Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  Anyway, after I lost the filly I was spoiling for trouble and Melvin said let’s drive down to Escanaba. Melvin had just had his sixteenth birthday and was still a virgin and this bothered him. Carl had told him to stop being so dirty-mouthed around girls and to wear clean clothes but Melvin’s mother had taken off to Missouri to join this religious cult and their house was a mess. Melvin said, “No, it’s only because I’m ugly.” The upshot was that Melvin had heard that there was this woman that worked at a strip club in Escanaba that would screw a fellow for twenty-five dollars. Carl would drive because he was fairly sober because if he drank more than two beers he would puke due to stomach problems. Carl’s dad was a big deal at the college and we were driving a newer-model Chevy. The beer was kept in the trunk so we had to slow down and drive off on a log road when we wanted one.

  We got to Escanaba and of course Melvin didn’t know which of the three strip clubs was where this professional woman worked. None of the clubs would let us in anyway because we didn’t have identification and we weren’t old enough. By the third club Melvin was pissed off and had become obnoxious pretending he was big and strong rather than small. This is what beer can do to man. Well, Carl became smart-mouthed and the bouncers shoved him away from the door and then little Melvin threw a punch about a foot wide of the mark and the bouncer backhanded him across the sidewalk into a car. I had to step in though I figured the bouncer to be about two-eighty to my two-thirty. He had a fair amount of fat around the waist, though, and I guessed he probably got winded pretty fast. Boxers know you have to build up your wind with roadwork or you can’t put meat in your punches. Well, I ran on the track team so wind wasn’t the problem. We boxed and I forced him to wrestle some to wear him out. I took a pretty good haymaker to an ear, which made my head ring like a church bell. By now a crowd had grouped around us and people were betting. The bouncer rushed me and got me half up on a car hood but I got my legs around his chest in a scissors and squeezed out what breath he had left. The bouncer was leaning up against the car when I started hammering him mostly to the body because that way you don’t hurt your hands and it takes the will to continue out of your opponent. I hesitated before I threw my last punch because the bouncer’s eyes looked like the German shepherd’s a few years before. I hit him once more anyway and that’s what I truly regret. I should never have thrown that last punch but I was angry about the filly and my dad getting fired by the Burketts for my behavior with Cynthia. Well, we heard a siren so Melvin, Carl, and me ran off down an alley and sat in a dark vacant lot for about an hour and then Carl snuck around and got the car. We didn’t get back to town until daylight. Dad was making breakfast and told me that Mr. Burkett had called him in the evening and hired him back. He made an ice compress for the side of my face which was swollen up. He said that my body had far outgrown my brain. I’ve regretted that last punch a thousand times. These days men don’t fight so much and it’s a good thing. Cynthia’s parents told her that she could never see me again but that afternoon we met up at Flower’s near Au Train. Cynthia only had a learner’s permit but she swiped her mother’s car and drove out to meet me anyway. She couldn’t have been an easy girl to raise. [I suppose I wasn’t. C.] I was pleased that Flower and Cynthia liked each other. When Cynthia said something bad about her parents Flower said, “White people try to keep their children young. You’re a grown-up. You can always move on.” She wasn’t preaching. She said it flatly, like “Try my homemade ketchup with your potatoes.” I was always proud that our son Herald never got in a fight except during his hockey games when it’s more or less expected. Herald never liked winter except for hockey. Once he got his B.A. at the University of Michigan with a straight four-point he headed for Caltech for graduate school. When we talk on the phone I begin with “You warm enough, Herald?” and he always says, “Sure am, Dad.”

