock readings with the exciting minutes at the junctures of A.M. and P.M., P.M. and A.M., recorded with a bit more flourish. The notes made me shiver in their naive attempt to ritualize reality into an acceptable form.
I took a sleeping bag out of the closet, turned out the lights, and settled down in the yard. Close attention to the stars, moon, sun, and earth is genuinely helpful when you want to stop talking to yourself. We all hope for a superior brand of madness but our wounds are considerably less interesting than our cures. While walking I thought the only viable reality to be the present step. I considered counting stars, unable to remember Lillian’s constellation lesson, but then counting seemed a vulgar intrusion for both the stars and myself. I sent a few prayers starward, not mentioning Magdalena but offering thanks for the universe that was making me well, and the request that I not forget the earth during my inevitable mischief.
*
The day of reckoning dawned bright and clear, deafening with birds and the sunlight creeping slowly down the mountain walls, the air so sweet I drank it in sips. I dozed on, listening to Lillian leave for school, then watching through the gate at grass line as the dogs jumped into the bed of J.M.’s pickup and he took off for the hills. It was my D-day, though not so auspicious as my father’s participation in the actual event.
For breakfast, at my request the grandma thawed a container of menudo and heated maize tortillas for me. I boldly dialed the phone and an irritable Magdalena answered. She had been up late and why was I calling at dawn — in reality eight A.M. I said that my love for her was so great I couldn’t help myself. She said to give her a few more hours of sleep, then come over, but not to forget the money. Of course not, I said. As an afterthought she said to dress like a professor, not a cowboy, as I could go on an errand with her. When I hung up the phone the grandma laughed, having figured out I was up to no good with her favorite spectacle. Magdalena’s dress request made me wary rather than disturbed. There’s no substitute for consciousness.
On the way back to the cabin I heard one of the barn cats mewing. Lillian had said J.M. didn’t care for cats but they kept them to control the mouse and scorpion population. I walked over to the tack shed only to discover that my favorite cat had been torn open and lay in the dust quite dead, while its companion mewed a funeral service. I suspected the dogs, and such was my anger it was lucky for them they weren’t around. At least a coyote would have eaten the poor creature.
I took a shovel out of the shed and buried my friend in the soft earth of the corral with Mona watching attentively. Was this an omen that I was going to die? No, it meant the cat had died. My mind chattered a litany of stray lines from Christopher Smart’s poem to his cat Jeoffrey: “For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery. For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin & glaring eyes. For in his morning visions he loves the sun and the sun loves him. For he is of the tribe of Tiger.” Poor old Smart, batty and impoverished, but he knew his cats.
*
What a day it was, my emergence, my foray into the great world of sin, crime, commerce, the indigestible hairball of civilization. I will cherish this day until I am cremated, as it is my vain wish to be ashes rather than a carcass. Appropriately enough, though the day was hot, I dressed in the slacks and tweed sport coat, a J. Press shirt and brogans, that I had worn the day of my arrival. In the mirror I looked like I was on the verge of lighting a briar pipe and saying the word “tautological.” All the way to Nogales above the rickety roar of the Jeep I hummed Mozart, buzzing along the road’s shoulder to allow faster traffic to pass, including one of those old VW buses once favored by hippies which always sounded like a magnified Singer sewing machine.
Magdalena’s neighborhood was less tha
n reassuring and I rechecked, in my jacket pocket, the heft of my Swiss army knife, a gift from Deirdre, small change indeed against the automatic rifles used by the criminal element these days. The tweezer attachment had been good for pulling cactus thorns and the leather punch ideal for making a shorter notch on my belt. In any event, it was not the sort of weapon you could whip out in a microsecond.
The house itself was a shabby little bungalow, with splotches of shattered stucco revealing the adobe bricks beneath, a peek into the house’s personal history. The porch was partly enclosed with a trellis of flowering vine loud with bees, and several hummingbirds I didn’t feel disposed toward identifying. I tapped the toe of the silly Church’s brogan and at the last possible moment took five of the fifteen hundred-dollar bills and shoved them far down my sock until they tickled my instep — an attempt to make my tribute to Eros two hundred, rather than three hundred, hours of labor. When I stood straight Magdalena opened the door, looking a bit sour and blowzy in a lavender peignoir, and nodded me into the darkened house that was airless but cool. In the kitchen she asked me to make her coffee while she showered.
