Good Day to Die

by Jim Harrison

  The shower had stopped but Sylvia hadn't come out. It occurred to me that she didn't think herself beautiful. She was beautiful in the way a model is beautiful and outside a few big cities the conception of beauty is a certain well-stacked perky cuteness, something I've always loathed. Sylvia was slender but many men I know would have thought her too skinny.

  I got up finally and dressed to go eat. It must be nearing three o'clock. I wondered idly where Tim was and looked out the window to see the Dodge there glittering in the heat with so many thousands of dollars’ worth of other cars. There was even a Winnebago Camper, the sort that costs at least twelve grand and retired couples drive them aimlessly throughout the country collecting stickers and curios. Sylvia came out of the bathroom in bra and panties brushing her damp hair. I was startled.

  “I guess there's no point in being real formal,” she said. She leaned over to get a blouse from her suitcase and her panties were semi-transparent. I felt vaguely ill.

  “No, there's no point being formal. I had three sisters who walked around bare-ass all the time.”

  We both turned, hearing the key in the door. It was Tim and he looked very bad as if suffering from terminal exhaustion. Sylvia walked over and kissed him. “We were worried about you.”

  He laughed and said over her shoulder that we must have fucked our brains out. Sylvia started crying and went back in the bathroom and locked the door. He beat at the door and said he was only kidding.

  “Well, while you were fucking around I bought two cases of dynamite plus the caps. We have to drive up to Bisbee this afternoon to get them. Or tomorrow morning.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  THESE gestures of importance! Tito pauses on the edge of the small spring. He is acting reverential, holding his straw hat in his hands and against his chest. A postcard Chicano now playing to the three of us. Sylvia is plainly touched. Tim is plainly bored. We have walked three miles from the trail end and it has been incredibly hot—I watched a sweat spot on the back of Sylvia's blouse grow to the size of a crow. Sweat trickled down my legs. Tim walked directly behind Tito who led the way. I don't think Tim slept more than an hour again last night. Tito is selling us the two cases of dynamite and caps at I think twice the normal price but we must first look at his favorite place in the mountains, a place he visited often in his youth both to bathe and for its beauty. I admit there is not a beer can in sight and it is above the elevation where one usually finds rattlesnakes. On the way up we saw a roadrunner and a small offshoot of an arroyo where some javelinas made their home, a foul-smelling cul-de-sac in the mesquite. My nose is so sweaty the sunglasses slide on the ridge. The point is that we had to look at Tito's shrine before he gyps us on the dynamite. A strenuous irony here. How can air be thin and still hot. We have found out unfortunately that anyone in Arizona can go into a hardware store and buy dynamite. So for extra money we are getting a large dose of exhaustion.

  “It is very beautiful?” Tito says.

  “Yes,” Sylvia murmurs. Tim and I nod assent. You can see deeply into the spring where some minnows are darting about and I am a bit stunned that there are minnows way up here. We all sit down on the rock with wary eyes for any creatures. There are many animal prints in the sand along the water's edge.

  “Is it good to drink?” I ask. Tito gives me a falsely energetic si si si and we both crouch and drink. Cold enough to make the teeth ache. I stand and shed my clothes and Tim follows suit. Tito pauses with a deviously shy look at Sylvia then strips. We all jump in the water which is gloriously cold.

  “If you don't come in I'll throw you in,” Tim shouts at Sylvia. The shout rolls down the small canyon and is lost far below us. Sylvia takes her clothes off except her bra and panties and steps into the shallow water. Tim signals me with a nod of his head and I move toward her right feeling like a foolish alligator. Tim slides up and grabs her ankles. She is laughing and even continues laughing when she catches what he has in mind. He holds her around the waist tightly while I undo her bra which doesn't fall. Then I slip her panties down her legs and she lifts each foot so they won't get wet. I can see Tito staring rather wide-eyed out in the pool with only his Indian head and shiny black hair above the water. We splash around for a half hour then sit back on the warm rocks drying out.

