by Jim Harrison
I looked up into the night unable to see the tiny raindrops falling against my face. It was a simulacrum of blindness. I thought idly that we are trained rather idealistically in secondary school, high school, at college, but with little enough to do directly with this idealism except to become drones, good citizens, make money, and die. This struck me as comic. There had to be millions of men like myself who thought likewise, at least on a rare occasion. I recalled an English professor, an elegant but misshapen oaf at Northwestern, who liked to quote Wordsworth’s “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” or something to that effect. We all knew that he had married well and collected rare sherries and port, and would shoot his cuffs so we could see the links made of Elizabethan coins.
I turned slightly and could make out the dark but comforting shape of the cabin. My shelter, as it were. Was Joe somewhere in a fifty-mile radius milling around in the light rain? Maybe he was inadvertently right. Inside and outside are a little confusing. I suppose that in anthropological terms shelter was what you resorted to when you were “done” with your hunting, gathering, tilling, and whatever, outside. I’ve spent the vast proportion of my life inside, of course, dealing with my livelihood. If you go outside in a relatively unpopulated area you are immediately a little less claustrophobic though, of course, there are no miracles because you carry your civilization in your head. I suppose if you simply spend your entire life indoors as many do you are lost within the confines of a maze with no solution. But then I recall taking a day hike with my nephew, truly one of the burgeoning swarm of eco-ninnies, and he spent the entire hike whining about his father, my brother-in-law, who was admittedly a nasty item. The point is that my nephew was outside in his body but not in his mind. Luckily his father dropped dead in a sand trap on a golf course and the young man is now chasing fossils in peace in South Dakota.
O Christ but our minds move so quickly that our emotions can’t quite follow. Years ago I met a Frenchwoman in Paris who maintained that you could only be truly alone in Paris when you were in the toilet, but then one day in late May in a light rain I viewed twelve hundred varieties of roses in the Bagatelle Gardens of the Bois de Boulogne and I was quite alone. The other day on NPR I heard that since atmospheric conditions are “inexhaustibly chaotic” it was difficult to predict the weather. Joe immediately came to mind.
III
We waited overlong at the neurologist’s office in Marquette. I became irritated in part because neither Joe nor Dick Rathbone were irritated. Dick scanned a year’s worth of National Geographic while Joe turned his chair around and stared at the street below as if fascinated by the sparse traffic in this neighborhood of the city. After about a half-hour, a dowdy middle-aged woman brought a girl in, probably about thirteen or fourteen, whose head was bandaged in the manner of a skullcap with a flesh-colored bandage. Joe turned his chair back around and he and the girl stared at one another, obviously recognizing each other as the patients in the room. The girl became a bit flirtatious which made me quite nervous because of her age. Dick ignored the display while the girl’s mother seemed not to mind. The girl’s left hand began to shake as if palsied and she grabbed it with her other hand as if embarrassed. I picked up a Harper’s magazine to quell my nervousness, but then Joe went over and sat by the girl taking her palsied hand and holding it. They both laughed and the mother smiled happily at me. The girl kissed Joe on the cheek and he kissed her back. This fairly burst my noggin with anxiety but then I scarcely knew what to do about the situation so I stared at a page of Harper’s until my eyes blurred. Dick Rathbone began to talk with the woman in the casual way of the Upper Peninsula, starting with locating each other. She was from over between Trenary and Chatham. Her husband drove a logging truck. I glanced at her feet, which were a bit swollen so her shoes were only loosely tied. I did not raise my eyes above her feet or the feet of Joe and the girl.
“They tell us Prissy’s a goner. Priscilla’s her name. She’s my number six. The last one. Tumor way inside her head.”
“Mother, I’m not looking for sympathy.” Priscilla announced she was going to show Joe her dog that was down in their pick-up and when they left the woman burst into tears. Dick Rathbone went over, sat down, and tried to comfort her. The whole scene was so wretchedly Dickensian, or from our own Steinbeck, that I was full of ire despite the fact that I could scarcely swallow from melancholy. Unlike her mother the girl was rather pretty. I stood up then and out the window I could see Joe and the girl petting a mongrel that sat in the back of an old pick-up with rusted fenders.
