WHAT I WANT to know is if I don’t find freedom in this life, when will I find it? That one’s got me by the cojones, as J.M. is fond of saying. Until recently I never got more than a mere taste of the sensations that surround you when you are shorn of your obligations. In academic life you live within the strictures of the sonnet form, and even the meter of your heartbeat becomes iambic. Growing up in Toledo, I could hear a distant drop forge day and night, the immense iambic hammers crumpling metal to its design. I think my father said the forge was making car fenders, and by the millions.
It is late February and spring is here. The days are much longer for reasons I can’t quite recall, and their middles encapsulate a period of warmth from about eleven to three. There’s a tinge of green in the cottonwoods, and in the closest village, seventeen miles distant, the strange tribe of birdwatchers has arrived. After Lillian made me an elaborate map I drove way over to a bookstore in Tubac, north of Nogales, in the valley that stretches way up to Tucson. There the trees and fields are already green, the area being three thousand feet lower in elevation than our own in the mountains.
After Magdalena left a month ago, J.M. noted I had become a little low and set me to work repairing fences. It took a few simple lessons before I got the hang of it and would saddle up Mona at mid-morning, returning by mid-afternoon. “Half days for half pay,” J.M. called it, but it was perfect for me what with working myself into a frenzy of notetaking from dawn until I caught lovely old Mona in the corral by proffering a carrot. J.M. was critical about the carrots, saying that one day I’d be out of carrots and also without a horse to ride. One of the dogs would accompany me and the other two would go with J.M., who was handling the fence in the highest locations.
Frankly, I have discovered nature. I’m quite aware that billions have discovered her before and no doubt millions have studied nature exhaustively. For my purposes, that is neither here nor there. We are not in this one together. My excommunication made me quite alone and I have to use what’s at hand to keep my soul from evaporating. If there’s nothing there worth saving, we’ll have to build something new. Simple as that. My somewhat cretinoid gestures of destroying clocks and calendars were not all that ill advised. I only quit smoking out of irritation at the dependency. The spleen over maintaining my position as the last smoker in the English Department went away with the English Department.
So I’d put Deirdre’s nature books in the saddlebags with my lunch, sort out my fencing tools, and I’m off into the hills, not altogether unlike a woodchopper in the twelfth century. Uniqueness is another illusion of personality. When I first began closely observing nature a month ago I found the experience a bit unbalancing, though the concepts weren’t new. Notions such as “otherness” and the “thinginess” of reality are scarcely new to a literary scholar. What is new is the vividness of the experience. For instance, one afternoon I was stretched out under a silverleaf oak (Quercus hypoleucoides, the identification got from Francis Elmore’s splendid Shrub Trees of the Southwest Uplands) when I noticed movement under a clump of trees on a grassy hillside a few hundred yards away. There was a virtual pack of wild animals romping and flouncing around, reminding me immediately of the otter at the Toledo Zoo that Deirdre as a child had favored watching when we visited Florence. Now I recalled from a children’s book I read aloud to her, Ollie the Otter or something equally otiose, that otters lived in rivers of which there were none locally. I crawled over to Mona, who watched me quizzically, and stealthily got a guidebook out of the saddlebags. The beasts were called coatis (Nasua narica) and were larger, more elongated members of the raccoon family. Quite suddenly they disappeared without my noticing how they managed to do so, leaving me with a hollow excitement in my stomach. They were described as social animals, and perhaps they had dashed off to their coati house or cave. The kicker was that when I got back on Mona a large owl flew out of the tree, startling me witless and making identification unlikely. I wondered how long this sort of thing had been going on without my noticing it.
To be truthful, this is all recollected in tranquility, and that’s putting it in its mildest terms. After my experience with Magdalena I went daft, the condition intensifying a great deal when her boyfriend swept her away a few days later. I didn’t actually meet the boyfriend, only glassed him from the cabin window with my monocular. He wore a pigtail and was big as a house, his ample belly folding over his belt, though somewhat light on his feet. He tossed her suitcase in the back of a car I recognized as a Corvette, which was frequently driven by rich sorority girls.
Making love — a wretched euphemism — to Magdalena was a mistake. Not making love to Magdalena would also have been a mistake. I read a parable in the New Testament that when you sweep a figurative room clean you’re supposed to fill it with good things or the demons will return. My cattle roundup had been a purge of sorts but the follow-up was akin to beating one’s head against a boulder, although I couldn’t imagine not doing it. Such is the perversity of human behavior. I don’t for a moment think it’s possible to both love and loathe a woman at the same time, but then what does it matter what I believe against the sheer weight of my feelings? After she left and when no one was around I went into the bathroom at the Verdugos’, hoping for what, I don’t know. A scent, a trace, a touch of her malign spirit. In a closet there was a Kleenex with a blotch of her bright pink lipstick which I tucked in my pocket and later burned.
All these sensations after our time on the couch recalled a singular childhood trauma. My father’s labor union was having an annual August picnic at a park on Lake Erie. I was shy and walked far down the beach from the other kids, rolling my inner tube in front of me. I paddled far out in the lake, a stupid thing to do because I swam poorly. Out of nowhere a fog swept in and there I was adrift and unable to locate shore. Naturally I wept. After an hour or so of inconsolable dread I made out the strains of merry-go-round music from the amusement park near our picnic area. I reached shore and made my way back to my parents. The fog had lifted. No one had missed me.
A few days after Magdalena left I rechecked the Alzheimer’s text tucked away in my briefcase and tried to study it, then abandoned the task in favor of my nature guides. Why on earth should I care if I have this disease? Dementia seemed childish compared to my torments about the present. My arms still feel her weight. She was lighter than I thought possible and even stronger than I had suspected. Her hair smelled densely of sunlight and green leaves. It is evening now, and perhaps this is “sundowning,” the clinical term for the way Alzheimer’s patients lose control at sunset.
My nature studies have intensified for a number of reasons, none of them rational, but I don’t care one whit. First of all I have had a Technicolor dream that instructed me to walk the border of the forest and open land, and at the same time to rename the birds of North America. This will be a long project indeed as there are over seven hundred of them. I do not question this dream assignment. It’s certainly more pleasant than when Ballard assigned me Contemporary Poetics 373 when he knew I loathed the subject. If I completed the bird project before death, I could publish a new guidebook. So many of the current names of birds are humiliating and vulgar. For instance, “brown thrasher” or “curve-billed thrasher” for these lovely, secretive birds is an abomination. The thrasher is now called the “beige dolorosa,” which is reminiscent of a musical phrase in Mozart, one that makes your heart pulse with mystery, as does the bird.
