Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  I don’t usually drive at night in Mexico unless I’m on a well-traveled route and Route 45-49 south qualified, but then I mistrusted my level of attention on this trip. Whatever I tried to imagine about seeing Vera would doubtless prove inaccurate but that didn’t stop my imagination from creating a reality that probably had the flimsiness of Hollywood movies about American Indians. In the most ideal form there was more than a tinge of silliness. I would arrive at the small coffee finca and stop to look at the wild orchids, which as “epiphytes” lived on air and water as they hung from the phone line. The stucco house itself was the color of a bruised rose, which merged wonderfully with the deep green hill on which it was built. I had no problem for some undetectable reason expunging the memory of my previous trip to the farm, the most physically violent event of my life. Where my father’s hands were buried bore no interest to me. I suppose the lack of my missing thumb tip had been such a daily reminder that the event had lost every filament of impact. But then Vera herself had luckily not been there that day and she was now the relevant creature that appeared in the palimpsest my mind constructs with the landscape. The best thing about travel, though, is that it’s difficult to be consumed by the past against the backdrop of a fresh landscape. There are so many semi-idiotic questions that you don’t have time to seek answers. Where does this river I’m crossing begin? What’s up that lovely canyon? When was that church built? What do people around here do for a living? That dog trotting across a barren field must have a name? Why is the waitress in the café so happy?

  I made the coastal city of Tuxpan on the evening of the third day, which meant I could see Vera the following noon. I called Vera and had my sylvan fantasy destroyed. She would be in Jalapa, where she had started a clothing store in the spring. I would have known about the clothing store if I had even read any of the letters she and Cynthia had exchanged since her sudden departure nearly thirty years before. Cynthia has always teased me about my selective reality. For instance I had told Vernice when she writes me a letter to please leave out any information about men she was seeing, plural or singular. In Vera’s case I had been masochistic enough to read some of the teenage mother–type letters, which were full of the usual pen-pal nonsense and once late in the evening while staying with Cynthia she had given me a lachrymose letter from Vera saying that she would never find a good husband because a raped girl with a child is ignored by gentlemen in Veracruz. The whole picture is usually beyond my ken. When I’m at the cabin and call Cynthia from the tavern in Grand Marais she teases, “How many birds and beasts have you counted today, darling?” She’s referring to a visit of hers to the cabin many years ago when she spied a page of my open journal on the kitchen counter that read “12 warblers, 5 thrushes, 3 ravens, 2 deer, equals 22.” But then on most days my skin is not thick enough to absorb the anguish involved in the daily life of many of the world’s citizens. I’m either handing out my simple-minded survival kits or retreating to my log hideout in the woods where the sound of the river baffles the world’s noise.

  In Tuxpan with the waning sun behind me the lightness returned while I was staring at the sea with its overwhelming neutrality. In the last light I looked into the heart of a large tropical flower full of busy insects. I remembered that someone had written that all human life depended on a few inches of topsoil and rain. You could easily add the improbable sea. A number of people were still taking an evening stroll in the gathering dark and then suddenly streetlamps came on. An old man led a mutt by a green leash and the dog sniffed at my foot and gave me a quizzical look. I said, “Good evening, magnificent dog,” and the dog looked concerned so I said, “Buenas tardes, perro magnifico” in my pidgin Spanish. The dog felt better and the old man laughed.

  I sat there looking at the lights of boats way off in the water until I began to doze despite my hunger. I wondered if my expectations about Vera should be made of air, soil, and water instead of my usual somewhat neurotic fandangos where my mind in its perpetual slippage keeps constructing a future to amuse itself. On Cynthia’s dresser there was a photo of Vera sitting on a horse wearing a beige riding outfit against a steep hillside of coffee bushes. She’s simply smiling with no backspin. I suddenly wondered if there were any fish in the river ten miles north of her farm. I had crossed the river so long ago on the way to my father’s doom. I got up and walked up a brightly lit street looking for a suitable place to eat a fried fish, remembering that when we went out for brook trout at dawn Donald would tote along a salt shaker, a small iron frying pan, a baby food jar of bacon grease, and a loaf of Cynthia’s homemade bread, and we would eat the first few trout over a smudgy campfire, listening to the inevitable whine of mosquitoes and the loud early morning birds, certainly too numerous to count. I passed a street musician playing a dulcet wooden marimba with over-elaborate motions as if he were dancing in one place.

  At first light from the hotel window the sun rose, a bruised tangerine in the sea mist, seemingly too ovoid. “Red sky in morning sailors take warning,” we used to say on Lake Superior, except the Gulf of Mexico was utterly placid, and the air out the little balcony of my room very warm. An old man rowed past in the harbor, his dog sitting on the back seat as if it were helping.