I felt generally desperate and grilled the receptionist for the third time about the doctor’s whereabouts, receiving the identical message that resembled a telephone answering machine to the effect that the doctor was in surgery and would be here as soon as possible. Of course it’s quite pointless to get angry with doctors who resemble the small captious gods that cursed the Greek peasantry. There was the briefest urge to strangle the receptionist but I doubted my strength. At least Dick had calmed down the woman and they were now busy talking about the “good ole days.” I went back to the window only to discover that Joe and the girl were now hugging each other on the grass while the dog was scooting in circles. It occurred to me with a dagger of fear that it was not totally beyond Joe to “close the deal” right there on the office lawn. As luck would have it our wayward neurologist pulled up in a spiffy BMW and when he got out to greet his embracing patients he was wearing what looked like golf clothes. Surgery indeed. You could almost smell his sun block a hundred feet away. But then I felt a tinge of empathy as he actually sat down on the grass with Joe and the girl. I had met him twice before and he really wasn’t a bad sort. My mind whirled for a moment at the idea of a doctor’s job what with having to say good-bye to the living whereas an undertaker didn’t have to listen to the response.
On the way home from Marquette we stopped for a hamburger at the Brownstone. Joe had been sleeping sitting up in the backseat with his eyes open, an ability unnerving to others, mostly to me as Dick Rathbone was in a state of rapture over Mozart’s Jupiter which I was playing on the tape deck. Earlier, and instead of me, it had been Dick Rathbone who had been vexed. The doctor, I suppose properly, had refused to slip a telemetric device under Joe’s skin, and this after telling us that any increase in Joe’s complicated medications would only disable him to the point he couldn’t walk or navigate. He insisted that what Rathbone suggested certainly wasn’t an “approved procedure.” When we got back in the car Dick was so pissed off that he told me he knew an alcoholic retired veterinarian who lived near Seney who might do the job. Joe, meanwhile, was studying the hand-drawn map the girl had given him locating where she lived. Dick hadn’t noticed this yet but my heart sank a bit thinking of the eighty or so miles between home and the girl’s place between Chatham and Trenary.
Mozart soothed Dick’s ruffled feathers but then I was off on another disturbing tangent. Roberto wouldn’t stop sending books despite my requests that he do so. And I couldn’t stop dabbling in the books. It was the simple matter of my inability to resist opening a new book with that peculiar new-book smell. Early this morning it had been Slobodkin’s Simplicity and Complexity in the Games of the Intellect. It had been the single sentence to the effect that no organism responds to the full complexity of its environment that had thrown me out of whack. Over my underdone blueberry pancakes I had wondered what if a great naturalist like E. O. Wilson, whose Biophilia I had revered, also had the penetrating insights into human behavior owned by Freud or Jung or Dostoyevsky.
Dick interrupted my thinking by asking, “How did Mozart make that up?” A simple enough question to which I said I hadn’t a clue. He rewound the tape and started it over. Meanwhile, I was back to my naturalist genius to whom I had added, in the manner of Dr. Frankenstein, an equivalent ability to probe into human behavior. Maybe toss in musical and other artistic ability. Caravaggio, Yeats, García Márquez. Of course the banality in my thinking was the old time trap. M
y invented genius had to go to meetings, seduce women, raise unruly children, drink wine and perhaps martinis, make a living. His own true character would be too expansive to adequately develop.
Joe startled me by saying he was hungry. There you have it. Our genius would have to cook, eat, defecate, take showers, and possibly make love. All human activity would be distracting. Or maybe ultimately supporting?
