Returning to Earth (22 page)

“Do you think Beatrice ever stood over Dante's head on the beach when she wore only a bikini?”

“No ma'am.”

“Did Beatrice ever show Dante her bare butt in the upstairs of his parents' house?”

“I doubt it.”

“Would Dante have written
The Divine Comedy
if his father had raped Beatrice when she was twelve?”

The last question broke the antic mood and I stood there weeping in Dante's alley with Vernice embracing me for comfort.

Back in the motel room I thought comically that these were pretty unique memories for the donkey and the bull on the wall to witness. It was pointless to think that my father had murdered my Beatrice when she was still alive. If anything, life was outrageous in its lack of symmetry. Donald wasn't a bear. Donald was Donald. Why was my mind imagining a fresh mythology? Of course in Donald's tribe men
had become bears but that was Donald's tribe not mine. And Vera was a Mexican girl from Veracruz. Her father, Jesse, brought her north to learn English, where she met and loved my wonderful family. Nearly thirty years later it was suddenly unthinkable that I allow my father's ghost to stop me from going to Veracruz to see Vera. There are no damaged goods when everyone is damaged goods.

Despite the nature of the night my curious sense of wellbeing persisted. Coughlin had always been disappointed in my apparent lack of a dream life, or a dream life so repellant that my conscious life denied its existence. I couldn't very well call him in Montana or Chicago after three a.m., or Vera to tell her I was headed her way. I was amused to remember a quote from a sophomore course in English literature. I loathed both the course and the quote: “In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.”

I felt this phrase to be as banal as the jingle “Fly the friendly skies of United.” Now in the motel it occurred to me that our passions are so messy that we don't even need a villain to fuck up our lives. I immediately gave up the thought of what my life would have been like without my central villain. A nitwit college roommate in my freshman year loved to say, “There is no God but reality.”

I tried to sleep for a while but my brain was constructing vivid pictures, from Vera's bare bottom to a huge coal pile I climbed as a child out near the ore docks. In grade school I liked to take the long way home and is this still true? So did Cynthia in her own directions. My father had Jesse follow me and then showed me the zigzag map. Like Cynthia I had
dozens of dog stops, places I'd stop and pet dogs because I was forbidden one. Children are hyperaware of what other adults think of their parents and I could see how people tried to avoid my father's dry and corrosive wit. Once when I was about seven he took me fishing at one of the lakes up at the club and promptly fell asleep from a hangover, draped along the width of the back seat of the rowboat. I was rowing clumsily trailing a lure from a fishing rod. In sheer luck a very large pike struck the lure and I yelled. My father rolled off the back seat and fought the fish on his knees. We had no net so I rowed to shore and he beached the fish, which was kept the rest of the day and evening on ice in a cooler on the front porch of our lodge. It was the biggest pike of the summer and many men came by to look at the fish, even men who disliked my father. Naturally he didn't say the fish was hooked while he was sleeping. Still, I was proud of the admiration he received.

I overslept but then immediately called all three numbers Cynthia had given me for Vera, reaching her on the third. “I'm coming to visit you in a week,” I said. “It will be fine if you arrive,” she said slowly and then we were cut off. The third number was for the small coffee farm, where the phone service is unstable with wild orchids hanging from the wires. And that was that.

Tucson was a mess as expected. There were only two hundred of my compact survival kits left. Jan and her two friends had held a fund-raiser (rock bands, etc., plus fifteen thousand of my money) and bought a new van. In September they had set off loaded with survival kits for Cananea, where they
had been
pushed around
by some coyotes. They then made the mistake of driving south from Agua Prieta toward Nacozari de García, and then farther south toward Bacanora, where they didn't realize that the bad road ended. Evidently some coyotes had followed them because when they stopped to wash up in a mountain creek the van had been stolen leaving them
high and dry
. I received this information early in the morning at the Congress Hotel, which Jan thought of as the “headquarters” of our mission. Now that I was in town there was going to be a lunch of the board at the Congress at noon to see if we couldn't “jump-start” the project again. I didn't even know that we had a board of directors but Jan insisted she had written my lawyer to tell me so. We embraced and I said that I would see her at noon. I then went back to my motel, packed up, and headed east on Route 10 toward El Paso, where I would turn south toward Veracruz. I figured the drive would take four days, a small item in my life these four days, but in this case time would grow larger with each mile and the ever so gradual change in the landscape.