I have concentrated on birds and flora for the time being. Mammals are difficult, and other than the coati, I have only seen deer, a single coyote, and a group of javelinas, diminutive hairy creatures of the pig family. I’m already fatigued with Linnaean taxonomy, as the impulse behind it, admirable in the life sciences, is the precise motive that made graduate English such a hoax in retrospect. Literary scholars can be, too often are, guilty of science envy, creating absurd schemata as if Shakespeare needed a sounder defense for being unanswerably Shakespeare. I suspect my own bird taxonomy, as I progress with this project over the years, will be a private one based on the spiritual consequences of the natural world.
I must add that nature has erased my occasional urge toward suicide, along with not wanting to bring Deirdre sorrow. I suspect it’s because this new world is not asking me to hold it together like the other one. For the time being I am too much of a neophyte to take part in defending it against the inroads of human greed. There is also the idea that I’m a newborn babe with a soft spot on the top of my head. My natural enemies, like Magdalena, could still crush me.
*
The other event that intensified my nature studies was a nasty piece of punishment. The morning mail brought a registered letter from Ballard notifying me that my hearing on the possible reinstatement of my position had been put off until summer due to budgetary considerations. This mouthful of mush meant, as the letter later implied and I had overheard the year before as gossip, that the “Endowment” had made certain unwise investments and each department had to sacrifice a position or two. Ballard urged me to accept the half-pay disability pension, not stating the obvious fact that it came out of our group insurance fund rather than the budget itself. Of course this would be paramount to admitting a type of mental incompetence, based mostly on the red check on my dossier and two joint visits by the college doctor, whom I knew well, and a female psychiatrist, also a college employee, whom I didn’t know, who was a dumpy little parody from the Baltics. I allowed her two brief interviews through my screen door which, as Deirdre and Bob had pointed out, was not the best possible idea.
At age sixty-two the disability pension would slide into my regular one, but a quick tote meant about twenty-three grand per annum, not a lot in our world. In fact, barely a secretary’s or instructor’s wage. Deirdre had always insisted that she was holding a nest egg for me. When my mother died seven years ago she had left me nothing, out of her basic ire over my divorce from Marilyn. The Presbyterians got the bulk of her estate that came from her house and the urban-renewal sale of the diner. Deirdre had received thirty thousand in the will, which she said was growing and was to be mine when I needed it. I had always become quarrelsome over the matter, refusing the idea, even after she told me her husband, David, gave her more than twice that every Christmas in stock from his inheritance. Perhaps it was time to stop being prideful. I could buy a little cabin at some point and become a secretary of nature. Ballard’s letter, however, brought me to the realization that I wouldn’t return to the college at gunpoint.
This was not the nasty event in itself but what caused it. I was at the very hindmost part of the property, a Forest Service lease scarcely fit for grazing, with a hoop of new wire to replace a section destroyed by a falling corkbark fir (Abies lasiocarpa var. arizonica). To remove the compromising aftertaste of Ballard’s letter, I was meditating on Keats’s notions of “the vale of soul-making” which I had never properly understood. I had been guilty like so many in controlling myself when there was nothing left to control. In short, I didn’t have enough substance to perceive what Keats was up to. Now in the deep forest glade it occurred to me that if you kept your heart and mind utterly open and were still full of incomprehension, you were exercising the glories of your negative capability and thus were plumb in the vale of soul-making. It was clear as day and I tingled with pleasure.
Of course J.M. had admonished me over and over to pay complete attention during the dangerous chore of fence stretching. When you cranked the ratchet handle you wanted to draw it drum tight but well short of breaking. If you were careless, the wire might break and come whistling back and “tear an eye out,” he had said for emphasis. At the exact instant my mind had lapsed from Keats to a brief vision of Magdalena’s bottom, I heard the ping of the wire but had no time to react. The wire missed my eye but hit my cheek and shoulder like a hideous lash. I must have screeched because Mona snorted and the dog came running from her sport of digging up ground squirrels and eating them for lunch.
I stood there for moments listening to the panting of the dog and my own scattered breathing, looking down at where I traced my finger along the bloody line where the wire sliced my shirt. The line broadened with red but the slice didn’t appear deep. My left cheek was another matter and I lifted my hand to catch the cascading blood. I had nothing to stanch the flow so I used my undershirt, pressing it to my cheek lightly, then with more firmness. The shirt quickly soaked itself red but I was still calm, thinking it unlikely I could bleed to death through my face. I sat down in the grass against a tree, feeling the numb ache similar to the aftermath of getting a wisdom tooth pulled. Of all the things to do, I fell asleep there in the warm sunlight, only waking when the shirt was dried and caked against my face, still clenched in my hand. The doctor later said the sleep was the aftermath of shock.
By the time I got back home it was late afternoon. J.M. hollered “Holy shit!” and off we drove to the emergency clinic at the hospital in Nogales an hour away. Lillian had wanted to get me a clean shirt from my cabin, which seemed inappropriate, while Grandma merely handed me the tequila bottle from which I took a deep gulp. The doctor, who was a pleasant old man, asked if it was from a knife fight or fencing, evidently familiar with both. He was also disturbed that I hadn’t come in immediately, as the elapsed time made a “neat job” impossible. It was then that he said something I shall cherish forever: “If you weren’t such a worthless old cowboy, I’d send you up to a plastic surgeon in Tucson.” He also asked if I had any money and I said no, because I’d left my wallet in the cabin. I was going to say my insurance would pay, or I had a friend out in the waiting room, but he wrote “indigent” on the form the receptionist had given me and sent me packing, my forty-nine stitches for free. It pleased me to no end to be taken for a cowboy.
Sad to say, later I had an argument with J.M. in a Mexican café. We drank several beers while I ate two bowls of menudo, a tripe soup the grandma often made and which I found delicious. Along with the tripe, calves’ feet are also put in the pot, an item that is readily available in Mexican butcher shops. All I did, idly enough, was ask J.M. if on the way home we could drive by where Magdalena lived with her boyfriend.
