The Woman Lit by Fireflies

by Jim Harrison

  Only, Gwen and Patty went through the charade of driving to the Tucson Airport, turning into the Hertz office, going in the terminal and renting an Avis. Then they headed back south toward Patagonia and the narrow blacktop that led to the San Raphael Valley.

  By the time the captain drove up the narrow dirt road south of Patagonia the American was already there with a helicopter he had borrowed from the DEA. The American looked fresh as a daisy, and had set up a spotting scope to scan the road miles below them. The American checked out the captain on the use of the AK-47 which the captain resented even though he was unfamiliar with the weapon.

  “How can you be so sure?” the captain asked, adjusting the spotting scope. The American had predicted that Billy and the two women would appear on the valley road within an hour and a half.

  “Look at it this way. It’s our only option and the probability is high that it’s their only option.”

  Sam and Zip had crossed the border and were resting in a clump of greasewood and cholla. Sam glassed the old couple’s ranch, relieved that they had gone and everything looked good. When he had called after the waiter left the night before, the old woman had said, “God bless you,” and he had said, “I hope so.” Zip sat on the ground, his senses dulled by the Percodan, but he was smiling. They remounted and headed for the ranch.

  The American was looking through the scope and said, “There they are.” The captain took a quick look and said it was a different car, which drew a contemptuous look from the American who stowed a .270 Weatherby beside the AK-47s.

  “I want the plane at least fifty feet off the ground. Correct?”

  “Correct,” said the captain.

  °

  Sam helps Zip down from the horse and leads him into the pole barn beside Gwen’s Cessna where he slumps, asleep against the wall. Sam permits himself a smile, walks back outside, slapping the horses on the ass and sending them back to Mexico. Sam looks off to the north and sees Billy’s car approaching, followed by a brown cloud of dust.

  Billy, Gwen and Patty rush to help Sam push the Cessna out of the pole barn. They look at each other and then at Zip in a state of profound foolishness.

  “We fucked up. There’s not enough room,” Sam says.

  “We can make it without the luggage.” Gwen starts the engine and Billy and Sam load Zip into the back with Patty, bow to each other until Sam starts to push Billy into the plane. It is then that Sam hears the sound that so hideously dominated three years of his life. The chopper is sweeping along the ground toward the back of the ranch house—“on the deck,” they call it. Sam yells, “Get out of here,” and grabs his alley sweeper but Gwen is paralyzed at the controls. Sam runs toward the landed chopper and blows the captain sprawling as he jumps out. The American calmly sights through the scope of his .270 and fires a shot into Sam’s knee. Sam drops the shotgun and clutches his knee, crawling in a circle.

  Billy runs openly to Sam and drags him back to the plane as if the American didn’t exist. The American ignores them as he calmly sets up two of the AK-47s on tripods.

  “What the fuck is he doing?” Billy screams as he loads Sam into the plane.

  “He’s waiting until we’re airborne.” Sam hands the pistol to Billy as Gwen tries to stanch Sam’s bleeding with her scarf.

  “I don’t know how to work this.” Billy holds the pistol down and Sam reaches out and flicks the safety. Billy fires a shot into the ground and looks up at them. “Please go. We shouldn’t all die. I’ll see you or not. Please.”

  The plane begins to taxi as Billy sprints around the back of the barn, eyeing the American from the corner as the American tries to keep track of both Billy and the plane. Then Billy runs out and gets one shot off before the AK-47 blows him along the ground like a wind-driven leaf. The American’s hands try to pretend he is fine as they swivel the rifle back toward the plane lifting off in the distance. Then the hands lift toward the blood gouting from the wound in the American’s throat.

  It is too much for us to presume, in that no one has reliably returned from death, but the winter sparrows that fluttered back into the yard now that the excitement had passed might have thought, if sparrows indeed thought, that there was a trace of a smile on Billy’s face.

