Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison Page A

There’s way too much I don’t understand.
    One thing I can’t get my head around is that no one seems to be equipped to understand the passage of time. When my son Herald was home for Christmas we talked this over and he said, “No one understands that sort of thing, Dad.” Herald says that one thing he loves about mathematics is that there’s no emotional content. Herald’s girlfriend jilted him when he was a senior in high school and he never got over it. She wanted to get married after graduation and he wanted to go to college. Clare told Cynthia that in Los Angeles Herald sees this young woman who is Mexican and works as a stripper in a nightclub. This information knocked our socks off. Clare said that Herald even flew down to Hermosillo and met her parents. I loved hearing this because for a long time it seemed to me that my son actually liked being lonely. It seemed to me that Herald was similar to a bunch of drunks I have known who seemed to want to be lonely and misunderstood. They had a secret gripe against the world that could only be drowned out by alcohol. Herald’s grief over this girl Sonia could only be healed by mathematics.
    Drunks seem to want to cut themselves off from others. I’m not an authority on this because I’ve never been a drunk. Cynthia says it’s partly because I’m large and it takes too much to get me cranked up. She’s real leery about alcohol because of her parents. Her mother, whom I learned to love, became okay when she left her husband, who was truly an awful man in so many ways that just thinking about him confuses you. He sold his son David’s cabin out from under him when David was down in Chicago with Polly studying religion.
    I’m all over the place. Alcohol doesn’t run much in my family. My dad said he had trouble when he returned from the Korean War. He stopped drinking because he knew he would lose my mother if he didn’t. He had tried to drown himself but changed his mind when he got to the bottom of the lake off the pier. One thing that truly bothered him was cutting open an enemy soldier’s stomach to stick his feet in to keep them from freezing. You look at Korea on the map and you see it’s real far north and they experience a hard winter just like we do in the U.P. Men are always quick to go to war and if it doesn’t kill them it kicks the shit out of them. Some of them recover and some don’t and who knows why. I knew a fellow pretty well who had a hard time in Vietnam and one day he drove his motorcycle off the end of a half-built bridge at a hundred miles an hour. He told his friends he was going to do it and some of them watched. They built a fire and had hot dogs and beer for his last meal and off he went. After many years of not wanting to think about her father Cynthia checked out his war record, then went down to Mexico and talked to her father’s old buddyand employee Jesse, who was retired down there with his own people. Anyway, Cynthia found out that early in the war on some South Pacific island, I forget which, her dad was an officer and after a battle ninety-three of his hundred men came up dead. I knew Jesse’s daughter Vera, who was a real peach.
    This was a real hard time and even now so many years later I know it’s hard for Cynthia to listen to but I want Clare and Herald to know my own feelings on the matter. One of the truest things I’ve ever heard is that the evil men do lives after them. David Sr. was always the talk of the town in the way that working folk can be amazed at the behavior of rich people. He had what some call a “drinking problem” but in fact was just a mean-minded drunk with a hankering for girls that were too young for sex. His right-hand man Jesse, who everyone in town liked, brought his twelve-year-old daughter Vera up from Mexico so she could learn English. She was beautiful and she and Cynthia’s brother got an instant