Returning to Earth (19 page)

On the way back to Marquette I stopped by Flower's near Au Train. Clare and K were intending to stop there but no one was home. The door was open and there was a note from K saying that he and Clare had gone off to help Flower fetch a deer she had shot early that morning, though they were out of season. Flower in her eighth decade shot a couple of deer each October. He had added, “Try the pie,” so I cut myself a piece of venison mincemeat pie. Flower had minced the meat and marinated it with dried fruit in cheap brandy and cooked it in a lard crust. It was delicious. She also pickled deer hearts and tongues, which I found interesting. I looked at a peculiar bear-claw necklace hanging above her bed but I didn't feel up to touching it. Donald had told me that Flower had religious reasons for not eating bear meat.

When I reached Marquette school was out so I stopped at the bungalow Cynthia had bought a few doors to the west of Polly's house. It was a bare-bones place, almost empty of furniture, probably a reflex against my parents' insistence on the finest furniture available and maybe the house was simply a gesture. Cynthia wasn't home yet from substitute teaching so I took my warmest coat and stocking cap from the car and sat on a lawn chair in the front yard watching Lake Superior misbehave with the wind at maybe thirty knots from the northwest and the muted roar of the water, a white noise possessing the air. I was a little astounded by how good I felt as if all the alcohol, and maybe the dancing
too, had been electroshock therapy or whatever. The fast, cold clouds were leaving large patches of light out on the water and a neighbor's tattered American flag was whipping and cracking up on its pole. I was a day away from the beginning of my long drive down into Mexico on my modest mission to reduce suffering. It was five years now and I remembered wondering at the time what could possibly happen to me after my father slipped beneath the waters off Alvarado. How would I recover into a different life? What was left of me raised the question of what I was before. I hadn't weighed enough to stick to the ground, always a problem for your average ghost. I was the problem because in our time the contest is to see who can ask the biggest questions and I had become an expert.

I managed to doze off there in the windy yard and was awakened by Cynthia's laughter as she nudged the crotch of my trousers with the toe of her shoe. I had an obvious hard-on.

“Who were you dreaming about, big brother?”

“A woman I never met. There's this physicist in England who thinks our dream people that we don't know actually exist. We just haven't met them and might not ever meet them.” The whole idea mystified me.

“That's what I call an unprofitable line of inquiry. Did Clare tell you our half brother is locked up, maybe for good?”

“What did he do this time?”

“Beat up two trespassers who were hunting. One was a politician from Jalapa. Who lost an eye and some teeth.”

“What can Vera do?”

“Not much. I'm helping him get better accommodations. Fifty bucks a month gets him a sofa, a television in his cell, and better food. What helped is the lawyer got him a brain scan at the medical school, which showed the injury from the bicycle accident years ago. Now Vera has no one.”

The fact was that Jesse had died last year and he was the only one with any control over Vera's son. I tried to imagine Vera sitting at the kitchen table of the small coffee farm, my memories of which were blurred by the violent events. In my mind's eye I could mostly see the wildflowers on the hillsides.

“Should I stop and see her?”

“I don't know. She said she would like to see you but I couldn't tell her where you were headed this time.”

“Probably Zacatecas or San Luis Potosí. Maybe even Durango because I heard a mine might close there, which will mean men will try to head north. Durango has always scared me. Behind this motel where I stay there's a long wall full of bullet holes where hundreds of men were executed during the revolution.”

We went inside and had coffee and I examined the piles of Russian and European novels stacked on the dining room table. Cynthia had been an obsessive reader as a girl and now with Donald gone she was resuming the habit. She felt that novels were a more “reliable” source of information than all the nonfiction I read, partly because it was less threatening.

I really couldn't understand why Cynthia was staying in Marquette but it was a raw subject and all she would say was that her decision was based on the fact that Marquette was the scene of both her worst and her best memories. I
was going to bring up the subject again but she started reading, which meant our conversation was over. Her eyes were misty and I kissed the top of her head.

