Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

“You’d be a lamprey eel in a wig that sucked out men’s souls through their peckers,” Lone Marten shrieked with laughter.

  “Cut that shit out. This lady helped us.” B.D. placed a hand firmly at the back of Lone Marten’s neck.

  On the car phone Sandrine had found out there was what she called a Northwest “red-eye” from L.A. to Minneapolis leaving at midnight, which didn’t sound all that encouraging to B.D. but then he sensed that fate was beginning to be kind to him. When she dropped him off B.D. walked around to the driver’s side to kiss her goodbye.

  “Goodbye, darling. You’re fab. Come see me again,” she said. It was nice to end it on a high note.

  While sitting at the gate and waiting to board B.D. rehearsed his airport troubles. The attractive woman at the ticket counter was at the same time so daffy and crisp he figured that she too must be trying to get into show business. It was Memorial Day weekend and the only seats left were in first class which would take nearly all of his money, about nine hundred dollars which included what Bob Duluth had kindly stuffed in his pocket. There would be no money left to take the feeder flight to Marquette. Or he could take his chances at the gate with standby tourist class, which would also entitle him to the flight at seven in the morning. There was a real ugly sound to standby so he turned over all of his crumpled money except eleven dollars, reassured by Delmore’s dream of picking him up in Minneapolis with what Delmore had called a “weird” haircut. It was clear that one should try to fulfill a mentor’s dream.

  There was a worse mess at the security check when the bear skull showed up on the monitor screen and a black woman in a nifty tight uniform screeched, “What’s that?” Two security agents took B.D. aside and there was the question of whether he had the proper papers for the bearskin as required by United States Fish and Game. This was a real impasse but luckily the shift was changing, the agents didn’t want to be involved, and B.D. used a line Frank had used when the cops had pulled them over on the way home from the Seney Bar. “I fought in Vietnam to keep this country free. My body looks like someone went over it with a big leather punch. We took a lot of incoming mortars on the Mekong Delta which really fucked up the fishing.” That was enough and he proceeded to the gate not knowing that only the most ardent officers want to deal with a crazy.

  When he called Delmore from a pay phone the news was mixed, but tending toward the median strip of the good side of life, except for old Doris who was still in intensive care. To B.D.’s surprise he hadn’t wakened Delmore at the late hour in the Upper Peninsula. Delmore had been chatting with a man in Uruguay on his ham radio and described it as an “up-and-coming country.” Delmore demanded that Brown Dog come home immediately, not only to see Doris before she “cacked” but to take over the raising of Rose’s children, Red and Berry. The erstwhile white nanny who loved Natives only lasted three days because Berry had done such things as put a baby snake in the girl’s cereal and had eaten hamburger raw with salt and pepper. There was still some controversy over whether B.D. was actually in Alger County when the fireworks were lobbed at the archaeological site. The real crime still garnering news was the fact that Rose had bit off a police officer’s finger, though a feminist lawyer had come up from Lansing to help because of Rose’s contention that the officer had manhandled her tits. Whether B.D. liked it or not Delmore and his lawyer were working on a deal for which Delmore had signed an affidavit claiming B.D. to be the true father of Rose’s kids. Since the new prosecutor was a Republican who believed in family values he wouldn’t want to put the father in prison too, which would cost the county a fortune in foster care. Raising the kids also had the virtue of keeping B.D.’s “nose to the grindstone,” not really an appealing idea but anything was better than confinement behind iron bars. B.D. had never felt that Frank’s idea that we all spend our lives in a cage included him. Finally B.D. told Delmore that he better start driving now because the plane would arrive at six-thirty in the morning in Minneapolis and there wasn’t enough money for the Marquette flight. “I told you this would happen, you goddamn numbskull,” Delmore crowed, adding, “Be at the curb. I don’t want to pay no parking charges.”

