Good Day to Die

by Jim Harrison

  “I brought you a sandwich and a beer.” She sat down on the folding chair.

  “Thanks.” I lay back with the sandwich on my chest. “I'm very sorry.”

  She turned in the chair and ran her hand idly along my foot. She seemed very far away and I felt that from then on I would try to make her happy no matter how difficult it was for me. She wasn't tough enough to be hurt badly and recover as I did so habitually. If I left now I would be over it all in a month. I felt sure of that though I didn't feel up to trying it.

  “You shouldn't be sorry. It makes me feel good that you love me.” She got up and took my hand. “I think I'm quite old fashioned and the way you and Timmy are scares me. Timmy tells me to make love to you but I think it would just make him feel free.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Why don't you eat your sandwich? He should be here soon and he'll want to go.”

  “Kiss me. And I'll eat this.”

  She was puzzled for a moment, then leaned down to me. “You don't look like a movie star so how can I pretend we're in the movies?” She lifted half the sandwich and offered me a bite. I grabbed her wrist but she pulled away so I loosened my grip. “If I'm going to kiss you you can't grab me.”

  “Cross my heart.” I held my hands along my sides as if I were standing at attention. She put the sandwich on the nightstand, then pulled the sheet up my belly further. “This is like playing doctor and I'm twenty-eight years old. You're going to pay big for this someday.”

  “Maybe.” She paused. “You meant everything you said to me, didn't you? I'm probably very dumb, not like your wife or other girls you like.” Now she was resting against my chest and her face was only a few inches from mine. I wasn't absolutely sure she was serious but guessed that she was. I glanced down her blouse and smelled jasmine and saw how the pressure raised her breasts.

  “Please.” She kissed me then and the kiss continued for several minutes. I broke my promise and slid her entire weight on me with my right hand. I raised her skirt tentatively but she continued the kiss. I brushed my hands over her buttocks and the simple cotton panties and then clenched each of them. The kiss became more open-mouthed and deeper. I pulled the sheet down and let my cock rest against her and then I lowered it and pushed her down so that it bored against her. I opened my eyes and saw that hers were open too. I swiveled her hips against myself, then had to pause for fear of coming. I ran my hands under her panties until the tips of my fingers touched my cock which was pressed in, impeded only by the cloth. Then we heard the car.

  Sylvia jumped up and drew the bedclothes over me, quickly put the sandwich back on my chest and the beer in my hand. She smoothed her skirt, grabbed the Blaster's Handbook off the nightstand and sat back down on the folding chair just as Tim walked in.

  “At it again?” He was grinning and looked a lot better.

  “I've tried hard but I think she must be frigid.” I took a huge bite out of the sandwich and a swig of the beer. “Get the car fixed?” I nearly choked on the flat beer and wanted an Academy Award for acting. My poor cock hadn't begun to wilt under the bedclothes so sudden was the action.

  “Yeah. The timing was off. There's nothing in the Flagstaff paper about the blast so I guess we're safe. Get ready and we'll get the fuck out of this pop stand.” He turned to Sylvia. “Get me something to eat and a six-pack.”

  Tim sat down on the chair when she left. He began babbling about the mechanic he had met in Page who used to be a racing mechanic just like Tim's dad but mostly around Riverside in California. Then he started racing motorcycles and busted himself up pretty badly. I stretched and gave a false yawn waiting for my hard-on to subside so I could get up without suspicion.

  “Haven't you tried to fuck her?” He was looking at me with just an edge of coldness.

  “No. Would you try to fuck a woman of mine?” I gave him a hard stare that I hoped concealed any guilt.

  “Depends on what she looked like,” he said with amusement in his voice but that changed. “You should cut the shit though. I told her we were all done and whether or not you want her is your business.” He drummed his blue boots against the end of the bed. “Give me a drink.”

  “But you just can't trade her off like that,” I said passing him the pint.

