by Jim Harrison
I won’t say my Omaha mother was glad to see me. Without so much as a hello she demanded why I, along with Marianne, had bullied Derek away from her. He went to New York this morning without inviting her. Yes, he paid back three-quarters of the money but wasn’t that her business? That was her own money and had nothing to do with what my father had made. She had always offered me money and I had always refused. Why had I become such a lazy, greedy bastard that I would interfere with a loan to her boyfriend? I knew it was serious as I couldn’t recall her ever using the word “bastard.” I tried to slide it off by saying the greed aspect belonged to Marianne and that I was only following my dad’s request to keep an eye on her. She fairly screamed that she didn’t want my eye kept on her. I attempted to pass through the house and out the back door to a thicket I’d planted myself: Japanese bamboo (northern), dogwood, Russian olive, for maximum concealment when I was ten. It surrounded a lean-to I’d sleep in when it rained. However, she caught me before the back door and called me a miserable, insensitive bastard. I aimed low and agreed that technically I was a bastard, regretting the quip on the spot. Her face blanched, contorted, then she ran upstairs as she always did when truly pressed. On the way out to my thicket I reflected with amazement on how fast she had covered the stairs. Must be her aerobics class.
I sat out there at least an hour, pleased that there was a mating pair of orioles in the yard. In my thicket it was hard to believe you were in Omaha, the density of the greenery baffling all but a trace of the ambient sound, say the shriek of a golfer a few hundred yards away. I dug up a metal container of arrowheads and marbles, rattling them together with fondness. A childhood buddy had swiped our mutual collection of dirty photos including the most powerful nut-buzzer, the butt of a French actress named Jane Birkin. We agreed that she would likely never appear in Omaha. Later I found another photo of her for my bedroom wall.
Three alarmed English sparrows fled and then there was a tinkle of glass and footsteps. She arrived with two wine glasses and a bottle of red. If it took alcohol to resolve this I was willing. “I should be shot for saying that,” she said, plunking herself down, despite an expensive dress, in the dirt beside me. I took the bottle from her trembling hands, also the corkscrew. We toasted and the wine tasted better than usual. Her eyes brimmed with tears and she repeated that she deserved to be shot for calling me a bastard. I was kind enough to disagree, and then she said, “Just because you’re older and your husband has died doesn’t mean you can do without a boyfriend. I’m only sixty-one.” I knew she was sixty-three but to try to smooth things over I offered to go to lunch with her at the club which used to be a Sunday family ritual. She pondered this for a few moments and I could see the contents of the cartoon light bulb above her head and then she smiled. “I never know what to say when my friends ask what you do.” When she said this I wondered at the nature of her recent inventions about what I was doing. Back before my father died during my last trip to the club I’d told table-hoppers that I was an explorer, and when they’d ask, “Where?” I’d say, “The good old United States.” Many had had enough problems with their own grown children not to pry any deeper. There’s also a slight interior yelp for freedom among the involved strictures of prosperity so that the idea of going someplace without an elaborate itinerary has at least a minimal appeal. I could see them thinking, Nelse is an explorer of America, with their forks poised above their Sunday chicken hash or lobster Newburg.
We settled for corn soup that she’d frozen last Christmas after my one-day holiday visit (fleeing Marianne’s butch girlfriend who fashioned herself a societal interrogator, also Lucy’s Washington husband who insisted he could wangle me a conservation watchdog job). Corn soup was another household joke that had begun back in my pre-suffocation Boy Scout days. Scouts were traditionally taught a polite amount of Indian lore, but not enough to do any damage to their potential citizenry. I went a bit further and before I was a teen I’d already read Densmore on the Chippewas, somewhat romanticized versions of the frontier in Washington Irving, Walter Edmonds, Kenneth Roberts, Hervey Allen, the last four from my dad’s thin library, which were oddly incendiary books if you were expected to finally enter the greed rampage of the late seventies and early eighties. Anyway, I came down with a not very severe case of pneumonia and demanded corn soup with marrow like the wounded Jim Bridger ate, or warriors ate before and after an arduous war. My father no longer hunted but got venison from friends and my mother boiled up chunks, adding a package of frozen corn. I would eat nothing else for weeks. What a pain in the ass I must have been. Boys who are no longer quite boys lying around tweaking their engorged weenies, dreaming of valor in the wilderness, wrestling bears and pioneer girls in thin flour-sack dresses, or mating an Indian girl in a hidden place behind a waterfall, then regaining their health only to face again the torpor of the schoolroom.
We spent a pleasant enough afternoon and evening backing well away from our bastard blowout which, while scarcely a psychodrama, was a pretty big deal in this household. We sat for hours in her “art room” with her leafing through dozens of coffee-table-type books to show me her favorites which were invariably nineteenth-century French. I’d bought her an Edward Hopper book once for Christmas but she had found him depressing. We also spoke at length about our trip to France though her rendition made me think we must have been visiting separate planets. Her Omaha travel agent had concocted an itinerary that properly would have required amphetamines and blood transfusions to enact the whole thing. We stuck to the game plan for a week before we figured out that my mother’s pidgin French could get us by. My regret afterward was that I couldn’t get her to spend more time in two areas I’d warmed up to, the Morvan and the Massif Central. Despite the fact of their population density most of their cultivated areas looked less fucked-up than our own partly, I suppose, because they had to be more judicious while we still felt we had infinite freedom to sprawl. She preferred Paris and the Louvre, and wandering not all that far between the Café Select and Café Flore for her timidly ordered glasses of wine. I did, however, see a hoopoe, in Burgundy, a marvelous bird that looks a little like a roadrunner with a heraldic crest.
