The English Major

by Jim Harrison

  “Dad, it’s only 7:00 a.m. for GOD’S SAKE.” I apologized. I don’t mean to present Robert as a nitwit. He has sent me many books on the human genome plus all of Timothy Ferris’ books in astronomy. Robert always said that he had the soul of an artist and the mind of a scientist and that’s why he ended up in the movie business. I must say that I wasn’t able to follow the logic of the statement.

  We found a pleasant, shaded campsite near the river and I set up the tent. Marybelle put on an actual teeny weenie polka dot bikini which I regarded with no interest. While she sunned herself I walked down to the river, sat on the bank and read yesterday’s Lincoln (the state capitol) newspaper. I make great effort to avoid thinking about politics. I think of myself as a Democrat but my party had been sorely disappointing in recent years while the Bush Republicans remind me of the mean-minded fraternity boys at Michigan State in the old days who were full of vicious pranks. It didn’t help that I had once taught high school Civics for a whole year in which one rehearses for the numb minded the ideals of our ideal government. It had occurred to me that elections tended to illustrate the abject failure of our sodden, fun educational system. Civics as a course offered high ideals that never seemed to present themselves.

  A scream pierced the hot, late morning air. I came running. Not ten feet from where Marybelle, now topless, was sunning herself, a small rattlesnake lay irritably coiled. “Kill it!” she screamed. I pushed it away with a stick which it struck. “I thought you were green,” I said.

  We moved camp to a bare sandbar next to the river, inadvisable if it rained hard. Marybelle thought a swim might help my wounded member which I had said felt like it was boiling. The river was barely waist deep and I sat still facing the hopefully healing waters while Marybellle porpoised and flapped. She stood and looked around quizzically, then pointed out the thicket where the old masturbatory professor had spied upon her.

  The rattlesnake had made camping impossible for Marybelle and I thought about my tiring wallet when I packed the gear for the trip back to the motel. Lucky for me she had a sunburn which meant I’d get to sleep an entire night.

  WYOMING

  It was my quiet prayer when we crossed the Wyoming border that a fresh state would make Marybelle’s behavior less antic. Without the exhaustion of sex my night had been restless waking for good at 5:00 a.m. when I heard a mead-owlark out the motel room’s back window. This lovely clear trill was diminished when Marybelle in throes of a dream wagged a hand in the air and growled the word “fuck.” The room smelled like our kitchen when my mom canned pickles because I had dabbed vinegar on Marybelle’s sunburn which she claimed had helped. I had felt vaguely like a doctor and her sweaty naked body had looked particularly mammalian with the location of her parts similar to Lola’s. My own wounds had subsided from outright pain to a maddening itch which it would have been foolhardy to scratch. I endured rather than prevailed. My senior students had yawned when I tried to teach them the glories of Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech. A chunky little cheerleader named Debbie who would later grow into a human bowling ball, squeaked, “I don’t get it.”

  Because of her sunburn Marybelle wore only one of my large-sized light cotton t-shirts. A Chadron gas station attendant was treated to a sleeping beaver shot when he washed our windshield. He smirked and blushed highlighting his troubled skin. Marybelle had been sleeping a couple of hours since Valentine. I was puzzled a week into my trip which made me so philosophical that there was a lump beneath my breastbone. I wavered between being absorbed in the glories of the landscape (I took a number of photos of a group of Chianina bulls, an Italian breed) and three friends, really long term acquaintances who had passed on to the next world in the last year, or possibly to no world at all. It seems we are all only one medical test away from certain doom. The innocuous lump in his nose ended up eating his face. That sort of thing. My thinking had not been clarified by the first five states but then the devil herself was beside me on the seat snoring softly, curled against the door with the shirt pulled up revealing the fetching beastliness of her rear-end. I was amazed at the graduality of the return of desire. Twenty-four hours without it and now it was beginning again like a tiny forest spring and soon enough I’d again be a butt kissing dog despite my dysfunctional member.

