Sundog (Contemporary Classics)

by Jim Harrison

  The next day was brutally hot, so I rigged up a hose to spray the tin roof of the temporary school. The Reverend's mood had improved because we had a big Kikuyu audience for the well drilling and he could wander around passing out tracts and Bibles. The half-dozen school children loved this artificial rain on the roof. You could stand inside the school, which was twenty degrees or so cooler, and stare out through the rain at the dusty compound. I laid the pipe and set up a pump at the mission entrance. The Reverend took to hanging out there in his pith helmet so he could talk to the natives about Jesus when they came for fresh water. They didn't seem to mind. The water was great, and we clearly weren't the much hated British.

  A man in love at first is ignorant in his passion that the woman involved can choose another option, or even that she might be entertaining another choice. I somehow thought that the doctor was Sharon's weekend toy, or drinking buddy, because she always returned very hung over. She gradually admitted how attached she was to him and that the affair had been going on for three years. He had promised to divorce his “horrible” wife and marry her. I was a little cynical, remembering how many bridge workers shacked up with local girls, then beat town on the last day of the job. Of course, I was utterly frantic and pushed myself way beyond good sense as a lover. I would brush her hair every night after her shower and try to be as bright and witty as I imagined an English doctor might be. It was no use. Letters began arriving every day for her, and I wondered at the duplicity of women, what with the way we spent our nights together. This was a basic misunderstanding on my part. I'd like to know where the vaunted altruism of the male has gotten us? Maybe she hadn't made up her mind, because I also promised to get a divorce and marry her and take her to France, how I don't know. I do know I worked from dawn to dark every day with a lump in my throat.

  Of course, to be pompous and wordy runs counter to the particulars of love. It takes years to get the distance to think it over, and what do you have then? You have the distance and your thoughts. The summer before Edith left we used to go into this big shed in town that Ted leased to store heavy equipment. One day it was raining, and Edith and I sat up in an old Dodge Power Wagon, watching the swallows fly around the rafters.

  “Dad says we have to move this fall,” she said. The idea was so unspeakable that we could only hug each other.

  I watched through the screen door when Sharon drove off with her doctor for the last time. It is difficult but necessary to accept the truth of what we are in our loneliest moments. I sat there all day until it got dark, then walked down the road to where the natives lived and got totally drunk for the first time in my life. At dawn Peter and his friends walked me back to the compound. I went to bed in Sharon's empty room to indulge my sorrow in the remnants of her odor and presence.

  I finished building the school at top speed with the help of two young Kikuyus in their teens. I still keep in touch with one of them, who owns a construction company in Nairobi. I paid them out of my own pocket, because there was nothing left in my budget and I was terribly homesick, or so I thought, and wanted to get home. I didn't know it then, but I was becoming one of those men who think it's enough to send most of his paycheck home. The day I finished I packed my bags, much to the regret of the Reverend, who wanted me to stay around for the dedication ceremonies. I'm sure he was concerned because for some reason I had become quite popular with the natives, and their hanging around the compound gave him the sense of progress in his work.

  The morning Peter drove me to the airport we could see the first rainclouds of the season gathered over toward Mount Eregero and the Lorogoti Plains. I had been so self-sunken I had forgotten the beauty of Africa, and for a change the raw feeling beneath my breastbone was for this beauty rather than Sharon. Those who haven't been there have to try to imagine Montana and the Dakotas in the eighteenth century, or the vast game herds described in the Lewis and Clark expedition. In those days it was pretty grand right up past the Kedong Valley when you were almost to Nairobi. Then, as we drew near the airport, I entered a fateful train of thought. Was I leaving all of this to go back to a late fall and winter in the Upper Peninsula when you mostly drink coffee or beer and wait for spring? The main excitement might be a night in January when the temperature went over forty below. I was lonely for Emmeline and the children, but suddenly I could envision a life building tract houses with Ted, trying to rough them in before cold weather so you could do the interiors in the winter. You build the exact same house forty or fifty times, and you weep with boredom. Was this to be my only adventure in life?

