by Jim Harrison
I’ve seen Franco’s uncle twice in the past week, once from the balcony through my binoculars, and once face to face under a theatre marquee when I was with my ex–gentleman friend the gynecologist. I have no solid reason to believe he is seeking me. Outside the theatre he merely glanced at me, his face swollen from the recently healed scars. He is an unlikely new resident of Santa Monica, though I’m wondering why, if he is looking for me, he doesn’t simply knock on my door. He obviously had no difficulty finding out my address from the clinic.
So I called Ted and arranged a meeting. I wanted to avoid the police and knew that Ted with his peripheral business connections would have a way of checking on the boy’s uncle. Ted lives in the Malibu Colony in one of those houses you see featured in Architectural Digest: normal mortals think How beautiful but I wouldn’t care to live there. In addition to the gatekeeper and a private police force in the Colony, Ted has a houseman who also serves as a bodyguard. This houseman doesn’t seem to belong to California—he is happily married with two small children, an ex–homicide detective from Albany, New York. He is hyperenergetic, a first-rate cook, wine connoisseur, and gardener, household accountant. He very quickly took the place of three other employees, excepting a Salvadoran maid. I mention this man, Andrew, because such a level of competence and wit is so rare. Ted told me that Andrew retired from police work because he shot a girl during an attempted robbery and found the experience unendurable. The girl was black and Andrew is mulatto. He is married to a schoolteacher who is also an accomplished cellist. Ruth introduced them before she left Los Angeles for Tucson some years ago.
I was a little startled when I reached Ted’s to find my professor of the baggy undies there. It had been a week or so since I had seen him, and he had apparently contacted Ted through Ruth, in hopes that more pressure could be applied from another direction. What the professor, Michael, wanted was access to the family papers and journals, particularly those of my great-grandfather dealing with his “astounding” ideas on what was termed the “Indian problem” in the nineteenth century. Ruth, Mother, and I (and earlier, Grandfather) had decided to keep all the material sequestered after the release of one essay in 1965 to the Nebraska Historical Society, which had caused some not very dramatic publicity and problems. Before he had begun what turned out to be an enormous tree-nursery business to provide root stock to mostly North and South Dakota and Nebraska farmers, Great-grandfather had served as an agricultural missionary to the Oglala Sioux. In the 1880s he had published two articles in Harper’s Monthly, and several in McClure’s. He retired to the farm, from the political controversy of what to do with the Sioux, after 1890, when Wounded Knee occurred, though he continued to know Joe White Coyote, Henry Horse, Daniel Blue Horse, Kills a Hundred, and the Minneconjous, Jackson He-Crow, Philip Black Moon, Edward Owl King. He was the closest to He Dog, the friend of Crazy Horse, but tended to be intensely secretive about He Dog. Grandfather had discussed his own father with Edward Curtis, George Bird Grinnell, Mari Sandoz, David Humphreys Miller, and a few others, but then decided in the late forties to put an end to such discussions. We still feel we made an error of honor in allowing part of the journal to be published in 1965. When I returned that spring without my baby I was told by Grandfather a number of specifics that I promised to keep secret, though they have no value except to the very few who care about such matters.
I’m only bringing this up at an unsuitable time because it made inroads toward ruining a fine dinner (bouillabaisse) and raised a kind of anger in me similar to that I felt over the violated boy. Before dinner I had a few private words with Ted and he quickly decided to have Andrew look into the scarred uncle who was apparently shadowing me. But at dinner Ted openly spoke of Ruth before Professor Michael, which upset me and I chided him. Ted likes to imitate the acerbic wit of Gore Vidal, which can be raw, amusing, even revealing, but ultimately of limited use. A certain nasty aspect of Michael’s otherwise delightful character arose halfway through the main course. It came in an oddly circuitous manner through a comment on the movie Amadeus, which Ted loathed as inaccurate and insulting. Michael spoke of the uses of history at length, larding his talk with enough of the anecdotal to keep the layman (sic!) interested. I spotted the gist well before he got to it: to wit, I was in defiance of a grand tradition of scholarship by not turning over the goods to a lover but virtual stranger. I gulped my Meursault and was guilty of a barely controlled explosion: history in his terms was utterly self-serving and no one had a right to know what he was looking for. Everyone was dead, and everything that followed in political terms was the equivalent of spitting on the memory of the dead. I said, You seem to think that if you don’t tell someone, nothing has happened. I won’t allow you to paw over these people for historical novelty or whatever. You will put a dress of your own designing on them like a circus poodle.
