by Jim Harrison
I finally pressed the buzzer and got my water, Demerol, and liquid diet. Coffee is not too interesting through a glass straw. The cuckoo went back into his hermetic clock and watched five hours of news on the twenty-four-hour news channel, but the door didn’t close properly and I remained uncommonly conscious of the hunger, thirst, and pain I was watching. I was stoned as a monkey but I still sensed the world of hunger, thirst, and pain. A bureaucratic wag in a rep tie thought that a hundred million people might die worldwide from AIDS in the next ten years. I thought of my daughter, Laurel, and her generation trying to be Keatsian romantics while totally sheathed in preventive rubber. I saw extensive items on spouse abuse, child abuse, widespread starvation, the epidemic of teenage suicide. There were frequent news updates on everything awful that was happening in the world—this is the first time in history that we get to know all of the world’s bad news at once.
The upshot of all of this is that I knew the beginning and end and this was apparently the unvarnished middle. I forgot nuclear proliferation, where an arms expert said within ten years every country in the world equaling or exceeding the budget of the state of Arkansas will have nuclear capability. Nel mezzo del camin de nostra vita, etc. Probably misquoted. I absolutely seethe to get at the second trunk of Northridge’s journals, because all of the above leads me to think it is the first meaningful work of my life.
To be continued: love, Michael
P.S. The nurses are pleasant but dense. I have learned to make my notes to them simple. Nurse Sally wondered how I hurt myself and I wrote, “I let my wiener, like a baton, rule the orchestra,” which took a lot of explanation!
This letter slipped involuntarily from my weakened hand. I wanted to see a group of polled Herefords out the window simply eating, then pausing to look at each other as cattle do. I was touched by his comments about the journals and his father but it was a little tiring to see a man of thirty-nine discover human suffering other than his own. That was the biggest problem when breaking in a newly hired social worker—suffering seems to have more dimension than the compensatory pleasures. I picked up a slip of paper Naomi had given me with the phone number of the owner of the puppies for sale. He was the brother of one of her friends with the somehow familiar name of Sam Creekmouth. After a few minutes I remembered that it was the name of one of Northridge’s Oglala friends. The West was full of people that were a bit of this and a bit of that, and the man was likely no more Sioux than my own one-eighth. There is no such thing as “part Indian”—you either are or aren’t out of a combination of some blood and a predilection. I made the call before I understood what I was doing but got no answer—ranchers don’t hang around the house in the afternoon in mid-June. Then I impulsively called Andrew at Ted’s house and begged him to take a few days off, go to Tucson, and start tracing my son. He heard the congestion and panic in my voice and after some dead pleasantries he agreed. If I felt like it, goddamnit, I’d drive way over to someplace and buy some bona-fide cattle, registered or not, or some cutting steers, a few dogs, some families with children to move into the area so I could teach school, a lover I was crazy about, a car that flew, a plane ticket, or whatever. I meant to do something besides rock at the window with a cold.
I tried to calm down with a shower and a drink, which hit my empty stomach rather hard but failed as a soporific. I fried a steak that was streaked with delicious but purportedly unhealthy fat. I went out and hoof-picked and groomed the horses, then shooed the geese back into their pen which had required two chickens and a case of beer to build. On an unspecific level Michael, Lundquist, and Roscoe formed a perfect trio.
My head and heart stopped thumping in the bunkhouse when I sat down at the desk and gazed out at the rich green grass and burdock covering the ancient manure pile. The window had been left open and the papers and books were still damp from the rainstorm during my night in the canyon. The journals were intact in their trunk and I slid it to the door to remember to take it back to the bank. The effect of the second trunk was problematical, but then I hadn’t signed on as a historian. The summer after Loreto I had busied myself June, July, and the first half of August putting the papers in order, then drove around the state and parts of South Dakota visiting many of the first Northridge sites. Rachel spent a week riding with me—she loved the old convertible because it was more like a horse. She used an Oglala word, “Hanblecheyapi,” a rite of “lament,” to describe a period where you expressed all your anguish, then received a new vision of life to keep you going.
I shuffled the dampest of Michael’s papers to dry them out and came upon a photo of Karen, a nude shot from the rear with her head turning in a totally silly grin. I laughed out loud, thinking of her mother’s shock. She certainly was splendidly put together, and my critical attitude toward Michael was tempered somewhat by the memory of a boy at the University of Minnesota who was an athlete, a swimmer, I had made love to simply because he was beautiful. I had been startled to discover that his legs and chest were shaved to lessen drag and increase speed in the water. I put the photo in an envelope and sealed it in case Frieda began snooping as she cleaned.