  I had a tinge of cold feet about being there but all in all was quite giddy at the prospect of seeing Vera, though I had become quite convinced that nothing would be as I expected. After dinner before I called Vera I talked to Cynthia in Marquette, who addressed my perplexity by saying, “Do you think after nearly thirty years she’s going to fall sobbing into your arms? For Christ’s sake she was twelve when she had a crush on you.” After hanging up I decided not to let the obvious truth of this discourage me. I called Vera and she had me write down the address of the hotel where she had made a reservation, which rather obviously meant I wouldn’t be staying with her. She would be quite busy at her store until eight in the evening but then we would have dinner and in the morning drive out to the farm, which was only a dozen miles away. The store was only three blocks from my hotel so that when I arrived I should stop by to say hello.

  I dawdled my way south from Tuxpan acting as if I were a tourist when I stopped briefly at the Zempoala pyramids, but with the kind of absurd butterflies in my tummy I had had before a high school football game with Escanaba which we were predicted to lose. On the outskirts of Jalapa I actually laughed at the old saying “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” since I have always put all my eggs in one basket. You couldn’t imagine a set of parents more lacking in folk wisdom than my own. Cynthia had absorbed hers from Donald and his father, Clarence.

  I checked into the hotel in Jalapa and watched a boy attendant scooping some coins out of the lobby fountain and asked him in Spanish if he was becoming rich. He giggled and said that someday he wanted to buy a Mustang, meaning the car not a horse. The hotel itself was decorated in the 1920s time warp and the doors to the rooms and the bedsteads were hand-carved. I tried to wash my face without looking in the mirror but then dared a glance and said loudly, “You goofy fuck, what are you up to now?” No answer was forthcoming and I hummed “Moon River” into the towel though I’ve always loathed the song.

  Vera’s clothing store was more than a little startling. It was a scant block from the ominous cathedral and was full of name-brand stuff in addition to cheaper imitations: Lauren, Hilfiger, French Izod shirts, and a large section of sporting wear. I suspected her clientele would be the sons and daughters of larger coffee plantation owners, and the more prosperous students from the local university and medical school. Two niftily dressed salesgirls approached and I simply said, “Vera” and one escorted me to an office through a closed door in the back.

  Vera was clearly her father’s daughter. She was behind a very big desk going through bills and receipts as Jesse had done at my father’s desk in the den in Marquette. She was a very attractive forty-one-year-old businesswoman wearing a beige linen suit and rimless glasses. She jumped up and hugged me but then promptly answered the
phone. I could understand that she was talking to a wholesaler in Mexico City and when she hung up the phone she said, “Well?” and then the phone rang and she talked to a wholesaler in Chicago in English. When she hung up this time she said, “Jesus Christ” and I followed her out the back door into an alley, where she lit a cigarette. I rarely smoked but had one too and naturally felt a little dizzy. A well-dressed man came out the office door and she said, “Not now.” I guessed him to be a suitor.

  “Your boyfriend?” I asked.

  “Of course. I should sell you some clothes.” She laughed when I looked down at my inelegant outfit. She took a hand of mine in hers and looked into my eyes until I turned away. She laughed again. Her hands were cool and dry while mine were sweaty. The cuff of my shirt was frayed.

  “How long are you staying?”

  I looked off down the alley as if it bore a specific interest and shrugged. “Indefinitely.”

  “Cynthia told me about your survival kits. Are you going to give me one?” She laughed again.

  “We’ll take two on a walk in the mountains tomorrow,” I said, my voice lacking volume. She turned to the ringing phone in her office.

  “Take a walk. Take a nap. Go to the museum. I’ll see you at eight.”

  I followed her back through the office and she gave me a peck on the cheek. Another well-dressed man, in his thirties, was waiting evidently to take her to lunch. Of course it had never occurred to me that there would be other men in her life. As I walked back to the hotel I wondered if I’d developed this simplemindedness as a means of self-protection or it had merely dropped on me from the heavens like rain or birdshit. I apparently didn’t have the toehold on life processes owned by men who have wives, children, and regular jobs. I was a drifter who could spend an hour in a thicket watching a bird called a brown thrasher feed on deerflies. Spending half my life in the woods despite all the books piled around the cabin ill-prepared me for a mating.

  I ate two bowls of delicious albóndigas (meatball) soup and drifted sleepily through the museum designed by Edward Durrell Stone drawing minus reassurance from twenty-ton Olmec heads and figurines of women undergoing transfiguration into jaguars. Only I could meditate on the nature of love and sexuality staring at these immense heads of sculpted stone whose meaning was as inscrutable as love. I tried to remember what I had written about Dante and Beatrice in college but the conclusions weren’t poignant enough to endure the passage of time.

  I caught a taxi back to the hotel, undressed completely, and took a nap after rereading a few pages of Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, a long essay of more than biblical authority about Mexico. When I shut my eyes I could see Cynthia and Vera dancing in our living room so long ago with my father watching them like an insane ogre in a Brooks Brothers summer suit. How did I watch Vera for those six weeks? Lust and anguish, and the burgeoning of something more we never quite understand, the smallest but most ungodly powerful niche in the human genome, as meaningful as topsoil and rain.

  Vera looked very tired when we had a drink in the hotel lobby but a rum and cola perked her up. She wore a pale blue dress, which made her hair even blacker. When I asked her why she worked so hard she was stumped at first.