  The other day K took me for a ride up to Big Bay but the day didn’t turn out quite as well as I hoped. Big Bay made me think about murder again and then I couldn’t swallow the hamburger K bought me at the bar and it smelled so good. I thought, “Look at me, I can’t even eat a hamburger and in my working days I’d sometimes eat five for lunch.” I thought about murder in Big Bay because I remembered watching this famous movie made in the area many years ago. [He’s talking about the movie Anatomy of a Murder with James Stewart, Ben Gazzara, and Lee Remick, part of which was shot in the Big Bay area. C.] I think I was about ten at the time and watched it with my dad, who treated me like a grown-up man at that time because I could do a man’s work. It had been two years since Mother had gone away and he had pretty much got his sense of humor back, which could be pretty rough. For instance at school a lot of kids called me Donny Injun and some of them not in a nice way. All my dad had to say was “You’ll have to live with it.” Once he had to come to school to see the principal because I had gotten in a couple of fights over being called Donny Injun. He bawled me out, saying, “You can’t fight over someone calling you a name. Only if they punch you.” I was upset because I didn’t think he understood me because being a little more than a quarter he could pass for an ordinary white person. My darker skin and bigger nose and cheekbones came from my mother, who was three-quarters pure-blood. It was hard also at this time because of Floyd booting the puppy to death.

  Anyway, I was sitting there in the fancy car Cynthia bought in the parking lot of the bar waiting for K and thinking about the murder movie. The woman in it was a real peach but then my thoughts went back to Floyd again. Sometimes you can’t control your thinking, and then this little girl came up to the open car window and asked, “Are you a real Indian?” and I said, “About half,” and she said, “How can anyone be half?” And then her dad, who was talking to someone in front of the bar for directions because he was a tourist, came trotting over, grabbed his daughter, and yelled at me, “Don’t talk to my daughter,” like I was a pervert. People are set on scaring the shit out of their kids these days. Well, K was just coming to the car with a sack of burgers and with his other hand twisted the guy’s ear and said, “Get the fuck out of here.” The guy was terrified of K and his funny haircut and took off with his poor kid. It was unpleasant.

  I’m slow to get to the worst thing about me. Last year before I lost most of my strength to this disease I had K drive me up to Baraga because I planned on killing Floyd. For years I thought that if I was dying of a dread disease I’d take Floyd along. I had to be dying because I couldn’t stand the idea of being locked into a prison. I can’t even sleep with tight covers or in a zipped-up sleeping bag. When I was real little and out of hand my mother would shut me up in a broom closet but not for real long. She said that if I didn’t behave a ghost that was half bear would eat me up in this closet. And then when I was in the second grade the teacher taped my mouth and shut me in a janitor’s closet. At recess Melvin had been pestering these older girls and they jumped him, took off his pants, and threw them in the pond. Melvin was real short so I had to wade in and get his pants, and I was punished because we weren’t supposed to go in the pond. It was fenced off because a kid had drowned there years before when he fell through the ice at recess. Well, the teacher forgot to let me out of the janitor’s closet and when Dad came home from work at the Burketts’ and I wasn’t there he went to the school. The principal was still in his office and when he found me in the janitor’s closet he was angry at the teacher but nothing came of it except she was nicer after the incident. I was embarrassed because I’d been in there about five hours and had peed my pants. Melvin played an old-fashioned Halloween trick on this teacher where you put a paper sack full of dog shit on the porch, light it on fire, ring the doorbell, and run for it. The teacher came out and stomped the little fire getting her shoe covered with dog shit. I suppose it’s not too funny but Melvin wanted vengeance on this teacher. Melvin had a bad end on the Seney stretch, which is fifty miles of straight highway between Seney and Shingleton. Melvin quit high school when I ran off with Cynthia. He became a pretty good mechanic and
drove in demolition derbies, where they get about thirty old cars ramming into each other to see who lasts. They draw pretty big crowds though I didn’t like them because of the noise. Melvin was liquored up and drove his hot Pontiac Trans Am about a hundred miles an hour down the Seney stretch with the state police giving chase. They said Melvin swerved to miss a deer and rolled the car about a dozen times including end over end near the Driggs River turnoff.

