Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  Now in Iowa City she sipped a scant inch of a nice wine I had bought and then we were off on an arduous walk in a hilly area north of town, a densely wooded few hundred acres not at all like my preconception of Iowa. We sat down near a lovely pond with a used prophylactic in clear view and rather than being her usual schoolmarmish self telling me what to read Vernice talked about university parking problems and the iffy question of whether she was on a “tenure track,” which would mean a lifetime sinecure. She was in her early forties and was fatigued with traveling between “lesser universities” as a temporary poet-in-residence.

  I still felt light-headed and pleasant though I had read enough about pheromones to understand that none were present there by the pond. The feeling wasn’t really similar to Polly’s brisk good-bye but it was hard to see clearly the nature of the curious bond I had with Vernice, which had never recovered its original sexual intensity. Cynthia had chided me a number of times of late about my “appearance” so I had put on a clean (but old) shirt and combed my hair before Vernice had arrived at the motel. Her single night at the cabin in July on her drive from Iowa to a summer-school place in Vermont called Bread Loaf had been pathetically chaste despite my wheedling. When we stood up at the pond she allowed me to embrace her and when I slid my hand down on her buttocks she wordlessly pushed it away. On the hike back to the car I remembered when I lived near Patagonia, Arizona, near the border six years before and misdirected myself on a hike ending up in a ranch yard where a chained-up dog was barking into the distance with his back turned to me. The rancher came out of the house and gave me directions to my car and I asked him about the dog. He said that the other cow dogs were off rounding up some heifers but this dog was worthless and was always left behind. Of course it was after the rancher explained about the dog, but I felt there was an eerie sense of longing in its voice.

  At Vernice’s pleasant rented bungalow she told me to take my usual nap because a small group of poet friends and graduate students always came over late Sunday afternoons for an hour. Meanwhile she would put on a big capon to roast, which was my favorite, and I could take the leftover fowl on the road in the morning. I lay down on the couch in her writing room with a glass of red wine and looked at the photos above her desk thinking I hadn’t really planned on leaving in the morning but then Vernice has always fixed the itinerary when we’ve been together. After a passing glance I averted my eyes from a photo of Carla and me at the cabin and then I fixed on it. Was I ever that young?

  I felt pleasant seeing one of the last rays of the afternoon sun collide with my half glass of red wine. I closed my eyes and saw Vera getting out of the car across the street from the Emporio Hotel in Veracruz. She really said nothing except to tell me to please go away. She had my father’s child. Who are the children of raped mothers? Two weeks after Donald’s death Cynthia and I walked half the night in Marquette under the light of a full moon. There was a trace of madness in her talk. We were out by the ore dock near the power plant studying what the moon was doing to the water. She was saying that Clarence and Jesse were the best parts of our childhood, the only adults we truly loved. Clarence gave her his son Donald and they had had a fine life. Our father destroyed the life of Jesse’s daughter. Her life became predetermined by our father’s act. Cynthia walked into the water up to her knees, wriggling the moon around her. She was doing fractions with our lives. She turned to me with her face shadowed by the moon behind her and said she was sure that I had spent all of that time in Mexico the past five years because Mexico was Vera even though I didn’t see her. I was probably rescuing Vera over and over trying to help people survive. I walked out in the water and put my arm around Cynthia and said, “I don’t know.”

  Now in Vernice’s writing room I felt that it was comical that I’d probably stay at the cabin the year around except that winter brought a couple of hundred inches of snow and many twenty-below-zero nights. I stay in a place because it seizes me. I go to a place because it seizes me. I doubt if there are as many turns, corners, crossroads in our lives as we think there are.

  “Where are you?” Vernice is standing in the doorway as if invisible. She laughs so I do too. “Come in. I can’t remember that poem you gave me.”

  They were all sitting around the dining room table, seven of them, and they certainly weren’t discussing business. Of the three young women one named Dora was terribly attractive, something I always feel in my tummy. None of the poets they were talking about were authors of the books of high quality that Vernice had given me (she was pleased with my fascination with Wallace Stevens, whose poems like good paintings made me want to live inside them). Instead they were discussing, mostly scornfully, colleagues in other MFA programs around the country. I made the mistake of saying that when Vernice was being doctored in Florence and on our last day she was strong enough to walk around the Uffizi for a couple of hours she had said, “It seems cheeky for us to give a master of fine arts in America.”

  Six of them looked stricken by my story but it was applauded by a scruffy young gay man who seemed the brightest of the lot. Vernice promptly changed the subject by getting me to quote from a Mexican poet, well known down there but unheard of in the U.S. and the only author I had ever suggested to Vernice who passed her implacable muster. His name is Francisco Hernández and he wrote of the madness of Schumann, Hölderlin, and Trakl.

  Estoy harto de todo, Robert Schumann,

  de edta urbe pesarosa de torrentes plomizos

  de este bello país de pordiorseros y ladrones

  donte el amor es mierda de perros policías

  y la piedad un tiro en parietal de niño

  That was the only portion of the very long poem I could quote and I translated:

  I’m tired of everything, Robert Schumann

  of this mournful city of leaden rains

  of this beautiful country of beggars and thieves

  where love is the shit of police dogs

  and pity a kid with a bullet in his brains.

