A Good Day to Die

by Jim Harrison

  Sylvia walked up behind me and as I turned she smiled. Almost a shudder. Tall and vaguely reddish hair, long and now in a single braid, perhaps for sleeping. Pale clear skin with a dust of freckles. Large hazel eyes. The old robe with an empire tuck at narrow high waist. Long legs. Nearly as tall as I am.

  “You want coffee?”

  “Please.”

  “Rosie's such a pig.” She began cleaning up the kitchen. I sat down at the table and watched her movements. She stooped to pick up a bottle top and I caught a flash and the outline of her thighs and butt. It was not so much the usual niggling desire and itch but as if I had caught some princess at her bath. This immediately increased my melancholy. She was Tim's not mine.

  “I guess I'll go to the Grand Canyon with you guys.” Her drawl was fainter than Tim's. She sat down across from me and I felt the blood rushing to my temples. “I don't like my job anyhow. I file insurance claims. I can't take shorthand or type very fast.”

  “I'm happy you decided to go.” I looked at her eyes which were watching my hands clench on the table. “I think you'll like the Grand Canyon. You been there before?”

  “I never been anywhere except Atlanta, and to Washington, D.C., once, and to San Diego to see Timmy.” No self-pity here but modulated statement of fact. “How come you're drinking in the morning?”

  I noticed I had put the Beam on the table along with my can of beer. Why was I drinking? I shrugged. “Don't know. Why not?”

  Then she shrugged. “What's your job?”

  “I'm on vacation.” I felt uncomfortably on trial, the sweat beginning to emerge on my forehead. “Actually I've been out of work and work makes me vomit a lot so I want to stay out of work.” Her eyes widened a bit and I was compelled to continue. “I've never found anything suitable, you know. So I borrow until I come across something I can do. I go fishing. Maybe you could call me a fisherman.” The last said very loudly.

  She looked at me quizzically. “That's no living. My dad went fishing too.” She began to sound like my mother.

  “You sound like my mother.” She laughed then. “I'm twenty-eight and my mother sends me lots of advice.”

  Sylvia stood and went to the window. She scratched her leg idly. My stomach was upset from the whiskey and I wanted to crawl like a dog up behind her and nuzzle her ass.

  “Timmy says you guys are going to blow up a dam in the Grand Canyon?” She turned. “I didn't know there was a dam there.”

  “Maybe there isn't.” I had forgotten the supposed dam. “Maybe it's just on the drawing boards.” I had an instantaneous sweeping fantasy of Sylvia in a log cabin in Montana late in the nineteenth century. It is May with only a few traces of snow left. She's in bed and has just died in childbirth; I've failed as a midwife. I gather the three children around me. The music will be Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys singing “Mother's not dead, she's only asleepin’ / Waiting patiently for Jesus to come.” Her face would be beautiful but pale. The child was dead too. The kids pitched in and we buried her ten feet deep. With the baby on her breast.

  “I know you'll get in trouble.” I was brought back to earth. What was trouble anyway when your wife had just died. I wanted to take her in my arms now that she had been brought back to life. Rosie was at the refrigerator door gulping directly from a half-gallon carton of milk. I hadn't heard her get up. She looked at me with a dairy products mustache.

  “You fuckoffs ought to be locked up.” She giggled and began arranging bacon and eggs for breakfast. Then she popped a beer and drew heavily from the can. “Saturday morning I always have a beer,” she said.

  “In two swallows,” Sylvia quipped.

  “You're a candy ass.” Rosie dumped a pound of bacon in the skillet and stirred it around over a high fire. Then she walked over to the phonograph and put on Buck Owens’ Carnegie Hall album. Sylvia rolled her eyes in mock horror. Rosie sat leaning back on her chair to turn the bacon down. She poked Sylvia in the ribs with a forefinger. “You're going along?” Sylvia nodded her head in affirmation. “Then Frank's going to stay with me.”

