Praise for The Beast God Forgot to Invent:
“Jim Harrison is a writer of expansive appetite . . . ranging hungrily through genres like a vagrant at a wedding feast. . . . Now he’s back with a collection of three novellas, and Harrison has proven himself a master of this quirky literary form, combining a poetic playfulness with language with his audacious storyteller’s wit.”
The Seattle Times
“[Harrison’s] stories strip people—particularly men—to their intoxicating animal essence. . . . The Beast God Forgot to Invent is pure Harrison, a bone-jarring gallop over the landscape of masculinity.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“Vintage Harrison . . . The finest—and most prolific—novella writer in the post World War II era. He’s as dedicated to the art of this deceptively difficult literary form as Joseph Conrad. . . . [Harrison] is older, working smarter and delving deeper. . . . All of these stories wrestle with the central notion of how we should spend our time on Earth. Harrison hasn’t pinned down the answer, but he offers worthwhile ideas.”
— The Denver Post
“The magic of writing as good as Harrison’s is that it can bridge the gulf of human separation. This collection is saturated with delightful, energetic voices; rich with the captured turns of lively human thought, careening from trenchant humor, raunchy longings, ironic japes and philosophical questing. The total effect is an invigorating and provoking embrace of human contradictions.”
—The Oregonian
“Harrison is a master. . . . Rejuvenation is often within grasp if we strive for it wholeheartedly enough, is Harrison’s theme here. He demonstrates it soundly with richly conceived characters whose intellectual perspectives, etched with wit and wisdom, propel their often bold actions.”
— Santa Fe New Mexican
“Packed with familiar Harrisonian elements: strange and bold characters, good eats, and carnal desire.”
—Outside
“Habitat suitable for living a full and natural life is . . . what we are all looking for. The tales that constitute The Beast God Forgot to Invent successfully couch that search in Jim Harrison’s unique and highly imaginative world.”
—The Bloomsbury Review
“Imbued with all the gravelly melancholy of a Tom Waits ballad . . . prickly, coarse, and utterly lovable . . . Harrison has been prowling the literary edges for four decades now, stubbornly eluding the snares of critical reduction—including such dim taggings as ‘macho’ and ‘regional’—while producing a body of work so lushly idiosyncratic as to thwart even the gentlest efforts at classification. . . . With the publication of The Beast God Forgot to Invent,[Harrison’s earlier works] gain dazzling new company.”
—Salon
“Harrison’s fourth volume of novellas takes hold of you through the sweetly intoxicating influence and power of his narrative voices.”
— Booklist (starred review)
“Jim Harrison’s voice is by turns raw, driven, polished, and humorous in the face of pathos in the three novellas of The Beast God Forgot to Invent. . . . The shifting realities of identity, of dream life and waking life, of locating oneself in time and space careen through Mr. Harrison’s story.”
— The Dallas Morning News
“The Beast God Forgot to Invent. . . ranks with his best work. . . . Its nonchalantly reflective feel is a nearly perfect fit for subject matters the Zenminded Harrison has long loved to address and does so beautifully here. . . . The puzzle of how—and where—we should best be spending our time on this beautiful and messy planet.”
—The Detroit News-Free Press
“Classic Harrison, rich with human insight, littered with references to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and D. H. Lawrence and focused on familiar themes of aging and regret.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Harrison’s intricate symbolism and scathing observations of urban foibles, his sly humor and vibrant language remind readers that he is one of our most talented chroniclers of the masculine psyche.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Tightly focused gems . . . As [a character] tells us around midnight in Paris, ‘I didn’t expect, after all, to become one of those men who could enter a bar, throw his hat, and hit the hat rack every time. As a matter of fact there are no more hats and hat racks.’ I’m not so sure. Jim Harrison hits the hat rack three for three with The Beast God Forgot to Invent.”
— St. Petersburg Times
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
Also by Jim Harrison:
FICTION
Wolf
A Good Day to Die
Farmer
Legends of the Fall
Warlock
Sundog
Dalva
The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Julip
The Road Home
POETRY
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer
Letters to Yesenin
Returning to Earth
Selected New Poems
The Theory and Practice of Rivers Other Poems
After Ikkyu Other Poems
The Shape of the Journey: Collected Poems
ESSAYS
Just Before Dark
The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand
CHILDREN’S FICTION
The Boy Who Ran to the Woods
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
JIM HARRISON
Copyright © 2000 by Jim Harrison
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harrison, Jim, 1937-
The beast God forgot to invent / Jim Harrison
p. cm.
ISBN-10: 0-8021-3836-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-3836-1
1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A67B42000
813’.54—dc21
00-038620
DESIGN BY LAURA HAMMOND HOUGH
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
07 08 09 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
To Joyce and Bob Bahle
CONTENTS
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
Westward Ho
I Forgot to Go to Spain
There is no road for the gods to offer you flowers.
