by Jim Harrison
“You coming back at six?” she said, in barely more than a whisper. She wasn’t letting him off with being noble.
“Why not?” He turned with a resolute smile. “I’ll bring a joint. You’ll probably need it after Ted.”
She watched him all the way back to the beach where Arthur was lurking under a palm tree with a paper sack in his hand. She felt tremendously queasy about Charles, wondering how you could love someone that much, then have it all dissipate like it had with her high school sweetheart, Johnny. There was the pathetic, anguished feeling of living within a pop tune sung by any of a hundred singers she loathed. She still had genuine emotions and it was difficult to endure the fake. She remembered when she was ten, visiting Marcia just before Marcia’s mother died. Her mother was drunk in their house in Georgetown and playing Janis Joplin’s Pearl at top volume. Julip ran out into the backyard, trying to distance herself a little from the pain in the voice. She couldn’t imagine how such a person managed to stay alive.
*
After Charles, Arthur was a tonic. He lumbered toward her with a big grin, carrying a good deal more weight this year than last. He was the kindest man she had ever known, though definitely certifiable in some respects. The year before, he had hired two call girls for an evening and one of them had told Julip she had counted every one of his thirty-two drinks, several grams of cocaine, plus the night-long wrestling. Yet he had wakened puzzled that he wasn’t feeling well. “You must have a bug,” the call girl told him and he had been pleased with the diagnosis. “There must be a bug going around this fucking town,” he had muttered at breakfast.
Now as he neared he paused to look around with that peculiar expression painters have when they frame their surroundings.
“Boy, what an outfit. I’d give a king’s ransom to stick my face in your ass, but fat chance for that. Once again I’ve been victimized by my love.”
“You always were a bottom feeder. What was that fish you said you were like?” Marcia had accurately told her that older men spent a lot of time going down on girls because it restored their energies. Older guys kept their eyes open, she had said, while younger ones closed theirs, as if unsure they wanted to know what they were doing.
“The flounder,” he said, dropping the notion that he was a victim of love, opening the sack in his hand. “One of the noblest fish. You got a choice between a Pepsi or a fresh lemonade with Stoli. Also I brought you a sandwich. You’re looking too thin. Eat or die, that’s what Ted says.”
“Pepsi. I can’t have any booze in my system if I have to deal with him. What did Charles tell you back on shore?”
“Nothing. The prick wouldn’t tell me anything. He said I liked surprises. I also made you a sandwich. The best imported foie gras on Cuban bread.” Arthur liked surprises and confusion, and nothing thrilled him like a real mess that was resolved happily and immediately.
She bit into the sandwich wondering how to begin. Why did the Boys eat food so rich it made your cheekbones tickle? “It’s real simple. Bobby can get out of this terrible prison, Raiford, if you agree to him being sent to a nut house.”
“Of course. Why not? Maybe he’ll shoot us again. It was by far the most interesting thing that happened to me last year. I’m sending you a painting and the name of a dealer in Chicago, so if you go broke on the dogs, the dealer will take it off your hands.”
“I can’t believe that,” she teased. He had a legendary tendency to offer paintings to ladies.
“Let’s go to the fucking phone pronto. I’ll call the gallery. I’m also offering this genius hand in marriage.” He put out his right hand, his eyes brimming with tears.
“Oh, for God’s sake. You’re on your fourth marriage.”
“I don’t disagree. But it’s waning.”
“I can’t marry you. When I’m thirty, you’ll be almost sixty.”
“But you told me in San Francisco I was twelve. I didn’t think you’d accept but I wanted to ask anyhow. Also I was wondering if you could get me a photo. I know Charles took these sexy pictures of you but he won’t let me see them or give me one.”
“Of course.” Julip blushed. At the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco she had looked at a dog-eared magazine in Arthur’s open suitcase and had been appalled at the stopaction pictures of jism flying through the air toward the waiting faces of women. When he came out of the shower she was hiding in the closet, having left a note on the open magazine on his pillow: “I’m leaving until you throw this sick piece of shit out the window.” He looked around the room wildly, then flipped through the magazine, saying goodbye, went to the open window, and watched the magazine flutter to the street far below, whereupon she jumped out of the closet screaming with laughter.
