Good Day to Die

by Jim Harrison

  What I frequently missed though was talking to bright people and also the sort of movie which so rarely reached the rural parts of the country. That Levantine gaze of Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim or Monica Vitti in sunglasses. But then I had gotten so generally strung out by urban life that I felt I must return to the “land” which proves even now to be a rather literary urging. The farmers who own and work the land scarcely ever sit around talking about the “land.” I sort of knew this from my youth but had forgotten it. The land is good, my sister. That kind of thing. I noticed that the fishing was no longer as good as the old days and this drove me around the country in a veritable frenzy trying to cream the good fishing before it totally disappeared.

  I was looking at their waists, then I noticed Tim and Sylvia were standing there waiting for me to get over my reverie. Sylvia in contrast to Tim looked so fresh in a short blue skirt and sleeveless white blouse and sandals. Her hair was drawn back in an unfashionable ponytail and her face showed no sign of last night's collapse. It occurred to me he must have slapped her when I remembered the swelling. But there is nothing quite so bad as not being able to get it up. You look at the goddamn thing and become hysterical over the way it works its own will, is contentious when you need it to be cooperative. And the girl, whoever she is, tries to be nice about it though you might have worked her up to the point that her face is a bleary mask. There's a toggle switch in the brain that we are not allowed to touch that runs the whole show. It seems unjust. And is. Faulty workmanship, God. Try again next time.

  I dreaded the car. It was hot and when I put my suitcase in the trunk earlier the two cases of dynamite had all the attractiveness of two giant cysts. Toss them over in the shrubbery but they would be traced to us. They fell out of the trunk, officers, where bad guys had put them when we were drunk. Some dirty hippies probably. But who were hippies these days when a shoestore owner in Waco, Texas, might be mistaken for a Rolling Stone. I had heard these shoestore people talking in the Braniff Lounge at Love Field in Dallas the year before. One particularly odious type in a Bill Blass outfit said to a younger clean-cut type that he had expanded and was “grooving on my own thing.” I contemplated walking over and smashing his head in with my aluminum fly rod case.

  While I guided Tim out of Tucson I noticed that he was a good deal jumpier than usual and was tempted to ask him what kind of pills he scored in his middle-of-the-night wanderings. He was making an effort to be good humored though he was rather distant with Sylvia. I sat in the middle of the back seat and studied their heads. One didn't need to be telepathic to perceive what they were thinking about. Every few songs Tim would compulsively change the tape in the deck and it was beginning to put me on edge. He kept changing the volume and balance and it struck me that unless something good happened it would be a long and nasty day.

  I reflected stupidly on how much everyone needed the night to give at least the appearance of a fresh start. I understood that we needed dreams to work out the kinks in our brains and that if we didn't dream for a long enough period, say a year, we were likely to go batty. I had lost my fair share of night; my mind helplessly rehearsed the scene with Sylvia and looking at the back of her head I wondered if she were thinking of it too. My fingers. And how her belly looked under the bed lamp. We forget how hot humans are and how physical. Ninety-eight and six tenths and damp. I allowed myself a long tremendously involved sexual fantasy about Sylvia and we were in Phoenix by the time it ended. I placed the whole thing in London to get rid of Tim. My imagination had so convinced my body that I was breathing hard and my groin stirred painfully. It was a letdown when she turned in her seat and started telling me that an aunt and uncle had lived in Phoenix for a year but had come back to Georgia for a lack of good work. I only looked at her sweet mouth and thought of all the uses I had just put her to. She was puzzled.

  In the late afternoon somewhere between Flagstaff and Cameron a state trooper pulled us over. I saw the flasher first and exploded with a “Jesus” that startled Tim and Sylvia. Our minds seemed to zero instantly on the dynamite and we began to groan. I sat up straight so quickly I dumped the contents of my fly box on my lap. Tim took out his wallet as the trooper approached.

  “We got our ass in a sling.” Sylvia rolled her eyes at me and put her hand on his arm to steady him. “If he looks in the trunk we got our ass in a sling,” Tim repeated.

