Good Day to Die

by Jim Harrison

  Still awake but I could feel the first soft nuzzling of the Valium in my brain and limbs. Something like hashish only more soporific. And boring. Odd that suicide can be inadvertent or we don't recognize quite what we are doing. It's always been easy to dismiss the shotgun across the lap, the brief temptation to hurl from Navajo Bridge the other day my body not the rock, or to miss the abutment on the freeway that looked sort of attractive.

  On the Yellowstone north of Livingston I fished one evening while in the middle of a severe strep infection. The high fever caused intermittent spells of dizziness so that I would have to grab something to avoid falling down. In my cabin I was either soaked with sweat or dry and burning. A doctor had cauterized my throat but it still hurt too much to get any whiskey past the raw parts. I had been in a severe depression for a year, so severe in fact that I no longer noticed my wife, daughter, dog. I had no interest in sex and when I would travel I had difficulty in remembering the sights I saw, meals eaten. I awoke one morning with my wife in a bedroom in an inn about thirty miles from London and said something that betrayed my state of mind so that she became very frightened—I had simply forgotten that we were in England.

  So that evening in Montana I drove to a part of the Yellowstone just above where the river enters a small canyon for three miles and the cliffs are sheer. If you went under in your waders the chances of drowning were excellent. It would be hard to miss, the water was so turbulent and swift, and the shore held no place that was not solid rock. When I walked from my car to the river I had to sit down three or four times, and I fell when I first stepped into the river in a channel facing a sandbar. The main power of the river was beyond the sandbar and I cast from the sandbar on the spit that faced downstream toward the canyon. I took several good fish with no pleasure and still did not understand what I intended to do. I stepped into the water in the lee of the bar until the cold water reached my waist, then I slowly waded toward the main force of the current. I think I gulped air in anticipation of going under and the sharp pain in my throat brought me to full consciousness of what I was doing. My panic was instant and the surge of energy was incredible. I struggled back to the sandbar and lay there for an hour watching the evening sun move up the cliffs and the swallows dart in and out of their crannies. I saw a prairie falcon skitter along the top edge of the cliff looking for a meal. When it was dark I made my way back to the car and drove into town where I drank until I was comatose despite the pain of swallowing.

  I woke up to laughter and pig noises. Tim had Sylvia around the waist at the foot of the bed. I covered myself for security.

  “She wants a shower and I want to get to hell out of here.” Then he oinked and snorted against the back of her neck. “Jesus you smell too good for a shower.” He oinked down her back while she wriggled to get away. “I don't want to wait a fucking hour.” He hauled her over to my bedside. “Smell her for Christ's sake.”

  “Smells like a manure pile,” I said snorting loudly which made me cough. “Manure's fine for breakfast though.” Sylvia kicked at me and I grabbed her foot to avoid injury.

  “You're squeezing too hard!” Tim's arms were around her waist tightly.

  “No shower or I'll take off your pants in front of this sex maniac.” She struggled harder still laughing and he turned her toward him and got another hold. “De-pants her, sex maniac. She got me while I was sleeping and thinking about someone else.”

  I saw that Sylvia was blushing and I got out the other side of the bed and went into the bathroom. Well, they made love or at least she did. Glad I wasn't awake for that one. Thank Valium. I turned on the shower full blast and, happy for a change, began singing my college fight song for no particular reason: “Close beside the winding cedars stands a college known to all; / Their specialty is winning and those Spartans play football,” I brayed. Then Tim burst through the shower curtain still holding Sylvia.

  “Glad to have you aboard,” I yelled and continued the song in the spirit of the event. They were between me and the opening in the middle of the stream of water.

  “Let's soap this pile of shit down.” Tim took the soap from my hand. Sylvia stood between us with any escape route blocked by Tim. “This rapist needs cleaning up.” He began soaping her front vigorously. She was braless but still had her panties on but then he knelt and pulled them down her legs. “Here, you soap the back.” He handed me the soap and I began scrubbing. It was freaky enough that I didn't feel the least bit excited.

