Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  It’s nearly dark about eleven in the evening this near the solstice. Lake Superior is dead calm and the few sailboats have to motor into the harbor. We haven’t spoken for a long time and she holds my hand, which makes my poor brain itch. I’m embarrassed at the inappropriateness of my feelings to the point that I begin to feel my head sweat. She senses my thoughts and takes her hand away. Her voice is hard.

  “Why do you love me? I find it irritating. Why can’t you just love Clare?”

  I can say nothing. She walks across the street and up the hill, disappearing into the large-mouthed tunnel of darkness made by the shade trees. I’m very tired and doze on the bench but am suddenly awake when I remember how my sister got to ride on the motorcycle with my dad. She started screaming and wouldn’t stop until he took her for a ride around the block, proving the value of screaming. She was like that with our parents. Go for the throat.

  I walked a block along the water to Polly’s house but David’s car was parked there. I didn’t want to interrupt whatever they had in mind. Through the yellow rectangle of light in the dining room I could see them sitting at the table having a drink. That’s what I needed. I walked up the hill but the big house was totally dark except for a dim light in the den, where I could see Cynthia sitting beside Donald’s bed. I went through the yard to where my pickup was parked in the alley in a bower of lilacs. There was a note on my windshield and I went into the dark workshop, where Clare was asleep on the ancient leather couch. My eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness and there was a little light coming in a window from a neighbor’s yard light. I decide to let her sleep for a while. There’s a trim little apartment upstairs but it’s never been used since Mr. Burkett’s aide Jesse, who was a Mexican, left for good. Clare told me part of the story about how Jesse’s young daughter was raped by her grandfather. I saw a photo of this beautiful woman, Vera, at Cynthia’s house years ago. Clare said that when she and Herald were in their early teens they went with Cynthia one spring vacation to Veracruz to visit Vera. Clare said she had been a little ill with flu but Herald loved the place and the trip was probably why Herald only feels affection for Mexican girls. Clare said that though it was hot in Veracruz she had chills from her fever and what she liked best was sitting on a hotel balcony and watching huge ships coming in and out of the harbor.

  Sitting there in the darkness I’m upset that I love Cynthia more than Clare. My, how fate loves to jest, people used to say. It would be better otherwise. It’s easy to feel anger at the randomness of love. I saw it in my mother when she told me in detail about her marriage to David. How can people continue to love someone who makes them so unhappy? Last year David told me that when he and Polly were married she had said that it was like being married to five people at once.

  I figured I have had four fathers. My first, who died in the accident, and then my grandpa, who is eighty-five in a nursing home in Iron Mountain and no longer recognizes me, and Donald, who is near disappearing from earth. The last being David, who actually was there before Donald but had no effective influence until I cracked up as a university sophomore. He saw himself as a master of depression and I suppose he is. I was a very capable student but it had struck me that all my courses dealt with tiny corners of subjects and my emotions craved a complete picture. Why study seventeenth-century English literature when Chinese T’ang dynasty poetry was much better? That sort of thing. My worldview was a ten-thousand-piece beige jigsaw puzzle. David looked at my torment from a radically different point of view. He came down to Ann Arbor to where I had sat in my little off-campus room immovably for a couple of weeks. He knocked on the door and then said, “This room is a shithole” and left. An hour later he had found me a big south-facing room in this old lady’s house. She was a professor’s widow and the rent was expensive even though my help maintaining the house was part of the deal. We moved my few belongings and then drove to the Detroit airport and flew to Tucson. Well, we walked in the Cabeza Prieta, a vast area of the Sonoran Desert down near Ajo, and then in the wooded mountains farther east along the Mexican border for a total of ten days. At the beginning my vision was that of looking through a tunnel, which is typical of depression, and by the end it was relatively stereoscopic. We even visited a small village named Portal, where David said the writer Vladimir Nabokov used to spend summers chasing butterflies. Nabokov was a reading passion David had got from his girlfriend Vernice. This taste boggled me as it seemed so unlike David but he said he loved to read Nabokov because he was from another world and when his own became stuffy Nabokov, like James Joyce, presented an escape.

