Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  Clare gave me a hug and we watched an Indian fish tug bounding over the surge of waves behind the breakwall. The wind was truly picking up from the northwest so the tug had been lucky. I was irritated when Clare ordered another drink and invited my barmaid friend for dinner but then I got over it in minutes and drove down to the dock to buy a couple of whitefish to grill on a wood fire to go with the pot roast Cynthia had sent. How could I become irritated with Clare in her present state, which had more than a tinge of pathology? When I reached the dock I was struck by how closely the captain, a Chippewa named Francis, reminded me of Donald in his prime, tall and about three hundred pounds with a wine-barrel chest.

  The evening was as far as possible from my usual last night at the cabin, which is a maudlin affair with me sitting before the fireplace listening to the wind in a mental state best described as muddy. Vernice has teased me about being a solitary Romantic poet when I’m not even a poet. It has simply been a matter of balancing the world by avoiding it, which means limiting my exposure to the woods and water of the Upper Peninsula and for half the year or more some of the remoter regions of Mexico, where I’ve found a purpose of sorts.

  At the cabin we “turned loose” and had a party. We drank, ate, and danced, and then drank, ate, and danced some more. I’m unsure what we had in mind, mostly nothing except the impulses children have toward play. For instance, it’s raining in July and a tiny creek through a vacant lot is gathering water so four kids bust their asses building a dam until they’re exhausted, filthy, and wet, but also delighted. That kind of thing, notwithstanding the peerless icon of death that hovered over us, and everyone else on earth for that matter.

  We started slow with K splitting some oak for the fish. As the fire burned down we stood in the lee of the pump shed staring at the flames as people do, also at the flames through our amber glasses of whiskey. I agreed with K on the addition of what is called a “space blanket” to the survival kits I put together and distribute for Mexicans intending to migrate north. Space blankets are sheets of material used by campers to protect them from cold and dampness but I thought they could also defend against the summer heat of the ground, which reaches over one hundred and fifty degrees. These space blankets fold up into a pocket smaller than a wallet. Depending whether it was winter or the severe heat in some of the desert areas of the border the survival kit I designed included a thin but effective thermal vest, a small compass, two canteens—one for water and one for Gatorade—sunscreen, a bag of dried fruit and sunflower seeds, route maps depending on the area, and halazone tablets to purify drinking water. The packet was in a Velcro latched bag and could be attached to a waist belt and weighed a little less than five pounds. I distributed these free of charge to workers’ groups and through left-leaning Catholic priests. I was opposed by many on both sides of the border for political reasons, which didn’t bother me except for the legal expenses I incurred avoiding prosecution by the United States. My raison d’être was simple on the surface. Estimates of crossing deaths along the entire nineteen-hundred-mile border with Mexico went as high as two thousand a year. I had learned to be goofy rather than logically argumentative with my opponents. I’d ask, If you could prevent twenty major airline disasters each year, wouldn’t you? The project costs me seven months of my time and about three-quarters of my income, which is unearned and derives from my dead mother and also my share of land I’ve been selling off that was owned by my father’s grotesque family.

  I’m an extremely imperfect person but this effort is as close as I can come to the naive Christianity of my boyhood. I haven’t come close to a Bible in nearly thirty years except for Stephen Mitchell’s small and incisive The Gospel According to Jesus. I have no interest in organized Christianity other than the art Vernice showed me on our trip to Parma, Reggio, Modena, and Florence. Vernice, incidentally, refers to my project as pure “Quixote.” Cynthia and Polly are all for it, as are Clare and K. Herald, naturally, has doubts. Donald loved it. I minimize the importance of my effort. It’s not much but it’s all I can do. It started when I found the dead man in a wilderness thicket a few miles from the border south of Sonoita, Arizona. The man smelled like a dead deer. Two days later in a local tavern an ex–dope pilot told me that two hundred miles to the west over in the huge Cabeza Prieta if he wished on moonlit nights he could navigate by skeletons on his under-the-radar flights. Three days after that while looking into what is euphemistically called “the problem” I saw the photo of the nineteen-year-old girl from Veracruz who died of thirst on the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation just over our side of the border. Naturally I thought of Vera. That did it. The project didn’t start out well but I’ll get to that.

