A Good Day to Die

by Jim Harrison

  I poured a glass of bourbon and settled back with my reading material. Mrs. Nixon had flown to South America to assuage the griefs of the Peruvians who had lost 25,000 relatives in an earthquake. The magazine said that that was more than half the number of our war fatalities in a single night. I puzzled over this as the comparison didn't seem apt. The Tigers weren't doing worth a shit. How often in youth they had broken my heart. All that I read was commonplace-sounding, even the earthquake which could not be translated from the print. I regretted not buying skin magazines.

  By the time Sylvia came in I was low to the ground and had lost the precarious balance I try to keep when drinking. I heard Tim's car roar off and hoped he was gone for the night. She stayed a long time in the shower after a few pleasantries and in my near drunkenness I kept dozing off when I wanted to stay alert. When the bathroom door finally clicked I was totally awake.

  “Why don't you just hop in bed with me.” I had intended something smooth but my voice was both tight and my speech a trifle slurred. She walked past me and sat on the edge of her own bed. “Why don't you come over here a minute.”

  She looked at me as if I had just flown in from Tibet. “Can I have one of your sleeping pills?” she asked.

  “They're in my kit in the bottle marked Valium. Only take one.”

  When she got back she turned out all the lights except the TV which rotated the weather forecast with the wind, humidity and temperature accompanied by Mantovani-type music. She stood there in a light flannel nightie letting me palpitate with cheap suspense. Then she got into my bed and I drew her to me with my breath collapsing. I kissed her and found that her cheeks were wet. Oh Jesus. Then she began sobbing in earnest and I withdrew the hand that I had instantly covered her sex with. I got up and drank deeply from my bourbon bottle until to the horrible music of her crying the lights in my head went out.

  CHAPTER

  13

  THURSDAY was ominous. I sat there naked in an armchair with my skin tight from the cold. The empty bottle lay near my foot. I squeezed my eyes hard several times to counteract the pain that surged up behind them in continuous slow rolls. The window was open and Tim lay on his bed covers with only shirt and socks on. My own bed was empty but looked slept in and what had happened made its way past the pain and into my consciousness. On the floor beside my bed Mrs. Nixon was looking just over the top of my head from Time and next to the magazine was the short flannel nightie that had been next to me for less than a minute. We were no more than a day away from buying the kerosene and fertilizer and the sticks of dynamite needed to get it going and my dreams had somehow recognized this imminency by orchestrating all sorts of explosions which were conducted by my dead father. “Daddy I can't come to you, you'll have to come to me,” she sang. Suicide would not be the problem today though. I was in for the sort of hangover that protects itself by striking out at everything: enough brain cells were dead so that the animal only thought of its own howling wounds.

  It must be only fifty in here and the only sign of life is my hard-on, the boozer's friend, this morning diuretic erection. Saves marriages by making Mom forgive last night's sins. There was a powerful smell of bourbon in my mustache. We should blow up the fucking motel for not turning on the heat.

  Tim sat up in bed and looked at me. “What's happening?” He was puzzled and glanced over at my bed.

  “I got drunk and fell asleep here.” I still had not decided whether moving was worthwhile. Even to get warm.

  “I tried to get you into bed but you wouldn't move. Sylvia wouldn't say anything.” He was rubbing his eyes and looked very bleary and bored.

  “I wanted to have her but she was crying and it turned me off so much I drank the whiskey.”

  He looked sympathetic for a moment then got up. “It's fucking winter in here.”

  While he was in the bathroom Sylvia came in with coffee. She wouldn't look at me directly and I truly wanted to kick her in the ass. It was partly the hangover but it seemed that this morning I had finally lost all patience with her. I felt coldly analytical about the sexual barrier that had grown larger between us as if we had somehow missed our prime chance and this loss had driven the final queasly remnant of tenderness from my head.

  “How's our little ole crybaby this morning?” She was looking over the top of my head like Pat Nixon on the floor behind her. I could see that she wasn't going to reply standing there pale and shivering in a light sweater and that short blue skirt. Her legs had goose pimples.

