Returning to Earth (18 page)

“You have a gift for English. Describe them,” I had said.

“Fuck you,” she said.

The trip was going poorly partly because I had miscalculated the nature of the roads and the time it would take to drive, and since we arrived a day late in Zihuatanejo (I had neglected to call) our plush beach hotel had rented our room. We found another place at one-tenth the price that Vernice typically liked better. It was on a five-story rooftop overlooking the harbor and closer to the poor folks downtown. It was really only a small room with a huge patio, the entire rooftop, with chairs and a table, lounge chairs, and plants. It was hot in late May and the air conditioner worked poorly so that after a good dinner of a whole roasted fish we pulled the mattress out onto the deck. Vernice still wasn't in the mood for love but when I woke up in the night she was standing naked at the roof's edge looking at the harbor and the ocean beyond the harbor's mouth and the approach of a gigantic thunderstorm from the southwest. I joined her a little queasy from two bottles of wine to “smooth” my feelings.

“I'm seeing the Pacific Ocean,” she said.

I got us chairs and we sat there watching the lights on the tiny boats far out in the harbor fishing for snapper in the night. As the thunderstorm got closer the boats started heading in and I mentioned that I should drag the mattress back into the room and she said, “Please don't.” There were black birds on the cornice and in palm trees nearby that I later determined to be great-tailed grackles. They had horrid voices that were wonderful. Vernice got up from her chair and sat on my lap waving her hands in the very warm liquid air. Now the approaching storm was only a few miles out near the harbor's entrance and the lightning cast a hot blue glow on the huge volcanic rocks covered with seabirds, mostly
gaviotas
. With each tremendous clap of thunder perhaps a minute apart our grackles would scream their slate-breaking calls back at the thunder. “How many millions of years have they been doing this? Just like us, arguing with thunder,” Vernice said, swiveling her body so that I entered her and she was still watching the storm, and then we could hear the wind and the sheets of rain coming toward us. When the storm reached us we were literally submerged and ran for the mattress, got under the soaked sheet, and continued making love. When I was on the bottom I could see the bluish-white lightning up through the sheet. I had never felt such a warm rain and driving wind and wondered how grackles could withstand its force to keep screeching. We dragged the mattress back in the little room and flipped it over and where there was a dry spot in the middle we finished making love. Vernice began laughing in between singing phrases of the Catholic Christmas hymn “O Holy Night.”

I came to consciousness from my reverie and could see Clare waving from the front window of the tavern. I tried to remember if it was Camus who wrote, “It rained so hard that even the sea was wet.” I went inside and had a double whiskey, which my putative girlfriend the barmaid poured short. She had met K before but when I introduced Clare as my niece she said, “I bet. I've seen you with a lot of nieces.”

“I am the asshole's niece,” Clare said.

“For a while they called us
needy
but now they're back to assholes,” I said to K, who was racking up the pool table for a quick game with a pulp cutter who smelled strongly of chain-saw oil and pine resin. Like miners and commercial fishermen, loggers always look older than they are. This one, Tom by name, was drunk one night and in an enraged state asked me why breakfast cereal had gone up to five dollars a box. He had four kids and a wife so large that their rusted-out compact car tilted to the passenger's side.

Clare was back at the front window looking out at the cold harbor. The wind had picked up from the north and it looked like a mid-October snow was coming.

“Mother said Vera called from Jalapa and her son did something very bad, I'm not sure what, and now he's in a place for the criminally insane. Or don't you care about your half brother?”

“I knew he was headed in that direction. Vera claims he was okay until that car hit him while he was on the bicycle. So I'm not sure. Back when I met him he was what the Mexicans call
muy malo
. They save that one up for men, and a few women, who are real bad.”

“Anyway, Mother's helping Vera get him in an institution that's not so totally crummy. When I was up wandering around the Yellow Dog last week there was this one spot near a small waterfall where I sensed Dad in the river. Of course it was the last place we fished together. I was wondering if some of our spirit might stay in a place. What do you think?”

