Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  He dozed for a few minutes while she brushed his hair and brought him his coat, and then they headed out for the Lower Don Parkland. Outside, B.D. wasn’t sure of reality because the long night of pain and narcotics made the world uncommonly glittery and vivid. There was also a brisk southwest wind and suddenly the temperature was in the low seventies. It was Saturday afternoon and the streets were full of nearly frantic walkers trying to shake off the lint and cobwebs of a long winter. Younger people, say under twenty, were moving into dance steps as they walked and kids were jumping up and down a bit envious of Berry’s jumping power. It all reminded B.D. in his floating body of those musical comedies from the forties that Uncle Delmore loved on television. Delmore’s highest admiration was saved for Fred Astaire. He would say, “Just think if Fred had learned Indian dance steps and showed up at the Escanaba Powwow!” B.D. admitted it would be quite a show. Delmore also loved Gene Kelly who could run up a wall, do a flip, and land on his feet. It would be fun to do that in a tavern, B.D. thought when he saw the movie.

  When they reached the area Berry ran up the gully to their snow cave. B.D. followed slowly noting that the snow and ice had collapsed part of the cave and if he had been in there with Deidre when it happened they might have been suffocated or, more likely, he would have pulled an Incredible Hulk move and burst upward through the snow and ice saving his true love. Only she wasn’t much of a true love. She and her turd husband were going to a place called Cancún to renew their vows. At least Nora, who had also removed herself from the list of possibles, wouldn’t die if she touched a peanut butter sandwich. Nora had said she was a gymnast in high school and could move her butt like a paint mixer in a hardware store.

  B.D. sat on a big rock while Berry called in groups of crows, not a difficult thing to learn to do as the Corvidae are curious about why humans might wish to talk to them. What’s the motive? they wonder. Soon enough, though, Berry had attracted a massive number of crows and a group of bird-watchers, those cranky coup counters known as twitchers to the Brits and some Canadians, made their way up the gully and scared the birds away. Birds have finely honed memories for people and they were familiar with Berry from the dozens of trips into this part of the Lower Don Parkland. Berry was irked and crawled into what was left of the cave.

  As B.D. dozed in the sun his half-dream thoughts turned to Deidre’s heat source. A thousand Deidres making love in a gymnasium would melt candles. He opened his eyes to the departing birds not knowing that their raucous cries were his Canadian swan song. In his view far too much had been happening and he craved the nothingness of the Upper Peninsula, a feeling he shared with the ancient Chinese that the best life was an uneventful one.

  They walked. And walked and walked. Because of his tough night B.D.’s feet were marshmallows which nonetheless dragged him along. Berry teased the bird-watchers along the paths by hiding in thickets and making the calls of dozens of northern songbirds that had not yet arrived from their winter journey south. A man with thousand-dollar binoculars told B.D. that Berry could be a “valuable resource” and B.D. agreed, lost in his diffuse homesickness for brook trout creeks and the glories of snowmelt time when the forest rivers raged along overflowing their banks, and bear fed happily on the frozen carcasses of deer that had died of starvation, and icebergs bobbed merrily in Lake Superior on huge waves often carrying ravens picking in the ice for entombed fish. On this afternoon Toronto seemed vividly beautiful, a characteristic in the perceptions of those who had endured extreme pain and survived it. The world, simply enough, became as beautiful as it does to many children waking on a summer morning.

  By late afternoon Berry had shown no signs of tiring while B.D. was barely shuffling along. He saw a young man taking a Tums and asked for one.

  “My fried pork lunch is backing up on me,” B.D. said, explaining himself.

  “I had pizza with too many red pepper flakes,” the young man said in a strange accent. They spoke for a few moments and it turned out that he was a country boy from near Sligo in Ireland. B.D. had been amazed by how many of the foreign-born he had met in Toronto and had often wished he had recorded the nationalities in his memory book which, of course, he didn’t own. Geography had been his best subject in high school but he had found to his dismay in Toronto that someone had changed many of the names of countries in Africa after they gained their independence.