  The water was as clear as Bimini and when I sank beneath it I could see Sylvia's body very clearly but was reminded unpleasantly of all those underwater nude photos I saw through my youth in Playboy and how if you lived way up in the uneventfully Protestant woods the pictures caused a terrible sort of groin disease. Beautiful girls playing naked in the sunny water while the fifteen-year-old student athlete looks out at the snow-banks. He is doing poorly in geometry even though the theorems are printed in red. The magazine has been passed to him along the row of desks. It is a hot country of bodies and he feels his member rising under the desk. His girl friend who sits across the aisle stares at him disapprovingly. She is Methodist and there is small chance that she will ever frolic bare-ass in the sun. He feels cheated that he is not elsewhere.

  Tim lights a large joint he has drawn from his shirt pocket and we pass it back and forth and for a change Sylvia takes a very deep drag.

  “A margarita would be a lot better.” I am thirsty for something tangier than the spring water.

  “I want a can of beer and a hotdog,” Tim says. Then he notices that poor Tito who is sitting on the other side of Sylvia is gazing at her and has become erect. “Watch out Sylvia. He's going to rape you.” She glances at Tito and blushes. Tito jumps up and pulls on his trousers and wanders off to the other side of the pool. He pretends to be examining the plant life. Sylvia begins giggling.

  “Mexicans like light-haired women,” I announce sententiously. Tito looks across at me with no little hatred. He reminds me of my dog who on emerging from our apartment would grab a stick or a jump rope or ball and stand very arrogantly looking off in the distance. Sylvia is leaning forward staring at her toes and Tim pushes his hand under her butt and twitches his fingers. She jumps up and swings at him and he quickly pushes her backward into the water.

  “You bastard. I didn't want to get my hair wet.” Sylvia clears her hair out of her eyes standing mid-thigh deep in the water. Behind her Tito is standing in the shadow of a rock ledge. For a moment the scene is frozen before me like the frame in a movie is frozen in that contemporary vogue: Sylvia lifting back her hair, her shoulders and stomach and thighs covered with droplets against which the sun glints so that the droplets are turned reflectory. And the clear blue water and the deflection of her legs beneath the skin of water—the figure in the shadows behind her so resolutely ludicrous. I felt a momentary pity for myself because the scene couldn't be withdrawn. It was now a permanent hole in my memory and I figured that in twenty years I would be able to recall the vision though it would be flat and still as a painting. And some of the color would naturally fade and the sharp planes of light and shadow would disappear, even the slight shadow between her upper thigh and cleft as she turned away from the sun, smoothly using her middle to turn with instead of her shoulders. There was even a brief sense of freedom, a clear but torturous happiness. While she stood there letting the sun dry her again we dressed and chattered about what we wanted to eat and drink. Then we watched Sylvia dress and Tim decided we should drive up to Tucson when we reached the car.

  We walked back down the arroyo slowly. Sylvia was developing a blister behind her sandal strap so Tito tore his handkerchief in half and wrapped it around the strap. I was mildly stoned and my legs jolted unpleasantly in their sockets with each downward step.

  The second night in Douglas and Agua Prieta had been better than the first though there were moments that couldn't be described as anything but horrifying. We had covered all the cantinas in the square, dawdling for at least two hours in one that specialized in transvestites, actually false transvestites as they were only homosexuals dressed and rather prettily as young women. Sylvia was very startled when she learned
they weren't female though she sensed something was wrong. Everyone stared rather cattily at her which made her uncomfortable. One of the “girls” sat with us and had a drink. She ran her hand up and down Tim's leg until it seemed he was on the verge of giving her a tumble. She began nuzzling his ear and then kissed him and Sylvia got up to walk out on the mess. I followed her out and we stood under the marquee of the bar looking vacantly at the lights of the dozen cantinas with their discordant mariachi bands and jukeboxes blending almost harmonically. The night was very warm and smelled unpleasant. I tried to explain to her that it was inconceivable that Tim would hurt her on purpose. He acted on impulse and liked to have fun though the fun might strike her as a bit strange at times. I had begun to feel a bit guilty: without me we wouldn't have been in a whorehouse or in Agua Prieta or on our clearly absurd mission to blow up a dam which Tim merely adopted again on impulse. I was the frayed and immoderately ugly brains of the project. Maybe Tim would have grown tired of speed and wandering around and returned to her. What we were doing didn't help. He was happy, maniacally happy, and you could see he didn't want it to end. While we were talking I understood why I cared so much for her, at least in part: she was an antique, reminding me of the comparatively simple country girls I had gone to high school with a decade before. And she was helplessly feminine. We were breaking her in pieces yet she moved with us as if she either had no character or simply wanted to please. What else could she do? I kissed her cheek lightly with my hand around her waist. Her eyes were moist and I told her she shouldn't cry again as that only made the whole thing worse than it was. A group of locals were watching so we went back into the bar. Tim was sitting alone and got up to meet us.

