Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  After dinner and a lukewarm dribbly shower from a hot- water tank recovered from a junkyard Brown Dog emerged to find Delmore playing Chinese checkers with Red and Berry who hadn’t the foggiest notion of what was going on but loved the game. Delmore and Red were tolerant as long as Berry didn’t throw or swallow the marbles. Delmore was impressed that B.D. was going off to seduce a “professional woman” and had suggested that if he did a good job Dr. Belinda might take a budget look at the kids’ teeth. They were spending the night with Delmore because of their stepfather’s hot date and Red was already protesting that they might have to watch John Wayne’s Red River for the hundredth time. B.D. had kissed the kids good night and was at the door when Delmore remembered and handed him a letter from the school district that said that in the coming September Berry was to be transferred to a public boarding school down in Lansing that specialized in her kind of infirmity. Locally they were at their wits’ end with Berry, plus their budget was being severely cut by the state but they were confident that Berry’s “socialization skills” could be increased in Lansing and one day she would find her place in society. This is a translation of the dreadful “education speak,” a language as otiose as legalese.

  Brown Dog paled and handed the letter back to Delmore. As he opened the car door he looked up at the stars beginning to gather in the spring twilight and howled at the heavens, “NO GODDAMNED WAY!,” then gave the thumbs-up sign to Delmore who was peering from the doorway with Red and Berry beside him. Berry returned B.D.’s howl with her patented whip-poor-will imitation, the melancholy musical plaint of a rarely seen avian creature, a twilit sound that introduces us to the coming dark that we forget during the day.

  Belinda, dressed in a fuchsia peignoir, answered the doorbell at nine PM sharp. She lived in a development called Nottingham Hill though there was no hill in the immediate area and Nottingham itself was some five thousand miles to the east. After her scruffy student days in Ann Arbor and dental school in Detroit, she wanted not only the new-car smell but the new-house smell. She wanted something charmless but efficient which wouldn’t further exhaust her after a full day spent with her hands in people’s mouths. Dental care wasn’t a high priority in the Upper Peninsula, an economically depressed area dependent on mining, logging, and tourism, and of late she had dealt with some toothy horror shows, including Brown Dog, who now stood on her doorstep looking more concerned than lustful.

  “Come in, darling.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” Passing through the foyer it occurred to him that he couldn’t recall ever having been in a new house. Above the odor of Belinda’s heady perfume the house smelled like a new car that he had recently sat in out of curiosity at the Chevrolet dealer’s. There was low music that resembled the muffled harmonies he had heard in Belinda’s dental office.

  “Is something wrong?” she blurted, having expected some kind of brazen gesture. “Do you want a drink?”

  B.D. accepted a glass of whiskey on the rocks and quickly told her of the threat against his stepdaughter, Berry, all the while staring at a far corner of the ceiling as if it might hold an answer.

  “They can’t do that. My cousin’s a big-deal lawyer down in Detroit. We won’t let it happen, kiddo.” Belinda meant to change the emotional texture of the evening.

  B.D. finished his drink and looked at Belinda through tears of gratitude. He had found an ally and they fairly collided in the middle of the living room before falling to the carpet which he thought might be made of cat hair because it was so soft.

  When B.D. left at dawn he felt at one, or maybe two, with the loud profusion of spring songbirds, his skin pricking at the warble of warblers. Of all the nights of love in his life Belinda had proven the sturdiest combatant. He aimed to take a bedroll with his chain saw to the woods because he knew that exhaustion would set in at some point. During a halftime break they had eaten some cold roast chicken with mayonnaise that smelled and tasted like garlic. He told Belinda of little Berry’s affection for toasted garlic. It seemed obvious that females who like garlic might have some sympathy for each other. They danced naked in a circle to mysterious music that Belinda said was Jewish. True, the spectacle wasn’t ready for film but it was nonetheless joyous.

