Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison
“Do you still own any bib overalls?” I asked. Clare imitated her father’s dress until she was in her early teens.
“Yes, of course. I have four pairs, though they’re too short. And I still have my favorite hammer and shovel.”
“I know what he’s going to do,” I said, nodding at Donald and chewing on my corned beef sandwich as if mortality were a fiction.
“I do, too. I sat beside him in the middle of the night and he told me. I didn’t say much. It’s up to him. It’s not like you can hold out any hope. People are always talking about the war against cancer but with this one the military metaphor doesn’t work. You’re dead with the diagnosis. The night Mom called last year I contacted a friend at UCLA medical school and got the information. Herald and I stayed up until dawn talking. As you know, when Herald is nervous he cooks something if he’s near a kitchen. He’s a thoroughly mediocre cook. Anyway, in the middle of the night he’s cooking chili and he weighs the cubed chuck because the recipe calls for two pounds. He pushes the extra two ounces of meat off to the side and for once I didn’t tease him, and then he said, ’There aren’t very many people like my father anymore,’ and then we both fell apart. That’s what I was thinking this morning when I read about the three Clarences. These kind of people are gone forever.”
“Well, I thought that too, but then I supposed that if you went far enough off the interstate you’d find some people with similarities. Also I thought of people in other parts of the world, what educated people blithely call the Third World and then turn up the Bach or Springsteen and drink a two-dollar bottle of water, which is the daily food budget for families in ninety percent of the world population just as an American car costs fifty times the annual income of eighty percent—”
“Oh stop it, you fucking ninny.” Clare rolled her eyes so far upward they were nearly all white, which she also did during orgasm when we were lovers. This stopped about five years ago, when I was nineteen and she eighteen, at which point she had perceived that my desire was greater for her mother, Cynthia. I thought that she broke it off because we were cousins and I said, “You love my mother more than you do me,” and that was that. Clare never drifts. When you’re with her you’re always walking along the cornice of a tall building. When she says something withering you actually wither.
“The water is so beautiful it’s hard to believe my great-grandpa died out there. Yours was taken underground and mine at sea.” Donald gestured and Clare handed him his warm milk shake. He was talking about my grandpa, Polly’s father, who was injured in an iron mine in his early thirties. He didn’t die but forever after scuttled like a crab when he tried to walk freely. I was a difficult boy and my grandma would come down to Chicago in early June when school was out and retrieve me to spend a month in Iron Mountain. We would travel on a Greyhound bus because a plane was beyond her comprehension. I didn’t want to go but once I reached Iron Mountain it was fine and I think of those summers as the best part of my childhood. I mean, my father would occasionally take me to a Chicago Cubs game but his lack of real interest in baseball was infectious. He would stare off at the field but you knew he wasn’t seeing anything. I liked it best when we would visit a friend of his from the Marines, an Italian auto mechanic with a big family. The whole family was always eating, shouting, and laughing. They had a daughter named Gaspara who was my age but was much stronger. She would throw me on a couch and kiss me and sometimes just get me in a stranglehold and hold me tight while she read a comic. Once she demanded to see my penis and when I showed it to her she literally laughed until she cried. Still I loved her. When she helped her mother serve dinner she would give me an extra meatball and if her brother teased her she would start pounding him, throwing real punches, which her parents would ignore. This was the opposite of our house, where my parents often corrected school papers during dinner. My wayward sister later said, “They were always out to lunch.” This wasn’t quite a fair assessment because Polly is one of those overconscientious people, a dawn-to-midnight worker. My father, however, in his vain attempt to create what he thought was a normal life after Vietnam, simply excluded what most of us think of as reality. Years later in my mid-teens, when Polly thought that I was old enough, she told me that she had felt “sucker punched” by my father, and that after being married to David she had craved an ordinary, nonneurotic man only to gradually learn that my father had “painted himself by numbers.” He was a highly intelligent man who utterly rejected his intelligence, just wanting to be a regular guy. His father taught economics at the University of Chicago and his mother translated from central European languages. They were austere and fustian academic people and I only saw them a few times when I was little. I thought they smelled strange, an odor I found out later was sherry. They moved to London before my dad was killed in the motorcycle accident and didn’t come back for the funeral. When I was in London on a college trip Polly made me look them up and they were cool and formal. The older woman that I thought was wonderful was David’s mother, Marjorie. She and Polly were friends despite the divorce from David. She gave me and my sister a charge account at Kroch’s & Brentano’s so we could have all of the books we wanted. She would take us to the Cape Cod Room at the Drake, where we would eat lobster. Naturally my dad didn’t like her—it was a matter of wavelength, his desire to keep everything in the discreet middle.