“That’s ethical mandarinism,” said Michael, a term at which Ted gave a gasp of pleasure. “You think you’re the keeper of the Grail and no one deserves to know what and why the Grail is.”
“Not at all,” I said. “We are no longer the same people who could have made critical decisions. We have become a totally different people, a different country. What you call history avoids any valuable concern for people. The essence is the mythology that allows us to conquer the native populations—actually over a hundred small civilizations—and then to make sure that their destiny becomes one of humiliation, a day-by-day shame and defeat, and what’s more, we can feel right about it because they are drunken Indians.”
“But I want to show how the myth worked.” He was getting irate now. “And you’re preventing me.”
“We all know how it worked. You’re merely the boy who wants to take the back off the clock. You don’t even want to be a mechanic, you just want to watch.”
“You’re reaching a bit, my dear.” He was trying to slow me down. “If I’m the mere voyeur, who are these supposed mechanics?”
“I mean Congress, Washington as a whole. My uncle Paul used to say that they ought to run an open sewer in thousand-yard pig troughs through the Senate, House, and White House to remind these folks what and who they are.”
“Amusing, but what does it mean? Before you get too folksy why don’t you admit your position is essentially feminist? You’re a woman, and by some sort of dull-witted extension you identify your womanhood with these defeated people. . . .”
“That’s what I mean!” I interrupted so loudly I heard Andrew stumble in the kitchen. “You sit there scratching your dick under the table in a state of total unwitting identification with the victors. Your weapon is your doctorate in history which you suppose entitles you to open all doors. I don’t identify with anyone. Indians are Indians. Blacks are blacks. Women are women.”
Now Ted was desperate to enter what he probably thought was sheer fun, at least an alternative to record-business talk. “Teddy Roosevelt invited Sitting Bull, American Horse, and Geronimo to his inauguration. All of Washington was miffed when these chiefs weren’t the least bit impressed. Politicians can’t bear the knowledge that people care more for food, sex, love, their families and jobs, than they care for political machinations. . . .”
Michael waved Ted’s comment away with a flap of his hand. He finished an eight-ounce hit of wine he had poured in his empty brandy glass. He was clearly pissed off to some nether edge but was so resolutely an academician, even while drunk, that he was summoning up an additional vicious clunker.
“I’ve often found it amusing that people with a negotiable amount of inherited wealth”—they always get you for this!”—hold a charmed, remote outlook toward minorities. As a simple, wandering scholar I’m far closer to their nature than you are.”
“You should drive out to Black Mesa in your BMW and tell that one to the Hopis.”
“You fucking bitch!” he screamed. “You miserable bitch!”
Andrew ran out of the kitchen to prevent any possible violence, but Michael had calmly taken another drink be
tween “bitch"es. Ted had meanwhile collapsed off his chair with laughter. “Ruth was trying to be nice. I bet she said, ‘I’ll consent to give you the papers if Dalva and Naomi will.’”
Michael shook his head and in the process decided to be charming again. After all, he probably thought, there’s no point in needlessly cutting off contact. With a sequence of not very probing questions he got Ted started on the sexual habits of rock stars, which turned out to be somewhat limited by drug ingestion.
I said good night and Ted showed me to the door with regret. I hugged him, feeling how his tall, gaunt body retained its boyishness.
“I’m sorry I talked about Ruth. He presented himself as a close friend. You slept with him, didn’t you? But then in my circles that doesn’t mean a great deal. It was a wonderful night, you know, like in a Russian novel where Pyotr Stepanovich steps into the parlor and announces that he’s been brooding on the recent problem of infant suicide. En passant the tykes see news photos of the president or attorney general and hurl themselves out windows onto cobblestones and windswept snow.”
