Sundog (Contemporary Classics)

by Jim Harrison

  Well, that was the end of my life as I had known it up to that point. I have thought long and hard about Mother, though it seemed at the time that it was Violet who acted as a mother much of the time. Perhaps it was a matter of exhaustion when you're the last of seven children. It wasn't just that women had no latitude at the time. It was the nature of life then to have to decide rather early the life to be chosen and stick to it, good or bad. The Alsatian servant girl meets the hyperthyroid, religious carpenter. They marry and plunge into their somewhat limited life with touching faithfulness in their capacities and their love for each other. How they loved each other! They were always smooching and taking long walks. Karl said that their noisy bedsprings would keep everyone awake. What I mean is, if you agree with Fate to raise seven children, that has to be your life's work. She was the best cook I've ever known, and I'm sorry I never got to Alsace, as they must surely eat well. Remind me and I'll cook you some of her dishes. I don't know what to say, except I loved her, and sometimes my heart aches at her memory.

  Dad had to be put in the county home, but that wasn't as bad as it sounds at the time. He had several friends there, including a goofy old farmer who would wheel Dad around in a wheelbarrow when Violet and I would visit. His brain was nearly gone, but he had a captive audience for his prayers and sermons, and his wild good humor was much appreciated by the staff at the home. In light of a later development, I now recall Violet blushing when Dad introduced me as his “grandson,” the “fiery-tongued preacher.” Dad died the following May, not six months after Mother, and it was the biggest funeral the county had ever seen. It makes country people nervous when a holy man dies. I was chosen to throw the first shovelful of dirt on his casket.

  Violet had been in correspondence with Mother's only sister in Fargo, North Dakota. She left soon after Dad died. I washed Karl's old Chevy and touched up the nicks. At first she was going to go south because she had never been in the main part of Michigan south of the Straits. Instead she went west on Route 2, not wanting to enter the world too abruptly. Ted and his wife, who had come to pick me up, stood on the porch while I walked Violet out to the car. It was a lovely summer morning, and we looked around without a word. Our emotions had carried us well past the point of anything but the simplest speech.

  “I love you, little brother.”

  “I love you, Violet.”

  Looking back at this with the estranged sensibilities of someone who has spent most of his life in foreign countries, I see that it all doesn't fit together. It's not supposed to. Symmetry is a term better suited to engineering than to people's lives. By the time you wish to become something, you're already something else. In the living nightmare after my accident, I had a dream that we were all black, fertile eggs, each of us encapsuled in our small, liquid universe. I'm aware that everyone sees the world differently, and what I've been telling you might be too peculiar to be of any use. I'm doubtful if I've felt really at home in the world since that summer morning I said good-bye to Violet. I couldn't very well feel homesick when, like so many of us, my home had disappeared. I guess I've moved too fast back and forth across the earth to become preoccupied with the question.

  CHAPTER XI

  * * *

  It was a warm June afternoon, and we had been working on the screened porch when we finished the previous segment. I was making notes and watching Eulia and Strang down on the riverbank prepare for his swim. They were speaking in rapid Spanish while she greased his legs and body against the cold water. Thus far the swimming had caused him great suffering; the awkward muscle bunches built up by crawling tended to cramp in the water, but he was sure he could work his way through the problem. The day before a cramp had been so severe that he had broken a tooth while gritting his teeth. I made a note to ask him about this apparent contrast between his intelligence and his optimism. I wanted to say “boyish optimism,” but it was both unfair and inaccurate. The forest clearing and cabin had become a bit claustrophobic, and we made plans to visit Emmeline, Robert Jr., and Aurora before Aurora had to return to Italy. I suggested out of maddened curiosity that we visit Karl in prison in Marquette. Strang said it was unlikely that Karl would see anyone, but that I might drop a note proposing an interview. The overwhelming goad behind the long, daily swimming sessions was that Marshall had sent a large folder describing the New Guinea project. There were no photos except a small aerial of the site, the usual twenty-five square miles of green hell with a large river running through the center of it. The rest of the folder was made up of blueprints and specifications, which drew the occasional gasp of pleasure from Strang. Something essentially mean-minded in me wanted to probe deeper for a raw nerve, for the great leveler that is at the heart of all personal journalism, wherein the noblest human might be made pedestrian at least for the length of time it took to read the article: the school of “Faulkner was laughably short,” or “Churchill, fat as a toad, coughed up his last bite of flan,” or “Eisenhower, despite his questionable talents in World War II, appeared ill at ease and simpleminded during an after-dinner conversation at Stokely Van Camp's winter home at Hobe Sound.” That sort of thing, Iago unleashed, the sweltering resentment a pencil pusher feels in a country where politicians keep raising the mythological spectre of the Frontier. Literary biographers have a special talent, too, for making writers more boring than the very least of their work.

