Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  Where Brown Dog hurt the most, though, was in the double of love and money. The truth was that he was out of both, the pockets utterly empty, and there didn’t seem to be a philosophical or theological palliative for the condition. The presence of one somewhat consoles the absence of the other, and when one possesses neither, the soul is left sucking a very bad egg indeed—say, one that got nudged into a corner of straw in the hen house and was discovered far too many months later. What’s more, he was dealing with a bum knee from a logging accident, and the five percent of the net from the Wild Wild Midwest Show had not “eventuated,”as they say these days.

  * * *

  The October before, he had rediscovered his childhood sweetheart, Rose, though it must be said that Rose had never offered a single gesture of affection in their youth, and she wasn’t overly forthcoming in the present. To think of her as a sweetheart at all would be called a far reach, in sailing terms. She was born mean, captious, sullen, with occasional small dirty windows of charm. The pail of pig slop she had dumped on Brown Dog’s head when he was the neighbor boy might have been a harbinger for a sensible man, but as a sentimentalist he was always trying to get at the heart of something that frequently didn’t have a heart. For instance, the afternoon Brown Dog had showed up after twenty-five years and taken off with Rose’s thirteen-year-old son, Red, and eight-year-old retarded (fetal alcohol syndrome) daughter, Berry, for the first taxi ride for any of them, all the way up to Marquette to retrieve Brown Dog’s van, he had returned to discover that Rose had drunk ten of the twelve beers he had dropped off, plus eaten most of the two chickens. There was a leg apiece for Berry and Red, and two wings for Brown Dog. Rose grandly split the remaining two beers with him, which made the score eleven to one. Her mother, Doris, only said, affably enough, that Rose was a pig.

  Still, it was a homecoming, and when he stepped outside to quell his anger (and hunger) in the cold air he was amazed that Fate had brought him back, with her peculiar circuitry, to the small farm where his grandfather had raised him. It was a pretty good feeling that after the real threat of prison he had arrived back here even though the home was no longer his. But well behind his boyhood love for Rose and its resurgence at the not very tender age of forty-eight, back in some primitive dovecote, there was the worry that he might not be invited to stay. The Son of Man might not have a place to lay his head, he remembered from the Bible, and this was not allayed by the nine hundred bucks in his pocket. He was one of the few poor people in creation who actually knew that money didn’t buy happiness, this knowledge due to the fact that he always squandered money at touch, which left the dullish feeling of a head cold.

  The front door opened behind him and he braced himself against the rotting porch railing without turning around. He hoped it was Rose asking him to stay, prayed though he had no verbs in his possession that might get a prayer going. He felt the retarded Berry clutching his leg, whispering insistently something that sounded like “whooper.” He turned to see Rose standing somewhat groggily at the door.

  “Ma says I should ask you to stay. There’s no room out of the way except under the kitchen table. I need the couch for TV.”

  “Thank you. May as well.” He looked down at Berry who continued her whispered incantation. “What does she want? What’s ‘whooper’?”

  “Her and Red want Whoppers. Make yourself useful.”

  At the Burger King they ate Whoppers, largish burgers loaded with condiments, and Brown Dog tried to make some plans. There was a specific peaceful feeling of being here with the kids like a real father, and the mood lent itself to thinking about his future. The authorities had allowed him a single day to return to Grand Marais and pick up his belongings, but he doubted it was worth the three-hour drive to gather a winter coat, boots, and an old single-shot .22 rifle. He’d call Frank at the Dunes Saloon and have him hold the stuff.

  It surely was time to take stock, as Grandpa would say. Brown Dog shuddered at his two brushes with prison, the first as a salvage diver when he found the dead Indian down in fifty feet of water for fifty years, perfectly preserved in the icy waters of Lake Superior, then stealing the ice truck in an attempt to transport the body to Chicago, followed by the arson of the anthropologist’s tent and camping equipment—all to protect the secret Indian graveyard from certain excavation, the only Hopewell site in the northern Midwest. His so-called girlfriend, Shelley, was right on the money as Eve in the original Garden tempting him, or so he thought, barely noting the commotion that had begun to gather around him at the Burger King. His beloved Shelley, whose pinkish body he had tried to memorize that morning at first light before the meeting with the detective, lawyer, graduate student, and Shelley herself, where he diffidently marked the graveyard site on the map, was given a thousand dollars, and once again was forgiven for his mayhem.