I was nonplussed. This kind of thinking was out of character. Clare tended to be as matter-of-fact as her brother Herald though, rather than mathematics, Clare leaned toward botany and the history of clothing. I certainly wasn't going to tell her about my bear experience of the morning the thought of which still gave my stomach a jiggle. I glanced at Clare, who clearly expected an answer of some sort, however lame. Once while we were fishing Clarence told me that he talked to his wife in the asylum on the phone. She was unable to speak but he said he knew “what she was saying.”

“I suppose that death, especially the death of someone we love, pushes us away from all of our built-in assumptions about what life is, I mean the ready-made day-to-day life and all that we've learned about what it is supposed to be that we readily accept. Death gives us a shove into a new sort of landscape.” My voice trailed off with disinterest in what I was saying, or maybe slight fear.

Clare gave me a hug and we watched an Indian fish tug bounding over the surge of waves behind the breakwall. The wind was truly picking up from the northwest so the tug had been lucky. I was irritated when Clare ordered another drink and invited my barmaid friend for dinner but then I got over it in minutes and drove down to the dock to buy a couple of whitefish to grill on a wood fire to go with the pot roast Cynthia had sent. How could I become irritated with Clare in her present state, which had more than a tinge of pathology? When I reached the dock I was struck by how closely the captain, a Chippewa named Francis, reminded
me of Donald in his prime, tall and about three hundred pounds with a wine-barrel chest.

The evening was as far as possible from my usual last night at the cabin, which is a maudlin affair with me sitting before the fireplace listening to the wind in a mental state best described as muddy. Vernice has teased me about being a solitary Romantic poet when I'm not even a poet. It has simply been a matter of balancing the world by avoiding it, which means limiting my exposure to the woods and water of the Upper Peninsula and for half the year or more some of the remoter regions of Mexico, where I've found a purpose of sorts.

At the cabin we “turned loose” and had a party. We drank, ate, and danced, and then drank, ate, and danced some more. I'm unsure what we had in mind, mostly nothing except the impulses children have toward play. For instance, it's raining in July and a tiny creek through a vacant lot is gathering water so four kids bust their asses building a dam until they're exhausted, filthy, and wet, but also delighted. That kind of thing, notwithstanding the peerless icon of death that hovered over us, and everyone else on earth for that matter.

We started slow with K splitting some oak for the fish. As the fire burned down we stood in the lee of the pump shed staring at the flames as people do, also at the flames through our amber glasses of whiskey. I agreed with K on the addition of what is called a “space blanket” to the survival
kits I put together and distribute for Mexicans intending to migrate north. Space blankets are sheets of material used by campers to protect them from cold and dampness but I thought they could also defend against the summer heat of the ground, which reaches over one hundred and fifty degrees. These space blankets fold up into a pocket smaller than a wallet. Depending whether it was winter or the severe heat in some of the desert areas of the border the survival kit I designed included a thin but effective thermal vest, a small compass, two canteens—one for water and one for Gatorade—sunscreen, a bag of dried fruit and sunflower seeds, route maps depending on the area, and halazone tablets to purify drinking water. The packet was in a Velcro latched bag and could be attached to a waist belt and weighed a little less than five pounds. I distributed these free of charge to workers' groups and through left-leaning Catholic priests. I was opposed by many on both sides of the border for political reasons, which didn't bother me except for the legal expenses I incurred avoiding prosecution by the United States. My raison d'être was simple on the surface. Estimates of crossing deaths along the entire nineteen-hundred-mile border with Mexico went as high as two thousand a year. I had learned to be goofy rather than logically argumentative with my opponents. I'd ask, If you could prevent twenty major airline disasters each year, wouldn't you? The project costs me seven months of my time and about three-quarters of my income, which is unearned and derives from my dead mother and also my share of land I've been selling off that was owned by my father's grotesque family.