  “My father was your father’s servant only so I could spend his money? I don’t know. I look after the whole family like he did but I don’t make them into children like he did. He could be quite mean-minded.”

  “Never to us,” I offered.

  “No, his job was to not be mean-minded about you. He was always worried about you but never had to worry about Cynthia. He was happy when she ran away with Donald. He thought Clarence was the finest man he knew in America. He thought the war had made your father a drunken beast.”

  “I don’t see why he stayed with him.”

  “It was his best opportunity. Both Cynthia and I figured out he stole from your family. I’m sure you know this.”

  “I don’t care. I never did. Jesse and Clarence were my real fathers.”

  “And your father stole from you and Cynthia. Our parents were thieves except your mother.”

  We were on our second drink and ate a light meal in the hotel. She began to cry when we talked about Donald and then her “hopeless” son. She was unmercifully beautiful when she cried. I ordered a third drink but decided not to touch it. I walked her to her apartment, which was only three blocks away in a rather elegant small building with a burly guard standing near the door. The guard gave me a hateful look as if I were responsible for Vera’s tears but then smiled when she embraced me.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I was wondering if I still loved you. I wanted to find out.” That was all I could say.

  “Maybe it’s good that we have no future,” she said and then went in the door.

  I followed her car with my own with difficulty rather early in the morning. When she stopped at the hotel she was wearing jeans and a wool sports coat against the slight chill. She was smiling as if our doleful evening hadn’t happened.

  At the farm I waited for the miserable thing that had happened there ten years before to revisit me. It didn’t. I had exhausted it until it couldn’t carry its weight. My dead father was so much less than an ordinary dead father whom others had actually loved.

  The farm itself was dormant and Vera explained that coffee prices had collapsed seven years before bringing great hardship locally. Now the prices were beginning to recover and she might start again.

  “This farm partly belongs to you and Cynthia,” she said when we entered the house. An old woman was cooking in the kitchen and they hugged each other.

  “I don’t want to own anything except my cabin,” I said lamely.

  “Cynthia says you are an odd man. You were an odd boy and now you are an odd man. You loved books and women.” She laughed and showed me to what I thought she said was “our” bedroom but then she lapsed back and forth between Spanish and English. On the way into the bedroom I had glanced at the living room floor where my father had fallen with his severed hands. No stains. Vera showed me a big shelf with dozens of books on clothing that Clare had sent her. Two more cartons had recently arrived because Clare had “lost interest.”

  We took an hour’s walk in the hills with Vera carrying a machete in a scabbard attached to her belt. I teased about this but she said a neighbor had been bitten by a stray, mad dog. Toward the back of the modest property there was a whitewashed casita where she said an American ornithologist lived with his Mexican wife. She gave them free rent for keeping an eye on things because the old woman in the kitchen was mostly deaf. She said the ornithologist and his wife left at dawn every single day to look at birds and that they would be having lunch with us. On the walk back we saw a small poisonous snake whose name I didn’t catch. She said she didn’t kill it because it was “just a baby.” She threw me off balance by saying she had to go to Chicago the following week to a clothes show and perhaps I would go with her? She thought that Cynthia might come down from the north.

  Back at the house I sat on the living room sofa drinking cold water with a nearly unbearable tension in my heart as if I were swimming through a questionable dream.

  “Why are you out there,” she called from the bedroom.

  I walked into the bedroom as if my feet didn’t quite know what they were doing. There were tears in my eyes and I couldn’t stop them. She was standing there in bra and panties holding up two outfits on hangers.

  “What should I wear?” she asked.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I tried to before I should have. Now I’m trying again.”

  I was hoping I wouldn’t die before I reached her.

  Part IV

  Cynthia

  I checked into the Drake a few hours after David and Vera were due to arrive. I called their room and left a message, then took a walk up Michigan Avenue deciding I didn’t need to look at Lake Michigan just yet having spent so much of my life gazing at Lake Superior. The air was oddly war
m and still for November 15 and I was glancing at smartly dressed people rather than in store windows when I saw them coming toward me a half block away. I ducked into a store entryway suddenly wondering if I was ready to see them. This is unlike my usual manner that my kids called confrontational, a word rarely encountered when I was growing up.

  I stood there in the glass foyer surrounded by expensive men’s shoes and was amused to think of what Donald would have said about five hundred bucks for a pair of shoes. Within moments I could see Vera and David approaching through a double pane of glass, which mildly distorted them. Vera was window-shopping with a critical look and David was staring up and away as if something interesting was going on halfway up the tall buildings. He has always thought that the basic realities were within his mind’s contents rather than outside of him. I wasn’t quite ready and ducked through the door and let them pass. I waved away a neutrally handsome young salesman, waited a few minutes, then left turning down a side street toward Lake Michigan. When I was nearly to the lake I had a feeling of déjà vu before the polished entrance of a brownstone and realized I had been there with my parents nearly four decades ago, and that these daffy people had owned a huge collection of Lalique glass.