The Woman Lit by Fireflies

by Jim Harrison

  Luckily there are methods for digging up the past and confronting it, and Shelley knows these methods like the back of her hand. This knowledge didn’t come from her university training but from her troubled youth. Her dad was and is a big deal gynecologist in the Detroit area and his overfamiliarity with women on the job made him act remote and impersonal to Shelley. Or so she tells it. “Too much of a good thing?” I offered, which she didn’t think was funny. The upshot was that Shelley went to psychiatrists, therapists and psychologists, and learned their methods. How you tell the difference is the first can give medicine (not cheap), the second goes deep into your past, and the third offers cut-rate tips on how to get through the day. That’s my rundown on it anyway.

  So we set aside an hour or two each day and she asks me questions in a professional manner. She calls this “probing,” just as she was probed because of her haywire times with her dad. They’re in fine shape now. He even gave her a new 4WD made in England when she got her master’s degree. I’d call that a top drawer relationship for a father and daughter on a certain level. Anyway, Shelley was probed from eight to eighteen at who knows what cost because she says there’s no way to add it up. It seems the real problem was that her mother’s younger brother, Uncle Nick by name, used to make Shelley play with his weenie on camping trips. Between this and her father’s occupation father and daughter kept their distance until it all came out in the wash. I suggested we go find Uncle Nick and kick his ass but she said that was missing the point. What’s the point then, I wondered. She’s pals with her dad and fearless about weenies? That was part of it but mostly it’s that she’s not upset for mysterious reasons. That made a lot of sense to me because you can’t even shoot a grouse or a deer properly if you’re upset about something vague.

  And now that she’s at one with herself and the world she can work my brain over with high horsepower energy. For instance, she nailed me to the wall on the story of how the student radicals in Chicago had ruined my future in Christian work. She got me all soothed on the sofa by talking about things I love like all the different kinds of trees and fish in the U.P. Sometimes her voice gives me a boner but I’m out of luck because this business does not allow a quick time out, sad to say, for fucking.

  We went back to the ordinary sadness of those hot days in Chicago and what really happened, not all of it my fault. The church treasurer in Escanaba had made a mistake and sent the scholarship check directly to me instead of to the Bible Institute. I didn’t even open the envelope right away because I thought it was just another letter saying that everyone in the congregation back home was praying for me. I just sat on my bed in the Christian rooming house (no smoking or drinking) and had a sip of after-school peppermint schnapps. I remember I was thinking about Beatrice who was a bubble-butted waitress at a diner near the school. She was a dusky beauty but when I asked her what nationality she was she said, “What do you care, you snot-nosed little Bible thumper?” We had to carry our Bibles (King James Version) at all times. I guess I looked so downcast that she came over when I finished my oatmeal and said she was part black and part Italian. I told her that to me she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I’d have my oatmeal and breakfast coffee and spring a hard-on just watching Beatrice wipe off a table.

  So I was sitting there in my room thinking of Beatrice, and not wanting to exhaust myself on unclean thoughts I opened the letter from the church. It was a check made out for three hundred and ninety dollars. The possibilities hit like lightning so I dropped to my knees and prayed for strength which did not arrive.

  I hit the bank as if shot from a rocket, then trembled my way over to the diner for an early supper. Mind you, I didn’t order thirty-cent oatmeal for breakfast out of choice but because it was all the budget would allow. It was irksome to sit at the counter and watch a neighbor eat ham, eggs and potatoes. I have always had a weakness for catsup, but it didn’t go too well with oatmeal. I tried it once and it wasn’t a popular move at the diner. For days afterwards other customers would look at me and shake their heads. So when I got to the diner I took a full-size table in Beatrice’s section and ordered a T-bone steak with all the trimmings. She doubted I had the money, so I flashed my roll and she smiled. I had become handsome between breakfast and dinner. The owner even nodded to me when he saw me eating a steak. I admit I was feeling like an instant big shot when I asked Beatrice to go out.

  “You looking for a chance to talk about yourself or are you after free pussy? In either case, the answer is no.”

  “I’d be a fool to think anything was free in Chicago except hot weather and bad air,” I said, catching the drift. I’d always flunked the courtship routine so I might as well try to sin boldly and quick.

