A Good Day to Die

by Jim Harrison

  I was walking around the streets of Tucson after midnight. When the movie let out I had told them I wanted to take a walk and have a nightcap or two. Tim winked which was mildly disgusting and Sylvia's eyes were fixed on something across the street. Sexuality. You watch other people. fucking and carrying on in Technicolor for a couple of hours and you get the startling idea that you might like to try it yourself. Or not. I felt “not.” I was glutted with the aesthetic brutishness of those huge pumping organs and wished that I hadn't insisted that we sit in the front row. Tim had leaned forward with his elbows on his knees occasionally murmuring “Mother dog!” and “Jesus frog!” It was much too real in obvious comparison with reality itself. And after an hour it may as well have been stone gargoyles fucking. If I were to make such a movie I would proceed with infinite delicacy so that my hero, stunted with my own neuroticisms, would end up making love to a succession of slender international beauties in odd places: under a lilac bush, beside a meadow stream in Killarney, in a canopied bed, in a tent in Tanzania and so on. There would be no improperly sized dildos or battery operated instruments. Good grammar would be used. In the outdoor scenes birds would sing and a trout might rise in the stream and the woman would be on strict orders not to scream like a fishwife or stuck hog.

  But then if the movies caused Tim to make love to Sylvia I guessed that they had served a purpose. And perhaps I was at fault for specializing my tastes. How often I had wanted to be Bob Bold and swagger around our great land having at every attractive girl, throwing in a homely waitress or two, even a grandmother out of kindness. It was never to be. Sadly, I never had trouble with whores but I knew that was because the act was so totally devoid of any response except the sexual. Like dogs. A very rare girl, Sylvia for instance, would throw me into a frenzy of trepidation: hollow stomach, trembling of hands, dry mouth and all of that. I had a brief vision of her and Tim together with her knees high against his back. I became angry and walked faster.

  It took several doubles and a half hour of the Johnny Carson show in a bar called the Green Door to regain a semblance of calm. How much easier the whole trip would have been had Sylvia been less interesting. Much less, though. If she had been a cute dope I might have flown back to Key West by now, perhaps wangled a cheap trip to Bimini to bonefish. I would get some fishing in within a day or two on the way north. I asked the bartender if he had any maps but he was very busy and decided that I was either drunk or loony.

  I more or less had our first dam picked out. It would be up in Idaho on a small branch of the Clearwater. There was another possibility near Ennis in Montana but the site was a little less secluded than the dam in Idaho where a wealthy rancher had ruined a good steelhead stream. The earthen dam he had constructed prevented steelhead from moving upstream to spawn while the dam near Ennis prevented brown trout from having the land of water they like to spawn in. Both built out of greed and in contempt of the natural world.

  I suddenly felt strong and clean and very moral. Slightly heroic, in fact. I turned on the barstool and looked at the roomful of collegiate hippie types, the counterculture on a liberal allowance. Some of the girls were admittedly interesting but I dismissed the idea of them because they vitiated my newly acquired heroic glow and also I didn't want to be reminded of Sylvia. The bartender advertised last call and I ordered a triple Granddad as a suitable sleeping pill. Narcosis with the liver hit by a club. The idea of sex movies and liquor depressed me. I grew up with the notion I might be a Jimmy Stewart type working a ranch in a valley with a fine trout stream running through it, a grand herd of Hereford cattle, and a lovely woman named Ramona or something like that as a helpmate. No time here for alcoholism or pornographic movies. The fantasy became errant—the closest movie had been fifty miles away and it featured year around Donald Duck and Francis the Talking Mule movies. Would I expose Ramona to all that vulgar quacking? Ramona herself began quacking so I left the bar.