J.M. virtually exploded on the spot. The upshot was he knew I had slept with Magdalena because she had told Lillian. How could I do such a thing? He knew she had worked as a call girl in Phoenix and Tucson and now she was involved with drug people, of which there are thousands along the border. I was told I knew nothing, unlike himself, about the world of evil, and perhaps Magdalena had slept with the dope assassin whose modus operandi was to dash out of an alley and bury an ice pick in an unsuspecting skull. I was a gentleman and professor, an intelligent man — how could I bring shame on myself and family by screwing such a woman? If she showed up again at his home he would kick her out pronto, and if Lillian forbade it he would leave himself, adding for a punch line that Lillian had even loaned Magdalena a chunk of their savings. When J.M. finished, the dozen or so people in the café were silent but staring at us, neglecting their drinks and meals. Then an old man piped up, “Why don’t you shoot the bitch,” and everyone laughed.
*
The yellow warbler is now the Delphic warbler. The previous name was as absurd as “blackbird.” We show our contempt for creatures by allowing the unimaginative elements of the scientific world to name them. It is perhaps a job for those countless M.F.A. poets crisscrossing the land, wheedling bullies carrying their Hermès briefcases. I decided on “Delphic warbler” because their song is bell-like but attenuated, bursting the notes so that the seams of the music cannot contain it, much like Sappho.
I am back to my fencing despite the accident a week ago. What a wake-up call! After dinner last night Lillian took off the bandage and we stood side by side in the bathroom looking in the mirror. She frowned. It wasn’t pretty but neither am I, the pinkish ridge from the dissolving stitches leaving an irregular Maginot Line down my face. “Care sat on his faded cheek,” I quoted Milton.
Of late my sleep has been disturbed by a spring Mona had discovered by scent. The weather had turned warm in early April and we had taken to leaving at dawn. Mona always stays in any grassy area where I drop the reins, so I was surprised when she trotted off. I hurriedly followed because there were some dark clouds sweeping up from the south. To tell the truth, I felt like I was being abandoned by the most reliable person in my life, though she was a horse. She traveled a scant two hundred yards over a hillock and up a narrow gully too thick with varied shrubbery for me to stop to identify.
I heard the trickling of water, then the gulps of Mona drinking. There was a miniature rock pool of cold, clear water and I let it settle before drinking myself. Unlike most of the local water it was untainted by the effluvia left by the gold and silver mining back at the turn of the century. I stood there a long time leaning against Mona, listening to the disturbed birds come alive again. There were too many of them and I didn’t want to upset them by getting out my guidebook. There were literally dozens of species flitting around, including inconceivably colored hummingbirds feeding from the flowering bushes. Mona had discovered a bird gold mine and it made me giddy. It wasn’t so much the immense weight of my dream project, the puniness of language in the face of this splendor, but that the birds made me feel that I understood nothing, nothing at all. It was partly the energy of their otherness, the sheer mystery of our existences together in that tiny arroyo. There was a shudder as if I were going to take leave of my senses. I took Mona’s reins to lead her away. A warbler unknown to me, but likely a Lucy’s warbler (see what I mean!), sat on the pommel of the saddle, staring at me. I stared back until she began to shimmer, her outlines beginning to blur. Horse, bird, rider: it became uncountable. The sky swelled black and blue, making me wet but joyful.
*
Mona pulled up lame so I’ve been walking with my tools and guidebooks in a daypack. She neighed mournfully this morning, wanting to go along, her injured foot lifted like a dog’s paw. I broke off a chunk of Snickers bar which she gnawed with pleasure with her worn teeth. The poor old girl doesn’t know that her life grows short. She makes me think of the part of Leaves of Grass about animals, of which I only remember one line: “They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.” One Sunday we came home from church with Florence all teary about the poor and hungry in Toledo. My dad was having a morning beer and reading the newspaper. Apprised of the problem, he suggested that she and her fellow church members “get their dead asses” across town and feed these people. I have neglected Whitman since graduate school, thinking him painfully sentimental like Dickens and Dostoyevsky. Maybe I’ll take another look.
I dawdled around the barnyard applying liniment to Mona’s ankle (J.M. calls it a pastern), and then Lillian arrived with the mail and groceries which meant it was Saturday. There was a letter from Bob in far-off Marseille, quite apologetic as he had only been sending the stray postcard. When he left in late September I wanted to make him feel good, so I had said I was going to London. He was more than a little overexposed to my problems at that point what with his own lifelong mental difficulties. His father had been one of the most successful black lawyers in Chicago and Bob had been found brutally wanting in his love of literature. Bob wrote that he had corresponded with “that pile of offal” Ballard and suggested that I accept the disability pension. What’s more, there was a part-time position available to teach two courses in American literature to French adults that was mine for the taking. Bob had decided against returning to America himself and hoped I might join him. I could live nicely there on my modest teaching pay plus my pension. He would even search out a handball court.
I was touched by this, however unlikely the idea. Perhaps I could teach the fall and early winter semester in order to be back here in plenty of time for the songbird migrations. I would also have to do a little research to check if the Marseille area had forests and walking room. My eyes teared when I thought Mona might not be there for my return. One of the cats that lived in the tack shed rubbed against my leg and I stooped to pet her. The dogs growled, jealous of my affection, but dared not approach as I had swatted them before for chasing the cat.
I looked over and Lillian was standing under the cotton wood tree near the back door, her arms folded in evident concern. Why is it, unless they are furious, must you ask women what is wrong? I walked over, praying that it was nothing to interfere with my upcoming hike, and was left sweating and stuttering in moments.
“What’s wrong?” I naturally asked.
“My sister needs to see you, and J.M. won’t allow her around.”
“He seems to have ambivalent feelings toward her,” I wattled.
“J.M. doesn’t understand that when Mom died Magdalena was fifteen and she didn’t get proper mothering.”
“I don’t know where she lives. How can I see her?”
“She’s over at your cabin. She snuck up the creek. She was going to wait there all day and then I caught you still here. Don’t tell J.M. or he’ll go crazy. I wouldn’t mind myself if she moved to Alaska, but I love her because she’s my sister.” Lillian had plainly reverted far from her education and normal composure. I shrugged and headed for the cabin like a gunslinger, though in truth I felt my bowels might let loose.
