Dalva by Jim Harrison Page A

of themselves, finally, as garbage and are willing prey to all those who victimize them sexually, and later on, emotionally. Somehow the fact that there is no home doesn’t decrease the longing. I’m not sure why. Of necessity we can create layers of activities to cover this longing but it is always felt beneath the surface. To become inert has always been to me the worst of survival tactics. The professor says that time is the most natural of artificialities, and that no one but a nitwit lives within its mechanistic specifics. An event of a few moments dominates years. Just now I was thinking of the precise moment I had to give up Duane’s necklace.

    On my seventeenth birthday, on October 10, my grandfather, with the grudging permission of Naomi, gave me my first car. It was a new turquoise-colored Ford convertible with a white top and looked desperately inappropriate in the Nebraska landscape, especially parked next to Mother’s drab and muddy Plymouth. I stood embarrassed in the yard in front of everyone—Charlene and Lena were out from town—until I took my cue from Ruth who was jumping around wildly. We went for a ride, with me driving and Charlene and Ruth on the seat beside me. It was sunny though cool for October but we put the top down anyway and drove into town, stopping at the single drive-in which was a meeting place for young people. Everyone was friendly, even one of the boys that Duane hadbeaten up. There is a haphazard resilience in young people that is not shared by adults, an ability to forget bitterness. Something as stupid and vulgar as a pretty car can be a tonic to all, at least for an afternoon.
    I think the car hastened the death of my grandfather though he tried to absolve me of this notion on his deathbed. What happened is that the car equaled freedom to me, and naturally a longer-range freedom than that of walking or horseback. Perhaps this is less true of women than men, but in my upbringing the differentiation wasn’t emphasized. On sleepless nights I would go downstairs, flick on the yard light, and look out at the car. Sometimes I would take an old road atlas and touring guide out of the parlor desk and study the possibilities. I began to slowly draw small amounts of money out of my savings account before I had a definite plan. For the first time in several years I counted my collection of silver dollars I had started as a little girl. There was also a stack of ten twenty-dollar gold pieces that Grandfather had found behind some books in his library in the summer. He had said “Spend these on a gewgaw or whatever.” It occurred to me that it would look suspicious if I tried to buy gas or a motel room with a twenty-dollar gold piece. I was on the verge of jumping into one of those holes in life out of which we emerge a bit tattered and bloody though we remain nonetheless sure that we had to make the jump.
    One evening a few weeks after my birthday, when our part of Nebraska had entered a warm Indian summer, I was out in the driveway wiping the car windows with a chamois cloth. The insides of the car windows were covered with the nose prints of Grandfather’s Airedales. That day, when I had driven to his house after school, he had suggested we take the dogs for a spin with the top down. The dogs sat in the backseat rather grave and self-important as we drove down mile after mile of gravel roads. Grandfather had bronchitis and sipped whiskey from a flask, talking about how in the fine, early years of his marriage he and his wife (this was in the late thirties) would jump in their car and drive all the way to Chicago in less than three days just to eat in a bona-fide French restaurant. At a crossroads he permitted the frantic dogs to jump out and chase a coyote—in a lifetime of chasing coyotes they had nevercaught one save the pups in the den. This coyote had a sense of humor and ran in great circles, passing the car several times with the dogs kept at a