Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  In Malibu, B.D. parked in the nearly empty lot of a restaurant, locked the car, and made his way down to the beach. He knelt and felt the water, colder than he expected, about like Lake Superior in May. A wave submerged his shoes with a delicious feeling, his feet, so unused to cement, still sore from the jaunt from Cucamonga. A big sailboat came by, its rail nearly buried in the water. B.D. waved and two folks in yellow slickers waved back, which gave him a good feeling about the human race. He sat on the beach for an hour in a state of total forgetfulness about his new job, watching seabirds that resembled the rare piping plover but were a bit larger, no doubt cousins. His mind was a peaceful blank other than thinking that after he retrieved his bearskin and before he headed back to Michigan to face the music, or better yet northern Ontario which was the U.P.’s cousin, he’d spend a couple of nights on the beach wrapped in his bearskin, and also a couple of nights on the ridge he had seen up in Will Rogers State Park. Of course there were many signs that said “No Camping” but then the world had become full of signs that said “No Something,” so to avoid suffocation you generally had to ignore them. In the Upper Peninsula such signs were generally filled with bullet holes from those acting out of resentment or for convenient target practice. During the worst of the bug season, late May and June, when the mosquitoes and blackflies could be irritating, B.D. on breezy nights liked to sleep on a stretch of fifteen miles of deserted shore of Lake Superior, a different place each time, though most of the routine was invariable. First he’d get a loaf of homemade bread from an old lady he cut wood for, catch a few fish, buy a six-pack, start a driftwood fire, fry the fish in bacon fat in an old iron skillet, and eat it with the bread, salt, and the bottle of Tabasco he always carried in his old fatigue jacket, wrapped in duct tape so it wouldn’t clink against his pocketknife. He’d finish the six-pack in the late twilight near the summer solstice that far north, nearly eleven in the evening, scrub the pan with sand, then get naked and scrub his body in the cold surf. A lady might come ambling along though this had never happened and it wouldn’t do to be unclean.

  When he reached the car and unlocked it Bob Duluth was still sleeping and now sweating profusely because the car was very hot in the midmorning sun. B.D. started the car but the air conditioner made a weird noise and wouldn’t work so he opened all the windows. Bob had begun to make a keening noise in the midst of a bad dream and his hands flapped and clutched his face. At first B.D. couldn’t think of what to do other than run for it, but opted for turning on the radio real loud. Luckily the dial was on a Mexican station and a woman’s voice was full of passion and deep lyrical sobs, then she would lilt off into high beautiful notes. The music seemed to go with the wordless, verbless immensity of the ocean thought B.D., though not in that specific language.

  “I was never the man I used to be,” Bob said, opening his eyes and mopping his face with a handkerchief, looking out at the water. “When I die I will disappear at sea. A hot sea.”

  “In a boat?” B.D. asked, a bit unnerved by memories of choppy, rolling Lake Superior.

  “I’m not at liberty to say. Let’s have a beer. This fucking car is a steam bath. At a garage in Ensenada some fucker stole some parts from the air conditioner.”

  “It’s not open until eleven,” B.D. said, having checked the lounge door after his beach-beer reverie. B.D. followed Bob around to a service entrance where Bob banged at the door and gave a kid in dirty white kitchen clothes twenty bucks for two Tecates. B.D. was pleased to drink his first foreign beer while looking at the ocean.

  “Feminine ambrosia. Seaweed trace. Nipple taste. A bit of tire,” Bob said, tasting the wine.

  “Oh Bob, you big dork,” the waitress shrieked, tapping him on the noggin with her ballpoint.

  The first beer seemed to have given them a certain momentum. B.D. thought other people might join them when Bob ordered five complete meals plus bottles of both red and white wine. B.D. stuck with Mexican beer, his wine-drinking career having ended young when he and David Four Feet had stolen a case of Mogen David which made them quite ill though they had drunk it all so as not to be wasteful. The very long lunch required seven beers which B.D. had always thought was a perfect number. Bob liked the number seven, too, noting that he had ordered five lunches rather than four because odd numbers were better than even. He had sworn, or so he said, during his impoverished youth never to get stuck with the wrong lunch which would leave you depressed the rest of the day. By ordering five you vastly increased the odds of getting something good to eat. B.D. raised the issue of the expense of this custom and Bob replied that his agent had negotiated a per diem of a thousand dollars a day which was peanuts compared to what certain actors and actresses required.