When Clare and I first spent any time around each other I was twelve and she was eleven. She was taller than me and wore blue-and-white bib overalls. Within minutes of a silent walk down to the St. Marys River with her dogs she said, “You’re an odd duck.” Polly had taken me and my sister over to Sugar Island, near the Soo, to visit Donald and Cynthia, Herald and Clare, and also to see a Chippewa powwow the next day. We were fairly fresh out of Chicago and the powwow was what the kids nowadays call a mind-fuck. It wasn’t because I was small but these Indians looked real big because they were real big. Some of them rode up in Harleys, went into the school locker room with satchels, and then came out in full regalia. There were drum groups and several hundred Indians dancing in a hot dusty circle. I didn’t know what to think. My sister, who was ten, started to cry and Polly took her back to the car to explain things. Some people danced in street clothes, including Donald and Clare. Herald worked at a stand making hamburgers and hot dogs, which didn’t taste good like they did in Chicago. Cynthia was taking care of a bunch of babies and young kids so their mothers could dance. My sister calmed down and Cynthia asked us to help her out. I held two babies at once, small brown babies. I thought Cynthia was beautiful. She had given birth to both Herald and Clare by the time she was twenty and at the time was only in her early thirties. Late in the afternoon when it was still hot I went down to the river with Herald and Clare and a few other young people and went skinny-dipping. They all teased me because I wouldn’t take off my underpants. I was in a different world. Everyone seemed poor but more vivid than my life in Chicago except for my dad’s Italian friends. At the time I actually wondered if Indians and Italians might be related.
Clare fed our leftover sandwiches to a stray mutt, who didn’t chew the proper thirty-two times. I half lifted Donald into the car, where he promptly fell back to sleep. Clare told me I looked thicker and I said I had gone to the gym five days a week in Ann Arbor in anticipation of my chores with Donald.
“You’re a good person,” she said.
“But you said I was an odd duck.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, that was forever ago.”
“I could have said you have pointy tits.”
“Of course, I was only eleven. You didn’t even take off your underpants.”
“I was afraid I would get a boner.”
“Now men are always worried they won’t get a boner.”
“I always had a boner for you.”
“I seem to remember that. But also for my mom.”
“But I never came close.”
“Of course you didn’t. Did you try?”
“Never
“But you had lust in your heart, odd duck.”
She gave me the first close hug in five years. Her body felt so slightly fuller and my heart actually raced. I allowed my hand to slide down to her bottom.
“No necking in front of Dad,” she said, pushing away, leaving my hand to touch air.
Back at the haunted house after I get Donald settled David waves me into the empty kitchen, where he’s cooking what I sense will be a mediocre spaghetti sauce. Like Herald, he has no knack. He shows me a book from the den library, opens it, and there is a bottle of veterinary pills marked “Gretchen. 2 a day with meals.” Gretchen was an ordinary mongrel with severe arthritis, her only talent being that she would catch fish, which the other two dogs would take from her. She didn’t care. Being a finicky eater, she only wanted to catch them. The malamute named Bob would eat a five-pound sucker in a couple of convulsive bites.
“I think Donald has questionable intentions,” David said, holding the obvious mystery of the pills in one hand and the hollowed-out book in the other.
“It’s up to him.” I turned off his sauce, which smelled like scorched tomato juice, and guided him out the back door for a walk.
It’s hard to believe that David and Cynthia, with their radical differences of character, are brother and sister, but then this is true though to a lesser extent of Clare and Herald and my sister and I. The notion of personality holds mostly question marks. In the backyard headed toward the alley David started mumbling about having missed his late-morning nap, having been concerned about the pills. He takes three naps a day to get a “fresh start,” though Cynthia teases him that he’s the same person and it’s the same world before and after his naps. David can walk all day in the woods surrounding his cabin but in Marquette he weaves a bit as if struggling to get his mind and body on the same track. Out near the garage he enters the big grove of lilacs and stands in the center, telling me for the twentieth time that this was one of his main hideouts as a child and young man. He also jokes that it was a good place from which to watch Cynthia’s friend Laurie do gymnastic exercises in her bikini. I love this man whom I count as one of my fathers and have studied him carefully. Early on I found him mystifying. Right after we moved to Marquette from Chicago he bought me an expensive racing bicycle, I think for the absurd price of seven hundred dollars. I sold it to this rich kid at the college and bought a balloon-tired Schwinn in fine shape at a yard sale for thirty bucks, hiding all my extra money in case I wanted to run away to my grandpa’s in Iron Mountain. I needed a bike I could ride on gravel roads and dirt trails in the woods and you didn’t see mountain bikes locally in those days. I was very worried about what David might think about my transaction but he never noticed. He saw me on my paper route on my Schwinn and was so pleased I liked the bike.
