The English Major

by Jim Harrison

  “Jesus Christ, don’t die,” she shrieked.

  “I forgot to breathe.” I sucked in air and the room began to resume shape.

  Then the phone rang. It actually rang three times in fifteen minutes. I said, “I’m not here” and Sylvia answered, introducing herself as the “cleaning woman.” The first call was Vivian who insisted a note should be left saying to call her ASAP. Rather than ruining the mood I liked the candid shot of Sylvia on the phone. “I think he got crippled up from climbing a mountain but he’ll be okay.”

  “Who is Vivian?”

  “My ex-wife. She ran off with a guy named Fred last year and now she sort of wants me back.”

  “Are you going?” Sylvia scratched her tummy which gave me a tremor.

  “I’m not sure.” The phone rang again and this time it was Robert. Sylvia repeated the mountain climbing injury story, hung up, and told me to call my son Robert ASAP. She went back to her Tai Chi and told me that her mother had lived with a gambler in Vegas who had been in the top fifty of the World Series of Poker but he had wanted her to screw his friends.

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “I bet she’s real pretty.”

  “She’s a knockout but she’ll crush any man’s nuts to get back to the blackjack table. I’m hungry. Do you mind frying the fish for me?”

  She moved her Tai Chi to the kitchen while I fried the fish and made a small salad. The move to the kitchen overcame the ten foot barrier and I pinned my dick under my belt when she turned to answer the phone again. This time it was Marybelle who wanted me to call her during her lunch break at 1:00 p.m. California time. It was enervating but I had to leave the phone plugged in because Ad might have trouble with his flight west.

  Her table manners were delightfully messy and when she said, “You know how to fry a fish, kiddo,” I glowed. My mom had beaten perfect table manners into me. How many hundreds of times did I hear, “Little Cliff, strong and able, keep your elbows off the table,” or “chew thirty-two times with your mouth closed.” Even though the food from your mouth was gone you had to chew thirty-two times.

  A droplet of butter from the fried fish had fallen on the upper part of Sylvia’s breast and was slowing making its way toward a pink nipple. As Robert would say, “What a visual!” About two-thirds of the way through the meal she glanced up at the wall clock and fairly shouted, “Time’s up.” She modestly turned her back when she slipped on her clothes and I got the best view yet of her flexed buttocks which would win the Olympics if they had sense enough to have a best butt competition. She hastily finished her meal then lost herself in thought.

  “I have to say that a man’s dick is the silliest looking thing in the world. When I was about twelve and doing confession with our priest I asked him why if God wanted us to take men seriously did he give them dicks that look like night crawlers?”

  “What did he answer?”

  “He said, “I have no idea, daughter. Call me if you want another posing session,” and then she was out the door and gone with my tightly rolled three one hundred dollar bills in her hand. She streaked past the window like a bird of prey. So this is the life of an artist, I mused. I tuned in the NPR station from Bozeman and got a Brahms symphony which was less interesting than nude Sylvia. My brain flitted around like a hummingbird looking for nectar in my last year. Marybelle had been pretty much pure accident, say like a meteorite killing a steer. The only other sexually explosive period of my life had been during the first month of marriage to Viv. Marybelle had come along so late in my life, an absurdly answered prayer, that I thought all too frequently of mere survival.

  The phone rang but luckily it was Ad who had a three hour layover in Minneapolis airport and was strictly limiting himself to five drinks. I had given him the number and Ad had spoken at length with our fishing guide who had said that thunderstorms were predicted and we might have to go up and fish the Missouri if the Yellowstone got muddy, or perhaps go back to the Big Hole where I had already been if the water wasn’t too low. I recognized that Ad was just killing time with his cell phone and I wasn’t very attentive. I was feeling homesick for northern Michigan, for a home, a farm, that would likely no longer be there in any recognizable condition. I had the idea that they would save the ancient barn because city people think that barns are pretty. Grandpa’s place up in the woods would have to suffice though there was a pretty good garden spot.