  I leaned forward and stared into my coffee trying to invent some adequate torment. “You should go home. You're no use to anyone and the way you're acting you're liable to fuck up the project.”

  She looked down at me and I immediately was sorry that I said it. I had no guts for meanness of the more dramatic sort, only for a long relaxed meanness by omission.

  “I'm sorry I cried last night.” She turned and quickly walked out the door even though I called to her.

  We were quiet in the car and I brooded when we crossed the Snake River. I had counted on fishing it but the day wasn't much over forty and huge clouds were sweeping through and over the Tetons. It would be snowing up there. The Tetons always appeared as excessively pretty to me, not serious mountains but mountains created by a pastry chef for the wealthy ranchers around Jackson Hole. But I cautioned myself with the thought of what a prick I'd be if I owned ten thousand acres of that land and had the income to maintain it—maybe a Lear Jet to fly me to San Francisco for dinner, probably wander around the ranch clearing my throat like Melvyn Douglas and vote for Nixon. At cocktail parties I would say “We got to stop this goddamned runaway inflation” and my guests would be attentive because I was very rich and they wanted to be invited again. A frowsy wife would pipe up “Right on, Bernard, our savings are being eaten up like sixty” and I would smile and nod at her and think, That little woman has got some real horse sense. Then my wife would yell “Chow's on” and the whole party would lash into piles of prime beef and ranch beans and later we would all dance to stacks of Glenn Miller and Guy Lombardo records while all our children were smoking dope in Europe.

  We were going over the top of Teton Pass with snow ticking steadily off the windshield when I touched a hideous nerve of failure in myself: Sylvia was right and Tim and myself were wrong. Or maybe. Or at least she was a part of that purportedly normal group that formed such a stunning majority. I saw us as goats who stood for alcohol, dope, dynamite, errant promiscuity, while she was some hearth goddess who was sweet, virtuous, gentle, kind and faithful. It must be the guilt that accompanies a hangover. And she was simple-minded. The meanness crept in again. Tie her up and throw her over the cliff on the left side of the car which was going too fast for the slippery conditions. Or don't tie her up but send her home. I wasn't used to questioning the essential truth of the way I lived. My life might be a loathsome mess to an outsider but I cherished the notion that it was honest. All lapsed Calvinists continue to crave that simple monism by which everything is excusable because it is inevitable. “God willed it” when one still believed, and after that, “At least I'm honest.” But now in the back seat my honesty seemed poor and thin in the light of Sylvia's naïve altruism which, though battered, daily centered in her wanting to wholly love someone and to be loved as totally and faithfully in return. That was certainly asking too much on earth from my own experience—if adopted as a guiding plan it could very well tear your head off. For me, anyway. It could work for Sylvia but not with Tim and much less with someone like myself who was so falsely battle worn.

  Of course she wasn't as simple as I was pretending, but nearly. She had swallowed the whole bait and now it was betraying her. She merely waited. And was punished. And there was no real majority of the sane to be a member of. She had gradually by the act of waiting for Tim cut herself off from all but a few like Rosie and Frank and her mother whom she exchanged letters with and now on the road sent so many of those postcards that look like nothing at all on earth. And her
mother whose marriage had been and still was awful and dimwitted didn't really care any more that she wasn't actually married to Tim. After the initial shock many parents nowadays accepted the fact that their children were simply living with each other. A decade before and it would have been unimaginable. Fathers had visited daughters and met the friends of daughters and had come away after saying their piece with a niggling desire to get some action themselves, or a regret that they had been so deep in their post-Depression haze that they forgot to have much fun. So the clarity got by my hangover began to diffuse and wander. Whether or not I would be good to Sylvia meant nothing to me when weighed against my desire for her. There were no mysteries involved: I would love her but I doubted if that would cure me any more than it had Tim. I wasn't diseased. I was the disease perhaps. And my pretensions toward admiring myself on this brutish level were as nasty as any other form of cancer. If I did any good at all it might be to let a few miserable fish swim to that higher, cleaner water where they were surely meant to spawn, as surely anyway as we are meant to die or vote or drink or screw out our torpid days.