*
There she was, big as life and death, sitting at the table and inspecting the contents of my wallet as if that were what one did on a visit. Thank God she hadn’t found my beloved Miriam’s photo or I might have lost control. I noted that her foot cast was gone.
“You only have thirty-five dollars,” she announced.
“I use the bank,” I lied, noting she hadn’t had the inclination to check the Gideon Bible where I had accumulated nearly two thousand dollars with my roundup plus my fencing pay (five dollars an hour). She was wearing a white sleeveless dress perhaps to denote her purity.
“I’m pregnant. I need fifteen hundred dollars to go up to the clinic in Tucson. The cops are after my boyfriend so he took off. Besides, it’s your fault.”
“You mean I’m the designated father?” I had the tremors and tried to be ironic to quell them.
“However you want to put it. The timing is right. Perhaps you want to make love to me right now?”
“No,” I said, the most outrageous lie of my life. The mere sight of this depraved creature sent my depleted hormones spinning, but this was akin to being mugged.
“Just pay up and I’ll always be ready for you.” She smiled, not her best gesture, and held out her hand.
I went to my briefcase in the closet and got a Michigan check, filling it out at the table and writing along the top, “Not admitting paternity guilt,” slightly proud of my caginess. She took the check, gazed at it, then tore it into confetti.
“The clinic in Tucson only takes cash.” She remained cool, stirring the confetti around with a finger.
“Then why didn’t you cash the check in Nogales? You’re no more pregnant than I am.”
“Come and see me when you are willing to bring cash.” She wrote down her address and phone number, then kissed me, her tongue probing against my clenched teeth.
When she left I went to the window, quite astounded when she vaulted the fence. This unfortunately reminded me of an old movie I did like, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Spencer Tracy. It was also unnerving because within an academic atmosphere we grow to think that all people are essentially the same and that the spectrum of behavior, barring psychotics, is quite narrow. Magdalena revived the notion, usually only a scholarly footnote, that there might be demons afoot in the land.
I had the immediate sense to calm down by wondering what Raymond Chandler might do in this situation. Rather than dabbling with one of his heroes, I wished to enter the mind of the master himself. Was I the putative father? Why did she have to have cash? What was wrong with the check, my “not guilty” notation or something else? Could it be that a check can be traced to both issuer and casher, but what difference did that make? I knew that Magdalena was not a rocket scientist, as the young say, but what did she have in mind above ordinary mischief? The surest way to solve the riddle was to leave it unsolved and completely ignore her. It was difficult to throw away her number and address so I neglected to do so. There’s that time-frayed saw about there not being any fool like an old fool, but then I had taught young people for nearly thirty years and never felt they had a collective leg up on us. Besides, how old is fifty? A question not the less stupid for my asking it.
*
Deirdre stopped by for two days, making a detour on the way to San Francisco to meet her husband, who was at a medical meeting. It was definitely a rapprochement and I was pleased to see how delighted she was with my condition, although I wish she hadn’t used the word “progress,” a musty concept at best. She was only mildly upset by my scar, which is understandable considering the daily bullet wounds in her Chicago neighborhood.
But stop. Reality is so peculiar. The other day I checked an old packet of notes found in my briefcase and discovered that the year has fried a lot of fat out of my thought and language. With your only child, you tend to gloss things over; ergo, in truth, Deirdre was pleased I was no longer shaking and raving. The scar was small potatoes compared to the fact that I apparently wasn’t deliquescing at the speed of the calendar. Her own problems seeped out. The charity clinic she and David worked for was undergoing political convulsions and they were thinking of moving on to a similar operation in Rapid City, South Dakota, a place that sounds exotic to me and probably isn’t.
Deirdre determined that my grackle is actually a Mexican blue mockingbird blown north by the winter storms. Her bird book is admirably dog-eared and notated, but she had to use a Mexican bird guide to locate this creature. Oddly, my only mental pratfall of her short visit can be directly attributed to birds. She took me to a Nature Conservancy property along a creek bottom some twenty miles from here and the area was dense with birdwatchers. I felt claustrophobic despite the beauty of the riparian thickets, as if I were being sucked back into the black hole of the ordinary. Deirdre joked that if she called the Audubon Hot Line, my cabin would be stormed by hundreds of birders in their crazed lust to add the Mexican blue mockingbird to what is called their life list, a tawdry system they use for keeping count and competing with one another. I was so appalled that I stepped off the legal trail and hid for an hour in a thicket, letting Deirdre continue toting the day’s numbers. By a wonderful stroke of luck I was visited in this thicket by my beloved beige dolorosa. I sat in utter stillness on a log as if I, too, belonged there. The bird came within an inch of my foot, peering up at me as if I might be a tree. I resolved then that there would be nothing expedient or useful in my own renaming of these creatures, certainly no paintings or photos attached to vulgarize or explain away their beauty and mystery. My work would not become more fodder for “the deceitful coils of an institution,” as the poet said. Readers would simply have to imagine what bird went with which of my sonorous names.
The second and last night of Deirdre’s visit we camped out by my secret spring that Mona had discovered. We arrived late on a sunny afternoon and at first a strong wind dampened the activity and I feared I had imagined it all. An hour or so before twilight the wind ceased entirely and the immediate area of the spring became dense with life. Deirdre became so excited she put her guidebook aside and clutched at her hair, her eyes unblinking in excitement. When the dark came it seemed to emerge out of the ground rather than coming from the sky, with undetectable slowness so that we turned with shock to the quarter moon.
There was a raw moment around the campfire when Deirdre brought up the subject — another euphemism — of Magdalena. I was glad the fire wasn’t all that bright because I blushed horribly over the idea that she and Lillian had spoken of my little fling, though “fling” is a slight word for an experience from which you are lucky to emerge alive.
“I’ve met her a bunch of times, Dad. She’s not a very nice person. But I don’t suppose that’s what you were looking for. I mean, she’s not exactly a coed.”
“I agree,” I said with the utmost lameness. Young women these days feel free to comment about their fathers’ sexual behavior. My throat constricted in the effort to say something à point. “It wasn’t serious. I doubt I’ll see her again.” I was suddenly in the thick of regarding my entire use of language as suspect, both past and present. Recently it had lagged so far behind my perceptions that I realized I’d have to make a major project out of changing this language.