  So K drove me up to Baraga last August so I could kick Floyd to death like he did to my puppy. Nothing about the day was what I expected. First of all it was real hot with a south wind and I had imagined killing Floyd on a cool day. We stopped at a gas station and convenience store outside of Baraga for directions and K bought a twelve-pack of beer saying that Floyd might want it as a last meal. We drove down this gravel road a few miles with my anger rising so that the edges of my sight were blurred. Floyd’s place was Depression brick, that fake brick made out of tar paper, the whole house tilted a bit to the south from a weak foundation and north winds. There was what we call a car garden with a half dozen old cars and pickups sitting in a wild raspberry patch. Floyd was sitting on the front porch next to a big electric fan with an orange extension cord coming out of the house window. Three old, fat dogs got up and barked once when we pulled up and then the dogs lay back down near Floyd’s wheelchair. Floyd yelled out, “Donny Injun” and started laughing as if this was a social visit. There were no steps up to the porch but a sheet of plywood so he could get his motorized wheelchair up and down. K sat down on a rickety porch swing and petted the old dogs. He put the twelve-pack on the table, on which there was a big package of sweet rolls and bottles of Floyd’s medications. You couldn’t imagine a man my age in worse disrepair than Floyd. He had a bad case of the bloat and I guessed him to be well over three hundred. He had so much fat around his neck that you couldn’t have strangled him. I was leaning against a porch post because I was feeling dizzy. He said he’d heard through a cousin in Marquette that I was sick and was sorry about it. I was losing my anger but said in a rush that I had come to kill him and he laughed and said, “Why bother?” I had to move because the fan was blowing my way and Floyd smelled bad. He drank three of the beers in no time at all. He talked baby talk to the dogs and showed us how they would all roll over in unison after which he gave them each a piece of sweet roll. Floyd leaned over and turned off a country music station so we could hear a group of sandhill cranes squawking in a field full of big stumps to the west of the house. I couldn’t collect my thoughts. Floyd opened his fourth beer and said he was sorry about the puppy and that dogs were his favorite things. The county welfare people wanted him to move down to the VA hospital in Iron Mountain but he couldn’t live without his women. All the dogs were female. One put her chin near the stump of his missing right leg and he gave her another piece of sweet roll and then to be democratic he had to give another piece to the other dogs. He asked me if I had a pistol because he had always thought someone might shoot him. I said no and that I was going to kick him to death like he did the puppy. He closed his eyes and said he was sorry about the puppy and then he said, “Everyone was always afraid of you, Donny.” Suddenly I was embarrassed. K couldn’t take it anymore and vaulted over the porch railing and took a little walk. The dogs went with him. Dogs like K. We sat there for a while talking about Melvin and also Carl, who was a GP doctor down on the outskirts of Chicago. I was itching to get out of there but was too hot and dizzy to move. Floyd said that in June a bunch of the young sandhill cranes walked into the yard and scared the hell out of the dogs. Finally K came back with the dogs and we left after asking Floyd if we could make a grocery run for him. He said no that he just ate canned food because he couldn’t chew with only a couple of teeth. He seemed worried that K was going to take the rest of the beer. There was crusty stuff in the corners of his eyes and his dogs stood up to bid us good-bye.

  [A week later Donald was still quite distressed about this trip to murder Floyd. Donald also had his most severe seizure to date. He said his whole body felt like his foot did when he dropped a cement block on it, which he did a couple of times in his working life. He became so low that I was frantic and suggested that if he still intended to see a glacier he better get started. It was mid-August and K would leave to go back to Ann Arbor in a month. Right now what I remember most is my tears when they left. I was not totally confident that I’d see Donald again. When you’ve been married a long time you simply know the nature of your lover’s thoughts and I knew he was thinking about suicide. Luckily there was a remission and he made it through the winter, which is a somewhat dormant period in the Great North, where people are mostly eager to discuss the latest blizzard and how far out Lake Superior would freeze, if not all the way across to Canada. C.]