Ruth called to say she wasn’t pregnant. Oh my God, I’m sorry, I said, but then she said she wasn’t particularly sorry. The letters from the priest in Costa Rica had been full of the vilest sort of recriminations, the intent being to somehow prove that she had managed the whole thing herself. There was the suggestion that she had bewitched him and that thankfully God had sent him to Costa Rica well out of her sphere of influence. She wondered what he was doing with the suggestive photos he had begged for, taken with a discount-store Polaroid. She had viewed the photos session, she admitted it with some embarrassment, as the single silliest event of her life, but was reassured by my laughter. Then she told me she had gone out twice with a Mexican grocer, a widower and the father of one of her piano students. All of Ruth’s students are physically handicapped, the largest proportion being blind. She thinks of her teaching as “music for solace” and works very hard at it. The grocer’s blind daughter was seven years old, a lovely little girl who showed a great deal of promise. The grocer himself was haunted by the fact that he hadn’t insisted that his wife go to the doctor earlier even though she had died of fallopian cancer which is nearly always undetectable in its early stages and consequently fatal. The first date had been so courtly and somber, dinner and a movie, that she had doubted she’d see him again. He had called her the next morning to ask her to a fiesta dance in honor of a saint. She had accepted because no one had asked her to a dance since she had met Ted at Eastman. In a panic she had spent a week learning to dance Mexican polka style from her cleaning woman who was overweight but agile. Then at the fiesta they had merely sat at a front table with his well-heeled but stuffy relatives until she bribed his twelve-year-old nephew to dance with her. After that it had been wonderful though the leavetaking at her door had been a subdued embrace.
My breath shortened and I was holding the phone tightly because I knew what she was going to say. She began with the anticipated “Remember when . . .” And I did remember, in itself a harmless memory of an event that followed an intensely difficult time. She was referring to the County Fair and how three months after I returned from having my baby I won a dance contest with Charlene as a partner. It was a communal effort to break through the aftereffects of the birth, a kind of lassitude or somnolence where I would sit at my upstairs window at first light trying to balance out what my life had been. It began in early August, a few weeks before the fair. Normally I would have been working with the horses to enter several classes at the fair but I couldn’t bear to look at a horse because Duane had come in late May to pick up the buckskin a week before I came home and I had missed him. What happened was that Charlene’s mother, Lena, brought her out to see me on a Sunday afternoon. Charlene’s mother was thin and sharp-featured, shy, an unsuccessful lover of garage mechanics, a clothing-store salesman, the constable, a farm-implement dealer. She had come to Nebraska from Chicago with her husband and the infant Charlene to make a “fresh start.” That day she had told me her husband missed the city but she had refused to go back. Mother persuaded her to stay for dinner. Ruth was just finishing her piano practice in the music room and Lena was curious. She said she used to play the piano in a polka band in Chicago while her husband drank and played accordion. It took some effort to persuade her, including a gin and tonic, but Ruth dragged her to the grand piano whose use had been limited to the classics. It became a strange sight that hot August afternoon with two mothers and three daughters jumping around the house, the mothers drinking gin and the daughters lemonade with a little gin snuck into it. Ruth took over the easy, raucous melodies at the piano and Lena showed us the steps. We rolled up the Persian rug in the parlor for extra room. No one wanted to stop so we didn’t. Everyone seemed to be dancing out their own loneliness, and when that was over, we danced together, separating when the urge took us. I danced before the portrait of my father, and I danced into the kitchen when I began to weep because I didn’t want to upset the others. I danced right through my weeping. I began to see others for the first time in three months. We watched each other as we danced with sweat beginning to moisten our Sunday dresses, then soak them. Lena and Ruth would trade off at the piano, then continue moving at the kitchen sink as they ran cold water on their sore fingers. Naomi tripped and fell, springing back up and nearly falling again as I caught her. Ruth jumped straight up and down, her eyes on some distant imaginary object. Charlene’s steps were intricate and we held on to each other as I tried to imitate them.
Suddenly we were too tired to go on. We laughed for a while then became strangely silent. Naomi led us out to the car and we drove to the swimming hole where three of us had been baptized the year before. We all lazed nudely in the river, paddling in circles, utterly quiet. I forced out air and sank down to the bottom thinking of Duane’s whistle that had led me away. I stayed down so long that Charlene swam down past me and grabbed my arm, drawing me back to the surface.