  His mouth was full of now tepid Whopper when he realized that the yelling was directed at him. A short man in a uniform was shouting, “Get her out of here,” his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing. Brown Dog then noted that Berry was jumping from table to table. Red had given up in embarrassment and was standing outside, looking in the window with the strange grin young boys affect when the nervous shit hits the fan.

  “She’s not right in the head,” Brown Dog said, standing and making a shattering whistle at Berry, then closing in and missing the grab. Many diners were standing as she leapt the tables, making the cries and voices of birds and animals. When Brown Dog caught her she clutched his body like a frightened cat. He barely heard the shrieked insults of the restaurant employee: “You Indians catch all our fish, shoot all our deer, get drunk, and can’t mind your own children, you welfare bastards.” That sort of thing. But then the voice trailed off into a gurgle. Brown Dog turned to see a gawky, rawboned younger woman in a black turtleneck sweater shaking the man by the throat.

  “Shut up, you racist pig, you piece of filth,” she hissed.

  Back at Rose’s, he brought in his second-best war-surplus sleeping bag (the best was back in the cabin near Grand Marais) and arranged it under the table where Rose’s mother, Doris, had pointed out a place. Both mother and daughter were watching a tiny TV with a cloudy picture. During a commercial Rose turned to him with a winning smile that fluttered his heart.

  “Could I trouble you to get me a six-pack?” she asked with an imitation pout.

  He crawled out from under the table wearing what he assumed was a sexy smile, though by then Rose’s attention was fixed again on the television. He stood near the couch squinting at the wretched set. It required a lot of imagination to detect the outlines of floating images.

  “Looks like you could use a new TV. Want me to pick one up with the beer?”

  It was a real big-shot line, but not one he would regret since he had always proved himself an anti-magnet for money. Their reaction was slow but the brown chins of Rose and old Doris turned upward to him as he rocked confidently on his heels, the kind of physical gesture brought to success by the late actor Steve McQueen.

  “How come you’re talking new TV? You don’t got a pot to piss in,” Rose said, turning back to the visual mire of the screen. Doris, however, continued to look at him, her face as crinkled as a shucked pecan, her eyes shining out from the dim cave of her age. He wondered for a millisecond how such a lovely old woman could breed a screaming bitch like Rose, but this observation was mitigated by the worm turning in his trousers at the sight of Rose’s big breasts rising within the confines of her blue sweater. There was still the fine warm smell of fried chicken in the room, one of his favorite odors along with a freshly caught trout, lilacs, the fermenting berries in a grouse’s crop, the dense sourness of a bear’s den, not to speak of a vagina within a few days of a shower.

  And so it was that he flashed his remaining nine C-notes from the payoff from Shelley and they were off to Wally’s Discount Palace at nine in the evening of his very first day with Rose. The purchases included a color TV with remote, a sewing machine for Doris, Taiwanese-mad
e bikes for Red and Berry, a down payment on a satellite dish (fifty dollars a month for three years), a wall clock in the shape of an angry leopard, an army cot and a big roll of duct tape for Brown Dog himself. It had occurred to him the house was going to be too warm for a solid sleep and the barely heated pump shed would be a better idea. On the way home he swerved into a liquor store for a case of beer and a half gallon of the butterscotch-flavored schnapps Rose had requested. This shopping frenzy left him with only thirty-seven dollars but since the sum was in dollar bills it still felt like a lot of money.