  West of Chadron I stopped at Fort Robinson to see the old U.S. Calvary remount station which once handled 5000 horses, but mostly to see the death site of the grand Lakota warrior Crazy Horse. I had read about him in Mari Sandoz’s biography, a book that would haunt me, in an American Studies course during a vulnerable spring term at Michigan State. April has always knocked me for a not very pleasant loop where my brain seems semi-fevered. Here I was in crowded East Lansing terminally homesick and missing the trout fishing opener April 23rd and thus the woeful history of Crazy Horse and the Sioux were a gut punch. Now here I am forty years later and my mind again becomes that of a 20 year old college junior writing a term paper speculating that both Crazy Horse and the Apache leader Geronimo were motivated toward war by the deaths of their three year old children who died because we simply enough were chasing their people to death. It is said that Crazy Horse spent three days with his deceased daughter on her burial platform in a tree playing with her toys.

  I left the windows open in the gathering heat and walked the scant thirty yards to the death site but then my eyes blurred with tears and I returned to the car. Marybelle was stretching feline style.

  “I’m not going to ask you where we are. I need some new light on the nature of reality. I also need some coffee. This fucking sunburn itches. I also need to pee.”

  “I wouldn’t get optimistic on reality.” I poured her coffee from the thermos.

  A little while later when a sign gave us a hearty welcome to Wyoming I stopped the car and we got out to study this border. Obviously it lacked the specificity of the jigsaw puzzle where Nebraska was green and then there was suddenly the blue of Wyoming which to the eye lacked blue except the sky. The earth herself lacked any sign of demarcation. There was an urge to walk to a distant butte, sit down and think things over but then I judged the butte to be a half dozen miles away. The new laser instruments surveyors use could give a reading on the border that was accurate to a thousandth of an inch. It didn’t used to be such a science and when the new technology came in I lost forty feet of woods on the north end of the farm but picked up twenty feet of good pasture to the east but when I talked to my neighbors none of us were up to building new fence.

  “I’ve failed as a wife and a mother,” Marybelle said when I got back to the car. I didn’t know the details so I couldn’t respond. She sniffed and then picked up the road atlas for the first time on the trip. “We have to detour up to Malta before you drop me in Bozeman. I need to make some apologies.”

  I slowed to a near stop and located Malta up toward the northern border of Montana. It was fine by me and I turned to her but she was snoozing again. When I had applied the vinegar she said she had taken a sleeping pill or two. Vivian used to drink this over the counter sleeping potion and still say she didn’t sleep a wink but then I knew otherwise because she was so dead to the world she didn’t even get up to pee. My doctor, Ad, says women need more sleep these days as their lives are often fraught with tension of an undetermined source. On a day when I was hauling bull calves to the sale yard Vivian was all wound up in a frazzle trying to sell a cottage for twice what it was worth a few years back. People who come from downstate have so much money they buy their kids brand new cars.

  Marybelle is obsessed with her fatigue. It’s different for me because I know the future is more of the same. However, this may have changed now what with my past life being cut off by the sale of the farm. When I wake up at first light I still wake up as a farmer. I think of doing morning chores that are no longer there for me. Lola would help me break up bales of hay with her teeth. The cattle would stand around her as if in full approval. Twenty-five years of routine and suddenly it’s evening.

  What
can dad give me now? Maybe that I should loosen up as much as I am able. And stop thinking of that little farm on the Niobrara about ten miles from Valentine. Everyone pretty much pans out in the middle ground or less. In college I thought I was destined to go overseas but I didn’t. We don’t quite get started except on our livelihood which is probably the story of mankind. This doesn’t include what realtors like Vivian call “lucky sperms,” those with a bunch of inherited wealth. In some of the rest of us hope keeps springing up like rye grass. Marybelle says that if her husband can wangle a teaching job in a big urban area she can “return to the life of the little theatre.” Instead of model airplanes my son Robert used to make cardboard models of theatres, sort of theatre dollhouses. He even made a little mock-up of Shakespeare’s old timey theatre in London, the Globe, and won a 4–H (head, heart, health, hands) blue ribbon for it at the County Fair.

  Thinking was wearing me out so I stopped the car to take a photo of some grand looking Angus bulls up on a hillside near a rock upcropping. When I walked up the hill they weren’t too happy with my presence and the largest began to paw and blow snot so I retreated. I owned a tough old bull I named Bob and Lola liked to tease him until he’d bellow in fury, but then later she might take a nap in the shade of his huge body and several times on especially hot days I watched from the kitchen window as they strolled out to the pond together for a dip. I’ve always had this notion that we don’t know other mammals nearly as well as we pretend to.

