The English Major

by Jim Harrison

  I selected ten books and took them into the guest bedroom looking with fear at Marybelle’s suitcase beside my own. I realized that not very far back in my mind I was planning an early escape. I opened a volume of Emerson for random wisdom but didn’t get it. The very idea of self-reliance seemed banal when you weren’t sure who your self was.

  When I went back to the table Marybelle dozed in her chair and Robert and Ed were planning on going out to a club for a nightcap. Ed helped me haul Marybelle down to the bedroom where we undressed her and tucked her into bed.

  “I’ve never undressed a woman before,” Ed laughed. “She certainly keeps herself in fine shape.”

  “So I noticed,” I said. “She could fuck the balls off a cast iron monkey as we used to say.”

  Robert was boozy and maudlin when he said goodbye. When we left the bedroom Ed had told me that they were going dancing and I had said, “Why not?” At the door Robert said, “Dad, you are on a great adventure and have been liberated to a new life.” I couldn’t help but agree.

  I finally fell asleep to Marybelle’s light snoring. There was the not too comfortable feeling that in this condo I was bedding down on the top layer of a five layered cake. I couldn’t get rid of the idea that nature had had too much effect on my abilities to pan out in this world. I was an old baloney bull who favored the far corner of the pasture where it merged into the forty acre woodlot. A baloney bull is one that has out-aged its effectiveness. You cart it into the slaughter house where it’s turned into low-rent cold cuts. When fairly drunk on French wine Ad had said the gods murder us in hot blood not cold. He had just lost out in surgery with a downstate hunter with a burst appendix. By the time the man’s drunk deer camp buddies had got him to emergency peritonitis had set in. When I first met Ad twenty years back we started out with a modest quarrel. He perceived that immediately that I was trying to live out an “ideal” which he called “literary.” This pissed me off but then by breeding I had to be polite to the new doctor in town. Besides he was good humored when he said, “Normal people don’t try to be normal people, they’re just hopelessly normal people.” Maybe I had married Vivian as an ideal but that seemed not out of the ordinary.

  Marybelle was crying at 4 a.m. which woke me up. She claimed that her pal in Minneapolis was due to have electro-shock therapy. I calmed her down and we made love in the most restrained fashion ever and then she said that she was an orphan because her husband was going to divorce her. I doubted this and while I tried to prepare a response she fell back to sleep. Last evening when she was pie-eyed I sensed a vacuum to which I couldn’t begin to offer anything substantial. By contrast when she and Robert were talking about the theatre she was fully animated.

  I went out to the balcony at dawn with coffee and stared at the fog furling though the landscape. I had taken out one of the books I had borrowed, Martha Foley’s Great American Short Stories, but my hands felt too lame to open it when my own story seemed interminable. It occurred to me that like Marybelle I needed to pour myself into something with the same energy I had given to teaching and farming. My self obviously couldn’t be a full time profession. The birds and the states would have to do for the time being. I had swiped Robert’s Sibley book on western birds and had my jigsaw of the states. What more did I need?

  Lo and behold I fell asleep and woke up lucky at mid-morning. The upshot was that a friend of Ed’s had driven him to Pasos Robles in the middle of the night and Ed retrieved the Tahoe at dawn. Now he was in the kitchen having breakfast with Robert and Marybelle who were bent on going off to look at some office space for Robert who was feeling jammed at having an office at home. “Like your work shed, dad,” he said, and I felt lonesome for my shed with its woodstove, books, and a sheepskin cushion for Lola.

  When Robert and Marybelle left I began packing which puzzled Ed who could barely keep his eyes open. He pointed out the grey Tahoe from the balcony and seemed drowsily concerned with my welfare. I explained I had changed my itinerary after looking at the Weather Channel and seeing that it was 107 degrees in Tucson, Arizona. I’d check it out but would likely leave the southern tier of states for the autumn. He wanted to know what to tell Robert and Marybelle and I said to just tell them I’d be back in nine days. When you’re on the loose it’s nice to be precise about something.

