Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  I found the Chief just after daylight as soon as I could pick out my triangulation points. I dove with a single tank and the gill net and a light to help me find the body. The Chief had tipped over on his side as if he were sleeping. There was a school of lake trout that looked like they were standing guard. I was all business and wrapped the big body in the gill net and towed it upward with a rope. I can’t tell you why things weigh less under water. I tied off the body at about fifteen feet to ensure clearance when I towed it through the channel to Little Lake.

  So far so good, you might say. I thought I was making smart moves while I was doing it, all cool as a cucumber. I pulled the body up to the dock where the ice truck was parked. How was I to know there was this old Audubon-type woman down the beach trying to find a kind of plover that is nearly extinct? She was watching me all the time through binoculars and she said in court that when she saw me load the Chief into the ice truck it struck her as “peculiar.” And there was another thing I was missing out on that would have given me cold feet. I always listen to country music on the Ishpeming station and never the Top Forty out of Newberry. Little did I know that the town of Newberry was treating the missing ice truck as the crime of the century. Not much has happened there since the state closed down the nut house. I bought a whole roomful of their furniture once for twenty bucks to fill an empty deer shack. I don’t know why but it was comforting to have furniture that was all worn out by crazy people. So there I was driving down a two-track in a dark green ice truck not knowing that an old woman was on her way to the Rainbow Lodge at the mouth of the Two-Hearted River to call the cops.

  When I reached the cabin I hid the truck in the woods and drove my van into town to the hardware store to see if the eyes had arrived by UPS. This wasn’t suspicious as Bob sends out artifacts through UPS all the time. The eyes had come and I opened them in the van and rolled them in my hand. They were sort of disappointing as they were blue and not too realistic. There was a note from Shelley that read: “Dearest B.D., Here are your eyes. My tits and pussy ache for you. Behave yourself. Your Love Pumpkin. P.S. See you this weekend.”

  Shelley is quite the potty mouth for such a high-class girl. I never ran into this before in a woman and it threw me off balance. After I met her in the bar that night two years ago we agreed to meet the next day. That was a downfall of sorts as I took her out to the burial mounds to impress her in order to screw her. In a way I was like Adam in the Garden I guess. We started necking out there in the clearing in the woods and she shrieked, “Stick your dick in me, you asshole,” and it stopped me cold for fifteen minutes or so. I never even heard the lowest-class lady talk like this when making love. This talk took some getting used to during a sacred act (or so I am told) but I’ve learned to like it a bit over the past two years.

  Anyway, I put the two eyes in my pocket and went in the Dunes Saloon to calm my nerves. The weather had turned hot which put me on edge and meant I’d have to keep the truck’s refrigeration unit running nearly full time. My nerves forced me into a double whiskey when I realized I hadn’t yet looked the Chief full in the face from close up, then I had to order a beer chaser because the whiskey was catching in my throat. Bob came in with grease to his elbows from working on the Evinrude. He asked about my earache and I said both of them were ringing. He was pretty upset because the diving season was just beginning and he didn’t have the money to replace the lower unit.

  “How about I offer you five thousand dollars for a day’s work?” I found myself saying. I sketched out the story in a whisper leaving out the fact that the truck was stolen. At first he was angry over my breaking the bonds of our partnership so I edged up his share to seventy-five hundred. All we had to do was drive the Chief to Chicago. He said he’d call Avakian and meet me at the cabin. Meanwhile, I should install the eyes as he didn’t want to fool with the body.

  I drove out to the cabin all warm with the feeling I was no longer in the scheme alone. It was easy enough to burn down a chicken coop years ago but now I was in the big time and I had to act strong like Robert Mitchum does in the movies. Just by the way Mitchum talks or lights a cigarette you know he’s not fooling around. When I got to the cabin I stood there in the gathering heat and watched the last of the south wind stop in the trees. I could hear the soft putt-putt of the ice truck’s refrigeration unit in its hiding place out in the woods. I strode right toward it rattling the eyes in my palm as if they were dice. I paused at the back of the truck in full sweat because of the heat, then opened the door.

