The English Major

by Jim Harrison

  “When I woke up this morning I began to think of myself as a Zen-Indian,” he said.

  “That’s a pretty big mouthful to chew, Danny boy.”

  “Hey, fuck you,” he said, and walked out. She winked at me and paid the bill. To be frank, she had a perfect fanny which that fungoid nitwit didn’t deserve.

  When I started the Tahoe the buzzing began again which it had three times between Patagonia and Tombstone from a row of buttons above the windshield. It was a gizmo called Onstar which I knew was a kind of phone but I assumed someone was calling the previous owner. Ed, Robert’s friend and driver, had told me that if I wanted to use it I had to call a number in New Jersey and have it activated which I had no intention of doing. I gave up and pressed a likely button.

  “This is Jack Kerouac,” I said.

  “Dad, that’s not funny,” Robert fairly shouted. “What did you do to your cell phone?”

  “I drowned it in a toilet. It was abusive.”

  “Dad, you’re a runaway! Mom is sick, sick, sick. She has Type II diabetes. You should go home and HELP her.”

  “Robert, your mother pitched me out on my ear. Three of the eight friends of mine at deer camp have type II diabetes. What it means is they take a pill and can’t have pop, desserts, pasta, potatoes, and bread among other things. Vivian is going to have to give up her Pepsis, donuts, and butterscotch Schnapps for starters.”

  “Well, at least call her. It would be an ordinary act of kindness. She told me she NEEDS you.”

  Suddenly Marybelle was on the phone and her voice wasn’t exactly Mozart to my ears. While I waited for the coming attack I watched five Japanese men dressed to the hilt as cowboys get out of a SUV and enter the restaurant.

  “Cliff, I think it’s time you reached out for maturity. You told me that you did the cooking in your family and it’s obvious you’re the cause of your wife’s diabetes.”

  “It was Pepsi, powdered donuts, butterscotch Schnapps,” I interrupted. “Also the occasional Oreo binge, as many as fifteen at once.”

  “Be that as it may who else could be at fault?”

  “Vivian?” I suggested.

  “O bullshit, Cliff. You’re in denial. Meanwhile I think I’m going to start working for Robert in September as his aide, his girl Friday. San Francisco is seething with theatre groups and I think I could return to the real me out here.”

  “What have you been all your life?” I was seriously interested.

  “Fuck you, Cliff. What I want you to do is to come back to San Francisco and that way I could ride with you as far as Minnesota. I need to go home and pack up and that way we could talk about all of our issues. Frankly, I’m a little lonely for your dick, Cliff.”

  “I can’t come back to San Francisco. I’m headed for Reed Point in Montana, that place on the river where you sang to me when I was sick. I’m going to rent a cabin, go fishing and work on my states and birds project. It needs closure.” I thought it might help if I used the word closure, one of Marybelle’s favorite words.

  “Cliff, I need you. Just get here ASAP. Robert wants to say something.”

  I quickly hung up and then pressed buttons until I reached Onstar headquarters and talked to a nice sounding woman who after a delay told me that my service had only been activated that morning and since the vehicle was owned by Robert he would have to “authorize deactivation.” I gave up in a trance over her melodious voice. There was the idea that I could buy a squirt gun and keep shooting the gizmo until it expired.

  Lucky for me I drove off on a side road that had been marked on my map by one of the fellows in the bar in Patagonia. I was headed for New Mexico which is purple on the jigsaw puzzle. It’s known as “The Land of Enchantment,” a feeling I could use. My friend the roadrunner is the bird, the yucca the flower, and Crescit eundo (it grows as it goes), the state motto. I can’t say I understand the latter and struggled to get my mind to let it pass.

