Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  It was late afternoon before I returned to the house. I had run into two old Finnish drunks I knew and one had touched my Mohawk haircut and said, “I bet the girls like to rub their butts on it.” They were both in their seventies and drank whiskey heavily the week after their Social Security checks came in and after that did yard work to keep in beer money. They steadfastly refused any help from social services.

  The household was upset because Donald had rejected an oxygen unit some medical personnel had brought over. Cynthia’s eyes were red from crying. She and Clare sat wordlessly beside Donald, who was sleeping with an arm around Betty the dog, who growled when I waved from the front door. In the kitchen David was in a slight huff because Herald had tossed out his pasta sauce and had started a new batch. You could still smell the acrid odor of scorched tomatoes in the kitchen. Watching the two of them I thought how hard it is for any of us to understand that life is different for everyone. In my understanding of the disease, Donald’s mind remains clear while his body is becoming a desiccated roadkill. Herald and David must be the only two people outside of academics who would quarrel about the human genome while cooking. David is enamored by the idea that the essential nature of the flea is nearly as complicated as our own. Herald says, “I find your generalities repellent,” and David attacks science’s fear of the “big picture,” saying, “Einstein said that scientists who drill dozens of holes in a thin piece of board aren’t admirable.” Clare comes into the kitchen, tastes the sauce, but is noncommittal. “It needs something,” she says, putting an arm around my shoulder. Cynthia comes into the kitchen, tastes the sauce, and also says, “It needs something.” She quickly fine-chops several cloves of garlic and shreds more basil, tossing it all in the pot and stirring. Herald wouldn’t put up with any of us touching his sauce but he can’t withstand his mother. No one can as far as I know. When the doctor stopped by the other day Cynthia made him sweat under her questioning. Clare whispers that she wants to go for a ride.

  In my shabby pickup Clare fiddles with the music, quickly switching from the Grateful Dead to Los Lobos and settling on a Pink Floyd tape we used to listen to together.

  “I’m buying you a new truck for Christmas.”

  “I don’t want a new truck.” This conversation has been going on for years.

  “I’m quitting the wardrobe business. I don’t want to dress people for a movie I won’t like.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “If Herald gets married I’ll go to graduate school in Berkeley in the fall. Uncle David got me interested in human geography years ago. I want to know why people are where they are throughout the world. Herald can’t manage alone.”

  “No more movies?”

  “You gave up before I did.”

  I start thinking of my former obsession with movies, which Clare took part in when we were in our teens soon after the suicide of my friend, in other words a period of great instability. It started with my mother, Polly. When I was young, at any given moment she could explain my father to me. I envied this clarity. For some reason when I returned home late in the summer from Donald and Cynthia’s my mind only felt clear when I watched movies, either at theaters or at home. No movie was too specious for me. I could watch Roy Rogers singing to Indians in warpaint and after that screen Bergman’s Virgin Spring or The Magician, which cranked my mind around severely. Actors as varied as Gary Cooper, Robert Ryan, Jack Nicholson, and Robert De Niro always had a look on their faces that told me they knew what they were doing under the direst circumstances. This was a relief from being clubbed to death by question marks over my friend’s death. I had always been curious about everything under the sun but the movies served to vastly broaden the dimensions of my curiosity. Clare and I were writing letters, mostly about movies, several times a week and when I ran short of money for rentals she would send cash. Herald and Clare got an allowance for “educational purposes” from their grandmother Marjorie’s will and since Cynthia never nagged at them about this money they tended to be responsible. Clare and I often didn’t agree on films and I remember the way we quarreled about Joel Coen’s Raising Arizona and Berto-lucci’s The Last Emperor. I loved John Huston’s The Dead and Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, while Clare disliked both. She tended toward movies that featured clothes, like Dangerous Liaisons.

  Meanwhile Polly and David, an off-again, on-again couple, were worried about my obsession. At the time I looked at them as childish in their refusal to accept that life was chaotic and inconclusive. Life is slow and I watched movies to know immediately what happened next. I even made notes on what the characters might be doing during scenes in their lives that weren’t in the movies. Parents often only see what they wish to see. Polly never knew that my sister Rachel and a girlfriend had sold nude Polaroids of themselves for money to buy marijuana. Clare sent me some money and I managed to buy the photos back from a half dozen boys. With two of them it took money and physical threats. My sister thought of herself as a free spirit and couldn’t care less. She asked me, “Why are boys always embarrassed when you give them what they want?” A solid question, I think.

  I suppose I became a bit peculiar and probably still am. When I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan I had a teacher, a graduate student finishing a Ph.D. in anthropology who was in the top five of the most unhealthy people I have ever met. He had many “substance issues,” which is a euphemism people use for drug and alcohol problems. He was a brilliant man in his early thirties whom students referred to as “the blob.” He always smelled like licorice because he drank a bottle of Ricard pastis every day. He only ate doughnuts and cheeseburgers. He could talk for hours on the mystery of personality and how among billions of people on earth no voice prints or appearances were exactly the same. A Hitler and a St. Teresa of Avila could come from the same genetic background. Once when we were having a drink at Flood’s I told him about my movie obsession and how it had etiolated into my only being able to watch Spanish, French, and Mexican films that were undubbed and had no subtitles. He said that the visuals in life could be wonderful but the sound track was unacceptable.

