The Woman Lit by Fireflies

by Jim Harrison

  Sam’s other advantage, which was the equal of the first, came about by accident. An ex-Black Panther, a chopper gunner who died at Khe Sanh, had given Sam a small poem to live by, a poem that supposedly derived from the “Sarmoung Brotherhood,” whatever that was—Sam hadn’t asked. He simply carried the poem in his wallet as a reminder and corrective. It read, modestly enough:

  There is no God but Reality.

  To seek Him elsewhere

  Is the action of the Fall.

  His reverence for this little poem did not mean that Sam delimited reality in the manner of the true believer whose blinders came in a thousand colors, rather that he studied what appeared to be “there” rather than what he wished to be there. To a degree that is incomprehensible to the individual, our lives are pretty much lived in air-locked compartments—Patricia had the movie business, Billy was in international law, Gwen lived the life of the marginal rancher, while Sam could only survive in emptiness, in the dimension of stillness that wilderness offered.

  In sharp contrast to the hordes who had been attracted to the ecological movement, Sam disliked the attitude of moral superiority above all else. It was a bit simplistic but Sam was a victim, survivor and student of war. One merely had to tip open the Britannica to discover that between the years 1912 and 1945 the Germans had destroyed a hundred million lives out of a basic assumption of moral superiority. And this was only the most notorious example that could be extrapolated in every direction in human history, including our own extermination of over a hundred Native American cultures, up through Vietnam, and perhaps Nicaragua in the future. Sam no longer thought these thoughts that had formed his life; they had become cellular, and he dwelt among the wildlife attempting to survive as they had. Part of the ethos, the soul history, of American capitalism was to destroy absolutely everything that wasn’t immediately useful. Sam’s high school history teacher in Durango, Colorado, liked to quote General Philip Sheridan: “To destroy the Sioux you must destroy his living commissary, the buffalo. Only then will our plains and prairies be safe for the speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.”

  Sam had literally walked off the war. After five months in prison, a clinical depression and the loss of a quarter of his body weight, Sam was sprung through the efforts of his father, a high school superintendent in Durango, and his draft board. The local opinion was that Sam had got mixed up in the wrong crowd up in Boulder. In a classic “out of the frying pan, into the fire” move Sam became a Green Beret medic and a student of the languages of Vietnam and Cambodia. After three years and dozens of experiences that would remain unspeakable he received a medical discharge after he tried to duct tape back together some children who had been blown to pieces. With his ample muster-out pay he spent three years walking around western Wyoming and Montana, then finished his education at University of Oregon, taking a master’s in game biology.

  The first object of Sam’s study was the grizzly bear but after a half-dozen years in Montana this particular field of game biology had become overfull of researchers and very contentious. His career with the Department of the Interior had effectively ended at a conference on grizzlies in Missoula when he had lashed out at his superiors for using the drug phencyclidine hydrochloride to stun bears to remove them from an area or to attach telemetric collars. A problem grizzly who had been stunned a half-dozen times with the drug had recently devoured a camper in Yellowstone. Game biologists could be rather otherworldly but Sam knew that the street name for phencyclidine was angel dust. Any critter that had received six massive doses of this drug was liable to be irascible and psychotic. Sam said this at the Missoula conference, adding unwisely that he had used the drug himself in the old days and it had put him in a fighting mood. He recommended they stick with alpha-chloralose which wasn’t as effective and thus a little dangerous to those who administered it, but this would properly reduce the number of game biologists. This was a man clearly not destined for promotion.

  Sam resigned and went home to tend to his mother who was dying of stomach cancer. She was in a great deal of pain so Sam would make the long drive from Durango to Denver, score heroin and shoot her up to supplement her more orthodox medicine. After he buried her and consoled his father he began a guide service, taking mostly bird watchers and students of Indian lore into the back country north of Durango, and to Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon.