We continued to practice the next three weeks under Lena’s tutelage. Naomi altered Father’s tuxedo for Charlene to wear, because we were supposed to be a couple and thought the sham might pass muster. In the northeast corner of the county there was a big concentration of Polish and Slovakian farm families and they always won the contest. Naomi thought the dress Lena designed for me was rather too short, but Lena pointed out that all the judges were male and there was no point in “fighting reality.”
We won handily before a crowd of a thousand or so cowboys, yokels, bumpkins, big farmers, marginal farmers, wives, children, 4-H Club members, schoolboys in blue FFA (Future Farmers of America) jackets. Grandfather told me that there was no question that we were the best, not forgetting Ruth at the piano, but my legs didn’t hurt our chances. Curiously, I was no longer upset at a reference to my body, and the fact that a group of town boys cheered for “Squaw” pleased me. Away from the others, out behind the grandstand in the dark, Charlene and I sat on the grass and watched the gaudy lights of the Ferris wheel and the yellow square that was the entrance to the horse barn. I felt a sharp pain at the thought that I might have competed with Duane at calf roping. Grandfather had assured me that Duane had asked about me when he had retrieved the buckskin. Suddenly Charlene put an arm around me and kissed me deeply on the lips. I pulled away and she apologized and said she hoped she hadn’t ruined our friendship. I said of course not. I had been through enough that so direct a gesture failed to shock me, and besides, I knew that Charlene hated men. She cried so I reassured her over and over that we would be friends forever. We still are, though she lives in Paris now with a third husband and we haven’t seen each other in several years. At the time the experience reminded me of the novels I was reading, and Charlene’s lips on mine were merely part of a chapter.
Andrew stopped by this afternoon to say I may have to move. The boy’s uncle, Guillermo Sandoval by name, can’t be reliably controlled except by a bullet, and unless I would agree to that measure, moving was the only option. I
wouldn’t agree. Andrew expected that, and went to some lengths to describe what kind of man we were dealing with: a barrio drug enforcer, a U. S. citizen out of McAllen, Texas, so he couldn’t be deported; an intelligent psychopath who claimed that he and his nephew were in love (!), a man who claimed he didn’t hate me for causing his aerial whipping though God would surely cause me to have an accident at some point. Meanwhile Ted had had the man put under twenty-four-hour surveillance, which might prompt rash behavior if discovered. I asked Andrew how he found all of this out. He said he “held a gun to the sucker’s head.”
When Andrew left I sat at my balcony and stared at the summery Pacific and thought how deeply irrational the situation had become, that just beneath the ordinary skin of ordinary life—the life that looked so comforting and normal from the balcony—something uncontrollable was whirling with all the indirection of the Brownian movement. The posture of writing it down is after the fact; the event recorded in tranquillity has a larger sense of tranquillity than it has earned.
But I am getting ahead of myself. It was some time before I realized that it was my uncle Paul who saved my weary soul that summer. I had come to him in Patagonia, Arizona, actually south of a point between Patagonia and Sonoita, by a circuitous route. The Monday after Thanksgiving Mother drove me northeast toward Marquette, Michigan, on Lake Superior where I was to live with her cousin and his wife and have my baby. It was a two-day trip that was stretched into five by snowstorms. We spent nights in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Blue Earth, Minnesota; Minneapolis; and two nights in Duluth, before reaching Marquette on the kind of brilliant, cloudless day that signals the passing of an Arctic front. Lake Superior, surely our most inhospitable body of water, was roaring under a glittery sky only a few blocks from the house. I hadn’t minded the delay, because beneath my breastbone I knew that this would be the first time I had spent more than a night away from my mother. It all seemed a mistake because it was barely three months and the baby hadn’t made its presence felt. I wanted to be either home or back in Duluth, in the hotel where we could see all of the harbor during the few hours the blizzard let up. We had had a wonderful room-service dinner sitting by the window; then Mother began to cry and I comforted her with more strength than I owned. I liked the snow-laden forest and hills, so unlike Nebraska, on the road between Duluth and Marquette.