  David didn’t say all that much about depression. He thought that one of the central diseases of our culture was that meaningful work was available to so few. He said it was obvious that I didn’t think my university studies were meaningful work but there were certainly ways of making them so if I followed my own curiosities rather than the prescribed university programs toward making me fodder for the economy. He also thought I should walk a couple of hours a day because the primitive rhythm of walking tended to delight the mind. Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn’t comprehend how I had almost drowned in it. However, I neglected a clue to other minor slumps to follow when on the plane home from Tucson to Detroit David advised that as much as possible I should avoid the junk of our culture. He said it was hard enough to live with what we know without drowning in this junk. It was a year later, when I visited a friend in Los Angeles, that I began to understand what David had said. In defense of L.A. it is essentially no junkier than the rest of our urban centers, it’s just more on the surface. In New York City the endless blocks of huge buildings say to us, I’m serious and within me serious people are doing serious things, even though five thousand people in a building might only be playing with the market edge. In L.A. they’ve largely dispensed with the delusion of seriousness. In a rather radical economics seminar at the university we collectively decided that ninety-nine percent of the products of the culture were junk and this included books, movies, television, art, new food products, political speech. This was temporarily distressing because all of the twelve students were deeply immersed in this junk, and were perhaps doomed to earn our livelihoods buying and selling junk. Our young professor, a gay princeling from Harvard, thought it all quite funny and disappeared into Europe after a year at the University of Michigan. When I went north that June to spend the summer working for Donald, a job on which my sanity depended, the bleakness disappeared in the exhaustion of manual labor, but not the overwhelming sense that everything was a generic mistake. When David sent me to France and Spain as a graduation present the following year I felt sorry for the young intellectuals I met because the option of manual labor over there was unthinkable for the educated class. For better or worse, I was the only one who knew how to build a house. I fixed a number of faucets, toilets, and sink traps for Sorbonne students that summer.

  I sat there over an hour watching Clare sleep and thinking my unproductive thoughts. I felt sexed up and impatient. I tiptoed over, knelt before her, and pushed up her skirt. I began to sing “Moon River,” a song she hated, and she awoke with a shriek of laughter and pushed me over backward with a foot.

  “Not here. Let’s go to a motel. I don’t want any more mosquitoes at your fucking campsite.” She flicked on the overhead light and we looked at the assortment of the immaculate tools of Clarence, long dead, kept on the walls and at the back of the workbench, which was stained with oil. The edge of a hoe still gleamed with sharpness. Donald had given the same care to his tools as his father, Clarence. When he got sick he gave his tools and business to his favorite employee, Clyde, a grouchy Finlander who wouldn’t stop working during the midmorning coffee break.

  When we turned off the light and left the workshop we groped at each other to keep from stumbling in the dark and then started necking. We made love like dogs on the grass and Clare didn’t stop laughing. I didn’t last long and she said she hoped I’d last longer at the mo
tel. Clare readily admits she’s lucky because she never fails to be orgasmic. Afterward she often falls asleep for a few minutes and wakes up quite happy and girlish.

  Herald’s warmed-over spaghetti didn’t do the job so on the way to the motel we stopped at a bar and had a hamburger and a beer. The bartender was cleaning the grill and hesitated in irritation but Clare offered him an extra twenty bucks, saying she was starving. “All you young fuckers get stoned and then you have to have a hamburger,” the bartender said, refusing Clare’s twenty. “You can buy me a drink.” He poured himself half a water glass of bourbon and gulped it down. “The Tigers and Braves suck. Everything sucks except my girlfriend.” It occurred to me that the bartender was two years ahead of me in high school, which would make him about twenty-six. He was a fine basketball guard and now he’s fat and sallow.

