Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  The emergency room was fairly crowded and B.D. was out of luck because he didn’t have a Canadian health card with a photo ID. He also made a mistake by acting manly despite the pain which made his eyes roll back in his head. This faux manliness was typical of some men in the Great North who pull their own bad teeth with the aid of whiskey and grip-lock pliers. He was slumped in a chair in a far corner pondering his lack of options when a diminutive young woman in a gray dress and white hat stooped beside him. She had been near the front desk and had overheard his ID problem and asked him if he knew a private doctor. He said no but then remembered his Red Underground contact Dr. Krider who was a skin doctor. He had written Dr. Krider’s number on the back side of a photo he had begged off Gretchen, hoping for a nude though he knew it was unlikely. Instead he got a photo of Gretchen on the beach in a two-piece blue bathing suit, a towel wrapped partly around her hips, but clearly showing her slightly protuberant belly button. This photo and his Michigan driver’s license and an old brass paper clip to hold cash were the sole contents of his pockets except for a lucky Petoskey stone with its pattern of ancient invertebrates. Unlike most of the rest of us except the homeless, B.D. had no Social Security card, draft registration card, credit or insurance cards.

  Despite her miniature size Nora, his immediate savior, drove a large Plymouth station wagon, sitting on a stack of cushions to see out the windshield. B.D. slumped on the seat beside her, tilting sideways until his head rested against her thigh. Despite the near delirium of his pain he was always one to take advantage of any possible physical contact with a woman. He looked up at the passing streetlights determining that Nora’s scent was wild violets. Another surge of pain prevented him from trying to turn over so he could be facedown on her lap, since his teens a favorite position.

  When Nora pulled to a stop at Dr. Krider’s home an immense man appeared and carried B.D. inside the house, impressive B.D. thought since he weighed one-ninety. He also noted that he was in the posh neighborhood of his snow shoveling. The huge man lowered him to a sofa at which point B.D. could see that he was an Indian with a pockmarked face and a bushy ponytail. Dr. Krider poked and probed B.D.’s lower stomach and bladder, determined that he had a sizable kidney stone, and administered a shot of painkilling Demerol. Nora had retrieved a warm washcloth and had bathed B.D.’s face and now he had it buried in her neck, a vantage point from which he could see down under her blouse to a single peach-shaped breast. Krider had pushed up his shirt and pulled down his trousers and as the Demerol slowly took effect B.D. was embarrassed that he was wearing wildly colored Hawaiian underpants which Gretchen had sent him for Christmas as a joke. He was also chagrined that the peek at Nora’s titty had given him a boner.

  “I can’t believe that a man passing a kidney stone is tumescent,” Dr. Krider chuckled, “but then I’ve seen geezers in hospitals minutes from death still trying to pat a nurse’s ass.”

  Nora blushed and snapped B.D.’s dick with a forefinger, wilting it. This was a well-known nurse’s trick to control excitable patients.

  “Nora! That was unkind,” Dr. Krider said. “Surely a penis isn’t a threatening object to you?”

  “Bitch!” said Charles Eats Horses, the big Indian who was a Lakota.

  “You could make it up to me later,” B.D. squeaked in his drug trance as Nora rushed from the room in tears.

  B.D. dozed for a few minutes then lapsed back into pain. The stone was making its determined way down his urethra, propelled by satanic forces. He flapped his hands wildly in the air as does a dying grouse its wings. He crooned a song of pain which resembled Berry’s verbless melodies. In short, he flopped and writhed. Dr. Krider gave him another quick shot and Charles Eats Horses put on a CD of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Charles had heard his oldest sister die giving birth in a remote shack on the Rosebud Reservation and the savagery of B.D.’s personal sound track was close to home. B.D. himself was sure that he was giving birth to an unadorned concrete block and if a river had been available he would have gladly rolled into it in a fatal winter swim.

  Finally the stone emerged, rough-hewn and the size of a smallish marble.

  “I’ll have this set in a ring for you,” Nora joked washing away a splotch of blood.

  “Will I ever love again?” B.D. croaked.

  “It might be a few days,” Krider said, yawning.

