Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  After the adrenaline of the media event their little interview hadn’t gone well. He resented the notion of being unemployable and being chucked into the bin with others she termed “learning and physically disadvantaged”—what they used to call dummies and cripples. B.D. was in a third category of malcontents: crazies, outcasts, felons, the plain pissed-off residue of society. He felt typecast when all he had done was spend his life at odd jobs and at what Delmore Short Bear had described as “nothing.” Gretchen wanted to pin him down about his background and “ethnicity,” so he had acted remote and distraught over the TV experience in order to get out of there. When you got pinned down by questions from anyone, especially those in any branch of government, they were going to take advantage of you or try to keep track of you. Of course that was what they were in business for and it was all well and good for them, but there was no way he was going to be involved. Gretchen kept saying she needed to “share” his work experiences in order to help him, so he settled for one example, avoiding diving with scuba tanks to illegally pillage sunken ships in Lake Superior, a summer occupation that had gotten him into a lot of trouble.

  “I get up at daylight and take a little stroll in the woods to see what’s been happening there overnight. I make coffee and breakfast. I cut and split a cord of wood and sell it to a cottager for twenty-five bucks. I got plenty of orders from hanging out at the bar. Then I have a little lunch followed by a snooze to change my thought patterns.”

  “How’s that? I mean, what you’re saying about thought patterns.” She was taking notes.

  “The woods business can make you nervous. If you take a snooze, you can forget the stress of the guy acting like he’s doing you a favor for paying for the wood he doesn’t know how to cut himself. You lay back and think pleasant thoughts, say about birds and animals, like the time I saw a great horned owl blast a red-tailed hawk out of a tree just at daylight, or two deer fucking in late September, or a big raven funeral I watched.”

  “Birds have funerals? You’re bullshitting.” She was irked.

  “Ravens do. I can’t tell you about it for religious reasons. Anyway, after the snooze, I go do a little fishing or hunting depending on the season. Catch a few trout or pot a grouse and woodcock for dinner . . .”

  “I personally feel hunting is shameful,” she couldn’t help but chime in.

  “Tell it to someone who gives a shit. I’m answering a question you gave. After dinner I have another snooze, then read for an hour, then go to the bar for an hour or two. Maybe longer. That’s it.’’

  “What do you read?”

  “Popular Mechanics. Outdoor Life. Girlie magazines. I also been reading this south-of-the-border novel called One Hundred Years of Solitude.” He hadn’t actually gotten beyond the first fifty pages of this book given him by a tourist lady but he liked the title and the parts about the discovery of ice and magnetism.

  “How extraordinary,” she said, and it was then she got the call-in about the church basement. He noted the poster on the wall proclaiming “The Year of the Woman” and readily agreed. Despite his experience with Shelley, Rose, and dozens of others, women still beat the hell out of men to be around. You weren’t always cutting and bruising yourself on their edges.

  In fact, the church basement proved the point, a mudbath for the mind and body. Neither the pastor nor the janitor wanted to get wet, and watched standing on chairs as B.D. found the drain and reamed it out with a coat hanger, then worked laboriously with squeegee, mop, and pail. It was a good two hours’ sweat, but then he had the two twenties and a ten already in his pocket, and kept his mind busy with thoughts of the waitress and Doris’s promise that she would make pork chops, also pinto beans with salt pork and hot peppers, a condiment he had taken to when he had worked welding on a gas pipeline and met two Mexican laborers from Texas. The pastor was annoying with his spit-shined shoes, asking B.D. if he had “come to the Lord,” to which B.D. responded that he was meek, and “the meek shall inherit the earth.” This piqued the minister’s interest but B.D. clammed up, preferring as he worked an involved sex fantasy about the waitress, all the more tasty because it was fabricated in a church. They were picking blackberries on a hot afternoon and she pulled down her jeans, leaning over a stump for a quickie. That sort of thing.