  The Chief was still wrapped in the gill net and the sunlight struck across his chest, his head still in the shadows. It occurred to me I shouldn’t have painted the truck camo green from its original white because it was absorbing too much sun and heat. I got halfway in and unwrapped part of the gill net around the Chief’s head and slid him down so I could see better what I was doing. He owned the biggest head I’ve ever seen on a man so there would be plenty of room for the eyes. I looked down and saw there was some water on the floor which told me I was dealing with meltage. This didn’t bother me too much as we would be driving mostly at night which would cool it off. I figured after I got the eyes in I would throw some boughs and bed sheets on the truck top for the time being. Just then, as I was looking up the Chief let out a moan and some air which flubbered his lips. Suffice it to say I threw myself backwards out the door, knocking my wind out when I hit the ground. I felt like I was full of hot jelly I was so scared. I hadn’t even moved a minute later when Bob drove up and came down the trail into the woods.

  He looked down at me, then in the truck door at the Chief, quickly slamming the door. “Jesus,” he said, “that’s fucking Frankenstein.” He helped me up and I told him what happened. “Just gas,” he said, having seen it before in dead bodies. Bob suggested we start right away instead of waiting for dark so the wind could help cool off my paint job. Avakian wanted us there before dawn and the trip was over five hundred miles. I’d wait and see if Avakian would pay extra for the eyes. Little did Bob and I know that bodies aren’t a case of finders-keepers.

  Right now I am back in present time with my rabbit stew bubbling on the stove. Old Claude just walked in without a knock. He said he smelled something to eat a half mile away, then asked for a drink. There is something in the air up here that makes us lie a lot. For instance, if you catch three brook trout you say you caught fifteen, and if you caught fifteen you say you caught three. If things are terrible you pretend you’re okay, but if things are going too smoothly you tend to piss in the whiskey and create a problem. I’m not sure why this is true. I told Claude I didn’t have any booze in the cabin and he started sniffling loudly and said he smelled schnapps, McGillicuddy’s Peppermint Schnapps, in fact. I got the bottle out of the cupboard and took a big swig first in case he had it in mind to hog the rest. When I handed him the bottle he sat by the stove and just looked at it for a long while before drinking. He always acts like this when he has something important to say.

  Claude is in his midseventies and he just walked seven miles out here to tell me something but he was in no rush. He carries a big garbage bag folded up in his pocket to crawl into in case it rains or the snow is wet, or he just wants to take a nap. Claude’s the one who told me that every tree is different from every other tree. I thought about this for a week, then told Bob who didn’t think it was such a big deal. Claude has a weak spot for Shelley even though he thinks she’s up to no good. He tells her a lot about the old ways of the Chippewa though I know he makes most of it up on the spot.

  It wasn’t until I set out two bowls for supper that Claude told me the news. First of all Shelley wanted me to come over to Marquette tomorrow because she and Tarah were feeling blue. Claude said they were at the Ramona Inn but I was pretty sure it was the Ramada. Then came the shocker. Just this afternoon while Claude was wandering around in the boondocks for reasons of his own, he came upon two fellows setting up camp despite the bad weather. It just so happened that the two guys were Sh
elley’s friends and classmates, the asshole with the red hair I’d met several times and the small blond fellow who walks around being sincere about everything. The blond guy had given me a book of poetry by a fruitcake Arab by the name of Gibran that I couldn’t understand, so I gave it to a tourist girl and it made her horny as a toad.

  When I heard about the camp certain things were clear. Claude said when they drove off he came out of hiding and snooped in their tent, finding a whole tube of marked-up topographical maps. It dawned on me Shelley wanted me over in Marquette so I wouldn’t run into the two guys looking for my burial mounds out in the woods. I got so angry that I couldn’t eat my rabbit stew, then I calmed down in a few minutes and it was so good we finished the whole pot. Sad to say we didn’t have a single beer to go with it, and the schnapps was gone.