  Out on the street I was unsure about the direction of the motel and cared less. Maybe a taxi to the airport was in order. But my fly rod and my pills. And Sylvia. What did I think I would do with her if I ever got her? The liquor seemed to swish in my guts as I searched for landmarks. I must have found the bar in a trance. Nothing was in the least familiar so I stopped a strolling couple and asked directions. She was so pretty that I didn't listen attentively and I was as lost as ever. O God get me to the motel. I hope they are done making love and I hope it makes her happy. I was suddenly possessed with the notion that I should hug everything on earth and that my own temporary euphoria would immediately heal all that I touched. Flower be well even though the cutworms have eaten off half your petals. Baby get up out of your crib and get rid of that leukemia. Dog regrow that leg you lost to a car.

  None of it seemed likely and I came back to earth after imagining the difficulty of healing Tim's knot of scar tissue which like so many infirmities in friends one ceased noticing after a while. If other people didn't stare you wouldn't be reminded. Tito was almost envious and regarded it as a badge of courage. But I thought that every morning he shaved he must be reminded of the war though he never talked of it at all unless I brought up the subject and then he quickly dropped it. He said that when he was wounded it was only like a good knockout punch in a fistfight. But I had never fought much and hadn't been knocked out. He did say that he had gotten in a fight with a member of a helicopter crew over the matter of shooting cattle. It was bad enough shooting those scurrying human figures let alone cattle looking skyward in alarm. Yes it was true that prisoners being interrogated were occasionally pushed out the open door of a Sikorsky gunship at three thousand feet but Tim thought that was only part of war. Bad as it was it was more interesting than Georgia, and the re-up bonus was a big one.

  I was finally nearing the motel. I stopped and lit a cigarette. The car was there and the room was dark. Tim had said he liked to screw with the lights on so I could assume that they were finished. He said Sylvia didn't like to make love with any light at all but she had gradually got used to it and if she had a few drinks would make love in front of the mirror. This was all said in Texas three or four days ago with Sylvia listening and looking out the window. They all know we are assholes. I turned the key in the lock and stepped in.

  “Tim?” Sylvia said.

  “No. It's me.” I turned on a bed lamp. She was sitting with the sheet drawn up and her eyes were red and one side of her cheek was slightly swollen.

  “He went looking for you. He didn't drive.”

  “It doesn't look like you guys had much fun.” I was instantly struck by the stupidity of my statement.

  “He said he doesn't want to sleep with me any more. He said I confuse him and that I only want him to marry me.” Her voice was weary and flat. I began to wish that it wasn't so late and television was still on. I felt dull and sleepy and extremely tired of their frazzled entanglements. Romantic love was certainly our messiest invention. Wasn't there any way I could get back that stern glow I had in the tavern. I reached in my suitcase and got out the Blaster's Handbook and a pint of tequila.

  “Take a drink and go to sleep.” I handed her the pint and leaned down to kiss her forehead. She put her arms around my neck and we hugged, another one I couldn't heal. By her trembling I could tell that she was going to weep and I tried to get up. I murmured sweet comforting fatuities but she began sobbing anyway. Oh, Christ. I opened my eyes and looked down her bare back and watched my hands at her waist to see if they were going to do anything stupid. I ran a hand along her backbone then tucked in my chin to see her breasts against my shirt. A nipple was touching a small pearled button on my flowered cowboy shirt. The worm was going to turn so I tried to get away again.

  “Sylvia, I can't say anything that will help.” I was desperate about getting away. I held her shoulders and she lifted her face with those hazel eyes so pointlessly full of tears. “You should go home tomorrow. Well put you on a plane and you'll be home in a few hours, at least to Atlanta. Rosie and Frank wi
ll drive up to get you.” She paused a moment thinking it over and then began to cry harder, encircling her arms around my neck again.

  “Sylvia!” I was pissed off now and wanted to get out of there. A plan evolved. I ran my hands between the sheet and her buttocks and began kneading them. What smooth skin. No effect though. I removed my left hand and forced it down between her legs letting the forefinger and then another enter her. She became very stiff in my arms and then slumped back on the bed. I followed the course of my arm down to my wrist and hand and then looked at her. She was wide-eyed but her face was incomprehensible. I moved my fingers. Perhaps a minute passed.