“I thought you were gone.” He was unnerved.
“Did you think I was down on the street waiting for the smut? How could you throw it out when some poor kid might find it and become a lifelong pervert.” It was the kind of confusion that needed an immediate resolution. Later, when she asked him why he had the magazine in the first place, he’d only say, “I’m real visual.”
Back at the pier, he asked for a goodbye kiss during which he was surprisingly polite. “Sure I can’t fix you dinner? You’re going to need some garlic after you see Ted.”
“I don’t know. It depends on what happens. Is he really that bad?”
“Yup, ready for the farm. Now just remember you can count on me to take care of you if your life goes haywire.”
She bowed and off he walked down the pier, looking straight up in the air, fixed on cloud shapes. She craned to see if Ted was back there in the palm trees. She knew that every year or two Ted had to be sent away to dry out, either voluntarily or fueled by threats by his doctor, publisher, agent, and family. She turned, hearing a shout out at sea. It was Ted on a beach-rental Sunfish heading toward the end of the pier, screaming, “I can’t control this fucking thing!” She ran out toward the point of impact and looked over the rail where he was swimming toward a ladder. He cut his hands on the coral-encrusted rungs, and when she helped him over the rail he said with stark simplicity, “The wounds of Christ.”
“Why did you come this way? What about the boat?”
“Fuck the boat! The element of surprise. I see you’re wearing those shorts to torture me.”
Julip wandered over to the other side of the pier to collect herself. She was terrified when she looked back at him slumped dramatically to his haunches. If he were running at a field trial, his owner would have shot him as a mad dog. Maybe the judge would take two out of three and she should run for it herself.
“I talked to Charles,” Ted began slowly, his voice so low she approached closely to hear. “I wasn’t about to come out here without knowing what you wanted. You’re asking me to die. Your brother is a psychopath and he’ll strike again, so you’re asking me to die. I’m the one that noticed him all that week. That fuck’s a killer if there ever was one. But then I suppose I should die for you, you know, die for love. It would be a pure death. You would be killing me. Like in nature where the bugs eat each other.”
Now he began to weep, a sodden middle-aged heap, leaning against the railing in a squat position, the dried salt water on his face now streaked with tears. For Julip there was the awful memory of her father during the last summer in Wisconsin when she was eighteen. He had come home terribly drunk from the tavern on a hot Saturday and her mother slapped him and he walked stumbling off into the woods. Julip took their best bitch, Rose, to track him down when it began to get dark, fearing that blackflies and mosquitoes would bite him to death. She packed water, matches, mosquito dope, and a flashlight in a daypack, and kept Rose on a tether so she wouldn’t think they were looking for birds, and waved her dad’s cap before Rose’s face so she’d know what they were looking for. It was dark before she found him, sleeping against a white pine in his underpants, his body filthy with algae from taking a dip in a swamp pond where he’d taught her to hunt frogs. She rubbed his scrawny body with m
osquito dope, started a fire, then looked for his clothes. When he woke up and gulped the water, he had that same look that Ted did now, nose pressed to an invisible wall he couldn’t see beyond. Ted couldn’t stop weeping so she knelt beside him and hugged him as she had her father.
“I’d be better off dead than the way I am now. I was thinking on that sailboat that if you would marry me, your brother wouldn’t shoot me.” He glanced sideways at her, suddenly bright-eyed with the idea.
“But you’re already married.”
At the hotel in New York he had talked to his wife on the telephone, mostly whining to her, as Julip read on the couch beside him. He had hired a car and driver to take her around the city while he made dozens of phone calls, but she had sent the driver back to the hotel and had taken the Circle Line boat tour around Manhattan. What an incredible and gorgeous city, Julip had thought, and if she weren’t a dog trainer she might live there for a while. On the boat she sat between two dorky servicemen from Kansas because an old man up on the bow had scared her by whispering obscenities. Back at the hotel Ted was on the phone again with his wife, whining about the afternoon spent on the phone.
“I know I’m married but your brother probably doesn’t. That’s what counts.” He rose to his feet with a manic smile. “All you have to do is send him a copy of our marriage license, for Christ’s sake, don’t you get it? Then he wouldn’t shoot me.”