  At the motel Clare examined the grass stains on her knees from our love bout. She began to talk about my grandfather in Iron Mountain, which certainly delayed more sex. When I took Clare over to meet my grandparents I was startled at how much Ted, Polly’s father, liked Clare. Because of his crippling mine injury he was the orneriest man I’ve ever known though his wife, Nelmi, insisted he had a good start on ornery before the accident. He was courtly with Clare except for a single verbal binge against David’s newspaper essay on his family and the history of mining and logging. His point was how could David know a goddamned thing if he had never been down in a mine or cut a tree? David had clearly always had “his head up his ass.” Old Ted still referred to Polly as “my little girl.” Clare had spent hours with him looking at his rock and mineral collection. She had done well at her geology courses at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she and Herald had taken undergraduate degrees.

  Now in the motel in her alluring panties and bra she scratched her grass-stained knees and decided she wanted to visit Ted in the nursing home even though I said he wouldn’t recognize her. She wasn’t convinced of this.

  “I’m hoping to get pregnant,” she said, looking away from me to a print of a sad-eyed donkey wearing a garland of flowers on the wall.

  “With me?” I almost hissed, unbalanced.

  “Who else?” She smiled.

  “You could have asked for my consent.” I was struggling for an appropriate attitude.

  “Why? You’re not the main thing. I told Dad this afternoon and it made him so happy he cried. I mean I don’t know if I’m pregnant but I said I was. He always wanted grandchildren. I said if it’s a boy I’ll name him Clarence after his father, and if it’s a girl we’ll have another Cynthia in the world.”

  “Jesus Christ, he won’t even see the baby.”

  “Yes, he will. In his religion you stay on the ghost road for a year or so and then we have a ceremony and throw tobacco in the bonfire and let his spirit go to the other world. He said that we could still love him but we had to let him go.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” My mind had become a bucket of mud. Clare was the least maternal woman I knew.

  “I’m not asking you to marry me. I’m honoring the wishes of my father.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed with a sense of absolute depletion in body and mind. I thought I knew her completely but now could see that her surface didn’t reveal everything, which made me wonder what else might be underneath.

  “Does Cynthia know about this?”

  “It’s none of her business. It’s ours and maybe it’s not yours the way you sound. I have my own money. I can go it alone. Maybe you should go over to the hospital emergency and be treated for shock.”

  She pushed me aside and got into bed. I turned off the light and took her place in the chair, sitting there nakedly and noting the way the mercury vapor light in the motel parking lot shone through the Venetian blinds casting light stripes across Clare’s body. It was warm and she had slipped out of her bra and panties and there was a light stripe across one of her nipples and her pubic hair which normally would have been an evocative vision. I sat there quite paralyzed.

  “I’m trying to get pregnant. Aren’t you coming to bed?” she tried to joke.

  “Of course, dear, when I finish balancing life on my nose.” I was confused by two memories, one good and one bad with the bad one often returning during bad moments. I was a spindly boy of twelve. It was August in Iron Mountain and my grandpa and I drove over to a lake adjoining the city park in Crystal Falls, where he kept a decrepit wooden rowboat. He liked to fish for panfish here and I rowed the boat. After he parked the pickup I’d get his walker out of the pickup bed and I would carry the fish poles, a can of worms, and a small plastic tackle box and he would follow slowly in the walker. The county welfare people tried to give Ted one of those motorized wheelchairs but Ted wouldn’t accept it. He said he wasn’t “that much of a cripple” but he was. His legs sort of flopped from being squashed between two tramcars full of iron ore. That day he stumbled trying to get into the boat, banging his forehead on the boat gunwale and rolling backward into the water. Blood came out of his left eyebrow and he started yelling, “My goddamned cigarettes are wet. My goddamned cigarettes are wet. Go get me some.” So I ran across the park and downtown to a small grocery store but the young woman cashier wouldn’t sell me a pack of cigarettes because I was too young. Naturally I started crying. An old man asked me what was wrong. He had just bought a pack of chewing tobacco. I explained the situation and he said, “So you’re Teddy’s grandson?” He bought me a pack of cigarettes and a plastic lighter, taking the money out of one of those little rubber coin purses that opens like a vulva. The cashier said, “That’s against the law” and he squawked, “Fuck you and the train you rode in on.” I ran back to the boat and Ted said, “What took you so long?” He always drank a six-pack while fishing but this time he gave me one of the cans of Goebel. It made me dizzy. Ted’s left eye was swollen almost shut. We only caught five small fish, which Nelmi fried up when we got back to Iron Mountain. Ted talked about the great Labor Day union picnic on this very lake while we fished that day. Every time a fish would bite and he missed the hookup he’d yell, “Goddammit” and his voice would roll across the still lake.