  It was well past midnight before he closed the romantic deal. The television set and sewing machine were unpacked from their commodious boxes and both worked perfectly. Rose began to watch and drink, and Doris to sew, laughing at the sweet and luxurious hum of the machine. Red took off into the darkness on his new bike but the toy was plainly impossible for Berry. Brown Dog wheeled her around until he was breathless, trotting down the gravel road until he reached the county blacktop, a big moon lighting their way but the night growing palpably colder. Berry just couldn’t get the hang of the bike. He meant to work with her until she was a champion at the sport, no matter how unlikely the notion seemed. On the way back to the house they nearly hit a curious deer with Berry shrieking, clutching to his back, her teeth locked on his jacket collar.

  Back at the house Doris patched up Red’s scraped knee. Red was soon dozing from exhaustion and Doris whisked both grandchildren toward the bedroom, with Berry bidding Brown Dog good night in a jumble of Chippewa.

  “She’s too simple for school so she may as well know the old language,” Doris said, glancing at her daughter on the sofa, sprawled before Jay Leno with a jam jar full of butterscotch schnapps. Doris winked at Brown Dog and he recalled that day she gave him his name while he stood in her yard in the cold rain waiting for a peek at his beloved Rose. He was only nine years old at the time, truly a young romantic. “Get on out of here, you brown dog,” Doris said, and the name stuck though he wasn’t, so far as he knew, one bit Native.

  With Doris and the kids gone he plopped himself down on the couch beside Rose, wishing he liked butterscotch schnapps so he could calm down his trembling.

  “You’re a good boy, B.D. What happened to your fancy girlfriend?”

  “Shelley and me called it quits just this morning.”

  “Bullshit,” Rose whispered drowsily. “She gave you some money and told you to hit the road. Nobody can bullshit me.” She gestured to the bookcase overladen with mystery novels and crime magazines to explain her prescience, then lifted her blue sweater, revealing two very large brown tits, the captured heat rising to his face. He suckled one as her eyes closed to a commercial, his member setting up a wild twitching in his pants, then she drew it out while clicking the remote with her other hand. Arsenio Hall was talking to an actress who only ate fruit and cheese, so Rose went back to Leno. She flopped back and he had a difficult time pushing her tight skirt up to her waist, making the additional mistake as he mounted of not taking his trousers all the way off, allowing limited movement as the trousers constricted his ankles. He pumped away in unison to her burgeoning snores, his orgasm seemingly timed to when Leno changed to Letterman and her eyes popped open.

  “You should know I love only Fred,” she said, and then slept.

  It rarely is, but it can be a blessed event when a dream dies. The bigger the dream, the bigger the vacuum when the dream slips off into the void. First love is always a somber though colorful thicket of images, and when Brown Dog pulled on his trousers and went outside the images tumbled and wavered through his mind: tracking Rose at twelve when she picked berries with her mother, looking so lithe and petulant in the patch of wild raspberries, wiping the August sweat from her eyes as she filled her bucket with the red fruit. He was sitting well up in a white pine to spy on them, and they stayed so long his need to pee became ungovernable and he hugged the pitchy trunk for courage, looking down at Rose and Doris as a bird might. At last his friend and Rose’s brother, David Four Feet, came to help them home with the berries and he was able to pee out of the tree with shuddering relief.

  This happened thirty years back but could have been only a moment ago, thought B.D. as he peed off the pump shed steps. The moon looked too big and in the wrong place and the wind had increased since the bike ride with Berry. One vast round cloud with a black bottom looked very much like an angry Mother Westwind in an illustration from a children’s book barely on the edge of his memory. The big mother’s face contorted into a howl and through her cloud mouth blasted the cold damp air that meant snow.

