Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  After finding his botanical-garden nest Brown Dog drifted through the greenery in the last of the twilight. There was a slight evening breeze from the west, clearing the air which had all day long resembled a sheen of yellow snot with the heat close enough to body temperature to emphasize the exudate nature of the air. B.D. found a patch of bamboo and lit a match to see it more closely, noting with pleasure that the bamboo was a giant version of the cane poles he had used as a child to fish inland lakes. This bamboo was a half foot in diameter and he supposed that it was capable of landing a fish the size of a Budweiser Clydesdale. The breeze picked up further and rattled the bamboo. He thought the breeze must surely come from the Pacific Ocean and his body fairly shimmered with delight at the prospect of seeing this body of water. He had spent enough time with maps, his favorite schoolbook being the world atlas in the library, and he remembered clearly what this ocean looked like on paper. While he arranged his Hefty garbage bag on the ground his thoughts of the Pacific wavered into the image of a girl getting out of a Mercedes convertible on Sunset, and as luck would have it he had been blessed with a clear view way up her legs to her pale blue undies and slightly visible fur pieces. She had trotted down the sidewalk and into a store and he had marveled at her grace of movement, the fluid lubricant that fills such a body and makes it move so beautifully. He whispered a very old song, “I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China,” something on that order, before he slept, quite unmindful in his ordinariness that his straits were dire indeed, or that some in this immediate area of a great university, not to speak of the film business, would mistake this ordinariness as extraordinary.

  Those who sleep outside a great deal know that this sleep can’t aspire to the comatose aspects of hibernation that so many seem to crave from night. You might wake up a hundred times for a moment or two, allowing your senses of hearing or smell or sight in the dimmish light to test your surroundings. This is unconscious enough not to deter from rest. Brown Dog was visited by a single curious cat for a short time, and also the stars which finally made an appearance as the ambient light of the city diminished. The few times he became conscious enough his thought processes settled on simple things such as he would not be able to continue spending seven dollars a day on water. The air was quite sweet in the garden, a wonderful contrast to the fungoid odors of the motel rooms he had stayed in with Lone Marten who was armed with a dozen phony credit cards. Brown Dog had suggested that a couple of cheap sleeping bags would cost less than a night in a motel and Lone Marten had called him a fool and a “blanket ass,” a pejorative term for traditional Natives. Lone Marten insisted he needed a desk at night to work on the “colloquium” he would perform at U.C.L.A. Lone Marten called him a fool so often that in Laramie B.D. had to run him up the wall by his belt so that he flopped there while B.D. asked him to stop using the word “fool,” that in biblical terms it was a terrible thing to call your brother a fool. Of course from his uncomfortable position Lone Marten agreed, thinking at the time that if he weren’t David Four Feet’s brother he might actually be in danger with this simpleminded fool who hadn’t the sense to do anything to his own advantage.

  About an hour before dawn a siren howled down Hilgard Avenue and through the foliage B.D. could see the flickering amber lights of an ambulance, the yowl the most ghastly of all human-produced sounds, which had barely subsided when a medevac chopper fluttered and whacked overhead landing on the roof of the medical center that adjoined the gardens. Rather than being irritated B.D. had the feeling that these local people had the wherewithal to immediately take care of their sick or injured. A few winters before a logger friend had had some of his ass literally frozen off when he had been trapped by a fallen log for about eight hours before help came. Of course, he reminded himself, he had seen a great number of the miserably poor on his day-and-a-half walk who might be advised to walk in front of a car for a change of luck. There was an owl with an unfamiliar call directly above him and moments later the first stirring of dawn birds which always brought on an hour or so of the deepest sleep the outdoor sleeper can have, maybe a genetic remnant from a time when the predatory enemy was always nocturnal and first light meant the sweet dream of security.

  Having finally figured out where he was Brown Dog was on his knees neatly brushing off and folding his garbage bags when he was approached by two garden workers, a young man and woman, who told him he wasn’t allowed to sleep there. “But I already have,” he said, adding that it was a truly wonderful place. They were botany graduate students and the lumpish girl tried to give him a dollar which he turned down saying he already had forty-nine dollars. He asked a few questions about the flora which they referred to as “Pacific rim,” a new term for him though in his mind’s eye he could see the black ink outline of the ocean in the atlas. He also asked if there was a nice woods in the vicinity where he could camp out and they thought not, though the young man added that he might check out Will Rogers State Park farther out Sunset. A mountain lion supposedly lived there, right smack-dab in Los Angeles, also lots of coyotes, not to speak of rattlesnakes and birds. This information made B.D. think that this wasn’t a bad place after all. He asked the whereabouts of the “Indian office” at the university in hopes of a starting place for tracking down Lone Marten. They only said that there might be one but they didn’t know where it was. They said goodbye then and when they walked off with their pruning shears the lumpish girl had begun to look pretty good. B.D. thought they could sit naked together in the carp pool near the bamboo thicket and it would be like some old movie set in a tropical island. On the way out of the garden he looked at the top of a very tall palm tree and it reminded him of one of Delmore’s favorite movies, Sands of Iwo Jima, which B.D. didn’t care for because of the endless gore. The stealthy Japanese hid at the tops of coconut trees because, according to Delmore, their heads looked like coconuts. Delmore’s own head looked like a beige bowling ball, size nine, in fact, on the top of a small wiry frame.