  Well, she wrote down her address and told me to come over at nine, but not unless I had a fifty-dollar bill in my pocket. I said I’d be there, though fifty bucks about equaled the largest amount I’d ever made in a week. This fact and a lot more caused the next three hours to be pretty uncomfortable. There was a sense in my small room that I was wrestling with Satan and I somehow knew I was going to lose to His power. I felt the overwhelming heat of His presence in the room though I realized it was mostly the weather. I prayed and almost wept and even gnashed my teeth. The guy in the next room, Fred, a poor kid from Indiana who was also a Moody Bible Institute student, heard the noise and came over to pray with me. Of course I didn’t tell him the nature of the problem. The trouble with Fred’s prayers was that he sounded like the popular comedian from Indiana, Herb Shriner. At one point the devil made me laugh out loud. I gave Fred ten bucks and he ran out with plans to eat a whole fried chicken. My food budget was two dollars a day and his was only one. The week before his mom had sent him cookies and he ate them all at once and puked.

  I worked on my term paper on Nicodemus but the bubble-butt of Beatrice seemed to arise from the page and smack my nose. How could I think of spending fifty bucks straight off the collection plate of the poor folks back home? Few unbelievers and upper-class-type Protestants understand this kind of test and the fact that deep faith is a surefire goad to lust. Forbidden bubble-butt fruit is what I was dealing with. Years later when President Carter spoke of the lust in his heart I sure as hell knew what he was talking about.

  To be frank, as some of you might have guessed already, I failed the test. I still feel a trace of shame over my five days in Beatrice’s school of love. That’s what we jokingly called it. We started slow but soon enough we were on the fast track, me to perdition, and for her, business as usual.

  When I got to her small apartment the first evening she was still in her waitress uniform making late dinner for a little boy about four years old. While she took a shower I read the kid a book called Yertle the Turtle about ten times, which was not much of a warm-up for sex. She came out of the bathroom in a blue satin robe and white furry slippers and took the kid down the hall to a babysitter. While she was gone a mean-looking black guy peeked in the door and tried to give me a bad look which didn’t work. I was known around my hometown as a first-rate fistfighter and I had dug enough eight-foot-deep well pits by hand not to take any bullying.

  So she came back, we went into the bedroom and it was over in less than three minutes. What I bought was what she called a “half-and-half” which is half “French” and full entry. She took off her robe and had nothing on but a teeny pair of red undies. I was dizzy from holding my breath without knowing it. She undid my trousers and let them drop to my ankles, went down on me for a few seconds, and when I groaned she jumped up, pulled down the undies and bent over. I had barely plugged her when I shot and fell over backwards to the floor, where I thought for a moment of my young love for Rose. I looked up in despair at Beatrice’s fanny, then she turned and started laughing. She put her robe back on and went out to the other room still laughing. Was it for this that I had betrayed all my principles?

  We sat on the couch and had a beer and I became cagey. I pointed out that at her current rate for work done she
was making a thousand bucks an hour which was more than the President of the United States. “Fuck the President,” she said, still laughing. I tried to slide a hand in on her breast and she slapped it away. I developed a lump in my throat and got up to leave with shame sweating out of my pores. She stopped me and said for another twenty bucks we could transfer the deal to an hourly rate. She let a breast slip out of her robe and I agreed. I also had to do the dishes because she was sicker than shit of dishes and food.

  It was while washing the dishes that I realized I was in the hands of forces far larger than myself. There was a temptation to cut and run, reduce my losses to the T-bone dinner and seventy bucks (I had immediately turned over the twenty for the hourly rate). I could tell the Institute that the money had been stolen from my room while I was at prayer service. Tears formed at the image of me on my knees while some craven thief stole the church’s money, stealing money from God Himself. Only that isn’t what happened, I corrected myself.

  I turned then to see Beatrice on the sofa, now with her robe off and only the red panties to cover herself. She was reading Life magazine which seemed to me a coincidence.

  “What I was wondering is this. Is the dish-washing time using up my hourly rate?”

  “It depends. It all depends. I’ll take another beer.”

  I brought her a bottle of beer and she set the cold bottom of it first on one nipple, then on the other. The nipples perked up and she shivered.