  There was an odd lot of freakishness in what suddenly began to happen. I was engrossed in a pile of maps when Sylvia yelped. I looked up to see my side window aimed at the center of the road with the car still going very fast. Then the road came at the back window and I thought that we were backing up terribly fast. We must have switched ends a half dozen times on the icy road and when we came to rest in a dip I discovered that I was yelling at Tim something on the order of “You stupid jackoff, you goddamn hillbilly freak.” By mutual wordless consent we jumped out and faced off for a fight but Tim started slipping when he stepped from the shoulder onto the pavement and made a neat little skater's pirouette. My balance was less fortunate—I went down hard on my ass and if I hadn't thrown my arms behind me I would have cracked my head open. It was that ugly sharp pain of having a chair pulled out from under you and I doubted sprawled there on the glazed road in a thin film of snow that I would ever walk again. I lay back and looked straight up at the flakes that seemed to aim at my face and veer off at the last possible moment. A few made their target and melted.

  “Are you all right?” Sylvia knelt beside me and slipped a hand under my head. Tim took my hand and pulled me into a seated position.

  “Get me the whiskey.” I felt horribly undignified and Tim was giggling. “We'll have to postpone the fight for a few hours.” He trotted along the shoulder and then whipped out on the ice and twirled around in a tricky maneuver. Then he came back down into the dip whooping and giving us the finger as he passed.

  “Do you want to try to stand up? You'll get wet there.” Sylvia handed me the whiskey and I took a huge gulp, caught my breath and took another.

  “You know that asshole was going too fast.” Now Tim was way up the hill behind us launching into a run for a super effort. He came past us at a startling speed this time with both index fingers raised. I only thought he would be easy to hit with my sixteen-gauge Remington Model 12, say with buckshot or a simple slug through the middle. Sylvia made a little run and lost her balance but came down easily on her hands and knees. I crawled over and pulled myself up by the door handle. The feeling had returned to my legs but my ass still hurt badly.

  We made our way slowly down the divide with two tires on the shoulder and when we reached the valley it was noticeably warmer on the western slope. I lay back to ease my discomfort and returned to my maps. There would be some trickery involved in getting Tim over to the Big Hole River where I wanted to fish but I remembered he had mentioned Chief Joseph in Key West and the scene of the battle was close to the river. But he probably wouldn't notice the circuitous route and his accrued knowledge about Indians had been got from Zane Grey novels and the movies. Cheyenne Autumn had disgusted him. Also, the Seminoles were pitiful to him and a Choctaw had been in his battalion in “Nam” as he called it.

  “You're missing the scenery.” Sylvia leaned over the back seat to check on my health.

  “Fuck the scenery.” What was left of my pain was gradually being displaced by the whiskey. I looked up over my maps. “Just describe it and I'll decide if it's worth looking at.”

  “Sylvia, you do a job on that poor old boy and it might cheer him up.” I could tell from the sound of the motor and the sway of the shocks on curves that we were back up to our habitual ninety.

  “I think he's hurt too bad.” She leaned over and patted my head. I took her hand and began kissing it then licked between her fingers. She withdrew her hand and raised her eyebrows. “It's sure he'll never do it again.”

  “I'll bet a thousand dollars on me,” I said. My brain was on a pool in the Big Hole I had fished several years back. Maybe the salmon flies would be hatching. I hoped that it would be too early for the main part of the runoff which usually came in mid-June. The Green had been fine, maybe a little too high, but if the runoff had begun in earnest the Big Hole wouldn't be fishable. “By this time tomorrow we can be looking at the dam.”

  “About goddamn time,” Tim said.

  I felt less enthusiastic. If I only had broken my back . . . but then I saw myself swaddled in a body cast with Sylvia definitely out of reach by reason of plaster. Wounded. She sits by the hospital bed with some lilacs she has picked. There is music of course. She locks the door and takes off her clothes but I am a male plaster manikin and nothing is possible. She weeps.