  He was asleep on his feet by the time they reached Yitz’s for supper. He settled for a bowl of beef borscht while Berry had three orders of herring and a serving of French fries which she ate at a back table with the children of a couple of waitresses who were kind to her. B.D. in his semi–dream state was thinking that it was only ten days from trout opener in Michigan which seemed so fatally far away. The first week of the season he often visited a daffy hermit north of Shingleton who was a fine angler but had some peculiar ideas. One of the theories the hermit mourned over was that there was a hidden planet in our solar system that contained an even million species of birds but we would never be allowed to visit them because of our bad behavior as earthlings. The hermit painted watercolors of these birds and one that B.D. especially liked was a huge purple bird with an orange beak that had three sets of wings. Who was to say it didn’t exist? B.D. had never cared for the naysayers of the world of which there were far too many.

  They took a cab home after they proved to the driver that B.D. had the estimated ten-buck fare. Berry was frightened of the driver who was angry over the war in Iraq and decidedly anti-U.S. B.D. was helpless to say anything but “It’s not my fault.”

  B.D. fell asleep in his clothes while Berry danced for an hour or so to country music which she did every evening. He drifted off to Patsy Cline singing “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.” It was a full seven hours but seemed only moments when there was an alarming knock on the door, startling because it was the first time there was a knock at the door in their five months of residence. B.D. heard Nora’s voice and his heart took flight as he turned on the lamp. She had obviously returned for more of the same and in his pleasant drowsing head he had a vision of her delightful paint shaker doing its sacred job. But no, when Berry opened the door it was not only Nora but Charles Eats Horses and a sturdy Indian woman in her fifties who wore a business suit and was introduced as the Director.

  “We move out at dawn,” said Eats Horses. “I heard that line in a movie once and always liked it.” Eats Horses was wearing a leather jacket with beaded lightning bolts and looked ominous. Berry who was wary of strangers went to him and took his hand. He picked her up. “We’re going home.”

  Nora and the Director helped them in their hasty packing. B.D. was miffed when they said there wasn’t room for his big, used electric fry pan which had set him back five bucks. The Director also shook her head no when he tried to put the last remaining beer from the fridge in his jacket saying that no alcohol was allowed on the “tour bus.” B.D. was confused and picked up Gretchen’s letter and sniffed it for signs of life feeling an ever more insistent tug of homesickness. Nighttime wasn’t his time for clear thinking. In troubled times B.D. tended to cut way back on alcohol to avoid feeding the fire of chaos but at the moment he felt the need for a double whiskey because Nora was sniffling at the door and bounteous tears were falling.

  “You poor redskins. I love you.”

  “I can’t be more than half. I’m just a mongrel,” B.D. said, embarrassed.

  “My great-grandmother was married to a Jewish peddler in Rapid City in 1912. There aren’t hardly any Lakotas with a streak of Jew,” Eats Horses joked.

  “I’m a mean-minded, ass-whipping pureblood,” the Director said, embracing Nora.

  It took only minutes to arrive at the arena parking lot a dozen blocks away. B.D. was irritated because the Director beat him to the front seat where he had fully intended to feign sleep and let his head fall onto Nora’s lap.

  The tour bus was an immense affair with THUNDERSKINS painted in large red letters on the side surrounded by yellow li
ghtning bolts, all on the black metal skin of the bus which was lit up like Times Square and ready to go. The Director explained that the Thunderskins was a Lakota rock-and-roll group with only two more stops on a month-and-a-half tour, one in Thunder Bay, on the north shore of Lake Superior, and the last in Winnipeg, after which they would head south to Rapid City and Pine Ridge to drop everyone off, “everyone” being the usual assortment of roadies and soundmen, both skins and whites who were now outside drinking from pints and perhaps dragging at joints before entering the bus where the Director manned the door like a guard dog. The four stars of the band would fly on a plane to Thunder Bay and the Director explained to B.D. that the plane wouldn’t work for him and Berry and Eats Horses because of the tight security at all airports. B.D. noticed that the small crowd of employees all nodded to Eats Horses and then averted their eyes.

