Returning to Earth (9 page)

In my three days I was able to see how creatures including insects looked at me rather than just how I saw them. I became the garter snake that tested the air beside my left knee and the two chickadees that landed on my head. I was lucky enough to have my body fly over the countries of earth and also to walk the bottom of the oceans, which I'd always been curious about. I was scared at one
point when I descended into the earth and when I came up I was no longer there.

When I came down the hill and drove to the Soo with my teacher I saw one of the same ravens just north of the city. I doubt if my experience was much different than anyone else who spent three days up there. It was good to finally know that the spirit is everywhere rather than a separate thing. I've been lucky to spend a life pretty close to the earth up here in the north. I learned in those three days that the earth is so much more than I ever thought it was. It was a gift indeed to see all sides of everything at once. This makes it real hard to say good-bye. My family will be with me just like that old raven falling slowly down through the tree.

Jesus Christ. Mosquitoes. I'm camped on a semisecret pond about a dozen miles northwest of town. I'd say it's about midnight though I've misplaced my pocket watch and I've just finished reading Donald's story by the light of my Coleman lantern. Cynthia gave it to me this morning. I think the story would be better without Cynthia's glosses but then if you're going to say something critical to Cynthia you better have your ammunition stockpiled. She doesn't get angry but she always has a dozen reasons why she's right compared to the one or two contentions you might have that she's wrong. It doesn't really matter because Donald's story is limited to family use.

I usually stay in a back bedroom at my mom Polly's house but I picked up a girl I vaguely knew at the Verling the other night and she puked on the back sidewalk. I forgot to hose off the sidewalk in the morning and Polly became
a witch. Her voice pattern changes when she's pissed. It becomes terse and clipped. I remember this voice pattern very clearly from before my father died and they argued about his motorcycles. He claimed he needed motorcycles to “let off steam.” I was about ten at the time and didn't understand the term and when I did it occurred to me that my father didn't have any particular steam. His was a case of a man who had kept the lid screwed on tight for so long that there was nothing left in the jar. He never took me for a ride on a motorcycle, saying it was too dangerous, which it eventually was for him. Every Saturday morning when weather was permissible he would roar off with four or five friends. Like my mother he was an elementary school teacher on the South Side of Chicago. He and his motorcycle friends were all Vietnam veterans and all singularly marked by that conflict.

Yesterday I was reading to Donald in the backyard from Schoolcraft's
Narrative Journal
. Schoolcraft was in this area in the 1820s and Donald likes what he calls the “old-timey” feel of the book. After about fifteen minutes Donald fell asleep on the old sofa that I'd hauled up through the cellar door into the yard. The little pound mongrel Clare brought in from Los Angeles lay curled up near Donald's neck. The dog is named Betty and is not very likable. When she arrived with Clare a few days ago she examined all of us and seemed to decide we were a bad lot except Donald. We don't know her background but Betty is an irritable creature. She caught a fledgling robin under a bush the other day and ate it before Clare could get it away from her. I told Clare that she looked attractive in her blue shorts, crawling
around under the bushes trying to catch her dog with half a robin sticking out of its mouth. Clare screeched, “Fuck you,” which Donald thought was funny.

I've come to think of Donald as a tugboat. Last year during semester break in the winter I house-sat an apartment in New York City owned by the old aunt of an ex-girlfriend. This woman, who was in her seventies, was paranoid about her art collection. We had stayed with her during a brief trip to New York and she had developed an affection for me that survived my breakup with her niece. Though this woman was Jewish she reminded me of Marlene Dietrich in the old movies I used to be addicted to. I still think Dietrich's left thigh in
The Blue Angel
is sexier than any photo I've ever seen in
Penthouse
or
Playboy
. Of course, the film had the advantage of her voice. Anyway this wonderful old lady has a voice like Jeanne Moreau's (the French actress). I spent a confining ten days in her apartment while she was off attending a trial in Frankfurt attempting to recover some of her family paintings that had been “misplaced” by the Nazis in World War II. Most of the paintings were now in the possession of an Alsatian sausage king who was unwilling to relinquish them. I got five grand for two weeks sitting in this spacious apartment guarding some Kandinskys, Tchelitchews, and Bakst stage drawings, etc., also a stimulating Mary Cassatt. I had full use of an improbable collection of take-out menus, on which she had made notations, and each day I was spelled at five for three hours by the doorman's thuggish brother, during which I walked because my sanity depends on that and my bicycle (an old balloon-tired Schwinn), which I hadn't brought to New York for fear it might be stolen. So
sitting in this huge apartment leafing through the thousands of art books and ignoring a semester paper on Wittgenstein as a possible source of the deconstructionists I also spent hours with an antique telescope looking out the parlor's bay window at the East River and the passing craft, big ships, little ships, sailboats, and suchlike. Which reminds me of a tugboat, their dense weight and immense power, slow to achieve speed but with an irresistible surge of power. To care for Donald in his present state is to finally understand that there are no miracles except that we exist. Like his ancestor the first Clarence, we ride a big horse to the east and then it's over.