  I drove Claude back to town and we decided on the spur of the moment to have a nightcap at the Dunes. Sure enough Shelley’s friends were there. To protect their identities I’ll call them Jerk and Jerkoff. They were all smiles and pretended surprise that Shelley was in Marquette. After buying us a drink they said they were headed back to the Superior Hotel for a night’s rest. When they left Frank came over and warned me that the two of them were talking about me to Shelley on the pay phone. I felt my muscles tighten as if they were steel. “I’m going to deal hard with those shitsuckers,” I said. Frank offered to loan me an axe but I thought that was going a little far. You never know when Frank is kidding.

  The next day dawned bright and clear. I wasn’t feeling great but a lot better than the day before. I made a thick bacon and raw onion sandwich which always gives me energy. It was about seven and I knew I should wait until ten before I checked out their camp as they would likely be out on their burial search at that time. If Shelley was blue I was a whole lot bluer. I’m not talking about feeling betrayed, because I saw that coming, but the idea that far too much had been happening in the past four months for me to get my balance.

  When Shelley probes me she can’t get over what she calls my “preferences” and “life choices.” For instance, my favorite thing is just plain walking in the woods. I can do it days on end without getting tired of it. I mix this up a bit with fishing and hunting. Of course I like to make love and drink. That goes without saying. Before I started diving for Bob I sometimes had to cut pulp which is hard work. When I cut pulp my favorite moments were drinking cold water, making my dinner, then falling asleep because I was bone tired. I think I’ve seen every bird up here but I don’t know their official names which irritates Shelley. Perhaps no one is who they seem to be. Shelley also thinks that what with my being pretty much an orphan, and with an old man as a parent, I was raised as if I myself were an old man with no expectations, no drive and ambition. When I agreed she didn’t want me to, so I said I’ve been around a bit and there’s a lot worse things than that. To be sure, it is strange to be an orphan and have to invent yourself because you don’t know the facts. Having parents would give you an anchor on earth, but when you’re an orphan you’re always dreaming about how you came to be, and you could well pass your life dreaming. Or walking around in the woods.

  This reminds me of the finest thing I ever saw, and which upset Shelley so much we skipped the next day’s probing. I was about ten at the time and we were living over west of Escanaba. It was the day before school let out before Christmas vacation and a storm had begun in the morning so we were let out of school early. The problem was that the wind had been coming from the south up across Lake Michigan bringing in rain because the lake hadn’t completely cooled down. But then the wind, as it always does, came around to the west, then the northwest, increasing to about fifty knots and we had a full-blown gale and blizzard sweeping down all the way from Manitoba. First it was the rain turning to ice, then a foot or so of wet snow freezing up as it turned cold, then another foot or two of dry snow casting in drifts so it came halfway up the kitchen window. It was a hellish storm and by late afternoon the electricity went off. That didn’t matter to us as our heat was wood anyhow and we had twenty cords stacked against the back of the house, with another two cords of dry maple in the pump shed. We just lit the oil lamps and continued to play cribbage which we always did during storms.

  Somewhere in the middle of the night the wind stopped and moonlight came in my frosted-up window. I blew my breath on the window to make a peephole in the frost. I remember staring at the field outside and the woods beyond and feeling quite satisfied that I wasn’t an animal freezing my ass off. Then I saw a movement way out in the field near the edge of the woods, a black shape wobbling around and coming slowly toward the house. My skin pricked up with fright before I realized it had to be our neighbors. I also remember Grandpa was worried about David Four Feet’s mother because she was due to have a baby and her husband was in jail for getting drunk and slugging the deputy. The upshot was that I woke up Grandpa and he got dressed in a hurry and went plunging through the deep snow to help out. It was David, his two brothers and sister Rose dragging a toboggan with their mother aboard. She was in labor and the kids, none of them over ten, were upset and their legs were bleeding from the crusted snow. Grandpa put the mother in his bed and the kids in the parlor where he attended to their wounds with me helping out and fetching hot water, bandages and iodine.

