Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

When they reached the pond Robert built a small fire and they heated a can of baked beans, all that was left of their food supplies. She ordinarily didn’t like them but on this evening they were delicious. They snuggled up in the sleeping bag near the fire where Grandpa found them at dawn.

Catherine remembered this fondly twenty-five years after the fact. Mother drove out to pick them up. She had a black eye. Dad had pounded on her until she called the deputy who hauled Dad off to the jail in Livingston where he would be spending a second night. He never forgave her for the public shame of this.

Catherine tilted the urn to the side and dumped out the rest of the ashes into the water. Her finger touched what was obviously a piece of vertebra and she felt a chill. She felt oddly serene sitting there until she thought that she must go back to the house and feed Tim his lunch. Hud was asleep, tired from his night of wandering. She would have Clyde build a pen to contain him at night when he wasn’t sleeping inside because of bad weather. He was having a pretty good life with her and little Tim and now Lola who was obsessed with sweeping the floors. Hud already fawned over Lola and Catherine remembered the man’s joke about interspecies love as she passed the chicken yard. There she had sat in the second grade, making notes outside the henhouse while sitting on the milk stool.

From his upstairs bedroom at 6:00 a.m. Sunderson could dimly hear his cell phone in his jacket pocket down in his study. It was more irritating then getting up to pee on a cold night. He was proud of the way his prostate was holding up at his age, also of his ears and their acute hearing in an era when many had destroyed their hearing with loud rock music.

The phone calls had been nearly continuous since 5:00 a.m. and he wanted to jerk the caller’s teeth out with his Griplock pliers. He normally arose shortly before 7:00 a.m., flipped the coffee machine on, and went to his study, pulled out a book from the shelf that blocked the window, and gazed at his neighbor Delphine doing her nude yoga. She knew he was watching and was enthused because it helped what she called “sexual repression.” Last Thursday she had masturbated in plain view, then called to say that her husband had gone to East Lansing and they could enjoy themselves. He hustled over to the back door in his old terry-cloth robe and she met him in her bare skin smelling of Camay soap.

Sunderson was ready early with his coffee and had pulled a study titled The Jongleurs for his view. She was flat on her tummy in a position called Snake’s Pose, one of his favorites as it showed her sumptuous ass and the concealed goodies. In the year or so they had been playing the game her husband had showed up only once to make love to her. Sunderson had quickly replaced the book. He didn’t want to start the day seeing a nude man, always a laughable sight. Her husband was a stiff who taught American literature at the local university. She taught anthropology and was tremendously popular with students while these same students ignored a course of her husband’s devising called “Faulkner vs. Hemingway,” as if the two writers had been in a foot- race. He had told Sunderson that he had hoped to become the department chairman and perhaps a dean someday. He was without apparent personality and she had told Sunderson that he had some money on the side which afforded them the opportunity to spend their summers in Europe. That was why she married him. The money enabled her to visit archaeological digs in southern France and Spain. Her academic career was limited because she had never finished her Ph.D. dissertation despite working on it for fourteen years. Her excuse was that her mentor professor at Cornell had died and no one else was capable of dealing with her complicated writing.

Sunderson had noted that his voyeurism lacked the punch it had when he was watching his young ex-neighbor Mona, whom his ex-wife had later adopted, in her nude calisthenics. His neighbor shifted into the Royal Flux with her legs flopped up and over her head. He actually yawned rather than feeling his worm turn. He was not prone to fully accepting aging though he knew very well that it was what caused his sexuality to be less than rampant.

The other day on a warm afternoon he was sitting on the front porch reading the paper, the Mining Gazette , when Barbara, a lovely girl from down the street, broke her bicycle chain in front of his house. He fetched his pliers and small hammer from the kitchen and fixed it, removing a link. It was too loose anyway. Meanwhile she squatted in front of him with her weight on her haunches. It was simply electrifying with her bare lovely legs under the blue skirt leading upward to the white undies with a slight indication of pubic hair. He was naturally engrossed and tarried at the simple job. She had done well in the state high school gymnastics championships but was lithe rather than short and muscular like most female gymnasts.

“There you are,” he said, finishing the job.

“Did you enjoy the view?” she asked coquettishly.

“Yes, frankly, it was wonderful,” he said taking a last look before she got up.

“My uncle Bob will sit on a chair for an hour if I’m on the sofa with my dress up a little. It’s really quite funny.”

“It’s the nature of man,” Sunderson said self-righteously. She had to be sixteen and above the age of consent.

“Boys are terrible now. All they want day after day is blow jobs.” She was apparently eager to talk about sex.

“Well, I suppose you avoid pregnancy.”

“I simply don’t like it one bit. I’m saving for college if you have any work you need done. I’m good at weeding. I get two bucks an hour.”

“I have a flower garden that needs work when you have time.”

“Sure thing.” She hiked up her dress to throw a leg over the bike seat, a view which gave him a jolt. She smiled and rode off.

She hadn’t returned as of yet. He meant to have her rake some leaves which he loathed doing. People in Munising used to be cheapskates. You’d rake for hours and get blisters on your hands for a couple of quarters that you very much needed. He was always saving for another fishing reel he’d seen in the Montgomery Ward catalog.

It was a warm day for September and later that morning he saw Barbara in a pair of tan shorts in the grocery store buying a box of Cheerios. He imagined her eating from her bowl in her early morning nightie. When she saw him she cocked her hips and apologized for not yet taking care of his flowers saying, “Maybe this afternoon.” He had no plans other than to watch the University of Michigan — Michigan State football game on television. When he got home he arranged a peeking laboratory up in his bedroom where a window looked out on the backyard flower garden. He adjusted its shade for concealment and polished his binoculars. Barbara made him lonesome for his ex-girlfriend Monica who had worked at the Landmark Inn in town, but now had a boyfriend close to her own age, a college student at that. Monica liked sex even more than he did and during their months together he was frankly so worn out that he missed a lot of the last week of trout season. Since Monica left a couple of months before, he had made love twice to his ex-wife Diane. He had had dinner at her place and been lucky enough to see Mona, who was home for the weekend from college, step out of the shower. He winced and ran for the kitchen where he had a nasty glass of Diane’s cooking sherry.

An insane desire occurred to him to go down on Barbara, as unlikely an idea as world peace. Did this call for the services of a mind doctor? Sexual fantasies could easily become tiresome, the mind migrated anywhere it could get its nose tweaked. He defended himself with the contention that Barbara was aesthetically overwhelming but even he had to admit that this was truly lame. Her father was on the city council and they had been at odds several times. He was a classic liberal who was sure the police were forever on the verge of taking away human rights from everyone.