  “They think I might be a wicasa wakan but I’m not,” Eats Horses whispered to B.D. who was even more confused not knowing that wicasa wakan meant medicine man, often a somewhat frightening person like a brujo in Mexico.

  Eats Horses took over the door frisking while the Director showed B.D. and Berry to a small compartment at the back of the bus across the aisle from her own. There were two cots, an easy chair, a miniature toilet, and a window looking into the night. Before B.D. fell back to sleep after a cheese sandwich and two cups of strong coffee he wondered how so obvious a bus was going to smuggle himself and Berry back into the United States. He was diverted by seeing Nora drive away and how when they’d kissed goodbye she had rudely pushed his hand off her ass when only yesterday at high noon she had allowed him to grip her hip bones like a vise. Berry was sitting on her cot looking frightened and B.D. held her hand but the Director came back and got Berry saying she needed some mothering. B.D. fell asleep to the wheezing of the big diesel engine beneath him as the bus moved north on Highway 400 toward the landscape he called home, dense forests of pine, hemlock, tamarack, and aspen surrounding great swamps and small lakes that had wonderful fringes of reeds and lily pads. There were creeks, beaver ponds, and small rivers where B.D. would always find complete solace in trout fishing. He was observant of the multiple torments people seemed to have daily and felt lucky that he could resolve his own problems with a couple of beers and a half dozen hours of trout fishing and if a female crossed his path whether fat or thin, older or younger, it was a testament that heaven was on earth rather than somewhere up in the remote and hostile sky.

  B.D. had a head-and-chest cold, an infirmity he only experienced every five years or so and which he blamed on his kidney stone exhaustion. He slept most of the day and a half it took to reach Thunder Bay, waking now and then to study the passing Lake Superior Provincial Park south of Wawa and the Pukaskwa National Park farther north along the lake. There were an unimaginable number of creeks descending from the deep green forested hills down to Lake Superior which tingled his skin despite the irritation of coughing and blowing his nose. He felt much better the second morning when they had stopped at a bar and restaurant and with several of the crew had drunk his meal in the form of three double whiskeys with beer chasers, a surefire cold remedy. Two of the Lakota crew members not realizing that B.D. was local to the other side of Lake Superior warned him that they were in “enemy territory,” the land of the Ojibway, the dreaded Anishinabe who had driven the Sioux out of the northern Midwest.

  B.D. had never been more than vaguely aware of rock and roll and was ill-prepared for the spectacle that would meet him in Thunder Bay. He knew it mostly as the music heard in bars favored by young people in Escanaba and Marquette but then he had never owned a record player in its varied forms and had certainly never fed a jukebox with any of his sparse beer money. He couldn’t recall understanding a single lyric of this music except “You can’t always get what you want” which he viewed as the dominant fact of life. He was back asleep from his liquid lunch when the tour bus pulled into the arena parking lot. He awakened to an oceanic roar and screech that reminded him of a ninety-knot storm on Lake Superior hitting the village of Grand Marais. In the bright afternoon light out of the window thousands of young people, mostly girls, were jumping straight up and down in the manner of Berry and screaming, “Thunderskins, Thunderskins, Thunderskins!” Within minutes of leaving the bus it occurred to him that he should have taken up a musical instrument, say a guitar, when he was young and learned how to sing. The Director had put a small laminated card around his neck reading “Backstage Crew” and the frantic girls stared at him like kids looking at a gorgeous ice cream cone on a hot day. He felt a little embarrassed, actually unpleasant at this sense of power, quite uncomfortable over the way he was encircled by the most attractive females looking at him imploringly. He had always had more than a touch of claustrophobia and recalled his panic at nineteen when he had been caught up in a big Labor Day parade in Chicago and had run for it a few blocks down to Lake Michigan where he could breathe freely. When looking at the Tribune the next day he had figured out that there were many more people involved in the parade than lived in the entirety of the Upper Peninsula. Now it occurred to him that one girl was enough but thousands screaming like banshees made you crave a thicket.