  When B.D. emerged from the garden his heart jumped and his stride quickened. What luck! Right there across Hilgard, parked illegally, was the five-year-old dirty brown Taurus station wagon, Lone Marten’s car, and a rumpled and burly man was unlocking the car. Brown Dog dodged the early-morning traffic with difficulty and when he looked back at the Taurus a squad car had screeched up behind it and the burly man was leaning against the car in despair. Brown Dog’s momentum, caused by a leap to escape a yellow Ferrari, was such that he was nearly in between the burly man and the cop before he could stop himself. This was a collusion of fates that afterward would stun B.D. For lack of a better thing he opened his lunch bucket and swigged the last of his water, noting too late that it definitely wasn’t Lone Marten’s brown Taurus. Shit, he thought, as he smiled lamely at the burly man and the cop. At the very moment a half dozen U.C.L.A. coeds, definitely sorority girls, flounced up the sidewalk singing a merry tune, all with uniformly tan brown legs and trim bottoms. While the cop glanced at the girls the burly man winked frantically at B.D. and flashed a wad of bills from his pocket. The cop looked back at the man and then at Brown Dog with irritation.

  “I think you were going to drive. I could take you in,” the cop said.

  “I was getting a manuscript out of the car while I waited for my driver, Ted. You really shouldn’t arrest me for my supposed intention. Besides, Ted drives me everywhere.”

  “Get in the car and start it,” the cop said and Brown Dog took the keys from the man and started the car, so obviously not Lone Marten’s though it was even more of a mess. It didn’t, however, smell of Lone Marten’s main fuel, cannabis. The car phone, the first of his life, began to ring and the man jumped in the passenger side, saying, “It’s the coast.”

  “We’re already on the coast, fuckhead,” the cop said and then demanded B.D.’s driver’s license. “You’re the driver. Where’s your license?”

  “Yes, sir,” B.D. said, knowing with cops that politeness was the primary move. He was somewhat proud
that he kept his driver’s license current though in fact the renewal form constituted the only mail he ever received, not being a member of any organization or even owning a Social Security number. The cop appeared as if he were going to return to his squad car to check the license, then changed his mind saying that he was originally from Livonia which was part of Detroit and had been up deer hunting around Curtis which wasn’t all that far from Grand Marais. The cop had also fished perch at Les Cheneaux and walleye near Rapid River, two species that bored B.D. though he didn’t say so. B.D. asked him why he had moved to L.A. and the cop said he had always wanted to become an actor. As they shook hands the cop stooped and looked over at the burly man who was in the middle of saying on the phone, “If you think I’d do a rewrite for a hundred thou you can suck a Republican’s dick.”

  “Bob, shut up and listen to me. Don’t ever in your wildest dreams try to drive a car in this city again. You’re grounded forever, Bob. You’d do a year minimum no matter what lawyer you got. If you so much as touch a steering wheel you’ll be eating and shitting with beaners and jigs for three hundred and sixty-five days.”

  “You shouldn’t talk to me like that, you blue-belt pansy. I was a United States marine,” Bob said, hanging up the car phone.

  “You were never a marine, Bob. We know your record. You’re only a writer.” The cop walked off as if he had won the day and B.D. turned to Bob wondering how he dared call a cop a “blue-belt pansy,” so he asked him.

  “The U.S. Constitution. Also he wants a part in a movie. He tried to get my last D.U.I. reduced but lower-echelon cops can’t swing anything. I went over the curb on San Vincente onto the median because it was hot and I wanted to park under a tree for shade.”

  “What did you blow?” Brown Dog asked. Driving under the influence was a big-ticket item in the U.P., especially around Marquette and Escanaba.

  “I blew a point two three which is slightly major.” He gestured for B.D. to get moving and they headed north up Hilgard toward Sunset. “The name’s Bob Duluth. Where do you want to go?”