  “We’ll check the set tonight. We’re night shooting. This bimbo actress has a hundred-foot trailer with a full Jacuzzi. She eats caviar on oysters which should only be eaten separately. Her hamburger must be ground from prime sirloin right in front of her eyes or she won’t eat it. Her tuna fish must be made from scratch. She changes her underpants a dozen times a day, all at studio expense. I’ve heard that the best barber in Beverly Hills charges her five hundred bucks to shave her pussy because he’s gay and doesn’t like the job. Don’t quote me on that because it might not be true.”

  This wasn’t quite the kind of information B.D. was likely to quote though Frank back home might enjoy hearing it. His mind had been somewhat seized by the idea that this nutcase got a grand a day to live on and that before he ordered the food he had consulted his “food notebook,” telling B.D. that he preferred to avoid eating food prepared the same way during the same year, adding that on New Year’s Day the slate became clear again.

  “What about eggs?” B.D. had asked.

  “There are a thousand ways to cook eggs,” Bob had replied, reeling off a manic string of egg recipes, many of them in French which B.D. recognized because he had met French Canadians over in Sault Ste. Marie. He rather liked the way they talked for the same reason he liked to listen to the older, traditional Ojibway (Anishinabe) talk, say when Delmore was speaking to a friend on the phone. Delmore explained to him that all that language was comprised of was agreed-upon sounds. And now he was listening to this batshit writer talk about his incapability of repeating meals within the same year. He wondered idly what his anthropologist lover, Shelley, would have had to say about it? She regularly visited her mind doctor for a tuning up and when Brown Dog looked at the wide array of food before them there was something crazy about it though it didn’t deter his appetite. They ate Dungeness crabs, clams, oysters, and three kinds of fish, including sea bass and fresh yellowfin tuna.

  “Can you offer me a recommendation for the job?” Bob asked, putting down his fork for a split second and taking a monstrous gulp of wine.

  “Nope. I’m here on a secret mission. I didn’t bring my paperwork.” B.D. was pleased by his fib. No one could be expected to cart around all their paperwork though he, in fact, had none save the aforementioned driver’s license and a twenty-nine-year-old selective-service card.

  “I’d have to guess you were on the lam and trying to bury your identity in a big city,” Bob said. “Don’t forget that I write detective novels and am widely admired by professional criminologists.”

  “Tell it to someone who gives a fuck,” B.D. said, studying the ornate carapace of the Dungeness crab, thinking that the creature carried around his or her house much in the manner of the way old Claude carried his Hefty garbage bag and taught him to do so. “I’m thinking of heading up to Oregon to cut timber, or maybe Chapleau up in Ontario. If you want to do a readout on me drive your own car and end up in the hoosegow playing with yourself.”

  “Calm down. I could easily jump on the computer and get your records.”

  “If you knew my name.” B.D. took Bob’s car keys out of his pocket and slid them past a bowl of vongole with a rich hint of garlic. Two women at a nearby table were eating lunch with their sunglasses on which seemed awkward to him.

&n
bsp; “Chill out,” Bob said, pushing the keys back toward B.D. and twisting a forkful of pasta and spearing a clam from the vongole bowl. “My own origins are unknown, even to myself.”

  “Mine too,” said B.D., spooning up garlic and oil from the bottom of the bowl. Few tourists understood that a diet that included lots of garlic was useful as an insect repellent, though right now he was suddenly lonesome for his mosquito-infested home country, the lakes and bogs, the ceaseless cold rain, the pockets of snow in swamps that persisted into late May, the shelf ice buried in the sand and rock-strewn shores of Lake Superior that often lasted well into June. You could dig down and store your beer there and it kept wonderfully cold.

  “I often pretend I’m a dark orphaned prince but the truth is my mother was promiscuous. It’s brutal to accept that your mom was loose with her body.” Bob was sad for a split second, then slurped down several oysters.