—Yuanwu
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
I
The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense. The discounted sociologist Jared Schmitz, who was packed off from Harvard to a minor religious college in Missouri before earning tenure when a portion of his doctoral dissertation was proven fraudulent, stated that in a culture in the seventh stage of rabid consumerism the peripheral always subsumes the core, and the core disappears to the point that very few of the citizenry can recall its precise nature. Schmitz had stupidly confided to his lover, a graduate student, that he had in fact invented certain French and German data, and when he abandoned her for a Boston toe dancer this graduate stude
nt ratted on him. This is neither specifically here nor there to our story other than to present an amusing anecdote on the true nature of academic life. Also, of course, the poignant message of a culture spending its time as it spends its money; springing well beyond the elements of food, clothes, and shelter into the suffocating welter of the unnecessary that has become necessary.
So what? This is the question that truly haunts us, coming as it does at the nether end of any statement of consequence beyond the moment, as if grave matters must prove their essential worth in a competitive arena and not demanded of the meaningless activities that saturate human lives.
But I must move on because this is actually a statement offered to a coroner’s inquest in Munising, Michigan, the county seat of Alger County in the Upper Peninsula, concerning the death of a young man of my acquaintance, Joseph Lacort. Locally he was known as just plain Joe, and he drowned thirty miles out beyond the harbor mouth near Caribou Shoals in Lake Superior. Everyone thinks he was looking for his fat Labrador retriever, Marcia, who swam pointlessly after ducks and geese and there was a large flock of Canadian geese in the harbor that day. But then what sort of madman would swim all evening and all night looking for a dog? Joe would. Myself, I think Joe committed suicide, though I consider this a detail mostly pertinent to myself as his remaining relatives doubtless feel well shut of this troublesome creature. But then the word “suicide” is a banality that doesn’t fit this extraordinary situation. Perhaps he felt summoned by the mystical creatures he thought he had seen.
Before I forget, yes I do forget who I am, no longer a matter of particular interest to me, my name is Norman Arnz, and I’m sixty-seven years old. I’m semi-retired and from Chicago where I worked in commercial real estate and as a rare-book dealer. Not that it matters but I’m the only one in my larger family, none of whom I have any contact with—we share a mutual disregard—who readapted the family name “Arnz” after it was changed to “Arns” during the First World War when the Boche were a plague. My mother was mixed Scandinavian, so I’m a northern European mongrel.
I’ve spent summers in my cabin my entire life since my father bought the property while a mining engineer for Cleveland Cliffs in Marquette, Michigan, early in the Great Depression which has now filtered down into millions of little ones in our inhabitants. Excuse this modest joke, but then any product involved with depression has done very well on the market for those dedicated to this otiose poker game. When some clod begins a sentence with “My broker . . .” I immediately turn my back.
I told the coroner I couldn’t come to Munising because of failing health when, in fact, I avoid the village because of a melancholy love affair with a barmaid a decade ago in the last deliquescent flowering of my hormones. It was a love affair to me but a well-paying job to Gretel, not her real name of course, but then our miserable affair was public knowledge in Munising.
I took the precaution of phoning Chicago the other day to determine if whether Joe’s death was suicide or accidental had any bearing on the insurance money due his mother. It doesn’t. She’s an attractive woman in her mid-fifties, deeply involved in her third abysmal marriage, this time to a logger over in Iron Mountain. I knew her first slightly in the sixties—she grew up here —when she ran off with a nitwit Coast Guardsman who became Joe’s father for a brief time.
Before I get started I must say that the end of Joe’s life was his business. Swimming north in those cold, choppy waters I can imagine his croaking laughter, the only laughter he was capable of after his accident some two years before. The aftereffect of the motorcycle accident was called a traumatic brain injury, or a closed-head injury as there was no penetration by the beech tree he ran into while quite drunk. It was lucky indeed for the tavern owner that Joe’s last six-pack was consumed on the beach before he roared off on his Ducati. I could go on here about the pointlessly litigious nature of our culture but then would anyone listen? Of course not. Even my wife said soon after we divorced some twenty years ago that she looked forward to being married to someone who didn’t make long speeches or lectures during dinner. In fact my local friend Dick Rathbone, with whom I’ve been close since we were children, actually turns off his hearing aid when I begin one of my speeches. Luckily certain old retired men on short rations will listen to me at the tavern as long as I continue buying drinks.
Until his accident in his mid-thirties Joe owned an interest in three successful sporting goods stores in central Michigan which enabled him to spend his summers up here. I’ve heard different figures but I’d guess his entire net worth, some seven hundred fifty thousand dollars, was spent on his unsuccessful rehabilitation until last May when Dick Rathbone and his sister Edna kept an eye on him for the welfare department. Dick had worked as a lowly employee of the Department of Natural Resources for thirty or so years and it was his idea, quite brilliant I think, to attach telemetric devices to both Joe and Marcia to keep track of their whereabouts. Certain newcomers to the community thought it inhumane (whatever that could mean in view of the past century) but then newcomers are generally ignored on important matters because of the essential xenophobia of the human condition. Due to his impact with the beech tree, the flubbery rattle of the brain within its shell referred to technically as “coup contracoup,” Joe lost most of his ability at visual memory, even for faces such as his mother’s and my own, a deficiency called “prosopagnosia.” Joe’s very least problem was boredom because everything he saw he saw for the first time, over and over. Each of his dawns began as a brave new world, to borrow a phrase from Aldous Huxley whose first editions have remained curiously stagnant in price.
