The Woman Lit by Fireflies

by Jim Harrison

  On the car phone Billy called the pilots over at Burbank to tell them he’d be running late, then called his dad in San Francisco to cancel dinner plans. There was a foolish urge to tell his father he was seeing Gwen for dinner but it was unthinkable. Instead, he fibbed and said he was flying back after the first game to have dinner with a prominent L.A. socialite. At the trial his father continually referred to Billy’s friends as “filthy hippies” and it grieved Billy twenty years later to remember this. On impulse he called his secretary and told her to locate Gwen’s bank and wire a few grand on deposit. All this running around was obviously costing her money she could ill afford, he thought.

  The meeting at the Mexican consulate was brief. The consul, Matthias Arndt-Guerrez, had been nearly a friend before the firm had stopped doing business in Mexico, and Billy still ran into him on social occasions. In the consul’s private chambers it occurred again to Billy how many Mexicans of wealth and power are at least part German in ancestry. The family of Arndt-Guerrez owned the largest brewery in Mexico, also a steel mill up in Chihuahua. Billy could, in any event, expect Matthias to be discreet in this matter. After a few pleasantries, they got directly to the point.

  “Your college chum is a bad apple,” Matthias said, “but then you are aware of that.”

  “I only need to know if he’s actually in danger of being murdered and what his probable sentence will be.”

  “Fifty years, which means twenty with good behavior. He’s in bad health so that is also a death sentence. As far as being murdered I’m not sure. The international left, at least the Mexican and Central American groups, consider Mr. Frazer a well-intentioned pest, an old-style Don Quixote radical, you know what I mean? An altruistic ideologue scarcely near the left power structure. In Cuba he was confined to lecturing schoolchildren and cane-cutting crews. He was given a bicycle rather than a car, an accurate gauge of the esteem in which he was held. The right wings of a half-dozen countries wish him dead but he is one among thousands they would like to exterminate. I’m a little uncertain of his standing in Mexico. Like your own country, one arm of our government frequently does not know what the other arm is doing. There are also billions of dollars in electronics and fruit-and-vegetable export businesses in the Nogales area. Labor organizers are not popular, perhaps fatally unpopular. That’s about it.”

  “Are you neglecting another factor we’re both thinking about?” Billy had a sharp ear for things left out of explanations. He always advised corporations against allowing “spooks” to be placed in their foreign operations, though this advice was frequently not taken.

  “Of course our respective governments tend to lose enthusiasm for their respective constitutions. This is what you mean, no doubt. I wouldn’t be surprised, since this is a border matter, if your government is involved in Mr. Frazer’s imprisonment.”

  Back in the car Billy made another call, this time to Patricia’s office to make sure she was there. Her secretary was evasive, trying to interpret the nature of the call, but Billy didn’t want a turn-down so said he was a personal friend, Bob, in town from London, and discovered that Patty was due at the studio momentarily.

  The pleasure from this minor subterfuge was brief. There was a traffic tie-up on Hollywood Freeway near the Barham exit and Fred brought Billy’s attention to something quite unpleasant: a tall and pathetically thin man with very long hair was standing nude on the balcony of an apartment house playing with himself.

  “Maybe he’s waiting for the right model of car to get off,” Fred joked. “That’s it. He’s waiting for a blue Lamborghini.”

  Billy watched the man stroking himself and thought, inaccurately, that this couldn’t happen in the Bay Area. He glanced around and saw that other drivers, also stuck in the traffic, were watching. An older woman was laughing. Perhaps that was the right attitude but Billy didn’t quite have it in him. The truth was that Billy was beginning to delaminate. Everyone started beeping at the naked man and Billy slumped down in the seat and rubbed his face, then opened his briefcase in a panic for something to do.

  “That’s a real weird way to show the world you’re lonely,” Fred said, accelerating violently as the traffic loosened up.

  Patty’s office turned out to be a large back-lot bungalow, manned by a brisk English secretary whose efficiency on the phone Billy admired. He had been made to wait for a few minutes at the gate, and now he waited further, remembering the full dimensions of Patricia when she was cold and angry. Then she was standing at the door and he followed her into her office, a cavernous room, nicely if eccentrically decorated with paintings, bibelots of the best sort, framed movie posters and a few photographs.

