by Jim Harrison
This kind of journey is inevitably a stomach churner for a boy of twelve and a half. He’s aware of how far he is from his friends who are more family than his own, his mother in distant Massachusetts which he saw once when he was young but the memory is truncated beyond bits and pieces, and the inscrutable dodo father beside him swerving the car ineptly to look at any passing bird, yelling “Aplomado” in personal triumph. On the outskirts of Ojinaga I saw two women necking passionately outside a cement-block bar and Father said, “Disgusting.” I knew better having looked into my mother’s volume containing the fragments of Sappho. Mother had told me in regard to Sappho that it wasn’t for us to quarrel with the nature of nature. After my inconclusive good-bye the night before I had even read the fragment, “Eros shook my mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees,” and thought this was on the money for Emelia at the water tank and under the oak tree. Love was messy to be sure. Before we swam we’d have to step gingerly around all of the nasty cow plots.
I decided that Mexico so far didn’t look very foreign when we turned onto Route 49 after an uneventful border crossing. This was the 1960s well before the media was full of the dangers of Mexico. Back then it was considered a serene alternative to our overpowering busyness, our grotesque squabbles in Vietnam. Emelia could sing what she called “Mexican country songs,” really corridos, which were even sadder than our own and comprehensible with the rudimentary Spanish I’d learned at school which was a multilingual babbling ground.
Meanwhile I had the gut feeling that we were going in the wrong direction because I had just read my mother’s copy of Drums Along the Mohawk, one of her favorite early books. In my then-literal imagination I wanted to be an Indian in the northern forests, perhaps capture a white girl from a settlement and live with her near a waterfall. Prophetically enough I intended to wear a suit of wolf pelts. Mexico was also the wrong direction for another recent reading experience, mother’s copy of Little Women where I had the somewhat unpleasant perception that girls were only big women in miniature and consequently quite dangerous. Lawrence had told me how a nun had broken one of his fingers for “tinkering” with a girl.
We reached our campsite near La Poquito de Conchos by suppertime. No one had told me but it was grand indeed to see that we weren’t camping alone. There were three other men my father’s age, all former graduate school ornithology pals from Cornell. The dominant male apparently was George, already an associate professor at Yale. He evidently had some money because as a “treat” he had hired a Mexican outfitter and his wife, Nestor and Celia, who had set up our floor tents. George had brought along his wife, Laurel, a sullen woman interested in the primitive art of the Sierra Madre. She was lovely and the beginning woman in the very long line of attractive creatures who seemed quite unhappy to me, but then she was married to the kind of man described by Emelia’s little brother Dicky as “just another asshole.”
“I thought we agreed that no one was bringing kids,” George said, looking at me with distaste.
My father explained that my mother had received a last-minute grant for Radcliffe and he hadn’t wanted to leave me with “low-rent neighbors” which angered me. He added that I was handy and would help out around camp and wouldn’t be going on their expeditions.
“She better watch out. We all know how those Radcliffe women like to cozy up to each other,” George guffawed.
“You pig,” George’s wife said, sitting down in a camp chair with a book.
Off they went with their birding paraphernalia: spotting scopes, binoculars, cameras. I must have looked forlorn because Celia who was fixing supper at a big camp stove came over and hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. She must have troweled on her ruby-red lipstick because she left a smear though I liked its scent.
Nestor gestured and we took off in his ancient pickup. Nestor spoke English with a German accent and explained that he was half German Mennonite and half Mexican but the Mexican part won over when he ran away from the Mennonite farm colony at age twelve. I mentally seized on this, thinking of what courage it must have taken to leave his family at my own age, but also the possible fear and hunger. Nestor sensed my thinking and said his liberation from the Mennonites was wonderful. Anything was better than hoeing corn and the interminable praying. He ran up into the mountains and lived with a cousin of his Mexican mother’s. While his father was constructed of stone this cousin was a hunter and trapper and made mescal. “There is no freer life than that of a hunter,” Nestor said. Now he earned a living guiding rich men from Chihuahua, Hermosillo, and Mexico City on their hunts and sometimes American naturalists and anthropologists. He swigged from a flask of mescal and offered me a drink which I took out of politeness and which made me half-gag and choke from its rawness.