  Well, there was a few hours left before plane time that I had intended to use buying souvenirs. I dug in my wallet for Martin's card, the construction man I had met in Narok. We found the building with no difficulty, and I sat in the Rover with Peter, trying to summon up the courage to go in and ask for a job. Peter was all for it, having a great sense of humor about the vagaries of a white man changing his fate on the spur of the moment. In I went, and after I composed myself in this rather elaborately subdued office, I offered Martin's card to the employment manager. Much to my surprise, he said that Martin had told him I might show up and he would “enjoy” having me on his crew up in the Sudan. There was an embarrassing amount of paper-shuffling when I had to admit my life had been without schooling. An engineer was brought into the office so I could prove I knew trigonometry, could read specs and blueprints, and could operate all manner of equipment. I was shown out to a pleasant waiting room with wicker chairs and ceiling fans. A male secretary even brought me a cup of tea. By now I was nearly nauseated by the sheer daring of what I was attempting to do. I pretended to be reading an old issue of the London Times when the employment manager and the engineer entered the room with that typically British air that leaves you hanging until you're used to it. Everything was fine. I could rest up and catch a morning flight to Khartoum, where someone would meet me. They would make a hotel reservation for me for the night. Glad to have you aboard, that sort of thing. I chatted with the engineer a little longer about the Mackinac Bridge. There are only so many of these huge projects going on in the world at the same time, and they are the object of intense curiosity with everyone in the trade. I walked back out in the sunlight, having cast a rather large die.

  Peter was ebullient and swerved up to the entrance of the New Stanley Hotel as if he were delivering royalty. We hugged good-bye, and I impulsively gave him my watch. Even the hotel people were polite, probably because this English company did a lot of business with them. Before I went up to my room, I bought a linen sportcoat and a pair of trousers, having sensed in the hotel lobby that my brown suit didn't fit with my new image as a construction vagabond. The man at the shop said that he would have them pressed and sent up to my room, which gave me pause, thinking there might be some swindle afoot. The only hotel I had even stayed at before was the Ojibway in Sault Ste. Marie with Emmeline. My room was rather grand, and I was a little unsure how to behave in it. The towels in the bathroom were huge, and I got a hard-on for no reason. I became a little frightened, so I got down on my knees and prayed, which struck me as a little silly, what with a hard-on like a toothache, but I did it anyway. There was a shocking rap on the door, but it was only my pressed coat and trousers. The man asked me if I wanted anything, and I asked for a Plymouth gin and tonic, Sharon's favorite drink. I can't tell you how giddy I was, just short of twenty-one years, in a fancy hotel, and on my way to Khartoum. I sat here with my gin, wishing that Karl was in the room to share my pleasure. Or Sharon, but the thought of her brought me to tears.

  That evening during dinner in the elegant hotel dining room I established a precedent that damn near killed me seven years later. It was drinking, pure and simple. Now you know my system was already less than intact, though that's not central. The waiter asked me if I wanted a cocktail, and I thought, why not? The waiter asked if I wanted a bottle of wine with dinner, and I thought, why not? It had been over three months since I had a decent meal except for one evening
that Sharon and I had roasted some zebra steaks over the fire—it was a lot like venison. It was as if I were hypnotized or suffused with pleasure: Indian Ocean shrimp, Tilapia fish from Lake Victoria, which are like bluegills, and a big joint of rare beef. The alcohol blunted, sedated, any normal anxiety, nervousness, the usual self-consciousness. I looked up with some surprise when it was over, and the fear that I was being watched with ridicule was banished by a snifter of brandy. The good feeling returned as the brandy worked its way down through the bellyful. An attractive woman smiled at me on the way to the powder room. I felt I was entering a world where loneliness had been banished, that anything had become possible, that I might meet one of those English girls from three months back—we'd repair to my room, fuck ourselves brainless, and talk about sophisticated things. The bill was a bit of a shock, but I had spent very little of my original grubstake except on my Kikuyu helpers. On my groggy way up to the room, the fact that I had left a big tip made me swagger a bit. The only niggling piece of remorse came from the idea that my dad and mom up in heaven might somehow know the amount I had laid out for the meal.