  He popped a pill, then drank. “Guess not. I don't want her on my hands any more and I like you. You would be better to her than I have. We used to be great but now I don't feel anything any more and there's no good reason to feel I do.” The color in his face rose. “I wasn't going to see her again when we met in Key West. I was trying to figure out where I wanted to go in South America. Then when we decided to come out here and practically had to drive right through town it seemed like a good idea.”

  “Did you tell her that?” I started dressing and decided I wanted a fancy pair of boots like Tim's.

  “Only about a dozen times. She thinks I don't love her because I drop all those pills. I told her that was nonsense. Sure we might fuck a lot but that never changed my mind in the past. When this is over I'm going to get the hell out of the country. I can ship on a motor schooner to Venezuela with a guy I know and make more on a load of grass than I could in ten years’ working.” He was buzzed up now. “But if you don't even like her there's nothing you can do about it.”

  “I like her a lot but she treats me like a brother. I think she would never do anything with me because that would let you take off scot free.” A quarter of an hour before the brother had been a bit loose with the sister.

  “Well it's too bad for you because I'm going to take off anyway and she has a great body and you would like her. You're always looking at her.” He was pacing around the room laughing as I zipped up my suitcase.

  “She's nice but she's not really my type. I'm like you. I don't want anyone to depend on me.”

  We left the cabin and I waved to the owner who was standing near his single gas pump. Sylvia sat on the car fender with the six-pack and a sack of food. She was drinking a Dr Pepper and when we approached she greeted us as if nothing had happened. We agreed that since we had come this close we should take a look at the Grand Canyon even though it lacked a trace of a dam. But we didn't think we could take the chance of driving back through Cameron and over to the south side of the Canyon which I knew was the best way to look at it. Instead we headed for Jacob's Lake and then down toward North Rim. I was oddly depressed by the immensity of the landscape. If you were to live here there would be a long period of adjustment and perhaps you would never get used to it.

  At Navajo Bridge we threw stones down into the Colorado and I had vertigo almost to the point of nausea. I wondered how the Indians ever got back and forth across the river let alone adapted themselves to the austerity of the landscape which seemed to shrink the human to a perhaps more accurate scale. Sylvia was delighted and Tim as usual was concentrating on making good time.

  During the entire afternoon of fooling around North Rim I brooded about Sylvia. I had a more than a mild case of lover's nuts from our kiss and felt stupidly young and foolish. And put upon. I had slept too long and that caused a foggy sort of displacement. I walked around in a sensual haze and later could barely remember looking at the Canyon with any interest other than to wish I was a Havasupai Indian living down at the bottom. I was fatigued with trotting around like a pitifully horny dog. I was purposely distant with her, and her gaiety over the scenery disgusted me. Tim mostly concentrated on the idea that it would be impossible to blow any dam large enough to cross the Colorado unless you owned a squadron of B-52s. At dinner while Tim was in the toilet Sylvia reached for my hand and said that she was sorry we had been interrupted, that it had been “fun.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  TRAVELING north through Utah our plot began to take a more definite shape. And the optional methods narrowed down to the fusion of kerosene and bags of nitrogen fertilizer, both less traceable than the more stagy dynamite. I had read about the method years before in an outdoor magazine where it was recommended fo
r making instant ponds in low lying areas for the propagation of ducks. And assuming some caution, it was safe. Three or four bags would make a hole as large as an average bomb crater. We would have to double up a bit on quantity because we wouldn't have time to bury the bags. And we would buy the material in Montana and rent a small U-Haul so that it would be extremely unlikely that we would be caught by the usual circumstantial route. Perhaps we would try the method in Montana with a bag or two to see if we judged it as adequate. I was sure but Tim wondered why more people weren't using it. I said because everyone wasn't us. In Michigan a landowner could illegally dam up a feeder stream but he would only be fined fifty dollars and the dam stayed. I began to get the holy glow I had in the tavern in Tucson. And Tim suggested that maybe we should blow up a dozen dams or fifty or a hundred and make a real mark for ourselves. Why stop at one or two? It was infectious and I saw us as the equivalent of the Resistance in France moving around the country committing just acts of sabotage. We talked on for hours in the Utah night with Sylvia dozing prettily. At a gas station while Tim was out of the car I kissed her awake and she smiled sleepily but it reminded me horribly of kissing my daughter good night. I didn't need such thoughts now when I would have to summon up all of my not very considerable nerve for what we were going to do. We were getting uncomfortably close to having to actually carry out our plans that had been made so blithely. It was ominous. I had immoderately thrilling visions of my picture in post offices where the FBI posters are tacked in sheaves: WANTED FOR UNLAWFUL ACTS OF SABOTAGE . . . CONSIDERED ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS . . . TO BE APPROACHED WITH GREAT CAUTION.