I don't usually drive at night in Mexico unless I'm on a well-traveled route and Route 45-49 south qualified, but then I mistrusted my level of attention on this trip. Whatever I tried to imagine about seeing Vera would doubtless prove inaccurate but that didn't stop my imagination from creating a reality that probably had the flimsiness of Hollywood movies about American Indians. In the most ideal form there was more than a tinge of silliness. I would arrive at the small coffee
finca
and stop to look at the wild orchids, which as “epiphytes” lived
on air and water as they hung from the phone line. The stucco house itself was the color of a bruised rose, which merged wonderfully with the deep green hill on which it was built. I had no problem for some undetectable reason expunging the memory of my previous trip to the farm, the most physically violent event of my life. Where my father's hands were buried bore no interest to me. I suppose the lack of my missing thumb tip had been such a daily reminder that the event had lost every filament of impact. But then Vera herself had luckily not been there that day and she was now the relevant creature that appeared in the palimpsest my mind constructs with the landscape. The best thing about travel, though, is that it's difficult to be consumed by the past against the backdrop of a fresh landscape. There are so many semi-idiotic questions that you don't have time to seek answers. Where does this river I'm crossing begin? What's up that lovely canyon? When was that church built? What do people around here do for a living? That dog trotting across a barren field must have a name? Why is the waitress in the café so happy?

I made the coastal city of Tuxpan on the evening of the third day, which meant I could see Vera the following noon. I called Vera and had my sylvan fantasy destroyed. She would be in Jalapa, where she had started a clothing store in the spring. I would have known about the clothing store if I had even read any of the letters she and Cynthia had exchanged since her sudden departure nearly thirty years before. Cynthia has always teased me about my selective reality. For instance I had told Vernice when she writes me a letter to please leave
out any information about men she was seeing, plural or singular. In Vera's case I had been masochistic enough to read some of the teenage mother–type letters, which were full of the usual pen-pal nonsense and once late in the evening while staying with Cynthia she had given me a lachrymose letter from Vera saying that she would never find a good husband because a raped girl with a child is ignored by gentlemen in Veracruz. The whole picture is usually beyond my ken. When I'm at the cabin and call Cynthia from the tavern in Grand Marais she teases, “How many birds and beasts have you counted today, darling?” She's referring to a visit of hers to the cabin many years ago when she spied a page of my open journal on the kitchen counter that read “12 warblers, 5 thrushes, 3 ravens, 2 deer, equals 22.” But then on most days my skin is not thick enough to absorb the anguish involved in the daily life of many of the world's citizens. I'm either handing out my simple-minded survival kits or retreating to my log hideout in the woods where the sound of the river baffles the world's noise.

In Tuxpan with the waning sun behind me the lightness returned while I was staring at the sea with its overwhelming neutrality. In the last light I looked into the heart of a large tropical flower full of busy insects. I remembered that someone had written that all human life depended on a few inches of topsoil and rain. You could easily add the improbable sea. A number of people were still taking an evening stroll in the gathering dark and then suddenly streetlamps came on. An old man led a mutt by a green leash and the dog sniffed at my foot and gave me a quizzical look. I said, “Good evening, magnificent dog,” and the dog looked concerned
so I said, “Buenas tardes, perro magnifico” in my pidgin Spanish. The dog felt better and the old man laughed.