Karen’s photo made me look at my hands which, unsurprisingly, were getting older. Naomi had said her address book was filling up with dead people, an attitude so laconic as to be admirable. I had been around New York and Los Angeles enough to know that Karen could easily be a bathing-suit or lingerie model, a not unrealistic option to becoming another of the hundreds of thousands of B.A.’s in the liberal arts. That sort of attractiveness is undemocratic but then so are an astronomical IQ, innate athletic ability, and possibly creative talent. Naomi had spoken to a friend, the county agricultural agent, about a job opening in case they closed the country school. She thought I’d be ideal for the job which was to be funded by the federal government: mental counseling for bankrupt farmers and their families. Holy Jesus, I had said, and she laughed. I had always worked because nothing whatsoever in my background had prepared me to act like a rich person, a notorious nonprofession, the dregs of which everyone has witnessed in life, or in magazines and on television. I had also been taught that rancorous self-judgment was a Protestant vice that never did anyone any good. You did your best and made do. One of those whirring, semi-fatuous rehearsals passed through my mind after I remembered the last job evaluation by my superior—“an intense, effective, and affable worker with no particular leadership abilities.” How correct! What is thought of as leadership involves an ability to deal with thoroughly compromised situations, while I am hopelessly addicted to primary colors, and the direct approach. The necessary adumbrations involved in telling people what to do require a particular gift. I worked three summers in college and graduate school as a seasonal employee of the Department of the Interior on a lamprey control project, which was an annual three-month camping trip on the feeder streams entering Lake Superior and Lake Michigan; Naomi’s cousin, Warren, with whom I had stayed when pregnant, got me the job. With my not very valuable master’s degree I worked at a famous clinic for rich alcohol and drug abusers in Minneapolis as an ineffective counselor—I was too young to understand how deep wounds can be and I was basically unsympathetic to the problems of the rich because it was the late sixties. I moved to New York, a city I loved, but not my job with a lower-echelon fashion magazine which served to make me permanently bored with elaborate clothing. After that were two years with a documentary-film maker which ended, as I mentioned, with my trip to Key West. After recovery I tried the East again and through the influence of a friend of Naomi, a U. S. representative, I became an “assistant assistant” liaison for the Organization of American States, really an errand girl between New York and Washington. I seemed to have a genetic aversion to politics but then our influence in Central and South America has never been pretty. At a party at the Costa Rican Embassy I met and became infatuated with a Brazilian diplomat twice my age. He said he wanted to marry me and invited me down for Carnival. After enduring frequent absences in a lavish hote
l on Ipanema I spotted him with his wife at a party I had come to with an American actor I met at the hotel. At the confrontation we both acted very badly but no one seemed to mind, including his wife. After this sophisticated mud bath I returned home for another summer, then took a job as a social worker in Escanaba, Michigan. Two years of the Upper Peninsula were more than enough, and I moved to Santa Monica at the suggestion of the actor I had met in Brazil. We spent an expensive month doing cocaine, then parted company. After a week of eating a great deal, insomnia, and exercise, I recovered and took the job working with teenagers who had problems with alcohol, drugs, and/ or were suicidal. They didn’t have the language and necessary set of perceptions to deal with the world we had made for them. It was a harder language to teach than the English I taught to the poor folks of Loreto or Baja. All of this adds up to a wonderfully undistinguished career, but an interesting enough life. Regrettably few women have careers but then most men have jobs that they don’t like.
I toted and dragged the trunk to the house for safekeeping because it was late in the afternoon and the bank was closed. It was an absurd gesture in a remote and crime-free area (except for wife-beating, sodomy, occasional embezzlement) but I had promised Michael. I got Sam Creekmouth on the phone about the pups and agreed to arrive at noon because I otherwise wouldn’t be able to find him on the ranch. He would be out back in the foreman’s trailer, he said, in a Sand Hills drawl that reminded me of Duane’s. The dog meant I might stay here, job or not. Then I called Ruth who had been spending time with Fred, either in Tucson or down on his ranch near Patagonia. I asked her if he folded his underpants before they made love and there was a long pause before she said yes, then began to giggle. She added that he was “somewhat metronomic” and I guessed that Paul was failing as a matchmaker. She said she had received a sweet, placatory letter from her priest in Costa Rica who begged her to come down for a visit. She wondered why the idea “stimulated” her and I admitted I had never begun to figure out that question. Maybe it all depended on a cluster or assortment of sexual “signals” that none of us ever perceived on a conscious level. I did know that never in my life had I been seduced, though of course I had pretended to the man that I had been “swept off my feet,” as they say.
I went outside and sat in the tire swing, smelling the rotting scent of the last of this year’s lilacs. As a child the graveyard hidden within them was one of my secret places, especially when the Bowers were loud with bees, which my dad had told me were tiny birds. There was a lightheadedness in the moment, almost as if I could feel my father’s hands at my back pushing me higher on a summer evening. Naomi would be leading Ruth around on her pony during that happy time after the war. Now I heard crickets, frogs from the creek, a whippoorwill, the plaintive good night of the white-throated sparrow.