Deirdre was struggling for the words to put the matter to rest when we both heard an odd noise. It was a soft sound somewhere between a chirrup and a cluck and it came from all around and above us. We looked up at the firelight reflecting silver off the leaves of a black oak. We were being watched and spoken to by dozens of tiny elf owls. Each would have fit inappropriately in a vest pocket, their eyes as big as black marbles below small tufted ears. They studied us for a scant few minutes and then, their curiosity satisfied, they flitted away into the surrounding darkness. I was overcome with the sense of feeling at home, whether I deserved to or not. Why should I break my heart wondering?
*
Deirdre left at dawn in her rental car. I rode with her the half-dozen miles out to the main road and walked back, discomfited to learn that the two gray hawks that nested in a cottonwood at the side of the long driveway were among only fifty nesting pairs left in the United States. Walking steals away anger but this was a troublesome detail. When I caterwauled about the noxious creative types, Bob would laugh and remind me that too many good writers at one time would knock the world further off balance and flood the insane asylums. Bob’s ability to find bedrock in absurdity always made me envious. For instance, if I think “six miles,” I’m liable to ruin a part of my walk until I rid myself of the six-mile notion which is nearly as corrupt as the clock. That’s partly what Dostoyevsky meant when he said that two plus two was the beginning of death.
I detoured at the creek bed, walking west until I picked up Magdalena’s tracks from her visit, following them to where she scooted under a fence to her waiting vehicle. There was a remote urge to sniff the tracks as a dog might, and a lump arose in my throat. If my youthful prayers had been answered, by now I would have lived out a fifty-year-long harp solo with my beloved Miriam, which had certainly not been the case.
On the way back up the creek bed I came upon a road-runner and followed this bird in an anthropomorphic trance. The bird would trot swiftly ahead fifty yards or so, then stop to regard its approaching enemy, me. When I became too close the bird repeated the process, stopping again, its head cocked in inane curiosity. To break the monotony of this paradigm of my life, I sat down on a boulder and checked the driver’s license: I was indisputably fifty years of age. In the distance the roadrunner waited patiently for my next move, eventually drifting off into a catclaw thicket.
The boulder had a comfortably sculpted backrest and I couldn’t think of a single reason to continue a life of movement. Perhaps I’d sit there until my expiration date, a novel impulse. Bob had divorced early and his only child, a boy now in his late twenties, lived in an ashram, a religious commune of some sort out in Oregon, from which he sent a letter once a month, beautifully written but full of hygienic pieties. Last year there had been a package, a piece of wood which had been carved in rather ornate calligraphy: “Life is a housefire of impermanence.” Bob had found the sign amusing enough to put it up on our office wall. I didn’t say so but I thought the message a tad banal, though since then life had certainly whirred right along.
Sitting there in my stone nest, I thought of the proscribed limits of my father’s life: coming to manhood in the rigors of the Great Depression, four years of World War II, marriage, learning how to operate heavy equipment, then death. Compared to that, I could finally admit that my own life had been spent on silk cushions in jeweled chambers. The process of getting a Ph.D. had threatened mind and body, but once that soporific rite had been endured there had been marriage to a woman with an ample allowance, frequent trips to England and, as I climbed to the top of the academic ladder, a work schedule that only entailed three courses per semester to small numbers of students. The system was designed to give me time for research and writing but had instead made me somnolent and dreary, albeit totally safe in a world suppurating with tribalism and chaos.
Now I was left with a pension that ensured something less than genteel poverty. I mulled and moped for a few minutes, then realized what with free lodging and a sublet apartment back in Michigan, I had not even touched my half paycheck. I had, in fact, supported myself by rounding up cattle and mending fence. I gave Lillian forty dollars a week for my part of the groceries, which is all she would take, and through Deirdre, her husband’s family had sent along the message that I was welcome to the humble cabin as long as I wished. Perhaps I should kiss the ground as they once did in Russian fiction, or offer up a prayer or two, but I wanted to spare God any additional tedium. He was no doubt busy managing His black holes, one of which was said to be the size of three hundred million suns. It was also inappropriate for me to ask Him to free me of my random and troublesome thoughts of Magdalena, which stirred my loins uncomfortably. During our lovemaking session on the couch the heel of her cast had dug a sore area in the small of my back as if I had been a horse and she had worn spurs. The discomfort of this abrasion had been a nagging wound of Eros herself but I was somewhat disappointed when it went away. I was an expert on the subject of my mind but was still infantile about my emotions.
I tried to distract myself from Magdalena by the pleasurable thought that my life might henceforth be rid of students. Year after year my informal surveys of new students in my classes revealed that few if any had read an appreciable book in the previous year. The worship of the ersatz and peripheral was the norm. They had been so overexposed to the visual image on television they were dull to good art or fine photography. I was less knowledgeable in the area of their music, but I could only recall three students in my career who had cared for Mozart.
All of this suddenly wafted away because I no longer cared for that world and the hideous sense that I was in danger of becoming a premature geezer. The immediate, heretofore unconscious question was whether a toss in the hay with Magdalena was worth fifteen hundred dollars. I knew enough of the world at large to suspect this wasn’t a record, although it might be in my reduced economic category. There was humor in the idea of how much physical work it had taken to save that amount of money. I had inadvertently redeemed my body only to have it presenting me with this problem. If only I knew a winsome middle-aged lady who loved nature and Mozart, but I didn’t. It is an alarming item to think you are sexually dead for a decade only to discover that you aren’t. I had always presumed I understood what Yeats meant when he wrote the line, “The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,” but had no real idea at the moment aside from the sensation of dread and arousal.
*
It was a manic rather than a dark night of the soul. I couldn’t stop talking to myself and my mental language blurred into a passionate gibberish. I got out of bed a dozen times, fingering the slip of paper that contained her phone number and address until the paper became as soft as cloth. I was more in need of a witch doctor than a psychiatrist. The fact that there was no phone in the cabin saved me from bedding down a demon. The image of me racing through the night in an ancient Jeep that topped out at thirty miles an hour was comic. The sensible thing to do was to use the cash I had earned through the sweat of my brow as a down payment on a spiffy 4WD pickup, the kind all cowboys pine for.