He parked the truck and we hiked up a creek for a half mile to a lovely little glade where the creek formed a rock pool. It was hot so I shed my clothes and paddled around quite stunned by the hundreds of hummingbirds in the flowering bushes, one of which rammed his beak into the smear of red lipstick left by Nestor’s wife Celia. I yelped at my wound and Nestor laughed saying the wound was good luck which I doubted. He said that the local Indians, nearly all of which had been murdered by Mexican cowboys, believed that hummingbirds contained the soul of thunder in their bodies.
Not oddly my memory is blurred about these days nearly twenty years ago, perhaps because my unwittingly violent hummingbird was a mere peck on the cheek compared to what followed in a scant few days. It was as if Nestor telling me about his life blinded me to my surroundings for at least a few days. He said he had to leave the casita of his mother’s cousin after the first winter because they were too poor for another mouth plus the local priest at the nearby village was always trying to fuck him. He had slept all winter in the goat shed under a pile of goat skins. The goats had to be herded into the shed late every afternoon because there was a jaguar in the area that would kill and eat goats. The local men were too cowardly to hunt the jaguar so Nestor went to the largest landowner of the area and said he could kill the jaguar if the landowner would loan him a rifle. The landowner was very amused that this mere boy intended to kill a jaguar and loaned him a single-shot .22 rifle and a few shells. Nestor hunted the jaguar for five months and finally killed it when it was sleeping in a tree. At the last possible moment the jaguar awoke and snarled and Nestor pissed his pants. He managed a lucky shot to the beast’s head and it fell from the limb. It took Nestor two days to drag the beast to the landowner’s finca and on the way an hombre tried to take the jaguar from Nestor for its valuable pelt. Nestor shot him in the head and he also fell dead. (Here I was talking to a murderer!) The landowner gave him twenty dollars which was a fortune in the mountains at the time though Nestor soon found out that the landowner had sold the pelt for five hundred dollars. Nestor was acclaimed as a boy who hunted jaguars and began to get occasional jobs guiding rich hunters but he was still often hungry. One of his hunters killed a female black bear and Nestor fed a remaining cub goat’s milk but one winter day when he was cold and hungry he killed the cub and roasted it. When Nestor told me this he began weeping and we walked back to his pickup. On the ride back to camp he said that by the time he was eighteen he knew he was himself becoming a wild animal so he married Celia. He said that he had feared someone would mistake him for a lobo and shoot him.
At dinner I tried to tell my father about the hundreds of hummingbirds I had seen but he ignored me. The four ornithologists hadn’t done very well and were disgruntled. The blowhard George overheard me and was angry that Nestor hadn’t directed them to the place. Nestor said he would take them in the morning. George continued fuming and his wife said, “Shut up,” and he did. I learned later it was Laurel who had the money. She was upset at my swollen cheek and doctored me with a medicine kit. The men seemed distracted by Laurel’s shorts and brief halter and so was I when she rubbed iodine on my cheek, her breasts were grand and I got an uncomfortable hard-on in my camping shorts which she noticed and la
ughed. Later in the evening just after nightfall while the men drank beer and waxed sentimental about Cornell she was looking at a book about Goya in the light of a Coleman lantern. I told her shyly that my mother owned the same book and as a child I had been frightened by the drawing of the gathering of brujas, or witches.
“You’re no longer a child?” she teased.
“Not at all, madame,” I said rather archly.
This started a friendship that continued until last year in Madrid. O Laurel, what grace and protection you occasionally offered my life!