  “You were weaving back there.” The trooper stooped taking Tim's license. He stared at Sylvia then at me. I was nervously busy putting the flies back in the box. “Fishing?” He moved his head further in the window and looked at my pile of leader spools and fly boxes.

  “Yeah. We were down Guaymas. Now we're going up to Wyoming and fish the Snake and the Clark's Fork.” I thought my voice was quavery but he seemed not to notice.

  “That's an awful big stone nymph.” He picked up the fly and leaned back out of the window, examining the fly closely.

  “I fish it deep with a high D line. Keep it.” My voice relaxed a bit as the adrenalin subsided.

  “No. I can't accept anything.” He tossed me the fly and walked back to the squad car to check us out. He fiddled around for a few minutes.

  “I don't think he called in,” Tim said. The trooper was approaching again. He stuck his head in the window, glancing, I thought, at Sylvia's legs which she was crossing and uncrossing out of trepidation.

  “I'll trade you this for that stone nymph.” He handed me a vulgar-looking weighted streamer, an attractor pattern used mostly in discolored water.

  “Fine with me. Take two. They're hard to get hold of.”

  “O.K. Be careful on this road. There's a lot of drunk Indians hereabout.” He walked back to his car and made a U-turn heading back toward Flagstaff with incredible acceleration.

  We sat there in silence for a few minutes. I reflected dully on a civil rights worker I had met once who said that when he drove through Mississippi he always had golf clubs in his station wagon though he didn't play golf. And the ultimate disguise for a big dope wholesaler would be a Ford pick-up with a camper towing a boat.

  “We got to get rid of that fucking dynamite. We can get more in Idaho.” I thought we weren't acting very professional for saboteurs. Tim quickly agreed and I looked at the map for a road that would turn off into the high desert country we were passing through.

  “I thought he was real nice,” Sylvia said. Tim began laughing.

  I had been upset with him all afternoon. He had driven erratically but had refused to give up the wheel. We had argued seriously for the first time: Tim wouldn't promise to keep the car below eighty and was further insulted when Sylvia sided with me after he swerved to miss some tumbleweed. I offered to get off in Flagstaff which served to slow him down but then at the fountain at a service station I watched him drop two more pills. We talked for a few minutes and he admitted he was out of control. It was apparent to both of us that we were both thinking of the trouble he and Sylvia had had in bed and I thought numbly about how crappy sex can be, how infinitely susceptible to not working well. But he said that last night hadn't really mattered except for his pride. He felt sorry for Sylvia and wished to God he knew how to stop her from loving him because he was sick to death of it. He punched me lightly on the shoulder, then and smiled his “everything fine now” smile. But only fifty miles further on he flipped again. He announced that he was sure Sylvia and I had screwed last night and didn't care but we could at least admit it. We were subjected to a long crazy tirade on women and how he preferred the tough whores he knew in L.A. or the Vietnamese girls, neither of whom ever whined or demanded marriage or tried to tell you what to do and they were great fucks too unlike certain women he knew. Sylvia said nothing but I offered that marriage was good enough, that I had been married for six years and that there had been some fine years. But he said why are you here or in Florida. A good question.

  Now we had to get rid of the dynamite. It didn't matter much—I knew from my reading that there were better ways to bl
ow a dam. It was merely too bad that Tito had fucked us out of the money. I directed Tim off a side road near Tuba City which though it was blacktop looked very deserted. We drove about a dozen miles on it, then turned up a dusty two-track and came upon a small shack behind a rock outcropping. The shack was empty and doorless and smelled badly of sheep. We put the dynamite in the corner, then stood looking out at the beautiful succession of mesas in the twilight and the thunder-heads gathering above them that gave the air a yellowish cast with their backlight.

  We had a violent argument: Tim wanted to set the dynamite off. Sylvia watched blankly from the door and I finally acquiesced out of curiosity. This after all could be rated as a trial run and I never had seen two cases of dynamite explode. Tim sent Sylvia back toward the car in case something went wrong. I served as a lookout while he fiddled with his pliers and the caps and a small roll of wire. When he was finished we walked down the hill toward Sylvia who waited a hundred yards below us. Tim ran to the car and got a large battery out of the trunk. Sylvia was grinning and I put my arm around her waist. She looked stunning with the yellow evening light shining on her face and hair and legs.