  I was also somewhat dreading certain aspects of Ad’s visit, not the fishing but the drinking. For more than a decade we had been cooking a bachelor dinner once a month, deciding in advance what subject we would discuss excluding farming and medicine. These dinners didn’t start out as bachelor affairs but neither Vivian nor Ad’s wife at the time found our talk interesting so they went bowling in Petoskey. Ad thought this bowling might be a cover-up for adultery but like most preposterously adulterous men Ad was always worried about his wife’s faithfulness. Anyway, we tended to drink too much when together. With me it was sometimes a defensive measure because I only got actually drunk when I was with Ad who was always discovering new wines for us to try. He tended to drink wine like beer, you know, two sips then down the hatch in big gulps.

  I went to my work table and was soon engrossed in the juvenile books on all the states that I had bought in Bozeman. When I sniffed the air sharply I could still pick up Sylvia’s waning scent. After the Brahms they played Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony which alleviated my stupid melancholy.

  MONTANA REDUX VII

  I had a bowl of my soothing chicken soup and made my phone calls which turned out to be pleasantly inconsequential. Vivian wanted an address to send contracts and I said I expected to be back home in ten days at which her voice became softer and more cordial. Marybelle only wanted me to check my dope kit because she thought she dropped her earrings in there in Nebraska. I found them and she was delighted though when I saw my tube of dick salve at the bottom of the kit it wasn’t a sentimental moment. Robert was upset because I had told Vivian that I wouldn’t accept his share of the farm. I said that I would put my money in the bank which would give me five grand a year, plus four grand retirement from my years of teaching, I had a place to stay and could heat with wood. I could get farm work or possibly a janitorial job at the school. He said, “Dad, that’s 17 grand below the poverty level. And don’t SIGN any contracts with mom without SHOWING them to a lawyer first. And you have to have health insurance.” I didn’t tell him that I intended to sell the expensive Tahoe and buy a cheap used pick-up which I would need to haul building material to grandpa’s place. I also couldn’t explain how much I looked forward to playing the role of my old hero Thoreau in a clearing in the woods. If I visited Bert in mid-winter I’d camp out there and back.

  On the way to Bozeman I stopped on a mountain pass to watch a gorgeous thunderstorm coming from the south, a regular event up in Michigan but evidently rarer in the west. The guide, Tim, had advised me that the storms might ruin the Yellowstone for a couple of days but I didn’t mind getting Ad away from the active bar life of Livingston.

  At the Bozeman Airport the deboarding passengers looked ashen from the bumpy ride and I heard a number say to greeting friends that the plane had been struck by lightning, all the more reason not to get on these tumble-buggies. Ad looked especially bad though he was dressed in expensive outdoor clothes as were half the male passengers who had arrived for Montana trout vacations. The word “clones” came to mind at baggage when they picked up their big fly rod containers with multiple rods. I raised my eyebrows at Ad in a mute question.

  “Carolyn is filing for divorce because I accidentally gave her herpes. I had a run-in with a biker chick in Kalkaska when I was fishing the Manistee. Carolyn will fleece me. I’ll be financially ruined.”

  I was wondering how you accidentally give your wife herpes but didn’t say anything. Ad always says he’s in a state of “financial ruin” for one reason or another but then this would be his third divorce and once again he was culpable. This became even more
apparent in the car between Bozeman and Livingston when he admitted he had been treating his wife for what he called “cold sores” and then Carolyn had gone to her mother’s doctor on a visit to Chicago and received an accurate diagnosis.

  We were driving into the tail-end of the thunderstorm which was a nice diversion to someone else’s marital woes. Ad was crying in his beer, as we used to say, no more innocent than Hitler, but pretending he was more to be pitied than censured. At age fifty-five Ad was finding it hard to be Ad. At such times men become the twelve-year old that dropped the ball in the championship game. “The sun was in my eyes,” he yells on a cloudy day.

