The English Major

by Jim Harrison

  MONTANA REDUX III

  Dawn and on my way east toward Reed Point I began to think of my plans as a little ill formed. I didn’t remember seeing a motel in the tiny village much less the library that I’d need for the project. I pulled off the Interstate near Whitehall and looked at the map determining that Livingston might be the best destination, remembering that when I passed through Big Timber it seemed rather small.

  The morning had begun with a lurch. The NPR news from Iraq made me heartsick and I turned to a classical station only to hear that Borodin music that had been used for “Kismet.” This was the singular piece of classical music that Viv loved and I loathed it. I’d hear her from the shower, especially if she had been into the schnapps, singing. “Take my hand, I’m a stranger in Paradise.” I certainly knew I wasn’t the object of her fantasies. She intermixed her reading of conspiracy novels with romantic novels. I had looked at a couple and noted that when hero and heroine fucked they tended to fall back on great waves of nothingness. At one point I had hidden her Kismet album in the pump shed and she had, guessing me as the guilty party, defiantly bought three more copies in Traverse City. What’s more, she had taken to singing the song when she wanted to irritate me.

  I limited myself to a few minutes of pondering marriage. Marybelle had said that she loved to act because you got to be “many people, not just one.” Of course she already was. Maybe one of the problems with Viv and me is that each of us was just one person. Perhaps this came about because when you are born and raised in the country neuroses are only minimally tolerated. You can be goofy if you’re a good worker. In the upper Midwest stern duty always calls and to be late for work or a layabout is a crime against the State. You have your coffee and then feed your farm animals before you feed yourself. Trying to figure out the place of marriage’s arduous dreariness became inscrutable parked there on the roadside. A raven watched me from a fence post and then turned around and pooped. I took this as a coincidence rather than a sign. In marriage ceremonies the word twain was used for that old-timey sacral feeling, also asunder.

  The Onstar buzzed and there was the thought of disabling it with a pistol. It was Robert and he sounded drunk and tearful.

  “Dad, I’ve been up all night in a state of joy because my parents are getting back together.”

  “Well, I’ve turned toward home but we haven’t exactly made a deal yet.” It was 6 A.M. in San Francisco and I was expecting a mudbath.

  “I worked out the GPS coordinates and you’ll be living forty miles from each other which is not EXACTLY romantic but it’s a start. I’ve had a lot of turmoil in my LIFE and those memories of you and mom and me walking through the orchard at SUNSET holding hands has kept me going. I’m so grateful for the way you raised me. Thank you. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” His voice was breaking and I began to sweat despite the coolish morning.

  “Dad, the car is now in your name so you can terminate the phone service but please don’t. It’s a lifeline of our family.”

  He was sounding drowsy and we said our goodbyes after a lame discussion of how I might help Viv with her diabetic diet which involved constant donut prevention. Put out the raging donut fires!

  For the time being there would be no more puzzle pieces to toss away in the watercourse, not anyway until I made my next voyage which I assumed would be in the coming winter. When you don’t have much to do, why rush? I’d have to go home through the same states where likely no one has found those small waterlogged pieces. My dream had forbade re-crossing the Mississippi so I would have to cut way north up by International Falls, a vehicular end run so as not to defile my dreamscape. Many artists have received oracular hot tips from their sleeping brains. I certainly wasn’t an artist yet but I had a sense of calling not unlike James Joyce near the estuary when he saw the girl pull her dress up her thighs. Art loves biology.

  My thoughts drifted back to a nasty incident in the Hitch’n Post Bar the night before. I was having a bountiful nightcap after eating a famous Montana dish, the chicken fried steak with cream gravy, and idly talking to a nicely dressed woman in her thirties who was a grade school teacher south of Melrose in Dillon. She was what we used to think of as a “plain Jane” but in her case so plain that she was quite attractive. She also wore an ever so slight lilac scent, an odor that always gets my hormones churning. We were talking about the pleasures and horrors of teaching when two cowboys entered, one very big and one small, both a little drunk. She waved and said, “There’s my husband,” which surprised me because she had said they’d only moved from Seattle the year before and I hadn’t expected she’s married a cowboy in Seattle. However, I was gradually figuring out that the real cowboys wore hats with sweat-stained brims, had severely weather beaten skin and their clothes tended to be frayed. Anyway, the smaller one lurched between us half knocking his wife off her stool at the bar. He was wearing newish western clothes and an absurd turquoise bolo tie.

