by Jim Harrison
I stretched out on my sleeping bag on the picnic table at ten in the morning and was still there at dark with little movement except to roll over and pee off the edge. I had no real desire for food or drink, not enough anyway to get me to move. My brain fluttered and pounded, my body twitched. Tears came and went. My blood pressure spiked the passing cumulus clouds. It was a delight when my left foot cramped and drew me away from the rest of my body. My life unrolled like a torpid newsreel. My condition kept reminding me of an uncle, a gruff man, I didn’t care for who returned from a four-year Pacific stretch in the Navy in World War II, looked over the Chicago arm of our family for a few scant months, and then moved off to Corpus Christi in Texas. Moving to Texas was truly a breach in family taste. Anyway Carl was an old-fashioned manly man in the manner of the movie actor Robert Ryan. My father had mysteriously said that the war had “cooked Carl for good.” I wasn’t sure at the time what he meant but Carl certainly followed his own counsel. I, of course, had never been to war but that was how I felt. Cooked to near death, as if my life in our culture had been some wretched and meaningless war in which the economy had become the only acceptable reality. I didn’t in the least feel entitled to whine or complain about this. I was at least a one-star general in this lifelong conflagration. Of course, there had been the temptation all along to pursue the hundreds of self-improvement schemes that afflict us, then convince us with their ultimate silliness. At one of my former geezer clubs in Chicago we used to be carelessly amused about the joggers among us who had dropped dead, conveniently ignoring those who dropped dead from physical sloth.
A screeching blue jay brought me back to the core that I had spent the day so relentlessly avoiding. I shut my eyes, which enabled the bird to approach the feeder for the last time in the twilight. What did a blue jay understand about my eyes, I wondered, re-opening them to perceive how the twilight seemed to have advanced toward darkness within the few minutes I had been giving the blue jay a feeding break. If I could notice this how much more securely could I notice that there was no time left for another life. This was the source of the terrifying anxiety that had kept me glued so absurdly to the picnic table for more than twelve hours.
The next step was even more harrowing to deal with because it was so logical. What had made me so foolishly wish another life when I had been reasonably contented with my own? Age sixty-seven was obviously not appropriate timing for this question but it seemed that the biggest pratfalls in my life had been deemed quite appropriate. Both my own and my ex-wife’s families thought of our marriage as overwhelmingly appropriate. Of course within this sort of state of exacerbation it is easy to become sidetracked into less threatening items in our personal histories. My ex-wife was basically dead to me and I suspect I was even “deader” to her.
Luckily I recognized the white light in the forest as the rising moon, a few days into its waning state but certainly bright enough to help Joe who, given his improbable physical condition, might be nearing his outrageous destination, not certainly outrageous to Joe because those considerations must have fled his brain. I could imagine him gliding through the forest toward his too young girl in the manner of those terribly corny Zane Grey novels of my youth that featured improbably heroic woodsmen and cowboys.
Dick had had the sense to call Ann when we returned without Joe. She was taking an exam but would be up tomorrow. We had immediately thought of Ann as, at the very least, a decoy to get Joe off the track of the girlish tumor victim. The problem was not the less poignant for being so absurdly vulnerable to sentimentality.
The moon was slipping up through the trees and my body and brain were finally, after nearly thirteen hours, in a state of rest. Of course I didn’t have time for another life but at least I could take a look. It is easy enough to discard the possibilities gotten from a thousand good books but the nature of Joe was close at hand. And it was also easy for me to assume that my little torments were caused by Ann in the obvious manner of an older man with a virtually sexless life running head-on into a young woman for whom he felt a powerful attraction. This was predictable and somewhat comic. It always is. How often with my Chicago friends, really acquaintances, had we spoken in comic derision when one of us had been silly enough not to act his age, sometimes disastrously, and certainly very expensively. But then just when you are quite confident that you have stored your hormones up on the shelf they are capable of suddenly leaping down at you. I suppose in contrast to the youthful it is a matter of frequency and intensity.