I’m a wine amateur or I would have kept my mouth shut. It sneaks up on you in thick velveteen shoes. I had begun to wonder at midevening why I had so strenuously avoided this guileless woman when I errantly dropped the fact that I had spent two wonderful days looking for birds with my grandmother. Other than rebuking me for not sticking around to meet my “birth mother” she asked me reasonably lucid questions about the landscape, and pointed questions about the interior of my grandmother’s house. I noted that her eyes had begun to fill with wine tears and there was the specific idea that I should run for my truck. “I suppose you found yourself wishing you had grown up there,” she blurted out. I had enough wine myself not to shut up and let it pass. Instead I agreed that it had been exactly the kind of area where I’d like to have grown up, that Rock, Brown, and Cherry Counties together were bigger than Massachusetts and collectively had less than twelve thousand inhabitants. Why the hell wouldn’t I have preferred growing up there given my obsessions? The absolute stupidity of the whole thing was mutual between us, as if there were a parallel universe where actual alternatives to our lives could take place. We had suddenly dropped into a hole and while I was struggling to get us out of it she was buried there by the weight of tears, wine and the kind of thinking that had never lent itself to rationality. She fairly shrieked about my birth mother’s grandfather, starting at the beginning with a dinner with Samuels to arrange the adoption. My father had been angry because Northridge had been a bully and she said his face looked like a crude brown boxer’s face (a racial slip), and he wore a pretentious antique English suit drinking water glasses of whiskey and gulping down wine. “He even insisted we name you after him. How arrogant! And then he gave you that allowance that ruined your life.” I said how for Christ’s sake can six hundred bucks a month ruin someone’s life? You have thousand
s of times that much money in the bank, did it ruin your life? Probably. “Don’t you dare attack your mother,” she said, then continued on with the “fact” that this man was known as one of the biggest bullies in Nebraska, that he had swindled ranches away from people in the Depression, then sold them all after World War II. She had met the two sons when she was young and their mother came from a fine family but the father was a monster using money as a club.
“But I didn’t grow up there,” I said. “I grew up here. You forget they gave me to you. It’s happened a lot with babies for one reason or another. I grew up here in the same way Dad died. You can’t change a goddamned thing starting a split second ago.”
“I’m alone,” she howled and I went up to bed, coming back down in the middle of the night to cover her with a blanket where she still lay on the couch in embarrassing disarray.
Jesus Christ, I thought, improvement can be splotchy. Now it’s nearly four A.M. and I doubt I’ll have any more sleep after seeing her in that corpse-like condition. I almost checked her breathing. Squabbling primates, and one couldn’t neglect the way comedy pitched in with what had never been, and could never have been. I wished I had a few powwow cassette tapes that were in the stolen truck. I surely didn’t know what the hell was going on in the music but it drew me the furthest away from an emotional sump which is where I am now. I had been to about a dozen powwows over the years, keeping a discreet distance from the activities, so much so that I didn’t even record the visits in my journal. This was odd enough that I’ve wondered if there were secrets you even try to keep from yourself. I saw Frank Fool’s Crow at two different Sun Dances, so old his face looked like a shucked walnut. Men with leather thongs attached to their bleeding breasts. Why not? I studied the steps to the Grass Dance closely and once when I was in a distant place near the Escalante in Utah I stuck in the tape and danced until I sweated through my clothes. That was just once. Afterward I felt exhilarated but eventually bogus. It was evening when I started and I danced right into the dark under a big moon with a chorus of coyotes near the end. I danced until I scared the hell out of myself with the sensation I was seeing the moon for the first time, and all sides of it at once. I admit it was only last year. Ralph curled up under the truck and watched attentively as if he knew it was serious stuff.
It was a struggle to stay in bed until daylight. During a brief doze there was a disgustingly obvious dream about living in a dollhouse with J.M. with the exit door so small you had to crawl out like a ground squirrel. Will I have to give up Veracruz up near Jalapa where I had been twice, once in April and once in November, to watch a million raptors migrating north and south? Am I such a bad bet for permanence that I shouldn’t offer myself? Nomadic cultures are extraordinarily civil until you try to confine them to one place.
I snuck out of the house at daylight and made it a whole block before I was stopped by a patrol car. Doubtless my lightning-stroke truck looked unpromising in the neighborhood. I sat there tingling with adrenaline until the approaching cop yelled, “Nelse” and he turned out to be a high school acquaintance, much swollen now by bodybuilding which cops do to look overwhelming. We shook hands with him glancing down at my lightning bolts and shaking his head. He smiled and said, “I heard you were a hippie. You getting much?” a slang reference to pussy. “Quite a bit,” I said because it was easier. We chatted a few minutes about the old days for which he had more enthusiasm than I did.
