Free Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison Page A

straight four-point he headed for Caltech for graduate school. When we talk on the phone I begin with “You warm enough, Herald?” and he always says, “Sure am, Dad.”
    The other day K took me for a ride up to Big Bay but the day didn’t turn out quite as well as I hoped. Big Bay made me think about murder again and then I couldn’t swallow the hamburger K bought me at the bar and it smelled so good. I thought, “Look at me, I can’t even eat a hamburger and in my working days I’d sometimes eat five for lunch.” I thoughtabout murder in Big Bay because I remembered watching this famous movie made in the area many years ago. [He’s talking about the movie
Anatomy of a Murder
with James Stewart, Ben Gazzara, and Lee Remick, part of which was shot in the Big Bay area. C.] I think I was about ten at the time and watched it with my dad, who treated me like a grown-up man at that time because I could do a man’s work. It had been two years since Mother had gone away and he had pretty much got his sense of humor back, which could be pretty rough. For instance at school a lot of kids called me Donny Injun and some of them not in a nice way. All my dad had to say was “You’ll have to live with it.” Once he had to come to school to see the principal because I had gotten in a couple of fights over being called Donny Injun. He bawled me out, saying, “You can’t fight over someone calling you a name. Only if they punch you.” I was upset because I didn’t think he understood me because being a little more than a quarter he could pass for an ordinary white person. My darker skin and bigger nose and cheekbones came from my mother, who was three-quarters pure-blood. It was hard also at this time because of Floyd booting the puppy to death.
    Anyway, I was sitting there in the fancy car Cynthia bought in the parking lot of the bar waiting for K and thinking about the murder movie. The woman in it was a real peach but then my thoughts went back to Floyd again. Sometimes you can’t control your thinking, and then this little girl came up to the open car window and asked, “Are you a real Indian?” and I said, “About half,” and she said, “How can anyone be half?” And then her dad, who was talking tosomeone in front of the bar for directions because he was a tourist, came trotting over, grabbed his daughter, and yelled at me, “Don’t talk to my daughter,” like I was a pervert. People are set on scaring the shit out of their kids these days. Well, K was just coming to the car with a sack of burgers and with his other hand twisted the guy’s ear and said, “Get the fuck out of here.” The guy was terrified of K and his funny haircut and took off with his poor kid. It was unpleasant.
    I’m slow to get to the worst thing about me. Last year before I lost most of my strength to this disease I had K drive me up to Baraga because I planned on killing Floyd. For years I thought that if I was dying of a dread disease I’d take Floyd along. I had to be dying because I couldn’t stand the idea of being locked into a prison. I can’t even sleep with tight covers or in a zipped-up sleeping bag. When I was real little and out of hand my mother would shut me up in a broom closet but not for real long. She said that if I didn’t behave a ghost that was half bear would eat me up in this closet. And then when I was in the second grade the teacher taped my mouth and shut me in a janitor’s closet. At recess Melvin had been pestering these older girls and they jumped him, took off his pants, and threw them in the pond. Melvin was real short so I had to wade in and get his pants, and I was punished because we weren’t supposed to go in the pond. It was fenced off because a kid had drowned there years before when he fell through the ice at recess. Well, the teacher forgot to let me out of the