  B.D. fell asleep wonderfully without pain for the first time in half a dozen hours. Dr. Krider and Charles went back to bed and Nora settled in at the far end of B.D.’s sofa with an afghan throw after covering him with a duvet. To be sure this man’s penis was decidedly more ample than her boyfriend’s. He wrote book reviews and everything else in the catchall category for the Toronto Globe and Mail and she felt lucky indeed that he was a compulsive oralist who also sang in an Episcopalian choir. Only last week he had started singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” while going down on her. A former boyfriend with an XXL wanger had caused her discomfort and she had dropped him like a spoon when the smoke alarm goes off. As her eyes closed she tried to erase the vision of the half dozen silly-looking penises of her past in favor of a cinnamon sticky bun at the airport. The mind can become so tiresome when it comes to sex and the man at the far end of the capacious sofa mystified her until she remembered the louts up on Manitoulin Island when at thirteen she had gone to the cabin of a friend’s parents. She and her friend had been sunbathing on the cabin’s deck and a mixed-blood had brought a cord of wood in a battered pickup and when stacking the wood had said, “How about a blow job, cuties?” They were shocked but then laughed when her girlfriend replied “Beat it, jerk-off.” The man had swarthy good looks but at the time she couldn’t imagine herself ever following through on such a request.

  B.D. slept for an hour or so waking at the first peek of dawn through an east window when he felt the toes of his right foot touch what was obviously smooth skin toward Nora’s end of the sofa. He was instantly alert enough to be cautious, squinting in the dim light and noting her soft feminine snore and answering with his fake snore to show her if she awoke that anything was an accident of sleep. The drugs had worn off and his hardening dick was painful but then one must be brave. The hurt reminded him of his early teens when he and his friend David Four Feet who was crippled and walked like a crab would have off-the-cuff masturbation contests and on the way to school would mysteriously yell, “Four times,” “Five times,” or less. B.D.’s record was seven and it had caused the kind of pain similar to the passing of the kidney stone.

  Now he moved his toes lower until he encountered the magic area and it felt like his big toe was touching a mouse under a thin handkerchief. He snored louder in a proclamation of innocence. Dare he wiggle his toes to offer her pleasure? he wondered. She stopped snoring and pushed her vulva against his talented toes. From the other room a clock alarm rang. She stopped moving but he didn’t, his destination now dampish. They heard Dr. Krider’s padding feet in the hallway and she moved well back into her corner of the sofa. His friend David Four Feet used to say, “Drat it, foiled again,” when one of their pranks went awry. B.D. never gave time much thought but it occurred to him that if Krider’s clock had delayed itself ten minutes she could have been slowly spinning on his weenie like a second hand. Time is a bitch, he thought, his right toes feeling absurdly lonely. He continued to fake sleep until he dropped off listening to Nora and Dr. Krider talk. She said something about visiting Berry to tell her that her daddy was okay.

  When he woke again there was only Eats Horses offering a breakfast tray of a bowl of oatmeal pleasingly piled with sausage links to counter the banality of oats. B.D. was still morose about his lost opportunity with Nora and the obvious healing power of a good fuck. Now that the white people were gone Eats Horses dispensed with the Indianness of his speech, the peculiar way our characters offer people what they expect.

  “We have to get out of Dodge pronto,” Eats Horses said.

  “Why?” B.D.’s first thought was, Why leave an area with
such fine pork sausage?

  “We’re both illegal and Dr. Krider is too valuable to the movement. He could be busted for harboring illegals. We have to leave Canada.”

  “I can’t figure out how,” B.D. said. “Trout season starts in two weeks and here I am high and dry.” He had finished the sausage and now the oatmeal looked real ugly.

  “Fuck your trout season. First you trade in illegal shipwreck artifacts, then you try to sell a frozen body, then you violently raid an archaeological site. You become a phony Chip activist and befriend a convict named Lone Marten. You steal a bearskin from a fancy home in L.A. You smuggle your stepchild out of Michigan in defiance of state laws. A criminal like yourself is no help to us.”

  “How do you know all this shit?” B.D. was appalled.

  “Until a year ago I was a cop in Rapid City and when you got here I had a buddy on the force check your rap sheet. You’re poison. That’s why we never got in touch with you. I quit being a cop and went into the house-painting business with my cousin but we were going to paint a shed and got caught with seven gallons of red paint and Homeland Security entered the picture. For years the Lakota have been threatening to give those presidents on Mount Rushmore a dose of blood-red paint. We’d bought ours in Denver to escape the hassle. The paint store in Denver must have tipped the cops off. Anyway I was accused of plotting a terrorist act but after a month in jail the ACLU bailed me out. I made my way here but now I have to leave. Your uncle Delmore made a contribution to the movement so the leadership instructed me to take you and your stepdaughter along.”