  Back in the car I got a boner glancing at Marybelle’s butt peeking out of the bottom of the t-shirt and speculated if I put on three condoms it would likely protect my slowly healing member. The contrast here and there of white and sunburned skin was hunky dory erotic. I felt like a geezer peeping Tom and turned back to the road atlas with prickly heat in my wattles, refusing to admit that good luck is a mixed blessing. My friend Ad had insisted that I see the Wind River and the Sunlight Basin but that was way over west and out of the way to a more direct route to Malta. Wisdom told me to drive to Malta in Montana, head south to Bozeman and rid myself of this nutcase woman who was blinding me to the beauty of the United States; but even as I thought this my weary eyes would flicker from map to bottom to map to bottom. A couple of times a year when Robert was in Arizona he’d send me a five pound bag of prime pistachios. He thought that the tyranny pistachios had over me was funny. There was an obvious connection over pistachios which I’d eat until nearly in tears and Marybelle’s stellar bottom.

  Suddenly it occurred to me that I hadn’t rid myself of the Nebraska piece of the puzzle and here I was fifty miles into Wyoming. I pulled off on the bumpy shoulder of the road waking Marybelle who hissed “fuckhead” meaning me I suppose. Across the ditch there was a small irrigation channel and I released Nebraska with its tiny picture of an ear of corn to float merrily down the man made stream. I squinted my eyes making the ditch look like a giant river and I was a hawk flying above it, or more likely a flycatcher like a black capped towhee, and then Marybelle’s feet were beside me and she sat down in the ditch.

  “Wow, this feels great on my sunburn,” she said. I glanced up and a rancher passed in an ancient grey Studebaker pick-up and we waved at each other. Marybelle lay back in the ditch and rolled over and over like a porpoise might. The water felt pretty cold to me but who was I to say so? A little while later we had breakfast in Shawnee at a place where the Studebaker was parked and the rancher, a small wiry man about my age, said, “There’s no charge for your girlfriend taking her morning bath in my ditch.” I thanked him and we began to talk about hay prices. I couldn’t get more than thirty bucks a ton for my alfalfa so that’s why I bought cattle. He said hay was more than twice that locally and if you didn’t raise your own you couldn’t afford to raise cows. Marybelle ate six fried eggs and three sausage patties. The waitress, a big older woman, was amazed and Marybelle nodded at me and said, “This old fool keeps me up all night and I’m hungry.” I was a little embarrassed when the waitress and rancher laughed loudly.

  MONTANA

  I made tracks for Montana, hitting Interstate 25 over past Douglas and heading north toward Casper and Billings. Marybelle had become a herky-jerky chatterbox holding her cell phone at the ready for a signal. I questioned her sudden energy and she said she was getting a protein rush from her eggs and sausage. I said that was only a half hour ago and it wasn’t possible unless she was a dog because they can metabolize fat and protein real fast.

  “Cliff, I know my body real well, thank you, and I’m getting a protein rush.”

  I let it go because I recalled how marital arguments can start with tiny seeds and grow instantaneously into giant oaks. I had also accepted as fact that I wouldn’t see the Real America with my present passenger. For instance I had neglected to say that Wyoming, receding into the past, is known as the “Equality State,” the meadowlark her bird, the motto “equal rights,” and the wildflower “the Indian paintbrush,” a flower I have loved since childhood.

  Near Douglas Marybelle as a joke called my cell phone but it was turned off and in my suitcase in the back so the joke went flat. She was irked and gave me a lecture on cell phone ethics.

  “Cliff, a cell phone isn’t a toy. It’s a very lucky technical miracle for all of us. It’s a prime weapon against our essential loneliness.”

  “I can’t say I ever felt that lonely.” I knew it was a mistake to say this but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Bullshit. You’re utterly lonely without knowing it. You wandered around that farm in a state of absolute loneliness. I bet you talked more to your dog than to your wife.”

  “Vivian got so she mostly wanted to talk about real estate and maybe a little about whatever diet she was on.”

  “The question is, did you try to get interested in her issues? Maybe real estate is more creative than farming?”

  “That’s certainly possible.” I was trying to look for a route to back away.

  “Right now you’re high and dry and I sense you’re vaguely looking for a creative solution to your life but are you really searching?”

  “I have a few things in mind that haven’t quite taken shape.” I was miffed, glancing back between the front seats to see that Marybelle had put her suitcase smack dab on top of the puzzle.

  “Name one!” she fairly hissed. “Name one single creative thought you’ve had for your future!”

