by Jim Harrison
I could tell this girl was playing hardball when I parked near the river and said from then on we had to go by foot. I could have damn near reached the site by two-track in the van but thought I’d make her pay some dues. It had become a fair day for mid-October, what we call Indian summer, but I knew the river water would be cold from the frosty nights. I waded right in, then turned to watch her take off her boots and socks, shorts and panties, so she was only wearing her shirt. She plunged right in and crossed the river’s waist-deep water and scrambled up the far bank ahead of me, a pretty sight for the eyes. I just stood there waiting for a few minutes while she air dried and got dressed. My plan was not to be a pushover for any tricks but my heart was like a deer’s that’s been chased by dogs, so I just stared off in the distance, taking only the shortest peeks at the lady.
I hauled ass off on a zigzag route for the burial ground, but I sure was wrong thinking I was going to tire her out. When I paused after two miles to catch my wind she wasn’t even breathing deeply, and this raised a certain resentment in me that came from a lot of directions. For instance, how could Shelley really care for me, then try to trick me out of my secret place using her cousin? There’s no way I’m going to try to jump this girl, I decided, just to spite Shelley who thinks I’m going to try. Maybe they even talked about it.
“I just can’t do this,” I said, and sat down on a stump, facing away from her.
She walked around the stump and faced me with tears coming into her eyes. “I can tell what you’re thinking by the way we walked here. You don’t trust me. I want to commune with these people, not dig them up.”
I reached out and caught a tear that had made it to her chin and was about to fall off. Tears have a powerful effect on me because I doubt if I ever cried myself since I was a baby.
“I’ll tell you what. We’ll go there but if you try to bring Shelley back I’ll put a Chippewa curse on you that will short-circuit your entire life. You’ll damn well wish you really was a porpoise. In fact, within a year you’ll be praying to die, wagutz.” Wagutz is a real dirty Chippewa name for a woman but it was the only thing I could think of.
She nodded and put her arms around me. This had to be the best-smelling woman in the world, despite the hike. I thought she was going to kiss me but I slid off the stump, not wanting to lose control of the situation. I never have been in control which means someone else is, and at this moment I didn’t want it to be her.
So we came to a natural clearing in the woods and I pointed out to her the seven large mounds and four smaller ones about thirty yards away, then I sat down under this small tree that had been blasted and burned by lightning. I don’t have an ounce of superstition in me but you have to draw the line and I wasn’t going near the mounds this time.
When I thought about it later it seemed that the light was too clear, the clearest I had ever seen, and the area was full of ravens whirling and croaking. She walked right out there and sat in the middle of those graves and began chanting in another language. After a while she lay facedown on one of the larger graves which I wouldn’t have done at gunpoint.
As luck would have it, from way off there came a howling and bawling sound. Now I knew very well it was just a baby bear trying to locate its mother but there was a split second of doubt and I jumped up before relaxing again. Tarah out there on the mounds heard it and started flopping around and crying out. I thought, Jesus Christ, she’s gone goofy on me, and I shouted out it was just a bear at least a mile away. Now she was rolling around shrieking and I had half a mind to leave her there. Of course I didn’t. I ran out and grabbed her, dragging her away. She was flat-out hysterical for the first ten minutes I led her back toward the van. She didn’t hear anything I said about the noises bear cubs make when they’ve lost track of their mothers.
It didn’t take us long to get back to the river because I could see I was safe not retracing the crooked route. In fact, I was worried because she was acting like some of the crazy folks in the County Home I saw when I visited Grandpa before he died. She just lay down on the bank of the river and cried, then started to take her boots off but I had to help her. She lay back in the sand and I pulled off her shorts and undies. It was at this point I got an idea, and not the one you might think, as my notion of fun isn’t fucking a crazy woman. First I bit her on the leg to get her attention, then picked her up and threw her headfirst into the river. By the time she came up sputtering I was right beside her, shaking the living shit out of her. “In the name of the sacred coyote, get the fuck out of here, demons,” I shouted. I used coyote because I couldn’t think of anything else at the moment but raccoons and woodchucks and they didn’t seem right. Then she calmed way down though she was still crying. I went back to the bank, picked up her stuff and helped her across the river and up to the van.