  It began to sprinkle and the large sporadic raindrops raised little cones of dust. Tim spliced another roll of wire and we moved the car another hundred yards down to the blacktop while he followed on foot unrolling the wire. Sylvia was excited and swiveled in the seat watching Tim out the back window. Her panties were a gossamer black today and I momentarily forgot what we were doing. I ran my hand along her leg but she slapped it away though she was still smiling. I positioned the car and got out leaving it running. Tim told Sylvia to get back in the car. We talked for a moment looking nervously both ways on the road. Then I got in the back seat.

  When it happened I knew I would remember it clearly until I died. Tim stood there cradling the battery in his arm and holding the wire with the other hand. He grinned at us, looking either like a maniac or the happiest man on earth. The hand with the wire moved and touched just as a battered old pick-up came over the hill toward us from the direction of Tuba City. For some reason I watched the truck draw closer rather than the explosion behind the rocks. The truck was perhaps a quarter mile away when the dynamite went off. Tim was in the car shifting when the shock waves hit and the incredibly spectacular noise that followed. Sylvia was screaming. Later it seemed that it sounded like a thousand of those Fourth of July buzz bombs at once. The tires burned and smoked and we saw the startled faces of three Indians as we passed the pick-up. They had stopped, straddling the center line, and Tim had to swerve to miss them. My skin prickled and I had forgotten to breathe. It was magnificent. Sylvia stopped screaming and turned around toward me still very wild eyed. Tim pushed the car up over a hundred and the wind roared in the windows.

  “I shouldn't have dropped the fucking battery. My fingerprints are on the fucking battery.” He slowed a trifle and we rolled up the windows.

  “They'll never report it.” I wasn't convinced but knew by the time they got turned around and to a telephone we would have an hour start. Besides they couldn't have got our license number. “I know we're good. They'll never report it. And nobody would believe them unless they came out and saw for themselves.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  THERE were magpies on the roof and bluejays somewhere in the trees nearby. I had heard some animal scratching underneath the floor and each time I awoke to the scratching I would have to focus on the yard light until I remembered where I was. For the first time we slept separately. The small cabins only had one bed but they were very cheap; they were musty and smelled strongly of pine, and pitch still oozed fragrantly from the cracks in the boards. It had been a very cool night and I got up at dawn to adjust the electric wall heater.

  Out the window in the still first light I could see dew on the car. The cabins and the store were dark but the owner's dog, a shepherd-collie cross, shuffled around the yard and drank from the creek which was the border of the yard before the forest began. He looked into the forest and barked once. I woke often and lorded in my privacy imagining that I was far up in some mountain fastness and had never had anything to do with blowing a Navajo shed to dust and splinters with two cases of dynamite. But I couldn't dismiss the shed—the noise had been too palpable, a steady roar that imitated itself in successive waves and layers. A bit of the overkill but we got rid of the stuff.

  We had driven up to Page, quickly eaten, and checked into the cabins. Tim seemed very near collapse. I talked him into three Seconals and he was asleep by ten. I sat with Sylvia on their porch steps for a little while then kissed her good night. She was shivering and sounded drained as we talked but still quite excited. I had lost all fear of being caught and when we said good night I walked over to the store and bought a pint of whiskey. The owner was a pleasant asthmatic retiree from Mansfield, Ohio. We chatted in the dark about bass fishing and shared a few pulls from the bottle. He had worked in a steel mill until his lungs went bad and wished that he had never seen Mansfield, Ohio, but had been born right here near Page. He allowed that the Glen Canyon dam had been good for his business but he had liked it better before. I agreed as lakes and reservoirs usually bore the shit out of me. I asked him about a proposed Grand Canyon dam but he said that it was only a realtor's dream that got a lot of publicity. Of course the Army Corps of Engineers would be glad to build a dam even if there were no water within a hundred miles. He laughed a lot and appeared sorry when I said I had to get some sleep. I didn't finish a whole drink before I dropped off despite the lumpy mattress and damp sheets. I telephathically invited Sylvia over but she failed to materialize.