  When B.D. took his seat near a window at the front of the plane he stowed the bearskin under the seat in front of him, then took off his shoes so he could place his stocking feet against the fur, making it impervious to theft. A prominent Minneapolis businessman sat down beside him and was obviously unhappy to do so. The man wore a tailored pin-striped suit and made B.D. feel more invisible than he had felt before which was some pretty stiff competition. When the stewardess came around for drink orders B.D. asked for the price and was delighted to find out they were free, though later he figured out the nine drinks he consumed in the night were actually a hundred bucks apiece. His composure was pretty firm except for the improbable land speed of the takeoff and the ungodly noise of the engines. Soon afterward his skin prickled at the beauty of all the lights of Los Angeles, drawing their vision within as an uncritical child does. And later, when the altitude reached over thirty-five thousand feet he had to say to his seat partner, “We’re seven miles up in the air, the same distance so I’m told of the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.” The man quickly closed his eyes, feigning sleep. And later yet, far below, he could see small thickets of lights that marked villages and cities that blurred into lovely white flowers.

  When the snack of a seafood salad was served B.D. quickly determined the food wasn’t of the quality of Bob Duluth’s Malibu restaurant, took his bottle of Tabasco from his pocket, and turned the contents of the plastic dish into an appealing pink. The man then looked at him longingly and B.D. passed the hot sauce.

  “How bright of you,” the man said.

  “Can’t say anyone ever called me bright,” B.D. said, savoring his burning tongue.

  “Fuck ’em, you’re bright.” The man had finished his third drink and was warming up.

  It turned out the man had done some rather fancy kinds of hunting and fishing and was quite pleased to find someone to listen to his self-aggrandizing tales of salmon fishing in Iceland and Norway, duck hunting in Argentina, dove hunting in Mexico where in one fabulous afternoon he had shot three hundred white-winged doves. Coming down to earth he also admitted to simple grouse shooting up near Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where Judy Garland had been born and not all that far from Bob Dylan’s birthplace. The man took out his computer and showed B.D. moving pictures of his two Brittany bird dogs and the dogs actually barked rather loudly which turned the heads of passengers who were trying to sleep. Since men are men, whatever that means, the man also showed him several different photos of his Los Angeles girlfriends. He traveled to L.A. and back once a week and though he was happily married, attested by earlier computer photos of his wife and children who came right after the dogs, the road was a lonely place and a hard-working man deserved affection. If B.D. hadn’t dozed off for a few minutes he would have seen the photo of a poor French actress the man was helping to get a green card. B.D. also didn’t take note that during the entire four-hour flight the man hadn’t asked him a single question about his life. The final transfiguration was the shimmering dawn on the greenery far below. “This is the shortest night of my life,” B.D. said too loudly. Even time herself didn’t stand still in a way you could count on.

  Nine drinks is quite a bit on earth let alone in a cabin pressurized to a mile high, a dangerous height for drinking in volume. When the plane landed on a cool, wet, and windy Minneapolis dawn the other first-class passengers gave the prominent businessman and Brown Dog meaningful glares which were not recorded. The businessman conked a fancy lady on the head while dislodging his briefcase from an overhead bin, tried to kiss a stewardess goodbye, and brayed he was now headed for work in his brand-new Land Rover. The copilot, peeking out from the cockpit with a tired smile, chided the stewardess for giving the asshole too many drinks. Even B.D. dimly knew that it was time for their friendship to end and let the man go ahead while an older woman across the aisle
told B.D. that he was an “enabler.”

  He was well down the long corridor and emerging into the main terminal while clutching his full garbage bag to his chest when he stopped to ask himself why the ground, the endless carpet and now the hard floor, felt so strange beneath his feet. He had forgotten his shoes and when he turned to retrieve them he saw that he would have to go through security again which was definitely a bad idea.

  Outside he sat on a bench near the curb and was soon wet and cold but dared not retreat for fear of missing Delmore. Finally he unwrapped his bearskin and enshrouded himself in it, violently hungover but warm. Two eco-ninnies fresh out of Boulder, the kind that piss off left, right, and middle, stared down at him with anger from the height of their elevator Birkenstocks but he was nonchalant, safe and secure in this citified version of the north country.

  Finally, after more than an hour, Delmore beeped his horn repeatedly from a scant five feet away and B.D. roused himself from a beautiful dream where he and Sandrine were whirling through the universe attached tails to teeth like Celtic dogs. He opened the car door and spread out his skin.

  “I got the bearskin back,” B.D. said, near tears.