  There was the kind of silent face-off that both of them were good at, and Billy might possibly have won had he not seen a naked man jerking off on a balcony.

  “What are we going to do?” He nearly blurted it out.

  Patricia gestured him to the sofa but continued leaning against her desk, clearly the superior position.

  “I’m not sure I like your first person plural. I’m not sure I want to be we, in other words. I still have a very distinct feeling that you sold us out,” she said.

  “That was clear to me the last time. Try to enlarge your heart, though, and think about what we’re going to do about Zip.”

  “Zip’s cause sounds lost. But I think we should try to do what Gwen asks us.” There was not a trace of warmth in her voice. “How does that sound to you?”

  Billy nodded in agreement, trying to retreat into the day before when the problem did not dominate his life. Deep within him a torment that had been thoroughly rationalized and put to sleep began to grow.

  “You think I tipped off the police. The draft board had an alarm system. Whatever that means to you now. I don’t think it really matters if we like each other, and if we’re going to do anything for Zip, that should be clear to both of us. Agreed?”

  It was Patty’s turn to nod. She walked over to the sofa and offered her hand. Billy stood and shook it, desperate for escape.

  “Can you bring Gwen over? She’d probably get lost. I might be running a little late so seven would be fine.” As he headed for the door his heart cringed a bit waiting for something else.

  “Are we only going to do something because we couldn’t bear ourselves if we didn’t?” Patricia’s question was almost plaintive.

  Billy leaned against the door jamb thinking that she was right on the money. “There’s something to that. When I was a kid I used to have nightmares about the electric chair. I told my granddad who was the only one I could actually talk to at the time. He said if you’re going to spend your life worrying about the electric chair you’ve already been electrocuted.” Billy paused, seeing that Patricia was eager to say something.

  “Actually, when I saw her I thought she simply had no idea what she was up against. To be honest, she took care of me in prison so I owe her whatever. So it’s not like I’m being a sucker for Zip’s latest fuck-up. It’s for her.”

  V

  Gwen was walking the beach up near Trancas. If she had looked up she might have seen Billy’s jet heading out over the ocean before turning north. Gwen was so direct that people frequently interpreted her singularity as being simple-minded. It was more than a mannerism—her mother had been the same way. This characteristic encouraged people to help Gwen even when she didn’t need help. She was a very hard person to lie to because she never lied herself. She would have been appalled had she known that the willingness to help evinced by Billy and Patricia was for her rather than Zip. This ingenuousness made Gwen less seductive than she should have been for her level of attractiveness, since sexuality is, at best, an indirect art. She was vaguely aware of it all and supposed it came from a solitary childhood on the ranch near Mule Creek, population zero. When she was a physically advanced thirteen-year-old a cowboy at the local rodeo had said, “I’d like to stick it in you,” to which Gwen had replied, “You would, would you? I think that’s a strange thing to s
ay to someone you don’t even know.” This quality tended to keep men, young and old, at a distance.

  After a walk she fell asleep on the beach, awaking startled at the path of the sun. The ocean had aroused her and she wished that she could knock thirty years off her train mate Stuart’s age. In the parking lot she was approached by a youngish beach bum in the dirty remnant of a tropical suit. He asked for a buck or two for food and she opened her purse, looking at him in alarm.

  “My God, what are you doing to yourself?”

  “My wife left me. So I’ve been having a few drinks for a year.”

  “There are plenty of fish in the ocean, if you’ll allow me to say something stupid. Start taking care of yourself. This is all I can afford,” she said, handing him ten dollars.

  “I love you,” he called as she drove out of the parking lot.

  Gwen was delayed by rush-hour traffic and reached the small lobby of Le Parc at the same time Patty did. For some reason the specific density had lifted a bit. Patty had brought a wrapped present plus a bottle of champagne and while they waited for the elevator she joked about Billy’s visit. Two sallow rock musicians at the desk glowered at Gwen and Patty in a parody of lust, and Patty gave them the finger as the elevator door closed. By the time they reached Gwen’s room they were laughing hysterically. Patty iced the champagne and Gwen opened her present which was the loveliest blouse imaginable. Gwen remembered that she had packed along the article from the Denver Post about Sam to show Billy and Patty, and found it in her suitcase, failing to notice that the mention of it froze Patty in her chair. Then Gwen went off for a shower leaving Patty to stare at “Coyote Man Sticks to His Mountains” and a large photo of Sam as feral as the beast he studied.