  Every drinker can remember the backside, or the down side, of these first experiences. I awoke at dawn with a parched mouth and an ear-ringing headache. I had slept in my fine new clothes and was soaked with sweat. I puked, wept, took a bath, puked again lying on the cool bathroom floor, inspecting the undersides of the bathtub. I read the Bible, prayed, got a hard-on, whacked off thinking of Sharon, cried again, ordered up oatmeal, juice and coffee. I took a cab to the airport, boarded my flight to Khartoum, and when at midmorning the lovely stewardess asked me if I would like a drink, I thought, why not? By then I was full of piss and vinegar again, staring down out the window at the incredible landscape of the White Nile. A man who pushes himself like I do shouldn't be so hard on himself over a few drinks, I thought.

  You quoted someone the second day you were here who said, “The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.” I like that. What else could it be? I'm not going to get preachy about alcohol. It was partly my age, and partly Sharon, whose photo I had already worn until the edges were soft. You take a young man full of muscle, energy, hormones, bitterness, and you either send him off to war, or off to work, the harder the better. I like to think of Caesar's legions going off to Iceland where there was not a single soul to kill. The habit is too predictable; the results gained so carelessly are nearly always the same. You cut off the part of life that irritates you the most, but you have cut off the legs of the horse to get him in the box stall. I am not talking about casual drinking, but the hard-driving, day-after-day variety, where it is the substitute for something, often unknown, that you wished had happened or didn't happen to you. And the British I worked with in the Sudan and India were a special kind of drinker: The purpose was the maximum amount with the minimum visible results. Real drunkenness, except on very special occasions, is bad form. The daily beers and gin, or rum, were a sedation after work. Then came dinner, a little cards and reading, then sleep.

  I was less than a year south of Khartoum in the Sudan. We were restructuring a giant irrigation system between the Sennar Dam and the Rosieres Dam on the Cezira Plains between the White Nile and the Blue Nile. At the time this was the second largest cotton-producing area of the world. I still don't like to wear anything but linen and cotton, because it doesn't feel right. Once you move to wool you get the feeling you might be in the wrong place.

  I was mostly operating a big shovel or a drag line or installing hydraulic gates on the canal. This part of the Sudan has none of the charm of Kenya: It is mega-agriculture, and only the owners could love the look of it. It is similar to corn in Iowa or some of the wheat areas of the Dakotas, the horizonless monotony of one-crop agriculture, the ruthless banishing of anyone or anything not conducive to the growing of cotton. When we'd get a few days off, we'd go up to Khartoum, where not much fun could be had, or if we had time we would fly over to Addis Ababa or down to Nairobi, the best place for R and R, as they call it. For the much needed prostitutes, I preferred the Galla and Amharic ladies of Addis to the seedy English girls some of the men liked in Nairobi. It's hard to believe, but we lost one of our best workers, a welder from Liverpool, one day over on the White Nile. We were having a picnic and roasting a goat. The locals told us not to swim in the main part of the river, but we were all beered up, and a crocodile took him right in front of us.

  “It makes you want to go back home to wherever, doesn't it?” said Martin, who was our foreman, We spent all that afternoon in boats, shooting and gutting crocodiles, trying to find some leftovers to send home to Liverpool for a proper burial. It must have been in the high nineties, and cutting open the stomachs of crocodiles was a sobering experience. Naturally, we never found a thing to send home to his wife and kids. It was horribly primitive but somehow understandable; in the aftershock we felt we had to do something because the fault lay with the whole sodden, incautious bunch of us.

  Martin became my mentor. He later died up near Hyderabad of amoebic dysentery, the same disease I caught in India. I must have known him for over half a year before it occurred to me he was a homosexual. There was another homosexual who worked for the firm in the area, a Scandinavian engineer named Sorensen. Curiously, he and Martin didn't like each other. Sorensen got in trouble with the locals for fooling with the wrong young men. Every culture I've been in seems to make a specific accommodation for homosexuals, but it is often brutally limited. I caught on to Martin one week when we were waiting for some equipment to arrive and took a three-day business vacation up in Alexandria, Egypt. After we went down to the docks to check out an arriving freighter, I went for a stroll in the polite side of town while Martin went to a shipping office to do paperwork. While I was drinking some muddy but delicious coffee, I met this lovely girl. We went back to my hotel room, and she pulled the shades, then commenced to give me an overhaul that was breathtaking. She put my dick in her, and I could hardly get it out. Before she left, I made an appointment to meet at the same cafe later. Well, at dinner I was breathless when I described the girl to Martin, who at first seemed embarrassed, then loosened up with the wine.