  The good memory is easy. When I was in my mid-teens Polly and I went over to Bay Mills for a few days over Christmas. My sister didn’t come along because she was in a home for troubled teens with “substance-abuse problems” for a couple of months. She would have come home for Christmas but she was angry at Mother. On our second day in Bay Mills a blizzard began with a gale out of the northwest across Lake Superior. I was helping Donald rewire a tiny house for an old Indian lady who mostly spoke Anishinabe. It was pretty exotic. Donald spoke some of the language. She was smart and wanted to know the precise nature of electricity. Clare stopped by and said we were needed at the day-care center Cynthia had started a few years before. Many mothers who worked in the Soo were going to be late getting back because of the snowstorm. The two women who worked at the day-care center were afraid of the storm and wanted to go home to their families. When we got there Herald had started a wood fire in the stove in case the electricity went off, which it finally did, but Donald waded through the snow and got Coleman lanterns from home, some sacks of candy, and hamburger and ground venison from the freezer. Polly hacked the meat into pieces and fried it on top of the woodstove. We had about twenty kids between the ages of two and five and they were quite a handful. Donald lay out on the floor and a half dozen of the kids jumped up and down on him. It was a mixed bunch of pure-bloods and half-breeds and a few white kids. Clare and Cynthia got them singing Christmas carols and it was interesting to me how they sang loudly with no real idea what the words meant. By midnight all but two little boys had been retrieved and we took them back to the house, where they wanted to sleep with Clare. We sat around the kitchen table in the light of a lantern and each had a shot of peppermint schnapps. In the morning the wind had settled down and there was thirty inches of fresh snow.

  Soon after I crawled in bed Clare began to cry. At first I
thought that it was because for the first time I was physically incapable of making love. I was dead meat at the idea of fathering a child. I dozed off and on and she continued to cry. This was a girl who never cried. I even heard her whisper “Daddy,” which she never called Donald. It was either “Dad” or “Father.” I held her but it was like I wasn’t there. Her pillow was actually wet. I became desperate at my uselessness. My mind smelled the flowers at my dad’s funeral. My sister had insisted on sitting on my lap and she’d worn some of Polly’s perfume. By predawn and the first birdcalls Clare was still crying so I finally said that maybe we should go out to my campsite and take a hike or something. She turned on the light, got out of bed, and stood above me naked. I reached out for her and she pushed my hand away. She made weak coffee on the little room machine and spilled most of hers on the floor without seeming to notice.

  After a strange night it was also a strange dawn with the slightest breeze from the south in the warm close air. There was faint thunder but the clouds were so dense you couldn’t tell from which direction. I turned on the radio to catch the weather but she turned it off.

  “I dreamt I was pregnant.”

  “I didn’t know you slept.”

  “I read that you can dream in seconds, you know, little neural pictures. I was big as a cow at your campsite.”

  “Was I there?”

  “I don’t know. It was too fast. Are you coming to Berkeley?”

  “What would I do?”

  “Sign up for a few courses and take care of the baby. Cook dinner. Just plain be, like anyone else.”

  I reflected that she was becoming her mother when we parked near the trailhead to the campsite and she left the pickup door open. Donald was always closing doors after Cynthia. Clare looked up into the heavy mantle of trees at the loudness of the songbirds. I said that the clouds were so low that all of the sound descended but Clare was already off on the trail. At one point she took a wrong turn and I let her walk a hundred yards before I called out. I tried to suppress my irritation with her because I knew that her near hysteria was due to her father’s impending death.