On our trip in the convertible Rachel had worn a faded pink scarf to keep her hair out of the wind. We were up near Kadoka drinking coffee from a thermos and on our way to the Badlands to see a place she knew as a child. I asked her if she had ever known the medicine man Black Elk because I had recently reread Neihardt’s book for the first time since college. She corrected me, saying that “medicine man” was pejuta wicasa, a Sioux version of “doctor,” “herbalist,” one who tended to the sick and wounded. Black Elk, whom she had known slightly, was wichasa wakan, a holy man who got his first vision at age nine. She hadn’t seen him again after going off to Denver and becoming a whore during wartime, though she had heard that when Black Elk was well into his eighties he and other Sioux made a little money picking potatoes in Nebraska. At the time I couldn’t believe this great man was allowed to end his life in a Nebraska potato field but I later checked Rachel’s information and found it to be true. As I drifted back and forth in the tire swing I thought this fact would be hard to stomach for certain lovers of redskin lore, fans of Indian exotica, collectors of artifacts, and wearers of immense turquoise necklaces, but then I was sure Black Elk was above any annoyance over picking potatoes. It was a job.
I stayed in the swing until I couldn’t see across the yard. Just because you’ve been a student of all the permutations of brain chemistry and their behavioral effects, doesn’t exclude you from being a victim, albeit a knowledgeable victim. There was a hollow, quivering sensation, while I admitted I had come home and was going to stay there. I turned and looked at the light left on in the kitchen—a yellow square that shone out on the honeysuckle bushes that bordered the porch. It was my house. I was no longer a visitor. I would travel wherever I wished but this house that I couldn’t help but think of as “Grandfather’s” had passed into my being thirty years after his death, when it was mine by title only.
I went inside to tentatively consider changes, though I knew they would be slight, involving only the kitchen and a little painting to lighten an atmosphere that could tend toward gloom. I opened the door and turned on the cellar light with the intention of looking into the concealed storage area. Over the years I had received a fair amount of inquiry from dealers and museum curators about what had happened to Grandfather’s collection. I forwarded these to the law firm which responded to the effect that the collection had been sold to a private party who wished to remain anonymous. It was a little stupid for Paul and myself to keep this secret to ourselves, but then the storage area supposedly held additional things. It seemed curious that Grandfather has asked me to wait until the age of forty-five with the implication that the contents were not altogether pleasant, which I knew from the journals. I turned and looked at the paintings, thinking that in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, perhaps a few other cities, they would certainly require a security system. A Nebraska thief might swipe a Remington, or a Charley Russell out of sentiment, but Sheeler, Marin, Burchfield, even Sargent would be beyond his ken. Paul said he hadn’t known precisely what was there until he came home for my father’s funeral. There was anyway something inconsolable in the decline and death of the Sioux civilization as Northridge had known it. I thought of Rachel’s pink dime-store scarf, then turned out the cellar light and closed the door. The phone startled me from my reverie—it was Naomi full of bird and beast news. She was happy to hear I was buying a dog.
The night wasn’t kind to me. The breeze had come around to the south, and the darkness was warmer than the day had been. The horses were restless and I went out twice in the night to check them. The geese were upset and I guessed the coyote had made a pass through the barnyard. It was one of those nights when your perceptions are much grander than you want to indulge; instead of having a succession of idle thoughts ending in sleep you are unbalanced, nearly punished, by images with all the logic of snow flurries in the mind. The last moments before sleep went like this: At the fairgrounds when I stooped beside Michael, his jaw made an audible, grating sound. “What did I do?” he asked, and his jaw caught on “what” so that the question was slurred before his eyes fluttered and closed. My lover in Brazil masturbated me with a handful of flowers. I could see the reflection of the sea in a mirror at the end of the room. The ambulance passed a large gray building on the outskirts of town owned by my family that at one time was the Grange Hall. Farmers in their hopeless fight in the 1880s and 1890S against the power of the railroads. So the Chamber of Commerce determined the town could only support a motel with two rooms which no one wanted to build. The school system used the first floor of the Grange building for storage. Upstairs was full of old office furniture and odds and ends from buildings Grandfather had owned in town by default during the Depression. We thought we had the only key to the upstairs, but last summer we were looking for a marble end table and a box of old photographs by Butcher, and we discovered someone had set up a trysting place in an interior room. We hadn’t been up there in years. The window was boarded in this room, and there was a bed with a nice bedspread, a radio, some magazines and paperbacks on a night table, three towels, an ashtray with lipstick on a few of the butts. Naomi and I were startled, then amused, then we didn’t quite know what to think. Who
could the lovers be? A McCall’s magazine, a Barbara Cartland romance, and two Elmore Leonards were on the floor. There was a palpable sense of the lovers in the room, and though it was our building we felt we were invading their privacy. The pillowcases were fresh and ironed. We were silent for a minute or two listening to the wind against the tin roof. The woman’s scent was nearly undetectable lavender.
In the morning I lingered for an extra half-hour waiting for a smallish thunderstorm to pass. I was pleased at its direction because it meant I could follow it over toward Ainsworth—there was something wonderful about following a squall with the sun at your back in the early morning, shining off the roiling cumulus and stratocumulus clouds.