  “She seems pretty clean.” I was only halfway down her back but didn't have the heart to continue.

  “All the way, chickenshit!” Tim was laughing with his face streaming with water. Sylvia turned and sort of rolled her eyes so I continued lathering and handed Tim the soap and he began washing himself. I let my hand linger unnecessarily between her legs but she didn't move. I began to tremble and the whole thing began to lose its humor.

  “I'll bet you ten dollars he's got his hand up your ass,” Tim said rinsing his face.

  “No he hasn't,” she said. She deftly moved from my hand and past Tim out of the shower.

  PART

  III

  CHAPTER

  12

  I HAD LOST all of my uncontrollable melancholy of the night before. Tim had agreed to stopping to fish for a while and Sylvia bought food and drinks for a picnic. And as we moved further north in Wyoming we finally escaped a week's worth of oppressive heat. But I suspected Tim wanted to slow down for the same reason I did—after our long burst of verbal energy expended in detailed planning, the future which was to be painted with a series of explosions began to appear as excessively close. Almost around the next curve on the highway. A drunk is heading for us at a hundred miles per hour. But maybe he felt nothing of this and I was only projecting my own weak-kneed sense of caution. I thought he was trying to cut down his pill intake, something he was accomplishing by drinking an endless succession of cans of Coors beer. We had no way to keep the beer cool so we bought it a six-pack at a time and drank quickly. The only sour aspect of the day was his teasing of Sylvia. He prattled on how he had never taken advantage of a drunk or drugged or otherwise incapacitated woman, only to have his own sleeping body misused. At first she laughed about it and said she had been half asleep herself and had dreamed they were back in the hospital bed in San Diego which had been for her, oddly enough, a happier time. But he didn't let up and she resorted to staring wordlessly out the window. I intermittently hated his needling but sometimes it became funny. I tried to help by changing the subject at every opportune lapse in the conversation. He would get interested in, say, certain structural aspects of earthen dams. But they were fairly simple and didn't hold attention. All that you had to do was blow a large enough trough and the force of the backed-up water would work for you sweeping the rest of the dam away.

  It was so easy to become depressed with Sylvia's vulnerability. It was the same set of feelings I got when my daughter had a toothache or a bad earache. I would hold her three-year-old body weighing only thirty pounds and rock her; her face would be flushed with the fever and her eyes dull with pain. You wanted very badly to assume the pain for her and after many hours of it the depression would turn into anger.

  In a pond in a gravel pit I had once helped dive for a drowned child. There was a newspaper reporter clicking pictures and in my nightmares about the event there was always the sound of the camera clicking. A friend that had found the child on the pond's bottom kept yelling that “she's cold.” A few of the spectators had the dignity to run back to their cars but most stayed looking down at their shoes while the mother screamed. I was sixteen at the time and went to the drive-in movie that night with my girl friend. I sat there dumbly watching a giant ant attack some explorers but kept remembering the child's eyes had been open and when she was first brought to the surface I felt thrilled because she must be alive. I thought she was looking at me. I drank nearly a case of beer and my girl friend had to drive home.

  We made several turns off
the main road before I found what I thought was a fishable stretch of the Green combined with a good place to picnic. Tim was mildly irked because it all looked like water to him and he was sure that I was putting him on. But much of the water was wide, swift and shallow and I was looking for a stretch of the river that had deep pools where I might coax up a large fish in the midday glare. Sylvia set out the picnic but I declined to eat until I fished for a while.

  I had an absurdly good time; though I lacked waders and couldn't reach some of the rises further out in the river I quickly became less finicky and walked into the river with my trousers and shoes on. The water was so cold it numbed my legs painfully so I would get out every ten minutes and stomp around to return my circulation. Most of the fish were smaller rainbows but they were beautifully colored and good fighters aided as they were by the strong current. I was struck again as I had been for years by how my fishing so hypnotically wiped the slate clean again though only for as long as I was in the river. For a few hours though all problems—money, sex, alcoholism, generalized craziness—disappeared in concentrating on the flow of water, the likely places for feeding trout to be, the clear current or in the eddies next to the grassy banks or behind the large rocks and boulders that broke the water's surface, forming pockets behind them that always seemed to hold a fish or two.