  The Woman Lit by Fireflies

  SHE HAD NOT yet accepted as real the quiver in her stomach and the slight green dot of pain in the middle of her head that signaled an incipient migraine. Her husband on the car seat beside her punched in a tape called Tracking the Blues which contained no black music, but rather the witless drone of a weekly financial lecture sent from New York City. This particular tape was seven days stale and had been played three times on their trip, but Donald repeated it to get “fair value” for his money. The tape, not incidentally, replaced Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat from an Iowa City FM station, a piece she always enjoyed.

  “Do you mind, darling?” he asked.

  “Not at all, dear,” she replied, partly because the pain clinic she had attended in Arizona that spring had emphasized giving up resistance to outside phenomena at the possible onset of a migraine under the notion you wanted to starve rather than feed the affliction. For instance, she shouldn’t have been driving—sitting with her eyes closed listening to music would have been helpful, but she drove to avoid reading to him, which is what he required when he drove. An additional, insurmountable problem was that his car, an Audi 5000, was low-slung and the early August corn beside Interstate 80 in Iowa presented itself as a dense green wall. She preferred the higher vantage of her own nine-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser, a functional clumsy old machine that she and her beloved friend Zilpha used on their outings, or so they called them, which were somewhat famous in their neighborhood in Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit.

  Clare would be fifty in another week, Donald was fifty-one and eager to get on with life, a matter about which she had mixed feelings. They had just been visiting their daughter Laurel, who at twenty-nine was a veterinarian married to a veterinarian, the both of them ministering to horses and cattle in a clinic outside of Sioux City, Iowa, up near the Nebraska border. The visit had been cut short two days by a quarrel between Laurel and Donald. On the way home they were to spend the weekend with Donald Jr., who at twenty-seven was a commodities market whiz in Chicago.

  “I love you, Mom, but I can’t understand why you don’t leave that asshole,” Laurel had said.

  “Please, Laurel, he’s your father.”

  “In name only,” she had replied, and then they kissed goodbye as they always did, with Clare’s heart giving a breathless wrench at separation.

  A specific giddiness began to overtake her when she thought of the goodbye. This is the way, after all, I’ve spent my life, she thought. You could not fault Donald for being Donald, any more than you could fault Laurel for being the same as she was at three years, a cantankerous little girl with a sure though general sense of mission, a personality so specific as to be sometimes offensive.

  “The overloaded leverages are coming home to roost,” Donald brayed so loud she applied the brakes. She quickly reset the cruise control at a modest seventy considering that most cars passed her at that speed. The week before at the club she attempted a witticism about how all the lives saved by the Mothers Against Drunk Driving were being lost to the raising of the speed limit. The luncheon ladies were used to Clare and let the quip pass, but not a new member who found it “dreadfully morbid.” Suddenly it occurred to her that Donald didn’t feel really good about making money unless others were losing theirs, which made it all, to her mind, a silly game to spend your life on rather than the grave process with which he was totally obsessed.

  An ever so slight tremor of head pain made her dismiss the thought about Donald and money as true but banal. She forced her thoughts back to a pleasant morning with Laurel, spent hiking on some bluffs above the Missouri River. Laurel had discovered a rattlesnake that had difficulty getting out of their way because of a huge lump in its belly—no doubt, Laurel
said, from swallowing a gopher. They both laughed when Laurel added, “Poor thing, also poor gopher.” The laughter was nervous relief. The first hour of their walk had been spent lifting Clare’s confusion over a pamphlet an anti-vivisectionist neighbor had given her concerning a doctor down south who, on a defense contract, had shot several thousand cats in the head for research. Laurel habitually defended the scientific community but this one puzzled her, as the brain of a cat was dissimilar enough to that of a human as to make the research appear useless. She did not tell Clare that it would have made more sense to shoot several thousand dogs, or better yet chimpanzees, though the latter were very expensive. The purpose of the research, of course, was to better treat head wounds in soldiers. Then Clare had brought up another item that she had brooded about for two years without mentioning. Laurel had sent her an article from Orion Nature Quarterly, by a Spanish fellow, Lopez, called “The Passing Wisdom of Birds,” in which the author described Cortez’s vengeful burning of the aviaries in Mexico City in the sixteenth century. Clare loved birds and cats and could easily overlook the fact that Cortez had destroyed the city and murdered hundreds of thousands of citizens—that was to be expected—but the burning of Montezuma’s aviaries seemed to stand for something far more grotesque and the image of the conflagration passed through her mind daily. So she had asked Laurel, a scant fifteen minutes before they saw the gorged rattlesnake, why she had sent the article, and Laurel had said, “People who love each other try to explain themselves to each other. I wanted you to see again why I work with animals. I can’t stand people. Now it’s your turn to explain yourself to me.” That, as they say, was that, until the poor snake appeared as a convenience, almost a stage prop if it weren’t for the immensity of the sky above and the wide, brown Missouri River below them.