I got off the table, my legs deadened, and fell rather softly on my face in the grass. The earth felt reasonably solid in contrast to earlier in the day. Maybe the world doesn’t really look like the one I’ve been seeing all along. That was one of the questions Joe offered. The timing had to be right in that even last year I might have ignored Joe despite my closeness with Dick Rathbone, or at least kept my distance. I had to be in a state of vulnerability, somewhat pathetic in that my interest in life at large seemed to be evaporating, and I sensed that I wanted to see what Joe sees, even if it’s a brutal sensory overload. The anxiety comes from the “going, going, gone” chant, the much bandied “unlived life,” the sense of occlusion that arrives quite naturally to a stifled curiosity, or a curiosity that has buried itself in a familiar hole. I readily admit that the particulars of the effects of Joe’s injuries are unknown to me but then I’ve read that eminent brain researchers at their conventions are inclined to make jokes about when they’re finally going to be ready to attack the problem of the “nature of consciousness.”
As a worthy follow-up of my somewhat sententious day I cleaned out and sorted my spice and condiment shelf. I rarely make curry but found nine containers of curry powder, some of them god knows how old. Dick Rathbone jokes that I’m the “king of condiments.” The tiniest vermin possible thrive in ground chilies but not in brown sugar! Without training there are limits to how far you can take this. I heated some frozen tamales Fed Exed from a friend in New Mexico and opened a bottle of Domaine Tempier Bandol.
With the shelf cleaned and a crisp sense of accomplishment, and while waiting for the tamales to steam, I opened the most recent of Joe’s notebooks. I puzzled over a page of near gibberish, then noted a tearlike moisture in my eyes, quickly tracing it to the evening of my father’s death over forty years ago when my mother had irrationally spent most of the night washing her many sets of dishes. My cleaning of my condiment and spice shelf held a fragile similarity but then no one had died. I shivered a bit as I rejected the temptation to shine a flashlight out onto the picnic table to see if my body was there. It was now after midnight and I was counting on the wine, which hit my empty tummy rather directly, to return me to the solid earth or maple chair where I belonged.
Joe’s prose was a code with a seemingly infinite number of variables. Wolves were occasionally spelled “wuvs” or just “wo” while bears could be “bears” or “brs” but then all the connective language tissue, the articles, verbs, and adjectives, tended toward pure mud. Edna Rathbone had told me that in Joe’s quarters there was a large crock of bird feathers, dried flowers, dead insects, snake-skins, bones, parts of mammal skulls. A park ranger, an officious nitwit, told me that he had followed Joe’s tracks out into the fifty or so square miles that comprise the Grand Sable Dunes along Lake Superior, and in a thicket he had discovered a half dozen coyote skulls arranged on a low-slung birch branch. The ranger wondered if I thought this comprised some sort of “hocus-pocus.”
Further on I was able to parse that he often spent nights in the “sky.” I took the word “humock” to be hummock, a raised piece of land in a marsh, then thought he probably meant hammock. I knew he was given to climbing trees, which aroused modest fears in all of us, though not to the degree of his swimming. I also knew the ancient hammock was missing from my woodshed.
While eating my tamales well after midnight it occurred to me that once more I might be a victim of my envy. Since my youth I’ve always felt I was missing out, dou
btless because I was. I’ve dabbled enough in my reading in remote areas of botany, anthropology, history, geography, even physics, to name a few, and have been exposed to brilliance that made me feel like a simpleton, a proper feeling in that I was a simpleton in those areas. This admission did not decrease the level of my envy which fairly hissed through my pores. I was, however, hesitant to take the usual step in our culture of totally discounting acts of genius. For instance, very early on in my book collecting when I was still in my late twenties, my uncle who was my mentor in the area cautioned me against scorn and egregious comparisons. I was flippant about Langston Hughes and Richard Wright in favor of the recently published Ralph Ellison. I had wisely bought a whole carton of fifty of The Invisible Man. My uncle chided me that I was treating literature like a sack race, and that my humility in the face of any good work was appropriate. Of course the literary community at its worst, such as it is, does treat it like a sack race but that is collective stupidity.
