A GOOD DAY TO DIE
Also by Jim Harrison
FICTION
Wolf: A False Memoir
A Good Day to Die
Farmer
Legends of the Fall
Warlock
Sundog
Dalva
The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Julip
The Road Home
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
True North
The Summer He Didn’t Die
Returning to Earth
The English Major
The Farmer’s Daughter
The Great Leader
The River Swimmer
Brown Dog
The Big Seven
CHILDREN’S LITURATURE
The Boy Who Ran to the Woods
POETRY
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer and Ghazals
Letters to Yesenin
Returning to Earth
Selected & New Poems: 1961–1981
The Theory and Practice of Rivers & New Poems
After Ikkyū & Other Poems
The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems
Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, with Ted Kooser
Saving Daylight
In Search of Small Gods
Songs of Unreason
ESSAYS
Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand
MEMOIR
Off to the Side
JIM HARRISON
A GOOD DAY TO DIE
Copyright © 1973 by Jim Harrison
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DAN GERBER
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Certain technical aspects of the handling of explosives have been deliberately altered and blurred to protect innocent life and property.
Each torpid turn of this world bears such disinherited children to whom neither what's been, nor what is coming, belongs.
—RILKE
PART
I
PROLOGUE
DOUBLE-ANCHORED off Cudjoe Key: barely dawn and she's still asleep but I was awakened by water birds. So many. The first sight upward from the skiff's bottom was an osprey with a small snake hanging from her talons—back to the nest now in the rookery for breakfast. Almost chilly, in the mid-sixties at six A.M., but it will be eighty by noon. I wanted to get over to the Snipe Key basin and catch the incoming tide and what fish would be there looking off that huge sandspit toward the rank mangroves. She's snoring, when she said she'd never sleep as the boat's bottom was too hard and we had no air mattresses. Drone of a sponger off to work. How they stand in that narrow prow without falling off and it must be genetic. I talked to one for a half hour once and understood nothing. She's waking. Lukewarm coffee in the Thermos. The mosquitoes were bad in the night and sand fleas. Over the freeboard I see a small sand shark nuzzling around the prongs of the sea anchor.
“Let's go back,” she says.
“I thought you wanted to fish.”
“That was the margaritas you gave me.”
I thought for a moment of kicking her ass out of the boat but that would be murder. We were sweating like piggies in that sleeping bag and I thought how in youth I had heard about our soldiers in the Orient getting rolled up in rugs with Chinese girls. Too hot and we didn't manage. After coming out at dusk with the markers not totally visible. Only a drunk or a master would try it and I was the former. I stood on the free-board and cast a streamer but a barracuda snipped the leader when he struck.
I watched her dress with no interest. No panties, only white bells and a muslin blouse under which her breasts swung free and that was why I asked her out here. But she grew progressively dense after so much laughter. I tied on another tippet and small keel hook streamer. There is a long happy streak when half drunk: everything is possible on earth—love, sanity, enormous fish, fame. I met her in Captain Tony's, a saloon off Duval. A dozen drinks and some shrimp and picadillo in a Cuban restaurant. Then borrowed a friend's boat and took off from Garrison Bight with beer and a pint and a Thermos of coffee, some bread and cheese. I only stopped off Cudjoe because of darkness. I popped a beer; my head ached insanely and I wanted fresh water and aspirin but we had none.
“My friends will worry about me.”
“Your friends won't be up for a few hours.”
I pulled the anchors and coiled the dripping rope. She chewed on the bread and drank out of the Thermos, shivering. I checked the gas. The tank was nearly full but then I remembered Felipe had filled it while we bought the beer. I turned on the marine radio and picked up a Havana station which was playing some wild Latin music. I thought it would cheer her up. I checked the lower unit then pressed the powertilt and started the motor. Birds flew up by the thousands from a small key a hundred yards away. A few roseate spoonbills among them.
“Don't go fast, it will make me colder,” she said over the idling motor. It would be nice to drag her by an anchor rope at forty knots. I pointed toward Snipe Key and accelerated.
“You're going the wrong way,” she shouted.
“A shortcut.” I intended to have a look at the basin if it meant binding and gagging her. I slowed down enough to reach for the chart under the seat so I could check for the markers. They are generally easy to see, with a cormorant perched on each one.
“Why don't you get back in the bag?”
She looked at me quizzically then crawled in. If the water had been choppy she would have been pounded senseless. I pushed the throttle up to full bore, covering the seven miles flat out at forty knots, but when I pulled up to the basin the water was too shallow to enter. I got out the tide book to see if the wait would be long but the book was inscrutable. Numbers. I looked at the far end of the basin through my binoculars to see if any bonefish were tailing but the water was flat and motionless.
“Why did you stop?” she asked, peeking out of the bag.
“So I wouldn't tear out the fucking lower unit.”
“Don't get mad.”
