by Jim Harrison
The main part of dinner looked like a huge cornish pasty but it was baked dough covering rare meat with a liver-tasting sauce. To be frank, it was the best thing I ever ate. The doctor’s wife was real happy because no one else was eating much, so she kept serving me more, and with it I drank two whole bottles of delicious foreign red wine. There was also a dish of the tiniest carrots and onions and I said the onion was one of the most perfect things God made, and everyone was eager to agree. This made me feel more comfortable though the wine might have had something to do with it. In fact, the wine was creeping up on me like a dread assassin, and when everyone got up to go to the bar where they were playing music, I went to the bathroom and washed my face with cold water. When I got out they were all gone except the doctor’s wife who was cleaning up. I felt sort of forgotten but she said she’d told them she would give me a ride. I think she was fibbing but I let it go and pitched in with the dishes. There was some gravy left and I asked if she minded that I drink it to settle my stomach and that pleased her. She was the plumpest of the ladies and I couldn’t help but flirt a little. Her face got red and her eyes all teary.
“I know Fred is chasing that slut friend of yours, Tarah.” She threw a glass against the refrigerator and it broke all over. By Fred she meant Dr. Fred, her husband.
“Don’t worry, she won’t be caught. She’s engaged to this fellow in the hospital.” I swept up the broken glass so I wouldn’t have to face her. I knew if Tarah was primed up she’d probably fuck a rock pile if she thought there was a snake in it. I could see Mrs. Fred didn’t believe me either, so I gave her a simple enough hug, and when we kissed she stuck her tongue in my mouth which sets me off, but then she pushed me away though not too far.
“I’m not going to screw you. I’m pregnant and it wouldn’t be right.” She put her hand on my pecker under my trousers and I put one down her blouse and gave a nipple a tweak. She unzipped me, then poured some dish soap in her hand, saying she’d be glad to “release my tension” which is what she did. It might not seem like it to the naysayers but it was sort of romantic.
Mrs. Fred dropped me off at the bar with a big French kiss and squealed off in her foreign-made car named a Volvo, my first ride in one. The music was so loud it was deafening me but I still felt sleepy after love when you ordinarily take a short snooze. I went to the bar and had a couple of 7 Crown doubles to wake myself up, then looked around just in time to see Shelley going out the back door with the lawyer. I felt low for a minute but I can’t say I blamed her as he was cut from the same cloth as her, and I wasn’t. Tarah was dancing and smooching with Dr. Fred and the others hadn’t seen me yet so I left. It was the noise of the music that drove me out. I’m not used to loud noise in my life and it’s the same reason I quit cutting pulp. A chainsaw is just too loud.
It was a long walk back to the motel and I was feeling low so I stopped at a few workingmen’s bars along the way, also an all-night grocery store where I bought the new Outdoor Life. When I got back to the rooms Tarah and the doctor were fooling around on the couch. He jumped up grabbing at his clothes so I said “Peace, brother” like the radicals did way back in Chicago. I went into the bedroom, got my clothes off and started to read an article called “How to Nail a Big Swamp Buck” when I remembered the burning tent in the wilderness. It hardly seemed this could be the same day but it was, as I was to find out the next morning.
When I got up to pee at very first light Shelley and Tarah were also in the king-size bed, one on each side. You would think this would be the most exciting thing possible but I wasn’t feeling too good about the ladies or myself. The world was moving too fast and I had to get my balance back. I picked up my sport coat from where I had thrown it on a chair when I came in and interrupted Tarah and the sawbones. There was a gravy splotch on the sport coat which sent me lower and I thought, B.D., you ought to wear a bib. It did warm my heart, though, to look out the window and see my van down in the parking lot in the dim morning light. There was also a guy who was asleep in his car who might wake up feeling worse than me, though that’s like saying you feel great because you’re not a roadkill. It’s time to take stock, I thought, which is hard to do when you are bare naked and far from home. For some reason, I could remember a cold October morning when Grandpa and me got up at dawn and cut firewood all day. When we took a break at midmorning for breakfast, he fried two partridges and cornmeal mush and made gravy. Late in the afternoon the day got warm and he let me have a big glass of cold hard cider to ease the aches of a day spent on the end of a crosscut saw.