  Brown Dog said “the ocean” but the question was puzzling in that he had supposed Bob had places to go for meetings or whatever. There was also the unnerving idea that this was the most unlikely way he had ever gotten a job and there was the question of whether life should be changing this fast. He explained to Bob his theory about not driving over forty-nine and Bob said if you did that on the freeways you’d get your basic tailpipe up your ass. Bob’s language was a strange mixture to B.D., half the low-rent vulgarity of pulp cutters and construction workers, and half the peculiar kind of elevated talk B.D. identified with woods yuppies, as they were called, richer people that built in remote places way up north in order to be close to nature. These were often nice enough folks but their conversational patterns were quite intricate. B.D. had cut firewood for a couple in their thirties who had had a top-rate crew come all the way from Minnesota to build them an elaborate log house. They overpaid him for firewood and he had tried to give them some venison (illegal out of season) in return, but they were devout vegetarians. This was quite odd to B.D., one of whose ambitions was to eat a porterhouse every day for a week if he ever had the wherewithal. The couple had even invited him to take a sauna with them and the woman was absolutely bare naked and a knockout at that. He feared he’d get an erection but then he had a hangover and they raised the heat level to an unbearable degree to “purify their bodies.” They fed him a vegetarian meal with some vegetables and grains dressed up like meat which was pretty good though later in the evening he had one of Frank’s special half-pound burgers. They had become distanced when he had run into the woman outside the I.G.A. grocery store and she had said, “I feel good about myself.” B.D. had simply asked, “Why?” and she had totally delaminated and started screeching that he was a “thankless bastard” right there on the street which made the locals think he’d had an affair with her. Sadly, this was not true. Once when he had delivered firewood the couple had been doing their yoga exercises on the sundeck and the woman who was wearing a bikini had her heels locked behind her neck when she waved at him. He unloaded and stacked two full cords of beech while they were flopping around on the sundeck and he was quite amazed at their contortions.

  Bob fell asleep in the car after using words as varied as “etiolate,” “shitsucker,” “fractious,” and “motherfucker.” Brown Dog turned off into the Will Rogers State Park out on Sunset just to check it out as he had a feeling the job might not last and he might need to set up camp. The park fairly made his mouth water as there were few people around and the hills looked endless. Just the idea that there was a mountain lion roaming around made all of the multimillion-dollar homes in the distance look rather toylike and puny. The yoga couple never had any houseguests at their “retreat,” or so they called it, and the locals wondered why they had two bathrooms.

  Before Bob dozed off B.D. had heard a few items from his past that seemed a bit jumbled and possibly fibs. Bob said that he initially meant to be a scholar of real old literature from England, had taught in Ashland in northern Wisconsin, then at the University of Wisconsin in Madison which he considered his home. His wife and the son and daughter attending college were all fatally ill. This raised a lump in B.D.’s throat though only moments later Bob said his son was a Big Ten gymnast and his daughter a long-distance runner who had placed high in the Chicago Marathon, and his wife ran her own landscape gardening business. B.D. tried to imagine them all plodding to their strenuous activities shot through with mortal illness. No matter how well they were doing Bob felt that it behooved him to make money to insure comfort in their doomed futures. In successive summers Bob Duluth had written three mystery novels that did very well that featured a midwestern professor who was alone among all men in sensing the true and pervasive evil in the world. For the past few years Bob had been in and out of Hollywood to make the vast sums of money required to pay for the treatment of his gymnast, runner, and businesswoman. He dared B.D. to ask how much and B.D. asked, “How much?” and Bob said, “Over a grand a day,” an inconceivable sum to B.D. It was, however, in this matter and Bob’s current occupation as a “screenwriter” that B.D. sensed the skunk in the woodpile. Back in high school there had a been a teacher fresh out of the University of Michigan, rather than one of the state’s many teachers colleges, who was much disliked by the other staff for being too smart for his own good. This young teacher knew how everything in the world worked and, what’s more, could explain it to his students. He cut up a bunch of movie film and somehow developed it, put it on a wind-up roller and spun it, showing how moving pictures worked. It was still as impressive to B.D. years later and the teacher hadn’t made any mention of anyone writing the spinning film. Even though Bob Duluth said he only invented the entire stories for films he still seemed on thin ice. Unfortunately this beloved teacher had been caught tinkering with Debbie Schwartz on a woodland field trip, the same girl who made pin money showing her underpants. Debbie was fifteen at the time, though in most respects older than the teacher. The students widely protested the teacher’s firing but the school board was adamant. Brown Dog and David Four Feet did their part by throwing dog shit and Limburger cheese in the blower down in the school’s furnace room which evacuated the school. B.D. heard that years later Debbie and the grand teacher had been married and were living in a mansion near San Francisco, the teacher having invented new functions for computers.

  As they continued on toward Malibu, Bob Duluth was still asleep, snoring in fact, with an unattractive bubble of sputum on his lips. B.D. figured the man must work pretty hard because there were bags under his eyes and he twitched in his sleep like Grandpa used to when he worked two straight shifts, sixteen hours, at the sawmill.

  B.D. wasn’t quite ready for one of the signal experiences of his life. He had been following a slow-moving green Chrysler driven by a blue-haired lady when he looked up on a rise in the road and there was the Pacific Ocean. He drove off on the narrow shoulder
, got out, and leaned against the car hood, at first with his face in his hands and peeking out between his fingers because the view was far too much to be absorbed wide open. He felt choky as if there were a lump of coal beneath his breastbone and his body buzzed in a way not unlike the minutes before sex. If he had known Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy” he would have been hearing it, and the vast, rumpled bluish green water drew on his soul so that his soul only spoke the language of water, forgetting all else. He simply couldn’t wait to touch it with his hands, so he jumped back in the Taurus and sped off with Bob Duluth opening one eye in careless nonrecognition Who is driving me and who cares? I’ve been up all night eating what’s left of my heart, over an actress at that. A Brown Dog driving a brown car.