* * *
It was certainly time for my annual hamburger which turned out to be so delicious I thought I might compromise and have another this year. The waitress at the Brownstone was trying to flirt with Joe but he, of all things, kept sniffing the map that Priscilla had given him for a trace of pheromones and when we went back out to the car Dick Rathbone had to explain the directions to Joe since he was without his compass. Lake Superior across the road was to the north. East and west could be determined by the traffic on Route 28. On the near side the traffic was headed east. Joe looked at Priscilla’s map again and turned until he faced south. He apparently felt naked without his dirty brown shirt with its dozens of pockets and his compass, jackknife, fish line and hooks, insect repellent, and maps. It occurred to me at that moment that we better get him in the car before he escaped.
Which is what he did at the rest stop near the Driggs River when we stopped to pee an hour later. Dick has prostate difficulties and I was bent on overhearing a quarreling tourist family at a picnic table (since my youth I have felt I might pick up a dark secret in overheard conversations).
In any event Joe was across Route 28 and into the Seney Wildlife Refuge before I vainly called out. Dick heard my somewhat plaintive voice and rushed out of the toilet tugging at his zipper. “Goddammit,” he said. I glanced at a map in the car trying to estimate how long it might take Joe to cross the Refuge, after which there was a wide swath of the Hiawatha National Forest, at least sixty miles as the crow flies from where we stood to Trenary and Chatham. Of course you know you’re not a crow when you run into creeks, wide marshes, lakes, dense swamps, rivers. Dick immediately worried that Joe didn’t have his humble survival gear. We certainly didn’t bother discussing what Joe had “in mind” other than the obvious Priscilla.
* * *
That night, unfortunately, it turned very cool for August. I sat with Dick Rathbone in his kitchen while he got very drunk. I had a few myself but he basically finished a fresh bottle of whiskey. His sister became quite furious by midnight, coming out of her bedroom and shrieking incoherently. Dick yelled back, “Batten your gob you old bitch,” and she retreated weeping. Our conversation delaminated. I’ve always overvalued the friendship of Dick because he prefers the more relaxing surface of things. Now, however, he wondered aloud that we might be mutually worried about Joe because we had no children of our own. I had just enough booze to indulge in the sentimentality I normally loathe. I had years ago gotten a vasectomy to relieve myself of the threat of paternity suits, not that I was a Lothario but that at the time I was sunken in the disease of money. Roberto cured me a few years ago by asking suddenly over dinner what the first image was that came to my mind when he said “money.” My reply surprised me. “The soiled toilet paper you sometimes see near campsites.” He was delighted.
About midnight the sheriff of Alger County called to say that neither his people, the D.N.R., nor the Department of Interior employees at the Wildlife Refuge had seen Joe. We hadn’t expected anything and Dick reminded me of what the Chippewa tracker had said to the effect that if a competent person wanted to disappear in this area there was nothing anyone could do but wait. Waiting and drinking. Stewing.
I awoke at dawn on the Rathbones’ couch and Edna was already frying sausage and potatoes. She was one of those people who truly believe that “breakfast lays the foundation of the day.” She also was one of those women who seem to feel better to the degree that she senses you feel badly. She looked through the open double door from kitchen to parlor and cheerily waved and sloshed the remnants of the whiskey bottle, then brought me a mug of coffee which I drank hastily and fell back to sleep. I was disturbed again that I found her attractive in an old robe and her hair wet from a shower.
I awoke again at nine quite upset to discover that Dick was up and gone down toward the Hiawatha on the track of Joe. I had clearly been left behind. Edna said that though Dick was just a month short of my age he could still walk a good dozen hours in a row. This somehow clamped my throat enough that I couldn’t swallow the second bite of my breakfast. Edna tried to cover her insensitivity by saying her brother didn’t have a dime in the bank and their mutual pension checks barely stretched a month and taking care of Joe had been quite a financial windfall. Naturally this didn’t help and she errantly dug the hole deeper by calling up my envious position far in the past when my family would come up from Chicago in our “great big Buick.” She remembered I wore the “white buck” shoes later made famous by Pat Boone. All the local girls knew that by the time I was sixteen I would be a “prime catch” and that’s why I had my way with them. In fact, Edna added with a prolonged giggle, the girls called me “Johnny Fuckerfaster” after a famous dirty joke of the time.