  “Hey, B.D., they just want a fucking backstage pass,” one of the Lakota crew yelled at him, noting his puzzlement.

  B.D. made himself busy helping the crew unload the sound equipment, then when he found he was getting in the way drifted off toward the waterfront to get back in touch with Lake Superior which would likely calm his rattled brain. He was pleased to find Charles Eats Horses down near a pier sitting on a park bench.

  “This water reminds me of the sea of grass in the Sand Hills of Nebraska south of Pine Ridge.”

  “If I had a good boat I could head straight south to the Keweenaw Peninsula and be fairly close to home but then I don’t have a good boat and storms come up real sudden.”

  Eats Horses explained to him that Berry would be staying in a nice hotel with the Director who had to watch the rock stars carefully. One of them was her son and he was crazy as a weasel in heat. B.D. felt mildly jealous about Berry but since he had grown up without a mother himself he figured Berry needed the company of a female. Looking out over the water toward his homeland he felt his homesickness become as palpable as a lump of coal in his throat.

  PART II

  Dawn in Thunder Bay. The two AM announced departure of the tour bus was delayed by a snowstorm but by dawn the wind had shifted to the south and the snow turned into an eerie thunderstorm so that Brown Dog peeking out the bus window was startled by a lightning strike glowing off white drifts in the parking lot. He had a somewhat less than terminal hangover and could easily see the dangers of life without the immediate responsibility of looking after Berry. It was quite literally a “blast from the past” what with B.D. not having had a hangover in his five months in Canada, certainly the longest period since age fourteen when he and David Four Feet had swiped a case of Mogen David wine from a truck being unloaded in an alley behind a supermarket in Escanaba. The aftermath had been a prolonged puke-a-thon in the secret hut they had built beside a creek outside of town.

  B.D. lay there in his bus compartment watching the rain that had begun to lift so that he could see far out into Lake Superior to the water beyond the shelf ice. He diverted himself from the memory of last night’s mud bath by pondering the soul of water. He had meant for a couple of years to enter a public library and look up “water” in an encyclopedia but doubted that any information would include the mysteries of water that he so highly valued. Life could kick you in the ass brutally hard and a day spent fishing a creek or a river and you forgot the kick. Now, however, with no fishing in sight he could vividly remember the wonderful whitefish sandwich in the bar, and then meeting the two girls in their late teens who had spotted his “Backstage Crew” badge. The concert was sold out and they had no tickets. He was sitting there with a Lakota nicknamed Turnip who thought the girls “skaggy” but B.D.’s mouth was watering thoug
h one of the girls was a tad chubby and one very thin. B.D. thought that if you put the two together the weight issue averaged out. Playing the big shot he got them in a side door of the concert which was far too loud for him to endure and the flashing lights were grotesque. Berry was up on stage jumping straight up and down batting at a tambourine and looking very happy. The girls jotted down their address and phone number and said they’d see B.D. at their apartment after the concert. He left feeling smug about his worldliness. Back at the bar after having more drinks and playing pool with Turnip, who looked a bit like a turnip, he saw that the streets were filling up with the concertgoers so it was time to make a move. Unfortunately after walking around in the snowstorm and stopping at another tavern B.D. gave the slip of paper to a bartender who said there was no Violet Street in Thunder Bay and what’s more the phone number only had six digits. Turnip thought this very funny while B.D. was morose.

  “I bet they’re backstage with the stars. We could check it out. Those guys get more ass than a public toilet seat,” Turnip said.