  B.D. was wet and tired when he pulled into the dark yard, puzzled at the fairly new three-quarter-ton step-side pickup parked there. He scrambled back in the old van to sort through a pile of clothes, looking for something clean and praying that he would be allowed a hot shower or bath. His favorite flannel shirt had a crunchy BBQ stain on it which he sniffed for clues to the occasion. Doris tapped at the van window and he slipped open the side door. In popped Berry with a screech, another screech, and a hoo hoo in the manner of an owl in the half-collapsed barn out back. Doris held out a plate of chops and beans steaming in the cold air, the steam rising across the moon, and a warm can of beer.

  “Fred’s in there with Rose. They just finished the butterscotch schnapps. It wouldn’t be safe for you. I’m real sorry.”

  B.D. gave Doris a pat. It was hard to think clearly what with Berry starting her bluejay renditions, so he ate his plate of food in a trice. Doris could fetch his sleeping bag from the shed but that might not be a good idea since it wasn’t more than twenty degrees, a little cold for sleeping in the van. B.D. said, “The sucker’s real big, I hear.”

  “Real big and mean. He ate a pork chop raw, covered with black pepper. He just don’t care about man or beast.” Doris shivered. B.D. sent her and Berry back to the house, starting the van and lighting their way with his deer-shining spotlight. Fred appeared at the front door, filling the frame, his eyes reflecting yellow like an animal caught in the headlights, raising his arm to shield his eyes. He brushed past Doris and Berry, knocking Berry over, and came down the steps.

  “Hey, you motherfucker, shut off that light!” Fred bellowed.

  B.D. backed the van in a half circle to prepare an escape route, keeping the spotlight in Fred’s eyes. Fred roared and began trotting, then broke into a run, with B.D. keeping just barely ahead of him as he drove out the driveway onto the wrong side of the road. He was a man with a plan, sucking Fred toward disaster. Fred slowed and B.D. pretended to have problems shifting, spotting the mailbox just ahead. Sensing victory, Fred moved into a sprint, his hand on the locked door, when B.D. wiped him off against the mailbox perched on the cedar fence post. Not smart. But fun, he thought, shining the spot back at the huge man writhing in the snow-filled ditch.

  The cheapest motel he could find was out on Route 2, next to the filled parking lot of a bowling alley. He stowed his van in back just in case Fred came out on the prowl. The room was only fourteen bucks but luxurious by his standards. He bought a pint at a party store next door and took a long hot bath, sipping the whiskey and trying to sing along with MTV. Out of the tub, he dried while watching go-go dancers jumping around in undies in a big cage while the singer kept snapping at the cage with a bullwhip. B.D. favored letting them out of the cage and being nice. He peeked out the window to make sure the bowling alley had a bar. Some did, some didn’t.

  Fortune struck true, a boon, a blessing, a gift probably not from heaven. It was ladies’ night at the bowling alley, and when he stood in the bar looking out at the lanes he picked out her trim figure on lane 7 in a gaggle of plumpies. He shuddered, easing out of the bar toward her like a crawling king snake. He reached her lane as she held a ball, stooped with her taut butt protruding, then skipped to the line and threw a strike which seemed to mean more than it actually did. She turned, shrieked with joy while her friends jumped and clapped and then she spotted him, rolled her eyes and danced in a circle, waving her hands in the air as if at a minstrel show. She came toward him, trying her best to minimize her limp.

  “You possum dickhead! How did you-all find me?”she hissed, giggling.

  “I just followed your lilac scent through the cold, dark night, Frieda.” Her name was on the bowling shir
t, which made it easy.

  “I borrowed this shirt. The name’s Marcelle. Maybe I’m ready. Maybe I’m not. What you got in mind?”

  “I got a pint and a motel room next door. I want to root like a hog and turn you to butter. That’s just for starters.”

  “That so? Sounds pretty good to me. What’s your room number? I don’t want these ladies knowing I’m fucking over Travis.”