  When Clare and I made our way down a trail to my campsite we ran into a half dozen people who were a crossbreed between econinnies and body Nazis with their cute outfits, fanny packs, and water bottles. The two in the lead were furious with exertion and seemed to ignore the aesthetics of nature. When we stepped aside Clare laughed and they all frowned as if she were an unworthy creature. When we reached my campsite and took a dip in the pond Clare caught a largish water snake and waved it at me as if it were a baton. It was angry and wrapped around her forearm but she somehow soothed the snake and then let it swim away.

  We put on mosquito dope and made love in the over-warm tent, the first time in five years. She cried for a long while about her father and then we made love again, after which we began to talk about sex and death and then quickly dropped the subject. A friend who was an intern at the medical school at U of M had told me that surgical nurses were especially sexual but he had drawn no conclusions on the matter. Clare had become much more aggressive and I wondered idly who her lovers had been.

  “Remember when you couldn’t stand anything but the previews of coming attractions?”

  I had done some sweeping up at a theater in Marquette in order to just see the previews. The owner thought I was daffy. I wore an old fatigue jacket from my father’s military service and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. This was my senior year in high school and Polly was impatient with me though I got all A’s and had won a National Merit Scholarship. I had decided on the University of Michigan because it was close to Detroit and I had become addicted to both Mexican music and the blues and Detroit had large black and Mexican music scenes.

  “Why don’t you come to Berkeley and live with me? Then you won’t have to work so hard to support yourself.”

  I was thinking this over when she fell asleep, snoring softly because of her allergies. She had never clearly
understood that all of my jobs had kept me grounded in actual life whereas simply sitting in my room with my studies tended to make me unstable. Besides, I didn’t work as hard as she thought. For instance I took a man in his fifties who was confined to a wheelchair to all of the home Wolverine football and basketball games. I’d pick up sandwiches at Zingerman’s and off we’d go. He made a lot of money in the stock market and I got a hundred bucks per game. On the way back to his grand home in the specially outfitted vehicle he would ask me about my latest sexual adventures. This could have been slightly creepy so I only told him stories I made up, and one about a professor’s wife ran like a serial for nearly a year. It was as if I was describing a movie I had invented rather than a short story or novel. He liked the visuals. “Her hair was reddish and she limped a bit.” Donald’s story didn’t need much embellishment because it had actual content. It was what William Faulkner called “the raw meat on the floor.”

  Staring at Clare I thought of our contact since our preteens and the idea that I may have had too much influence on her. Once I told her that her uncle and my semi-stepfather, David, was still tied to his dead father with a thousand ropes, and then one night when we were all at a restaurant together Clare was irked at David and right in front of everyone she told him that he was still tied to his father with a thousand ropes. Polly said, “Clare, that’s bitchy.” Cynthia said, “Clare, don’t act like me.” David covered his face with his hands for a long while. Donald lightened it up by saying he thought the apple had fallen a long way from the tree. You could see that David was grateful.

  After my movie obsession waned I came to think that my main business was to check out everything to make sure reality was what I thought it was. For some reason I enjoyed correcting myself. I realized that the landscape changes depending on which way you’re traveling the road. I simply had to accept the fact that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. Not that I wasn’t still childish. I hurt Polly by refusing to go to my high school graduation. That morning I was in the grocery store buying supplies for a solo camping trip into the Huron Mountains and suddenly there was the girl my friend had made pregnant with a lovely baby she said was a year and a half. The baby reached for me and I held her between the grocery aisles. The baby had my friend’s green eyes and I was falling apart inside. The girl said that her family had moved to Newberry after the funeral mass. She said her family didn’t believe in abortion and they couldn’t give up the baby for adoption because it might have gone to an unchristian family. She said she was still sorry every single day. “Now I have all of him that’s left in my Sandra.” I looked at her and down at the baby in my arms, who was fondling my pretentious Tibetan prayer necklace. “I knew you was so close as friends.” Her bad grammar made it all more unbearable. I impulsively said that if she ever wanted to get away from her family I’d support her and the baby. She never called.

  When I returned from the Hurons I rode my Schwinn way over to Sugar Island to work for Donald for the summer. David had given me a car for graduation, a red Vega, but I wasn’t quite ready for a car. My mental health depended on the physical exhaustion of the bicycle. That summer my sister and her friends were stoned and beered up, swiped the car, and wrecked it over near Champion. David replaced it but I traded the new car in on a Honda pickup before leaving for Ann Arbor. When David saw the pickup he was puzzled but made no comment.