Early the next morning my cheek was further swollen and Laurel insisted I be taken to a doctor. Nestor dropped off the four men whom Laurel referred to as “birdbrains” at the hummingbird rock pool.
Nestor drove us north on the main road toward the doctor’s. I sat between Nestor and Laurel who were talking rapid-fire Spanish. Laurel had lived in Madrid for two years studying folk art and I could tell with my own minimal Spanish that hers was formal and educated. Nestor stopped the truck and got out to talk to a man who was coming down an arroyo from the Diablo Mountains leading a packhorse. Laurel whispered to me that Nestor had been talking “dirty” to her. This upset me because naturally I was infatuated with her and consequently jealous. She was flushed and her nipples were obviously more erect under the halter. Lawrence or Emelia would have described the halter as that of a puta, or whore. I sat there in the hot cab of the pickup wondering at the inscrutable nature of adults. It was dawning on me that Nestor and Laurel were “sweet” on each other and I couldn’t comprehend why. She was lovely and sophisticated and he was a weather-beaten Mexican about fifty years old whose features reminded me of the Catahoula wild hog dogs owned by a rancher near Alpine.
Nestor gestured us out of the truck and when we approached there was a terrible stench. On the packhorse were the gutted bodies of a wolf and her two pups. The man was animated and happy because he would collect a bounty for the animals from a local rancher. Laurel screeched, “Disgusting,” and I backed away from the odor.
Back in the pickup I asked about the huge claws on the man’s necklace and Nestor said that the man had killed the last grizzly bear in the central Sierra Madre right after World War II. Nestor also said there had been a third pup that got away and we would go looking for it in the next few days.
Laurel was upset when the doctor we stopped to see turned out not to be a real doctor but a very old lady with a bulging left eye that looked like it was full of milk. She lived in a tiny adobe hut and at first I was frightened but she quickly soothed me. She made a poultice out of clay and herbal plant leaves and taped it to my cheek. The old lady thought Laurel was my mother and told her to be careful because I had “vulnerable” blood. Laurel was pleased to be mistaken for my mother and ever afterward even when I was suckling at her breasts she would laughingly call me son.
Within minutes of driving back toward our camp my previously hot cheek felt cooler and my jaw less sore. Nestor teased me about having hummingbird thunder in my blood and Laurel began singing a song about love being strange. I was shocked when Nestor stopped the truck and told me to stay still while he and Laurel took a walk. I sat there thinking that life isn’t as I wish. Nestor and Laurel were likely up behind the boulder and bushes fucking like dogs as my friend Lawrence used to say. Emelia had told me that she was never going to blow a man or fuck on her hands and knees. I kept thinking of the female wolf’s huge teeth and purple deliquescent tongue. The dead pups were unbearable to me sitting there being treated like a pup myself. I slipped out of the truck and the radiating heat coming through the windshield. I heard Laurel yelping from the bushes and tears of embarrassment formed. As a young romantic I was getting my nose rubbed in the animality of people. I was so distressed I wished I had the copy of Virgil’s Georgics my mother had bribed me five dollars to read. I wanted to be a noble farmer in a green and leafy land not waiting there in the immense hellhole of Mexico while the engine heat ticked off the truck hood. When they returned Nestor was soaked with sweat and brushing the dirt, grass, and leaves from his clothes. Laurel was merely smiling as if she had been reading from the little stack of New Yorkers she had packed into camp.