  Rather than wake the kids Brown Dog slept a couple of hours sprawled in the backseat of the car wondering if there might be a salve appropriate for his sore weenie. He put a stray jacket of Berry’s over his face to protect himself from the loud whining of mosquitoes. He had invited Belinda for dinner and supposed she might like the chicken-and-sausage recipe favored by the kids and Delmore. She likely wouldn’t be impressed by their humble trailer and maybe Delmore would consent to dinner at his house though he had an aversion to messes. The main thing was to get Belinda interested enough in Berry to help out against the government, a shadowy monster the nature of which Brown Dog had never been able to locate. B.D. thought it would be nice if there was a simple recipe book that explained the government to innocent citizens interspersed with good things to cook including photos. It seemed a raw injustice that he had only been Berry’s father for six months and now the government was bent on taking her from him, a problem that couldn’t be resolved by a few hours of fishing followed by drinks.

  PART II

  With an eye toward free dental treatment Delmore had welcomed the idea of having the dinner for Belinda at his house. On getting out of her spiffy car she had made a faux pas by saying that the unsightly, abandoned trailer just down the road should be hauled away which Brown Dog corrected with “That’s where I live with the kids.” To get off the embarrassing hook Belinda had taken Red and Berry for a spin in her Mercedes convertible. Brown Dog and Delmore were left in an actual cloud of dust standing there next to the mailbox on the country road.

  “I admire you,” said Delmore.

  “I doubt that.” B.D. had noted that Delmore was less mentally solid than in former times but figured that with increasing age he had dropped all barriers that might impede his self-interest.

  “Don’t doubt me, nephew. That is a lady of substance. Her ass is an axe handle wide.”

  “Am I your nephew?” B.D. was stunned. Delmore had never called him nephew before and though it was no longer a large item in his life at age forty-nine, he was still curious about his own ancestry, the possible line of which had been purposely blurred by the grandfather who raised him, Delmore himself, and the pure-blood Doris whose passing at Christmas had left him missing what he thought of as a beloved aunt. B.D. had detected that he was a mixed blood but then so were tens of thousands of others in the Upper Peninsula. When the loggers and miners swept through the area on the path of conquest their sexual energies naturally sought out what was available, and that included Ojibway (Anishinabe) women. But then so what? Delmore had once said that people willingly jumped into the Mixmaster of sex and the product was likely improved by the variety of ingredients. “If you keep breeding beagles to beagles you’ll get dumb beagles.” This had been after a day of unsuccessful rabbit hunting when the beagle had disappeared into a swamp near Rapid River and had been found two days later some twenty miles to the west sucking eggs in a farmer’s henhouse.

  Dinner went fairly well with Belinda loving the chicken-and-Italian-sausage dish laden with what she called “the spice of life” which was garlic. By the time he had dished up ample portions for Belinda, Delmore, Red, and Berry, B.D. found himself with two wings but waxed modestly philosophical over the idea that a father must first provide for his family. Belinda had also done quite a job on the venison salami he had put out before dinner. The good news was that she would take a free look at the teeth of Red and Berry. The possible bad news was that she had had lunch with Gretchen and there was not much that could be done about Berry being sent off to school in Lansing in the coming September. It turned out that despite having married the incarcerated mother, Rose, to keep out of prison himself B.D. didn’t as yet have what constituted “clear title” to the children. There was a probationary p
eriod of a year which was only half over. He was obligated to provide for Red and Berry but Social Services and the educational system still held authority. Belinda said this would be very expensive to fight in court and Delmore choked on his single remaining strand of spaghetti.

  While B.D. washed the dishes Delmore showed Belinda around the farmhouse bragging that nothing much had been changed since he had fixed the place up after coming back north in the 1950s. The linoleum was original and he had hung the floral wallpaper with his own hands. Belinda was dubious about the anteroom filled with Delmore’s ham radio equipment, but then Delmore startled her by saying that like computers the process was more interesting than the content. Delmore put on his earphones, flicked some knobs, and quickly discovered that his radio friend in Mexico City had lunched on pork and vegetable soup, taken a two-hour siesta, and was dressing to go back to his dry-cleaning shop. When Belinda shrugged Delmore ominously warned her that in a time of worldwide crises it would be ham radio operators who would save the day.

  B.D. was finishing the dishes and watching Berry do expert cartwheels in the backyard when Belinda said goodbye with a “You going to visit me later, cutie?” He was tempted but had to turn her down mostly because of a profoundly sore weenie from last night’s sensual acrobatics. Belinda admitted that she was also “saddle sore” and B.D. had a momentary and unconvincing glimpse of himself as a mighty stallion like a horoscope drawing of a half-man, half-horse.

