Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  Now he grabbed the handles of Rollo’s wheelchair and trotted around the rest stop with Rita frequently whizzing by at warp speed. He enjoyed the job and wondered if there were any openings to push attractive women around. The drawback was that they would have to be pretty crippled up to need a man to push their chair. He had a fine time for a month or so with a waitress with a short leg so a lot was possible.

  Rollo had begun to detox and requested a vodka shooter. B.D. couldn’t see why not, opened one and slipped it to him not seeing Rita coming up behind.

  “You miserable cocksucker. I saw that. I’m docking your pay,” she yelled while passing.

  B.D. wasn’t concerned as he had had a lifetime of having his pay reduced. One thing people liked to do is cut your pay.

  Back in the car Rollo croaked that he had dreamed that he should go back to raising and training hunting dogs. He could partition the barn or chicken coop for kennels and B.D. could build a five-acre fenced running area.

  “No fucking way,” Rita said. “No fucking dog near my young horses. You can set up near the calving shed a mile down the road.”

  Rollo dozed off under the powers of the vodka shooter. B.D. didn’t like building fence but a job was a job. Rita was driving but a little slow. On the southern outskirts of Sioux Falls it was sleeting and she gave up. It was ten in the evening and they had had no dinner. “I don’t want to sleep in this fucking van. We’ll try to get a room with two double beds.” She stopped at a truck stop with a diner, a motel, and fuel pumps. He watched Rita trot into the office then dozed until she came out of the diner with a big sack. In their room which had the heavy dense smell of smoking and a bit of manure from truckers hauling cattle Rita unpacked the large bag including a six-pack which lightened B.D.’s heart. Come to think of it he had noted that his heart had been lifting by the hour with the growing distance from his job.

  “I figure we’ll need a beer to eat this shit,” Rita said.

  “I don’t get why there’s so much celery in the chili,” B.D. said, draining his first beer in one long swallow.

  PART II

  Chapter 5

  He awoke with a screech. His foot had strayed out of the sleeping bag he had grabbed from the van and now Bruno’s teeth were attached to his big toe not altogether playfully. Rita stood at the opening of the decrepit calving shed.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Where should I be?” he said, looking at dried cow plots and old straw from ground level.

  “Next door in the cabin.” She actually laughed now standing near his sleeping bag.

  To B.D. she had become even more of a giant and he felt sad that you couldn’t look up the legs of Levis. After two more days of driving, she had dropped him off in the dark without a flashlight and he evidently took a wrong turn. They had been quarreling about sex and alcohol in some manner beyond memory and she had shoved him out the door into a place without water or his toothbrush. Before sleep he had concocted an image of himself, somewhat lugubrious, as a black slave, then dropped it for a captured Indian. The problem had started in Valentine, Nebraska, when he used his emergency twenty-dollar bill to buy fifteen shooters and Rita’s twenty dollars to buy ham and cheese sandwiches with very little ham and cheese. When he had been a Bible student in Chicago a local grocery store gave you a half pound ham and cheese for fifty cents but that was thirty years ago. At his request he had bought Rollo a sweet roll that was at least a foot wide. B.D. did not ask what was becoming of the world because he was poignantly conscious that everywhere the chiselers were in control.

  Meanwhile, the fifteen shooters would not make the rest of the trip better.

  “Where did Bruno come from?” B.D. asked struggling to get his pants on in the sleeping bag over the painful morning hard-on ever more firm with the presence of Rita.

  “Your lesbo girlfriend shipped him by flight. She thought I lost him. Now I owe her four hundred bucks for this fucking nitwit dog’s transportation.”

  Bruno crawled into the sleeping bag perhaps to check on the wounded toe. It occurred to B.D. that he rather liked waking and not knowing where he was. It could mean a new life or at least the old life with new clothes. There was the old lesson of not leaving a foot straying outside a sleeping bag which could leave the foot swollen with mosquito and blackfly bites or nips from a beloved dog. He looked up and noted Rita was sweating. He had thought of her in the night when he lay cushioned on a bed of manure listening to coyotes and nighthawks. He struggled out of the sack turning away from her to capture his dick with a zipper remembering her sensitivity to the organ.