  We stopped at the bar at the Murray Hotel because Ad needed a martini for a nightcap and I had nothing at the rental but whiskey and the cases of wine. Tim, our fishing guide was there, and he said a “slug of mud” was in the river so we should fish the Big Hole for a day and then the Missouri by which time the Yellowstone would be in shape. Way over in the far corner of the bar I could see Sylvia and the masseuse Brandy dancing near the poker machine and suspected the other woman with them to be Sylvia’s dreaded mother. Ad finished a double Sapphire martini in a trice and ordered another and I went outside with Tim to see if the hitch on the Tahoe would fit his MacKenzie boat trailer. He said my friend looked like a cow plot run over by a wagon wheel and I agreed. I mentioned divorce proceedings and he said, “O that.”

  When we got back in the bar Ad was half asleep over his second double. Sylvia was just finishing a frenzied dance with Brandy and then came up to the bar for a ginger ale followed by her mother who was attractive indeed but with a trace of glitter in her eyes. We said a polite hello and she bought her mother a Jack Daniel’s and coke, an inscrutable drink. I paid for them and Sylvia said, “You’re a nice man” which shivered my timbers but I thought how odd to see a girl babysitting her mother and dancing with such passion with her roommate as if no man on earth were suitable. It was at this point that I questioned myself, “Cliff, could Sylvia be a daughter of Sappho?” Very likely.

  I felt lucky that Ad was comatose enough not to notice Sylvia and her mother which normally would have set him off like the 4th of July rocket. Dad used to say “thank god for small favors” when a whole litter of piglets survived. The memory of bottle feeding a piglet made me homesick. I half carried Ad to his bedroom where he collapsed fully dressed, then pre-cooked some spuds and put out sausage to thaw for breakfast.

  Tim arrived at 6 A.M., and Ad was in fairly good shape eating what he also called a “heart stopper” breakfast. We reached the Big Hole in two and a half hours and fished until dinner time at the Hitch’n Post where Ad chugged a bottle of “despicable” California wine and was asleep at eight in the evening. What saved us from larger considerations like life herself was the exhaustion of dragging the boat at times when the water was low, the heat and stinging yellow jackets, the fishing itself because there was a hatch of spruce moths and fish were rising everywhere. Ad smelled like he was sweating pure gin and only became problematical at lunch on the riverbank when he delivered a manic rehash of his three marriages. For a change he didn’t play himself as the insulted and the injured, in fact concluded by saying, “I won every argument and I was always wrong.” Ad is a fierce and eloquent debater and I could see how that was possible. Ad insisted that it was our hopeless and antic glandular fevers that led us astray. He said, “Some men will climb the same mountain hundreds of times while other men need to climb hundreds of mountains.” Tim, who had also been married three times, said his wandering had only been a search for the right one but Ad said that was bullshit because who we think of as the right one could change every week or so and that maybe it was the craziness of the sexual impulse that kept the world populated. They continued wrangling and I clambered up the bank to the railroad tracks that ran along the river on the other side of which was a marsh and a spring fed pool containing a few large trout, clearly trapped there. I had had a pretty bourgeois life because farmers haven’t the time or many opportunities to chase stray ladies. Ad and Tim had lived a river life and I was more like the fish trapped in the spring pool except maybe they didn’t know they were trapped in a spring pool.

  We left at dawn driving north to the Missouri River near Cascade south of Great Falls. It was cool enough when we arrived but by noon the temperature was already in the low nineties and we ran out of drinking water a full two hours before we reached the site where we could get off the river. Ad stupidly poured one bottle of drinking water over his head then lamely apologized. Neither trout nor fishermen like this kind of heat so the day was a blowout. The Missouri in this area is like a hundred yard wide, crystalline spring creek, truly beautiful, but was quite weedy from the prolonged heat wave. I leaned over the gunnel and stared at many large trout we passed over who, sensibly enough, seemed to be snoozing. We intercepted a large bull snake about six feet long as it crossed the river and were amazed that the snake attacked the boat. Tim said that bull snakes kill and eat rattlers.