  “Let's get the fuck out of here. She had bad breath. I can't stand bad breath.”

  It became good for a few hours then. We had a fine dinner of Guaymas shrimp with a lot of wine then walked around arm in arm laughing. We played pool for an hour and I won thirty bucks off Tim but he refused to pay me unless I spent it on a girl of his choice. I said he would choose a hog. Sylvia was mildly drunk and tried to make Tim promise he wouldn't go with a girl but stay with her as she was much better than they were. I felt sorry for her then as Tim always accepted an admonition as a challenge to do otherwise. He teased her that she was turning into a whore too and said he liked her better that way. She seemed pleased and asked him to take her back to the hotel which he refused to do. I only stared down into my double shot of tequila. These little scenes were exhausting; she apparently saw him as he must have been years before, less intractable and without any Methadrine or fatalism in his blood, though when she became frantic it seemed to me that she was beginning to understand that it was hopeless.

  And there was no sense of balance left in anything we were doing. All that had begun as an innocent boozy comment crossing Duval Street so many miles away had become fact and we weren't accomplishing anything but pulling our own particular emotional plugs. Like so much reality it was merely what we were not “not” doing—I mean walking home that night and standing on the bridge dividing the countries looking down in the dark sandy dry riverbed. I was tired of imagining actions and having them come down to merely nothing, or something as confused as what we were taking part in. It was all as muddled as turning to my left and seeing United States and turning right to see Mexico. I needed a few days of fishing to sort my feelings out or better yet to lose all my feelings. And who were these two strangers with me and why had we caused ourselves to be where we were.

  I took my pool-game payment out on a very pleasant older woman and when I came back to the table and said that she was fantastic, which she was, Tim had to try her too. If I had kept my mouth shut I could have made Sylvia momentarily happy. But in the ensuing quarrel he told her that she was becoming a pain in the ass and he would put her on the bus the next day. So we walked back in silence with Tim refusing my urgings to have them go ahead and make peace. He only said that there was nothing to settle. It was a very dull drunkenness I felt, so that in the room when we took turns at the bathroom I felt nothing when I saw Sylvia partially nude. I wanted a total blackout. I took the last shower and made it a long one hoping that Tim might make love to her which he hadn't done on the trip. But when I got out the room was dark and he was sitting on the edge of the bed sipping from the tequila bottle.

  Somehow the next morning we awoke rather happily. During the night Sylvia had talked Tim out of sending her home. We all seemed to feel a sort of childish renewal out of driving up to Bisbee to get the dynamite. We would at least see the Grand Canyon by the next afternoon even though we agreed to start on smaller demolition projects and work our way up. At breakfast we even giggled over our pretentiousness; we had pored over the Blaster's Handbook and it became obvious that it was all much more complicated than we thought. The only bad feeling was caused by Tim having bought a pistol that first night in Mexico. I disliked pistols and thought that having one would mean a lot of trouble if we were ever stopped and searched. But Tim said that a pistol would be no harder to explain than the two cases of dynamite in the trunk.