  “Watch it buddy,” he said as if I was the one who shoved his wife.

  “Of course,” I said shrugging.

  “I might just kick your ass,” he fairly shrieked.

  “Cut that shit out, Freddy,” his large friend said, rolling his eyes to apologize to me.

  “I think I better kick your ass,” Freddy said grabbing my shirt.

  “That seems unlikely. You’re a smallish cowpoke and I’m a large farmer,” I was smiling to try to defuse the situation.

  “Freddy, you turd!” his plain Jane wife hissed. She grabbed his ear, twisting it, and then led him out of the bar with his head leaning into her hand. That was that. An old lady and a couple of actual cowboys laughed loudly.

  I was diverted by NPR where a disembodied male voice said that a mere teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh a billion tons. As a literature person I at first missed the point and wondered at the preposterous strength of the teaspoon. I was amazed at my own density while closing in on the fair-sized city of Bozeman. I had mulled it over and decided that I didn’t need a close-by library, only a simple book that characterized our fifty states, plus my bird books. I would begin by changing the names of the states and birds I already knew and then with travel and bird watching gradually complete the project. I was saddened by the idea that I might not finish the work before I died, a natural enough fear. Keats wrote, “When I have fears that I may cease to be before my pen had gleaned my teeming brain…” That was throwing the raw meat on the floor in a lovely way. My brain wasn’t exactly teeming but nature is heraldic and birds simply don’t deserve the banal names we’ve given them.

  While filling up at a service station outside of Bozeman I was impressed once again by the fact that there is no tourniquet for a self-harried brain. The young man at the cash register had tiny rings in his eyebrows, nose, and ears, perhaps a sign of the new West. It turned out he was from Columbus near Reed Point where I shouldn’t stay if I wanted any action. When I said I preferred solitude he said that I’d have solitude coming out my ass in Reed Point and that Livingston was “chock full of willing pussy.” Back in my car I questioned myself why I wanted solitude when I had just had a twenty-five year dose of it while working the farm? And I was headed for a lot more of it while I remodeled Grandpa’s house where it would be a dozen mile drive to even look at a female. It was also doubtful if the visiting Ad would tolerate Reed Point. At deer camp Ad would drive to Grand Marais or Newberry and close the bars at night. He reminded me of a poet who was one of my roommates at a squalid little bungalow on Lake Lansing when I was a junior in college. Every night he’d go out carousing quoting a line of Rilke saying, “Only in the rat-race of the arena can the heart learn to beat.” I presumed this man Rilke to be a pretty racy poet but when I looked at one of his books I found out otherwise.

  I stopped at the Country Bookshelf in Bozeman and bought a compendium of the fifty states designed for young adults, also two books on local grizzly bears and rattlesnakes. If I climbed a wilderness mountain I wanted to take precaut
ions with the local fauna. The bookstore had a number of attractive clerks who didn’t make eye contact with me but looked just above my hairline reminding me again of my safe place in the biological dumpster.

  In Livingston it didn’t take long through the Chamber of Commerce to find a good place to stay because there had been a cancellation on a temporary rental on Ninth Street Island in the Yellowstone River. On the way out to look at the place I called Ad on his cellular because the rental price was expensive. Ad said he had a pretty woman in the stirrups in the other room so that in order to be professional he was thinking about “mom and apple pie.” He would be out in five days and wanted reassurance that our quarters were near the night life whatever that turned out to be. He also said that he had hurt an ankle on a hike and that I should hire a drift boat and guide for the week.