  That ended the little party and I was pleased when Dora gave me a not entirely chaste hug. I basically ate the capon and roasted vegetables solo because Vernice insisted the chicken was overdone, a small matter for a citizen of the northern Midwest, where the chicken is always overdone. She did, however, drink a lot of wine, which was untypical of her, right to the point where her voice slurred like Judy Garland’s on talk shows. My parents absolutely hated it when Cynthia mimicked their voices slurred with alcohol and, in my mother’s case, pills. For unclear reasons Vernice rehearsed the history of what she called our “friendship,” another indication that we weren’t going to make love. She made coffee but barely touched hers, and couldn’t stop rattling on about her career and the likelihood of getting academic tenure. She failed to ask a single question about me or my family when usually she wants to hear about Cynthia. I ascribed the narrowness of her concerns to alcohol and the job worries, Vernice having taught at seven colleges and universities in ten years. She now feared that having published her little quasi-pornographic novel with a small press years before in an effort to make some money had jinxed her. She kept repeating that this was a period of political correctness in American universities, a matter I had no familiarity with except from reading newspaper items. I was relieved when by ten she showed me to her small guest bedroom with twin beds. I had had enough to drink that I didn’t want to chance driving across town to my motel. The room was far too warm and she came back in her bra and panties and helped me struggle with a stuck window. Her figure was truly full for the first time in a decade but her attitude reduced me to thinking of her as a sexy photo in a magazine, the kind my friend Glenn pasted to the walls of his room with perfect knowledge that never in his life would he get to touch such a woman. She slumped down on the other bed and I tried to turn off the very modern bed lamp, which was evidently faulty because I couldn’t get the light to go off. I gave up at four a.m. to Vernice’s not unpleasant snores and cold wind coming through the window bl
owing the curtains apart. I went downstairs for a glass of water and then took a chicken leg from the fridge. I sat on the bed eating the chicken leg and feeling my dick stiffen at the sight of Vernice’s sprawled body, but then her eyes opened.

  “What are you doing?” she snapped, sitting up and trying to cover herself.

  “I’m eating a chicken leg,” I said.

  She huffed out of the room so I dressed and left, driving altogether too many miles without taking a nap to Dalhart in the Texas Panhandle, arriving in a bleak twilight. I ate a mediocre Mexican supper reflecting that it was like eating in a French bistro in Missouri. If you spend a long time in Mexico you become a food critic elsewhere. I was utterly jangled from the long drive and thinking about Vera so I bought a pint of whiskey anticipating a long night. There was a wild and stupid urge to backtrack a bit and drive south to Brownsville and down the coast of Mexico to Veracruz. What stopped me, of course, was the brooding and dread I intermittently felt over what I might have to confront in Tucson to further the life of my survival-kit project. I’m the rare bird who finds Nebraska and Kansas fascinating so most of the time my worries were drawn away by the landscape and I would whistle along to doleful country music on the radio, most of the contents of which were laments over aborted love.

  It’s appalling on a road trip when you fall asleep shortly after seven in the evening and are wide awake at two a.m., still in your clothes and twiddling your thumbs. On the wall there was the same print of a sad-eyed donkey wearing a garland of flowers that I had seen in a half dozen other motel rooms. On the other side of the room a new one presented itself that I hadn’t noticed when I’d arrived: a sappy longhorn bull on an aqua-greenish promontory surveying the sunset, naturally, and a valley full of cows.

  The room was cool but I was sweating from jumbled dreams that centered in the thickets behind the cabin. A big mother bear was concealing herself but I could only see her baby flouncing in the yard near my bird feeder. This had happened three times in twenty years and only once did I see the mother peeking from behind the pump shed. In the dream the moon was my mother’s face and though it was dark I could see the baby bear crying because it couldn’t locate its mother. In actuality a baby bear crying sounds like a human baby. Somehow in the dream the baby bear was Vera and the invisible mother bear was Donald.

  I was utterly disoriented so I poured a drink of whiskey and turned on the television to escape the dream. By happenstance the only movie on was one of my father’s favorites with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope somewhere in the tropics. He owned a copy of this movie and I can remember on several warm summer evenings him playing it on a rented projector in the backyard. There were always drinking adults but Cynthia and I loved the occasion because the movie made my father laugh a full-throated nonironic belly laugh.