  I impulsively called Ad since it was Saturday and I knew he’d be home before making hospital visits. He gave the alarming news that my grandpa’s old place had half-burned down because a yuppie had tried to do his own rewiring. It was for sale at a bargain price and he suggested that I try to get Vivian to buy it for me. This was a startling idea and I let it pass without comment since I’m a slow study. He then said that Vivian’s prognosis was good as long as she strictly followed a diabetic regime. He was trying to clear a week to go trout fishing and we made some tentative plans to meet in Montana. When I pressed the button to turn off the phone I was a little alarmed at how suddenly the possibilities of life could change with a phone call. It was melancholy to think how badly my dad had wanted to buy Grandpa’s place that had to be sold when the old boy got cancer. He had no insurance and the money had been eaten up in the usual unsuccessful attempt to treat liver cancer. My friend Ad told me that it was not infrequent to see the aged devour their net worth in a forlorn attempt to stay alive.

  My glum thoughts quickly dissipated in the beauty of the mountain landscape. My new found cronies back in Patagonia had directed me on a challenging mountain route that would arrive at the location of Geronimo’s surrender at the foot of Skelton Canyon. I had remembered dwelling on a photo of Geronimo in a history book and thinking that he was the toughest looking hombre in the world.

  The road was a bit slippery from the recent monsoon so I drove slowly in 4WD, pausing to check a set of large feline tracks crossing the dirt road that signaled the recent passing of a mountain lion. I beeped the horn at a group of skinny cows who charged off into the brush. It turned out it was harder to descend then ascend, and on the far side of the mountain I went into a barely controllable skid that made me sweat. I thought once again that we who hail from east of the Mississippi are rarely aware of how much emptiness there is in the west. At times it seems a little threatening.

  When I reached Skelton Canyon I decided to call Vivian. At first she sounded a little blurred and plaintive but then recovered her old Viv spirit the moment I tried to make a deal. I said that I’d come home if she’d buy me my grandpa’s old place and pay for the cost of rebuilding it. I should have known this was the area of her expertise. She said she’d think about it though she would retain the deed in her name and limit me to a life lease. Love is like that. She said that Fred had tried to forge a check of hers and she was pressing charges. “Life without donuts is real tough,” she said. She meandered about the hot weather, her horrid diet and that she was thinking about buying a Corgi pup. She found it puzzling that she could still love an old fool like myself.

  I took a long hike up the road in the gathering heat, then drove up to Portal and checked into a motel early because I wanted to think things over. Life had gone from slow to too fast. At lunch (a green chili cheeseburger that made me sweat) an ancient waitress told me that Nabokov used to hang around Portal to chase butterflies. This was more thrilling to me than the idea that my own home ground once had Hemingway as a summer visitor. Viv even bought table and chairs from a furniture company’s Hemingway Collection.

  UTAH

  Nothing on my trip thus far was as I expected which shows you that rather than simply read about the United States you have to log the journey. I mean the look and feel of it. I’ve read that television has made us all the same but I haven’t seen the evidence for that point of view.

  Suddenly while traversing a mountain valley I felt a surge of resentment over the numberless times I had to teach Carl Sandburg, Steven Vincent Benet, Edward Arlington Robinson, and Robert Frost. I mean they’re all okay but then the repetition became sodden and I came to favor Edna St. Vincent Millay whom I read in college while drinking two beers to help me feel her extreme emotions. The Frost represented in high school anthologies reminded me overmuch of my mom’s weekly letters while I was in college so full of cryptic reminders of my duties which were never spelled out. She also liked to say that my dead father would wish me to be a success when my dad never spoke about such things except to say that successf
ul people never had much time for important things like hunting, fishing, drinking, and wandering around in the woods. High school literary anthologies always seemed skewed to the middle path of good citizenship which means they left out the best work. In the middle of these muddled thoughts I stopped and tossed New Mexico into a roadside mud puddle around which Nabakovian butterflies fluttered.