“We don't have enough water to get over the reef.”
“Can we turn around?” She was sniffling now, in part from her obvious hangover. She looked at me as if I were a madman, not altogether inaccurate as a judgment of character. It is hard enough to wake up in a motel room with a woman you don't really know. I began to try to remember her last name but drew a blank. Ansel. Atkins. Aberdeen. Angus. Cow. There was nothing to do but turn around and head back to Key West. I eased the boat around at low throttle in the shallow water, disturbing a small, beautiful leopard ray.
“Where are we going now?”
“The Japs have closed off the channel. Keep your head do
wn.”
Now her eyes were truly fearful. No gift for the surreal, a dull stenographer's brain.
“Have a beer,” I suggested.
“I’d throw up.”
The questioning eyes again, reminding me of a retarded collie pup I owned as a boy. Bit a bicycle tire and caught its teeth in the wire spokes. Back broken when flipped. How I mourned for puppies.
“You look like a puppy I owned once.”
She made another snivel noise and receded into the sleeping bag. A giant turd. Burial at sea. I'll play taps on the kazoo when I dump the bag over. Full throttle again, following the markers to Key West, singing fly the friendly skies of united over the motor whine. Jingo songs stick in my head. Do all people sing when alone in their cars? Once in Boston I was bellowing out Patsy Cline's “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me” and at a stoplight a truck driver clapped.
I entered Key West channel at full speed passing the Navy officers’ housing with a sign of NO WAKE tacked to each dock. An early morning wake for each. A dawn riser stood on his lawn and mouthed a soundless “slow down” and I gave him the finger.
At the marina Felipe looked at us and said a pleasantry in Spanish while tying up the boat.
“Dumbo cunto stupido no fisho,” I said pointing at my mate who was crawling out of the bag. Felipe giggled.
We drove in silence down Duval to the Pier House where she was staying. She got out and flounced to the motel door without a backward glance. Oh well.
CHAPTER
1
I WENT BACK to my room and lolled around naked. I took a shower and examined my insect bites and my gritty bloodshot eyes. Was it all worth it? No. The soul of a clerk bent deeply over his arithmetic. Eve proffers the clerk an apple which turns out to be hollow and contains a howling succubus. I considered smoking a little dope but rejected the idea—after a nap I wanted to play pool and dope always took the edge off what-ever competitive spirit I had left in the world. Stretched out on the cot my thoughts alternated between pool and fishing in an attempt to rid my brain of the girl. She would be in a perfect snit by now. Perhaps it had happened a hundred times. The clerk again. Maybe only seventy-seven. A rack of pool balls lay gleaming against green felt. The one-ball is yellow but then the color of the two-ball escaped me. The water was calm and very clear and shallow and some maniacs could see tarpon coming a quarter of a mile away. They would deliver their casts with graceful fluid motions while I would chop the air in panic. In Ecuador the Indian mate was too poor to buy Polaroid glasses but he saw the caudal fins of marlin long before my perfect eyes noticed anything. Benny played pool as if the cue stick emerged from his body. Not my own alcohol and geometry. She was an asshole and I couldn't have loved her at gun point.
The late afternoon sun flowing in a sheet through the window. Why didn't I draw the blinds. Sweating with the air apparently the same temperature as my blood's. I dressed quickly in a light khaki shirt and suntans and tennis shoes. Anonymity. I took a beer from my boat cooler but the ice cubes had melted and the beer was lukewarm. I drank it looking out at the white hotness of Duval Street. The world looked askew and foreign. The girl might be just getting up from an air-conditioned nap, stretching her admittedly attractive limbs and deciding to be more careful about whom she left bars with.
In Sloppy Joe's I drank three or four glasses of beer waiting for a used-car salesman from Denton, Texas, to show up. We played pool nearly every afternoon when I got through fishing and he finished hustling sailors into car deals they couldn't afford. I was pleased with the way beer made me feel like an ordinary sot. Maybe I was really a veteran or a pipefitter or carpenter. Seventh Airborne or something like that. After a case of Budweiser I might have voted for Goldwater. A retired chief petty officer, a passing acquaintance, sat down next to me and began rattling off complaints about the weather, his car, his wife's drinking, and then politics. When drunk he was not above trying to run over a hippie. I had once teased him about the Navy's combat readiness at Pearl Harbor and that after that debacle they were lucky to get their hands on a rowboat. He was on the verge of hitting me but I apologized and bought him several drinks.