  We began discussing escape routes now that we had become so notorious in our conversation. The Yucatán or Quintana Roo sounded good but so did the island of Cozumel where I could fish out my dark exile. Or Cartagena in Colombia which I suggested to Tim not because I knew what was there but because the name sounded good. Tim preferred the Far East. If I would only get a taste of the kind of action he had had on R and R in Hong Kong and Tokyo. But I declined as there wasn't any good fishing on my terms in the Far East.

  So we played on with explosions and locations through the night. Not petty but giant crime and the map freakery involved in such names as Temuco, Vera Cruz, Belize, Alexandria, Trinidad, Cabo San Luca and so on. I told him about the good month I had in Salinas, Ecuador, how the fishing was exquisite and you could live very cheaply there. The girls were pretty too though you had to be careful as shankers were prevalent. But Tim's notions were more movie oriented and swashbuckling. We would need a fortune off a bank robbery or some vague huge dope deal. Then we would live stylishly in the tropics, gamble a lot, stay stoned and wear white linen suits. Our plans began to fall apart a bit but we finally reached a compromise with the Caribbean where both fishing and the high life were possibilities though the location was less redolent with mystery than some of the other places.

  Sylvia would occasionally wake and change a tape and say something though we were too busy to pay any attention to her. She didn't obviously appear in any of Tim's plans and she seemed to sense this. But frequently in our endless talk I would place her in a hotel room with me, or in a boat or she would be on the beach waiting for me when I returned in the evening. I could see her slightly darkened by the sun which would emphasize the greenness in her eyes and bleach her hair. But so often my power of fantasy would lapse and I would either see us caught and imprisoned or, worse yet, Sylvia would disappear. I could not bear to think of the event in the cabin and how I would have been in her, in fact was in her almost, were it not for a millimeter of cotton. Perhaps that was as close as I would get. And it somehow began to matter less. The closeness was enough and brought on that strange sickness of the heart and throat and loins and though it might have been fatigue made me feel weepy at the thought of it. For a silly instant I knew I would kill to get her and what I would do with her was irrelevant.

  We were still barreling along at dawn. Sylvia and I kept at Tim until he agreed to stop at a motel. We found a vacancy just over the Wyoming border near Evanston though the owner was cranky at being waked early. But the motel was scabby enough with just a few cars in front so he needed the business. I stood out in front of our unit for a half hour smoking cigarettes; I didn't want to see Sylvia in any state of undress, and even more I didn't want to see her get in bed with Tim while I lay there three feet away paralyzed with jealousy.

  Now in the first light, standing in the gravel parking lot, all of my berserk enthusiasm, fed by Tim's speed talk and my imagination and a dozen tapes in the deck, had vanished. The landscape was bleak and the air already warm. I thought about the false power of music, the insanely dead-end kind of romanticism it promoted. If you listened to the Stones at high volume long enough you invariably had some sort of sympathy for the devil. And hearing that Dylan-Cash duet you wanted to travel north and find a girl at a county fair. Tim's apparent favorite which I had begun to dread was Joplin's “Get It While You Can” which seemed unequaled in modern music for sheer relentless desperation. Millions listen to these songs and unless they are utter dullards they must be affected by them. Maybe it's good. What did the previous generation get out of Perry Como and Andy Williams and Rosemary Clooney? But often it seemed the passion was excessive and the music transliterated the passion so accurately that you couldn't help but be convinced. Merle Haggard always made me want to get drunk. The Cream or The Who or The Grateful Dead made me want to get stoned while with Dolly Parton I wanted to fall in love. June Carter seemed to beckon from Jackson, Mississippi, and Patsy Cline from Nashville. No wonder that most people prefer weak, sappy music.