  In the mid-afternoon I was cutting across the Navajo reservation from Window Rock in the east toward the west when I was nailed by Vivian on the Onstar. She said she would put a down payment on grandpa’s place if I’d head straight home. I said “nothing doing” because I was aiming at catching some brown trout and meeting Ad in Montana. She was pissed off and then teary saying that Fred was trying to jumpstart their affair again. “He only listens to his own mind. He can’t hear anyone else,” she said, and then hung up on me. This comment actually reminded me of Viv at her worst. For instance, she doesn’t want the cosmos to be so large. The night we returned from our last polka party we were standing out in the backyard and the stars were especially brilliant and I mentioned that I had read that astronomers had discovered that there weren’t twelve billion galaxies, there were ninety billion. She was quiet for a moment and then whispered, “That’s how much money Bill Gates has.” Since I can’t get my head around large sums of money I said, “I’m talking about galaxies,” and she said, “I don’t believe a goddamn word you say, Cliff.” She went into the house leaving the odor of butterscotch schnapps in the night air. I had hoped we would make love but then I shot off my mouth about galaxies even though I knew Viv preferred earth as a limited homeland. With Viv gone Lola approached and I sat in the grass petting her while we listened to a couple of whippoorwills from out by the pond.

  Viv’s call made me lose my energy and I turned north toward Chinle. The air conditioner was on but the thermometer built into the rear view mirror read one hundred. I simply had to get out of this fearsome heat where even nighttime was as warm as a warm day back home. I fantasized about a cabin in Montana where I’d sit buck naked out on a porch at midnight and get real cold. This fantasy changed when I checked into the Thunderbird Lodge in Chinle and the clerk at the desk was a lovely Navajo woman who quickly joined me on my dream porch in Montana. She, however, was all business and evinced no interest in a white geezer other than to book me on a guided evening trip into Canyon de Chelly assuming no monsoon rains hit between now and then.

  In my room I studied the road atlas for the route over toward Colorado City which had been much in the news because of apostate Mormon polygamy mayhem. When I first heard this news I tried to imagine what it would be like to be married to seven versions of Vivian. Better to volunteer for the front lines in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now in the room I remembered when I first noticed Viv when she was running the bases for the girl’s softball team. She bowled over the Boyne City shortstop and second baseman. I was a timid soul at the time and she was a little hefty for my taste but I wholeheartedly admired her boldness and verve. Throughout our marriage when there was an illness or death or injury in our country neighborhood Viv was always the first one there to help out by organizing everything. When our neighbor Durwood lost a hand to a faulty corn picker Viv got him a hot shot lawyer in Suttons Bay and now Durwood and his wife tour the south every winter in their fancy motor home. Everyone describes Viv as a “go-getter.” This certainly did not mean that Viv would be sympathetic to my project which now seemed part of my destiny, a big word but what else could I call it? I’d have to keep it hidden from her just as my college heroine Emily Dickinson kept her poetry writing largely in secret. When she finally showed her verses to the eminent editor Higgenson he turned out to be largely a nitwit.

  I fell asleep and missed my tour of Canyon de Chelly thus losing my thirty dollar deposit. So it goes. I had become self-indulgent and careless. Thirty bucks was a day’s work in the former times but when I took a stroll there was an explosive cloud burst and the tour dune buggies came racing in with drenched passengers. I stood there in the parking lot in the sheets of rain taking an al fresco shower, not wanting anything else on earth except to be cold and wet, smelling the heat disappear from the rocky landscape into the rich odor of rain.

  I had a gorgeous dinner of chile rellenos at the lodge, hot peppers stuffed with meat and cheese. The Navajo Reservation is dry and I had run out of whiskey which seemed to make my dreams more vivid. My dreams kept returning to images from a childhood book, Brave Tales of Real Dogs. My mother didn’t care for dogs so dad read it to me. It was easy enough back then, and occasionally now, to wish to be a dog running through the mountains, perhaps with a flask of precious serum tied around its neck to save a remote and imperiled village. However, in my confused dream my run through the Alps had been accompanied by small elephants obviously leftover from Hannibal’s trek, another favorite story of my dad’s.

  These images did not permit sound sleep and I awoke at 4 A.M., turned on the light and discovered a dead fly in my bed. Maybe I rolled over on it, poor thing. It owned a leg and head like me. Luckily I had bought extra coffee paks at a convenience store and made a strong little pot. In my run across the Alps as a dog there had also been flocks of birds in the pink, twilit sky. Anyone who had picked up a dead blackbird knows that it’s not truly black. In a notepad next to the desk phone I wrote down “darkbird.” Not great but not bad. I had no fear of avian flu thinking the scare similar to Viv’s frenzy over the Y2K event and the threat to her precious computer.