  “You silly shit, that wasn't a girl,” he said.

  “I don't get what you mean.”

  “You jolly well didn't feel her pussy or tits.”

  “She was shy and didn't want me to.” I frantically searched my recent memory for a positive indication of her girlhood.

  “They're all over. Don't worry about it. He didn't charge you much because it was a true conquest. I mean, the deception was complete.”

  To be frank, I was pretty irritated. I insisted we keep the appointment and bet Martin ten pounds, which was a fair amount of money at the time. Well, the girl-boy and Martin figured each other out pronto, and it became quite funny. Martin bought a bottle of champagne, and we drank to my naiveté. On the way back to the hotel in the taxi, I asked Martin not to tell the other guys. He said, of course not. We sat up and drank coffee and brandy, and he confessed his life. I can't say I understood the whole thing at the time, but he was a true friend and I heard him out in the manner that you always hear a friend's most private anguish. Martin was from up near Grassmere in the Lake Country, and his first boyhood lover had died during the Normandy Invasion. It was nearly daylight when he finished his story and we finished the bottle of brandy. In some strange way his first love reminded me of Edith, despite the difference in sex. Naturally, I had heard a lot of stories, but Martin was the first dyed-in-the-wool homosexual who was a friend. When he died in India, me and the crew, who all loved him, put up a stone that said: “This was the noblest Englishman of them all.” It was sentimental, but that's what we felt about Martin.

  Last night I had a problem talking to Allegria, and that scared the hell out of her. I wasn't saying what I thought I was: a whole stream of disorganized words would come out. It was similar to what often happens to stroke victims. I wouldn't believe it at first, but she recorded my voice
on tape and played it back. I thought it was humorous instead of frightening, because I recognized that herb at work again. I guess I still thank the Lord, or whomever, I didn't take an even bigger dose, which I'm told often leads to almost total paralysis or death. Then this inability passed as suddenly as it arrived.

  You should probably stop trying to read that book on dam engineering. It just occurred to me that a dam is more like a movie that you have to see; it can't be successfully described. When you drive back south, take a detour over to Elberton, Georgia, and look at the Russell Project on the Savannah River. It's not a monster, but it's a pretty big operation. A friend of mine is one of the project engineers, and he'll show you around. Or if you're in the area, come see me in New Guinea this winter. A big dam might take more than ten years from start to finish. One of our main problems in India was that we were working too fast. It was in the beginning of Nehru's second five-year plan, and we scarcely drew a breath while we were there.

  The real goad to working hard in India for some of us was the hunger you would see all around you. Some of the dams being built under the second five-year plan were basically for irrigation, to increase the amount of tillable land and feed these people. Others were built primarily for hydroelectric power and industrialization, to decrease India's almost total dependency on other countries for any manner of machinery. Starvation in print remains an abstraction, something that can be ignored or dismissed with a quip. You see that in the papers right now: those who are doing well simply refuse to recognize the malnutrition in our own country. It's impossible, they say, because they have never taken the trouble, the unpleasantness, to come into contact with any people but their own kind. Historically speaking, of course, these leaders are swine, utterly contemptible. You could easily feed the hungry people in this country on the extra dough the defense contractors swindle out of the Pentagon. I read there was a miner over west of here, where the unemployment is forty percent, who was trying to feed his kids on bouillon cubes. A teacher noticed when the kids commenced to faint on the playground. I hope to tell you I sent a check over in care of the newspaper. None of these fat fuckers in Washington or Lansing will ever have to serve his kid a cup of bouillon for dinner a week hard-running. That's for sure, because they're all lawyers, and lawyers think everything is a matter of the right language. The final settlement on the asbestos poisoning case yielded up sixty percent of the total in legal fees. Reporters aren't much better except in city matters; it is an inconvenience to get up in the country where readership is anyhow low. They have largely taken up writing about themselves.