A Good Day to Die

by Jim Harrison

  “We're going to the Grand Canyon,” he said.

  I looked at Tim, thinking about the Grand Canyon and the motorcyclist who was supposedly going to fly across it. Evel Knievel was his name.

  “You could get off at Coral Gables or Hialeah,” he told her.

  “How come you guys are going to the Grand Canyon?” Her eyes were opaque and rheumy. The air-conditioner whirred on. It would be a hot day.

  “We're going to blow up the dam out there,” Tim said matter-of-factly as if the dam were to be equated with the palmetto bug.

  “Oh.” She paused. “Groovy.”

  I saw a mushroom cloud and turbulent water crashing and pouring through rubble. And men running like ants around the ruins of a huge dam. The valley would be flooded and people perish. Walter Cronkite would give it half the evening news time. And there would be an extra news special with the holocaust looked at from many angles. The ground, a heliocopter, a Cessna. Then I remembered mentioning it in passing the night before.

  The heads began filtering into the kitchen, my saltine lover among them. She smiled. Tim began running around the kitchen yelling boom boom boom.

  “These guys are going out West to blow up a dam,” the fat girl said. We were looked at with a mixture of admiration and sleepy shock.

  My system began to speed up in a rush, no doubt the leftovers of what I had been dropping and smoking, and I felt preternaturally tough and gutsy, a little fated and doomed like a samurai or some tropical exile holding dark secrets. My voice became tight and humorless as I began a tirade against realtors, land developers and lumber companies. In a few years there wouldn't be much worth looking at and if anyone in the room planned on having a son there wouldn't be any rivers or forests left and our sons wouldn't have any fishing and hunting. What was needed was some sort of Irgun like the Israelis had when they drove out the British. Some men brave enough to blow up dams and machinery. Tim nodded and kept saying yes and I felt encouraged though several of the heads had wandered out of the kitchen. I had become a battle- and grief-hardened fighter for justice and momentarily wondered if any of my little freak audience were government agents. Then my lover left with her friends and my voice trailed off. Up and down. Chemicals. The hero is abandoned with only the three of us.

  “When are you leaving?” The fat girl was distracted and intent upon her ride.

  “I'm not going anyplace. I came down here to go fishing and I'm going fishing.” Out of the window the wind was rippling the canal. I had heard that there was a front coming in from the northwest and wondered where I would find a lee to fish in for the next few days.

  “Don't be such a chickenshit. Two days out and two days back and then you can fish.”

  I could see that Tim was buzzed up from my speech and excited about the idea of sabotage.

  “If you don't go you're just another bullshitter.” Now he had me in a corner and I felt silly and helpless.

  “You can't drive to Arizona in two days.” I felt myself weakening.

  “We'll change off. We'll stop in Valdosta. I know a girl who will want to go. You'll really dig her.”

  Offering plums while I was trying to think clearly. Why not see the Grand Canyon. It was late April and early for the best tarpon fishing. We could eat some Mexican food. I was hungry and thought about all the Mexican dishes I liked.

  “I don't have the bread.”

  Tim shrugged, patting his wallet pocket. His face brightened as I neared agreement.

  My thinking became muddy and tenuous. Never been West by the Southern route and I always wondered flipping through the Rand-McNally what it looked like. Gumbo. Might take five days not four, or more assuming we might blow the engine, run into a tree or bridge abutment, or likely end up in jail somewhere with not enough money for bail. The prospect of jail food horrified me though I had only eaten in jail for two meals—concealed weapons, blackjack, charge in Duluth when I was sixteen—and it was oatmeal with powdered milk for breakfast and meatless beans at noon. And I feared disorientation. Back in the days of Thorazine . . . Those paralyzing anxiety attacks when the arms go numb, breathing is difficult, tunnel vision, feet won't move; the temporary incomprehension of things like shoes, hands, cars, buildings, as if you had just descended from Saturn and were looking at earth for the first time through the eyes and brain of some galactic foreigner, a lumpy space beast with atrophied sensors. I felt safe in three minimal areas of Michigan, Montana and Key West. Or pretty much in any woods or on any body of water. I read a true story of how Hölderlin, the German poet, was found standing in a nobleman's garden in the winter: a half foot of snow had gathered on his head and he was mistaken for a statue of Hölderlin. I thought I understood.