  Now walking down the arroyo on the steep path from the spring it seemed we were still happy. The late afternoon sun was becoming less hot and was casting clean dark shadows in the Pedregosas which were so dry-looking compared to the mountains I knew in Montana and Idaho. They reminded me of Ecuador and how unhappy I was spending a week in bed with dysentery and looking out at brown mountains that offered up no fantasies of fishing. We rode to Tito's in silence though Tito seemed quite happy at Tim's usual driving exhibition: we would go into mild four-wheel drifts on the corners, fishtail in second and move up to nearly a hundred on the straightaway. Though I had confidence in Tim's driving when he hadn't dropped too many pills I hated speed, even hated the idea of motors, which I regarded as hostile. But I supposed that Tim's best moments had been in driving stock cars back in Georgia on those small dirt tracks in the pines at night with not very good lighting and the cars and spectators being covered with red dust as the cars roared around in a tight circle in second gear.

  We reached a small settlement and Tito directed Tim into a large yard where half a dozen children were playing softball. There was a rather dingy stucco house placed in a cottonwood grove with a shed in back among some junked cars. We loaded the two cases from the shed into the trunk, gave Tito the money and then Tito went inside and brought out four beers. We sat and drank them in silence and then Tim began playing softball with the children. He batted them grounders and then a few fly balls. They asked him to hit a long one so he twirled the ball, which was old and covered with black friction tape, in his left hand, tossed it up and hit it very hard. We watched it sail very high across the road into the mesquite. The children clapped and shrieked. We sat and drank another beer and Tito's wife came out and sat with us though she was very plump and shy and said nothing. It was so peaceful that I was disturbed when Tim said it was time to go. I could see that Sylvia felt the same way, that Tito's yard was some sort of retreat for our exhausted bodies and nerves. We all shook hands and when we got into the car Tito gave us a large joint, a true bomber, which he said would make our trip to Tucson a good one.

  Tito's grass proved to be very good indeed—within moments we were stoned. I thought it was the best I had ever had and began thinking of trying to rid myself of my dependence on alcohol which I thought, probably accurately, was slowly wrecking my body. We stopped and ate at a Mexican restaurant where I had tripe stew or menudo while Tim and Sylvia ate hamburgers and watched me with distaste. Finally Tim ordered a bowl and ate it on my dare. He said that it tasted like last night's whore to which Sylvia made no comment.

  We reached Tucson by nine at night and generally decided to try not to get too drunk or wrecked so we could get an early start for the Grand Canyon in the morning. We thought we would catch a movie and be in bed by midnight. On the way down Speedway on the south side of the city we passed a cinema that advertised a SUPER X EXTRA ADULT double feature.
We quickly checked into a motel and drove back to the movie. Sylvia was mildly curious because she had never seen a skin flick before. The first feature was called Greta and proved to be a bit of a shock. A virginal girl (we guessed her to be about twenty-five) argues with her parents, leaves home and immediately falls into the hands of a gang of lesbians who work her over with vibrators and dildos until she becomes a convert. I was rather surprised as the girls were pretty and didn't resemble the women one used to see in the old American Legion hall black and white movies. Sylvia peeked out behind her fingers and gasped as if she were watching a horror show. The second feature involved a love-technique clinic and a mad doctor who attached willing women to a monstrously ingenious machine. We were fascinated.

  CHAPTER

  8

  SOMEONE once said and I think it was a Russian poet that we are only the shadows of our imagination on earth. I sort of liked the idea that the three of us were darting to and fro like the minnows in the spring up in the Pedregosas while my poor brain was somewhere else trying to create a superstructure for what was taking place. Sylvia and Tim were “real people” and thus didn't need a fresh metaphysic every day to be taken after breakfast in one swallow. This seemed to increase my responsibility unpleasantly. I didn't want to lead. Perhaps within three or four hours I could talk Tim into driving to Alaska or back to Valdosta, then spend a week in Valdosta convincing him that he should marry Sylvia. But maybe not. He had become obsessed with the romantic aspects of sabotage and was always fishing around in the Blaster's Handbook for useful information while Sylvia tended to dwell only on her love problems and had forgotten, in fact, why we had come west in the first place.