My weakest characteristic, and this is perhaps where Joe was a goad, was in my paucity of imagination. Once in Barcelona while in my early thirties, I actually tossed a bilingual anthology of Spanish poetry off the balcony of a fine hotel down onto the Ramblas, peeking furtively over the edge to see if I might have struck one of the masses of promenaders on the avenue. I had reassured myself many times that the three most wildly imaginative acquaintances of mine had come to nothing, but stopped doing so when I realized I had come to relative nothing without being imaginative. The Spanish poetry made me seethe with jealousy because I couldn’t create a metaphor. Not even a bad one.
Ann arrived about four A.M. shortly after I finally fell asleep. She looked a bit like a photo of a Treblinka survivor with red eyes, flat hair, all twitches and blowing her nose. I was fatigued and quite cross, poured her a few ounces of Calvados, and went back to my bed in the loft, refusing to sacrifice my comfort to her like a sexual toady. On my way up the stairs she choked out that Edna had told her on the phone that Joe was off chasing a fourteen-year-old. Good old Edna. I whispered through fake drowsiness that I’d talk to her in the morning. Before I slept, and while I listened to the drumming sound of Ann’s shower, it occurred to me that Joe might need his tripartite beast or monster for the reason that Claude LéviStrauss pointed out, to the effect that the creation of such mythological beasts was as necessary as nest building. To take it a step further, in the terms of my ill-digested Neural Darwinism, maybe Joe’s beasts were similar to our own impulse in the creation of our early religions, a map of gods. I also wondered if there were monsters for genetic reasons left over in a few of our twelve billion neurons. Our monsters are now quite abstracted but earlier in our collective history they were very real. I imagined (for a definite change) some cave dwellers down near Sarlat in France struggling to defend themselves against a two-thousand-pound cave bear. God knows what they had to defend against two million years earlier in Africa.
About five A.M., not all that long after first light, Ann took it upon herself to join me in the loft. It was ultimately comic because I was deep in R.E.M. sleep and dreaming of a night with my wife in Palm Beach back in the seventies when we had stopped to visit her aunt after a pleasant week in Key West (by luck I got Tennessee Williams to sign most of his opus). The aunt was a loathsome Republican crone who drove her half dozen Latin American servants witless. She bitched about Democrats over dinner in one of those horrid “continental” restaurants that many rich folks prefer where you can’t tell the veal from the fish because it is laden with “Chef Pierre’s Special Sauce.” After a nasty quarrel over the minimum wage (the aunt had soap money from Cincinnati) I stalked out and checked into The Breakers close by because I’d left the car with my wife. All the hotel had available was a revoltingly expensive suite but I was too pissed off to care and ordered up a Côte Rôtie I favored. Anyway, my wife found me there and we were both so hopelessly exacerbated we made the best love of our marriage. “Go figure,” as they used to say.
Anyway, I was having a splendid though distorted dream of this marital fuck feast and when I awoke Ann had “covered” me for what I’d guess was a five-second sprint. She murmured that her gesture was “a thank-you note” for all my kindness. Still in a dream state where I wasn’t sure if Ann was my ex-wife I merely looked at the rough board ceiling, grimacing at a pain that shot through my prostate like a hot hat pin. When the pain subsided I began to go back to sleep but then she began weeping. My five-second coupling was beginning to look like one of the lesser deals of my life when by a grand stroke of luck a family of ravens arrived in the yard. I moved quickly to the bench by the windows because the ravens visit me rarely and usually about this time in mid-August. I croaked softly which didn’t alarm them because they were accustomed to my silly attempts at inter-species communication. Ann was at first pissed off that I found the ravens more interesting than her grief but then she joined me on the bench. There was one very outsized bearded fellow, an Ur-raven as it were, certainly the largest raven I had ever seen, but then I distrust my mediocre vision and the bird was partly in the shadow of a clump of cedar trees. The group of a dozen pranced, hopped, chortled, squawked, and whistled. The blue jays and evening grosbeaks that were normally at the feeder at this hour fled except for one brave female grosbeak. I admired her lovely Roman nose, which reminded me of Ann’s. There was the lingering jolt that the grand fellow in the cedar might be Joe’s bird. I turned to Ann who had her elbows resting on the windowsill, which drew her bare breasts upward. She was kneeling on the bench, which gave the inanimate bed a view I would have loved. I took courage from the ravens and said that I had to get the small pair of binoculars I keep on the nightstand for bird and beast occasions. So I caught the view of her upraised bottom at the window and there was the urge to howl “Praise God” but of course I didn’t. My member was becoming swollen again, a matter of some pride to this geezer, but when I returned to the window she laughed, gave it the briefest squeeze, and went downstairs.