  “What are you sweating for at this hour?” he asked examining the blood on his toe.

  “I worked a few horses then ran. I have to drive my body or I might fall back into booze and drugs, you know, the old ways where I’d be dead by now. Meanwhile we got to get something on your toe. Bruno’s been chewing horse turds.”

  He followed her out the wide opening of the calving shed into a new world of mountains to the west and the wide Missouri to the east and nearby in a grove of young cottonwoods surrounding the trim little cabin he should have slept in but hadn’t noticed in the dark.

  When they entered Bruno shot in growling in case there were enemies. He grabbed a trapped mouse in the kitchenette shaking it manically. Rita tapped his ass with a book and Bruno rolled over in supplication which he had never done for B.D.

  “This is the most obnoxious fucking dog God ever made.” She took iodine and cotton from the toilet cupboard gesturing him to sit down and stick out his bloody toe. She poured on the iodine and daubed the toe with cotton.

  “I deserve a drink,” he said, wincing.

  “When I was looking for you I was directed to your Gretchen in the Social Services office. She said while drawing me a map that you were partial to fishing, drinking, and fucking. That won’t be going on around here.” She glanced here and there checking the cabin. “The owner and top hand would stay here when they were dropping a couple hundred calves. It’s round-the-clock work to make sure there were no problems. Sometimes they have to pull one.”

  B.D. had seen this as a teen when he worked on a farm up near Arnold. He and the farmer pulled and pulled but the calf was dead. He had never seen anything so dead until later when he found Grandpa facedown on the kitchen floor. B.D. sat down on the floor beside him reflecting that Grandpa was eighty-three but it was hard to figure out what this number actually meant. B.D. was nineteen at the time, possibly the age when a young man is furthest from wisdom.

  “You’re drifting, asshole.” Rita took his arm and led him to the door. “You’ll live here for the time being. Mom got ahold of an old Chevy pickup that won’t go more than 45 mph. Rollo must be kept from speed.”

  “I was thinking of dead calves and my dead Grandpa who raised me.” B.D.’s thoughts stopped in their tracks at the sight of three very large rattlesnake skins mounted on the wall near the door. “What the fuck do we have here?” he said loudly.

  “Local residents. Sometimes they live under the floorboards here. You’ll hear them when it warms up.” He touched a skin and shivered before following her to her pickup.

  Rita drove unnecessarily fast to the ranch house or so he thought. He was struggling with a memory about rattlesnakes. He must have been about seven and having problems learning to read. He would sit with Grandpa on the sofa and they would go slowly through Life magazines with Grandpa reading the choice parts and then helping B.D. repeat the portion. There had been a big flood down south and a pretty girl, or so he remembered, had swam to a tiny island in the flood waters. Unfortunately on the island there were dozens of rattlers that bit her to death. It was the saddest tale imaginable and in his young heart he swore vengeance against these vipers and forty-plus years later he was to have an opportunity. Rollo had told him that at county school when they found a rattler in the yard they bet they could jump over it high enough not to get struck. A fat kid tried and failed and got bit. An ambulance came from Great
Falls. Rollo said the kid’s legs swelled up and split and he was never the same.

  Rita pulled in the drive of a fair-sized stone house with a yard full of flower beds. Out back were sheds and corrals and a long, low horse barn.

  Rollo was in his wheelchair in the yard shooting at blackbirds with a shotgun. Bruno would scoot around giving a coup de grâce by biting and tearing at the birds and then several barn cats would retrieve them and run off and hide them at warp speed.

  “Mom doesn’t like blackbirds shitting on the sidewalk and porch.”

  “I’ve never seen Indians living so high on the hog.” B.D. said. He observed that Rollo was a pretty good shot.

  “Mom was good at marriage and her used-car lot in Great Falls. She could sell shit as Shinola especially to Indians. They like those big old Pontiac sedans or fast Crown Victorias they could die in drunk. She bought twenty down in Denver and tripled her money.”

  Mom turned out to be tall and broad-shouldered though not so tall as her daughter but even more ominous. She had had a ramp built up to the porch and B.D. wheeled Rollo in for breakfast which was eggs, potatoes, and pork chops apparently cooked up by a white girl who stood in the corner. B.D. couldn’t recall ever using a cloth napkin. Mom didn’t eat but stared at him sizing him up. She wore a trim blue business pantsuit.