  There was an hour left of daylight so B.D. took Berry back to the creek partly to get her out of the hair of Red and Delmore who were playing chess. Delmore had Red River on the VCR and Red knew this was to throw him off his chess game. At age twelve Red was a child of his times with a fascination for the space program and all things technological and the cornball, lugubrious cowpokes of Red River filled him with a mixture of spleen and boredom. Even as a burgeoning star athlete Red had no tolerance for the mythology of “manly men.” Coaches were a necessary evil. He was pleased that his stepfather, Brown Dog, was a kindly fool, utterly without the silly macho characteristics of the Escanaba male population who affected total heartiness for hunting, fishing, and watching professional sports. Red listened to U2 while laboring over his homework with complete pleasure after which he would read a book by Timothy Ferris on astronomy. He had scant interest in his own purported father who was rumored to be a wandering botanist from Michigan State University his mother, Rose, met while berry picking. Before she died at Christmas his grandma Doris told him that he must be gentle about his mother’s energetic affection for the male sex. “Some of us gals are just like that,” Doris had said.

  Back at streamside B.D. and Berry sat on a grassy swath watching the water for signs of brook trout activity. Berry had the trembles so B.D. put his hand gently on her head to calm her down. Berry was a regular fish hawk who could see into the water far beyond B.D.’s capacity or anyone else’s for that matter. She pointed to a riffle corner beneath a dense overhanging alder and it was a while before he could see the trout sliding back and forth in the varying shapes of the current. With a hand on her head he wondered, What does she know and what doesn’t she know with a head full of short circuits? What will become of her in a world that has so little room for outcasts? Why does the government have the right to take her away? She’s a woodland creature as surely as the little year-old bear she had spotted sleeping against a stump on a walk a few weeks before. At first to B.D. the shape of the bear had only appeared as a black peppercorn in the pale greenery of spring.

  He got up and deftly caught the fish with a fly called the muddler. Berry, meanwhile, quickly plaited and braided marsh grass, forming a small green sack to carry the fish home which the only father she knew would cook her for breakfast. She had thrived with her mother in prison. One winter when she had peed her bed and Rose was drunk on butterscotch schnapps Berry had been thrown naked out the back door into a snowbank. Now when her brother, Red, chewed on his favorite butterscotch candy Berry fled the immediate surroundings. The scent of butterscotch clearly presaged evil in her neural impulses.

  Saturday dawned windy and cold, with rain driving in sheets against the mobile home which rocked in the gale on its cement-block foundation. Brown Dog watched the rainwater ooze through the cracks around the aluminum casement window above his head, noting the ghastly cheapness of the construction. Aluminum had to be an enemy of civilization. He lay in his cold bed remembering his grandpa’s “joke”: “It’s darkest before it gets even darker.” His sleep had been interrupted several times by worries about Berry though he was consoled by the idea that he had four months to resolve the problem. The government already had the somewhat justified idea that he was a total miscreant and there was nothing to prevent him from taking Berry and making a run to Canada in August. Doris had liked talking about her relatives in Wawa on the east end of Lake Superior, and also her dear cousin Mugwa who trapped up on the Nipigon. Mugwa was a U.S. citizen but had flown the coop to avoid the Vietnam War, rare for an Ojibway who like the Sioux farther west were always ready for a good fight even when it was on the behalf of their ancient enemy.

  By seven AM, the appointed time, they were all ready for the trip to the Boyne City area to pick morel mushrooms. Berry had decided to wear her best red dress over her trousers and she and Red were sitting in the back of the Chevelle. Delmore was in a snit because he had intended to make Spam sandwiches to avoid the expense of a lunch stop but the Spam had disappeared from the pantry. They had been through this before on outings and B.D. knew Red was the guilty party because Red hated Spam and liked the luxury of a restaurant hamburger. Red was an inquisitive boy and knew that Uncle Delmore carried hundreds of dollars in his wallet and thus his tightwad nature was inscrutable.