I immediately liked the rust splotches and cracked back window of my new car, which means it will be safe from envy in Mexico. Amid all the stuff in the old car while I'm switching gear between the two I find Panza's collar stuffed up under the back seat. A predictable lump arises as when I imagine I see Carla trotting doggishly ahead of me on a logging two-track through the forest. Panza was a big stray female mutt I adopted during my brief months in Caborca. She was at least part Catahoula and half Australian shepherd and wasn't a particularly pleasant lady. A neighbor told me she had been a guard dog for some drug runners who had flown the coop in the middle of the night. She slept in a hole she had dug under a shed behind my little house. Friendship came through the not very secret ingredient of food, especially a pot of boiled tripe I'd chop up and mix with kibble. Within days she became my companion and guardian, refusing to come in the house but draping herself out on the porch near the front door. I had a worktable and chair on the porch and she would look at my books and writing sad with puzzlement. If so much as a sparrow landed in the yard she would issue a coarse rumble.

I can't say I was comfortable in Caborca though I was lucky to meet a local cop who had worked for two years in the Oldsmobile plant in Lansing, Michigan. Since I had gone to Michigan State in East Lansing this slight bond was
considered major and he would often stop by for a beer in the late afternoon. The altruism of my survival kits confused him at first and the idea that I would live in Caborca rather than anyplace else on earth boggled him. He warned me that some local “coyotes” were misunderstanding the intent of my survival kits. These coyotes are men who guide migrants into the U.S. for a high fee usually across the mountains that surround Nogales or Douglas, or through the desert to the west between Nogales and Yuma. Either route can be hellish indeed and sometimes a coyote will abandon his group if he feels the Border Patrol closing in, or for no particular reason other than dishonesty or laziness. One abandoned group of nine all died of thirst including a woman who tried to eat the Bible she carried in the derangement of impending death.

So I had been forewarned by my cop friend but couldn't quite believe that the local coyotes wouldn't understand the purity of my motives in distributing the survival kits. The cop, however, said that it might make younger male “wetbacks” think they could go it alone rather than saving for years. Anyway, one evening when I had walked downtown to have dinner one of the coyotes came past and riddled my house and car with a shotgun and far more important blew a lower left leg off Panza. Luckily it was the bony skin and I applied a tourniquet, made a phone call, and headed for Tucson, a few hours to the north. This turned out to be stupid and nearly got me jailed, because U.S. Customs wouldn't let me in the country as I didn't have vaccination papers for my dying Panza. I had to be restrained after standing there fifteen minutes bellowing, sobbing, and cursing but then one
of the customs agents called a local vet, who got up in the middle of the night and saved Panza. She lived for three more years much farther south. When I'd leave for the north each May I'd find an appropriate old man to care for her for money, unload five hundred pounds of kibble, and kiss her big ugly face good-bye.

I left Caborca two days later. Panza was frantic while I packed so I loaded her into the back of the car with her bowl of beloved tripe, which smelled poorly. My cop friend came over and we discussed my obvious need for vengeance. I couldn't just cut and run. Even in the Upper Peninsula someone shooting your dog is a very serious matter. The cop advised that I shouldn't do anything personally or I might be forced out of Mexico, which would be the end of my mission. Instead I gave him a goodly amount of cash so that he and his colleagues would make it hot for the coyote. I kept in touch by phone and within a couple of months the coyote had been forced from his hometown and eventually ended up in prison over in Mexicali. Of course Panza because of the way life had conditioned her never became the companion Carla was but last year when she was hit by a truck in Durango I was bereft.

Our last evening was a bit muted. Cynthia and Polly were amused by the fatigue felt by Clare, K, and me over the night before. I tried to help K grill steaks in the backyard but there was a cold hard wind that my heaviest coat didn't seem to repel and he sent me inside. Cynthia pronounced my salad dressing “nasty” and made another. By common consent my
cooking is poor though I eat it with relish. It is only when I go into the poorest, cheapest restaurants and find their food superior to my own do I understand my mediocrity or less. Cynthia says it's because I'm always “on the way to someplace else.” It is her opinion that to cook well you have to stop time and dwell completely on the ingredients before you start.