  I made tracks straight up the gut of Utah on Rte. 89 after burying Arizona in a toeful of dirt near Kanab. I’d say the drive between Many Farms and Kayenta had been the most splendid of the trip. Perhaps as a joke the puzzle people had made Utah green which it was only in the highest elevation from junipers and other conifers. A cow had to work hard to fill its tummy. As a matter of fact I couldn’t recall a single fat cow in Arizona. Maybe in both Arizona and Utah the cows just stand around getting skinny while they wait for the greening that comes after the summer monsoons. Meanwhile Utah thinks of itself as the Beehive State, the California gull is the bird, plain old “Industry” is the motto, and the sego lily, which I looked for in vain, is the state flower.

  Marybelle called when I was driving around Panguitch looking in vain for a liquor store. For a change she was cheery rather than abrasive, complimenting me on raising such a fine son. I was wary waiting for her female hobnail boot to drop but it didn’t happen other than for her to say that I must return to Vivian and nurse her back to health. She did complain about her lack of “sexual outlet” and I jokingly suggested she tour San Francisco’s waterfront or hang out around one of the many local colleges. “Cliff, I’m searching for a worthy partner, a whole person, not a moron with a hard-on.” I apologized with a trace of sincerity.

  Utah would be a grand state if you could subtract Salt Lake City, the traffic of which wrung my soul into a dish rag. By the time I reached a rest stop north of the city I was actually trembling. I sat there at a picnic table vowing to never drive through a big city again. This would cost time and inconvenience but so what? When a blue-haired lady passes you an inch away going eighty while talking on a cell phone you fear for the Republic. Was it for this that the seagulls devoured the grasshoppers and saved the Mormon crops?

  I reached Dillion, Montana, at nightfall feeling dumb as a post for having driven fifteen hours. I had three drinks and ate a mediocre slab of rare roast beef. I drove back to my humble motel and fell asleep in the parking lot quite happy to be cold. When I awoke at 2 a.m. there was a truly ugly little dog sitting outside my car door having smelled the piece of leftover roast beef I took from the restaurant in a doggy bag. I gave him the meat and despite my gift he growled when I patted his head. In my room I tried to turn the print of the sad-eyed donkey with a lei of flowers around its neck so I wouldn’t have to look at it but it was stuck to the wall to prevent that. I fell asleep wishing Marybelle were perched on my nose like a gryphon.

  MONTANA REDUX

&
nbsp; I had the slowest morning start of my trip. I was still be-numbed at daylight by the overlong drive but there was no point in chiding myself further. I clicked on the weather channel then fell back asleep after learning that Montana would be in the mid-eighties which beat the shit out of the over hundred degree weather I had been enduring to the south along with everyone else who lived there. I awoke again sinfully late at nine with last night’s little dog growling and scratching at the door. I let him in and he made a quick circle and then, determining I had nothing more for him to eat, made a beeline back to the door. I decided at that moment to adopt him if he was a genuine stray or had been abandoned by someone staying at the motel. He somewhat resembled the dog of my dreams running through the Alps among the miniature elephants.

  I had an irritating hard-on and reminded myself that I must stay high-minded for my project. I glanced in the mirror while rinsing my face with cold water to wake up. I whispered “Devouring time blunt thou thy lion’s paws,” in honor of Shakespeare whom I still liked to read now and then for the same reason I listen to Mozart with pleasure fifty years after my mother introduced me to him. I tried to dismiss a pinprick of homesickness beneath my breastbone but then thought that homesickness like marital love was mostly a habit. What I missed was no longer there or on the verge of disappearing. I mean Lola was in dog heaven and the farm which had been sold to a stockbroker and his family from Chicago was to become a horse operation. The barn and my cozy workshop would likely be remodeled into stables, the orchard uprooted for pasture, and our old home razed in favor of what Viv said would be “French provincial” whatever that was. I consoled myself with the idea that there was freedom in having this large portion of your past vaporize. Flumius fumus, or something like that, said Thomas Wolfe, my hero when I was a senior in high school. I think it meant that our life goes up in smoke.