  ARIZONA

  Who am I that life disappoints me? I am embarrassed by this question. I can hear dad bellowing, “Quit your goddamn moping.” It seems like my parents die in my mind several times a week. Off they go in the monsoon of night birds flushing, say bullbats soaring around in the twilight. All in all Teddy was the happiest person I’ve ever known. He didn’t have much in the way of language but he loved music. Mom would turn on NPR for classical music and Teddy would sing along to it in nonsense syllables. He was real partial to Mozart and would do crazy dances to Mozart around the kitchen and living room. I didn’t start out liking birds but I sat on the sofa so often looking at the pictures in bird books with Teddy that I got to know these creatures. Sometimes if Teddy got to smelling a bit it was always because he had a dead bird in his pocket he’d found in the yard or back forty.

  I was thinking these thoughts as I crossed the long layered bridge toward Oakland, the same bridge that had pancaked years ago in an earthquake. I was thinking that if Teddy had the wherewithal to have a grand attitude toward life why couldn’t I have one? I had always felt guilty about Teddy drowning despite the fact that I had tried so hard to teach him how to swim in our farm pond. We had some carp in the pond and Teddy always wanted to sink down and be with the carp.

  While thinking about Teddy I had taken the wrong highway. I was headed inland when I wanted to drive down the coast. My brain made a satisfying split-second calculation and I figured I could drive back by way of the coast after I saw Arizona and possibly New Mexico, and Mexico. Frankly I was scared of the heat. Dad and mom were both half-Swede and dad said his people had come from just north of the Arctic Circle in reindeer country and that he also had a hard time with hot weather. Viv loved the heat. She claimed it oiled her joints but on the hottest afternoons I’d go back to the tiny creek that ran through our woodlot and sit in a hole I had dug out in the creek bottom. The creek was spring fed and stayed much cooler than the pond behind the barn. Years ago I read the Henry Miller novels, Tropic of Cancer and Sexus sitting on the creek sipping at a six-pack of Pabst I kept stored there. I couldn’t read Miller back in college when everyone else did for the odd reason that I saw a photo of Miller and he looked a lot like my dad and I didn’t want to think of my recently dead father in terms of Miller’s shenanigans.

  Actually I had been hemmed in by traffic in my big Tahoe and couldn’t have made the right turn anyhow. I had also switched on the air conditioner and couldn’t figure out how to make it go off not wanting to take my eyes off the heavy traffic. I used to say to Viv, “Learn your car. Read the manual,” but I never did myself. I could be a perfect prick in some ways. Now unless the traffic eased up the air conditioner was bound to freeze my ass. I used to save gists and piths on my long day’s work on the farm and drop them on Viv when she got home from work. One day I dwelled on my favorite Jewish professor’s lecture on D.H. Lawrence and when Viv got home, took a shower, poured a Schnapps, put on her favorite Barry Manilow tape I quoted Lawrence “The only aristocracy is consciousness” and Viv fairly shrieked, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  I hoped to look up my old high school classmate Bert Larson who lived just west of Tucson. He had attended our ill-fated class reunion on Mullet Lake just to see if everyone turned out as badly as he expected, or so he said. When Vivivan was so tardy in her return with Fred that day Bert had said, “Bivalves are always untrustworthy.” He was so ornery in high school that he was hard to be friends with. He was actually “summer people” but at fourteen he had refused to go back to Ann Arbor with his parents who were famous botanists if professors can ever be said to be famous. He boarded with a widow and told me he screwed h
er every night. I never believed him because she was a Lutheran but maybe it was true. Bert wore a t-shirt that said Resist Much. He went to Harvard but lasted less than a month. He took a bus from Boston to Tucson and enrolled in the University of Arizona because he wanted to be a student of desert flora and become what he called a “desert rat.”