  He paced the room, his breath and throat constricted as if on death row—or better, Saint Augustine in his monastic cell in a frenzy of religious doubt. He turned on the Weather Channel and watched the digital seconds tick away at the bottom of the screen. On his way back he had picked up another pint and he tried to sip sparingly on the first he had begun in the tub, knowing that whiskey was good for the noodle only in small doses. Then, just over the edge of despair, the knock came and she whisked in, immediately turning out the lights except for the bathroom. He almost said he liked to see what he was doing but remembered she might be shy. She took a slug from the proffered pint and went into the bathroom, closing the door all but an inch of yellow light. He decided not to peek, and flicked through the TV stations until he arrived at country music videos, somehow more appropriate than MTV, or so he thought. Back on the bed he slipped off his shoes to avoid the potential ankle trap, then leaned far out of bed, supporting himself awkwardly with his hands on the floor, feeling he deserved a peek. Times change. She was washing at the sink but the opening was too slim for more than a thin slice of the picture. Suddenly the door opened and out she came with her bottom half wrapped securely in a towel. Surprised, B.D.’s hands collapsed and he scrambled awkwardly back on the bed.

  “Window peeker!” She turned, glancing at the TV, the light flickering off her breasts. “Garth Brooks sucks. Give me George Jones any day.”

  “I was just a door peeker.” His voice had become very small. With her clothes off there seemed to be a lot more to her. She moved to the side of the bed, right above his face. He glanced up and then away at the TV, then back, with Marcelle smiling down at him over her breasts.

  “You might say I’m ready to get turned to butter.” She laughed. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “Nope.

  She did a free fall over his head and he went down on her like the no-hands pie-eating contest at the county fair, an event he had won at age thirteen.

  II

  THE MIND OF THE MAKER

  Gaagaagfhirmh! I found this on my notepad I kept for Shelley. It is the word the Chips use for raven. Claude told me so. Sounds like one if you say it right, not too loud from the throat’s back end. The days they come and go as always. Delmore is hard on my case and loaned me this cabin which is only fourteen by fourteen he and his son built the summer of 1950, the year I was born. Delmore hasn’t seen or heard of his son since 1952. He’s got me logging my days and thinking to pay my rent. It’s not like Shelley, who was always looking for the secret poison in my mind. I also have to cut Delmore’s firewood which comes to two cords a week for that big drafty farmhouse. You don’t have to be a scientist to know I am not getting a deal because I also shovel his drive and do repairs, like I had to dig up the main pipe to his drain field with a pickax because the ground was frozen and the pipe broke by a tree root. If you count up the worth of everything, I am paying about four hundred dollars a month for this midget cabin with an outhouse. I also have to haul my water about a quarter of a mile from Delmore’s on a toboggan, and there’s no electricity so I use oil lamps. Read this and weep, Delmore, you old fuck. You’re taking me to the cleaners but I’ve been there before.

  Delmore said this morning at Shorty’s when we ate breakfast that he can’t help but get the best of any deal he ever gets involved with. It’s part of his training in the Saramouni Brotherhood he went through when he was in the auto factories in Detroit. Their main saying was there is no God but reality, and if you look for him elsewhere you’re out of luck. Something like that. It was up on the wall of this cabin but I took it down and threw it in the stove because I don’t have to live every day with someone else’s bullshit. Just remember, Delmore, you don’t own me, you just got me rented for a short time. Here is the so-called clear thought for the day you asked me to come up with. A horse that shits fast don’t shit long. I take this to mean you have to conserve your energies. I also advise you I’m moving over to Duluth when I get three hundred bucks saved. You could say this town is getting too small for me after one whole week. I can’t get my breath if Fred is breathing down my neck, also Travis is bound to get home from Africa. I said to Marcelle, how come Travis will know about me? She says they exchange stories of their sex wrongs to energize their marriage. They like to go into rages, then feel peaceful afterward. She also told me Travis is a black belt which didn’t have too much effect. These weenies were always getting out of the service saying they were black belts, and the same pulp cutters as before would kick their ass. I hate to get hit myself as it digs a hole you don’t quite get out of for a couple of weeks.

  Tragedy struck Sunday morning. I’ve been bowled over for a couple of days so I couldn’t work at the odd jobs Gretchen digs up for me. First of all, I loaned my van to Rose. Actually she took it out of Delmore’s driveway but she left a note. Fred hasn’t been around since he ran into the mailbox because he went down to Flint where his dad is sick. The van’s not there when Delmore and me go off to Sunday morning breakfast. We stop at Doris’s and the van isn’t there and neither is Rose. We take Berry to breakfast with us because she likes both Delmore and me. She and Delmore say Chippewa words to each other.