  “It concerns me that you don’t know fuck-all about what you’re doing. You’re an amateur at this, aren’t you?” She slid off her undies and took another drink.

  “You’re crazy if you think it’s my first time. I’d say you were about number eleven. Maybe twelve.”

  She was actually number three. The first, by the name of Florence, was thin as a chicken carcass and we did it standing up against a pine tree in a cloud of mosquitoes. The second, Lily, was enormously fat and drunk, and I can’t even guarantee I was on target, though I suppose it’s fair to count it.

  “Let me tell you, B.D., I don’t like men who don’t know what they’re doing. It’s simple as that. You’re one of them. I have feelings. We all need pleasure, you understand.”

  She tugged my arm and I knelt down by the couch. She rubbed a hand through my hair and laughed. “You got the ugliest head of hair in the world.” True, my hair is bristly and will stand straight up without a goad soaking of Vitalis. She tugged my ears, then pressed a hand on the back of my neck, pushing it downward. And thus I faced the beautiful mouth of hell.

  Five days of this and I had run out of money. I went over on the sixth evening and she was friendly enough but it was no dice. Her “professional standards” made what she called “freebies” out of the question. Her heart of gold was actual gold and not very warm at that. She was cooking spaghetti for her boyfriend and served me a single meatball before showing me the door. I tried to get a little sentimental and she just shook her head like she did the day I tried catsup on my oatmeal. It is hard for me to admit that I didn’t turn her head one little bit. But still, a wise man would do well to go looking for a woman who’s half black and half Italian. There’s no point in searching the U.P. because the population is too scant for such a combination.

  Within a week I was locked out of my room for nonpayment of rent and was bumming around the park. When I think of that room now I wonder what they did with the new robin’s-egg blue suit Grandpa gave me, my schoolbooks and Scholfield Reference Bible (KJV), the single dirty picture of Beatrice, a present, stuck under the mattress. The last must have been an eye opener for the kindly old landlady, at least she was kindly until I ran out of money. I was lower than a snake dick until I cast my lot with the student radicals in the park who assured me I was one of the people. I couldn’t wait to disrupt a political convention, though we never got inside to see the big deals. At least there was plenty to eat. I didn’t realize at the time that college students were expert thieves.

  I’m running on at the mouth a bit here at Shelley’s insistence. What happened to me was in her terms a “key experience.” This doesn’t mean what I thought it would. According to Shelley, what I did with the church money and Beatrice wasn’t necessarily wrong, only that it established a pattern of failure as a self-fulfilling prophecy that I never got over. I was involved in failure as a habit, according to her. This is curious as I never felt I did all that badly at life, at least for up here. I’d say half the men I know are worse off one way or another, either from drink or jail or because a tree fell on them while cutting pulp. I never owned a house but my van is free and clear, though it’s a ’78 Dodge and could use some work. I rent deer cabins real cheap to keep a roof over my head. You just have to be out during the season from November 15 to December 1. Sometimes I live rent free if I do some improvements.

  Also I relish parts of what Shelley calls my professional guilt trip. The battle between good and evil is entertaining and is supposed to be instructive. Just about everything seems to be in the gray area these days, at least according to the newspapers. I only read the newspaper on Sunday like Grandpa did. I was just remembering that right after the brief trial Shelley’s father called me a scoundrel. Ten minutes later he asked me not to tell his daughter that he called me a scoundrel, to keep it between us. I agreed which lightened up his mood. After all, he paid my legal expenses, otherwise I’d be in jail like my partner Bob, or any other poor guy without a first-rate lawyer.

  To be frank, my life in crime started right after Rose hit me over the head with the schoolbook. About a week later when I still wasn’t feeling all that well a sheriff’s deputy shot my dog Sam for killing chickens, domestic ducks and geese, ripping the mailman’s trousers, chasing a stray cow into a fence and tearing the tire off a kid’s bike, that sort of thing. I’ll have to admit he wasn’t much of a companion, but I loved him, and he stood for something to me, something like Old Glory to a veteran. He even bit me once when I tried to take a fresh deer bone from him to destroy the evidence that he had been running deer.