  “Five bucks an hour. Rollo needs a dog kennel. A big one.”

  “That’s below legal minimum. I never work for less than ten.”

  “You’re getting room and board.”

  “I’d live in a snake den before I work for five.” This was definitely not true.

  “Seven and a half and a bonus of two hundred when you finish plus a vehicle to get home in.”

  “Nine or I leave now by thumb.”

  “Okay but no messing with the help.”

  B.D. nodded in assent. He had already stolen a few glances at the girl in the corner who was now blushing. She was a bit small and slender. He idly wondered why when people met him the low-wage lightbulb lit up in their heads. A teacher once told him that he wasn’t “presidential material.”

  Chapter 6

  It took B.D. nearly four hours to shovel the dried cow shit out of the calving shed into the bed of the ’73 Chevy pickup, a virtual mountain of manure. The day had warmed and B.D. was dense with sweat. He enjoyed the freedom of the exertion. He began to be homesick early on the job but he was thinking clearly enough to see that the homesickness was fucked-up like a soup sandwich. Between Gretchen and the dogcatching job he had been stomped into roadkill. He had teared up at the mere idea of euthanizing. To B.D. it was as if dogs were a different species of human who deserved a good retirement. One of his mongrels called Old Bob would emerge from the doghouse shortly after dawn madly wagging his tail and walk the big perimeters apparently in a state of ecstasy because of the world around him.

  At about noon Mom and Rollo arrived from a trip to the doctor’s in Great Falls. Rollo was pouty and yelled, “The fuckers are cutting off my drugs.” Mom swatted him, “No ‘F’ word in front of Mom.” Rollo demonstrated his new walker slowly but surely. They were both impressed at B.D.’s job on the calving shed and Mom told him to dump the load near her garden. She then handed him a huge ham and Swiss out of the van. A sandwich and a compliment made him warm inside. Rita drove down with some lemonade when a six-pack would have been better.

  Late in the afternoon Rollo directed him down to the river while sipping from a pint of bourbon and rigging fly-rod tackle.

  “I got a boat but that’s for a long day. Without pills I’m afraid I’ll become an alcoholic.”

  “You always were. So what?”

  “Maybe so. We got to draw up kennel plans. You don’t want to stay here forever. Mom and Rita are real bossy. They’re going to work your ass off.”

  “I’m hoping to save up five hundred bucks for retirement, go home, and fish until fall.”

  “That’s quite a retirement plan. You might want to throw away your fake Social Security card. Mom said they can get you for that. You don’t want her worrying about you or she’ll take over your life. That’s why I headed east after the second divorce. You should also send the cell phone back to the sheriff or he’ll get on your ass when you get home.”

  “I threw it in a body of water. I don’t recall where right now. My head is buzzing.” It occurred to Brown Dog that telling everyone about the fake Social Security card might not have been a good idea.

  They were parked on a two-track near the Missouri which was high from snowmelt runoff. B.D. wondered how trout could survive in such a vast river but Rollo had showed him photos of huge brown trout in an outdoor magazine. He was disturbed because he had noted that a small photo between the pages, a memento, had ripped in half and was blurred. It was of their East Side gang that had a hideout near the coal docks in Escanaba. There were five of them so tough that in the fifth grade even seventh graders avoided them. David Four Feet had been killed in prison, Eddy Murat was doing life without parole for shooting someone in a bar fight in Detroit, and the Lambert brothers took off for California and weren’t heard from again. Bobby Lupa tried to be a boxer, failed, and died from drugs in Grand Rapids. He, B.D., was just getting along, Grandpa’s term for doing okay but nothing special. He was known far and wide for doing a good day’s work if you could find him. He usually lived in deer-hunting shacks in trade for doing repairs outside the two-week season. Once he lived in a tent for the two-week deer season in an especially cold November but it was profitable. He had three stray dogs with him and they threw off a lot of heat. He shot four bucks and sold two for a hundred bucks apiece to unsuccessful hunters. A game warden stopped by but didn’t notice the other two butchered in the tree above him. So he was getting along though one afternoon in her kitchen recently Gretchen had said that he was having a “midlife crisis.” He didn’t hear her explanation very well because he was attentive to what he was cooking, a pork shoulder with pinto beans and red chili sauce. You had to cook it slow and then the pork shoulder would get so tender it would fall apart. To B.D. the pork shoulder was the best cut of meat partly because it was the cheapest. Meanwhile Gretchen’s lengthy explanation was lost in the kitchen air. Grandpa used to say you could walk or fish yourself out of a slump. Until he was seventy and then arthritis in his hip got too bad he could walk all day and then work in his garden and make dinner in the evening.