  “Please don't.” Her face was contorted.

  I withdrew my hand and uncapped the tequila bottle. I took a swallow and passed it to her.

  She gulped at it and shook her head. “It's awful,” she said. She nearly smiled.

  I quickly walked into the bathroom. It felt as if my head were about to blow off my shoulders like some old anarchist cartoon. In the shower I thought about Dexedrine and how in college if you dropped a few spansules to study you felt very alive but it was impossible to make love. Maybe Tim knows it but his kind of speed is even more violent. I'll talk to him but maybe he doesn't care. I had a terrible hard-on but the shock therapy had worked. For an instant I thought it might work too well.

  When I got out of the shower her lamp was off but a street light outside made the tequila bottle visible and I took a final swallow.

  “Are you sort of weird like Timmy?” Her voice had startled me.

  “What do you mean?” I took an additional final swallow.

  “Well, we really haven't made love for three or four months. Only that thing the whores do once or twice.” Her voice was even and low.

  “That's making love too,” I said without much conviction. “He takes a lot of pills. If he stopped taking so many pills he would make love to you.” I knew he varied his speed with Seconal which didn't help and at the slightest headache he would add a couple of Darvon to the stew. Christ.

  “I know it's the pills but he could stop. We used to make love all the time. Even in San Diego in the hospital. I don't think he really wants me any more or he would stop.”

  “It's hard to stop.” I felt foolish standing there in the dark dispensing counsel when I really wanted to get in her bed if only for a few minutes.

  “I can see you're not very weird.” I had been temporarily blinded from the light in the bathroom and thought the room was darker than it was. I was standing there with my hard-on visible if only dimly.

  “I think the poor thing wants you very much, Sylvia.” My mind was racing. “I almost wanted to rape you before. I'm tired of seeing you with no chance of having you. I love you and it's hard being around like a sad uncle all the time.” My breath was racing now and I wished that we would hear Tim's key and put an end to the nonsense.

  “I couldn't do that. I know you want to have me because I see the way you're looking at me all the time. Maybe I could do that other thing sometime.”

  I lay back on my bed then with my heart pounding. I smoked several cigarettes and could hear her steady breathing that meant she was asleep. I was still awake an hour after it got light when Tim slipped quietly in the door. I pretended to sleep but watched him sit back in a chair, prop his feet on the TV table, and promptly pass out. Where in Christ did he get those new boots in the middle of the night? They were pale blue and heavily tooled with steep heels. I'm sort of intelligent. I've got to get out of this mess. An awful case of heartburn from the tequila and lying here looking at Sylvia's sheet-draped rear which is aiming. Enter her de rerum natura as Lucretius. Ho ho, but the idea seizes until I dismiss it with the torrent of water and mud from a blown-out dam and running through the woods back to the car with the mud spattering on the trees and the fish free to go back to the main stream. I have struck. Opening the eyes and there's Sylvia. Women can't justly go to war as they disturb the planning. Tim snores on. The watch says seven. My too intelligent wife is getting up. My mother has my two degrees up on the wall. I have a closetful of mounted fish and a twelve-year fishing log. And that's about all I own I guess except all of those fly rods in the closet with the plaster fish we caught together. Mount no more fish. Let them go. Should break the rods and ascend into the good life.

  A decade ago I even taught Sunday school. After I was saved. Couldn't interest the little buggers with anything but tales of missionaries being strangled by giant snakes and eaten by hyenas. God is not very interesting they thought. Compared to animals. Maybe I can retrieve my body from exhaustion and drink but also fish the Fraser and the south fork of the Flathead and the Madison and the Henry's Fork and the inlet of Hegben Lake. Shit my stomach burns. Tomorrow in the car I'll tie up leaders with 4X and 5X tippets but also some that are heavier. We have no frying pan. Either buy a frying pan or let them all go, every single one. When they fight they build lactic acid and often die from it especially large tarpon that jump a dozen times with gill plates rattling and the water shedding as if they were hurled from an underwater catapult. I want to stand in that tower in the Marquesas and not know these people. Now the sheet is down a bit and I can see half her back. My hands slide down her back. She's so tight. The skin so smooth it is rare. I'll think about death to forget her. I'm blown up with the dam. They find my foot or head and then she is sorry. I hope. I wish I had put my face where my fingers were and that would have shocked her out of weeping fast. Maybe. I don't think I want her mouth but I do horribly though it seems improbable and far away. Only a service to which out of pity she yields. If we could cry like that we would truly clean out our heads almost at will.