At the time I kept badgering Polly about all the bad rumors I heard from my schoolmates about David’s family. The world isn’t perceptually organized for seventh graders. There are big empty places concerning sex and death, alcohol and divorce, war and world political mayhem. Kids overhear their parents’ conversations in bits and pieces and try to construct a reality however clumsy and malformed. Finally when I must have been about fourteen Polly sat me down and told me about the Burkett family though she was a little evasive about the sexual perversion of David’s father. She made much of the fact that David and Cynthia were heroic to have escaped the influence of their father though I already could see that David’s success at this was less than complete. Kids can have some pretty accurate insights but they tend to come from a sharp angle and aren’t very broad. I also had heard a lot from my grandpa in Iron Mountain, whose crippling injury had come about in a mine in which the Burkett family had a financial interest. In the ensuing workmen’s compensation suit it was determined that the mining equipment that crushed his legs was faulty and shabbily repaired. Consequently, grandpa’s opinions on the Burketts did not center on sexual perversion, alcohol, or business crime, which he referred to as “chicken shit stuff,” but on the Burketts’ long-term malfeasance in the mining and logging industries.
David and I walked down to the harbor and looked at boats for an hour or so without really seeing them. David was involved in one of those “on the one hand and on the other hand” disquisitions on suicide. This man is a maddening expert on not very meaningful alternatives. My own contention was that in Donald’s case it could not be considered suicide. It was a matter of being under a death sentence and deciding to push the date ahead.
“I wish it were me, not Donald,” he said, staring at a gull as if it was a rare bird.
“But it’s not you, for Christ’s sake.” I felt like unloading on this specific absurdity but then Herald walked up saying that he had spotted us from the hilltop through binoculars from an upstairs bedroom window. We paused to watch a pretty girl bending over on the deck of a sailboat and neatly coiling rope. From suicide to sex in a moment. David put a hand on Herald’s shoulder. “We’re pretty sure that you’re father is thinking about suicide.”
Herald was still looking at the girl but burst into tears. I was startled because I had never before seen him cry. He turned around and looked straight up into the sky.
“After you two left I sat with him for a while. His whole body was convulsed with cramps. I thought of suffocating him.”
Herald quickly walked away and we hurried to follow, with David lagging behind because of his bad ankle.
We ended up having a drink at the Verling. I admitted that I had brought up some pills from Ann Arbor at Donald’s request. We were all in our own peculiar knots with Herald making a vain attempt to be coldly logical. Our emotional stalemate was broken when a young woman came over to say hello, the same one who had puked on Polly’s back sidewalk. She was quite attractive though her edges were blurred. It’s amazing how many young women drink too much these days when they used to settle for marijuana. David pulled up a chair for her. Despite long resistance he has his father’s aggressive weakness for women though not those who are considered too young in our society. When Cynthia, however, is snide about her brother and women I correct her by saying that I’ve never met a man so “generally” interested in women. A few years ago I saw him embracing a rather dumpy librarian out on Presque Isle who had to be in her late fifties or early sixties. He saw me in the distance and waved and later told me that he had had a crush on this woman in his teens and still found her attractive. He added that a woman’s intelligence was her main erotic component.
This did not quite explain his rapt attentiveness to the young woman I had found to be a handsome little dipshit with a faulty stomach. She had a sense of reality that was alien to any perceptions that I had ever had. Herald got up and left in a state of puzzled disgust. I followed him out onto the sidewalk.
“We shouldn’t try to stop Dad from doing as he wishes,” Herald said, taking a left rather than a right that would have brought him toward home. He was headed toward the big Catholic church to sit for a while. The Mexican girl he was involved with in Los Angeles had asked him to consider becoming Catholic. This startled me and Herald grinned and said that he didn’t have a religious impulse in his body, only ethical concerns. I walked with him the few blocks to the church feeling quite uncomfortable. I mean it’s a beautiful, huge domed church but I’d had an experience there that had rather violently changed my life.
It was early in the spring of the year I was in the tenth grade. My closest friend and I were on the track team, both running the half mile. It irritated the coach when we would finish a race in a dead heat. We were sort of big shots at the time, what with me being the president of the class and he a star halfback on the football team not because he was so fast but because he was an extremely evasive runner with lateral movements that made defensive players look silly. He was very handsome and there was always a group of girls cooing around his locker between classes. Tenth-grade girls went out with senior boys and tenth-grade boys often went out with eight
The funeral mass had been held in the church, and when I watched Herald walk in, the whole day from nine years before came back to me. The pregnant girl and her parents came to the mass and I started yelling at them inside the church in front of hundreds of people. Some men wrestled me out the front door. I got on my bicycle and rode all the way to Sault Ste. Marie and Sugar Island in the cold rain. I stayed with Donald and Cynthia and wouldn’t come back to finish the school year despite my mother, Polly, calling every day though later in the summer I took makeup exams. Polly pulled this off because she was a teacher in the school system. I intended never to go to school again but I wasn’t quite enough of an asshole to see my mother’s heart broken yet again after dad died when I was ten. David and Polly drove over to see me but I ran out the back door and hid. Clare knew I was hiding down in the bushes where we skinny-dipped but wouldn’t tell anyone where I was. Late one night Cynthia caught Clare and me necking in our underpants. She didn’t say anything but only rolled her eyes. I worked for three months up to twelve hours a day for Donald’s construction crew, which helped consume my anger though I was never able to return to what people think of as a normal young man. Donald became half my father and half my friend.