  “O.K. but only five days on the outside.”

  “Let's go back to town and pick up our junk.” Tim nodded and tucked in his shirt in mock readiness.

  The next few hours proved bleary, exhausting. We promised the fat girl we would pick her up in an hour or so on our way back out from Key West. Then we drove into town with the sun glaring through the windshield, a humid morning with temperature near eighty by nine. I felt queasy and craved food and a pick-me-up, say a bloody mary or a stinger. Bad habit. All the garbage along Route 1 was supernaturally irritating. We passed an abandoned gas station where the week before coming back from Big Pine I had watched two girls fighting. They were about sixteen and one had the decided advantage of being able to punch like a male while the other was only capable of slapping. I parked until it aborted into a shrieking contest.

  We went to my room first and Tim took a shower while I packed a few things in an overnight bag including bottles of various tranquilizers and vitamins and a four-piece fly rod I take everywhere with me because it breaks down into a handy two-foot tube. It occurred to me that I should question my motives but found that I had none. I took a shower when Tim got out. He was shirtless and I reflected while the hot water poured on my head that he had a rare physique: a mesomorph who gave the appearance of being constructed out of sloping fleshy cables and knots. I looked at my body in the mirror: about fifteen pounds overweight though I regularly exercised myself into a frazzle, like carrying two lake trout around my waist everywhere I went. I struck a bodybuilder pose and quacked loudly.

  We ate a big Cuban breakfast, a steak with two fried eggs on it with raw onion, yellow rice and black beans, and I began to feel better about our little proposed adventure though I doubted the sensation would last. Tim was exultant and rattled on about cars, explosives, bird dogs and women. I allowed him to enviously assume that I had screwed the ears off the girl. We drove over to his sister's and I sat in the car fiddling with the radio knob. Sheriff Bobby Brown was talking about law and order. It was hot parked in the sun but Tim came out in a few minutes carrying a ratty duffel bag and wearing a newish pair of black tooled cowboy boots. His sister waved to me from the steps.

  “Here we go.” He gunned up the street leaving a thirty-foot stretch of rubber before he double-clutched into second, snapping my neck.

  “You're out of your mind,” I said.

  Then I fell asleep, dreaming of motion, feeling a nudge as Tim removed a can of beer from my hand. A long bus trip with a stop in a small town in Kansas, a cafe with a lazy wood-paddled overhead fan. Acrid coffee at three A.M. Where was I going then, watching the warm black Kansas countryside pass the window with only a few barnyard lights? Dawn came on the other side of Topeka. A swig from the pint as it got lighter. Stretched out on the seat with a sweating forearm covering my eyes, a fifty-dollar bill in my sock so it wouldn't be stolen. Dizzy slow jolt of the bus hitting bumps and dips in the highway. Diesel fumes. Looking out the window at a stoplight in Denver downward into a car where a girl's dress was pulled upward to her waist as she waited for the green. Dreams of adventure, a fatal expectancy.

  I awoke to a loudspeaker. We were in Islamorada at a drive-in and Tim was ordering some lunch into a black box. I smoked a cigarette, my mouth wretchedly dry and raw from last nig
ht's dope. A dowdy carhop who bounced rather than walked brought hamburgers with ketchup and mustard in small plastic containers that I couldn't seem to tear open. I drank some root beer and noticed Tim dropping two spansules with his. No more for me, ever. I turned around and looked at his duffel bag on the back seat.

  “We forgot the girl.”

  “She'd stink up the car.” He beeped and a different girl walked out lazily, a tanned teenage slattern barely more appetizing than lunch.

  I thought of our fat friend. Maybe she didn't like showers but she was witty. What would she ever do but wait? And they always seemed to have urgent plans to go someplace whether it was Miami or New York or India. Often they owned small dogs. It is so much easier for the male to be homely. You see homely men with beautiful women but scarcely ever the reverse. Feckless. Early in college I had charmed a homely girl into writing papers for me in the two courses we shared, economics and natural science. But we occasionally went to the movies or had coffee and argued endlessly about Sartre and Camus who were all the rage then. So brilliant. She became a veterinarian at an amazingly accelerated rate. And went to Brazil to study parasites. She said in a card that Brazil was “delightfully wormy.” Maybe she met a mad fucker down there for love after a hard day looking at tiny worms. Tape worms. I'm sort of homely but have given over thinking about it. I had a disturbing vision of taking a thousand fat girls to my kindly breast.