Before suppertime I had the mature thought that there are aspects of humans that make us barely governable. After returning both Laurel and Nestor had to take naps from their hard sexual work but not before Celia and Nestor had a nasty quarrel. I had barely enough Spanish to understand that Celia had smelled another woman on her husband. Laurel speedily retreated to her tent. I sat at a camp table in the shade leafing through my father’s nature guidebooks wishing that I had brought along something more interesting to read. Disappointingly my father always gave me such nature guidebooks for Christmas and they bored me though in truth a lot of their information was helpful later. I sat there finally amused when Nestor woke up from his nap and remembered that he had forgotten to pick up his four ornithologist clients from the rock pool and roared off. I treated myself to a beer from the cooler suddenly quite lonely for my true love Emelia and our sessions in the cattle water tank. Laurel got up from her nap and went into the camp shower under a tree which was only a canvas shroud with gravity-fed water from up the hill. By moving over to Celia’s cooking area I could see Laurel soaping herself through a parting in the canvas. Boys are natural voyeurs. While Laurel was rinsing off she glanced out, grinned, and waved at me. I was bold enough to wave back. After all I knew the secret. Laurel was my first full-blown naked adult woman and I felt nearly ill, quite overwhelmed by what I was seeing. My pecker felt like it was leaking and my face glowed hot as if my whole head was a hummingbird.
When Nestor brought back the bird-watchers rather than being angry they were effusive and babbling about their great day though also teasing my father about a few misidentifications. Nestor suggested a longer expedition the next day that would involve several hours of hiking in steep terrain but the men all wanted to go back to the rock pool. Nestor then asked their permission to take me on a long hike to look for the stray wolf pup and they agreed in the lightness of the moment. Unlike the other men Nestor was rather burly but could scamper up a mountain like a goat.
I was sitting there eating my posole, a hominy-and-pork stew, and listening to the quarrelsome men. I wondered why educated people always seemed to be arguing. I noticed that Laurel wasn’t listening. She made a silly face at me and I smiled. This reminded me of my mother who remained calm about everything while my father moment by moment tried to readjust reality to his wishes. Just then George noted thunderheads far to the southeast and started complaining that the monsoons weren’t supposed to begin until early July and here it was the day before the solstice and there were already signs of the dreaded summer thunderstorms and their flash floods. He demanded an explanation from Nestor who only said that since he wasn’t God he had learned to enjoy the weather that arrived. Laurel quipped, “Imagine that,” and laughed. My father looked at her oddly as if it was the first time he had noticed her. I was counting and knew he was at his three-beer limit after which he would snivel in the most maudlin way. A few weeks before at an academic picnic to celebrate the end of the school year he had had extra beers and on the ride home said, “People are so evil they shoot their own dogs.” I asked if that was the reason that I couldn’t have a dog because he was afraid he’d shoot it. He leaned over the front seat and tried to slap me. My mother swerved the car and shrieked, “Don’t you hit him, you lamebrain fuckhead,” and I felt thrilled that she was coming to my defense.
Everyone turned in when darkness fell or, it seemed to me, rose up from the burnt earth. In this clime the earth was the color of burnt toast until the monsoons took effect except for greenish arroyos and, farther up the mountains, the green conifers. I sat up for a while at the camp table looking with Laurel at a Velázquez art book in the gas lantern’s light. It was too dry for mosquitoes but large, lovely moths appeared. Of course I didn’t admit to Laurel that my pillaging of my mother’s art books was becaus
e I was looking for paintings of nude women and inevitably picked up a little knowledge along the way. I did admit that I liked Modigliani and she teased that it was because Modigliani painted beautiful women. I blushed visibly in the dim light and she smiled and said, “I’m an awful person. You remind me of my first boyfriend when I was about your age. He was always trying to play with me.” Then she asked if I had a girlfriend I played with and I said, “A little bit.” She probed further asking what we did but I couldn’t say anything except that we “rubbed” against each other. I was staring at her slight halter top and she released a nipple. She said, “Touch it,” and I touched it with a forefinger which was trembling. She touched my erection through my shorts then said, “I’m being stupid,” and walked off to her tent with the lantern, leaving me in the dark.
I left with Nestor soon after dawn with the birdbrains just getting up, muttering and looking for their gear. Far to the east there was thunder with the first of the rising sun casting its broad yellow light through black clouds. I felt weird and restless having slept poorly from my father’s snoring and the vividness of the incident with Laurel, a euphemism at best.