  The house was fine and I ponied up the dough to the rental agent, a lumpy woman who still was slightly attractive, as were nearly all women the further away I got from Marybelle. I wandered around the island after examining the suitable kitchen utterly relieved that I’d be able to cook for myself. The main channel of the Yellowstone was west of the house and looked so large as to be spooky for wading but there was a wide but shallower fishable channel to the east and I felt simply enthralled to have fishing near my doorstep. Since it was hot and clear I decided to take a snooze, go grocery shopping, and fish later in the afternoon.

  I lay back in a Lazy Boy chair and in sleep was drawn vividly to Viv (excuse the pun) in a dream so lurid I woke in a half hour in a sweat. The year after we were married and well before she was pregnant with Robert, Viv and I had met for the weekend with a dozen college friends at Houghton Lake, a mildly squalid resort area favored by the blue collar crowd of Flint and Detroit. We all met at the Lagoona Beach Motel and when we checked in I questioned the smart ass desk clerk whether the correct spelling shouldn’t be spelled “Laguna” and he said “What are you, a English major?” and everyone laughed. Viv and I were antidrug but we ended up smoking a lot of pot and drinking too much that weekend. Marijuana turned Viv into an implacable sexual tigress and I returned home with actual bruises. She did a lot of hooting and hollering to be frank. We all went nude swimming at night and I was so stoned that when I was underwater I couldn’t find the surface. Now thirty-seven years later I woke up pissed off because I was sure I saw a guy named Bob playing with Viv’s big tits.

  MONTANA REDUX IV

  I came fully awake in my chair in a condition of panic because when emerging from the edge of sleep I realized this August date was the first anniversary of our fatal high school reunion, a day that will live in infamy or something like that. We had been lukewarm about attending in the first place, especially me, because I hadn’t wanted to drive way back from Mullet Lake on a Sunday evening what with all of those pissed off tourists heading back to urban prisons. And little did I know I would be driving back to the farm with a boozed up Viv with shameless grass stains on her knees.

  Enough! Enough, my heart literally yelled at itself as I struggled out of the reclining chair, the knob to bring it upright being stuck. There was the question in college of whether or not Thoreau had ever had the pleasure of sexual union or did he remain a monk of nature? The school reunion had blasted my life apart with the power of a Shiite car bomb and my errant thoughts told me there were pieces that still needed to be rejoined.

  Luckily it was late enough in the afternoon that my mind drifted to creaturely hunger and the idea of a sizeable pork steak in an iron skillet displaced the battering of divorce. Viv never liked pork steak thinking of it as “poor people’s food” so Lola and I would share it for lunch. A history professor had said that pork had fueled our westward course of empire. Pigs happily followed the wagon trains that carried their evening meal.

  On the way to downtown Livingston to do my shopping I stopped at a bar called The Owl (a proper name for a bird, especially barn owl) for a pick-me-up and to find out a place to buy non-factory-farm pork. It was a bar populated by locals rather than tourists and they all seemed to drink pretty fast. Working folks are rarely sippers. Back in high school we’d have chug-a-lug contests and my friend Bert learned to pour down a bottle of beer without swallowing and won all the contests though there were no prizes except to be drunk.

  At The Owl I got my pork instructions and also met an acerbic man in his forties who gave me his fishing guide card. On the way out I remembered that Ad had said he’d ordered two cases from a wine store and that I should pick them up. I never go into such places finding them intimidating as men’s clothing stores. I’d buy a half gallon of Gallo Hearty Burgundy at the grocery store though I admit when I went to Ad’s house I enjoyed his expensive penchant for French wine but then he said he made his wine budget by indulging a few hypochondriacs. The two cases cost $470 so I was pleased that Ad had paid ahead by credit card. It seemed a lot of wine for the five days that Ad would be there but then he tended to drag home lassies after the bar closed.