The car salesman finally came in and we played a nearly wordless hour of eightball during which I lost twelve dollars. I won five of it back playing nineball but then he left saying that the “little woman” would have dinner ready. I had a disturbing image of a female midget before a stove stirring food with teeny-weeny hands. I went back to a stool at the bar and ordered a double bourbon straight up. I was tired of going to the bathroom every fifteen minutes to get rid of the beer. I glanced out through the large open doors to see if anyone interesting was wandering around but it was the dinner hour lull and dusk still came rather early in April. Then I noticed that there was a strange-looking guy sitting directly across the circular bar staring at me. He was large with fairly long hair, tanned and extremely muscular with a small eagle tattooed on his left forearm. But the right side of his face was distorted with a bleached twist of scar tissue and it drew his eye a few degrees off center. I instantly averted my glance. Perhaps a shrimper and they're always cutting each other up.
“What are you staring at?”
“Nothing. I was looking over your head at the street.” Shot of adrenaline. A single drop of sweat moved down the inside of my leg.
He turned around and looked out the open door behind him and I drew in my breath. Then he swiveled quickly on his stool and stood up. “How about a game?”
“O.K.”
He flipped me a quarter for the rack and walked over to the jukebox. By the time he chose his cue Jim Ed Brown had started singing “Morning,” a song I rather liked about country style adultery. Who screws who in Mingo County. It seemed to me that you had to be out in the country, traveling, or rather drunk to listen to such music.
“Eightball for a buck?”
“Fine with me.”
He broke very hard and got two stripes and a solid but I quickly saw on the next shot that he was a slammer, a hard stroker who didn't play for shape. This sort of player can be very accurate but he plays with his balls, his manhood, and never leaves himself well for the next shot except by accident: a pointless arrogance, a kind of dumbbell “macho.” His speech was Southern, either Alabama or Georgia, without the sing-song effect you hear in Mississippi. While he shot I thought of a record a teacher had played for us in college with Faulkner talking about fox hunting. The record was studiously fatuous with the great man's voice high pitched and lacking the timbre one would imagine in his heroes, say Bayard Sartoris.
I won a half dozen games in a row but he was only mildly irritated. He drew the money out out of a bulky clip. There were twenties and fifties in quantity and I wondered idly why anyone would take the chance. But then I thought that it was unlikely that anyone would attack him.
“My muster pay.” He had read my thoughts.
“Vietnam?”
“A year and a half's worth.”
Now two sailors were watching us play, obviously sizing up our game for a challenge. One of them was small and wiry and was giggling while the other who was large and beefy merely stared. Then the big one put a quarter on the edge of the table which meant he was challenging the winner. I had just missed an easy shot and was irritable. It was bad etiquette to put a quarter up while someone was shooting. My partner took the quarter and deftly flipped it out into the street where it rolled rather electrically in a small circle. I held my breath.
“What are you, a smartass?” the big sailor said. My partner continued his shooting but then the sailor picked up the eight-ball and dropped it in a pocket. “That ends your game, smart-ass.”
I felt a touch of vertigo and moved instinctively toward the door but curiosity stopped me. I couldn't see any sign in my partner's face of what he was going to do except that he chewed his gum more rapidly. He looked down at his left hand which held the cue stick and then at his right which was empty. Then with startling speed he clouted the sailor in the ear with
the heel of his hand. The arc of the swing was wide but fast and the sailor collapsed on his butt with a yelp. There was a quick boot to his chest and then the cue stick pressed across his throat until he began to gag. I saw the other sailor looking at me but he only shrugged. Several barflies had gathered around us.
“We're playing pool now. When we're done you can play.” He was letting his full weight rest on his knee on the sailor's chest. Then he stood abruptly and the sailor stumbled to the door.
“Those fucking creeps think they own this town.” Now he was smiling and we sat back down at the table but the bartender was standing next to us.
“You guys are cut off.”
“You don't know what those guys said.” I found myself talking. “They said we were queers and we weren't allowed in the bar. Do we look like queers to you? What if someone called you a queer?”
The bartender paused, trying to figure out if I was bull-shitting him, but then the chief petty officer who was now terribly drunk said he had heard the whole thing. We were allowed to stay and I gave the chief the victory sign and ordered him a drink. We played another game of pool but lost interest.
“What if that guy had known karate?”
“Nobody knows karate if you get a good one in first.” He laughed and put another quarter in the jukebox.
We began drinking steadily and talked about everything excluding the war: baseball (Boog Powell who played for the Orioles was from Key West), music, fishing, the girls that now walked by the door with splendid regularity. Many of the girls were tourists or college girls down for Easter week but some were local conchs and Cubans. He liked the Cubans but I preferred the tourists as I considered Latin girls to be somewhat frightening and unreliable. For an instant I thought of the girl I had met the evening before—all that I had drunk made her seem interesting again. He said that his name was Tim and that he was from Valdosta, Georgia, and was staying a few weeks on Stock Island with his sister who was married to a Navy man he described as a “real jackoff.” We were getting fairly drunk and I wanted something to eat before I lost control. We quarreled mildly about whether a pump or a double-barreled shotgun was better for bird shooting. I really wanted to ask him about the war but felt afraid to bring it up.