  Meanwhile, up in San Francisco, Billy sat drinking far too much with two cronies at the Washington Square Bar & Grill. The first game at Candlestick had been rained out as a scoreless tie in the fifth inning. Now he sat there waiting for a call from the airport to say that the fog had lifted and they had been assigned a takeoff time and position. His two cronies were aging and alcohol-weathered preppies (one was an otiose sports columnist) and over drinks they had been cruising and flipping through subjects ranging from the bear market, to baseball, to the threat of AIDS, which they did not feel threatened by. They had repeatedly questioned Billy’s melancholy mood until he had somewhat blearily admitted that his “dearest old friend” was on the eve of his execution in old Mexico. This was a real show stopper in that rarely, if ever, did anyone in the social position of the three actually know someone who’d been executed—or murdered, for that matter. The announcement was so extreme that Billy had even shocked himself. When the two cronies recovered enough to ask questions Billy limited himself to:

  “Let’s just say he was a great shortstop who got mixed up with the wrong crowd south of the border.”

  When the call came from the airport Billy was not in the best of shape.

  Gwen and Patty pulled up in front of Billy’s house in Pacific Palisades just at twilight. Gwen felt a little intimidated by the neighborhood, but Patty’s nonchalance and the shared bottle of champagne soothed her. They were met at the door by a black man in a baseball cap whose hands were covered with flour. This was definitely not what they were expecting. The black man said his name was Fred and that Billy had been delayed by the weather in San Francisco. They followed Fred through the hall—Gwen thought the home was lovely while Patty thought it was far too “House Beautiful.” There was a modest amount of disarray to show that it was the home of a divorced man.

  At the door to the kitchen they were met by a young woman whose hands were also covered with flour.

  “I’m Rebecca, the designated daughter. I hope you’re not expecting too much lucidity. He called from a bar and sounded a bit fluffy. This is Jack Blackhorse.” A rather dark Native American came in from the backyard dressed in chinos and a polo shirt. He was somber and rather good looking.

  Rebecca and Fred were making pasta and Fred asked Jack Blackhorse to make drinks for the ladies, explaining it was taboo for “redskins” to touch spaghetti. Jack made drinks and told Gwen and Patricia he had five older sisters and never learned to cook, and that he was from the Nez Perce reservation up near Colville, Washington.

  “I’ve eaten the so-called collard greens of your people,” Jack said to Fred. “I always thought rhubarb leaves were poisonous.”

  “At least we take the fur off our meat before we eat it,” Fred replied. “One more game and then I got to go to the airport.”

  Fred and Jack went over to the breakfast nook and resumed a backgammon game.

  Gwen and Patricia were a little off balance. Rebecca noted this as she drank from a glass of red wine, then stirred a huge skillet of meatballs in marinara sauce.

  “Don’t mind them. They carry on like this whenever Jack visits. We better have a few drinks in defense. This is Dad’s favorite dish. I make the meatballs with a mixture of veal, pork, beef and lots of garlic. Billy doesn’t seem like a garlic person, does he? I’m real honored to meet two original members of the wild bunch. I went down to his room in the basement and got this,” She picked a book off the counter. It was Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, signed by all of them, with a photo of the five on a Rocky Mountain camping trip.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Patty.

  “Oh, my God,” said Gwen, turning away in embarrassment.

  When Billy finally arrived he went through a marvelous charade of pretending not to be drunk, and might have fooled an outsider. He took Gwen and Patricia off to the den for a “meeting,” telling them he had retained the best lawyer in Mexico to look after Zip. (He actually hadn’t done so but would take care of it in the morning.) He would also make sure that Zip was isolated from the other prisoners for the time being, thus out of harm’s way. Gwen suggested that it might be helpful if they all went down to Nogales and looked the situation over, and maybe they’d have time Memorial Day weekend which was the following week. This plan made Patricia and Billy uncomfortable but they were eager to agree. Then Gwen said she had called home and there was a message from the bank that someone had put money in her account. She paused, glancing from Billy to Patricia. She said this would enable her to get a valve job so they could fly her Cessna to Nogales from the ranch, cutting the trip to less than an hour.