The coffee chore was just as well, as I was having difficulty catching my breath and touched my breast to check my heart’s accelerated tom-tom, deliberating whether this was an appropriate place to drop dead. I dumped the percolator’s old grounds in a wastebasket overflowing with fast-food cartons, put the coffee on, and took a Dos Equis beer from the nearly empty refrigerator that cried out for a black banana. I sat down on the living room couch and sorted through a pile of horse magazines, finding underneath with not a little shock my book, which she had obviously borrowed from Lillian. The first part of the title, The Economics of Madness …, gave me a sharp case of shudders as if I had peed outdoors on a cold winter night. I slid the book back under the nest of horse magazines where I thought it might be happier blind to its author’s fripperies.
All too soon she swept out of the bathroom hall, the very starkest of nakeds, toweling her mammalian mane and glowering down at me sunken on the couch. She reminded me of that vast and robust Maillol sculpture I remembered in the garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She sternly held out her hand on which I slapped the thousand dollars. She hastily counted it and looked at me as if I were vermin.
“I said fifteen hundred dollars. You’re five short.”
“Oh, my goodness. I thought you said a thousand.” I stared at my knees, crestfallen.
“It’s fifteen hundred dollars or nothing, you cheapskate.”
“I guess we professors are reputed to be absent-minded.” I was staring at a droplet of water in her belly button. This was as far as you could get from Milton’s theocratic mania. I got up abruptly, took the money back, and headed for the kitchen and the door. “I’m sorry I bothered you,” I said to a wall clock that looked back from the plastic flank of a smiling donkey. Magdalena was hot on my trail and grabbed the money.
“You can owe me but you don’t get the full treatment.”
“But if it only takes ten minutes, that would mean you’d be earning six thousand dollars an hour. In a full workday you could make a fortune, or at least go to Hawaii.” I don’t know why I was being so captious. I plugged the maddening drop of water in her belly button with a forefinger.
“You’re too much of a smartass for your own good,” she said, coming into my arms. I accomplished the mission while halfway on the squeaky Formica-topped kitchen table. Afterward I reeled and slumped, unable to get my sea legs. She made off to dress and I laughed softly in time to the perking coffee, feeling quite stupid but alive.
*
Our errand, as she called it, brought me closer than I ever hoped to be again to absolute disaster, mortification, imprisonment. We drove the Jeep to a gas station with me in a state of post-coital desuetude fueled in addition by a mostly sleepless night. I craved the sort of naps I used to have on Hampstead Heath after drinking three pints of Watneys in a nearby tavern. The day had become hotter and it had not yet occurred to me to take off my tweed jacket.
At the gas station we parked beside a white Ford pickup and Magdalena ran inside to get the keys. It was thirty yards or so away but through the window I saw her talking to a man who looked suspiciously like the boyfriend I had seen in Verdugo’s yard. He looked out the window and I averted my glance to the back of the pickup as if it were a newfound toy in the sandbox. There was an old car seat in the pickup box and I caught the slightest whiff of something that smelled like lawn clippings.
Magdalena finally came out and we were off in the pickup headed south, for her namesake town, which she said was only an hour away down in Sonora. When we crossed the border I perked up, mildly thrilled to add a new country to my life list even though I had lived close by for nearly half a year. It reminded me of Deirdre’s childhood squeal when we crossed the Blue Water Bridge on a car trip to Toronto. This definitely bore no resemblance to Canada and the slums looked decidedly friendlier than those of Detroit. On the outskirts of the Sonoran side of Nogales was a welter of American-owned factories, built there, so J.M. told me, because they need only pay wages of five dollars a day. This seemed unlikely so I asked Magdalena, who had been chattering along about her sick mother.