Everything was going fine up to this point, all considered, until I looked at her tiny white panties in my hand. Without question I deserved something for my efforts. I got an old blanket out of the van and used it to towel her off. Then she grabbed hold of me so legally speaking it was more her fault than mine, not that I was exactly a victim though this girl was as strong as any. It was quite a chore getting me out of my wet trousers and shoes and my body was real cold so that it made her seem hot as fire. To be frank we wore off some skin right there on the ground which at least served to make her stop crying.
We returned home to a tragedy of sorts though Shelley had the situation well in hand. It seemed that Brad had been riding full tilt on a deer path off the Adams Trail and rounded a bend and ran smack-dab into the Golden Age Dirt Trackers, which is a fine club of senior citizens who ride three- and four-wheel ATVs. I hate the racket these machines make which is worse than a chainsaw or snowmobile but it’s the only way real old folks can get around in the woods. The collision was of such force that Brad got a spiral leg fracture when he flew through the air and about crushed an old man. The local rescue squad took Brad to the Munising Hospital, then on to Marquette because a spiral fracture was too much for Munising to handle.
The upshot was that Shelley and Tarah took off right away for Marquette and I got a few days of solitude. I was about peopled out anyway though my solitude didn’t start too well. It was a fine afternoon and Frank stopped by and we went out bird hunting with his springer spaniel. We shot three grouse and five woodcock, and picked up two T-bones down in McMillan at Rashid’s, also making the mistake of buying a half gallon of wine and a bottle of whiskey because it was Frank’s day off. We grilled the birds and steaks over a wood fire and finished off the beverages to the last drop.
I woke up early not feeling too well and drove out to the deer cabin. I brought along some groceries, my tablet and three pencils (Dixon Ticonderoga number 3’s) so as to get on with my “memoirs” as Shelley calls them which is another word for your memories. I partly wanted to get out of Shelley’s place because of the phone. Not just Shelley calling, because if I wasn’t there she could check with Frank, but all the phone calls she gets from her friends in the anthropological business, and her parents who she talks to nearly every day, and whoever else. When the phone rings it’s not for me is the rule of thumb. I’ve lived pretty well at times on what she pays out in phone bills. When the people I know have to talk long distance they keep it under three minutes. With Shelley it’s like talking across a kitchen table.
By midmorning a northwester had come up and the temperature dropped thirty degrees so I let the deer cabin get real cold before I stoked a fire. I don’t take aspirin for a hangover because Grandpa said if you do you’ll never learn anything. I drank about a gallon of water from the spring and just sat there hurting and collecting my thoughts. About midafternoon I had a glass of peppermint schnapps to settle my stomach.
Now hangover thoughts are real long thoughts and I was feeling damned near like an orphan because I was standing outside listening to the wind and waves come up on Lake Superior some two miles distant through the woods. The stormy season was beginning. Abou
t ninety percent of all the shipwrecks that Bob and me dove on took place in late October and November. You’d think someone would learn from this fact. I was out near Whitefish Point when the Fitzgerald went down with all hands that November afternoon. The wind came up to ninety knots and the waves were cresting near forty feet. That day a friend of mine was on the ore freighter Arthur Anderson which was trying to stand by for help. When he reached the Soo he got off the boat and never got on another. The Coast Guard didn’t agree but my buddy said he knew the Fitzgerald sprung her hull on Caribou Shoals and despite having four seven-thousand-gallon-a-minute bilge pumps she went down in six hundred feet. Not a single body was found, for reasons I already said. Those thirty-four men will still be down there when the world ends as it surely must. Our preacher used to say nothing manmade lasts except real big stuff like the pyramids and even they show signs of wearing out.