  North out of Key Largo with vague thoughts of Humphrey Bogart's cancer. He wore the name very well. Such a long ride to go and Tim playing the maniac's part swooping out to pass when he probably shouldn't have. Another long doze and we were up near Fort Pierce and heading inland, wordless. By now I might have boated a bonefish or two but that was doubtful—staring out at the flats through the glitter of shallow water. And never growing bored with it. What else was there to do. Drink. Vote. Fall in love but I was most severely stricken by pictures of girls in magazines. I had written one, Lauren Hutton, a love letter which my wife had thought very funny.

  We stopped near Ocala to get some beer and gas. It was purportedly nice country thereabouts but you couldn't see it because of all the billboards. I took over the driving so Tim could get some sleep but the car was too tight and muscular for my taste. I remembered a wonderful Model A I had owned as a teenager. I had bought it for fifty dollars from a retired farmer, retrieving it from a barn where it stood covered with hay chaff and swallow droppings. My dad started it with a crank and showed me how to hold the crank to avoid breaking my thumb when the engine kicked in. The Model A made a fine car for hunting and fishing—with its high axle clearance you could cover any terrain—and was more reliable than any car I had owned since. I tended to have personal feelings about my succession of used cars and was close to weeping when my ‘62 Ford Fairlane died on the Penn Turnpike. But Tim's car growled when the accelerator was depressed, understeered, was too aggressive, plus Tim was unable to sleep and watched my driving critically.

  “This car is a pile of shit.” I pitched my second empty over the seat. “How much did it cost?”

  “Thirty-six hundred but I only made three payments.”

  I admired people who didn't co-operate with the economy. My own specious Calvinist breeding made me unable to cheat. I was afraid someone would “get” me if I failed to pay the phone bill or the gas credit card. I was amazed when people I knew had a car repossessed and promptly went out and charged up another. Once I was a week late on a two-hundred-dollar note and a banker told me I was on the verge of ruining my credit. I had come into the bank with the money and he had lectured me at his desk about financial responsibility and how the economic health of the nation depended on the individual citizen. I blushed but stayed and took my “medicine.”

  “What if everyone refused to make car payments? The nation would be in a mess.” I popped the last beer.

  “Tough shit.” He laughed. “Let's stop and get more beer and I'll drive. You're too slow.” His eyes were a solid pink.

  While Tim was getting the beer I looked around the parking lot of the party store. In front of an ice machine two attractive older women were talking in the evening light. And two cars over, three sunburnt men stood talking in summer suits. They looked a trifle criminal as if they had just stepped out of a John D. MacDonald novel. Realtors. When Tim walked out of the store whistling they stared at him sharply in unison but he was watching the women fiddle with their bags of ice.

  We began talking about women but the talk immediately lapsed into sentimentalities. I described an idyllic affair I had had years before in Boston and became melancholy over the memory: the girl had terminated it mostly because she enjoyed living and had become disgusted with my tenacious self-pity. Tim spoke at length of Sylvia, the girl we would be seeing within a few hours. He had met her while still in high school and they had had an on-again, off-again relationship ever since. She had been very religious when he first noticed her, the sort of girl who had been raised a fundamentalist, belonged to the school Bible club, and went to church three times a week not counting the tent meetings when an itinerant evangelist would pass through Valdosta. But she was lovely and shy and he was a football player and was known to go to Atlanta whorehouses and race dirt-track stock cars on weekends. It had only taken a single evening at a drive-in for her to submit but then he began to love her and things had gone well for a few years though he refused to get married until he got the chance to “see the world.” His time in Vietnam had changed things. When she visited him in the hospital in San Diego he still liked and wanted her but he had been through too much shit, too many drugs and Saigon whores for it to ever be quite the same again. She kept bringing up the idea of marriage until he became more and more abusive. It occurred to me that I had done something similar a number of times: you have ceased loving someone but you are still hanging on, so you begin to mistreat them.