  Rosie began talking about Frank as she cooked breakfast. He had only been out of Raiford for three months. A stolen car charge and it seems he had some hot TV's in the trunk. She pulled open the silver drawer and drew out what she announced as Frank's Colt .38 and waved it around before handing it to me. Frank couldn't keep it because he was on parole. I snapped open the cylinder. Full. I pulled one cartridge and saw that he had scored the soft lead with a cross for the much admired dum-dum effect. A real hood. The bullet would blow a hole rather than puncture. Sylvia wasn't very attentive so Rosie dribbled a little cold beer from the can down her neck from behind.

  She stood abruptly. “Jesus!” I saw one full wet breast as she dabbed it with a napkin. She was only vaguely embarrassed.

  “Sylvia's proud of her knockers,” Rosie said. Sylvia blushed deeply then. Why couldn't she be mine. Perhaps the movies have an eternal stranglehold on me as I either fall “in love” at first sight or not at all. Sylvia reminded me of a girl years back in 4-H Club who sang “Candy Kisses” in a slightly nasal though I thought beautiful voice. Beauty all around us.

  Rosie poured some coffee and sat down heavily with her bacon and eggs. “Want some of this?” I shook my head no. She became conspiratorial. “If Tim doesn't marry Sylvia there's lots of guys around here that will. She got half a dozen proposals after a swimming party.” Rosie laughed with a decidedly masculine bahaha effect, her breasts and neck quivering gelatinously. “Sylvia knit her bikini out of a Cosmopolitan pattern and you should have seen them eyes pop!” Sylvia blushed again. I began to feel uncomfortable. A slow fire stirred below. They used to call this configuration of emotions a “crush” and I had in an hour begun to feel the weight of it. Blood moved into my face and Rosie's bacon made me nauseated.

  “I'm going for a walk.” I nearly tripped in my momentum to the door. I went out to the car and fished around for my toothbrush and pills. No Valium until the whiskey wears off, I reminded myself. I looked at the bottles of vitamins—B complex, E, 250-mg C—and they depressed me. Argh. Is nothing natural? On Tristan da Cunha they eat fish and are happy. Musk-ox milk and seal fat for the Aleuts. Swim with sea otters and learn their tricks. A compulsive about vitamins; if I went without them a week my body would vaporize into detached molecules of filth. Tim had said after his shower in my room, “Why do you take all those fucking vitamins?” I don't know. I lit a cigarette and watched a few cars pass, housewives off to the grocers while the dad sleeps in. Pleasant enough town. Maybe I could hide out here but who's looking for me. Get a job. Marry Sylvia. Go bass fishing weekends. I began to think of the bass-fishing equipment I would need. An open face Shakespeare Ambassador reel and a stout casting rod with a tackle box full of daredevils, pikie minnows, jitterbugs, mepps, spoons. And wire clip leaders.

  Rosie came down the stairs in toreadors pushed to their limit, curlers in her hair wrapped with a scarf and large aqueous blue sunglasses. “Going shopping.” She waved. I decided to go back up and sleep in her bed.

  A few hours later when I awoke to Buck Owens singing “Together Again” I had no idea where I was. Then I remembered seeing Sylvia walk from the bathroom to the bedroom in her robe and falling to sleep to the bilious sound of my stomach in full recoil. And dreaming of standing on a coral outcropping beside a lagoon. There were large tailing permit, a splendid fish, but I had no equipment and I was frantic. I opened my eyes and watched Rosie unpack groceries and open another beer. I stood and stretched in my shorts.

  “Put on some pants or I'll get horny.” She brought me a beer and I sat on the edge of the couch sipping it. She put on a new Dolly Parton album she had bought at the grocery store. Parton has a clear, at times rather tremulous, soprano, but often shrieks and yells. She's frightening, the sort of woman one is attracted to but afraid of; too much of it there for this young neurotic dog. No frenzies please, just be peaceful and preferably demure. How much better Rosie carries her fat th
an that girl who wanted a ride to Miami. I thought I heard Tim call and I walked to the door. He called again and I opened it. He was sitting up in bed. Sylvia was asleep beside him, breathing deeply on the sheet, wearing only a pair of lollipop white panties. Tim rolled his eyes and I nodded my head approvingly and handed him the beer.

  “I'm going to get a tape deck put in the car and we'll be out of here by midnight.”

  “How much do they cost?” I liked tapes in a car but thought them rather expensive.

  “I know where I can charge it.”