Anyway, I was standing outside the cabin in the cold wind thinking these thoughts when I saw a big snowshoe rabbit. At the same time it occurred to me that Shelley might have been helping me out this long in hopes of finding my ancient burial mounds and becoming a famous anthropologist. A friend of hers had become famous for finding a prehistoric stone prayer wheel on Beaver Island even though a Chippewa lady had found it in a dream three years before. Maybe I was just glum from the liquor burning off and I knew Shelley really cared for me but I couldn’t figure in her long-range plans. It had to be the mounds that made her hang in there and pay the legal expenses and all that. The thought was too obvious for me to be struck dumb. I stared into the evening woods behind the snowshoe rabbit which was taking bites of grass in between keeping an eye on me. I was feeling right at home all by myself. The woods can be a bit strange. It takes a long time to feel you belong there and then you never again really belong in town. It’s a choice made for you by your brain at a moment you don’t notice.
When I had this notion of Shelley helping me out for mixed motives I can’t say I was real upset. Grandpa used to say to me, Don’t just listen to what people say to you but why they say it. Shelley and me have a fine time together but my future is more of the same which I don’t mind, and she’s bent on making her mark. Be thankful when a woman’s not kicking you in the ass one way or another, I said to myself. Also, there’s the point that I’m forty-seven and Shelley is the best I’ve ever been under the sheets with. She’s like Beatrice, with four more gears plus overdrive. If I start acting betrayed I’ll screw the whole thing up.
There was no point in standing there in the wind getting a hard-on thinking about my girlfriend so I went in the cabin, opened the window quietly, took my .22 rifle (Remington) and shot the rabbit for dinner. I skinned and gutted it, cut it in pieces and browned the pieces with a little bacon. The rabbit was a big male and I knew it would be tough so I stewed it with a few turnips, potatoes, onions and a head of garlic. Shelley started me on garlic for my high blood pressure and I got to liking it even better than her. Sometimes I boil up a head and spread it on toast because I don’t like butter. I put my Dutch oven on the stove and sat down to think recent events over step by step.
Your thoughts jump around when you are real hungover and hungry. For instance, I laughed out loud at the idea that Tarah mistook the bawling bear cub for the voice of an Indian dead for seven hundred years. An owl hitting a rabbit makes the rabbit scream like a woman which will startle you when you’re in the woods at night. The yelping a bunch of coyotes make chasing a deer or rabbit will tend to make you lighthearted while a wolf’s howl makes your mind lose its balance. The worst, the most horrifying noise I ever heard, was when the Chief asked me to bury him. How could this be, you might wonder, if he was found in seventy feet of water and his eyes were missing? When I walked to the stove to check the stew my feet dragged and the hairs rose on the back of my neck. It’s like I murdered someone and I’m pretending it was in a dream and I can’t admit it to myself let alone confess it in public. The judge said I was “delusional” and that’s why I got off so light while poor Bob was thought to have a “sound mind” and a bad lawyer so he’s doing two years.
What happened after I found the Chief was that I made a plan. Probably lots of folks make the same mistake. Your number one step on your plan might be wrong, therefore all the other steps will be even more wrong. The morning after finding the Chief I had full intentions of getting the advice of Frank who is the only man I can trust, but when I got there Frank was babysitting his kids and they were all on the couch watching the exercise girls on television while his wife was at work. Frank likes these exercise programs on television as you don’t get to see all that many girls in bathing suits in the U.P., what with summer being known locally as three months of bad sledding. Well, Frank didn’t have time for any advice but sat there with a kid on his lap eating eggs with its hands, and he was yelling stuff like, “I want the one in blue on my nose.”