  “Can I look at it?” It was Sylvia and she was seated on a rock not twenty feet behind me. I was both startled and irritated having been caught on the verge of giving a tiny rainbow a kiss before I released it.

  “Yes. Of course.” I waded over quickly. “I have to let it go fast or it will be hurt.”

  “It's pretty. Do they all have that pink stripe?”

  “All the rainbows do.” I stooped and gently released the fish in the slow water by the bank. It paused, moving its gills laboriously, then darted back out into the current. I was reminded rather painfully of my problem. Sylvia had her knees drawn up and was resting her arms and chin on them. If I didn't stand quickly I would stay there forever watching the way her inner thighs vanished into her crotch. Why did they bother wearing skirts at all?

  “Go ahead and fish. I just want to watch.” She let one foot trail in the water. Now the view was even better and my face felt stupidly hot when I thought of the shower of a few hours ago.

  “No, I'm getting cold and a little hungry. Where's Tim?” I sat down on the sand beside her rock and lit a cigarette.

  “He's been drinking a lot and fell asleep.” I turned away from her thigh which was only a foot from my face. I almost wanted to burn it with my cigarette. What a false problem. I would become a monk of violence and blow myself up—troublesome cock and brain full of romance—in a single deliciously orange explosion. All of the peace of fishing had dissipated.

  “Let's go up on the bank and make love.” I scarcely believed I was saying it.

  “I don't feel like it right now,” she said as if my request and her denial were an everyday occurrence.

  “I guess you took care of that while I slept.” She stared down at me angrily and I grabbed her hand and squeezed it as if I were trying to joke. She sighed deeply.

  “I was dreaming and when I was really awake he pushed me away and didn't even finish.” She stood up and waded out into the river up to her knees but quickly got back out. “God it's cold. How can you stand it?”

  “I couldn't.” My legs were finally beginning to get warm. I gathered courage and caressed her thigh with my hand as she stood next to me. “Sylvia I'm not bragging but I'm sure I could make love to you until you were absolutely sick of it.”

  “It's strange but I thought both of you were going to make love to me in the shower. I was scared and didn't think you were going to let me go.” She messed up my hair as I raised my hand further up the thigh.

  “I wanted to.” Then the car horn beeped. Jesus. The second time that bastard has interrupted. She laughed as the horn echoed down the river mixing with the roar of water. I pulled her down with force and she collapsed across my lap. I kissed her and pushed her dress up to her waist but when I let the kiss which seemed returned go she bit my finger and jumped up out of reach.

  “Maybe the next time we have a chance.” I sat there in my wet trousers doubting the eventuality of everything.

  Selective dolor: the largest boulder which was directly across the river from me caught and deflected the water with the noise of a giant kettledrum. When she left, there was this wish to become the riverbed or a rock, something so slight as one of those thousands of planes of sun entering a ripple. Trapped. I heard Tim gun the car and still did not move. An otter appeared on the far bank but vanished when I waved. I was sated with the West and wanted to be on some other riverbank, say the Neva embankment in Leningrad when it was St. Petersburg. Perhaps Peter the Great would be walking along the path on an evening stroll and I would wave to him like I did the otter but then Peter vanished with the horn. I walked to the car in an utter numb boredom with forests, rivers, mountains, cars, Tim and Sylvia. Especially the unremitting lewdness she caused in my head so that the only interesting alternative to this lewdness was to blow up a dam. Two choices, both of which you had become committed to. As I drew near the car I imagined myself sitting on a terrace in sixteenth-century Rapallo drinking a pitcher of wine: I weighed three hundred, had a huge goiter, and my children scuffled in the dirt at my feet. Reality pudding.

  “Sylvia said you made a pass at her.” Tim was glancing in the rearview mirror.

  “Oh, Timmy, shut up.” His head jerked toward her.