  “I heard mine was too but I figured she must have had her reasons. Grandpa said we have strong bodies and can always earn our bed and grub, and sometimes women have to play it a little looser to get by. He might have been trying to save my feelings from anything I might hear when he raised me. You know, local gossip.” B.D. felt that oysters were more interesting than the past.

  “We left my dad and older brother who didn’t look like me up on the farm near Cochrane north of La Crosse,” Bob said. “We lived in Eau Claire, Fond du Lac, Oshkosh, and ended up in my high school years in Rice Lake, which incidentally has the best pizza in the world, a place called Drag’s. Ever since I’ve not been much of a pizza buff. It’s hard to step down. It’s like going back to a waitress after sleeping with beautiful actresses and fashion models.”

  “I’ve always favored waitresses myself.” B.D. had noted that the bones and meat of saltwater fish had a density that suggested they must work harder for a living than freshwater species. “Of course I don’t know about magazine models much less actresses though I met one yesterday who starred in the film Butts Galore.”

  “I’ve seen it. Intriguing but not much of a story line. Most of our porn is shot through with our collective tit fetish. If only the money spent on tit jobs around here was devoted to the five million children in America that go to bed hungry every night. Meanwhile, I grew up as a waif, moving from pillar to post, from dingy apartments in one Wisconsin suckhole city to another. But I was a bright lad and by dint of hard work became successful.”

  “What happened to your mother?” B.D. watched closely as Bob struggled a bit for an answer, B.D. recalling another radio program his Grandpa listened to after Jack Benny. It was called Fibber McGee and Molly. Fibber fibbed a lot.

  “I support her lavishly in a posh retirement home in Milwaukee. My older brother and dad both wrote me notes to say that they didn’t care for my detective novels. It hurt deep.” Bob seemed pleased with this detail that should increase his credibility, or so he thought.

  B.D. pushed himself back from the table, chock-full to the gills, and wondering why Bob never took note of the ocean right out the window in front of them. “Some of your lingo strikes me as far-fetched, Mister Bob. Maybe it just comes from the locale which doesn’t seem like the rest of our country.”

  At this tense moment the waitress reappeared and asked if they needed anything more. Bob affected a heartfelt lust: “Only you, darling, can satisfy a need far deeper, far more basic than food. All this food we’ve eaten is dead. You’re living food.”

  “Sure thing, Bob. Eat me and you don’t get fat or drunk or have to spend an hour a day on the toilet.” She slapped down the bill and flounced off.

  Back outside they snoozed for an hour but with the car windows open, a sweet sea breeze wafting through the windows, keeping most of the flies away from their snoring mouths. They awoke on the same cue, a bit thick and grumpy. Bob opened the glove compartment and insisted they both take megavitamins, the capsules as big as horse pills, then directed B.D. to drive south to Santa Monica where he had a late lunch meeting.

  “You mean you’re going to eat again?” The thought of another bite made B.D. feel gaggy.

  “Eating at its best has nothing to do with appetite.” Bob took a small Dictaphone from his pocket and said, “Not call me a cab, but get me a cab,” with the air of someone who had accomplished an important project. Bob then glanced over at the ocean for the first time and said, “Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.”

  In Santa Monica they stopped at valet parking for Ivy by the Shore. Bob pointed at the pier on the other side of Ocean Avenue and told B.D. to be back in an hour, looking at his nonexistent watch as if puzzled.

  B.D. was pleased to be out of Bob’s range and have a chance to walk off the lunch which would only be justified by an eight-hour hike. There was the untypical fragile feeling in his mind, a fluttery sense that forbade him from getting his true bearings which, like the currently popular notion of “situational ethics,” were not set in stone. The wanderer is vulnerable, and no matter that he hadn’t been inside a church in twenty years except to mop up a flooded basement, certain almost religious feelings began to arise, the first surge caused by the overwhelming merry-go-round music coming from a big shed at the foot of the pier. Swank autos were parked in front and a group of natty chauffeurs were sitting in the shade. There was some kind of party for rich little boys and girls and their lovely mothers. B.D. stood there transfixed by the music which was just about his favorite kind, recalling all of his many trips to the Upper Peninsula State Fair in Escanaba though through the ornate shed’s glass he could see that this was the most gorgeous merry-go-round in the universe. Once again he noted that because of his green janitor’s suit he simply didn’t exist in view of the others on the somewhat crowded pier. Three attractive nannies were around the corner smoking cigarettes and they looked right through the invisible B.D. He was pleased to have found the ultimate in disguises but if he was going to come across any affection in this town he’d better buy some extra duds.