  Three hours later they were at the Straits of Mackinac with the wind whipping over the water so strongly, say upwards of fifty knots, that semitrucks were prevented from crossing the Mackinac Bridge, known widely as the “Mighty Mack,” the largest suspension bridge in the world until the building of the Verrazano in New York City. Brown Dog had never met anyone who had seen the Verrazano, the idea of which was ignored by the locals who preferred to think of their bridge as the biggest.

  They stopped at Audie’s in Mackinaw City for lunch and B.D. reflected again on how once you crossed the straits the women looked different, not exactly scrawny, but definitely more slender. You went over a five-mile-long bridge and suddenly women looked more like they did in magazines. Their waitress was so attractive that Red blushed. B.D. sat at such an angle that he could see back into the kitchen where the waitress squatted down on her haunches to retrieve something from a drawer. She swiveled and said something he couldn’t hear and he had a momentary glimpse up her pale green waitress dress. His heart perked and his bollocks twinged. There was enough of his early religious phase left in him that he could again give thanks for the mystery of female beauty, her graceful butt protruding like a barnyard duck’s. A little badge on her chest gave her the soft name of Nancy and she was doubtless the type that took a shower and changed her underpants every single day. His mind drifted back to his schoolboy days when the lyrics of “Four-Leaf Clover” had been changed to “I’m looking under a two-legged wonder . . .”

  “Pay attention,” Delmore barked at him. “I’ve been trying to tell you that the price of cheeseburgers has gone up twenty cents from two years ago. Inflation’s eating up my savings.”

  They hit the mother lode pronto a few miles north of Thumb Lake. Rather, B.D. and Berry hit the mother lode because it was still raining and Delmore and Red wouldn’t get out of the car. Delmore was engrossed in his morel mushroom notebook in which he had logged his mushroom locations since he was a boy while Red was reading about galaxies.

  B.D. and Berry managed to pick a little less than a bushel in an hour by which time they were dripping wet and Berry had uncontrollable shivers. She was an ace mushroom picker what with being closer to the ground in height and picking at a trot. She would whistle when she
found a good group among the miniature fiddlehead ferns, wild leeks, and trillium. B.D. also pulled a bushel of the leeks to make vinegar as Doris had done where you boil the leeks with white vinegar which added a fragrant and wild taste and then you got to eat the pickled leeks which could save a dish as dull as the meatloaf he made for Delmore who said the dish firmed up the wobbly backbone of America.

  Delmore, meanwhile, was brooding in the car. He had decided against visiting his relatives over between Petoskey and Walloon Lake. Some of these relatives were fine, especially the older ones, but the younger tended to be low-rent chiselers with a fondness for narcotics and rock and roll. The Berry worries had also struck Delmore hard. Berry reminded him of his own sister who had run off to Milwaukee at age fourteen and had never been heard from again. Delmore had ample funds from the sale of his small farm near Detroit and his UAW pension, plus Social Security, but couldn’t resolve his old man’s tremulous worries over his remaining family, Brown Dog, Red, and Berry, not counting Rose in prison or the phony activist Lone Marten. There were also numerous cousins beyond his sphere of interest. He felt responsible for B.D., Red, and Berry but B.D. had to be kept on the shortest string possible. B.D.’s legal scrapes had cost him a pretty penny, and a possible court case over Berry was a nightmare source because you could pay all that lawyer money and still lose. It was as bad a bet as loaning money to relatives which at base was the reason he didn’t want to head toward Petoskey. Delmore as a child of the Great Depression had an ocean of empathy within him but it was only allowed to emerge in trickles or else it might run dry. The memory of boyhood dining on beach peas, soft turnips, withered carrots, and moldy shell beans did not urge him to openhandedness with money.

  When Brown Dog and Berry returned to the car with their leeks and morels they were in high spirits despite being cold and wet. There is something inscrutably satisfying about finding a good patch of morel mushrooms that travels far beyond their excellent flavor, perhaps a trace of the glad hearts of hungry earlier gatherers in the long weary path of evolution. To Brown Dog, success in fishing, hunting, or gathering always reminded him of when he was a teenager and his grandpa who raised him was mortally ill in August and had made a request for venison on his deathbed. A half hour later B.D. was skinning an illegal doe in the pump shed and fried up the liver for dinner. A young doe liver is better than calf’s liver and Grandpa said that the doe offered him another month of life, in actuality three weeks.