I'm an extremely imperfect person but this effort is as close as I can come to the naive Christianity of my boyhood. I haven't come close to a Bible in nearly thirty years except for Stephen Mitchell's small and incisive
The Gospel According to Jesus
. I have no interest in organized Christianity other than the art Vernice showed me on our trip to Parma, Reggio, Modena, and Florence. Vernice, incidentally, refers to my project as pure “Quixote.” Cynthia and Polly are all for it, as are Clare and K. Herald, naturally, has doubts. Donald loved it. I minimize the importance of my effort. It's not much but it's all I can do. It started when I found the dead man in a wilderness thicket a few miles from the border south of Sonoita, Arizona. The man smelled like a dead deer. Two days later in a local tavern an ex–dope pilot told me that two hundred miles to the west over in the huge Cabeza Prieta if he wished on moonlit nights he could navigate by skeletons on his under-the-radar flights. Three days after that while looking into what is euphemistically called “the problem” I saw the photo of the nineteen-year-old girl from Veracruz who died of thirst on the Tohono O'odham Indian reservation just over our side of the border. Naturally I thought of Vera. That did it. The project didn't start out well but I'll get to that.

We roasted the fish as Vernice had taught me with dry vermouth, butter, and lemon. There were three bottles of wine left from Vernice's visit in August. Part of the name of the wine read
“Sang des Cailloux,”
which Vernice said meant the blood of the rock, after the steep stony slopes in the Rhône
Valley where the grapes are grown. Naturally I liked the idea of drinking the blood of the rock though K observed that the effect of the wine was pretty similar to any other alcohol. With K everything is in particular, from deftly turning the fish to talking about Donald's powers of observation that were learned from his tribal friends. K had talked to anthropologists about this matter, who in turn had referred him to a monograph written by Hallowell in the twenties saying that the “Gibwa” had thirty ways of describing a lake, in short, a high degree of specificity. K added when putting the fish on a hot platter that he had read that the Inuit had two hundred different terms for describing snow conditions.

We danced for a while between eating the fish and the pot roast. The batteries on my radio (the generator produced only direct current) were worn thin so K pulled his pickup around to the north window and cranked up the truck's stereo with Los Lobos. The wind was cold through the window so I turned up the propane heater and added big maple logs to the fireplace. The four of us jumped around to this Chicano music though I had to be careful about my weak ankle. It was wonderful to see Clare out of her mind. By common consent we didn't talk about anything more serious than the food and music, which in themselves have become more serious as I get older.

We were quite drunk by the time we collapsed before midnight except for K, who had the sense to go out and turn off the generator. Clare had never stopped dancing except for a few bites of food. K had closed the north window but we forgot to turn down the heater and with the overloaded
fireplace we awoke in the middle of the night to a ninety-degree cabin and all of us stumbling around drinking cold water.

The old Finn who took care of the cabin in my absence arrived at seven in the morning to help me close up for the year. I had the worst hangover since college twenty-five years before what with the cautionary idea of my father always present, which stopped me from overdrinking. The old Finn (in his late seventies) had a cup of coffee with the remaining inch of whiskey poured into it, glancing over with appreciation at Clare and Carol, who were getting out of bed in their undies. In July he had crawled under the cabin and removed a lot of dirt, jacked up the sagging southwest corner, and laid several courses of cement blocks to bring the cabin back into plumb. He reminded me a bit of Clarence, whose Indian blood was mixed with Finnish. These were people without irony. Last October while illegally spearing salmon in front of the cabin he spoke of a trip to L.A. to visit relatives in the “tumble buggy,” which was what he called an airplane. A cousin took him on a tour of L.A., which he figured had bad drainage because nearly all the land had been paved over. He had also said, “Be careful, Mr. Burkett, the world is filling up.” He added that he bet “Clark Gable got more pussy than a toilet seat.”

K made a breakfast hash out of the leftover pot roast and potatoes. Carol vomited in the backyard. Clare took a quick skinny-dip as her father would have done though the temperature was barely above freezing. I fell asleep at the breakfast table after I heard the old Finn say about Clare,
“That girl's got balls.” When I woke up everyone was gone and I shivered staring into the nearly dead fire.