My head was buzzing and I began to hear running water, or blood, within it for the first time in months. I nosed around in my briefcase and came up with the papers on which I had kept track of the time back in my apartment: neat lists of my clock readings with the exciting minutes at the junctures of A.M. and P.M., P.M. and A.M., recorded with a bit more flourish. The notes made me shiver in their naive attempt to ritualize reality into an acceptable form.
I took a sleeping bag out of the closet, turned out the lights, and settled down in the yard. Close attention to the stars, moon, sun, and earth is genuinely helpful when you want to stop talking to yourself. We all hope for a superior brand of madness but our wounds are considerably less interesting than our cures. While walking I thought the only viable reality to be the present step. I considered counting stars, unable to remember Lillian’s constellation lesson, but then counting seemed a vulgar intrusion for both the stars and myself. I sent a few prayers starward, not mentioning Magdalena but offering thanks for the universe that was making me well, and the request that I not forget the earth during my inevitable mischief.
*
The day of reckoning dawned bright and clear, deafening with birds and the sunlight creeping slowly down the mountain walls, the air so sweet I drank it in sips. I dozed on, listening to Lillian leave for school, then watching through the gate at grass line as the dogs jumped into the bed of J.M.’s pickup and he took off for the hills. It was my D-day, though not so auspicious as my father’s participation in the actual event.
For breakfast, at my request the grandma thawed a container of menudo and heated maize tortillas for me. I boldly dialed the phone and an irritable Magdalena answered. She had been up late and why was I calling at dawn — in reality eight A.M. I said that my love for her was so great I couldn’t help myself. She said to give her a few more hours of sleep, then come over, but not to forget the money. Of course not, I said. As an afterthought she said to dress like a professor, not a cowboy, as I could go on an errand with her. When I hung up the phone the grandma laughed, having figured out I was up to no good with her favorite spectacle. Magdalena’s dress request made me wary rather than disturbed. There’s no substitute for consciousness.
On the way back to the cabin I heard one of the barn cats mewing. Lillian had said J.M. didn’t care for cats but they kept them to control the mouse and scorpion population. I walked over to the tack shed only to discover that my favorite cat had been torn open and lay in the dust quite dead, while its companion mewed a funeral service. I suspected the dogs, and such was my anger it was lucky for them they weren’t around. At least a coyote would have eaten the poor creature.
I took a shovel out of the shed and buried my friend in the soft earth of the corral with Mona watching attentively. Was this an omen that I was going to die? No, it meant the cat had died. My mind chattered a litany of stray lines from Christopher Smart’s poem to his cat Jeoffrey: “For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery. For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin & glaring eyes. For in his morning visions he loves the sun and the sun loves him. For he is of the tribe of Tiger.” Poor old Smart, batty and impoverished, but he knew his cats.
*
What a day it was, my emergence, my foray into the great world of sin, crime, commerce, the indigestible hairball of civilization. I will cherish this day until I am cremated, as it is my vain wish to be ashes rather than a carcass. Appropriately enough, though the day was hot, I dressed in the slacks and tweed sport coat, a J. Press shirt and brogans, that I had worn the day of my arrival. In the mirror I looked like I was on the verge of lighting a briar pipe and saying the word “tautological.” All the way to Nogales above the rickety roar of the Jeep I hummed Mozart, buzzing along the road’s shoulder to allow faster traffic to pass, including one of those old VW buses once favored by hippies which always sounded like a magnified Singer sewing machine.
Magdalena’s neighborhood was less than reassuring and I rechecked, in my jacket pocket, the heft of my Swiss army knife, a gift from Deirdre, small change indeed against the automatic rifles used by the criminal element these days. The tweezer attachment had been good for pulling cactus thorns and the leather punch ideal for making a shorter notch on my belt. In any event, it was not the sort of weapon you could whip out in a microsecond.
The house itself was a shabby little bungalow, with splotches of shattered stucco revealing the adobe bricks beneath, a peek into the house’s personal history. The porch was partly enclosed with a trellis of flowering vine loud with bees, and several hummingbirds I didn’t feel disposed toward identifying. I tapped the toe of the silly Church’s brogan and at the last possible moment took five of the fifteen hundred-dollar bills and shoved them far down my sock until they tickled my instep — an attempt to make my tribute to Eros two hundred, rather than three hundred, hours of labor. When I stood straight Magdalena opened the door, looking a bit sour and blowzy in a lavender peignoir, and nodded me into the darkened house that was airless but cool. In the kitchen she asked me to make her coffee while she showered.
The coffee chore was just as well, as I was having difficulty catching my breath and touched my breast to check my heart’s accelerated tom-tom, deliberating whether this was an appropriate place to drop dead. I dumped the percolator’s old grounds in a wastebasket overflowing with fast-food cartons, put the coffee on, and took a Dos Equis beer from the nearly empty refrigerator that cried out for a black banana. I sat down on the living room couch and sorted through a pile of horse magazines, finding underneath with not a little shock my book, which she had obviously borrowed from Lillian. The first part of the title, The Economics of Madness …, gave me a sharp case of shudders as if I had peed outdoors on a cold winter night. I slid the book back under the nest of horse magazines where I thought it might be happier blind to its author’s fripperies.
All too soon she swept out of the bathroom hall, the very starkest of nakeds, toweling her mammalian mane and glowering down at me sunken on the couch. She reminded me of that vast and robust Maillol sculpture I remembered in the garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She sternly held out her hand on which I slapped the thousand dollars. She hastily counted it and looked at me as if I were vermin.
“I said fifteen hundred dollars. You’re five short.”
“Oh, my goodness. I thought you said a thousand.” I stared at my knees, crestfallen.
“It’s fifteen hundred dollars or nothing, you cheapskate.”
“I guess we professors are reputed to be absent-minded.” I was staring at a droplet of water in her belly button. This was as far as you could get from Milton’s theocratic mania. I got up abruptly, took the money back, and headed for the kitchen and the door. “I’m sorry I bothered you,” I said to a wall clock that looked back from the plastic flank of a smiling donkey. Magdalena was hot on my trail and grabbed the money.
“You can owe me but you don’t get the full treatment.”
“But if it only takes ten minutes, that would mean you’d be earning six thousand dollars an hour. In a full workday you could make a fortune, or at least go to Hawaii.” I don’t know why I was being so captious. I plugged the maddening drop of water in her belly button with a forefinger.
