by Jim Harrison
While waiting for the nitrous oxide to take effect on B.D. Belinda for the hundredth time wondered how Gretchen’s attractiveness went to waste. She was surprised when she turned from her equipment tray, cursing her assistant who was on lunch break, and discovered her patient had an obvious growing erection in his trousers and was smiling. Normally men were far more frightened in the dentist’s chair than women. She took a protective smock from a cabinet and brought it up slowly so her hand touched his protuberance before she attached the smock. B.D. greedily kissed her hand leaving a little slobber on her latex glove. She stepped back with her pliers trembling. If you bought him some clothes he would be more than acceptable and the way his sexuality overcame the fear of pain made him a hot number. She felt a tingle herself as she leaped toward his mouth like a tigress and pulled all three of the bad teeth after which she led him to the small recovery room with its cot and vase of forsythia blossoms mixed with pussy willows. She then trotted across the highway for her Big Macs, deciding at the last moment to add a small order of fries. The very idea of sex made her ravenous.
Getting up from her desk after her first very large burger bite she took a peek in at her patient who tried to smile seductively though blood was leaking from his mouth. Belinda patted his mouth dry then couldn’t help herself and gave him a hug, massaging his strong shoulders and letting a hand stray down toward his fly. He nuzzled her breast leaving a telltale smear of blood, but their love was not meant to be, at least for the time being. Belinda was thinking of hoisting a leg over the cot, no mean feat for her, when a buzzer went off on the office’s front door which meant her assistant was returning five minutes early from lunch, a rare event. She quickly composed herself and told Brown Dog to be at her house at nine PM sharp, then left the recovery room only to see it was Gretchen who had come to fetch her client. Gretchen glanced at the red smear on Belinda’s breast without comment, noting that her friend was breathing as if she had jogged up a ski slope. Love is certainly where you find it at this latitude, she thought.
“I jerked three for the price of one,” Belinda said in a croak.
“Thank you.” Gretchen counted out five hundred bucks on Belinda’s desk.
“We agreed on seven,” Belinda said coming back to real life. “I got a car payment.”
“I’m tapped out.” Gretchen glanced disapprovingly out the window at Belinda’s black Mercedes convertible, an SL500R, and doubtless the only one of its kind in the Upper Peninsula, a vehicle of ghastly cost bought at wholesale through an uncle who was a dealer in Detroit. Given Belinda’s sexual habits she would have been better off with a Chevrolet Suburban with a water bed in the cargo space and black satin sheets with stirrups purchasable through sex magazines. Gretchen quelled her unkind thoughts. After all she had got three extractions for the price of one. Belinda was a good egg though it was unfortunate that she was shaped like one.
B.D. emerged from the recovery room beaming with a wad of pinkish gauze against his mouth. “My head feels a pound lighter,” he slurred. In truth his spirit soared. His mouth was now without the throbs he’d felt for over a month and he was looking at an afternoon off. The sun shone, it had to be nearing fifty degrees, trout season was open, and though his mouth was sore indeed, the fact that his throbbing pain had dissipated made him childishly happy as it does for everyone in the human race. On the way out Belinda slipped him a card with her phone number and home address and “9 PM” scrawled at the bottom. Gretchen caught this exchange and found herself admiring Belinda’s vitality, her ability to close the deal. Unlike former President Carter “lust in the heart” was a piddling abstraction. When Gretchen turned on the sidewalk and saw B.D. kissing Belinda’s hand she felt no urge toward the film rights of the coming escapade, quite forgetting that ninety-nine percent of the people making love on earth aren’t particularly pretty, and if we are to believe Hollywood alien couplings are even less winsome.