  While I was loading the wine into the Tahoe I turned in order to listen to two attractive young women leaning against an older Volvo parked next to me. Women who have inferred that I’m not very interesting admit that I’m a good listener and this includes eavesdropping. One of the women was pushing a baby stroller containing a fat little rascal who was watching me with blank suspicion. She was explaining to the other who was obviously a ditz like Marybelle that her baby had only learned to crawl backwards which meant that the objects of his desire were always receding. I found this startling and full of meaning. The other woman prattled on about her upcoming divorce and used words like “iconic” and “embedded” and “closure.” She had found her husband’s obsession with fishing “too phallocentric” for words. Once when we had visited Viv’s cousin down in Suttons Bay I had heard a group of women using such language but I had no idea where it came from. Even common sensical Viv only used to have problems but now had issues.

  On the way back to the rental I tuned in the livestock report and laughed at the idea that I would have made real money on my cattle this year mostly because Canadian beef was still embargoed over mad cow disease. It reminded me of the year the cherry crop in southern Michigan (a state that perhaps should be called Ojibway?) froze out in the budding stage and our crop up north made substantial money for a change. In farming your good luck often depends on someone else’s bad. Toyota is ascendant while Ford mopes, that sort of thing.

  What pleasure I had cooking my own dinner and there on the desk in the corner were my tablets, pens, books, ready for my life’s work to commence. I dipped my massive pork steak in beaten egg to which I had added Tabasco, salt, and pepper, then rolled it in Italian bread crumbs. I used twelve dollar olive oil which made me shudder at the point of purchase. I added three cloves of finely chopped garlic and a tin of anchovies on my salad. Life on the road doesn’t present strong flavors except nasty ones, the deliquescent gravy that arrives in barrels. I certainly had experienced none of the bandied about food revolution which was obviously limited to cities and folks with fat wallets.

  I was silly and imprudent and drank a whole bottle of Ad’s wine that he especially liked called Sang des Cailloux Vacqueyras which he explained to me meant “blood of the stones.” Ad has been to France many times but the young woman who teaches languages at the high school said that she had overheard Ad at a party and the French he spoke was hokum nonsense like that on the restaurant skits on Prairie Home Companion. I asked Ad about this and he only said that the sound is more meaningful than the words “just like dogs barking.” To be sure, Ad is a puzzle.

  What with a full bottle of wine in my system I fished poorly after dinner and after tangling my leader and snapping off flies several times I settled on sitting on a boulder and watching night fall so slowly that it seemed to be rising up out of the river. I stumbled back to the house in the pitch dark, put on a pot of coffee intending to work, then fell asleep in a chair waking at two a.m. to the sound of bull bats through the screen
door flying after insects. It was an electric moment and I heard myself talking aloud, “I have no more time for self-doubt which is a profession in itself for English majors. I must follow my star even if it turns out to be one of those squiggly motes floating through my eyeball.” I thought how preposterous it was that anyone would try to paste a decal of sanity on our time. Like Thoreau I must walk to the beat of my own drummer. Ten years of teaching and twenty-five of farming had beaten my youthful idealism senseless but now I felt that it had begun to burble up again in me. In late April I’d take a pitchfork and rake out to the woodlot with Lola leading the way and free up the spring of its detritus of mud, leaves and sticks. It was quite beautiful to see the pure water pour upward, flooding the surrounding wild leeks, skunk cabbage, snake grass, and trillium. I had abandoned my purest impulses for a lifetime of toil and now they were arising again.

  Sitting there at the desk in the middle of the night with a mug full of coffee I could barely see the newish moon through the opaque window which showed my reflection with the moon perched on my hairline. Obviously my road trip had begun to tug my mind back from the so called real world to the world of books I had so valued in my late teens and early twenties. I had always thought of my university experience as largely unpleasant which in truth it was, but now the ghosts of all those books and ideas were returning. Doubtless the sexual depth charge of Marybelle had loosened me up for which I felt oddly grateful. Right after college I had dreamed of having what I thought of as a Henry Miller experience and it had lain in wait until I was sixty, perhaps too late in life to want the experience repeated right away. Holy Cow! What a woman.