  “Yeah I did. I offered her a hundred dollars.” I wanted to interrupt any fight before it started. “I was either going to borrow it from you or write a bad check.” I passed them a joint that I had found in one of my fly boxes. Peaceful medicine I hoped. I thought it was from a friend's batch that had been mildly diced with opium. Should quiet him down.

  “But I said I'm not worth a hundred dollars which is much more than you guys paid those beauties in Mexico,” Sylvia joined in. “So I said twenty dollars is more than enough and I'll give it to Timmy for gas money.”

  “She's not worth twenty dollars even for around the world. There was this girl in Saigon that could pick up a silver dollar with her pussy.” We had reached the main road and Tim was punctuating his talk by speed shifting.

  The marijuana began to take effect and we all lapsed into joking. I tried to make up an original English folk song but it came out something like “Dingaling ding ding derry dery dery dog dodo” and it was booed. So much for a songwriting career. Tim told a longish story about how as a child he guarded his dad's toolbox at the big races where his dad acted as a racing mechanic. Sometimes on the infield near the track where the pit crews worked it would be a hundred thirty degrees. His dad had been one of the best mechanics until he lost a thumb and forefinger to a fan belt then retired to his small repair garage in Valdosta. Tim missed seeing the big track action and decided he wanted to be as famous as Junior Johnson or David Pearson or Cale Yarborough so he built up his Mercury in high school and ran around southern Georgia on weekends lying his age and racing. His football coach asked him to quit during the season so Tim had quit football where he had played both end and linebacker. He had gone to Georgia Tech because he wanted to build a super car. Sylvia began talking about a football game where the first teams had both been thrown out for fighting and spectators had run on the field to join the fight. Tim added that it had been more fun than any football game he had ever played in because their coach whom he hated had been hit over the nose with a helmet and bled like a chicken with its head chopped off.

  But I had dropped far back into my own head and the little trip had become a bummer. Their talk seemed to indicate a direct connection with the past and what they were now. This was startling and I felt envious. There was a shrill phenomenology in thinking about my own life in comparison—the “we are one thing because we are not another” sort of confusion: I am only here near Bondurant, Wyoming, because I am not in the
Marquesas fishing.

  I said something crossing the street. I said something to Sylvia in a cabin and we nearly made love like cataleptic fifties teenagers. A large trout didn't take my fly on the Green because if trout had been around they had decided in their fishy way not to bite the fly. I was very stoned in a back seat of a car because I wasn't not stoned. I hadn't talked to my mother on the phone for a year because it hadn't occurred to me to do so. When Sylvia or Tim looked at me I was a person they had known only a short time, Sylvia seven days and Tim eight. It was so accidental and the force of it with the sprinkle of opium pushed me back into the seat until I became part of the Naugahyde. A plastic fantastic non-lover. If I happened to return to my wife assuming she welcomed me it would probably be for want of anything better or more interesting to do, or if I happened to be in the area when it occurred to me to try, or if she hadn't met someone else at a party or the grocery store. Things that were dead were not alive as surely as that bird dog I had grieved for several years. Her location was certain as I had buried her.

  In Jackson Hole we had a good meal and I drank a whole bottle of Pinot Chardonnay because they didn't like the taste. After dinner we wandered around from bar to bar and Tim scored a quarter gram of cocaine off a guitarist during a break. I idly thought his money must be running out but rather liked the idea of a line or two of coke. But back in the motel it turned out to be weak and overcut. Despite this Tim was pissed at Sylvia for refusing to try any. I had picked up some magazines and Eastern newspapers so that when they went back out I decided to stay. I was pleased when Sylvia looked disappointed. I could tell she didn't want to go out either but hesitated to expose herself to whatever Tim might decide to say.

  All the bars had resembled various movie sets and you couldn't tell the gimcrack from the real cowboys, not that it mattered. Why shouldn't a hard-working stockbroker from Boston be entitled to wear a costume once in a while. This reminded me of the more functional, nevertheless silly-looking, sailing costumes they wore in Marblehead and Martha's Vineyard or Vinalhaven.