  I turned the television off and sat there on the bed’s edge, then went to the desk, where there was no room for my legs. I got out my journal and turned on the clock radio to a Mexican station that was playing corridos, the contemporary peasant folk songs of the border mostly dealing with love and death and the drug trade. The music conflicted garishly with my memory of standing outside Dante’s house in Florence with Vernice. It was the next to the last day of our stay there and I celebrated her diagnosis by having four glasses of prosecco for lunch. She was wobbly for health reasons but happy and I was wobbly from wine. Vernice has always loved discussing the more grotesque and furtive aspects of sex and I’ve never hesitated to amuse her with my own tales. Anyway, back in college I had taken an advanced course in world literature and written my term paper on Dante. Standing there in front of his house I babbled on about Dante and his beloved Beatrice and how at the time I was writing the paper I was living with Polly in married housing at Michigan State. It was midwinter and I was having the usual depression and though I was after Polly a couple of times a day for sex I had difficulty coming off. What worked was if I imagined Polly was Vera and then I could ejaculate. Naturally I was ashamed of myself and also more than a bit puzzled. Vernice was delighted with the half-drunken story and stood there laughing in the shady, ancient alley. Vernice knew everything about my Vera obsession minus this story and when she finished laughing she put me through a silly quiz.

  “Do you think Beatrice ever stood over Dante’s head on the beach when she wore only a bikini?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Did Beatrice ever show Dante her bare butt in the upstairs of his parents’ house?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Would Dante have written The Divine Comedy if his father had raped Beatrice when she was twelve?”

  The last question broke the antic mood and I stood there weeping in Dante’s alley with Vernice embracing me for comfort.

  Back in the motel room I thought comically that these were pretty unique memories for the donkey and the bull on the wall to witness. It was pointless to think that my father had murdered my Beatrice when she was still alive. If anything, life was outrageous in its lack of symmetry. Donald wasn’t a bear. Donald was Donald. Why was my mind imagining a fresh mythology? Of course in Donald’s tribe men had become bears but that was Donald’s tribe not mine. And Vera was a Mexican girl from Veracruz. Her father, Jesse, brought her north to learn English, where she met and loved my wonderful family. Nearly thirty years later it was suddenly unthinkable that I allow my father’s ghost to stop me from going to Veracruz to see Vera. There are no damaged goods when everyone is damaged goods.

  Despite the nature of the night my curious sense of wellbeing persisted. Coughlin had always been disappointed in my apparent lack of a dream life, or a dream life so repellant that my conscious life denied its existence. I couldn’t very well call him in Montana or Chicago after three a.m., or Vera to tell her I was headed her way. I was amused to remember a quote from a sophomore course in English literature. I loathed both the course and the quote: “In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.”

  I felt this phrase to be as banal as the jingle “Fly the friendly skies of United.” Now in the motel it occurred to me that our passions are so messy that we don’t even need a villain to fuck up our lives. I immediately gave up the thought of what my life would have been like without my central villain. A nitwit college roommate in my freshman year loved to say, “There is no God but reality.”

  I tried to sleep for a while but my brain was constructing vivid pictures, from Vera’s bare bottom to a huge coal pile I climbed as a child out near the ore docks. In grade school I liked to take the long way home and is this still true? So did Cynthia in her own directions. My father had Jesse follow me and then showed me the zigzag map. Like Cynthia I had dozens of dog stops, places I’d stop and pet dogs because I was forbidden one. Children are hyperaware of what other adults think of their parents and I could see how people tried to avoid my father’s dry and corrosive wit. Once when I was about seven he took me fishing at one of the lakes up at the club and promptly fell asleep from a hangover, draped along the width of the back seat of the rowboat. I was rowing clumsily trailing a lure from a fishing rod. In sheer luck a very large pike struck the lure and I yelled. My father rolled off the back seat and fought the fish on his knees. We had no net so I rowed to shore and he beached the fish, which was kept the rest of the day and evening on ice in a cooler on the front porch of our lodge. It was the biggest pike of the summer and many men came by to look at the fish, even men who disliked my father. Naturally he didn’t say the fish was hooked while he was sleeping. Still, I was proud of the admiration he received.

  I overslept but then immediately called all three numbers Cynthia had given me for Vera, reaching her on the third. “I’m coming to visit you in a week,” I said. “It will be fine if you arrive,” she said slowly and then we were cut off. The third number was for the small coffee farm, where the phone service is unstable with wild orchids hanging from the wires. And that was that.

  Tucson was a mess as expected. The
re were only two hundred of my compact survival kits left. Jan and her two friends had held a fund-raiser (rock bands, etc., plus fifteen thousand of my money) and bought a new van. In September they had set off loaded with survival kits for Cananea, where they had been pushed around by some coyotes. They then made the mistake of driving south from Agua Prieta toward Nacozari de García, and then farther south toward Bacanora, where they didn’t realize that the bad road ended. Evidently some coyotes had followed them because when they stopped to wash up in a mountain creek the van had been stolen leaving them high and dry. I received this information early in the morning at the Congress Hotel, which Jan thought of as the “headquarters” of our mission. Now that I was in town there was going to be a lunch of the board at the Congress at noon to see if we couldn’t “jump-start” the project again. I didn’t even know that we had a board of directors but Jan insisted she had written my lawyer to tell me so. We embraced and I said that I would see her at noon. I then went back to my motel, packed up, and headed east on Route 10 toward El Paso, where I would turn south toward Veracruz. I figured the drive would take four days, a small item in my life these four days, but in this case time would grow larger with each mile and the ever so gradual change in the landscape.