  “Were you, in fact, going to paint a shed?” B.D. was suddenly thinking of Delmore watching the Perry Mason reruns and thus he asked a Perry-type question.

  “None of your business,” Eats Horses said.

  “How come you’re called Eats Horses?”

  “Many years ago in the time of my grandparents the rez got cheated out of its government-allotment food and people were dying of starvation so some started eating their horses.”

  “Why go back if we’re only going to get arrested?” B.D. was horrified at the idea of jail having been there a number of times. He’d also heard that you could no longer take Tabasco with you to jail so how could he eat jail food?

  “I have a new identity and I think Krider is arranging one for you. I’m going to be security and a bouncer at a strip club in Lincoln, Nebraska. I got a poet friend Trevino Brings Plenty who says, ‘Alive in America is all we are.’”

  Eats Horses lapsed into a melancholy silence and B.D. joined him. They were clearly homesick men on the run.

  “When I was a kid I told my grandpa who raised me that I wanted to be a wild Indian when I grow up and he said, ‘If you do keep it under your hat.’ I guess I’m only about half anyway.”

  “I’m three-quarters and that doesn’t make it easier. If my brain was white my ass would only be in a different kind of sling. A white friend got his house foreclosed and I said, ‘At least I don’t have a house.’” Charles Eats Horses laughed hard so B.D. joined him while thinking of the five-hundred-buck trailer he had lived in with Berry before escaping to Canada.

  The phone rang and it was Nora. She was sending a cab for B.D. because she had to be at work in an hour or so. Berry was fine and playing with the terriers. A letter had come from someone named Gretchen.

  While B.D. dressed he thought how dramatic life had become. He had never ridden in a cab and there was a letter from his beloved Gretchen whom he hadn’t heard from since Christmas. He dressed hastily still feeling spongy from the drugs, the railroad spike in his bladder having become a thumbtack. While waiting at the door Eats Horses told him to get packed up as they would be leaving in a few days and B.D. replied that since they owned practically nothing he could pack in minutes.

  It was a fine glittery late morning with a specific warmth in the sun not felt since the autumn before. In the cab B.D. had a rare sense of prosperity sniffing the air which had that new-car smell. The driver was from far-off India and was nearly as small as Nora. They didn’t understand each other but that was fine. The driver pointed up through the windshield and said, “Sun,” and B.D. said, “You got that right.”

  Up in the fourth-floor room Nora was kneeling sideways on a kitchen chair, her body halfway out the window, watching Berry far below leading the terriers around with grocery string for leashes. B.D. couldn’t help but make contact with Nora’s jutting butt which she wiggled a bit.

  “I feel bad about snapping your weenie so go ahead if you wish. I have a boyfriend so I’ll pretend it’s an out-of-body experience.”

  He felt like the luckiest man in the world as he lifted her skirt. Her rump was so pretty his skin tingled. There was a song he should be singing but he couldn’t think of what one. He pulled down her delicate panties and planted a big wet kiss on target and then stood remembering that in his narcotic haze early in the morning Nora had drawn a small vial of blood while Dr. Krider watched.

  “Why?” he had asked.

  “To check your PSA, your prostate.”

  “You don’t have one,” he’d said, a little smug in this rare piece of knowledge.

  “I’ve got other stuff,” she’d laughed.

  “I’m aware of that,” he had said dreamily.

  B.D. liked this kind of confab, this banter or repartee, a word he didn’t know, because it meant the world was going along okay. Now he began to do his job admirably, staring down at the sacred mystery and beauty of female physiognomy, trying to divert his enthusiasm so he wouldn’t come too quickly. His mind started singing a song they sang in fourth grade, “A Spanish cavalier stood in his retreat and on his guitar played a tune, dear.” The kids sang this loudly though the meaning of “Spanish cavalier” was in question. Nora began to furiously rotate her butt counterclockwise and that was that. B.D. was in no way prepared for the pain caused by his urethra so abraded by the kidney stone. He yowled and fell backward on his ass, the passage of the sperm raising the image of the hot liquid lead Grandpa poured into molds to make fishing sinkers.