I sat there looking at the lights of boats way off in the water until I began to doze despite my hunger. I wondered if my expectations about Vera should be made of air, soil, and water instead of my usual somewhat neurotic fandangos where my mind in its perpetual slippage keeps constructing a future to amuse itself. On Cynthia's dresser there was a photo of Vera sitting on a horse wearing a beige riding outfit against a steep hillside of coffee bushes. She's simply smiling with no backspin. I suddenly wondered if there were any fish in the river ten miles north of her farm. I had crossed the river so long ago on the way to my father's doom. I got up and walked up a brightly lit street looking for a suitable place to eat a fried fish, remembering that when we went out for brook trout at dawn Donald would tote along a salt shaker, a small iron frying pan, a baby food jar of bacon grease, and a loaf of Cynthia's homemade bread, and we would eat the first few trout over a smudgy campfire, listening to the inevitable whine of mosquitoes and the loud early morning birds, certainly too numerous to count. I passed a street musician playing a dulcet wooden marimba with over-elaborate motions as if he were dancing in one place.

At first light from the hotel window the sun rose, a bruised tangerine in the sea mist, seemingly too ovoid. “Red sky in morning sailors take warning,” we used to say on Lake Superior, except the Gulf of Mexico was utterly placid, and the air out the little balcony of my room very warm. An
old man rowed past in the harbor, his dog sitting on the back seat as if it were helping.

I had a tinge of cold feet about being there but all in all was quite giddy at the prospect of seeing Vera, though I had become quite convinced that nothing would be as I expected. After dinner before I called Vera I talked to Cynthia in Marquette, who addressed my perplexity by saying, “Do you think after nearly thirty years she's going to fall sobbing into your arms? For Christ's sake she was twelve when she had a crush on you.” After hanging up I decided not to let the obvious truth of this discourage me. I called Vera and she had me write down the address of the hotel where she had made a reservation, which rather obviously meant I wouldn't be staying with her. She would be quite busy at her store until eight in the evening but then we would have dinner and in the morning drive out to the farm, which was only a dozen miles away. The store was only three blocks from my hotel so that when I arrived I should stop by to say hello.

I dawdled my way south from Tuxpan acting as if I were a tourist when I stopped briefly at the Zempoala pyramids, but with the kind of absurd butterflies in my tummy I had had before a high school football game with Escanaba which we were predicted to lose. On the outskirts of Jalapa I actually laughed at the old saying “Don't put all your eggs in one basket” since I have always put all my eggs in one basket. You couldn't imagine a set of parents more lacking in folk wisdom than my own. Cynthia had absorbed hers from Donald and his father, Clarence.

I checked into the hotel in Jalapa and watched a boy attendant scooping some coins out of the lobby fountain and
asked him in Spanish if he was becoming rich. He giggled and said that someday he wanted to buy a Mustang, meaning the car not a horse. The hotel itself was decorated in the 1920s time warp and the doors to the rooms and the bedsteads were hand-carved. I tried to wash my face without looking in the mirror but then dared a glance and said loudly, “You goofy fuck, what are you up to now?” No answer was forthcoming and I hummed “Moon River” into the towel though I've always loathed the song.

Vera's clothing store was more than a little startling. It was a scant block from the ominous cathedral and was full of name-brand stuff in addition to cheaper imitations: Lauren, Hilfiger, French Izod shirts, and a large section of sporting wear. I suspected her clientele would be the sons and daughters of larger coffee plantation owners, and the more prosperous students from the local university and medical school. Two niftily dressed salesgirls approached and I simply said, “Vera” and one escorted me to an office through a closed door in the back.

Vera was clearly her father's daughter. She was behind a very big desk going through bills and receipts as Jesse had done at my father's desk in the den in Marquette. She was a very attractive forty-one-year-old businesswoman wearing a beige linen suit and rimless glasses. She jumped up and hugged me but then promptly answered the phone. I could understand that she was talking to a wholesaler in Mexico City and when she hung up the phone she said, “Well?” and then the phone rang and she talked to a wholesaler in Chicago in English. When she hung up this time she said, “Jesus Christ” and I followed her out the back door into an alley,
where she lit a cigarette. I rarely smoked but had one too and naturally felt a little dizzy. A well-dressed man came out the office door and she said, “Not now.” I guessed him to be a suitor.