I went back in the bedroom, picked up my Outdoor Life and sat down on a chair at the end of the bed. The room was too warm and the girls had moved around so the top sheet was half off. Shelley was snoring ever so little and her arm was on Tarah’s back. I looked at this page in Outdoor Life that is in there every month about a sportsman’s perilous adventure in a cartoon-style drawing. Usually a guy gets attacked by a bear or rattlesnake, or charged by a wild pig or moose, or maybe falls through the hole when ice fishing. This month a fellow was going down a river in a rowboat, just fishing and not knowing there was a waterfall ahead. The artist did a good job on the guy’s face as he shot over the waterfall, probably screaming “Holy shit” and having his close call with doom, but the person always survives the adventure or it wouldn’t make much of a cartoon.
There was a rustling from the bed and I was all slouched down so I lifted the magazine for a look. They were on their stomachs and both of their bare bottoms were showing plain as day. The room was getting lighter and if their butts were cameras it seemed like they were taking my picture. In a way I was having a stare-down with the source of life, then I thought of a weird ancient story Shelley had told me. It was an Indian story from out west about when we were first on earth. Every time a man would screw he’d bleed to death because women had sharp teeth in their articles. It wasn’t until a coyote came along and pulled the teeth out that men could screw without dying and get the human race started. This is why the coyote is thought to be sacred.
Men like to say that a hard dick has no conscience, but I’ve never believed that as I like to think I have free will even when I’m drunk. I moved closer to them for a better look and, though I was still upset, I began to think it was time to forgive and forget. Let bygones be bygones. A bad night had passed and now it was a new day, also it was hard to think of anything more purely beautiful than those two bottoms. I got a lump in my throat and couldn’t quite catch my breath. Given their behavior they could hardly turn me down. Man is not exactly built for two at once and I was going to have to keep real busy so they wouldn’t lose interest. I stood there at the ready, like the Olympic diver on the Dunes TV dedicating his dive to the Lord. The first ray of sun came in the window, a sign I thought, and I went for it. I almost yelled “Geronimo” but I didn’t want to startle them.
It couldn’t have been better and I still felt warm all over when I returned from getting some containers of coffee for myself, also sweet rolls and Diet Pepsi for the ladies. All I can say is I did my best and we all agreed we had sweated out the worst of our hangovers. Afterward, in the bathroom mirror, it looked like I had been saddle-soaped.
Unfortunately I may as well have gone back to a room in hell itself. Tarah was taking a shower and Shelley was on the phone and talking excitedly. When she put down the phone she started screaming at me so I couldn’t even understand what she was saying. She kept saying, “I carried you, I saved you, I’ve been carrying you so long, you hideous dumb bastard. I even loved you, you worthless fucker, and now you did it, you’re going to prison now, you asshole.” The upshot was that Jerk had called about the burned tent and equipment and all of Jerkoff’s “field notes.” It was a shock to hear the State Police had come out to the boonies and taken my fingerprints off the vehicle where I had drawn the skull and crossbones that looked like a shmoo. It was easy as they had fingerprinted me a few months before, and my name came up right away in the burned tent accident.
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I denied everything, saying that I had made the drawing in the road dust the night before outside the bar, but she wasn’t having any of it. She started sobbing there on the couch and wouldn’t let me comfort her, then she calmed down and became cold and mean. I had never seen her like this before and it chilled my poor heart. She told me to go out in the hall while she made a few calls and I stood out there like I was waiting for a dentist to jerk my teeth. It was all I could do to not cut and run, but there was a problem of the State Police and my slow van.
It was an hour before she came out, and by then I wasn’t sad and I wasn’t mad. She stood there with her hands on her hips as I studied the big girl vacuuming the hall.
“Look me straight in the eye, B.D.,” she said, so I came up to her until my nose was about an inch from her forehead, then I tilted down.