The difference between physical and mental pain was not a matter that Brown Dog had pondered greatly. The exhausting reality of physical labor each day tended to winnow the diffuse nature of mental pain into smallish knots in the psyche, thus when cutting pulp, felling trees to be trucked to paper mills, the pain of Shelley’s betraying the secret location of the Indian graveyard to the academic predators at University of Michigan isolated itself to the size of a dried pea in his brain and could generally be avoided like most bad memories. It reminded him of the fifth grade when on a cold dark winter morning after peeing on a snowbank he had caught his pecker in the zipper of his trousers. His best friend David Four Feet had flopped around in the snow howling with laughter. When David’s crippled legs tired he would scamper along like a chimp so when he received his true ceremonial name it recognized his permanent infirmity. The tribal shaman had forecast a great future for David but he died in a fight in Jackson Prison at age twenty-five. B.D. supposed that every boy at one point or another had zipped up his weenie but when Doris had told him of David’s death he had simply fallen to the ground in a whirling nexus of grief, his heart curdled. A month later over in Sault Ste. Marie an acquaintance who was half Chippewa and a prison guard had checked on the matter and discovered that David’s opponent had also died of stab wounds which meant eventual vengeance was out of the question, leaving B.D. to question the usual galaxies when he slept outside on summer nights.
Twenty-five years later while gathering his fishing gear on an early May afternoon he knew he was going to fish a stretch of creek that was favored by him and David Four Feet as a camping spot. The troubling idea arose when he looked into the darkness of his creel that we are mostly alive in each other’s minds and that we’re only dead when we’re dead to ourselves. This notion understandably made him reach for the schnapps bottle under the car seat. The liquor stung the three holes in his gums where teeth had once been but the sensation was tolerable in view of the coming desired effect.
There was a dreaded gravel crunch behind him and he turned to see Delmore standing on the county road some fifty feet from the mobile home looking pensive which meant yet another request for brute labor was coming. B.D. decided on a preemptive strike.
“Look. I pulled my teeth at no cost to you,” B.D. announced pointing at his own gaping mouth.
Delmore nodded as if this feat of moral strength was small potatoes. What he wanted at the moment was for B.D. to transplant four birches and three cedars to a place behind the house as a small grove within which he would bury the urn of ashes that had once been Doris. B.D. readily agreed and added a spade to his fishing equipment withholding the information that cedars would only survive in clumps. He was in a hurry to go fishing and consent was the best tactic for escape.
“Charlton Heston says the government is going to take our guns,” said Delmore, trying to prolong human contact.
“Take them where? I didn’t know you owned one.”
“Be that as it may I have a right to own one,” Delmore huffed.
B.D. shrugged and got into the car but Delmore hung tight to the window continuing the usual blather. B.D. pointed out that Delmore could hide his nonexistent pistols and rifle in a hollow log. After all, the local police and rescue squad had been unable to find the kid down the road the summer before when he was supposedly lost in a forty-acre piece of swamp. While watching the situation B.D. had noted that four of the cops in separate squad cars were mostly talking to each other on noisy radios, and the rescue squad guys were doing the same on walkie-talkies so how could they hear the kid if he called out? B.D. knew the parents who were slovenly boozehounds well beyond his own questionable level of behavior. Just before dark when the collective rescuers broke for dinner B.D. called out, “Ralph, fried trout” and the boy emerged from the swamp green with algae-laden water and a face swollen by bug bites. When B.D. took Ralph to Delmore’s for dinner Delmore called the boy’s grandfather up in Baraga after seeing the bruises from the drunken beatings received from parents. After Ralph was fetched in the morning by the grandfather, B.D.
drove Delmore down to the parents’ trailer where Delmore quietly told them they would go to jail forever if they tried to take back their son.
On approaching a brook trout stream or beaver pond Brown Dog invariably got the jitters despite having trout-fished on several thousand days of his life. He had reflected on the idea that these tremors were not unlike those preceding lovemaking wherein the heart quivered, the mouth dried, and the surroundings became diffuse. To calm himself he decided to first dig up the small cedars and birches, wrapping the roots in the pieces of wet burlap he had brought along to protect the tiny root hairs that drew in their food. While he dug he was diverted by thoughts of his impending date with Belinda that evening. The fact that she was a tad burly did not lessen the intensity of his fantasies, the idea that they might mate like bears in the moonlight of her backyard. He hoped he had a clean shirt left because Belinda was pretty high class though his experiences with the rich anthropologist Shelley had led him to believe that love could conquer his shabby wardrobe.