The first thing I did after Frank was to call Shelley in Ann Arbor and ask her for two eyes. She had friends over at the medical school and I was sure they’d have some spare glass eyes lying around. I’m proud to say I’ve treated my girlfriends good enough so that they trust me and will help out when I’m in a pinch. I’ve lived with a half-dozen ladies over the years and none of them left me over any unkindness but because there was no future in staying. Grandpa always said I’d be a late bloomer so something might happen yet. I have my own theories about what people think of as the future. Imagine yourself lying in bed sleeping and dreaming of things people dream of, say fish, death, being attacked, diving to the bottom of the ocean, the world exploding, the undersides of trees, screwing women or men without faces, that sort of thing. It makes the world seem blurred and huge. Then you wake up and you’re just B.D. in a ten-dollar war surplus sleeping bag in a cold cabin. The first step is to pee and make coffee, which I can deal with, and after that what happens is not in firm hands.
Part of the problem of handling the future of the Chief was the article I had read in the Reader’s Digest in a barbershop in Munising, where like Beatrice of yore the lead scalper thinks I have the worst head of hair in the Christian world. According to him, every single hair goes a different direction. This article said it is given to every man to have a few main chances in life, opportunities that will turn the whole thing around. While getting clipped it came to me my first chance had been when I sold Grandpa’s land cut-rate because I was in a rush to get to Alaska. This opportunity ended in the hospital in Bozeman. It was clear as day to me when I found the Chief that he was my second chance.
My first problem was to get ahold of one of those small trucks that deliver bags and blocks of ice to gas stations and grocery stores. I would also need a piece of gill net for towing the Chief into Little Lake. The man looked pretty big but I was sure I could boost him up onto the dock and then into the back of the ice truck, the one I didn’t have.
My ace in the hole was Avakian, the nautical artifacts dealer in Chicago. I always felt that he paid us fair prices though Bob wasn’t so sure and he was dealing from our side. When Avakian came to the U.P. on buying trips it was a top secret operation because, as I’ve said, everything we do is a tad illegal. We’d meet way out in the boonies, or in an odd place, and every time Avakian would be driving a different fancy car. Well, once this man got me aside alone and said if I came up with anything weird he’d be interested. When I asked him what he meant by weird he just said, “Think it over, think it over,” twice in a row in the slick way Chicago men talk which I could remember from so many years back. Being an honest fellow I later asked Bob what Avakian meant. Bob said Avakian had pretended he wanted an old-time body for science to study the qualities of preservation in cold water, but Bob had said to him, That’s bullshit. Then Avakian had said he’d pay twenty thousand for a shipwrecked body because a private customer wanted one to freeze in a big block of ice. When Bob had asked why, Avakian had just said, Who knows?
The problem for Bob was that before he signed up for the SEALs he was in a differ
ent part of the Navy working for some dentists and doctors identifying dead men by their dental records and body parts. Bob signed up for this duty because he was tired of San Diego and wanted to travel. What happened was the Navy would have an accident somewhere in the world like a plane would crash or a part of a ship would blow up. Bob and another assistant would fly to the place with a doctor and dentist and figure out which victim was which. After a half year of this Bob got sick and tired of sorting body parts and loose teeth and signed up with the SEALs. I say this because when I cut Bob in on the action with the Chief he wasn’t much help because he had developed a phobia about dead bodies and he only looked at the Chief straight in his empty eyes once.
The upshot was that the first of July I stole an ice truck in Newberry by hot-wiring the ignition. I drove the truck full of sacked ice cubes directly to the deer cabin where I repainted it with seven aerosol cans of camo green spray at five bucks apiece. The next day Frank drove me to Newberry to pick up my van. I told him it had broken down, not wanting him to be involved in my criminal activity. He was my only character witness at the trial and the judge wasn’t too impressed because Frank made it clear he wasn’t one bit impressed by the judge.
Anyway, I switched license plates with my van and drove the ice truck to Little Lake at about three AM with the deflated rubber dinghy and the gill net squeezed inside with the cubes. I had told Bob I had an earache and couldn’t dive so he busied himself trying to fix the Evinrude. You shouldn’t dive on wrecks alone as there is too much that can go wrong. You develop an excess of nitrogen in your blood and you get what they call rapture of the deep which is about the same as smoking too much dope. I have nothing against smoking hemp except it puts me dead asleep and it’s not what you’d do right before diving.