  “Let's eat.” The car swerves off the road onto gravel and stops. Tim gets out and starts to help me.

  “I'm O.K.” I find that I can hobble but my thoughts are back in the hospital room. I craved to be with her alone so badly that my throat ached. Throughout an awful meal we discussed our plans. We would get the fertilizer, kerosene and U-Haul in Missoula. There was no point in a trial run when we could experiment with a dam.

  But my mind was dully on Sylvia and I wanted to be with her back in that shabby apartment in Valdosta. I would take her to the Keys with me. Or anywhere. Maybe we would have children and become thirty and forty together. But I was disturbed remembering that long pull of boredom in marriage, that “love” as I knew it didn't hold enough energy or velocity to hold interest after three or four years in my own experience. But my own peculiar mania had cut down on my resourcefulness. So much nastiness involved in earning a living. And once or twice a week you would have to stop at a gas station for fuel. Very small matters like gas stations were capable of causing a sort of paralytic hysteria if the timing was off. In the last month or two of my wife's pregnancy I did all the grocery shopping and supermarkets exceeded service stations in horror. Nothing looked good to eat. I would wander the aisles nearly weeping I wanted so badly to find something good to eat. It made the clerks nervous—there were a few murmurs of “weirdo.” Mad Hatter goes shopping but there was nothing funny about it.

  The worst explosion of all, the one that precipitated the breakdown oddly enough centered on fishing. At a family meeting attended by those who loved me and wanted to help I announced I wanted to own a fishing tackle and sporting store. I hadn't previously thought of such an idea but I was cornered and was in a bad bargaining position having just lost my third job of that year. The two sets of parents jabbered tolerantly about the idea while my wife sat in the other room watching television. I kept glancing at my watch having arranged to meet a friend for drinks and a pool game. I didn't get my store but a job was arranged for me in the “outdoor” department of a large department store to see if I proved effective in the line of work. Never have I suffered so. My few fishing and bird-hunting friends were a charming and literate group. But the people who came in to buy the junk we carried or to buy fish and game licenses were collectively less charming than a drunken bowling team. I sort of knew this before I started work but I wanted to make good. I organized a beautiful fly display case but no one bought flies and no one bought the marvelous fly rods I had ordered without permission. The manager kept saying “I told you so.” And there were complaints. A real estate salesma
n bought a case of shotgun shells and told me in passing that he had shot seventy crows the day before. I always have had a soft spot for crows. My comment was a loud “You must be a real asshole.” And on the licenses it was fun to reduce the height and vastly increase the weight of the buyer. They always lied anyway. It got so bad that the regular customers avoided me and I only got to let loose my spleen on the unwary. Everyone looked like a murderous blimp. And I said so.

  CHAPTER

  14

  I SLIPPED out of the cabin in the total darkness about an hour before dawn. There was an owl in the trees on the hill behind the cabin that I had been listening to and now in the moonlight I hoped to catch a glimpse of him if he began chasing something. Barely enough moonlight to make out the watch dial and at the appointed time I nearly didn't get up, the bed was so warm and the air cool though there was no bite to it. I gave up on the owl who obviously had been disturbed by me and poked around in the car gathering my tackle. I sat behind the wheel and ate some sharp cheddar and crackers but the cheese had been bought two days before and didn't taste very good. I dismissed an urge to wash it down and supplant its rank taste with a sip or two of bourbon. Sitting there in the cool dark I felt more conscious than I had in the previous eight days and I rather liked this unexpected awareness although it took some effort to push out of my mind that dam near Orofino. It was only a hundred and fifty miles to the northwest but during the night it had seemed right outside the door. Time is running out. And butterflies were fluttering in my bowels and brain and whiskey had no power to diminish them. Not far out there in the dark was the Big Hole River. The night before when we pulled into Wisdom I shined my flashlight into the water from the bridge and saw that it was clear enough to fish. Now I dozed a minute or two with my forehead against the steering wheel.