  Then Sylvia turned in the bed and drew her legs up, still sleeping.

  “She's a goddamn knockout, huh?” I felt like going back and getting on my trousers before my interest become apparent. But I sat down not wanting to miss anything. There was a photo on the dresser of Tim in an old Mercury stock car, a number 33 painted on the side. He looked very young and had a duck's-ass haircut. Rosie came in with two beers after turning the record player up. A nice breeze was lifting the curtains, bringing in the odor of a flower I didn't recognize. It was similar though to jasmine and from that moment onward I always thought of Sylvia in terms of that odor.

  “If this is a gangbang I want to be in on it.” Rosie sat down and looked at Tim with narrowed eyes.

  “I'd lay you, Rosie, but I'm just too tired. Why don't you pick on him.” I quickly looked up in the air. Then Sylvia awoke and tried to pull the sheet around her but Tim grabbed it back off. “You Baptists are so chickenshit.” She smiled. Evidently it was a joke of some standing as she made no further move to cover herself.

  CHAPTER

  5

  FRANK came over just before dinner and he and Rosie necked for a few minutes, then she dismissed him to finish the cooking. He regarded me rather sullenly as if I were some sort of ardent competitor for the prize. I offered him a drink from a bottle of Wild Turkey I had bought an hour before and was suckling nervously on to destroy the notion that I was in the wrong place and the displacement might be fatal. Sylvia and Tim had been gone several hours to get the tape deck and the car tuned. Now Frank stared at me as he took the bottle and gulped, his adam's apple bobbing.

  Frank looked like a criminal turkey, gaunt and sallow. In ages past he would have been described as “craven” I had begun to think of many of the crackers as Englishmen, say from the eighteenth century, with generations of bad diet and the sort of line breeding that causes a genetic horror show in domestic animals. Southness. Somehow a warmer sort than the North owns but oddly more potentiality for meanness. All the chancre is open to the air with much of the imagination loosed from the prospect of making money thus more inventive and mischievous. In the North Frank would have kept busy in the Buick plant in Flint and his income would be a small fortune in Harlan County, Kentucky.

  Maybe the cold makes us more economically resourceful. I could remember while I was staring down the amber neck of the Turkey bottle all of those blue, glittery sub-zero dawns when I delivered the newspaper in a small town with the sidewalks too rutted with ice to use my bike and the cars with snow tires clanking and shaking with their chains. Businessmen would greet me through their mufflers and mackinaws. I showed promise. The papers got through and were always dry and cold, being placed in the milkboxes where on especially cold mornings the cream would congeal, freeze, pop up the bottle like a white turd. Then to use the bike and rip open a tire on a shard of ice would consume the profit from a month's labor in the repairs. The cold is plainly an imposition, a horrible thing. The breath is icy smoke, pants cuffs freeze, the schoolroom stinking with thawing wool. Even the scrotum tightens in its sack and retreats, the penis withdraws. The floated bored faces skating around and around, then singing carols and drinking cocoa with marshmallows not quite melting in the scum. There was a Christmas dinner when the furnace broke down and it was twenty below and the family and relatives toyed with their food all decrepitly bundled in the dining room, growing more desperate as the gravy solidified and their breath became visible. The barn fire that melted a circle, with the perimeter gray and foul—smoke still singeing the nose, and the cattle bloated and stiff-legged smelling sour of burned hair in an ashtray. The farmer and wife both red-eyed seeing their prize dairy herd cooked. Didn't even melt much snow and the fire pump truck's pitiful thousand gallons of water now frozen a foot thick everywhere so that the curious were slipping. Those very few, perhaps two or three doctors’ wives, who could afford a short trip to Florida were thought vaguely decadent.

  “You ever fish for cats?”

  Frank was staring at me. For a moment I thought of dragging very wet cats out of the river then it occurred to me he was talking about catfish.

  “No. They're too far south of us, south of Grand Rapids. The water's too cold where I live.”

  “I caught a channel cat last week that weighed thirty. Rosie get the picture.”