  The merry-go-round music had begun to increase a lump of homesickness in his chest, certainly a primitive religious feeling where the home ground is sacral, so that when you’re on a foreign shore you recall the hills, gullies, creeks, even individual trees that have become the songlines of your existence. B.D. fought against the homesickness by looking north along the Pacific’s shore up toward Malibu and the green hills sloping toward the ocean and the almost unpardonable beauty of the seascape. This place was not exactly the prison he was destined toward back home, or the Alger County jail where they couldn’t scramble eggs at gunpoint and the sheriff cheated at cribbage. Not far from him in a moment of sheer good luck a lissome girl dropped her skirt though there was a bathing suit under it. The suit was drawn up a bit into the crack of her butt and she deftly used her thumbs to adjust the blue strap edges. His heart lurched as her hands gave her thighs a rub and when he sat down on a bench behind her he could see the blue ocean between her thighs. She reached playfully for a gull that flew swiftly by barely beyond her reach.

  This vision was too much to deal with and B.D. moved farther out the pier where old men were fishing, turning several times to look back at the girl receding in the distance, unmindful of Nietzsche’s notion that if you stare into the abyss too long it will “stare back into thee,” but nevertheless feeling the admonition as a physical presence by the somber nut buzz in his trousers. Unavailability increases desire into the arena of dull incomprehension, and you can feel dowdy to a point that you may as well sit down, let out a sob, and eat your own shoes.

  Despite all of this he was still capable of compassion both to others and himself. He did an abrupt about-face and hastily returned to the bench immediately behind the girl, picking up a stray newspaper and tearing a small hole in the crease. That way he could hold the paper up as if reading it and stare through the hole undetected. It was a counterspy technique he had read in a stack of old Argosy magazines in Delmore’s woodshed.

  The girl was now talking to a friend, a chunkier versio
n of herself, and they were both sipping soft drinks through straws in plastic cups, making a noise that reminded B.D. of a very crude joke about a local woman back home who reputedly could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. He dismissed this witticism as unworthy of the vision through the hole in the newspaper, which already was producing an altered state, removing him from the mundanity of his problems. A great artist might be able to capture the ocean between her tan thighs, a distant swimmer’s head bobbing through the frame. His concentration was absolute though it did not disallow certain thought of revenge against Lone Marten. This was only his second full day in town, and though he was currently feeling vaguely religious and lucky, he was mindful that his only other city experience in Chicago so many years ago was not exactly admirable. A fly landed and the girl twitched her butt like a horse shimmied a flank. A gay blade sat down on the bench a few feet away but the green janitor’s suit repelled his interest. B.D. had to readjust his focus as the girl turned slightly sideways, a hand on her jaunty haunch. On their long escape drive from Michigan to L.A. they had stopped for a snooze beside the Wind River south of Thermopolis in Wyoming. B.D. had stretched out on his bearskin rug but hadn’t slept, watching the river transfixed, the smooth sheen of an eddy showing several dimpling trout rises. Now the girl was facing him with her slightly puffed “mons veneris” clear in the newspaper’s hole. Suddenly two cups full of ice rained down on him and the gay blade quipped, “You’ve been caught, buddy.”

  B.D. dropped the newspaper and tried to smile. The girls laughed and gave him the finger. At least they had a sense of humor. He got up and bowed deeply, then made his way out toward the end of the pier where on a lower fishing deck he redeemed himself. An old, particularly wizened man had snagged his fishing rig on the bottom and whined loudly that it was his last rig. B.D. quickly stripped to his skivvies, made his way partly down an iron ladder, then jumped in after first telling the old man to hold on to his trousers and wallet. B.D. easily followed the taut fishing line down about thirty feet to the bottom. The visibility was poor and the water suprisingly cold, but he quickly untangled the old man’s rig from a piece of rebar, cement reinforcing rod, jutting from a pier piling. When he came back up victorious from his charitable baptism a small gathering applauded, but there was Bob Duluth looking a little angry.