  “Well, when you slept all that time I did some thinking. I’ve mostly been working since I was twelve years old. My mother was made of iron and used to say, ‘Idle hands are the devil’s work tools.’ On the other hand my dad was real playful. Sometimes you wonder how they got together in the first place. Anyway, once when I was fishing the Jordan River with my dad we watched a family of otter at play and he explained that otters were so intelligent and skilled that they didn’t have to work hard to get their food. They spent a great deal of time fooling around, sliding down steep banks like kids on sleighs and teasing other less fortunate creatures.”

  “Step on the gas. I don’t see where you’re going with this idea.”

  I could see she was getting antsy because we were coming close to Casper (the State Capitol) and she had a top flight signal on her phone.

  “When you were bathing like a porpoise in that irrigation ditch I was also watching a pair of ravens. Like otters they have the privilege of fooling around a lot. So do porpoises or so I’ve read. So do people if they don’t just work forty-eight years like I did. So I had this idea at breakfast that I would start this project of renaming the birds of North America, and also the names of the states. Some of both are okay but most fall short of having the right names.”

  “I don’t fucking believe it, you goof.”

  Marybelle acted poleaxed but not to the degree she couldn’t dial her friend in Minneapolis. I drove off an exit on the freeway to take a look at the Platte River not wanting to listen to the conversation. When I got out of the car she covered the mouthpiece and said, “It’s an intriguing idea but I dou
bt if it’s marketable.”

  The river was moving from left to right. I had thought about tying my little ninety-pound dinghy rowboat to the top of the car but it was cumbersome except for short trips to local ponds and little lakes. Lola would sit on the backseat as if we were doing something of tremendous importance. Maybe she was right. I moved further away from the car so as not to hear any ambient chatter. Rivers make my favorite sound. If I had brought along my rowboat I could have escaped confusion because when you row you tend to think about nothing except the world floating off behind you. Staring at the river I began to wonder what we are when we are alone. Maybe we don’t count for much unless we are rubbing against others. I recalled that way back when in college when I was reading Thoreau I discovered he didn’t spend all that much time at that shack he built near Walden Pond. My dad had to interfere when I was too much alone in the spring of my sophomore year in high school. I was sweet on the prettiest girl in the whole school. She was a newcomer, a preacher’s daughter who arrived with her parents in the middle of winter. Her dad was a Nazarene fundamentalist and was too big a rock to last for long on the little shelf of our community. Every boy in high school was after Rebecca and it was inevitable that she would land in the lap of our best athlete who was a brutal lout with a big dick, common knowledge because the showers in our locker room were wide open. Anyway, I was close to Rebecca only once and that was when we drew lots to see who would partner on Spring Cleaning Day when we walked along the roads with big garbage bags picking up the trash thrown out of cars, mostly beer cans and bottles. I was thought to be the luckiest boy in school for drawing Rebecca who all the boys referred to as P.T. (prick tease) though never to her face. This was a period of mini-skirts though Rebecca was never allowed by her parents to wear one. She made up for this by throwing her self around in longer skirts giving us all a peek of what was widely called “the promised land” with a lack of modesty similar to Marybelle’s in present time. When Rebecca and I were dropped off on a small gravel road through a swamp it was disappointing that she was wearing loose trousers for the duty work of picking up trash. I was burning up with lust, love and embarrassment but she was remote and lazy letting me do all the work because she was afraid of the spiders but mostly garter snakes. I found a stick in the grass on the road’s shoulder for her to carry and she sang religious songs (Just as I am without one plea…) for further protection against nature. At one point she called me over and poked at a used condom desiccating on the gravel on the road’s edge. She rolled her eyes and giggled while my heart rose thumping in my throat. The high point for my hormonal fantasies occurred when we were nearly finished. She began shrieking and dancing around saying that there were spiders crawling up her legs. She yelled, “Don’t look” and pulled her trousers down to her knees and started slapping at her legs, glanced at me and hissed, “Get away asshole,” which was startling for a religious girl. I was frozen in place and stared as intensely as possible at her pubic mound and furze peeking out beneath white cotton panties. She swiveled and asked, “Is there one on my butt?” I dropped to my knees, my eyes only inches from her tulip fanny. “A very small one,” I whispered, watching a tiny spider traverse the upper back of her thigh. “Kill it,” she screeched and I did so with a trembling finger tip. And then it was over, this high point of my erotic life thus far.