  It was after one of these trips guiding an elderly man and his wife from Chicago that he received an offer in the mail from the couple announcing that they had been auditioning him. They had a family foundation and wished to underwrite an exhaustive study of the coyote, and would Sam consider it, and if so, prepare a budget? They were alarmed and surprised by the smallness of his demands, but then were led to understand on their successive summer trips that there were advantages to “traveling light” when studying this critter. Later Sam discovered that these people were relatives of the man who had underwritten Frank Waters’s monumental ten-year study of the Hopi Indian.

  The late May afternoon Gwen showed up on his mountainside Sam was repairing his telemetric receiver and charging his battery packs with a portable generator. He was also brooding about his shortcomings, the main one of which was alcohol. Once a month he would come off the mountain to get supplies in Gallup or Farmington. He would find a Mexican, Navajo or Zuñi girl to make love to, then get very drunk for the next twenty-four hours, sleeping it off in the back of his old Studebaker pickup. This behavior was becoming tiresome to him. He had checked out the psychiatric literature on recluses like himself—hermits, prospectors, solitary explorers—and knew that a great deal of time in solitude tended to blur the peripheries. Reality is perceptual and consensual and after thirty days alone you could forget where your skin left off and the world began. Then you emerged for supplies and forgot how to behave partly because you never really knew how in the first place.

  From his box canyon up the mountain Sam could see across a gently sloping alpine meadow, to a steadily descending forest, down to a broad scrubby plateau full of sage and mesquite. There, in a grove of cottonwoods beside a creek was the trailhead and the end of a narrow gravel road maintained by the Forest Service, a three-hour hike if you were in good shape. You would have to be a rock climber or some sort of intense survivalist to approach Sam without his knowing it. His closest neighbors were ranchers of Spanish descent, distant children of Cortez, and they provided, being hostile, yet another buffer to this domain which was public in name only. As a victim of war Sam liked to cover his back and flanks, plus he possessed a level of alertness and attention he seemed to have gathered from the creature he studied.

  Thus it was he noticed the curl of dust made by a car on the gravel of the Forest Service road and set up his spotting scope determining it was a single figure without a pack, thus someone on an errand. This mystified him, as no one was due for two more months unless it meant his father was ill. After an hour the figure disappeared into the forest, and then in another hour the figure emerged at the edge of the alpine meadow. Now he could see it was a light-haired woman in a green shirt and khaki trousers, he hoped not a graduate student snooping into his research. When Gwen’s features became clear Sam drew in his breath sharply, swore with pleasure and began to pace. In the old days they had been buddies, and he always felt Gwen, with her rural background, understood him better than the rest. His brain, in the fashion of a computer, clicked off the reasons for her arrival, and he accurately guessed that something had gone awry with Zip. He skittered around briefly trying to straighten up his campsite, gave up and ran down to greet her.

  They spent the first hour filling each other in and a number of disturbing factors arose. Sam had received several letters from Zip over the years and they always arrived having been opened. Zip had wanted Sam to use his military experience by coming down to Guatemala and helping blow up a dam, thus flooding out a military base. Other than having thought it was a naive way to communicate such a plan, Sam had written back to say his killing days
were over, and that though he couldn’t do much for himself or other people he could try to make the world a better place for coyotes. This point of view had brought forth a truly nasty harangue from Zip to which Sam hadn’t answered.

  What bothered Gwen was that Sam had yet to comment on the chances of their freeing Zip, reducing his sentence, saving him from the death Zip felt was imminent. She was hoping that Sam’s experience with Mexico might reflect some encouragement that he, thus far, had been unwilling to offer. She began to repeat all the details of the case but he waved her words away.

  “It’s like the States. If you have a great deal of money and first-rate legal help your chances improve immeasurably. We seem to have that much. But just like here it depends on how badly anyone wants to keep you in prison or kill you. And we don’t know who this ‘anyone’ is.”

  They picked some dandelion greens to cook as a side dish to go with Sam’s humble salt pork, pinto beans and chiletepines concoction. While they were eating Gwen was startled to hear Sam’s telemetric receiver begin beeping.