  Rosie went over and rummaged in a desk drawer. She handed me the photo leaving a grease splotch on the corner. Frank was standing holding the fish toward the camera to make it look even larger. Rosie was off to the side in an unattractive bathing suit with her huge sunglasses, holding a can of beer. I handed the photo to Frank and his face clouded.

  “Rosie you got grease on the picture, you asshole.”

  “Fuck you and your fish,” she said, back at the stove.

  “It was real good eating. At Raiford the food was shit. I'll never go back to Florida again. Cleaning drain ditches. Snakes all over and the niggers wanting to stick a pick into your head.”

  I wanted to ask him about prison but Tim and Sylvia came through the door. Sylvia was in shorts and a halter and the white shorts were pulled very tightly across her buttocks. One thought of Georgia peaches or even Anjou pears. Tim began talking about the car and the tape deck. He carried a small suitcase of tapes which Rosie and Frank picked over.

  “You're drinking again,” Sylvia said to me, raising her eyebrows but smiling. Tim took the bottle and looked at the level and had several gulps. I had an unpleasant feeling in the wishbone, partly from Sylvia and partly I suspected from the half quart of whiskey. I began to think the misrepresentation was chemical. Sylvia doesn't know much: aside from magazines there is no reading material to speak of in the apartment. While I was dozing on the couch I could smell faintly the odor of kerosene. And began to think that the Depression was going on in the room behind me—Valdosta in 1933. What it is is a measureless and ignorant grace that owes nothing at all to girlishness. It is so easy to become fatigued with love. My mind held a picture of two rains: a light sprinkle when I stopped with a girl under a flowering quince near a brown muddy river at night and the moisture in the air lightly falling increased the odor of the quince and when it began to rain harder and we ran for my car a hundred or so yards away we smelled like quince in the confines of the car with the steaming windshield, the metallic rattling of the rain on the hood. The other took place on Fifty-seventh Street in New York on a hot August afternoon walking out of a matinee with a girl I knew I was going to break from that evening. The rain was warm and the streets had that hot cement smell and we stood under the marquee simply watching it fall wordlessly. Sylvia was the equal of those two standing in the rain I thought and hoped she would betray some unpardonable vulgarity very soon so that I would not have to think about her.

  And Tim, all that conscienceless vigor would soon fail him, as it does most between the mid- and late twenties or early thirties when one first realizes one is alive and that like all other living creatures one has a beginning, a middle and a terribly certain end.

  And because of our rather mindless and disorganized plot there is a stiffness in the room. Even Frank seems to sense it. The eve of battle. They went forth. I had a rather yellow sense in my belly that the whole project was ten degrees off in the direction of the wacky. And began to hope that the project would metamorphose into an aimless joyride, a sightseeing tour with perhaps some good fishing thrown in. Tim and Sylvia could either watch or screw up on the bank or back
in the bushes. And watching the others now through the sweet blur of whiskey I began to realize just how tentative my interest in life itself was—I did not qualify even as an observer let alone a pilgrim. Or to make it tiresome, I was not in the stands watching or on the field playing, I was down in some subbasement regarding the whole base structure indifferently. My friends no longer existed, neither did my wife; I had no state or country, no governor or president. We used to call such people nihilists but that is much too strong a word for a vacuum. But the juice still seemed to be there, no matter how narrowed and atrophied. The delight in the air and water and trees and in such rare creatures as Sylvia, and the food that even now Rosie was slinging on the table. And in whiskey. And fishing. The brain seems to make its own little governments. The project was only a novelty, some sort of Coronation Ball.

  When we finally sat down to supper I felt that I was in the hands of foreigners, possibly enemies. I wanted to remember a time when I could walk up a wall backwards, a mythic seizure in the past when reality was successfully flouted as it never really is. It all seemed so helplessly accidental; a day and a half before I was in the middle of my usual excitement over fishing and now I was within hours of leaving for the West, the ostensible reason being to blow up a dam.

  But then we all began to eat aggressively, an essentially homely function that most of the time quiets any fluttering brain. There were smoked pork hocks, fresh spinach, new potatoes with gravy and biscuits. Those simple country-girl types actually knew how to cook. None of the brown rice and raw vegetable horseshit. We ate in almost total silence listening to Marty Robbins sing “Devil Woman,” a monumentally absurd song.