“American companies are cheapskates just like you.” She patted my knee, a rare gesture of affection. She either got right down to business or skipped the matter.
Now we were out in a lovely hilly countryside of immense rolling, female shapes leading up to distant mountains that I guessed were the back sides of those I could see on my fencing expeditions, or near the cliff on which I had done my purgative weeping, an experience that seemed a lifetime ago. I was surprised to find the road a superhighway like our interstates, and its smoothness made me drowse off, waking when she stopped to pick up two women and no less than five children whose car was disabled on the road’s shoulder. She talked animatedly with the women in Spanish and out of politeness I clambered into the back of the pickup with the children so the two women could ride up front. The children were sweet but shy. I gave each of them a dollar bill and held the youngest on my lap as we sat on the old car seat watching the world continuously recede behind us. I dozed off again despite the money itching against my foot within the sock.
When we reached town Magdalena dropped off our passengers at a gas station and I waved my merry goodbyes to the children. I was surprised when she then let me off in front of a small cantina. I wasn’t totally conscious yet but she told me to wait there until she picked up a load of statuary and visited her mother. I didn’t mind what with feeling rested from my short snooze and being quite hungry. I sat at the bar, the only discordant note coming from a table of American college kids in the far corner. Two of the girls were shaking their pretty little bottoms in front of the jukebox to the delight of Mexican workingmen sitting at other tables.
“So you know Magdalena,” the barman said. “You’re a lucky man. She’s a spitfire.” He spoke clear English and had evidently watched the woman in question out the window. I nodded in assent, ordered a beer and bowl of menudo, the second of the day. It is thought by the Mexicans to be both a hangover tonic and a sexual restorative. As for myself, I ate it because I liked the dark pungency of the flavors, reminding me that I was no longer trapped within the discrete squalor of a midwestern academic town.
At the exact moment I was served the food I wondered how Magdalena could be visiting her mother when Lillian had said several times that their mother was dead. I tore off a piece of tortilla, then paused at the thought that there was a strange odor on my fingers from riding in the back of the truck. On the way to the toilet to wash my hands I passed the table of college students and one of the girls smiled at me. She was a real peach, as we used to say, but then I recognized the resinous odor as that of marijuana. I had smelled it frequently from the bushes outside the student union building at college over the years, and heard the muffled “wow”s and giggling. I had smoked it once as an undergraduate and found the se
nsations intolerable, as if my body had been reduced to the cartilage one finds in a turkey leg. Under its influence I also had eaten an entire bag of Oreos and had felt quite ill the following morning.
When I returned to my menudo there was an urge to hop the bus I saw passing out the window. It wouldn’t really matter which direction the bus was going, but how could I travel in this country without knowing the language? It was time to abandon the bastard genre of making notes and learn Spanish. Lillian had said she would be glad to help but the best way was to enroll in a school down in Hermosillo that offered an intensive month-long course. I was intrigued by the city’s gorgeous name, presenting as it did the possibility of intrigue and romance, though Veracruz might be better, as it abutted the Caribbean. There were definite opportunities for a man not fully atrophied and wizened in his own private bell jar.
Deep in my menudo, which wasn’t as good as the grandmother’s but savory enough, I tried to tell my own fortune in the swimming pieces of tripe and hominy but couldn’t get past the idea that Magdalena was up to no good. It was impossible not to think of J.M.’s bellowed lecture in the café. The border was indeed rife with the mayhem of smuggling, the local weekly paper I read at Verdugo’s including long lists of charges for amounts ranging from a few pounds of marijuana to a ton of heroin in a produce truck. In the northern Midwest and upper New York state, cigarettes in large quantities were being smuggled into Canada because they cost four bucks there.
It was well over an hour before Magdalena returned. I wasn’t the least bit restive as the college students were jumping around to Mexican polkas and some young locals were teaching them the steps. It was frolicsome music and my toes tapped against the barstool. How was I to court a lady unless I learned to dance? I saw myself gliding across the burnished dance floor of a supper club with a woman who owned a tennis or birdwatcher’s tan. We were doubtless doing the foxtrot.