Read Online Dalva by Jim Harrison - Free Book Online

tuxedo for Charlene to wear, because we were supposed to be a couple and thought the sham might pass muster. In the northeast corner of the county there was a big concentration of Polish and Slovakian farm families and they always won the contest. Naomi thought the dress Lena designed for me was rather too short, but Lena pointed out that all the judges were male and there was no point in “fighting reality.”
    We won handily before a crowd of a thousand or so cowboys,yokels, bumpkins, big farmers, marginal farmers, wives, children, 4-H Club members, schoolboys in blue FFA (Future Farmers of America) jackets. Grandfather told me that there was no question that we were the best, not forgetting Ruth at the piano, but my legs didn’t hurt our chances. Curiously, I was no longer upset at a reference to my body, and the fact that a group of town boys cheered for “Squaw” pleased me. Away from the others, out behind the grandstand in the dark, Charlene and I sat on the grass and watched the gaudy lights of the Ferris wheel and the yellow square that was the entrance to the horse barn. I felt a sharp pain at the thought that I might have competed with Duane at calf roping. Grandfather had assured me that Duane had asked about me when he had retrieved the buckskin. Suddenly Charlene put an arm around me and kissed me deeply on the lips. I pulled away and she apologized and said she hoped she hadn’t ruined our friendship. I said of course not. I had been through enough that so direct a gesture failed to shock me, and besides, I knew that Charlene hated men. She cried so I reassured her over and over that we would be friends forever. We still are, though she lives in Paris now with a third husband and we haven’t seen each other in several years. At the time the experience reminded me of the novels I was reading, and Charlene’s lips on mine were merely part of a chapter.

    Andrew stopped by this afternoon to say I may have to move. The boy’s uncle, Guillermo Sandoval by name, can’t be reliably controlled except by a bullet, and unless I would agree to that measure, moving was the only option. I wouldn’t agree. Andrew expected that, and went to some lengths to describe what kind of man we were dealing with: a barrio drug enforcer, a U. S. citizen out of McAllen, Texas, so he couldn’t be deported; an intelligent psychopath who claimed that he and his nephew were in love (!), a man who claimed he didn’t hate me for causing his aerial whipping though God would surely cause me to have an accident at some point. Meanwhile Ted had had the man put under twenty-four-hour surveillance, which might prompt rash behavior if discovered. I asked Andrewhow he found all of this out. He said he “held a gun to the sucker’s head.”
    When Andrew left I sat at my balcony and stared at the summery Pacific and thought how deeply irrational the situation had become, that just beneath the ordinary skin of ordinary life—the life that looked so comforting and normal from the balcony—something uncontrollable was whirling with all the indirection of the Brownian movement. The posture of writing it down is after the fact; the event recorded in tranquillity has a larger sense of tranquillity than it has earned.

    But I am getting ahead of myself. It was some time before I realized that it was my uncle Paul who saved my weary soul that summer. I had come to him in Patagonia, Arizona, actually south of a point between Patagonia and Sonoita, by a circuitous route. The Monday after Thanksgiving Mother drove me northeast toward Marquette, Michigan, on Lake Superior where I was to live with her cousin and his wife and have my baby. It was a two-day trip that was stretched into five by snowstorms. We spent nights in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Blue Earth, Minnesota; Minneapolis; and two nights in Duluth, before reaching Marquette on the kind of brilliant, cloudless day that signals the passing