  When I entered the room Tim was lying on his back staring at me. He childishly pushed down the sheet to reveal Sylvia again in those white lollipop panties sleeping deeply on her stomach. Then he pushed them down and I gave him the finger and bolted for the bathroom. Great sense of humor. But I had convinced him that she meant nothing in particular to me. He was merely being playful.

  Years ago I had read D. H. Lawrence and become convinced that he had the right attitude toward sex. But it was hard to avoid acting out the depths of one's own sexual neuroticisms, the perhaps inevitable arrested development. Somehow I became convinced that people who lived in cities and the Frenchmen and Italians seemed less guilty than those of us who had grown up in the small Calvinist backwaters. Probably no changing now. Or not much. The teenagers appeared to be escaping some of it.

  I looked long and closely in the mirror for signs of incipient age and decay. Twenty-eight. Four times seven. Your life is supposed to change dramatically every seven years they say. Who says. The stars of course. We're in less than intimate contact I think. My throat hurts from smoking and my head from drinking and my ass from riding and the rest of me from Sylvia. My interest in life weakened again at a rapacious rate. It disappeared in fact while I brushed my teeth. Suicide was a thought that consistently held vitality.

  Back in the room Tim was asleep with a pillow over his eyes; a ray of the early morning sun stretched across his pillow and vanished into Sylvia's hair. He hadn't covered her with the sheet and her bottom was still frighteningly bare. I tried to pretend it was someone else as I treated myself to a look. It was definitely faultless. I would gladly die upon it in a marathon effort. An Elizabethan suicide. She moved a little which opened her. Too much to take right now or at any time. Global. Now a fly ticked against the window and a truck passed. But I stood there long enough so that there was some question whether I was capable of moving. Early danger signal. Their breathing had joined the single fly, my heartbeat, and the hole left by the truck. For a moment I thought I might be able to hear the ray of sun that was lengthening across Sylvia's hair. I stared at her body so long that the strength of my perceptions weakened and the bed and the entire room became flat as a magazine photo. I became dizzy but discovered that I had ceased breathing.

  Before I got in bed I dropped twenty milligrams of Valium, surely a chickenshit drug compared to Tim's s
pecialties, but perhaps it would get me some sleep. While waiting for its effect I tried to meditate on fishing. Tomorrow I might get a few hours on the Green—rather today—anyplace else I would have been up an hour by now for trout. On salt water you had to wait for the light, for the sun to climb enough so that it wouldn't reflect off the water which was usually around nine o'clock in the morning. At least in flats fishing where the skill depended so much on vision and the movement of the tides in the shallow water where it was so easy to confuse a fish with the configuration of the bottom. You might stand all day on the casting deck of a skiff and only get two or three shots at tarpon. The same if you were bonefishing. And in May it would be so hot that the sweat invariably got in your eyes and trickled down your belly and into your crotch and down your legs. But a day might come when you saw a hundred big tarpon in a single school wandering across a flat in three feet of water toward your staked skiff. The water was so thin that the silver backs and dorsals of the larger fish showed above the water and the fish would spook each other playfully. You hoped that another boat wouldn't appear, or a flock of gulls or pelicans or man-of-war birds to frighten them. No matter that most of them weighed over a hundred pounds, the tarpon still seemed constantly wary of birds which perhaps fed on their kind when the fish were small. It could be awful waiting, especially when you saw them coming three or four hundred yards away so that by the time they reached casting distance you were a basket case. But if you were lucky you might hook one or two of them if your first rig broke and you had another rod ready. If the hook was set well you might decide to fight the fish to the boat which often took more than an hour. Usually you purposely broke the leader after the tarpon made his inevitable succession of wild jumps that never failed to astound you with their strength and power.