  Back on Interstate 80 she wondered why they bothered teaching us the things they did—the grandeur, sweep and intricacies of civilization at its best—when there was little enough to do with the knowledge. Clare’s criticisms of the human condition were sharp but basically midrange and items like Cortez and the birds shifted her off balance as did, to a lesser degree, the three thousand holes in the heads of three thousand cats. Now she tried to reduce the growing pain by an act of will, dimming the fluttery green energy to a pinpoint if only for a moment as she had been taught to do in Arizona. There was a sign for a rest stop in ten miles and it was 2:50 which meant she would beat the phone call by a minute. The tape about blue chip stocks had mercifully finished but now Donald was whistling the “Colonel Bogey March” and tapping out the rhythm on the cellular car phone, anticipatory to his daily broker call. His lips pursed and the whistling and tapping stopped as he made a notation in red pencil on the day’s Wall Street Journal.

  “I’m going to have to stop while you phone. I’m not feeling all that well,” she said, stiffening at his possible reaction.

  “Fine, honey. We’ve got time to kill.” Donald glanced at his watch. “There’s room for your nappy in Davenport.”

  She never understood quite how “nap” became “nappy” but had always judged an inquiry as not quite worthwhile. She looked at him with a longing close to homesickness that the troubled at heart feel for those who treat the world as their lovely private apple. Donald was a passably good man, or so everyone thought, a citizen so apparently solid that, as a club jokester had said, he could throw a successful fund raiser for a crack dealer. A business associate had organized a dinner for ten at a hotel in Davenport, which Donald looked forward to as an orphan would his first circus. He was being especially tender because Clare was the daughter of one of the founding partners of the accounting firm which had branches throughout the Midwest, and the Davenport office was doing especially well. The Davenport people would be thrilled to meet Clare. It would be all bows by the men and curtsies by the ladies. He had even alerted them about Clare’s taste in wine which he thought a wasteful vice she had inherited from her mother. Frequently, he noted, the wine on a dinner bill equaled the price of the food, and when he picked up a case of Meursault or Chambertin at the wine store he liked to joke out loud: “Here goes three shares of General Motors.” The old clerk at the wine store invariably smiled his mask of a smile knowing it was Clare’s money in the first place, a point which would appall Clare herself in that she was so fair-minded as to be frequently rendered immobile.

  But not now. She eased the car into the rest stop, slowing to a creep for fear of hitting the children darting in and out of campers and cars in the crowded parking area. Across a green swath semis were parked with the muffled drone of their engines at rest only at destinations. One of the semis held squealing pigs in metal-slatted layers while another was full of silent cattle. Clare got out, taking the leather and canvas Buitoni bag Donald had bought her on their trip to Florence. At the time she could not believe his brusque affability translated so well. They had dined nearly every evening with Italians he had met in his tours of brokerage offices, several times in their homes, allowing Clare a look into the life of Florence never allowed the ordinary tourist. Donald waved at her with the other hand on the phone, antsy to make his daily call. She watched him dial, then walked toward the Iowa Welcome Center and the adjoining bathrooms, her head beginning to thrum in the noisy heat. It occurred to her that the tourists all looked blowzy and fatigued because they were headed back east at the end of their vacations.

  When she thought about it later Clare was surprised again by how clear and cool her painful mind had felt. Every human and object, the landscape itself, had the distinct outlines found in a coloring book before the crayons are applied. The green wall of the cornfield behind the Welcome Center became luminous and of surpassing loveliness. She turned and walked back toward Donald in the car but he was in his brokerage trance, his clipped business voice saying, “But what the hell happened to Isomet?”