Sometimes Joe followed Marcia but most often she followed him. His nexus was the rather ornate birdbath in Dick Rathbone’s backyard. Joe carried a good Marine-surplus compass and another was pinned to his belt. My cabin was a hundred seventy-three degrees northeast of Rathbone’s birdbath, a matter of some five miles though this wasn’t relevant to Joe. I have it on good witness that in June near the summer solstice he walked all the way to Seney and back to get a particular kind of ice-cream bar that Dick’s sister had forgotten while grocery shopping, a round-trip of fifty miles which took about fourteen hours, a double marathon though Joe viewed his pace as leisurely. A park ranger at the nearby National Lakeshore had maintained Joe walked up and down the immense sand dunes at the same speed. When I asked him about this he clumsily explained that it was apparently due to his injury, and that he was helpless to change his gait which was a little problematical during his night walking due to the brush.
Frankly I didn’t care at all for him before his injury. Despite his financial success downstate he would become immediately loutish up here, aping his local friends. It’s hard enough to have your foot in one world, let alone two, and catering to egregious pricks out of childhood nostalgia is a poor way to conduct your life. He used to drink rather vast amounts of beer, which caused pointless quarrels with whatever girlfriend was visiting. The impulse behind this kind of beer drinking is mysterious. Dick Rathbone has supposed they actually like to piss which they will do a dozen times in an evening. I called an old friend in Chicago on this matter out of idle curiosity. This friend is a true rarity, a gay psychiatrist of Italian parentage named Roberto. I exclude his last name because the world is his closet, as it were. Oddly enough Roberto agreed with our humble Dick Rathbone, but I can’t really imagine the nature of this impulse. We all have our limits, don’t we? The will to pee, indeed.
Fairly early one morning in July Sonia, a registered nurse from Lansing and one of Joe’s girlfriends, showed up at my cabin saying she had agreed to meet him there. It was already warm and she wore an unnerving shorts and halter. When I brought her coffee I could see her nipples and when she drew her leg up on her chair I caught a glimpse of pubic hair. Unlike women in my younger days she was utterly nonchalant about exposing herself and I felt the mildest of buzzing sensations plus a certain giddiness I hadn’t known in years. Naturally I tried to determine immediately if
this was a good or bad experience and came up with something between the two. We are mere victims, mere supplicants, in the face of what a Mexican friend calls the “divina enchilada.”
Her knees were more than a bit abraded and I retrieved some Bactine and cotton which she allowed me to administer with a smile. She said Joe had said he was walking up the small river, in the river at that, to visit the grave of an infant bear he had buried in late May. I asked her if she had fallen and she laughed heartily saying that Joe had “fucked” her relentlessly “dog style” on the beach which had been hard on her knees. Now I had met Sonia several times before but one would think this kind of information would be shared with only the closest of friends. I nodded and allowed myself a chuckle. Nurses do tend to be matter-of-fact because of their contiguity to death. After about fifteen minutes she asked if she could rest on the couch and assumed an even more daring position before she began the slightest of snores. Here I was, a prisoner in my own house, trying to read a previously fascinating botanical text but unable to pass through a couple of sentences without another look at Sonia. I admit at one point I knelt rather closely with a devil-may-care attitude toward getting caught. After all, it was my house.
And thus the morning passed until near noon when I fell asleep with my face pressed against the botanical text rather than something more interesting. I awoke to the sound of the shower and Marcia, Joe’s Labrador, barking loudly. I was slow to react, dreaming of all things of my favorite Chicago steakhouse, and damping a botanical plate with drool, when Sonia rushed past me in a towel. She stooped outside and petted Marcia who was obviously trying to get someone to follow her. My concern was leavened over the missing Joe somewhat by noting what a poor job the towel was doing covering Sonia. She was all for following Marcia which I advised to be a bad idea. Instead I called Dick Rathbone on my car cellular—there was no phone line to my cabin—and told him the problem. While we waited Sonia sat on a chair in her towel and began weeping. I stood beside her patting and rubbing her shoulders to comfort her. When a woman weeps I am desperately uncomfortable partly because neither my mother nor wife wept except on the rarest occasions. Sonia blubbered on about Joe’s absolutely hopeless condition which she certainly knew as a nurse. I began, of all things, to get an erection which would be obvious in my summer-weight chinos. I tried to move away but Sonia grabbed my arm weeping piteously then, noting my erection, gave it the brisk finger snap that nurses do, laughed, and called me an “old goat.” she dressed right smack in front of me with a boldly amused look, my heart aching with her insult.