  By mid-morning, nearly twelve hours later, I still hadn't got out of bed. The exhaustion was cumulative; I couldn't remember sleeping eight hours since several days before we left Key West. Then I heard the car leave and I remembered that Tim had said there was something that needed fixing in the timing or the distributor. I got into the old metal shower stall and convinced myself that the cold water was invigorating. Snow has to be wonderful if that's all you have. I finished off last night's drink and shuddered. I would go on the wagon.

  I heard a knock and let Sylvia in. She had brought me coffee and a doughnut from the store. I drank it holding my towel skirt together with my other hand. She didn't look good sitting there so primly on the folding chair at the end of the bed.

  “Good morning, beautiful.”

  She didn't look up. “Tim sort of flipped in the middle of the night for about an hour. Then he took more pills and was O.K. Only this morning his head hurt so much I thought he was going to cry.”

  “Well at least we got some sleep. That should help.” I put down my coffee and patted her shoulder. She leaned against my leg.

  “Are you trying to comfort me again?” She smiled and stood up. I hugged her, still holding my towel. “Your towel is wet.”

  “Oh, fuck you.” I sat down on the bed. I only wanted to be kind I thought.

  She stepped over and ran her hand through my hair. I stared glumly at her wrist and hips. How could she be a foot away and still so distant.

  “Why would you cheat on a friend?” Her smile had become quizzical.

  “We don't have to cheat but we could at least tease ourselves a little.”

  She laughed and lifted my chin and kissed me for a second but when I ran my hand along her leg and tried to prolong the kiss she backed away. “How do you tease?”

  I searched for a good answer that would keep the atmosphere light. “Oh you know, neck and pet a little like they used to in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies or like Natalie Wood and James Dean. Nothing serious. I've been a whole week without any woman at all and it's impossible.” I thought this might disarm her.

  “What about those whores?” She became serious.

  “They don't count.” I knew then for the hundredth time in my life that I couldn't talk a girl into my bed. I felt clumsy and contemplated a total clown act that might send her shrieking from the cabin
.

  “They took care of Timmy all right.”

  “Why don't you go away.” I was appalled by my directness but continued. “I'm sick of looking at your sweet ass which you're welcome to save as long as you want. You know I love you. You love Timmy and he doesn't screw you and you know what it feels like. I feel the same way and I wish the fuck I'd never laid eyes on your goddamn dumb hillbilly face. You know goddamn well nothing is going to happen for you but your stupid cow brain can't figure it out and rather than be nice to someone who loves you you sit around crying over someone who doesn't. You're beautiful but you're an out an out stupid cunt. Period.”

  I knew I had gone too far and even in my anger I felt ashamed. Her face had a strangled look and she stood there with her hands held stiffly at her sides.

  I got up and hugged her. “I'm sorry and I'll never say anything like this again. I'm sorry.” I dropped my arms and she turned and walked out the door.

  I lay back in the bed listening to the magpies and sipping from my pint of whiskey which I thought I'd like to throw. But drinking would help more than throwing. That should be the end of that. It would be hard for her to be even friendly to me now. I was overwhelmed with regret—being her brother or uncle was a little bit better than nothing no matter how difficult it had become. Then I lived out a fantasy of us living together and tried to convince myself how ill-suited we were for each other. What would she be like in New York or San Francisco and would she look as beautiful and graceful. Yes. No question about it. She would be a perfect wife but I already had a perfect wife. What then? But loving someone, especially at first, never seems to involve any questions. Maybe it would help if we could make love, if only once. But that was a lie. The two women I had loved the best in my life were my worst lovers and it made no difference. I suddenly envied the crudity of my friends though I often seemed on the verge of it myself. Percy Shelley. Or Keats. Indeed. I lay there in an utter funk. Then Sylvia walked back in without knocking and I quickly covered myself for a change.