  It wasn’t but about seven A.M. with few customers that got out of Mass, too early for the Protestants, and Shelley’s photo was on the cover of the Detroit Sunday magazine which is part of the newspaper. She was dressed up to climb Mount Everest and was called “The New Woman” for her famous discovery of the anthropological site. I was only mentioned once as the grave robber that she sent packing. This in itself didn’t ruin my biscuits with sausage gravy partly because Marcelle sat down and put her hand under the table and gave my pecker a little squeeze. Berry also poured some imitation maple syrup on Shelley’s picture which was justice indeed.

  Then in comes the State Police detective who warns me that my TV interview could be thought to be “inciting to riot” which is a laugh. He called Delmore “sir” and that shows just how much pull Delmore’s got. Delmore then tells the detective that I am under his care and direction. This seems to please the detective who leaves but then is followed by the local sheriff’s deputy in about ten short minutes. This cop wants to arrest me for leaving the scene of an accident. Delmore invites the cop to sit down and have breakfast and explains that Rose borrowed the “vehicle in question” to drive to her new job cleaning up over at the Indian casino in Hannahville so that I am innocent of all possible charges. The deputy calls Delmore “Mr. Burns” and “sir.” I already got a lump in my throat about my van because the deputy said it was totaled. It all made sense to him because he had arrested Rose later on over in a bar in Bark River for drunk and disorderly.

  I guess I broke down when I saw the van out behind the garage that had the towing service. Delmore stayed inside because it was real cold. It tore me apart because it seemed to be the last of Grandpa because I bought the vehicle over ten years ago when he died and I sold the house to a realtor who sold it to Doris after her house burned down. I got fifteen grand and went west in my first and only new van and ended up spending the leftover money in the Bozeman hospital after a fight with three cowboys this girl got started. Now the roof was stove in and the frame buckled. Berry was upset when I started to cry so I quit and she helped me gather up the spare stuff like the shovel and chain, kindling, candles, a couple cans of beans and a pint of whiskey, all in case I got caught in a storm. On the way home Delmore said it was a cruel lesson but I was going to learn it by doing a lot of walking. I didn’t answer. I just walked down the trail to the cabin saying to myself fuck the world that takes my last posses
sion from me.

  It’s only early November but it snowed three days, strange indeed as Escanaba is thought to be the Banana Belt of the U.P. Just seventy miles up the road, Marquette on Lake Superior gets twice as much snow, and over in Houghton they often get more than three hundred inches. That’s thirty feet but it settles a lot or there wouldn’t be any Houghton.

  I spent three days and three nights down in a mind hole. I am forty-eight with no vehicle and about fifteen bucks in my pocket. If Fred showed up I’d just plain shoot him but my .22 and my single-shot 16-gauge are both over in Grand Marais along with my boots. I remember some of my Bible training from Chicago about Jonah in the belly of the whale this long but I don’t get how he breathed. It’s supposed to stand for something else but I don’t know what. I can’t say I feel sorry for myself, I just don’t believe in the world for the time being. I didn’t even eat the first day, if you don’t count breakfast when I got the bad news.

  The second morning, right at daylight, I was watching it snow and a grouse ran into the window jamb. I hurried outside and there was a great horned owl in a tree and that is what scared the grouse who broke her neck. I studied this wonderful bird for a while and found aspen leaves and a few dried wintergreen berries in the crop. The bird felt real warm but dead. I peeled, cooked, and mashed a few potatoes. The bird’s bad luck was my good. I plucked, gutted, split, then roasted her over the potatoes in an iron skillet in the oven, basting her with butter and pepper. It takes a while to get the hang of a wood-burning stove and oven but I’d used one for a whole winter before. I must say it was a meal fit for a king.

  Come to think of it, the main good thing out here snowbound in this cabin is that nothing is happening. Think of smoking that one in your pipe, Delmore. I’ve got this personal feeling things are not supposed to be happening to people all of the time. At least I’m not designed for it. There should be more open spaces between events. That’s my clear thought for today.