  The conversation took odd, beery turns: Tim talked of how the time drifted in the hospital and how on some days he would refuse medication to make sure he was alive. He said that when he was first wounded he thought he was dead and lay there waiting for something interesting to happen. Near the Florida-Georgia border he lost control, swerving and fish-tailing with all the empties clattering in the back seat to miss an opossum. We decided to stop and sleep off the beer.

  CHAPTER

  4

  DRIVING down the main street at dawn, Valdosta still asleep and the trees leafy. Did General Sherman get this far? My little brother always lectured me on the Civil War as I was too lazy to read about it. We have very few magnolia in the north but I like their odor. The sun was orange over the cornices. Do they wear white linen suits with sweat rings. I was totally rested and wanted coffee. I looked at Tim and the whorl of scar tissue was shaped like a picture of a nebula, the knot in a white oak board. We stole white oak to build a Slocum boat, skidded it out of the woods with a Belgian mare in winter. Stored in a barn for seven years and no boat in sight. Around the world floating on stolen white oak. I wondered if the mare was dead. The theft was exciting; the land was owned by a Detroit dentist who only came up north once a year and we doubted that he would notice missing trees on five hundred acres. Then we stole his kennel. . . . We were driving past some row houses on a brick street, then past some houses with small neat yards. Flowering almond in many yards and wisteria.

  “That's where I grew up.”

  Tim slowed the car. We were near the vaguely junky northern outskirts, still on a side street. The house was small and ramshackled and four cars were parked on the lawn.

  “That old hemi-head Plymouth is my brother Verlin's.”

  I looked but I no longer recognized different cars. I nodded my head knowledgeably. Tim made a U-turn and speed-shifted into second, the tires making a helpless yelp and the engine roaring.

  “Verlin will know that's me,” he said chuckling.

  We drove back toward the center of town and turned right onto a street of large houses which were once fine but now in disrepa
ir. Almost daylight. I was tired of motion. He got out but I sat there a bit dazed.

  “Come on. This is Sylvia's.”

  I followed him across the bare lawn and up the flimsy out-side back stairs. He rattled the door violently. I heard the latch slip and a ponderous girl appeared. We walked in.

  “This is Rosie.”

  I shook hands with her but the shades were drawn and the kitchen too dark to see clearly. There were the remnants of pizza on the counter and a bullfight poster over the sink. Bullfight posters even in Valdosta. Rosie flounced over to a daybed in what served as the living room.

  “Timmy?” There was a girl standing in the bedroom door with a robe gathered around her. I couldn't see her clearly. Tim walked over and they closed the door.

  “There's beer in the refrigerator,” Rosie mumbled from her bed.

  I stood looking out the kitchen window feeling the coldness inside my head, strangely suicidal. I had difficulty swallowing. Why am I here? Deranged again. How long has it been since I've been home? I thought of my little daughter in her Sunday frock skipping in errant circles around the yard. My dog. Would dog or daughter remember their father? A Valdosta back yard with a car up on blocks, the rear of a house just after dawn. Tears welled and were drawn back down by an uncertain will. How I've never committed an act without a consequent fuck-up. The point is to go whole hog I guess. Or to have a life like Tim's that is conceived and lived only in terms of the act. Dull thoughts. If you could figure it out you would still be in the kitchen with Rosie snoring over your shoulder. But I knew I could walk down the stairs, get my suitcase out of the Dodge, find the bus station and go back to Key West. And tomorrow at this time perhaps be out on Coupon Bight looking for the shadows of tarpon. Gliding over the skin of water. Roseate spoonbills and the three eaglets I saw eating rotten fish on a sandspit coming out of the mangroves. The sun blinding, the body in full sweat: sentient, casting the streamer above and ahead of the tarpon on an intercept pattern. Chokink again. I heard mumbling from the other room mixed with Rosie's snores. Lighter. I could see many beer cans and the used pizza was garish, the crust gone and the red sauce and solidified cheese looking like the leftovers of major surgery. Involuntary shudder. Near the breadbox was a half bottle of Beam. I took two burning gulps and a mouthful of beer to chase them. Morning. Where are the principles of order on earth? The whiskey's slow flushed rise up the spinal column.