  I called Bert from a rest stop near the city of Manteca, California which I knew meant “lard” in Spanish. When young, say about twelve, I hankered to be a Mexican. At that age nothing seemed impossible. I was working full time on farms six days a week in the summer and was treated pretty much as an adult partly because I was a big kid. Bert’s family had enough money so that Bert didn’t have to work but out of contrariness he did anyway. On Saturday evenings we’d head down to the rural township hall where the Mexican workers would hold a dance with accordions and a few trumpets and a violin or two. We were shy and mostly stayed outside. They would set up grills and cook strips of meat and onions which you would eat in tortillas with peppery salsa. Bert had a mad crush on this lovely mostly blind girl about our age who sang with the bands. The next year she didn’t come back north with her family and we found out she had died in a car wreck down in Texas. Bert was inconsolable though I knew he never had the courage to say a word to her. Love is like that when you’re twelve. This girl was so good that she could sing perfectly without music. I thought of her over at Reed Point near the river when Marybelle was singing ancient songs.

  Ed had showed me how to put the cell phone on buzzer so I didn’t have to hear it ring. When I got to the motel in Kingman, Arizona, and took it out of my suitcase there were thirteen calls from Robert and Marybelle plus two from Vivian. I poured a smallish drink and went outside to feel the annoying heat, 105 degrees on a bank marquee. It’s rare for me when the outside is hotter than my insides. There was a Mexican restaurant across the street with the positive sign of a full parking lot when it wasn’t even 6 o’clock. I had this sudden good feeling that the life of the road might offer fresh thoughts in this extreme heat, the first of which was to go in my motel toilet, drop the cell phone into the toilet bowl and flush it. It was what Robert called a “great visual” to see the whirling, concentric current, and then the quiet quake and shimmer, and at the bottom the certain death of an electronic creature with nary a squeak. Sayonara motherfucker, as we used to say.

  I had dropped the California piece of the jigsaw puzzle into the Colorado River thinking that a big state finds an appropriate grave in a big river. While finishing my modest drink I studied the map of Arizona which calls itself The Grand Canyon State, the cactus wren is the bird, the motto is Ditat Deus (God Enriches) and the flower is the Saguaro which is a giant cactus. I didn’t know a cactus was a flower but I suppose it is if they say so.

  My chest and back still ached a bit from last week’s fall and it reminded me of my youth when on long hikes I had to carry Teddy in a sling on my back like a papoose. He would roar off ahead into the woods but within an hour he’d get tired and I’d have to carry him home. By the time Teddy died he weighed at least a hundred so I was really getting my exercise.

  After what I thought of as a fine Mexican dinner of the combination platter (one chile relleno, one chicken tostada, one cheese enchilada, rice and refried beans) with a single Pacifico beer, and one shot of Herradura tequila (five dollars). I went back to my motel room and on impulse called Ad. The conversation started out as pretty upsetting because it turned out that both Robert and Vivian had called him to see if he had heard from me.

  “Do me a favor and tell them I’m fine. I’m not up to talking to them at present.”

  “So now I’m your errand boy? I’ll do it if you deliver two cords of wood when you get back. I got this pancreas infection and I can’t drink so I’ve been strip searching my life. To be frank, it’s no fun.”

  “I agree it’s no fun. We’re forced to look back because we can’t see forward. Babe at the diner used to say, ‘Different day, same shit.’”

  “You have to forgive yourself for everything because no one else is going to.”

  “I have to ask you out of curiosity if you tried to get that party girl in Minneapolis to try to pee in your hat?”

  “Well, like the late President Reagan I can’t recollect that I did. I don’t wear hats but that doesn’t remove the possibility. I have to tell you that I saw Vivian in Petoskey and she said that if you come home she’ll try to buy you a farm.”

  “She’s the one who divorced me.”

  “I know that. I’m simply passing along the message. She knows from Robert that you had this young woman along for part of your trip. Maybe jealousy is making her reconsider her move.”

  “I have to clarify my thinking.”