“You don’t love me and you never did,” I said. “You just want my graveyard.”
I was using a woman’s wiles and it slowed her down for a few seconds, then she wanted to take a ride so off we went. She had a small bag and told me to take my toothbrush. When I hesitated she promised me she wasn’t turning me in to the police, though they were looking for me. I smelled a small rat and wondered what she wanted.
I won’t say it was a bad ride, because it started what I hoped was a new part of my life, but a lot of it made me sweat blood. The cool sunny air of October had cleared my head to the point I realized I could sure as hell do some time for torching their camp. Probation was supposed to make me walk the straight and narrow for three years and I had only made it four months, no matter that my heart was in the right place. I thought of my buddy David Four Feet getting killed in Jackson Prison and shivered. I did not want to die for the good cause of protecting my burial mounds, which would be like dying for the dead.
Shelley wanted to go down to Escanaba and Bark River which was only about seventy miles or so to the south. She said the ride was our “swan song” and I had promised to show her where I was brought up which would “complete the circle.” I didn’t know what the hell she meant by this and didn’t care because a squad car had passed us on the outskirts of Marquette and this had churned up my stomach. I agreed to show her around if we could eat something first, but she said she wasn’t hungry, so we stopped at a store and I ran in for a six-pack and a chunk of pickled bologna. At the counter I couldn’t help but check out the place for the back door as an escape route but I was breaking my last twenty-dollar bill and the notion was hopeless.
We took back roads to get down to the old place near Bark River. This was to avoid any Saturday traffic caused by what the tourist people call the “fall color tour” in their brochures, where Jack Frost uses his icy paintbrush to color the woods red and gold. A storm will come along and take off all the leaves overnight and the tourists who drove a long way are pissed off like it was the local people’s fault. I showed Shelley a two-track where once the game warden had cornered me and David Four Feet and his brothers. We had my 1947 Dodge I’d paid fifty bucks for, and a case of beer, and we had been out shining deer. We shot a spikehorn buck for the larder, threw it in the trunk and got ourselves chased by the game warden to this two-track where the game warden stopped and waited us out. He knew the road went into a big area where there was only about forty acres of high ground surrounded by thousands of acres of swamp, and then the road dead-ended. We felt real smart so I built a fire while David and his brothers skinned and pieced out the deer. Our plan was to bury the hide and bones in the swamp, roast and eat all the meat, thus destroying the evidence. We must have eaten about ten pounds apiece and drunk all the beer. David’s younger brothers got sick and wanted to go home so he had to pound them a bit. David said if the warden wanted to locate the dead deer all he’d find were turds. The trouble was we got convicted on the basis of the blood and deer hair in the trunk.
Shelley didn’t think this was too funny as it betrayed an early start in the life of “petty” crime, crime that authorities kept records on and doomed the criminal to failure. I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself but then I got upset over the fact that they wrote down every little thing you did wrong. For instance, at my short trial the thing about pouring beer down the woman’s neck came up, also my so-called resisting arrest when I pretended to fall on the stairs dragging the cops down with me, even the scuffle in Montana, shining deer, everything. What chance did a fellow have to improve when they had files to pull the rug out from under him? Especially when I never intentionally hurt anyone. Don’t Doggett, I thought as we entered Doggett country with a potential forest fire starting in every swale. Take your medicine and reform yourself, however that is done.
Then Shelley started laughing for no reason which lifted my spirits, even though she was beautiful and obviously bent on ridding herself of me. She described again what it was like to be down near the marina in Grand Marais at dawn with the sheriff, two deputies, and two state cops. They had all thought this meeting place meant I was coming by water, then they heard the roar from the hill at the far end of town. That was me in the ice truck, cranking it up to top speed for no reason but to make my giving up a big deal. I didn’t want to putter into Grand Marais in third gear. Shelley said the bunch of them got off in the corner so they couldn’t be run into and watched me heading down the hill into town at sixty miles an hour, swerving around the corner and down over the embankment. My idea was to drive the ice truck into Lake Superior and half drown myself but I got bogged down in the sand about fifty feet from the water. Even though it was barely daylight a lot of people came out to see the show because squad cars are rare in Grand Marais. I got to wave to Frank and his kids in pajamas before the cops subdued me. I put up a little tussle so the people wouldn’t feel disappointed they got up so early.