Waking at dawn to the drone of mosquitoes. In June the U.P. is a semitropical bug farm. I juice my skin with mosquito dope for a hike, trying to figure out a sentence from a dream, “Before I was born I was water.” I decided it was mostly a neural image evolving from a book I was reading,
Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology
. I'm sort of a professional student and am allowed to take many different courses usually limited to majors because I'm also a handyman for a big-deal dean's household. This freedom comes from my expertise at fixing faucets, among other things.

I make it to the haunted house by breakfast time. When we moved to Marquette when I was eleven my new friends always referred to Cynthia's family home as the “haunted house” and I can't shake this early perception. When I arrive Clare has picked up her uncle David from the early plane from Chicago. David and I eat breakfast in the den
with Donald, who can only manage his coffee and then eggnog through a straw. Donald is amused by David's story about a crush he developed on a waitress in the Red Garter Club at the O'Hare Hilton. Cynthia says that with women David is a benign version of their father. Each new woman is an undiscovered country, but then he has learned nothing from the other countries he has visited. She added that he is always loaning them money to start a new life. Of course I already knew this. At breakfast David says that teaching in Mexico for several years has taught him “the banality of Eros.” What can you say about a man that says such things? Donald wants a clear explanation. David hems and haws, saying that the problems of the poor are so overwhelming that one's sexuality drifts away. Donald says, “Bullshit” and that all of his working crew were involved in love and sex to such a crazy degree that it reminded him of the worst country music. David said that he meant that he had become less sexually motivated while teaching the poor. “You don't fall in love down there?” Donald asked and David said, “Well, occasionally” and we laughed. When Clare comes into the den and picks up our dishes she points out that though David's shoes are the same make and model, one is dirty gray and one is beige. “How could this happen?” he asks, a little irritated by her laughter. She says, “Finish your eggs,” which he does with a frown, clearly not wanting to finish his eggs. She kisses his forehead and he blushes. She told me that when he comes home a couple of times a year he'll go down to Getz's clothing store and buy a half dozen of the same shirt so he won't have to decide what to wear. She thinks her uncle is “goofy” but she likes him very
much. Her dog Betty comes into the den, jumps up on the bed with Donald, and growls at David. “Nice dog,” he says. In David you see the inevitable melancholy of the mix of high intelligence and unearned income. It can't be much fun to always feel vaguely unworthy. Clare has observed that there is always a tinge of the homeless to her uncle, almost unbelievable but true. She says that he never seems quite comfortable except when he's sitting on the rickety porch of his remote cabin over near Grand Marais. I once offered to repair this porch and he delaminated as if I were intent on modernizing a cathedral.

Clare and I take Donald out to Presque Isle but he falls asleep in the easy chair I've hauled along. Donald likes to sit under a tree near the graves of Chief Kawbawgam and his daughter. This man's life spanned three centuries, from 1798 to 1901. Donald sits there and stares at Lake Superior as if it is an enormous puzzle and his puzzlement puts him to sleep. It's a windy day and the crashing of the surf against the rock promontory is repetitively loud. Clare is upset as we're having a little picnic and the milk shake she bought her father is turning to soup. Donald can manage only liquids. He wanted me to make some pork barbecue the other day just so he could smell it. Clare said that it's strange to think that his body is at war with itself. After breakfast this morning she sat out near a grove of lilacs near the garage and read Donald's story. I was at the workbench in the garage and saw her out the window. She would lift her eyes and look at the lilacs, then go back to reading. Now
she wipes her father's drooling mouth with a handkerchief and he smiles in his sleep.

“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.