I reached J.M.’s by midmorning but no one was there. She had said her mother worked and then I remembered she was helping her dad hay. I found them in a field down the road with J.M. driving the tractor pulling a wagon, her dad throwing on bales and a kid too slender for the job struggling to do the stacking. J.M. waved and her father nodded, vaulting on the wagon to help the kid, so I began pitching the bales. I had bucked bales a fair amount to pick up change and it was a pleasant way to get rid of the horrors of the night before.
We finished by noon and back at the house her dad heated up a pot of chili while J.M. took a shower. Her facial bruise had subsided somewhat but her eye still showed redness. While I drank a couple of glasses of water at the kitchen sink I again pointlessly rehearsed murdering her shithead husband. You jerk up his sternum and tear out his heart, that sort of thing.
Her dad still hadn’t said much and was staring into the heating chili. He glanced at me as if sizing me up physically, and then said that the other asshole had never lifted a hand around the place. He then offered his hand and we shook awkwardly. I tried to pass it off by saying I had proved myself better at manual than mental labor which he smiled at.
J.M. came out of the bathroom in a short yellow sundress that made my ears buzz. Her dad teased, “You’re assuming you’re done for the day?” She merely pointed at me and said, “He can pick up the slack,” then served the chili. They were a little disappointed that I wasn’t upset by the pepperiness which J.M.’s mother, having grown up in northern Mexico, added to the dish. I explained that I had spent a lot of time in the Southwest. Then her father, Bill by name, asked what it was I actually did. The best I could come up with was that I was looking things over before I settled down. This was quite lame but J.M. interrupted with the suggestion that we take a ride. Bill stood politely when we got up but shook hands with me as if testing my grip. “Thanks for the help,” he said, sitting back down and beginning to roll a cigarette. I had the briefest flash of what he was like at my age before, like my dad, his liveliness began to disappear. Was it necessary, I wondered, following J.M. out the back door. What was it beyond the obvious factors of success and failure, and notwithstanding them, that diminished men so relentlessly as life gradually passed. For a change I wanted to reject previous thoughts to the effect that we’ve been around the last million years and only in the last one one-thousandth of that time, or less, have we been very civilized and simply squatted in one place. To me the advances were questionable and tended to ignore our true nature.
J.M. wanted to drive my truck so I simply sat there, a rare thing in my solo career. I developed a lump in my throat just looking at her legs and the way her hem hiked further up when she worked the clutch. There was no indication that this ache was mutual but my mind was certainly foggy as we drove along. I agreed readily to anything she said in her chatting such as that we had to live together a full year before we mentioned the word “marriage,” and then she repeated she was finishing her BA which would take up the coming year in Lincoln. My pecker was swollen enough that no iron curtain dropped at the word “Lincoln.” I don’t mind any city if it’s a quick in and out which wasn’t what she implied in her next suggestion. Why didn’t I finish my degree since I was so close? The lump in my throat began to take on a different nature and I tried mightily to observe the landscape. Finally I said that all I had to do was totally rewrite my senior paper but I was unwilling to do that. I added that my dead Ponca informant would rise from the dead and strangle me if I left him out by changing the paper to jerk-off academic specifications. They could shove the mortar boards up their asses sideways before I’d do that.
She reddened, stiffened and slammed on the brakes. “It must be nice,” she said, “to throw away something that the rest of us work so hard for.” I was appalled at the strength of her reaction, but then she went on to say that her dad had a real prosperous cousin, an older man who had been to their house on Sunday. This man had saved their neck when they got behind on the mortgage. It turned out he had known my own father and Samuels. Why had I lied about being a rich person? This man said he’d heard I was a “layabout” which upset her own father. And since I was a rich person why was I interested in her? People who say that America is a classless society are full of shit, I thought, jumping out of the truck and bellowing, “I am not a goddamned rich person! I’m a goddamned adopted half-breed! My parents are not my goddamned fault! If you can’t understand this simple fact get the fuck out of my goddamned life!”
She drove off so fast down the gravel road that I had to t
urn around quickly to shield my face from flying stones. Naturally I didn’t feel very intelligent standing there so I crossed the ditch and sat under a tree. It was quite hot and my throat was raw from shouting, an act I couldn’t recall committing since college. There seemed to be a clear question of how much of my arms and legs I’d have to cut off to fit in the world she was imagining for me. I could say to myself she was only twenty-one but that didn’t encompass the problem. It didn’t strike me as appropriate that love would immediately demand the most shit-eating compromise possible in my scheme of things. Within my own coda or private religion leaving school over a principle such as I had was inalterable. To suggest otherwise was to put my nuts in a vise, or so I thought sitting under a larch tree beside a hot dusty road. A long-billed curlew flew over heading west where it belonged. What the hell was it doing here? Not to speak of myself, an alien leaning against a tree on a hot summer afternoon in eastern Nebraska with my hands stinging from nettles from when I had walked blindly through the ditch.