Sleep was out of the question after having had only a mere hour or so. I was so much dead meat when I cooked and served a small breakfast to Ann. She pointed out that she had had as little sleep as myself and I let pass the simple fact that there was forty years’ difference in our ages. If she wasn’t dwelling on the fact maybe I’d have another shot, though at the moment sex was way down the list with anxiety attacks as desirable. She also made a little joke about the possibility that she might be pregnant with either me or Joe and I cagily withheld the fact that I had had a vasectomy. Just why this was tactically smart on my part escaped me but in both commercial real estate and book dealing there is the temptation to be pointlessly shrewd just to keep in practice.
On the way to Dick Rathbone’s Ann further irritated me by referring to Joe as noble. I slowed my vehicle for one of my special speeches, noting that the absurd concept of the “noble savage” can scarcely be extrapolated from Joe’s condition when, in fact, it was a brain injury that appeared to make him his own sub-species of Homo sapiens. She then shrilly called me a “tiresome old asshole.”
At Dick Rathbone’s there was a huge cab of a logging truck parked in the yard. Inside we were introduced to Priscilla’s father, Henry, a middle-aged fellow smelling of grease, diesel fuel, and pine bark, and obviously of French-Canadian descent. Despite his somewhat brutish appearance he shared some handsomeness with his daughter.
He was, unfortunately, a taciturn man and I had to piece bits of the story together because Dick was drowsing in his breakfast chair and not all that communicative. Joe had reached his Trenary-Chatham target area in about forty hours, not bad at all for sixty miles or so of this country, in fact well out of range, I suspect, of all but the sturdiest physical-culture nitwits our civilization has produced. Henry, Priscilla’s father, had found Joe sleeping under the porch with the dog Joe had met in the back of the pick-up at the doctor’s office in Marquette. Priscilla hadn’t returned from Marquette because her tumor was growing like “all get out” and she ha
d been sent over to the hospital. I couldn’t help being disappointed at the slight wave of pleasure that passed over Ann’s face when she heard Joe hadn’t seen Priscilla again. Sexual jealousy thrives even in the face of the death of the unwitting competitor.
Anyway, Henry said Joe wouldn’t leave but then Henry’s wife had called from Priscilla’s room at the hospital and the “lovebirds” got to talk a moment though Priscilla was “real doped up.” Joe had then comprehended the situation and Henry had brought him home, though down by the juncture of Adam’s Trail and Route 77 Joe had gestured that he had to pee and jumped out before the truck even stopped, heading east into the woods at a dead run.
When Henry got up to leave we thanked him and I tried to give him a C note for his round-trip which he proudly refused. He evidently came from an affectionate family because he gave us all a hug, which, of course, made me feel awkward. It was odd indeed to embrace such a powerful body. Out on the porch, Henry said, “This whole thing ain’t hardly fair,” an ultimate Dickens reverberation and my throat clutched.
The sky was still reddish when we set off at eight in the morning. Edna packed us a food basket and water and at the last minute we decided to take Marcia along for her tracking abilities. The problem at hand was that Joe hadn’t had his medication in two days and the effect of this was problematical. Ann was irked when we stopped at the Bayshore so Dick could pick up an emergency bottle of whiskey. When she chided him he said, “Mind your own fucking business,” a word he only used under the direst circumstances.