  Later, when Gwen was helping Rebecca put dinner on the table, Patricia took Billy aside.

  “Do you have any doubts? Do you think we can really do anything for Zip?” She hesitated to ask.

  “At best we might make some sort of difference. At worst it’s a picnic, a class reunion, a funeral with no corpse.”

  There was an awkward but funny moment at dinner when Rebecca baited her father into talking about AIDS, then nudged Jack Blackhorse under the table.

  “All you ex-liberals from the sixties like the presence of AIDS because it keeps your kids from screwing around like you did,” Jack said.

  This elicited gasps and dropped silver from Billy, Gwen and Patricia. Rebecca began laughing at her practical joke. Jack pointed at Rebecca. “She put me up to it.”

  VI

  Early the next morning Gwen was back on the train with a slight hangover and the scent of garlic still on her skin. She could not have hoped to accomplish more than she had in two days. All the improbable tensions of the trip on the way out had dissipated, and she read a mystery novel about the Navajos called Listening Woman that Sun had loaned her. She drifted in and out of sleep all day, and in conscious periods thought of how best to approach Sam. She had left the Denver Post article with Patty but had written down the particulars of Sam’s location in the Sangre de Cristos. It was up between Galina and Lindrith in the Sante Fe National Forest which was rough country, she knew, because she had taken Sun up into the area to see Chaco Canyon, the Anasazi settlement.

  Then it was twilight and her daughter was waiting for her in the pickup. They hugged and watched the train disappear to the east, then they turned west and studi
ed the sunset which served to remind Gwen why she lived where she did. The smell of saguaro flowers in the air was so clear one’s depth perception was doubled: the shadows were the homes of thousands of ghosts, for this was the homeland of Cochise and Geronimo. It was a little-admitted fact of history that Sun pointed out to her, that many Mescalero Apache families rode their horses pell-mell off the tops of mesas rather than submit to us.

  Very early the next morning Gwen drove north from the ranch on Arizona 666 on her way to see Sam. The evening with Sun had been a little difficult due to her dislike of Zip and Gwen’s efforts on his behalf. Sun, however, looked forward to houseguests, to seeing her mother’s college friends she had heard so much about. Living that far out in the country they talked about everything there was to talk about, then they read. On Saturdays they drove to town and shopped for groceries, had lunch, visited friends, spent an hour at the library, had dinner and went to the movies. On Saturdays a neighbor stopped by to do the chores in exchange for their doing his chores on Sundays. It was a matter of feeding the penned bulls and any other penned cattle, checking irrigation head-gates and making sure no stock had gotten through the fences. The most intense periods of labor for Gwen and Sun were during haying when the irrigated alfalfa was cut, bailed and stacked, but the second crop wasn’t due until mid-June. The real pleasure of the evening for Gwen was to call the airport mechanic and have him start a rush job on the valves of the Cessna. Gwen had inherited this passion for flying from her mother. Her dad had steadfastly refused to have anything to do with the old Cessna except to ridicule it.

  It was indeed ironic that Sam, studying coyotes in the mountain fastness of northern New Mexico, would have an infinitely better idea of what could happen in Nogales than Gwen, Patty or Billy. It wasn’t because he was smarter—in terms of sheer intelligence Patty, by common consent, led the five. She could practically dictate their term papers. Sam’s exhaustive knowledge of Sonora came about because the mountain terrain he loved in New Mexico became snowbound by November and then he would move his coyote operations down to Sahuaripa, about two hundred miles east of Hermosillo. Sam spoke fluent, idiomatic Spanish—the language of the poor rather than the educated. In the winter he relied on vaqueros for additional information on coyotes. The vaqueros treated him with a mixture of amusement and respect. The younger ones thought he was crazy, but the older ranch hands tended, with their more profound native roots, to have respect for both the beasts and a man who would spend his life with them.