  We roasted the fish as Vernice had taught me with dry vermouth, butter, and lemon. There were three bottles of wine left from Vernice’s visit in August. Part of the name of the wine read “Sang des Cailloux,” which Vernice said meant the blood of the rock, after the steep stony slopes in the Rhône Valley where the grapes are grown. Naturally I liked the idea of drinking the blood of the rock though K observed that the effect of the wine was pretty similar to any other alcohol. With K everything is in particular, from deftly turning the fish to talking about Donald’s powers of observation that were learned from his tribal friends. K had talked to anthropologists about this matter, who in turn had referred him to a monograph written by Hallowell in the twenties saying that the “Gibwa” had thirty ways of describing a lake, in short, a high degree of specificity. K added when putting the fish on a hot platter that he had read that the Inuit had two hundred different terms for describing snow conditions.

  We danced for a while between eating the fish and the pot roast. The batteries on my radio (the generator produced only direct current) were worn thin so K pulled his pickup around to the north window and cranked up the truck’s stereo with Los Lobos. The wind was cold through the window so I turned up the propane heater and added big maple logs to the fireplace. The four of us jumped around to this Chicano music though I had to be careful about my weak ankle. It was wonderful to see Clare out of her mind. By common consent we didn’t talk about anything more serious than the food and music, which in themselves have become more serious as I get older.

  We were quite drunk by the time we collapsed before midnight except for K, who had the sense to go out and turn off the generator. Clare had never stopped dancing except for a few bites of food. K had closed the north window but we forgot to turn down the heater and with the overloaded fireplace we awoke in the middle of the night to a ninety-degree cabin and all of us stumbling around drinking cold water.

  The old Finn who took care of the cabin in my absence arrived at seven in the morning to help me close up for the year. I had the worst hangover since college twenty-five years before what with the cautionary idea of my father always present, which stopped me from overdrinking. The old Finn (in his late seventies) had a cup of coffee with the remaining inch of whiskey poured into it, glancing over with appreciation at Clare and Carol, who were getting out of bed in their undies. In July he had crawled under the cabin and removed a lot of dirt, jacked up the sagging southwest corner, and laid several courses of cement blocks to bring the cabin back into plumb. He reminded me a bit of Clarence, whose Indian blood was mixed with Finnish. These were people without irony. Last October while illegally spearing salmon in front of the cabin he spoke of a trip to L.A. to visit relatives in the “tumble buggy,” which was what he called an airplane. A cousin took him on a tour of L.A., which he figured had bad drainage because nearly all the land had been paved over. He had also said, “Be careful, Mr. Burkett, the world is filling up.” He added that he bet “Clark Gable got more pussy than a toilet seat.”

  K made a breakfast hash out of the leftover pot roast and potatoes. Carol vomited in the backyard. Clare took a quick skinny-dip as her father would have done though the temperature was barely above freezing. I fell asleep at the breakfast table after I heard the old Finn say about Clare, “That girl�
��s got balls.” When I woke up everyone was gone and I shivered staring into the nearly dead fire.

  On the way back to Marquette I stopped by Flower’s near Au Train. Clare and K were intending to stop there but no one was home. The door was open and there was a note from K saying that he and Clare had gone off to help Flower fetch a deer she had shot early that morning, though they were out of season. Flower in her eighth decade shot a couple of deer each October. He had added, “Try the pie,” so I cut myself a piece of venison mincemeat pie. Flower had minced the meat and marinated it with dried fruit in cheap brandy and cooked it in a lard crust. It was delicious. She also pickled deer hearts and tongues, which I found interesting. I looked at a peculiar bear-claw necklace hanging above her bed but I didn’t feel up to touching it. Donald had told me that Flower had religious reasons for not eating bear meat.