  “Turn slowly. She’s up there on that small rock ledge. She’s number seventy-one but I call her Sister. Every day at lunchtime she checks me out though she never has accepted any food except a jackrabbit I snared. Her ears are up and she’s nervous because you’re here. Before she had a litter of pups a few weeks ago she’d sit over under that tree.”

  “Why do you suppose she watches you?” Gwen had swiveled and caught the dun-colored shape of the coyote up on the ledge.

  “She hunted all night and slept all morning. Now she’s rested, bored and curious. They’re a lot like dogs and people in that they all have different personalities. She’s just the most inquisitive one I’ve studied.”

  After lunch they bathed in a spring-fed rock pool and made further plans. Sam would locate a sheepherder friend to keep an eye on his camp, then would drive down to Gwen’s on the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend. Gwen sat on a rock, wrapped in a towel, having found the cold water nearly unendurable. She had noted that Sam had avoided the subject of Patty whenever Gwen had mentioned her. Now he talked about all of his half years in Mexico, a country her own great author, Octavio Paz, had called “the labyrinth of solitude.” Sam said if you stepped outside the ordinary tourist framework in Mexico, the country became the closest thing to the void an American could know.

  At mid-afternoon she watched the passage of the sun and said she’d have to go though she didn’t want to. He insisted on joining her on the three-hour hike back to the car. She tried to refuse because it meant he’d have to walk back up the mountain in the dark. This seemed to puzzle him a moment as if he’d run into a vacuum, but then he said that all of his work took place at night because that was when his “critters” were most active.

  At the bottom of the hill in the twilight he touched Gwen’s arm, then cupped his hands around his mouth and made a succession of long yelping howls that echoed down the canyon. Within a few seconds there were several answers, and he took her hand and kissed it in parting, heading across the plateau before she could respond. He can be awfully pleasant, she thought, for someone who has given up on the human race.

  VII

  It’s time to pause a moment at the beginning of the last and longest chapter of our fable. Ever since he first popped out of the egg man has been weeping. When John Milton presented his argument for Paradise Lost he said, “Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree, I sing . . .” and hardly anyone ever finishes the poem. It’s all part of the old school of “nobody gets out of here alive,” the reflection, whether in mirror, lake or coffee cup, most often vanishing in seconds, that something is terribly wrong. This, after all, is a world where it took the Catholic Church over forty years to issue a “position paper” on why the Church did nothing in particular to interfere in the Holocaust. Jeremiah spoke in jeremiads and still makes rather good reading for strong stomachs.

  There’s a lovely ranchero song out of Sonora with a refrain that goes, “Two horses, two friends, two guns.” You don’t need to be a student of doom to figure this out. If you’re not careful you can go to sleep in America and wake up in a foreign country. Sonora is full of the unpardonable beauty of desolation, a starving province that funnels its people into the sweatshops of cities like Nogales. They seem unafraid, these peons in Yankee clothing, because they know that the past is all we have, and it’s what we’re going to get more of. In the memory of their grandparents this is still the country where the men of Porfirio Diaz slaughtered tens of thousands of rebellious peasants. So when our four fly south to the border for a mere hour, they are still a lawyer, a v.p. in the movie business, a ranch woman, a student of coyotes, a heady brew of incomprehension. To give up, to abandon Ted Frazer, a.k.a. Zip, finally would be to abandon their own pasts, to say that the vibrancy of the time they spent together, no matter that it ended badly, meant nothing, or meant an insufficient amount to divert the courses of their lives for a few days. Within the mythology of our culture back to the early explorers, the mountain men, the Indian fighters, the cowboys, through a half-dozen wars, the notion of the primacy of friendship runs like a national spinal column. The fact that it was more talked about than adhered to does not make it less a motivation. Most often, no one threw themselves on that live grenade to save their friends.