  I got down in the dumps after our Floyd visit mostly because I wondered what kind of piece of shit a man could become before he cracked. Floyd was no more than a character in one of those zombie movies I used to watch on television with Herald and Clare. At the doctor’s office that week when I asked Cynthia to go out in the waiting room I tried to talk the doctor into giving me some pills for when I figured I might want to cash out. The doctor said no, that it was illegal. I said I didn’t want to make a mess using a pistol or deer rifle. The doctor said, “Let me think it over.” I have no intention of becoming too much of a burden to my family. Also, it’s my life to end if I wish to end it.

  It seemed to be time to see a glacier if I was ever going to see one. The trip turned out to be quite a joke because I never told K my true intentions and we spent damn near two weeks and a lot of driving and went to the wrong kind of glacier. Back in the seventh grade a man came to our school assembly with a film about the farthest north and Arctic country. Maybe it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen on film. The man was in a boat in this area where there were more than a million birds—I think they were named puffins—that lived in cliffs and flew down to the ocean to eat fish. Down the shore there was a glacier as high as a mountain it seemed and this glacier was moving so slow you couldn’t see it move and finally huge pieces of it would drop off into the sea with a crash like thunder. Well, when I got sick I developed this dream that a good way to die would be to be camped up on top of this glacier and ride a piece of ice as big as a house a thousand feet down to the sea. Well, I never told K this fantasy but then he wanted to head northwest to British Columbia because he had read a book about some Indians up there called the Koyukon. It turned out K was off a few hundred miles about where these Indians were. I had an old camper top and we put a mattress in the back so I could ride laying down when need be. We took a cooler, sleeping bags, a tent in case it rained, and fishing gear though K has never been much of an angler. He took a university course dealing with rivers and he mostly hikes and studies how rivers are shaped. He loves the Peshekee over in the Huron Mountains because it has quite a drop. I had also carved a hole inside a book in David’s library. The book was called The Indians of Lake Superior and the hole contained mostly veterinary pills for pain from when our last dog, a part-malamute mongrel named Sally, got old and died. There were about thirty of these pills and I figured they might do the job for me. I only asked the doctor because I knew he’d have something more guaranteed to get me on the ghost road.

  Off we went on our joke trip after Cynthia fried us up a pan of eggs and side pork. In my condition you don’t worry anymore about cholesterol. You have to know that K is not a normal person. He has built himself into a different kind of person. For instance he might stay awake a few days and nights and then sleep and read for a day and night. I used to think he must take pep pills but Clare said no, he won’t even take an aspirin. Anyway, we headed over into Minnesota, then north toward Winnipeg, where we caught the main western artery, Route 16. I wanted to detour up to Hollow Water in Manitoba to see where the first Clarence’s wife, Sally, hailed from but it was too far out of the way. Many people don’t know that Canadian cities are mostly like our own but the big empty places be
tween cities are larger than ours. K has a heavy foot and we drove forty-eight hours in a row until we camped beside a fine river near Hinton, Alberta. While K slept I caught a nice mess of trout to cook for dinner. A game warden stopped to see if I had a fishing license but then he looked at me closely and said it didn’t matter because even though I was American I was a First Citizen. I started to fall down but he was a big fellow and caught me. I was embarrassed and told him I had Lou Gehrig’s disease. He said he had a second cousin down in Calgary with the problem. First Citizen is the official term for what they call Indians in Canada.

  Well, we finally made Smithers up in British Columbia and I wasn’t feeling too good. K had called ahead and when we got to the airport a helicopter was ready to take us out to this glacier. He was to drop us off and pick us up the next afternoon. K had given me a pill to calm my nerves and I felt a little like the first time I smoked pot back in junior high school. The helicopter ride was quite a thrill. I kept thinking of a passage Cynthia read me once from a book where there was a Cheyenne Indian character named One Who Sees as a Bird who was an actual person in history. I don’t have any faith in what they call reincarnation but if I was to return to earth in the form of another creature it would be nice if it was a bird, a raven to be exact. Once when I was night fishing in the fall with my dad on the Escanaba River down near Arnold he pointed up into the darkness at the big moon to where you could see birds like little pieces of black confetti flying south.