  CHAPTER

  9

  AT BREAKFAST which we had in the early afternoon I looked at my maps. I was Timoshenko in exile; all of those lovely tactile multicolored lines before me as I traced the best route north. And the coy succession of inverted W's that meant the mountainous Continental Divide. But there were disappointments too; I knew the fabled Bighorn River near Crow Agency, Montana, was in reality only a muddy slough where a hundred years before Custer's men had drained their frivolous blood. Lucky Benteen. I've always been psychologically geared to retreat. Even without a recent advance, retreat is so often the sensible course. We would take Route 89 north, not the best route certainly but a route I had never been on and I was the chief navigator. At every junction Tim would say “Which way?” with an almost preposterous lack of interest. After consulting a map I would hand it to Sylvia to fold. She was very dexterous at it and would make the maps crisp and virginal again.

  My eggs were getting stiff and congealed and the coffee was loathsome and served in stained plastic cups. Tim had given Sylvia a half dollar for the jukebox and her choices were ruining my heady reconnaissance efforts. The first two songs were Merle Haggard's “Today I Started Loving You Again” and then the Conway Twitty-Loretta Lynn duet, “Lead Me On.” Both maudlin, corrupt, causing an eerie wave of sentiment. I had danced in so many bars to both the songs with my face in a girl's neck and my hands lightly on her back. In Agua Prieta Sylvia had been a graceful dancer with her pelvis thrust ever so lightly against mine, and a smile however brief on her face. I lacked the native coordination to be a truly good dancer but Sylvia was marvelous.

  Tim was rattling on in his usual speed rip about how he had bought these great Tony Lama boots off a drunk for only ten dollars and wonder of wonders they fit pretty well, maybe a bit loose but he could wear two pairs of socks and then they would be perfect only maybe a little hot and so on. He wasn't eating and I noticed that he was paler and had lost weight since the Keys. His arms looked less muscular though still powerful, but his eyes glittered and his face was drawn with exhaustion. Sleeping in a chair, then when we got up he washed down a couple of spansules from a new bottle when Sylvia was in the bathroom. He began another disconnected speech about a fire on a dirt stock car track where a friend of his had been burned badly only luckily not on the face when he hit a barrier a
nd the gas tank hadn't been placed either properly or legally and he began to lose interest in stock cars when he heard his friend screaming. The bleachers were quiet and the other cars had stopped and everyone could hear the screaming as they extinguished the fire. Sylvia was looking down at her plate obviously realizing that Tim had been dropping his pills again. He plucked nervously at his scar when he talked and drank three or four cups of coffee, lighting one cigarette with another on the verge of going out.

  A particular burned-grease smell had taken me away from the diner. At first I couldn't locate it but then I placed the smell in a small French restaurant on Ninth Avenue in the Fifties in New York. I ate lamb which they cooked rare and artichokes vinaigrette. Sometimes I would have sweetbreads. Then I would go to a movie or a concert or even an Off Broadway play. This was several years ago when I wanted very badly to be sophisticated. I wore cheaper imitations of the sort of clothing one could buy in the men's boutique at Bonwit's. This lust for the civilized even entered my fishing of that period: only eighteen-foot gut leaders and silk lines and very small fly patterns seemed appropriate, and English nylon waders. I nearly bought an umbrella one day. But that period of my life had passed, in fact had lasted only a few months. I could live for a week now on what I had once saved and then spent on a Cote Basque lunch for myself and some pretentious cunt.