  There. Eulia was kneeling in her bikini, pointing her bottom at me with telescopic accuracy. If I can't have it, it must be suspicious, I continued my train of thought, then let it trail off into the greenery. It is scarcely the fault of the world that my head weighs a thousand pounds, net. Strang's life seems full because it “is” full, and effortlessly so. Mother used to say “Niggle, niggle, niggle,” when I was caught in a fit of spite. My tight heart released a bit, watching Strang kick away at the swift current while he held a rope. He would kick as long as possible, then lie on the bank to warm up and regain his wind. The dog joined in these activities as if they had been designed particularly for her, that is, with a touching air of self-importance. For the first few days of swimming, Eulia was an anxious young mother, but she relaxed when Strang reminded her that he had survived in a far larger river after his accident, and without the use of his legs.

  Eulia sensed my current mood and recognized it as a New York relapse, a state of anxiety or disassociation brought on by having to be your own, entire support system, far from your native habitat. Years before I had met two French trout fishermen on vacation in Montana. Their first week had gone splendidly, but then this mood set in, caused by bad food, bad wine and a few days of rain. They were ready to bail out despite the good fishing, so we cooked them a Provençal daube of elk and marrow bones and drank a case of decent California Zinfandel, throwing in a few rancorous, coke-fiend cowgirls who infest the West, and their spirits were restored.

  Eulia was full of the emotional subtleties owned by Latin women of intelligence, against which the hardest macho specimens tend to finally shatter, retreat, try to regather their strength by the usual lies, alcohol, sport, violence. I didn't so much shatter as withdraw into a state of melancholy confusion. There was an urge to send this Zen master I had met a half-dozen Latin beauties for a private “sesshin” and see if, how, and why he survived.

  Now I felt a harsh lump beneath my breastbone from watching Strang's river struggles: O Jesus, give up, you godforsaken bastard, flatten yourself, subdue your spirit, eat the dirt the rest of us eat from the pot of self-pity. I could hear Eulia's battery-operated tape deck from back in a forest glade where she went every day for her dance workouts. I could make out the strains of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps and left the porch, walking seven-eighths of the way to the glade to be closer to the music, an old favorite.

  I could barely see her through the trees, and sometimes my view was blocked entirely. The music had reached a strident, thumping portion, and she was moving to the music by raising her knees to her chin in a pistonlike motion. I moved closer, a
nd it seemed a missed step might break her chin. A third party would have seen the scene as “Susannah Before the Elders,” and I felt a little murky: She whirled and flung herself forward, stopped, then repeated this march back across the glade, with her back now toward me, which I used to approach even closer. She was wearing one of those abbreviated leotards, and it was drawn up into the crevice of the buttocks and soaked with sweat. To say I was transfixed would be a euphemism. At first it was curiously nonsexual, similar to the day she stood in the cloudburst, but then the music began to descend from my head into the pit of my stomach.

  Abruptly the music stopped, and I found her returning my stare between two clumps of trees. Caught red-handed, I walked over with a faked sense of purpose and a fluttering heart. She, however, was exuberant and laughing with exhaustion. She raised a foot and touched me lightly on each shoulder, resting it a moment on my forehead, where I naturally kissed her ankle, a tripartite blessing from a priestess of an invisible church. Then the dog barked, and we heard Strang's voice. The alarm was immediate, and she ran toward the riverbank, with me in tow at an ever increasing distance.

  He had somehow raised himself to his feet by digging his heels into the river bottom and pulling on the rope. He wore a crazed smile and was bellowing a hymn, “Work, for the Night is Coming.” There was something ludicrous in the strain required to keep himself upright.

  “I would that ye were hot or cold in Laodicea. But because ye are lukewarm, I will utterly cast you out.” He had a convincing evangelist's shout, and his head wagged with false but effective rhythm. “So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast . . . and the woman was arrayed in purple . . . having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication . . . and upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON, THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH . . . and I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. . . .”

  Then he lost his grip and shot backwards into the current, going under and bobbing up thirty or so feet downstream. I beat Eulia to the water, making a considerable leap for someone my size, my ears ringing with her screams. I floundered clumsily after Strang, who was floating facedown well ahead of me and approaching a log jam. My heavy, wet clothes and the frigid water made my progress clumsy and exhausting. I was swept into an eddy and found the bottom, standing up just in time to catch sight of Strang as he grabbed an overhanging alder branch. He literally jerked himself out of the water with one continuous movement, the dog scrambling up the bank behind him. Then the dog turned and barked playfully at Eulia and me. Strang disappeared into the greenery. I picked my way as quickly as possible through the swamp with Eulia behind me, crying and shuddering from the cold.

  Strang was sprawled near the cabin door, writhing and incoherent, his legs cut up from the crawl back through the swamp. Eulia ran into the cabin while I knelt beside him at an utter loss what to do. I had witnessed a severe overdose on a street in Key West, but this owned the radical difference that Strang was smiling, a fact that frightened me senseless. It took all of my strength and the weight of my entire body to hold his arm still for the hypodermic Eulia brought out of the cabin. The effect of the shot was gracefully immediate: The tremors stopped, and his body went limp, the eyes closing, but the smile firmly in place.

  “Jesus H. Christ.” I began crying for the first time since my wife asked for a divorce.

  Eulia brought out a pillow and blanket and sat beside Strang in silence. I took off my wet shirt and let the sun warm my back, then went into the cabin for the whiskey bottle, which, for a change, seemed appropriate.