“You’re too much of a smartass for your own good,” she said, coming into my arms. I accomplished the mission while halfway on the squeaky Formica-topped kitchen table. Afterward I reeled and slumped, unable to get my sea legs. She made off to dress and I laughed softly in time to the perking coffee, feeling quite stupid but alive.
*
Our errand, as she called it, brought me closer than I ever hoped to be again to absolute disaster, mortification, imprisonment. We drove the Jeep to a gas station with me in a state of post-coital desuetude fueled in addition by a mostly sleepless night. I craved the sort of naps I used to have on Hampstead Heath after drinking three pints of Watneys in a nearby tavern. The day had become hotter and it had not yet occurred to me to take off my tweed jacket.
At the gas station we parked beside a white Ford pickup and Magdalena ran inside to get the keys. It was thirty yards or so away but through the window I saw her talking to a man who looked suspiciously like the boyfriend I had seen in Verdugo’s yard. He looked out the window and I averted my glance to the back of the pickup as if it were a newfound toy in the sandbox. There was an old car seat in the pickup box and I caught the slightest whiff of something that smelled like lawn clippings.
Magdalena finally came out and we were off in the pickup headed south, for her namesake town, which she said was only an hour away down in Sonora. When we crossed the border I perked up, mildly thrilled to add a new country to my life list even though I had lived close by for nearly half a year. It reminded me of Deirdre’s childhood squeal when we crossed the Blue Water Bridge on a car trip to Toronto. This definitely bore no resemblance to Canada and the slums looked decidedly friendlier than those of Detroit. On the outskirts of the Sonoran side of Nogales was a welter of American-owned factories, built there, so J.M. told me, because they need only pay wages of five dollars a day. This seemed unlikely so I asked Magdalena, who had been chattering along about her sick mother.
“American companies are cheapskates just like you.” She patted my knee, a rare gesture of affection. She either got right down to business or skipped the matter.
Now we were out in a lovely hilly countryside of immense rolling, female shapes leading up to distant mountains that I guessed were the back sides of those I could see on my fencing expeditions, or near the cliff on which I had done my purgative weeping, an experience that seemed a lifetime ago. I was surprised to find the road a superhighway like our interstates, and its smoothness made me drowse off, waking when she stopped to pick up two women and no less than five children whose car was disabled on the road’s shoulder. She talked animatedly with the women in Spanish and out of politeness I clambered into the back of the pickup with the children so the two women could ride up front. The children were sweet but shy. I gave each of them a dollar bill and held the youngest on my lap as we sat on the old car seat watching the world continuously recede behind us. I dozed off again despite the money itching against my foot within the sock.
When we reached town Magdalena dropped off our passengers at a gas station and I waved my merry goodbyes to the children. I was surprised when she then let me off in front of a small cantina. I wasn’t totally conscious yet but she told me to wait there until she picked up a load of statuary and visited her mother. I didn’t mind what with feeling rested from my short snooze and being quite hungry. I sat at the bar, the only discordant note coming from a table of American college kids in the far corner. Two of the girls were shaking their pretty little bottoms in front of the jukebox to the delight of Mexican workingmen sitting at other tables.
“So you know Magdalena,” the barman said. “You’re a lucky man. She’s a spitfire.” He spoke clear English and had evidently watched the woman in question out the window. I nodded in assent, ordered a beer and bowl of menudo, the second of the day. It is thought by the Mexicans to be both a hangover tonic and a sexual restorative. As for myself, I ate it because I liked the dark pungency of the flavors, reminding me that I was no longer trapped within the discrete squalor of a midwestern academic town.
At the exact moment I was served the food I wondered how Magdalena could be visiting her mother when Lillian had said several times that their mother was dead. I tore off a piece of tortilla, then paused at the thought that there was a strange odor on my fingers from riding in the back of the truck. On the way to the toilet to wash my hands I passed the table of college students and one of the girls smiled at me. She was a real peach, as we used to say, but then I recognized the resinous odor as that of marijuana. I had smelled it frequently from the bushes outside the student union building at college over the years, and heard the muffled “wow”s and giggling. I had smoked it once as an undergraduate and found the sensations intolerable, as if my body had been reduced to the cartilage one finds in a turkey leg. Under its influence I also had eaten an entire bag of Oreos and had felt quite ill the following morning.
When I returned to my menudo there was an urge to hop the bus I saw passing out the window. It wouldn’t really matter which direction the bus was going, but how could I travel in this country without knowing the language? It was time to abandon the bastard genre of making notes and learn Spanish. Lillian had said she would be glad to help but the best way was to enroll in a school down in Hermosillo that offered an intensive month-long course. I was intrigued by the city’s gorgeous name, presenting as it did the possibility of intrigue and romance, though Veracruz might be better, as it abutted the Caribbean. There were definite opportunities for a man not fully atrophied and wizened in his own private bell jar.
Deep in my menudo, which wasn’t as good as the grandmother’s but savory enough, I tried to tell my own fortune in the swimming pieces of tripe and hominy but couldn’t get past the idea that Magdalena was up to no good. It was impossible not to think of J.M.’s bellowed lecture in the café. The border was indeed rife with the mayhem of smuggling, the local weekly paper I read at Verdugo’s including long lists of charges for amounts ranging from a few pounds of marijuana to a ton of heroin in a produce truck. In the northern Midwest and upper New York state, cigarettes in large quantities were being smuggled into Canada because they cost four bucks there.
It was well over an hour before Magdalena returned. I wasn’t the least bit restive as the college students were jumping around to Mexican polkas and some young locals were teaching them the steps. It was frolicsome music and my toes tapped against the barstool. How was I to court a lady unless I learned to dance? I saw myself gliding across the burnished dance floor of a supper club with a woman who owned a tennis or birdwatcher’s tan. We were doubtless doing the foxtrot.
When Magdalena arrived I had just ordered another beer so she had one herself. She went through a panoply of moods in the first minute, trying to select one to suit her devious purposes. I asked about her faux mother and her eyes moistened. She put an arm around me and cooed in my ear as if I were a film star, rubbing a hand up a thigh toward my groin. Over her shoulder I could see the college boys regarding me with envy, and in truth Magdalena made their girlfriends look like clones of Barbie dolls. The boys were not in the position to afford her, and neither was I.