  “I didn’t know you lost it. It’s a good thing you got those clothes because I forgot to tell you on the phone there’s a chance you can get Rose’s old night job sweeping the casino. So help me navigate out of this goddamn suckhole.” Delmore passed B.D. the map but he was already asleep, having heard nothing at all.

  They were halfway across northern Wisconsin on Route 8 when Delmore stopped the car at a roadside park that abutted a lake east of Ladysmith. He had bought a loaf of bread, mustard, and a can of Spam as a welcome-home lunch for Brown Dog who still hadn’t awakened. The sun was out now, and though it still was only in the high fifties Delmore felt warm and good to have his relation back even though the simpleminded fool wouldn’t wake up. Delmore made the sandwiches, set out an ice chest with a six-pack for B.D. and iced tea for himself. He became a little irritated, went back to the car and turned on a Sunday morning Lutheran church service at blasting volume. B.D. sank deeper in his bearskin and Delmore opened a beer and dribbled some on his lips. B.D. fumbled for the door, got out and fell to his knees, got up and took the can of beer from Delmore. He drank deeply, blinking his eyes at the landscape, rubbing his stocking feet on the soft green grass, drained the beer and handed the can to Delmore, then half-stumbled down through a grove of poplar, cedar, and birch to the lake where he knelt in the muddy reeds and rinsed his face in the cold water. On the way back up the hill he took a longer route through the woods, half-dancing through the trees like a circus bear just learning his ungainly steps, slapping at the trees and yelling a few nonsense syllables, dancing back to the picnic table where he popped another beer and picked up his Spam sandwich, looking out at late spring’s deep pastel green with the deepest thanks possible.

  The Summer He Didn’t Die

  PART I

  What is life that I must get teeth pulled? Brown Dog thought, sitting on a white pine stump beside the muddy creek with a swollen jaw for company. It was late April and trout season would open in two days. Brown Dog was a violator and had already caught two fine messes of brook trout, not in contempt for regulators but because he was hungry for brook trout and so were his Uncle Delmore and his stepchildren, Red and Berry. Despite this Brown Dog put the highest value on the opening of trout season which meant the end of winter, though at his feet near the stump there was still a large patch of snow decorated haphazardly by a sprinkling of deer turds.

  Here I sit in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, one hundred eighty pounds of living meat with three separate teeth aching and sending their messages of pulse, throb, and twinge to each other, their secret language of pain, he thought. Brown Dog was not what you call a deep thinker but within the structure of aching teeth mortal thoughts tended to arise in the seconds-long spaces between the dullish and the electric, the surge and slight withdrawal. Sitting there on the stump he blurred his eyes so that in his vision the creek became an immense and writhing brown snake emerging from the deep green of a cedar swamp. Until the autumn before the creek had run clear even after big rains but the bumwads from the County Road Department had done a sloppy job on an upstream road culvert and now the water was the color of an average mud puddle.

  Brown Dog knew that teeth were simply teeth and they shouldn’t be allowed to repaint the world with their troublesome colors. When he had gone into Social Services the week before more than curious about finding help for his malady, he was not allowed to immediately see his ally Gretchen but first had to pass the foamy gauntlet of the Social Services director Terence Stuhl who always reminded Brown Dog of the suspicious water of the Escanaba River after it had been sluiced through the local paper mill. Stuhl was more bored than mean-minded and began chuckling the moment he spotted Brown Dog in a mirror on the far wall of his office that reflected anyone entering the lobby of his domain and was stuck there temporarily dealing with the purposeful hostility of the receptionists to whom anyone on any sort of dole was up to no good and must be tweaked into humility. Along with his relentless chuckling Stuhl sucked on a dry pipe sometimes too deeply, whereupon the filter stem would hit his uvula and he would begin choking and then draw on a bottle of expensive water paid for by the taxpayers of Delta County.