“I don’t see how you’re going to get an actual filled-out marriage license.” She suspected he hadn’t been taking his lithium, which he always said dried up his creative juices.
“How do you think I got my private detective’s license?” He looked into his thick wet wallet, drawing out a full inch of bent-over hundred-dollar bills. He gave her five of them as an afterthought. “Buy yourself a pretty dress,” he said, and began to walk away. She followed, trying to give back the money, but he waved her off. “I love you so much I could die, but I’m not going to. The fact is I’m too fucking smart to die for the time being.”
By the time they walked off the pier, Ted was merrily telling her a Hollywood joke. She had always thought it odd that as a writer he couldn’t tell a joke or story worth a shit. He’d jump from the beginning to the end, then back to the middle, get lost in a recipe, a new bird he’d possibly discovered, an ignored book from 1937, or why his left boot was wearing out faster than his right. He gave her a chaste kiss just as Charles stepped out from behind a palm tree with his binoculars around his neck. Ted gave him the thumbs-up and rushed off. Charles sighed and took out the promised joint.
“Why were you spying on us? He’s harmless.” Julip was well past tired of protective attitudes that ended up with someone wagging his dick in your face, the easy step from altruism to desire.
“He mentioned drowning himself,” Charles said, passing her the lit joint. She refused it, wanting to feel normal for a while. “I didn’t want you trying to save a two hundred pounder. I called his wife and said he’s ready for his retreat. She said he has been for months.”
They walked hard for a solid hour in silence after she briefly explained Ted’s marriage license plan.
“What are you going to do for your wedding night?” Charles joked. “I thought if anyone, it should be me. I discovered you.”
“I’m sleeping with Emily Dickinson.” She let her “discovery” pass as they walked, thinking of the bumper sticker she’d seen in Kentucky on the way down: “Wherever you go, that’s where you are.” It was disturbingly direct, and that was the wonderful thing about Charles — he knew when there wasn’t anything to say and you could walk a whole hour in peace. You could be where you are without being totally addled. The only time Ted had come up to Wisconsin, he had arrived with closely cropped hair and two zafus, cushions for Zen sitting, declaring somewhat like Bobby that he was becoming a Zen monk. She and Ted walked off into the woods and sat on the cushions for an hour during which he did a great deal of fidgeting. She did not tell him this was essentially the same thing she did every dawn after the long run with the dogs. She would make them all sit down for nearly an hour for discipline in utterly alert stillness, their ears perking, noses wiggling, eyes rolling toward her as they sat under the white pine her father wandered to when he was terminally drunk. Ted and Zen seemed the same mix as her dad and AA.
*
They stopped at her motel room where Charles dozed on the bed with a baseball game on TV while she made several calls, first to Sam Hinckley, the lawyer up in Starke. He congratulated her on the progress, but given the “volatility of the situation” he asked her to get the Boys to sign a simple statement that they agreed to Bobby’s transferral. She thanked him and tore out a back page from her dog diary, composed the statement, then called her mother, who said that Mr. Stearne’s lawyer was looking into places near Washington for Bobby. Julip noted that her mother’s voice was acquiring a more refined accent but decided it wasn’t the time to mention it. In the background she could hear ricky-ticky music. Mr. Stearne was known to possess one of the world’s largest collections of Dixieland records, a music she found insufferable.
“I’d feel better if Bobby were in a place where I could visit. These days a mother’s love is underrated. I should add that Marcia called after visiting Bobby. I just pray that you become a fine young lady like Marcia.”
“You’ve been praying a lot lately,” Julip quipped, buying time. It would be fun in a sick way to be around when Bobby ran off with Marcia to be married. “But I want to thank you for the help. You’ve been a real peach.”
“I always tried to be a good mother, Julip.”
“I know. We’re all living proof that nobody’s perfect. I’ll call when I get home.”
Julip put down the phone and selected a skirt and blouse. Despite the heat, the shorts could be stored now that her mission was nearly accomplished. She refused to meet Charles’s pleading glance and headed into the shower. It occurred to her she had forgotten the final element, the prosecutor, but then he was the one who tried to work out the asylum compromise Bobby had refused.