  “That’s impossible. You’re trying to start a new life at age sixty which is also impossible. You can only try variations on your common theme. You’re a raccoon who has been treed by the hounds of life.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said and hung up the phone which in any form is a suspicious instrument except for ordering a pizza.

  I was asleep at twilight after a pleasant sex fantasy about the woman who was the cashier at the Mexican restaurant. When I told her that the food was wonderful she beamed at me. Not many women beam. She was a tad hefty, maybe about one sixty which was Viv’s size, but this woman exuded mellowness and had the haunting scent of wildflowers. We shook hands and hers was moist and my groin was tickled.

  I awoke at 4 a.m. and drank coffee waiting for daylight. I turned on CNN for a few minutes and there was a panel discussion about young people and drugs. I turned it off thinking that those blimpy little nitwits are on their own. I studied the road atlas and noted the Tonto Run and Mogollon Plateau that Zane Grey had written about in the novels I once loved. The noble cowpokes pursued craven rascals and blackguards. I had recently read that Zane Grey himself wasn’t too noble. Of course any English major knows that writers, perhaps because of their beleaguered early years, have nothing up on car salesmen, realtors, or grain dealers in terms of ethical behavior. I still remember the nasty March afternoon when a professor told us that Dostoevsky had pawned his wife’s wedding ring and had run off to the Crimea with a thirteen year old girl.

  ARIZONA II

  When I was looking for Bert’s place I momentarily regretted drowning my cell phone when I could have used it for further instructions, but then I was inattentive at mid-morning feeling a certain warmth for Viv despite her slanderous letter most of which was true. I had also been distracted by the idea that I needed to get rid of all of these personal “issues” (as Marybelle would have it) in order to proceed with my sacred project of re-naming the states and most of the birds. For instance, I had no intention of changing the name of the Godwit. In addition I was having trouble concentrating because of the alien desert flora that surrounded me. I had begun at dawn driving toward the fabled Flagstaff then slowly descending 5,000 feet in altitude from the forests of the north to the hellhole of Phoenix, then turning east toward Tucson. When I found Sandarino Road running through the border of the Saguaro National Monument I was stunned as if I had suddenly been transplanted to Mars. Finally I located the smallish dirt road that led to Bert’s place with its hand painted ominous sign, “No trespassing. Snake farm.”

  It was the strangest of days, already burning hot by late morning. Bert was out of sorts as usual and still wore a “Resist Much” t-shirt. Nothing should come as a surprise with Bert. There was a young woman named Sandra in her mid-twenties wandering around humming but it was hard to tell her age because her face was leathery, her teeth bad, though her body fairly nice. These were tell-tale signs of meth intake, a long time curse even in northern Michigan but only lately noticed by the authorities who still concentrate on the relatively harmless pot.

  Bert showed me all the snake tracks in the sandy property and said vipers were hiding from the heat, adding that ground temperature reaches nearly one hundred fifty degrees, enough to start melting the sneakers of the woebegone w
etbacks trying to enter our country for work. He ignored Sandra when she took a pee in plain sight near a cactus called a cholla. She was evidently a free spirit or a nitwit.

  We ate a nice lunch of garden tomato sandwiches which made my soul quiver because it was my first summer in over thirty-five years without a garden and my very own tomatoes. Bert had heard from his old Lutheran widow friend, now in her eighties, that Vivian had divorced me. While we were drinking quarts of ice tea Bert advised me to stay away from women under the age of fifty because they speak a different language. The words are similar but the meaning is different from what it used to be. Across the table Sandra was petting a tiny rabbit who nibbled a piece of tomato on her plate.

  By midafternoon the sun had become reddish from a distant sandstorm and Bert cursed because the monsoons were overdue. Bert left pans of water spread around the yard for the snakes but said they usually traveled to his pond way out back. People in the area would call Bert in alarm and he would remove the rattlers from their yards. He said that the roadrunner bird would eat baby snakes but not the big ones. We were at the kitchen table and now Sandra was licking the rabbit’s face as if grooming it. The house was quite bare except for the living room with its walls of books and a desk.