  Soon after I started working for Donald that summer Clare and I became lovers. Cynthia had fixed me up a nice little room in Donald’s toolshed in back of the house. It had a woodstove for cool nights and mornings. At this latitude it’s hard for gardeners to have a reliable tomato crop. Once while visiting David near Grand Marais I noted a trace of snowflakes during the Fourth of July fireworks. Clare would sneak out to the toolshed after she thought her parents were asleep. I was eighteen and she seventeen but we were precocious in the varieties of lovemaking. Clare has her mother’s “matter-of-factness” and researched the subject as if she were writing a term paper. Not very well hidden under my mattress were instructional volumes like The Joy of Sex and other manuals with bases in India and the Orient. Unfortunately Clare fell asleep one night and didn’t return to the house and Donald discovered us when he woke me at dawn, about five a.m., for work. He bellowed, “I can’t believe this! You’re cousins!” I must say I felt a little fearful. Clare covered her head with a sheet and said nothing. Donald left the room and drove off in his pickup. Clare went inside to talk to Cynthia and Herald brought me out a cup of coffee. “Boy, you got your asses in a sling,” he said, laughing. Clare and I drove off to Grand Marais in Clare’s car and stayed in a tourist cabin, with Clare spending a lot of time in the phone booth next to the gas station. We visited her uncle David at his cabin way back in the woods next to the river. One of his girlfriends was there, a skinny poet named Vernice who had been living in Europe. I liked her a lot though she had a more acerbic tongue than Cynthia. I made myself useful by fixing a couple of leaks in David’s roof and greasing his pump handle, which made a maddening squeak. Vernice was the first time I ever met anyone who was a good cook. I think she was skinny because she had some sort of disease but she never said what. David sensed something was wrong about Clare and me being there but he never pried. Sometimes people can’t seem to overlook his eccentricities but he’s a fascinating man. My mother has done everything to interrupt his brooding. A few years ago during her spring vacation from teaching she made him take her to Hawaii but he loathed the place. “People who have meaningless work take meaningless vacations,” he told me. Finally after three days of suspense Cynthia showed up and said that Donald had calmed down. She asked us to keep the sexual nature of our relationship secret because Donald was an informal elder in the community and even though we weren’t blood cousins it would look like incest to some. We drove back and Donald had decided to act like nothing had happened. We kept the secret and never so much as held hands in public.

  When we returned to the house from the campsite Herald was in a snit because we had missed dinner. Clare nuked two portions and we listened to David’s analysis of the sauce. He’s a poor cook himself but likes to reread aloud portions of McGee’s book on the science of cooking. Everyone seemed reasonably happy because Donald was playing tug-of-war with the dog, his laughter a croak because of throat constrictions. Herald said that their uncle Fred had called from the Zendo in Hawaii and wanted to come for a visit before Donald died but Cynthia had said, “Please don’t,” not wanting to add to the general stew. While Clare ate she scratched her many mosquito bites. Cynthia brought some calamine lotion and teased that we must have been “thrashing in the ferns like the old days.” Clare was displeased and shrieked “Mother!” Cynthia has always ignored ordinary proprieties. I mean, she behaves like a lady of high birth like her mother but in a restaurant she might push away her plate and tell the waitress the food tasted like dog poop. Cynthia draws me aside and says we have to talk. Immediately my stomach sinks. The odor of Clare’s mosquito-bite lotion reminds me of my grandmother in Iron Mountain who covered me with the stuff.

  We walk down the hill to the old Coast Guard station near the harbor’s breakwall. We sit down on a bench and have a cigarette. Cynthia only smokes three a day, one after each meal. My throat constricts a bit when I’m alone with her and I can’t quite manage my normal voice. This has been going on since after my father’s funeral when I was ten and she hugged me for a long time. It was then that I decided I loved her, with the total romantic irrationality of a ten-year-old boy.

  We talk about what she calls “the plan,” which is drawing painfully close. She spends most of the night with Donald and he talks best in the darkness. He is almost ready. Donald thinks that God is in every living creature, people, bugs, birds, animals, microbes, and that the earth and its mountains, plains, lakes, and rivers are part of His body. The rivers and creeks are like blood vessels. He asked me once if I had noticed that lightning bolts are shaped like river systems. I
actually had noticed this. Consequently Donald wants to be buried naked in the earth with no casket. Of course this is illegal but who cares? Another slight problem is that he needs to be buried in Canada north of the Soo where he spent the three days and nights without food, water, or shelter. I was with him when he chose the grave site, about a half mile from the place of his “vigil.” He won’t say the Anishinabe name for it. He suggested I might try it sometime but I said I’m just a white guy. He said, “You’re human” and laughed.

  Cynthia talks logistics and I calm her down as much as possible. Herald and I will go up a day ahead and dig the grave and she can follow with David, Clare, and Donald. Polly doesn’t think she should go even though she’s been very close to Donald and Cynthia since she moved back north with us.