  When I reached Marquette school was out so I stopped at the bungalow Cynthia had bought a few doors to the west of Polly’s house. It was a bare-bones place, almost empty of furniture, probably a reflex against my parents’ insistence on the finest furniture available and maybe the house was simply a gesture. Cynthia wasn’t home yet from substitute teaching so I took my warmest coat and stocking cap from the car and sat on a lawn chair in the front yard watching Lake Superior misbehave with the wind at maybe thirty knots from the northwest and the muted roar of the water, a white noise possessing the air. I was a little astounded by how good I felt as if all the alcohol, and maybe the dancing too, had been electroshock therapy or whatever. The fast, cold clouds were leaving large patches of light out on the water and a neighbor’s tattered American flag was whipping and cracking up on its pole. I was a day away from the beginning of my long drive down into Mexico on my modest mission to reduce suffering. It was five years now and I remembered wondering at the time what could possibly happen to me after my father slipped beneath the waters off Alvarado. How would I recover into a different life? What was left of me raised the question of what I was before. I hadn’t weighed enough to stick to the ground, always a problem for your average ghost. I was the problem because in our time the contest is to see who can ask the biggest questions and I had become an expert.

  I managed to doze off there in the windy yard and was awakened by Cynthia’s laughter as she nudged the crotch of my trousers with the toe of her shoe. I had an obvious hard-on.

  “Who were you dreaming about, big brother?”

  “A woman I never met. There’s this physicist in England who thinks our dream people that we don’t know actually exist. We just haven’t met them and might not ever meet them.” The whole idea mystified me.

  “That’s what I call an unprofitable line of inquiry. Did Clare tell you our half brother is locked up, maybe for good?”

  “What did he do this time?”

  “Beat up two trespassers who were hunting. One was a politician from Jalapa. Who lost an eye and some teeth.”

  “What can Vera do?”

  “Not much. I’m helping him get better accommodations. Fifty bucks a month gets him a sofa, a television in his cell, and better food. What helped is the lawyer got him a brain scan at the medical school, which showed the injury from the bicycle accident years ago. Now Vera has no one.”

  The fact was that Jesse had died last year and he was the only one with any control over Vera’s son. I tried to imagine Vera sitting at the kitchen table of the small coffee farm, my memories of which were blurred by the violent events. In my mind’s eye I could mostly see the wildflowers on the hillsides.

  “Should I stop and see her?”

  “I don’t know. She said she would like to see you but I couldn’t tell her where you were headed this time.”

  “Probably Zacatecas or San Luis Potosí. Maybe even Durango because I heard a mine might close there, which will mean men will try to head north. Durango has always scared me. Behind this motel where I stay there’s a long wall full of bullet holes where hundreds of men were executed during the revolution.”

  We went inside and had coffee and I examined the piles of Russian and European novels stacked on the dining room table. Cynthia had been an obsessive reader as a girl and now with Donald gone she was resuming the habit. She felt that novels were a more “reliable” source of information than all the nonfiction I read, partly because it was less threatening.

  I really couldn’t understand why Cynthia was staying in Marquette but it was a raw subject and all she would say was that her decision was based on the fact that Marquette was the scene of both her worst and her best memories. I was going to bring up the subject again but she started reading, which meant our conversation was over. Her eyes were misty and I kissed the top of her head.

  I immediately liked the rust splotches and cracked back window of my new car, which means it will be safe from envy in Mexico. Amid all the stuff in the old car while I’m switching gear between the two I find Panza’s collar stuffed up under the back seat. A predictable lump arises as when I imagine I see Carla trotting doggishly ahead of me on a logging two-track through the forest. Panza was a big stray female mutt I adopted during my brief months in Caborca. She was at least part Catahoula and half Australian shepherd and wasn’t a particularly pleasant lady. A neighbor told me she had been a guard dog for some drug runners who had flown the coop in the middle of the night. She slept in a hole she had dug under a shed behind my little house. Friendship came through the not very secret ingredient of food, especially a pot of boiled tripe I’d chop up and mix with kibble. Within days she became my companion and guardian, refusing to come in the house but draping herself out on the porch near the front door. I had a worktable and chair on the porch and she would look at my books and writing sad with puzzlement. If so much as a sparrow landed in the yard she would issue a coarse rumble.