Brown Dog was intensely wary and attentive in the woods except when in a pussy trance, thus he failed to see a man leaning against an olive SUV, and glassing him with binoculars two hundred yards down the road. B.D. put the trees in the trunk leaving the lid up but binding it to the back bumper with a bungee cord. He stepped back in alarm as Dirk the game warden swerved up, then jumped out with his hand on a holster. Game wardens in the Upper Peninsula had been especially careful since one had been murdered on the Garden Peninsula a few years before.
“Dirk, it’s me,” Brown Dog whispered. Pistols frightened him, designed as they were for punching red holes in people.
“I see it’s you. It could have been someone who looked like you,” Dirk said, taking his hand away from the holster. “Anyway, you’re under arrest for stealing from state property.”
They both looked at the forty acres from which B.D. had dug up the birch and cedar saplings. The land had been pulped in the winter and no self-respecting hurricane or tornado could have done a better job of laying waste to forty acres of woods. There were piles of tops strewn about and water-filled trenches dug by the giant tires of the log skidder. Many of the younger trees had been fatally scarred by the falling older trees when they had been cut.
“It’s the law,” Dirk added.
“The law sucks shit through a dirty sock,” B.D. offered.
“Be that as it may I’ve already radioed in the offense. I have to take you in.”
“You want me to spend a year in jail for digging up a few saplings? I’m already on probation. I got eleven teeth pulled this morning.” B.D. pointed at his widely opened and still bloody mouth at which Dirk recoiled. “Red and Berry will be sent off to foster homes. Remember after Thanksgiving and just before she croaked Doris gave you a pound piece of chocolate cake? Delmore gave you a bone-handled knife and an eagle whistle his great-grandfather made before the Civil War. Last week Berry showed your wife a place to see all the spring warblers. We’re an American family and now you’re pissing in the whiskey? I even bought a fishing license this year in your honor.”
Dirk was stricken, shuffling his feet in a clumsy two-step. Being a game warden could be real hard. In March he had chased a drunken snowmobiler who had hit a bump and when his outflung leg struck a light pole guy wire the force had torn the leg nearly off. Dirk had stupidly opened the snowmobile suit and once again discovered how much blood a body contained. He had gone without dinner. And then there was Doris who had been his favorite old woman on earth including his mother who was still a virago docent at the local hospital. Doris told him wonderful stories about the old days, how in the Depression when deer were scarce she and her brothers had helped their father dig up and kill three denned bears for food and how consequently the family had been afflicted with bear nightmares so severe a Midewiwin shaman had to be called in to purge them. Doris had added that a cousin over near Leech Lake in Minnesota had been so hungry he ate a trapped wolf and the next day had torn out his own dog’s throat with his teeth. Her cousin had never recovered but had disappeared north hopping on one snowshoe. Doris had finished the story by telling Dirk, “You have to be careful what you eat.”
A compromise was reached. Dirk helped B.D. replant the trees back in their holes with the burlap intact so that B.D. could retrieve the saplings without too much labor after he fished and Dirk was in another part of the county. When finished they both looked at their surroundings without comment. Nothing man does to nature is very pretty, or adds rather than subtracts, and though B.D. earned his livelihood cutting pulp the immediate ugly results singed his brainpan. Of course within a year or two the land would begin to repair itself with new growth but the purpose of paper for newsprint, cardboard boxes, sacks, shiny sheets for magazines seemed suspicious at best.
While Brown Dog floured and seasoned the dozen brook trout he rehearsed the catching of them. The first four had come from a cloudy eddy with worms and a Colorado spinner for visibility, the next five were caught on a Taiwanese bumblebee imitation, and when that delaminated in the manner of cheap flies from Taiwan he caught the last three trout in a tail-out with his favorite fly of all, a No. 16 female muddler with a tiny yellow tummy that he regarded as his most stable girlfriend. In another large black skillet, an iron Wagner of his grandfather’s, he made Sloan’s “Home Fries Supreme” from Dad’s Own Cookbook with potatoes, onion, green pepper, garlic, and a little paprika. Red and Berry insisted on these potatoes often and they had the grace of being easy to make compared to the special-occasion spaghetti dish that involved frying up a whole chicken plus Italian sausage which was then added to a marinara sauce. Like any working housewife Brown Dog got home tired so did a lot of his cooking prep work the evening before. For instance he had already started a pot of “Dad’s Own Chili” for tomorrow because his hot date with Dr. Belinda was coming up, the thought of which palpitated his loins.