  “Has this happened before?”

  “Twice since the hospital. The last time was the first day we arrived here.”

  “I'm going to ask him why he was smiling. That sounds insensitive, but I don't mean it to be.”

  She sat down beside me at the picnic table and put an arm across my bare shoulder. She drank deeply from my glass of whiskey, watching the dog curl up beside Strang as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  “The first time happened in a motel room, and I broke the hypodermic. Then I got another one into him and was frightened I might kill him. It was after I made love to him. He was in the hospital three months, so I took him to the hotel and started making love to him as he slept. You should go now. Thank you.”

  * * *

  TAPE 5 : It is well after midnight. My watch crystal is full of water, and the alarm clock is in the bedroom. My head was ringing when I left Eulia and Strang. Got back to my place, took a rare Valium and tried to sleep. Is she fucking her own father, for god's sake? Not likely. Or stepfather? Not likely. There is the image of a large, open-air zoo and that I had spent the first half-day on the wrong side of the fence, a vulgarization, but emotionally accurate. I couldn't sleep so walked the two miles down the beach to town, an unexampled act of exercise for me. I wanted somehow to wear myself out—there is nothing quite so fatiguing as real emotion.

  There is the problem of keeping Eulia at arm's length when it is your narrator who is in modest pursuit. On my long walk to town I discussed with myself the utter lack of options open to us, or to anyone for that matter. What did you wish to become? Oh, it's far too late for that. The blue, untypically calm, water of the bay reminded me of the Caribbean and what it is like to stare over the side of a skiff during a fast-falling tide along a channel cut. The sun-blasted shallow water yields up nearly everything it holds in a swimming, tumbling stream: nurse sharks, small bonnet sharks, permit fish, barracuda, dollar crabs, minnows, honest-to-god tropical fish, pinfish, baby snapper, needlefish, jelly fish, sponges, unidentifiable flotsam and jetsam, translucent baby shrimp, clumps of sargassum weed, strange wormlike creatures, all stream by for no other reason except that the world rotates and there's a moon in the sky. It is the sweep of this life that gives vertigo, a sense of relentless departure. The rearrival on the incoming tide is much more gradual and ordered, a processional, much like the paradigm of our own early years, which appear so painfully slow when we live them. No one is ready, it seems, for the loss of control, the ineluctable character of acceleration that gathers around the later years.

  The rhythm of walking on the harder sand subdued me to the extent that I felt nearly happy, in part because the little dog of a few weeks back appeared for a game of stick-throwing. This dog evidently spent his life wriggling with pleasure. In my sanest moments, I have not been able to convince myself that less is more. Once in an awesome palazzo in Venice I had eaten wretchedly mediocre Italian food. Still, one looks toward the horizon with a heart willing to lighten, somewhat like a poor child looks toward Christmas with a well-suppressed expectancy.

  The village was agog with a criminal incident. Some young campers from Detroit, a full seven hours to the south, had slashed dozens of tires the night before. One merchant I had become acquainted with wanted to shoot the culprits. Isn't that a little radical for the nature of the crime? I asked. “Don't worry, I won't get caught,” he answered, misdirecting my question. Since this area is virtually crime-free, I wondered at the strength of the emotions elicited by what anywhere else would be a minor nuisance. Easy question, he says, we're not used to that shit up here. In other words, these people haven't been desensitized. Reception is so poor most of them don't even watch television. I'm not at all saying that they are better or worse than the rest of us, just not desensitized. It is somehow an appalling notion. My stepdaughter's eyes wandered back to the television when I explained to her that the old lady behind the cash register at the deli next door had to be beaten to death with baseball bats because a group of young men were victims of unhappy childhoods. Oh, well. In any event, I discovered how to be exhausted. I drove way out into the outback with a local to “check out” a brook trout spot. From the dead end of a logging trail this involved a three-hour round trip by foot, a real lung-cleanser, an indescribable mu
dbath trek through swamps, over hills, through swales and marshes. I would have abandoned the hike early, but the prospects of finding the car by myself were dim indeed. Plus, there was the bedraggled remnant of male pride in me. In other words, the experience offered a lifetime of fodder for the whine. But we kept a half-dozen lovely brook trout! Then the blackflies and mosquitoes drove us away. The whole point was the most powerful sense of déjà vu I have ever experienced. We were at the edge of a swamp where the creek opened out into a small meadow covered with sumac. There was a spring and a clay bank with an otter slide—they like to shoot down banks to amuse themselves. We didn't keep one fish out of five that we caught. I was trembling with enthusiasm. Then I knelt down to drink at the source of the spring and saw a trout staring up at me from beneath a clump of water weeds. There was a bird cry, or was it Edith's voice? I could somehow hear the voices of Strang and Edith, especially their laughter. Maybe he was lying in the water while she sat with her legs drawn up on the sandspit. It was uncanny, overwhelming, and I had to breathe deeply to dispel the sensation. Why did I want to dispel it, to draw back? I had had enough and wasn't equipped to handle any more of the purity of this moving picture my mind had devised.