  Now in the Missouri B.D. jumped out of the pickup and rigged the fly rod quickly because black storm clouds were approaching from the south and he wanted to get in a few casts before the rain hit. He cast a small female muddler five times and on the fifth a large brown trout rolled the fly and took it then shot out into the main current. B.D. put on too much pressure and the line broke.

  “The fucking leader was too light,” he said, turning to Rollo who stood off to the side in his walker.

  “If the leader’s not light on this river they won’t take the fly. Look at how clear it is. You just can’t horse a big fish like that, asshole. I’ve been fishing this river since I was three years old. I was once swept away in the current for a mile before my dad caught up to me. I was wearing a life preserver. I saw a lot of big trout, some the size of an all-night log in the U.P. when you need a good fire.” Rollo had to add a fib to anything he said.

  Then the rain suddenly hit and Rollo hobbled to the pickup while B.D. stood there as if he was a mallard. B.D. had come to the conclusion that he wouldn’t have lost the fish, by far the biggest brown trout of his life, if he hadn’t been thinking too much. What’s with this five-hundred-dollar retirement fund? He wasn’t one to think about money and had spent a life living day to day and now suddenly the figure five hundred loomed. It occurred to him that maybe as he aged just past fitty his brain had changed a bit. That didn’t seem possible but it could be true. In Gretchen’s terms this might be the midlife. Grandpa had inherited the small farm and after he died B.D. sold it and pissed away the money quickly. He didn’t really sell it for money but so as not
to live with memories. Now he wouldn’t mind owning a place way back in the woods near a creek rather than moving from cabin to cabin. This was also a new idea.

  Rollo began beeping the weak horn of the pickup. B.D. was soaked but unconcerned. After they had cut and split fifteen cords of wood in the fall Grandpa would say, “Now we can den up.” He had canned everything possible from the garden though by spring they would mostly be eating macaroni cooked in a jar of canned tomatoes and illegal venison and rabbits. They basically lived on a one-quarter disability check from the army, $160 a month at the time. Grandpa had been shot through the thigh by a small caliber rifle at Monte Cassino in Italy. All in all he thought it was a fair trade especially since he discovered garlic in Italy. He and B.D. were certainly the only garlic eaters in the area except for a few Italian families that arrived in the late 1800s from the Piedmont to work in the mines.

  “I think I remember where I hid some whiskey in your cabin a few years ago,” Rollo said triumphantly. “Mom was drying me out and I had to get cagey. Mom was good at drying men out. She was quite a looker years ago.”

  “She still looks good.” B.D. did not avoid older women. “Eureka,” he said, drawing four shooters from deep in his wet coat pocket. He was going to save them for himself but Rollo was a friend and critical to his five-hundred-dollar retirement plan. There it is again, he thought.

  The world was blurred and beautiful through the rain that lashed against the windshield. It occurred to him that he was liable to fish all summer, five hundred dollars or not, because he had always fished all summer. It wasn’t an intention, just something he had always done since he was a child. At Grandpa’s he had always done his chores fast. That was where he learned to work hard and fast. All so he could go fishing. After all if he ran short of food he could cook for Gretchen or Uncle Delmore. He had been avoiding Uncle Delmore because he was always loudly playing with his ham radio or had the TV on loud and was talking back to it with his crackpot theories. Delmore wanted B.D. to live with him mostly for his cooking but also because at eighty-seven he was getting fearful at night. When B.D. wasn’t cooking for him he only ate Dinty Moore beef stew. Period.