I put my plate of breakfast on the floor for Marcia, petting her head while she ate. I had plainly been knocked off my pins by Edna’s initial inference that I would merely get in the way in the search for Joe. And then there had been a flood of memories of the half dozen local girls I had made love to with my high-grade Chicago condoms before I went off to college and began working summers. Staring into a pool of cooling egg yolk I could recall their names, also the moment of the hopeless attempt at camaraderie when my father had told me right after my sixteenth birthday to use condoms, “safes” he called them, because girls would know we were “well-heeled” and might wish to trap me into a “shotgun marriage.”
O Jesus but I fled the house, stumbling so that Edna caught me at the door. I managed to push her away, my hand recoiling at the jiggle of an ample breast. By the time I reached my car in the yard I had calmed down in the manner of a movie zombie. It was unthinkable not to stop at the grocery store and post office. For some reason I bought my first can of Franco-American spaghetti since college (surely an early sign of profound confusion). At the post office there was yet another book bag from Roberto and a letter from Ann, which I read immediately, not a good move. She wasn’t pregnant by Joe yet but still insulted me roundly for not consenting to marry her when she became “with child,” a curiously literary way of putting it.
At the cabin I ate my canned spaghetti on toast and was quite swept away by unhappy college memories about a girl in my French class who I adored but would have nothing to do with me. She pretended to be intellectual but was pinned to a basketball dork who was also the president of his fraternity. Come to think of it this girl also looked like my eventual wife and Ann. My father was obsessed with hard work and thrift, those Calvinist curses, and all of my spare time was spent helping my uncle get commercial properties ready to sell. Often they were small factories and I’d go in with a crew of blacks to scrub the place clean and then do a cheapish, cosmetic paint job. I often wondered later how we could have such a grand time doing something so clearly unpleasant. My uncle had a very rare theory that if you paid your men well you made a better profit for yourself so those who worked on my crew had very high morale. My uncle was also a trencherman, though quite finicky, and the lunches he had sent over were always a treat, usually gigantic sandwiches from an Italian delicatessen.
How could I now wax sentimental about scraping grease off the floor of an empty, unheated factory on cold January mornings or on blistering July afternoons? Frankly my black friends at the time made my college acquaintances look shallow, puling, emotionally shabby.
This week’s book from Roberto, Edelman’s Neural Darwinism, shoved me over the edge into a prolonged anxiety attack that my poor soul had evidently been spoiling for. Here I was spreading the spaghetti on toast and as smart as I was supposed to be (157 on one I.Q. test) I simply couldn’t seem to com
prehend a single paragraph. I smelled the new book and that didn’t help. I quaked and the room became blurry at the edges. Tears formed. My lungs wouldn’t fill. My mouth became dry. There was the quick image of my cousin Laura showing me her rear end when we were twelve in this very room. Over where the windows nearly met in the corner. Under the antique brass fish scales with her left hand on the windowsill. “See my butt,” she said with a ladylike lilt.
As I was flipping pages in Neural Darwinism in a vain search for a sentence I could understand Laura’s lilac scent entered the room despite its fifty-five-year absence. My own wife didn’t care for bugs, in fact couldn’t tolerate them, thus was rarely here. It actually approached a phobia that evidently began when her cousin dumped a sack of bugs he had collected into the tub when she was bathing. Or so she said. The details were good.
I met Roberto right after the last details of my divorce were settled over teatime at the Drake. How very amiable until everyone left except my personal lawyer and I went to the toilet which began swirling in a mockery of movie versions of whirlpools and vortexes. Roberto’s office was just down the street and he gave me drugs that dumbed me down for a few months. What are we to make of the vast hole that divorce shovels in one’s life, at least a three-year hole?
Roberto insists that it’s because we’re essentially monkeys, primates, and grow hopelessly absorbed with one another. Obviously people wouldn’t have anxiety attacks if the particulars (a million possibilities per human) were all known. Few know their own minds and we are all suffocated by psychologisms, I reminded myself.