I sit at the table with my hands joined to the hands of Cynthia and Polly. We stare over into the living room where K and Clare are half dozing and watching a video documentary about Bengal tigers. I sense that Polly and Cynthia are joining me in the wordless questioning of what will become of these two young people who, perhaps like myself, so obviously wish more from life than life willingly offers. I wonder if their relationship isn't doomed because they started too young, and they haven't stopped being stepbrother and-sister, if this overfamiliarity doesn't prevent the mystery of love, but then I look at Polly and question if there is a mystery to love or mere confusion, or if the element of chance doesn't suffocate everything. I mean the chance of accidental meetings: Polly at the hamburger stand in Iron Mountain, Vernice selling matches near the Newberry Library in Chicago, or Vera coming north from Veracruz. With Clare and K the union is perhaps too much like mine with Laurie though Clare and K are far more sophisticated. Are they able to delight each other? The thought of bald Laurie in her last days rattles my heart in its flimsy cage.

Cynthia and I walk Polly home. They are talking about the problems of Polly's daughter, off in New York City, who has an acute case of herpes, which makes it difficult for her
to find “sexual partners” (Polly's phrase). I find their matter-of-factness about such matters amazing and the idea of being a partner with a dick rather clinical. Cynthia kisses me good-bye at her door and tells me not to try to see Vera without calling home first. I feel the mildest resentment over this but agree. I continue on with Polly and minutes later we're at her doorstep. I had figured that there was some chance of her inviting me in because it's Friday night and she doesn't have to teach tomorrow. No luck. At her door I get a conclusive peck on the cheek and a whispered “Take care of yourself.” Of course I'm pretty confident she has another friend or “love interest” (her term). When she visited the cabin in August and spoke with “martini truth” (her term) she wondered why I kept hanging on to her when I never really wanted a wife or children and had no intention of being in the area more than half the year and with that time being spent mostly at my “depressing” cabin. Over the years Polly is the only person who has openly found the cabin depressing. She thinks the windows should be enlarged. I stand out on the street for a few moments and through the yellow square of light I can see her on the kitchen phone, probably with her daughter or boyfriend. I tend to try to hold on to what we used to be together.

On the walk up the long hill toward home it occurs to me that the wind has subsided and the three-day blow out of the northwest is over; the inland sea, Lake Superior, gradually has become a murmur rather than a steady roar. The last of the leaves from the hardwoods that line the street have fallen and are pasted against the sidewalk by rain, their bright yellows and reds turning dullish. Time to head south.
I have this sense of being a prematurely old man in a quarrel with himself over the worth of his life, a hopelessly bullshit notion. I stop under a streetlight and think about Donald and how the death of a man who was so loved seems to exhaust everyone as if they're struggling in a vacuum and not quite enough air is being pumped in for survival. There are none of my helpful little packets for this border crossing.

In the last fifty yards toward home I see that the lights are out except for up in Clare's room, and a porch light in case I return. I am relieved and then immediately wonder how much good my more than twenty years in the woods have done me. The culture pretends it admires solitude (but not too much solitude, for you might become nonproductive) but I'm swept away by the Saturday western movies that Cynthia and I watched on television as children wherein the nutcase prospector is always returning from his solitary life in the mountains and babbling at everyone in the village. After a few days and nights at the cabin and in the woods seeing no one at all and then going into the grocery or tavern my voice would sound tinny and alien to me as if speech were not the natural fact that I had assumed it to be. Of course I had read the testimony of explorers, religious devotees, or adventurers who had been lost on land or sea, or had simply withdrawn from human concourse for long periods. In their accounts you quickly learn that what we think of as ordinary reality needs the contact with and reassurances from others. Even a man and dog alone for a month become each other in ways that are ordinarily thought improbable. I pushed away the thought of Donald's time on the hillside.