He turned from the stove and saw that Berry was playing with her largish pet garter snake on the table of the trailer’s dining alcove. She was actually trying to feed the snake a browned garlic tidbit, originally a product of a cooking accident that he liked to snack on though not as much as Berry who would devour a cupful. Berry’s teacher in “special education” had sent a note home asking, “What is this young woman eating?” and B.D. called the teacher to explain the passion.
B.D. sat down with Berry who gave him a hug. She would never be able to read, write, or actually talk but B.D. communicated with her perfectly. At the Christmas program for her special education class Berry had held up pictures of fifty different birds and imitated the songs of each so that it sounded like the birds were in the Christmas tree behind the podium. When he had taken Berry and Red walleye fishing over on Big Bay de Noc Berry had confused the gulls with her imitations so that they had followed their boat in a huge flock, driving B.D. crazy until Berry sent the gulls packing with a goshawk shriek. All birds were frightened of goshawks. Berry liked to eat raw slices of walleye with salt and Tabasco but Red wouldn’t touch it.
“You better put the snake away, dear heart. Delmore and Red will be here for supper in a minute.” After school Delmore helped Red with his homework and now Red was getting mostly A’s. He was also the captain of the seventh-grade football and basketball teams which was pretty good for a mixed-breed boy.
While he watched Berry put the snake away in its arranged nest in her dresser B.D. felt a blurred pang for his former undomesticated life. In one deer camp he had reroofed for rent between hunting seasons there was a big garter snake that hung out coiled around the pilot light of the propane cookstove for warmth. When B.D. would put down a skillet for breakfast the snake would vacate for the day, slithering out a burner, down the counter to a place behind the breadbox that was near the woodstove. When the days were warm enough the snake would crawl to a corner mouse hole that led to the outside world. Tavern tarts visiting for the night were horrified by the snake except for a 4-H girl from Germfask who sat by the woodstove r
ehearsing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” on the saw for the talent show at the county fair. The snake seemed charmed by the musical saw which was wavering and querulous as if it were a metal loon. The girl was too young at seventeen for B.D.’s taste but she avoided sexual contact in high school to maintain her reputation. B.D. didn’t mind the saw music. It wasn’t something you wanted to hear every day but at least this girl Rhonda didn’t screech at the poor snake.
He turned to see Berry jumping straight up and down as high as any seven-year-old in far-off Africa. He had promised her a puppy after they all went down to Antrim County for the long Memorial Day weekend to pick morel mushrooms with some Pottawatomie friends of Delmore’s. Watching Berry made B.D. angry at Rose. Her mother, Doris, had described Rose as “a big rock on a narrow shelf.” You stay drunk when you’re pregnant and you got a baby girl maimed in the head. Berry’s teacher said they were lucky as far as fetal alcohol syndrome usually went because Berry was a happy child enclosed in her own world, a woods nymph whose curiosity made the natural world an endless source of pleasure while most victims of the infirmity were uncontrollable and sullen, sensing their difference from others. The teacher loaned him a book by Michael Dorris but B.D. couldn’t read it because each page gave him a heavy heart. He was at least halfway through a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude a tourist had given him ten years before. He never read more than one page at a time but the book made him want to head down that way, noting on the map that there was plenty of water in Colombia and doubtless the fishing was pretty good. The trouble was he wouldn’t be going anywhere until Rose got out of prison. He couldn’t forgive Rose for Berry but then she was scarcely asking his forgiveness, or God’s for that matter. Larger questions led his thoughts to crawl toward a vision of Dr. Belinda in a garter belt. He turned up the heat and flipped the brook trout for the extra skin crunch the kids liked.