Just to be a bitch she came out of the shower in the cheap, skimpy towel the motel offered and made the call and appointment for the next morning. She dried off in front of the air conditioner, just out of Charles’s reach, turning slowly in the cool breeze and making a feeble attempt to keep covered with the wet towel. She was pleased to note that his hand tried to cover the hard-on under his khaki shorts.
“Do you love your mother?” she asked. “I’m just curious.” She snapped the towel at his hand.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Just answer my question. Do you love your mother? Then you can take it out.”
“I love my mother,” he said, taking out his erect dick and blushing.
“That’s an odd thing to talk about when you’re thinking about fucking. Shame on you. Now I want you to close your eyes and count to one backwards from ten. Actually, put the pillow over your face.”
“Ten … nine … eight …” came Charles’s voice, muffled under the pillow. She arranged herself, hovering over him, aiming his dick with a hand. When he reached one, she thrust down, screaming “Bingo!” and rotating her bottom as if she were working a pepper grinder. She noted by the bedside clock that he lasted a scant twenty-three seconds. He mooed like a pissed-off cow and she rolled off screeching with laughter. It took a full minute before he could laugh, and then rather weakly, more like a cough.
“Quite a joke,” he said, putting his hand on his chest as if to still his heart’s thumping.
“I just wanted to get the job done,” she said, kissing him.
*
You can always tell what kind of boy a man was, because that’s what they still are under the veil of physical growth, or so Julip thought as she swam laps in the Boys’ backyard pool. Charles was in a post-coital slump that reminded her of Bobby’s surly daze that always told her he had probably been in his bedroom or out in his hideout masturbating. Sitting by the pool with a drin
k, Charles was slack-jawed and remote, trying to give the impression of being lost in thought. She paused in mid-lap to tease him out of his mood, resting her bare breast on the pool’s edge.
“May I have a sip of your drink, sir?” she asked, then examined her breasts with a worried look.
“Something wrong?” he asked, stooping and offering her his Scotch.
“Just lately I think one has grown smaller. It keeps me up nights with worry.”
“Nonsense. They’re the same. Perfectly lovely. You’re being a hypochondriac.”
“Don’t call me that, goddammit. You guys spend hours worrying about your weenies. The left one is definitely smaller.”
Charles touched her left breast tentatively, as if he might be splashed or stopped. The life was returning to his eyes. Over his shoulder she noticed Arthur, who was making her favorite dinner, peering out the kitchen window, and she gave him the finger. His head darted back, discovered again. The year before while making love to Charles she had seen Arthur’s big nose around the edge of a doorjamb and had thrown a nearly full can of Pepsi which sailed expertly through the door crack, hitting the wall of the hall and splashing the voyeur.
“We could weigh them on the coke scale,” Charles suggested with enthusiasm.
“Oh, never mind.” She continued swimming laps, listening to the rumbling approach of a thunderstorm and watching the first spatter of raindrops on the pool’s surface. She aimed to swim off her nervousness over Ted. The others had signed the paper on the kitchen counter, both with a kindly flourish, but Ted hadn’t returned from his wedding license mission. Arthur said he had burst in, showered, shaved, then dressed in a summer suit and tie, and was off, all the time singing “Born Free,” which he did to grate Arthur’s nerves.
Now the thunderstorm increased in intensity and Charles and Arthur were shouting from the patio door, saying that she’d be electrocuted in the water. She swam on in the deluge, her stomach tingling with the scent of Arthur’s manicotti coming out the kitchen window. Never one to small-time it, Arthur usually made three kinds, on this occasion her favorites: fresh lobster, spinach and ricotta, and Italian sausage with basil and ricotta, all with different sauces. The Boys proudly felt they had pioneered ordering multiple entrées in restaurants — they could not bear being disappointed in matters of food, and three entrées were a minimum in their home cooking because, as Ted said, you couldn’t stop at two, what with even numbers being unlucky. In phone calls, visits, and letters over the more than two years she had known them, they had announced the collective loss of over a thousand pounds in their dieting.