I was pretty upset at my so-called trial because I didn’t even get a jury I could explain myself to. The sharpie lawyer from Detroit Shelley’s dad got for me said we’d be better off throwing ourselves at the mercy of a judge, a notion I didn’t care for. I had plenty of friends in Munising who knew my heart was in the right place and I thought a couple of them might squeeze onto the jury. The lawyer told me just to “act like a geek which shouldn’t be too hard” which upset me. I told the silly little fucker I was going to jerk his ears off which was held up as an example of my “unsoundness” to the judge, who had already thrown the book at Bob, which put him in a good mood. I could also see that the judge liked Shelley’s father, probably because they were both big-deal Republicans. When Bob started yelling “Retard” at me at a hearing they just took him away. Shelley cried a lot and grasped my arm. I liked that even though at the time I suspected she had other motives, such as being a famous anthropologist. Frank wasn’t too helpful as a character witness because he didn’t dress too good and lipped off to the judge. Frank is his own man and doesn’t like the authorities. What gave me the most trouble was convincing them I had dumped the Indian back in Lake Superior. The State Police divers even had a look but of course couldn’t find anything. This is where my asshole lawyer came in handy because the police couldn’t prove there was a real body before their fight with Bob. When I went into the judge’s office, just the two of us, he asked me why I thought the body was my dad’s and I said there was nothing to prove that it wasn’t. He was plainly glad to give me probation and see me drive off with Shelley.
Now we were getting near the old homestead and I was pretty nervous. I don’t know why for sure, and I began to fiddle with the buttons on the electric seats that could put you in any comfortable position. Shelley had said the seats were calfskin but when I smelled them I couldn’t catch the scent of calf. I had her stop by a culvert so I could check out my old-time fishing creek. I walked downstream and felt bad that when they widened the road they had silted up the rocky creek with sand which meant trout could no longer spawn. Rather than keeping track of the likes of me the authorities might better be tending the health of their creeks, I thought.
Around a curve was another
shocker. David Four Feet’s house had burned down and all there was around the foundation were dry burdocks and chokecherries, and one sugar plum the bears had broken down to get at the fruit. Another quarter mile and there was our old place with David’s mom bent over putting bales of straw around the foundation to insulate against the coming winter. She hadn’t told me about this move when I called but she probably thought I knew. I had Shelley pull in the drive which she was glad to do as she knew this was the mother of my first love, Rose. The old woman admired Shelley’s vehicle for its great big tires. In the U.P. it’s the car that doesn’t get stuck that gets the admiration. She pointed over about a hundred yards to the old orchard where she said Rose was picking apples with her two kids so we headed off across the bumpy field in the car. I asked Shelley if she had something I could give Rose and she said there was a nice scarf in her bag. I took the scarf out and it smelled nice with a foreign name on the corner.
“Your hair still looks like shit,” is the first thing Rose said to me after all these years. She was wearing overalls and had picked four bushels to make a batch of applesauce. To me Rose looked real good though she was quite round, to be frank. I had read in the newspaper that the circle was Nature’s most perfect form so that put Rose up there on the top. She introduced us to her boy Red who was called that after redskin. That’s what the kids called him at school and he didn’t seem to mind. Red was twelve and the little girl she called Berry was seven, though it was plain to see something was wrong with her. Berry was called that because all she knew how to do or liked to do was pick berries. Berry wrapped herself around my leg like a monkey and I had half the notion she might take a bite but she didn’t. Rose told Shelley not to get drunk when she was pregnant because that’s how Berry came out haywire. Red wondered if it would be okay to take a look in Shelley’s Rover so she took him for a ride around the field, partly to be nice and leave me alone with Rose.