Benny Gutierrez’s alcoholism and fatal liver disease

Benny Gutierrez’s alcoholism and fatal liver disease define a decline that the novel presents in two registers: his medical chart records cirrhosis and acute alcohol poisoning, while the story’s spiritual account links his final illness to the dead girl whose body he discovered. His drinking leaves him precariously housed and working, and his encounter with the girl continues to haunt him until death brings release.

Drinking and Precarious Circumstances

On November 2, 1970, Benny is working along Highway 86 west of Sells, dragging plastic trash bags as part of the Tribal Work Experience Program. He has spent the weekend drinking with friends after going to a dance at Crow Hang. Suffering from a serious hangover, he longs for fortified wine known as Big Red and would settle for beer. The episode establishes alcohol as an immediate craving as well as a recurring feature of his circumstances.

Benny’s work is tied to the need for shelter rather than any prospect of worthwhile pay. After Esther has sent him away and the credit union has repossessed his pickup, his brother Robert and sister-in-law Doreen offer him a place to stay if he works. In the cold of early November, even sleeping in a truck would no longer be a tolerable alternative. The arrangement gives him a bed, but the slow pace of the cleanup work and his hangover leave him moving without urgency; Alvin Narcho, working across the highway, is accumulating trash at much the same pace.

Encounter and Medical Cause of Death

During the cleanup, Benny discovers the body of a murdered girl in a blue-and-white Coleman cooler. The encounter becomes central to the account of his later decline: the novel does not present his death as a medical fact alone, but as an experience that continues to intrude upon him afterward.

Less than two years after that November afternoon, Benny dies at age thirty-eight. His medical chart attributes his death to cirrhosis of the liver and acute alcohol poisoning, and the narration affirms that account. His alcoholism and fatal disease thus have a direct physical explanation in the text; the spiritual explanation is presented alongside it rather than as a replacement for the recorded medical cause.

The Ghost and Benny’s Release

The narrative adds that a siwani, or medicine man, might have identified another affliction: Benny’s spirit had been infected by a kokoi, the spirit of someone dead. Even as he lies dying in a clean hospital bed, the murdered girl’s presence remains with him. Robert and Doreen are there, as is Esther, but the face he sees as he drifts into unconsciousness is the girl’s, associated with the cooler in which he found her.

Benny is freed from the girl only when he dies. That ending binds the physical consequences of his drinking to the novel’s account of spiritual disturbance without claiming that one simply explains the other. The discovery marks the beginning of an ordeal that outlasts the cleanup scene and reaches into his last moments; death is both the confirmed end of his illness and the point at which the girl finally releases him.