  I can’t say I was comfortable in Caborca though I was lucky to meet a local cop who had worked for two years in the Oldsmobile plant in Lansing, Michigan. Since I had gone to Michigan State in East Lansing this slight bond was considered major and he would often stop by for a beer in the late afternoon. The altruism of my survival kits confused him at first and the idea that I would live in Caborca rather than anyplace else on earth boggled him. He warned me that some local “coyotes” were misunderstanding the intent of my survival kits. These coyotes are men who guide migrants into the U.S. for a high fee usually across the mountains that surround Nogales or Douglas, or through the desert to the west between Nogales and Yuma. Either route can be hellish indeed and sometimes a coyote will abandon his group if he feels the Border Patrol closing in, or for no particular reason other than dishonesty or laziness. One abandoned group of nine all died of thirst including a woman who tried to eat the Bible she carried in the derangement of impending death.

  So I had been forewarned by my cop friend but couldn’t quite believe that the local coyotes wouldn’t understand the purity of my motives in distributing the survival kits. The cop, however, said that it might make younger male “wetbacks” think they could go it alone rather than saving for years. Anyway, one evening when I had walked downtown to have dinner one of the coyotes came past and riddled my house and car with a shotgun and far more important blew a lower left leg off Panza. Luckily it was the bony skin and I applied a tourniquet, made a phone call, and headed for Tucson, a few hours to the north. This turned out to be stupid and nearly got me jailed, because U.S. Customs wouldn’t let me in the country as I didn’t have vaccination papers for my dying Panza. I had to be restrained after standing there fifteen minutes bellowing, sobbing, and cursing but then one of the customs agents called a local vet, who got up in the middle of the night and saved Panza. She lived for three more years much farther south. When I’d leave for the north each May I’d find an appropriate old man to care for her for money, unload five hundred pounds of kibble, and kiss her big ugly face good-bye.

  I left Caborca two days later. Panza was frantic while I packed so I loaded her into the back of the car with her bowl of beloved tripe, whic
h smelled poorly. My cop friend came over and we discussed my obvious need for vengeance. I couldn’t just cut and run. Even in the Upper Peninsula someone shooting your dog is a very serious matter. The cop advised that I shouldn’t do anything personally or I might be forced out of Mexico, which would be the end of my mission. Instead I gave him a goodly amount of cash so that he and his colleagues would make it hot for the coyote. I kept in touch by phone and within a couple of months the coyote had been forced from his hometown and eventually ended up in prison over in Mexicali. Of course Panza because of the way life had conditioned her never became the companion Carla was but last year when she was hit by a truck in Durango I was bereft.

  Our last evening was a bit muted. Cynthia and Polly were amused by the fatigue felt by Clare, K, and me over the night before. I tried to help K grill steaks in the backyard but there was a cold hard wind that my heaviest coat didn’t seem to repel and he sent me inside. Cynthia pronounced my salad dressing “nasty” and made another. By common consent my cooking is poor though I eat it with relish. It is only when I go into the poorest, cheapest restaurants and find their food superior to my own do I understand my mediocrity or less. Cynthia says it’s because I’m always “on the way to someplace else.” It is her opinion that to cook well you have to stop time and dwell completely on the ingredients before you start.

  I sit at the table with my hands joined to the hands of Cynthia and Polly. We stare over into the living room where K and Clare are half dozing and watching a video documentary about Bengal tigers. I sense that Polly and Cynthia are joining me in the wordless questioning of what will become of these two young people who, perhaps like myself, so obviously wish more from life than life willingly offers. I wonder if their relationship isn’t doomed because they started too young, and they haven’t stopped being stepbrother and-sister, if this overfamiliarity doesn’t prevent the mystery of love, but then I look at Polly and question if there is a mystery to love or mere confusion, or if the element of chance doesn’t suffocate everything. I mean the chance of accidental meetings: Polly at the hamburger stand in Iron Mountain, Vernice selling matches near the Newberry Library in Chicago, or Vera coming north from Veracruz. With Clare and K the union is perhaps too much like mine with Laurie though Clare and K are far more sophisticated. Are they able to delight each other? The thought of bald Laurie in her last days rattles my heart in its flimsy cage.