All this preening and affection was directed to her announcement that I would have to drive the pickup back to Nogales by myself; her mother needed her that afternoon. I was to get her house key from the man at the gas station when I dropped off the truck. She would meet me early in the evening for dinner and “a night of love.”
“For free?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“Free, but you still owe me five hundred bucks.” She gave my member a friendly tweak.
*
Outside the cantina I was amused to see that the back of the pickup was loaded with a dozen or so large statues of the Virgin, garishly painted — the kind you see in the Midwest, enshrined in porcelain bathtubs stood on their ends on the lawns of the devout. They are usually surrounded by small flower gardens and people of my ilk usually make fun of them which now seemed mean-minded.
Magdalena kissed me goodbye and as I drove off I beeped playfully at a college boy who was vomiting his freight of beer off the steps of the back door of the cantina. He lifted his hand in a wan salute. Soon enough he’ll be bound, along with his friends, to the dreadful bourgeois treadmill, mere bungfodder for the dissolute economy.
It was past mid-afternoon and I had driven two thirds of the way back to Nogales, enjoying the scenery I had missed during my snooze, when my skin began to prickle and my stomach churn. It was not the fabled bowel ailment turista but the dawning of reality that had been obscured by the two beers and the upcoming putative night of love. It was almost as if the voice of Chandler himself were whispering from the grave, “Are those statues of the Virgin full of sour air or something else?” I was immediately awash with sweat. It was damnably possible that I was a sodden patsy in a criminal conspiracy, plugging down the road toward the border check with a load of heavy Virgins.
Within a mile or so I found a tiny dirt road leading off the highway and along a brushy, dry creek bed. I swerved on the shoulder to avoid a litter of broken glass and beer cans, a half-burned mattress. My heart was thumping audibly by the time I drove a quarter of a mile or so, pulling around behind a dense thicket so that I was well hidden from the highway. I got out and calmed myself into lucidity by studying the flora, which were quite different from the ranch’s at this lower altitude. From my study of the guidebooks I recognized cholla, prickly pear, and ocotillo, the latter being one of the most strangely shaped of all life forms. The thicket was mostly palo verde, greasewood, and a larger shrub I didn’t recognize. I took out my Swiss army knife to cut off a small branch for later identification, then the ticking of the engine heat brought me back to my senses. The Virgins looked silly en masse and deserved to be seen alone, however clumsily they were made and painted. I tried to bore into one well below her bottom with the leather punch and had no success until I drove it in with a rock, knocking a quarter-sized hole. The dark green marijuana was packed in there as tightly as baled alfalfa. From the prison sentences announced in the newspaper, the pickup load was more than enough to use up the rest of my life.
For unclear reasons it was simple enough to figure out what to do. I took the same rock and the leather punch and flattened a tire with a mighty hiss, then walked away from the whole mess. I stood beside the highway for only a few minutes before a car with an Arizona license plate came to a halt and began to back up toward me, no doubt because of my reputable appearance. The car contained four very hung over and sunburned college boys who didn’t welcome me into their vehicle until they determined I could contribute gas money. I gladly offered my last twenty dollars, other than the sock load which had continued to itch throughout the day. The boys were students at the University of Arizona and had just had a Mexican beach vacation they pronounced as “awesome,” a doubtful word for anything they might have experienced.
I wasn’t out of the woods yet. I had the boys drop me off a block past the gas station where the Jeep sat innocently in the late afternoon light. I needed to collect myself and construct a plan, though it seemed easy enough to make a calm approach, then sprint to the vehicle with the keys, which is just what I did. Sad to say, Magdalena’s big thug came bouncing out of the station by the time I got the Jeep started and ground the gears into reverse. We had an inane conversation, the rationality of which was colored by my unalloyed fear. Where was the truck? I said I had had a flat tire. He said he would get a spare tire and drive me back to the truck so I could bring it back here. I said that would make me late for an important dinner engagement but I’d be glad to draw him a map, which I did, on a notepad on the seat that I normally reserved for my nature sightings. He kept insisting, of course, that I be the one to retrieve the truck, and I kept refusing. There was no point trying to speed off when I could be caught by a bicyclist. Finally I delivered a punch line by saying that if he didn’t stop yammering and let me go I was going to discuss the matter with my friend Roderigo of the Border Patrol. He slumped a bit then, accepted the map, and shook his fist. I said if he couldn’t be more polite I would go ahead and speak to Roderigo, and he said that wasn’t necessary, he’d send someone else to fetch the truck. It was impossible for him to determine how much I knew and he stood there thinking his grave thoughts as I drove off into the twilight.
*
On the way home I stopped at a pull-off near Sonoita Creek where Deirdre had told me that a rare bird named the elegant trogon had often been seen. It was apparent to me that in my dream project certain birds had earned the right to retain the names they already had. Not many, but a few. The trogon was a fine name, and so was whimbrel and Hudsonian godwit.
I sat on a boulder next to the stream until just before dark, letting the dulcet and purling sound soothe me. Bob had told me that in India the peasants will tie a madman to a tree next to a river and the water would draw off his madness. He had neglected to tell me how long the process took. If I was still mad as a hatter, the condition had become far less irksome and I was no longer a danger to myself. One might never know perfect sanity, but then again it might resemble the elongated harp solo I had imagined with Miriam. If only Bob were here so I could recount the day’s adventure, the tension of which had passed downstream with the creek’s flow.
*
At the foot of Verdugo’s driveway the Jeep ran out of gas, an event that J.M. was said to enjoy but didn’t seem all that much fun to me. There was the consolation that I hadn’t had my walk that day and the two-hour stroll up the drive-way would ensure a good night’s sleep. It was the warmest night of the year and I had a momentary thought about rattlesnakes, but that seemed insignificant compared to Magdalena and her compadre. I doubted if the fabled Birdman of Alcatraz had seen all that many species through his barred window.
There was a small piece of moon to light my way, and my walking meditation was full of pleasant thoughts about my limits. A horse could walk, trot, lope, canter, gallop, and run. As children we had scooted around with our cap guns, slapping our own asses as if we were both horse and rider. Of course a horse couldn’t read and I was very good at that. Counting was a matter that could be pretty much ignored. Far off along the creek bed I thought I heard a whippoorwill, sometimes called a goatsucker, from the nightjar family (Caprimulgidae). The future was acceptable rather than promising. It was certainly my choice.