  Stuhl, however, was far from the biggest asshole Brown Dog had to deal with in life. Stuhl merely drew Brown Dog’s file, really a rap sheet, from a cabinet and chuckled and choked his way through a recitation of Brown Dog’s low crimes and misdemeanors: the illegal diving on, stealing, and selling of old sunken ship artifacts in Lake Superior, the stealing of an ice truck to transport the body of a Native in full regalia found on the bottom of Lake Superior, the repeated assaults on the property and encampment of University of Michigan anthropologists who were intent on excavating an ancient Native graveyard, possibly the northernmost Hopewell site, the secret location of which had errantly been divulged to a very pretty graduate student named Shelley while Brown Dog had been in the usual ill-advised pussy trance. There were also small items like a restraining order keeping him out of Alger County, the site of the graveyard and his former home in Grand Marais, a lovely coastal village. Another charge of flight to avoid prosecution for a trip to Los Angeles had been dropped through the efforts of Brown Dog’s Uncle Delmore, a pure-blood Chippewa (Anishinabe). Delmore had managed to keep Brown Dog out of jail by arranging the marriage to Rose, a cohort in the attack on the anthropological site. Unfortunately Rose in a struggle had bitten off part of the finger of a state cop and had another year and a half to serve which seemed to be a long time, two years in all, but then her court-appointed lawyer, a dweeb fresh out of Lansing, far to the south, had claimed the photos showed that Rose had also blackened the cop’s eyes and ripped his ear after he had touched her breasts. Rose had also intemperately yelled during the trial that the judge was welcome to kiss her fat ass which brought titters from the audience and angered the judge, especially when Rose had turned, bent over, and showed the judge the ample target. Brown Dog had regretted missing this proud moment but he had been on the lam in L.A. with Rose’s older brother, Lone Marten. Rose’s other brother, David Four Feet, had died in Jackson Prison and had been Brown Dog’s best boyhood friend. Rose had behaved poorly in detention, so that when Delmore, Brown Dog, and Rose’s children, Red and Berry, had driven to the prison near Sault Ste. Marie the children hadn’t been permitted to witness their mother’s marriage. Rose hadn’t even kissed B.D. through the heavy metal screen. She only whispered, “My heart and body still belong to Fred,” another cohort in the attack on the anthropologists. On the long drive home Brown Dog reflected that the only marriage of his forty-nine years hadn’t been very imposing but was better than being in prison himself. The deal Delmore had made with the prosecutor, thus allowing Brown Dog to return from the not so golden West, was simple enough: marry Rose and assume full responsibility for raising her children, Red and Berry,
whose separate fathers were indeterminate, and save the county a bunch of money. Red was fourteen years old and no particular problem while Berry at nine was a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome, a modest case but debilitating enough to prevent any chance at what our society clumsily defines as a “normal life,” a concept as foggy as the destiny of the republic itself. As a purebred and an enrolled member of the tribe Rose had a few benefits, and along with some help from Social Services and what he made cutting pulpwood for Delmore, Brown Dog got them by, with the only sure check being the fifty dollars a week Gretchen and Social Services had helped extricate from Delmore after a tree kicked back and crushed Brown Dog’s knee.

  In truth domesticity is an acquired talent and up until his prison wedding Brown Dog had not spent more than moments a day devoted to it. So much of his life had been lived in deer cabins where he traded his handyman services for rent. He was fairly good at laying out new but cheap linoleum, reroofing, shoring up sagging bunk beds, fixing disintegrating woodstoves, and cutting firewood that he was never without a place to stay. This scarcely qualified him to raise two children but then Rose’s mother, Doris, though quite ill had helped him right up until Christmas morning when she had died, an event that was the reverse of Dickensian expectations. Delmore’s cabin back in the woods was hard to heat by the beginning of November, and too far to the road for Red to catch the school bus, so Delmore had bought a repossessed house trailer which was placed a hundred yards from the main house. Brown Dog had pickaxed frozen ground to dig a pit for an outhouse. There was electricity, and a propane cooking stove and a heater, but water had to be hauled from Delmore’s in a big milk can on Berry’s sled. The sled broke and he had to buy a new one plus a toboggan for the water, all of which had cost him two full days of wages.

  In her last waning days Doris had been moved from the trailer into Delmore’s house where he had patiently nursed her. They had been friends since they were children, over seventy years in fact, keeping in touch during the long years Delmore had worked in an auto factory four hundred miles south in Detroit, and had become wealthy by default having bought a small farm during World War II on land part of which became the wealthy suburb of Bloomfield Hills.