  We felt like road kill driving to our motel in Great Falls even after sharing a gallon of water from a convenience store. Ad was half asleep in the backseat nursing at a bottle of hot vodka from his luggage. We only picked at bad steaks for dinner and Ad drank a procession of doubles. We stopped at a strip club and Ad was smitten by a lovely heavily freckled stripper and stood up bellowing the words to the song, “My heart cries for you.” He wouldn’t stop so the biker type bouncers threw him out. He wept on the way back to the motel and we had to half carry him to his room. I was concerned but Tim said, “Don’t worry about the asshole. He’s a big boy.”

  At dawn we drove four hours east just past Livingston to Big Timber and had about five hours of miraculous brown trout fishing and also saw seven golden eagles and nine bald. Much of the time Ad was asleep in the back of the boat so missed nearly everything.

  The final disaster struck in the evening during a splendid meal at the Bistro. Ad had apparently taken a pep pill as some doctors do and had sidled up to the bar and had a drink with Sylvia’s mother and Brandy the masseuse. When Sylvia served me a piece of chocolate cake and took away Ad’s uneaten meal she asked about him. I reassured her without confidence that Ad was a doctor friend from northern Michigan which seemed to allay her fears but when I came out of the toilet they had vanished. I checked the Murray bar and they weren’t there so I went back to the rental and had a good night’s sleep.

  At seven in the morning Sylvia ran out in tears to tell me that Brandy had called from Bozeman to say that Ad and Sylvia’s mother had caught the early plane to Salt Lake headed for Las Vegas. I was dumbfounded but counseled Sylvia that it was time for her to stop looking after her mother. I cooked her an omelet and half way through eating it she decided to agree with me. I gave her a ride back to her apartment and she kissed me on the cheek which gave me a delayed shudder. I had two more fine days fishing with Tim and then packed for home without a phone call from Ad. Sylvia had the night off and came out the last evening for my patented spaghetti and meatball recipe of which she ate a great deal. We played double solitaire for a while and watched L.A. Law. I very much wanted to ask her for another posing session for the health of my project but it seemed inappropriate. She sensed the depth of my melancholy and gave me an electrifying thirty second freebie, lifting her blouse and dropping her shorts and doing a little twirl. Tears formed as I doubted I would ever see her again. I walked her home as far as the Ninth Street Bridge and we paused to look down at the sweet smelling, turbulent river. I said, “Life is a river,” and she said, “No, a river is a river and life is life.” I felt corrected.

  MICHIGAN

  I made tracks as we used to say, leaving brown trout and Sylvia in my past. I didn’t even stop to look at cows. I fled Livingston at dawn like a refugee fleeing a war torn country, or maybe not, maybe just a geezer heading home. Near Miles City I talked to Robert five minutes and then an Onstar voice said I had run out of time, adding instructions on how to buy more time with a credit ca
rd. I think the voice came from New Jersey. Robert was absolutely jolly at the idea that his dad was heading home to see his mom, and I certainly wasn’t going to correct him by saying that my motive was to fix up grandpa’s place in order to have the necessary solitude for my literary project which I had mentally enmeshed in the larger world of art. To be sure, I was at the bottom of the barrel but who knows what the future will bring? I had written a few haiku in college that my literary friends thought were awful. Here is my favorite:

  I want to look at a cow

  without my mind saying “cow.”

  I reached Jamestown in twelve hours, had a brisket sandwich, then laid out my project work on my motel desk. Due to the fatigue of driving I was without insights. I was back at the desk before dawn having used two bags in the coffee maker which only made me a wide awake fantasist with the visual of Sylvia’s butt drifting across the blank page. Did this mean biology was stronger than art? Probably.

  I made Iron Mountain in the gathering dark after fifteen hours of driving. I went to Vantana’s, a restaurant I’d heard about, and had the special called “The Italian Holiday” which was Italian sausage, a huge meatball, spaghetti and gnocchi, all covered with marinara. This virtual mound of nutrition put me to sleep pronto.

  Up at dawn again I reached Vivian’s real estate office just as her snotty secretary was leaving for lunch. This young woman had a peculiar accent of her own devising and could look at me without seeing me. She pointed at Viv’s closed door and said a “closing” was in process. I fell asleep on a plush sofa reading a National Geographic article called, “Uzbekistan Faces the Future.” The future, as always, turned out to be uncertain.