  “I could have told you the last part wouldn’t be fun but I was looking out for number one,” Nora said, looking down at him with a merry smile.

  “I forgive you,” he said, jumping up at hearing Berry climb the stairs. He recalled a magazine article in the office of his ex-lover the dentist, Dr. Brenda Schwartz, that said, “No gain without pain.” “I just pray we get another chance.”

  “This was a one-shot deal, kiddo.” Nora let Berry in the door and embraced her, then left.

  The blues descended lower than his sore dick with Nora’s departure. Never in his life had he been attracted to a small woman and the idea that it was a “one-shot deal” left him bereft. He was nearly irritable with Berry which was unthinkable. When she had nothing else to do she would jump straight up and down in place and in the year this habit had begun she had acquired the ability to jump astoundingly high. “Too bad she’ll never make a living out of her jumping and birdcalls,” Uncle Delmore had said.

  B.D. took a large package of pork steak from the mini-fridge and decided to cook it all in his outsized electric fry pan. Once the pork began to brown he opened Gretchen’s letter with a bit of dread. Delmore maintained that no one in the United States complained as much as those who’d graduated from college and that sure was true of Gretchen. Despite her beauty and good job as a social worker she was often lower than a snake’s ass, B.D. thought. Once a week she’d drive all the seventy miles up to Marquette just like Brenda the dentist to see a psychoanalyst. Brenda went for what she called her “eating disorder” and she had wept hysterically when B.D. had said, “You’re fine, you just eat too much.” Gretchen on the other hand was lithe and beautiful but beginning with her Christmas letter she’d said she was discovering in therapy that she was sexless and it was driving her batty. After college she had discarded men as “horrid” and B.D. remembered poignantly her nitwittish young woman friend who had discarded Gretchen. Once when he and Gretche
n had had a couple of drinks in her kitchen he had asked about the mechanics of Sapphic lovemaking and she only said, “You’re disgusting.” Now in her early thirties Gretchen was thinking about having a baby and was seriously considering B.D. as a sperm donor. He was proud as a peacock but couldn’t understand why she would refuse him the pleasure of slipping it in for a minute rather than an artificial method.

  While chopping a head of garlic to add to the pork steak, B.D. meditated on the letter. Gretchen’s analyst had said that her sexless nature was “rare but not unheard of.” Once when they had taken Berry swimming Gretchen had fallen asleep on her huge flowery beach towel and B.D. had slowly studied her body from the vantage point of an inch distance trying to memorize it for recall on cold winter nights. She had awakened and looked down under her sunglasses and thought he was on the verge of probing her pubis with his nose.

  “What are you doing?” she’d shrieked.

  “I’m memorizing your body for cold winter nights. Turn over because I’m missing the butt side.”

  “You asshole,” she’d said, raising her foot and pushing him away. Her soft warm insole against his neck was one of his most cherished memories.

  Berry nudged him to remind him not to burn the garlic. She used to like burned garlic but now she wanted it softened. They ate the entire pan of pork steak with a loaf of the French bread he bought daily from a bakery down the street, the likes of which was unavailable in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The bread was so delicious it mystified him. They were always passing stupid laws, why not make it a law that this sort of bread be available everywhere in America?

  B.D. began to doze in his chair from his long uncomfortable night and full stomach. Berry was making a variety of birdsongs and he knew she was begging for an afternoon walk. She also made a couple of guttural mutters, a struggle for the “b” consonant that might mean she was on the verge of saying “bird” after nearly four months of speech therapy. Berry loved the teacher which led B.D. to the obvious fact that Berry at age ten needed a mother and the sadder fact that her own birth mother would be in prison a couple more years for, among other things, biting a thumb off a cop when a group of malcontents had raided an archaeological site. The therapist had pointed out that Berry hadn’t felt an urgency toward speech since B.D. was basically her only current human reality and they communicated perfectly well. B.D. had nervously confessed that he had whisked Berry out of Michigan rather than subject her to a state school and the therapist had said Berry would still need “socialization” with kids her own age in some community. B.D. had thought of moving her over to the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians rez near Sault Ste. Marie but he was persona non grata in the Soo area for reasons of past misdemeanors.