  He made the kids stay in the parlor, then put another pot of water on the stove, and we went in to help the mother. I mostly stood there and let her squeeze my arms and hands and within a half hour out came a baby girl with the help of Grandpa giving a tug or two. When he held the baby up and cleaned the gunk off and it started crying he said to me that this would be the finest thing I’d ever seen and this was how every person came into the world. I believed it though my arm hurt and was all bruised up from her squeezing. They all stayed with us for four days and we had a grand time playing games and cards and tobogganing though it didn’t make Rose and her mother like me later on. I must have been an unlikable kid.

  That afternoon in July before Bob and I took off for Chicago with the Chief we had more than a few cold beers to fight the heat, and me with a plumb empty stomach. The beer filled me with courage and I took an easy chair out to the truck and tied the Chief down on it so he wouldn’t be sliding around in an undignified way. A thing worth doing is worth doing well, they say. I also stuck in the blue eyes. It was then I made an important discovery I have divulged to no one. It was possible the Chief had been murdered because of the piece of frayed rope around his ankle. On a whim I ran my hand through his ice-cold hair until my fingers touched a hole that could have been made by a bullet. It was then I checked his trousers and came up with a thin wallet which never occurred to me before. Everything in the wallet had turned to mush except a plastic-coated driver’s license that read Ted Sleeping Bear and a Marinette, Wisconsin, address. The license had an expiration date of November in 1965 so the body wasn’t nearly so old as I thought, right around twenty-five years in Lake Superior. I pitched the wallet in the brush and hid the license in the outhouse where it still is today.

  I drove first and only made it halfway between Grand Marais and Seney before the hot air and the truck’s bad exhaust system made me sick. I rinsed my face in some ditch water but it was warm and green. I was dizzy and my clothes stuck to me and Bob was anxious to get going. I said I’d ride in the back with the Chief and cool off and he said, “B.D., you got a real set of balls.” By this time, though, I wasn’t afraid of the Chief, and to be truthful, while riding back there in the cold dark I got to thinking he might be my dad. Of course I was half drunk and sick, also afraid of being caught, so my mind was a bit crazy. This is what the court called “delusional.” There was nothing to say the Chief wasn’t my dad. Marinette is across the river from Menominee which is less than fifty miles from Bark River. Of course Shelley has pointed out just about any man near sixty years old or older could be my dad. Be that as it may, the idea set itself in concrete in my mind, which shows again I had no talent for crime. All Grandpa would ever
say was that his wife was a bad woman and so was their daughter, so he finally kicked them both out when I was a baby and raised me himself. Just before he died in the old folks’ home I tried to badger him out of more information but he just said, “B.D., cut that shit out,” and told the story he had told so many times about how he started to cut a big hemlock to get it out of the way for the skidder and it tipped over uprooting itself. Out popped a big bear that had been hibernating under the tree roots but the bear was still too sleepy to be pissed off. The bear just looked at him and walked away. Then when Grandpa was near death he was mumbling about Beaver Island. Sometimes in the summers we’d catch a ride with a fish tug out to Beaver Island and that was where I first learned how to dive. There’s nothing to equal being down there on the bottom looking around except walking in the woods on a cold morning. Shelley couldn’t quite believe how I’d take a stroll on a cold blustery night in just a T-shirt. Anyone who’s not a fool should try walking in the woods on a cold night when the moon is full. That’s when I learned most of life’s secrets that I know.

  Sitting back there with the Chief I could tell when we hit Seney because Bob stopped and turned right, heading west on 28 on a part of the road called the Seney stretch. This country strikes some as a thirty-mile swamp but it is beautiful when you get inside it. We were about five minutes or so down the stretch and I was having a chat with my presumed dad when I heard the siren and knew the jig was up. As the truck slowed I scrambled around behind the Chief’s easy chair to hide which was pointless but I did it anyway. The truck stopped and in a minute or so I heard two voices besides Bob’s, then the door opened and flashlights shone in because it was evening. Partway as a dumb joke I let out a howl and the police yelled. I peeked out quickly and saw one cop throw his hands back, dropping the flashlight, and accidentally hit Bob square in the face. I’ll tell you that to hit Bob is to light a stick of dynamite because you better run for it. I jumped out and watched the three of them fight and it was quite a struggle. Just then I had the bright idea of jumping in the truck and taking off which is exactly what I did.