  Now he felt his love sweat drying as if into a film of ice and the cold wind became so delicious he wanted to drink it. Far off across the fallow pasture dotted with ghostly clumps of dogwood he could hear a small group of coyotes yapping in chase. Three or four or five at most, he thought, taking the army cot from the van and setting it up in the pump shed, deftly patching the holes in the wood and the slat cracks with duct tape. As a mongrel anchorite he could not bear the heat of the house, or the way the TV seemed to attack you like a barking dog, or to sleep within the dank scent of heating oil. He had finally achieved his dream of making love to Rose and the feeling was much emptier than the pocket that had held all the money that morning. But then, just on the verge of opening the door, he had a sodden wave of homesickness for the deer-hunting cabin in Grand Marais, for Shelley’s dainty undies, for his lost move up in the world and his plummet back to his original home. He could almost hear himself as a child pumping the morning water in this very shed as his grandfather cooked breakfast in the winter dark.

  He dismissed his melancholy into the sound of the wind. He might be B.D. dragging along the earth but he actually was a lot lighter in the mind than nearly everyone else, save a few sages and master adepts sprung from the Far East. There was also the hot memory of the time he and David Four Feet had snuck up on the swimming hole up the creek and watched Rose and Ethyl, a plump pinkish girl with a cleft palate and David’s main crush, swimming in the nude. Then the girls knelt on the bank drawing pictures in the sand with forefingers, their bottoms aimed at the boys, with Rose’s bottom so trim and beautiful compared to Ethyl’s big pink one. Now, just over thirty years later, he had fondled that bottom, albeit in a much larger state, and felt a sure and certain accomplishment though it was joined to the perennial problem all artists feel on finishing a work—what’s next? Not to speak of the fact that he had nothing to show for his efforts except the lineaments of gratified desire.

  Thinking Rose asleep he tiptoed into the living room, but there she was, big as life, cooing on the phone and watching David Letterman drop watermelons off a tall building, an activity B.D. instinctively recognized as worthwhile. Rose looked up, lifting her spare hand from her pubis, and made a shushing motion. “My pen is running out of ink, Fred, just know that I’m real hot to see you,” she said to the phone and hung it up. She watched B.D. gather up his sleeping bag from under the table. “We could do it once more but it would have to be the last time.” She held out her glass and he poured a few fingers of the schnapps. She smiled fetchingly and his legs hollowed. “I also got to send thirty bucks to Fred up in Amasa so he can get his carburetor fixed. Or else he can’t come to see me. Can you spare it? If not, no pussy.”

  That left him with seven bucks after he counted out the stack of ones. And the thumping set-to that ensued gave him a back spasm, so he slept in the painful cold of the pump shed quite happy that love had died.

  B.D. awoke temporarily famous but he was not to know it for an hour or so. Doris fixed him a breakfast of fried cornmeal mush with maple syrup which he shared with Berry wriggling on his lap. Though it was only late October the world was bright and beautiful with a full foot of fresh snow, and he had wakened to the grinding of the county snowplow on the section road, soon followed by the school bus to pick up Red. Rose was still on the couch, a green mound that snored, totally covered by an old army blanket. Doris showed him the emp
ty refrigerator, a wordless cue that meant to get cracking, while he drew pictures of bears for Berry so she could fill in the outlines with her crayons.

  “She saw her first bear in August when we were picking blackberries,” Doris explained. “She run right toward it and the bear waited a second before it took off. She must have bear medicine. Rose told me she didn’t eat no bear meat while she was pregnant but she might have done so when she was drunk.” Doris looked off at the lump of her daughter noncommittally.

  It was at the employment office that B.D. discovered the unpleasantness of fame. He stood there in his cold wet tennis shoes wishing his boots weren’t back in Grand Marais but facing up to the fact that they were. There was nothing fresh up on the bulletin board except a crying need for snow shovelers—and him without even gloves, let alone his icy tennis shoes.

  “I don’t believe I recognize you. You’ll have to register with us,” a voice boomed out from behind the counter. It was a middle-aged man sucking on a dry pipe while he kibitzed with the secretaries. He beckoned B.D. back to his office with the amiable boredom of a midrange civil servant. There was a plaque on the desk that said his name was Terrance Stuhl and framed diplomas on the wall from Michigan State University, four hundred miles distant, down in East Lansing.