  Grandpa had found Sam two years before while he was skidding logs in Dickinson County. The dog had no doubt been lost by bear hunters as he was part terrier with some Plott hound on the other side which made him large. Sam’s muzzle was full of porcupine quills, also his sides, as if he had bowled it over after biting it. Sam wanted help in a real unfriendly way and Grandpa said the only reason he tried is another logger bet him a quart of beer he wasn’t man enough for the job. It wasn’t that hard, he said. He took a tarp from the truck, threw it over the dog, wrestled him down and rolled him up in the canvas with the dog’s head poking out. Then he wedged a stick sideways in Sam’s mouth, tying it behind the head, and pulled the quills out with a pliers. When he unrolled the canvas the dog stood still for the side quills and Grandpa had the notion this had happened before. Certain dogs are so ornery they can’t learn from their first porcupine experience. He washed Sam’s mouth out with whiskey and water, then the dog jumped in the truck and went to sleep, so we had a dog.

  Unfortunately, as we were to see, a dog that is bred, raised and trained to chase bear was not the best choice for our small farms, one near Bark River and the other outside Escanaba, where we lived depending on where Grandpa was working. To call them farms is a bit of a joke as both of them were Depression brick shacks sitting on forty untilled acres of swamp, woods and meadow. I liked the one in Bark River better as there was a small creek and a beaver pond where you could catch brook trout. Living in two places allowed two school systems to share the load of my behavior without totally outwearing my welcome.

  In her search for problem spots and “glitches,” as she calls them, Shelley sometimes gets a bit loony in my book. For instance, she made a big deal about the fact that though Escanaba and Bark River are only twenty miles apart they are in different time zones which must have confused me. I said no, though I generally preferred the central time zone in Bark River, but I couldn’t say why. Grandpa said all the world cares is tha
t you get to work on time. I never owned a timepiece but I could see the need for one if you had to catch airplanes, or were having business-type dealings. Of course Bob had an underwater watch for me when I was diving. When you’re down deep you have to come up slow, otherwise you’ll get the bends and die. If you don’t time your air and leave enough for a slow climb you may as well cut your throat and stay down there. The late afternoon I found the Chief I had to spend a full half hour moving slowly up the line, looking down at his black hair wavering below. It made me want to draw up my feet closer to my body.

  But what I said about time isn’t what Shelley means. If you don’t have a sense of time you tend to drift along without any plans. You’ll just be another working stiff waiting for his next day off. That’s what she means by calling it a glitch in my brain, not thinking ahead pure and simple. For instance, if I had kept closer track of Sam the deputy wouldn’t have had to shoot him, she said. Just try keeping up with a bear hound, I replied. Then keep him tied up, she said. He would just be a piece of meat tied to a dog house if he didn’t get a daily run. Mind you, the dog has been dead nearly thirty years.

  What happened was that I was walking home looking for Sam when he appeared with a white chicken in his mouth. I tried to get it away with no luck. I heard a car and turned to see the deputy coming at me at top speed, then I tried to get Sam to run but he stood his ground. In the winter he’d stand in the road and the county snow plow would stop and lay on the horn. The dog would piss on the snow blade and walk off. The deputy jumped out with this woman from down the road screaming “My chicken!” The deputy drew his gun and when I tried to get in the way he pushed me in the ditch. Maybe he tried to shoot Sam in the head, I don’t know, but I do know he caught him in the gut which was sad indeed. Sam started howling, still with the chicken in his mouth, and ran into our yard with me right after him. When I reached him the chicken was turning red from the blood coming out of Sam’s mouth. He was hanging his head but unwilling in death to let go of the chicken. The deputy came up to finish the dog off but Sam tried to attack him and the deputy ran backwards while I hauled on Sam’s collar. Then Grandpa drove into the yard, home from work and beered up. He read the situation right and grabbed the pistol from the deputy, then walked up to Sam, gave him a goodbye pat and a bullet in the head. He threw the deputy’s pistol across the road into the weeds and told him if he came on our property again he’d stomp him until he had to be hauled off in a gunny sack. We buried Sam with the chicken still in his mouth. Even now, across all these years in between, my eyes get wet thinking of my beloved dog.