  Because of Zip’s winter visit only Gwen actually knew the man they were trying to save. And at this point she alone had left her own element to effect the rescue. Billy, Patricia and Sam remembered a golden boy whom everyone liked—eloquent, kind, a born leader, the sort of half-manic goofy who spends his life pushing our tired ideologies forward. They would have been less enthused about the man Gwen knew: a fatigued gadfly rather than a revolutionary, a man so obsessed with injustice that it had destroyed him, reduced him to an embittered paranoid who tended to be ignored and avoided by his fellow revolutionaries. The authorities who still might wish to pursue him had forgotten that it had been well over a decade since there was anything meaningful on his record.

  In the eyes of Sun, Friday was a strange and fascinating day, one of the best days, in fact, of her entire life. Her mother had stayed up late the night before, making potato salad and waiting for Sam, whom Sun had found curled up in his sleeping bag on the front lawn when she got up at daylight. Their Labrador was sleeping with Sam, and Sun had run into the house to get him a cup of coffee. Gwen came out in her robe and he told her his truck had broken down and he had hitchhiked the last fifty miles. Sun was entranced because Sam spoke to her teasingly in Khmer, a language she hadn’t heard since she was adopted at age five.

  After breakfast she and Sam helped Gwen untether and push out the Cessna from the lean-to pole shed that doubled as a cattle shelter in bad weather, then watched her take off from the grass strip for the airport in Safford to pick up Billy and Patricia. Sun showed Sam around the ranch, riding double on the John Deere tractor because the gears were acting up on the pickup. They were intense and voluble from the beginning and she buried him in questions about coyotes, then about Native Americans of which he knew a great deal. She jumped in the pen and showed off their prime Simmental-Charolais bull, warning him not to follow as the bull only tolerated her and the dog, and even disliked Gwen. Theirs was the immediate relationship of a very bright girl who discovers a long-lost uncle who is also bright and imaginative.

  They pulled the hydraulic jack out from the tool shed and Sam began working on the transmission of the pickup with Sun passing the wrenches. She felt a wave of melancholy that her mother hadn’t married someone this nifty. She wasn’t at all surprised when Gwen’s Cessna came sweeping back down the canyon and Sam didn’t emerge from under the truck—Sun knew that Sam and Patricia had been a hot item and Sam was probably in some mental pain about her arrival as he pulled the gears.

  The Cessna taxied up. The bull bellowed and the dog barked as they always did. Sun walked over, immediately nonplused that Billy and Patricia looked like a “weekend wear” a
d in Vogue magazine. She had never met such people despite a number of stays in Albuquerque and Tucson. Sun owned the built-in shit detector of the intelligent teenager but found them both likable, despite Billy’s apparent nervousness and the fact that Patty folded her arms after they shook hands.

  They walked over to where Sam’s feet were sticking out from under the truck. Billy said he had brought a case of Anchor Steam beer from the coast, and Sam wiggled out, stood, and they embraced, leaving a grease smear on Billy’s sweater. Then Sam and Patty looked at each other, and Sun, being a closet romantic, felt tears rise. The two of them just couldn’t seem to say a thing. Gwen and Billy backed away pretending to be interested in the bull, while Sun walked over to lug in the two huge, expensive-looking suitcases. Sun glanced back and saw that Patty was now hugging herself as if to break her own ribs, but Sam had come closer and they had begun to stroll down the driveway.

  Sun spent the day trying to cover all the bases at once. When the four of them would split up for a while in separate twos she would become frantic and undecided where to eavesdrop, even join in the talk when it seemed provident. She listened most attentively at the kitchen table when Billy filled them all in on the latest developments of the case. A new lawyer was working on getting them visiting privileges to see Zip and it looked good. The Mexican lawyer who was supposedly very important was already running into unspecified political resistance which he hadn’t anticipated. When Patty and Gwen walked off Sun wanted to stay with the men but was too shy. She followed the women out into the yard and Gwen told Patty an embarrassing story about how, a few years back, she had nicknamed Sun “Screen Gems” because Sun read movie and gossip magazines. Sun remonstrated that she had left all of that behind along with heavy-metal rock groups. Then Patty invited her to come out for a week in the summer so Patty could show her how movies were actually made. This was an overwhelming invitation to Sun who thanked Patty and wandered off to think it all over.