  In the bathroom stall she checked her bag for certain items: Donald Jr.’s Boy Scout compass she used on hikes with Zilpha, a small can of cranberry juice, the addresses of three orphan children she wrote to and helped support in Santo Domingo, Mexico and Costa Rica; in a leather packet was her passport and a copy of the new translation of the Tao Te Ching given to her by a counselor at the pain clinic, and at the bottom, and most important, was the tan beret she had bought thirty years before on Rue St.-Jacques and had never worn. As a comparative literature senior at Michigan State she was to spend a year studying in Paris which lasted only three weeks when her father died and the family sent her boyfriend Donald to fetch her home. At the time Donald was her act of rebellion, a left-wing political science major who wore lumberjack shirts, the only son in a working-class family from Flint, who intended to be a writer or labor leader. On dates they read John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy aloud to each other. Curiously her father had rather liked Donald, and perhaps this was foresight into the man Donald would become. So each morning for three weeks in her tiny pension Clare would look at her beret but was too timid to put it on.

  Now in the toilet stall she finally put on the beret and laughed softly to herself. It was so easy. For luck she also slipped on a conch pearl ring Zilpha had given her in March as a remembrance. Among her last words had been “We never got around to the Amazon,” a trip they had planned since they were girls when they were convinced they’d discover a pleasanter civilization somewhere in the jungle. Clare took out a Cafergot pill, then put it back, preferring pain-ridden consciousness. She tried to remember something René Char had written, “Blank blank blank the legitimate fruits of daring,” but the growing pain blinded her memory. The note itself was simple enough: “I am in a small red car driving east. My husband has been abusing me. Do not believe anything he says. Call my daughter.” She added Laurel’s number, wrote “To The Police” on the envelope and stuck it to the side of the stall with a postage stamp. She noted that someone had scratched “Bob is cute” with a sharp object on the paint and she smiled with the confusion of female and male.

  Behind the Welcome Center
a small boy walking the family dog held Clare’s bag as she climbed the fence which was more difficult than she anticipated. She wobbled and the wire cut into the soles of her tennis shoes. On the other side she lost a few moments explaining to the boy why he couldn’t go along, but then the dog started barking and she hurried off down between two corn rows, toward the interior, wherever that might be.

  Within a scant five minutes Clare would have liked to turn around, had turning around not already become so improbable. A hundred yards into the cornfield the beret made her feel silly so she took it off and stuffed it into her bag. The moment the hat came off the pain became so excruciating she fell to her hands and knees and retched up her lunch of iced tea and a club sandwich. The pain was such that she could not balance herself on her hands and knees, but pushed her legs backward until she lay on her stomach. She closed her eyes a moment but the world became bright red and whirling. There was the slightest memory of a pain lesson but it was too abstract to be of much use: the secret was to maintain your equilibrium in the face of incomprehension, as pain, finally, could not be understood.

  At eye level she looked at the way the roots of the corn broke up the earth. She tried to let go of her brain which it now seemed would boil over with its brew of knots and hackings, clots, soft lumps against sharp hot stones. She rolled over onto her back. By the time the sun made its way down through the tassels, leaves and stalks, it was weak and liquid. There was a crow call so close it startled her, the bird flapping low over her row, then twisting, darting back for another look, squawking loudly in warning at the intruder, then a third pass up the row out of curiosity. She had never been so close to a crow, she thought, and tried closing her eyes a moment to rehearse crows from the past. The red storm had somewhat subsided and she saw the open mouth of a rooster at her grandmother’s, and herself as a child stooping near the rooster as he swelled his throat, craned his neck outward and crowed as if he could not stop himself. As a child she had liked cellars because they frightened her, and now she longed for a cool, black cellar with a rooster for company, for her grandmother’s dog whom the rooster pretended to chase though he kept a safe distance, as if he and the dog had agreed upon a reasonable pace for the dog to walk away. Grandfather told her that the rooster felt the whole world was after his hens, and that was all he thought about.