Brown Dog: Novellas

by Jim Harrison

  Westward Ho

  In Westwood Brown Dog recognized a cloud as one he had seen several years before over two thousand miles to the east out near Fayette on Big Bay de Noc. The cloud was sure enough the same one, no question about it. The question was what route did it take to California, to Westwood in particular? This cloud sighting was not remarkable in itself. In a lifetime in the woods he had witnessed three different birds (a raven, a red-tailed hawk, and a lowly robin) drop dead off their separate perches, and once while illegally pillaging a shipwreck in Lake Superior at a depth of a hundred feet or so, a very large passing lake trout had picked that moment to drop, wobbling slow and lifeless to the lake’s floor. There was a moment’s temptation to pluck it up and stow it in his diving bag with some brass fittings from the sunken ship, but then it occurred to him that the fish had achieved a peaceful death and it wouldn’t be quite right to fry it up, douse it with hot sauce, and eventually turn it into a turd. As a child his grandfather was wont to say when B.D. was sullen or depressed, “Keep your chin up, Bucko. We all end up as worm turds.”

  The cloud passed away, replaced by blue. B.D. stretched in his nest beneath the immense leaves of the taro bush (Colocasia esculenta) in the U.C.L.A. botanical gardens, a bush, he decided, that was one of God’s most peculiar inventions, so unlike his native flora in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as to be from another planet. But beautiful as his dome of vast green leaves was it did not help Brown Dog locate himself as was his habit on waking. This was to break the thrall of his vivid dream life, a spell that dissipated easily when you said, “I’m in the cabin where it’s about forty degrees. The wind out of the northwest at thirty knots. November first and if I hadn’t had the extra poke of whiskey I would have got up in the night and fed the stove and it would have been fifty in here instead of forty, a weenie-shrinking dawn.” That sort of thing. How can you start the day without knowing where you are?

  Or, perhaps more important, why? The answer to which is bound to be lengthy, imprecise, blurred by the urge to think that where you are is bound to be the right place on your short and brutish passage. Seven days ago he had been in the Upper Peninsula and now he was under a taro bush in Westwood in what is euphemistically called greater Los Angeles (what with lesser Los Angeles throbbing to be released on a moment’s notice and frequently springing free).

  Frankly, Brown Dog was on the lam, having flown the Michigan coop with Lone Marten, an erstwhile though deeply fraudulent Indian activist, after a series of petty misdemeanors and relatively harmless felonies. His original crime had been pillaging Lake Superior shipwrecks, even removing a Native body from one, a corpse he had eventually decided might have been that of his dead father, though this conclusion was based on circumstantial evidence. Like the proverbial collapsing dominoes, this first crime seemed to lead to others, though in his own mind he was altruistic because his abrasive brushes with the law had come from his efforts to protect a secret Indian graveyard, the presence of which had been betrayed in a pussy trance with a lovely young anthropologist. Concurrent with these legal problems was the fact that Lone Marten had abandoned him in Cucamonga two days before. Brown Dog had gone into a restroom to pee and when he came out Lone Marten was gone, and when Brown Dog had asked the attendant about Lone Marten’s whereabouts because his precious bearskin was in the trunk the attendant had said, “Beat it or I’ll call the cops,” not a very friendly welcome. He persisted, asking directions to Westwood whereupon the attendant merely pointed west. Brown Dog was a bit transfixed by the attendant’s large hoop earrings which seemed inadvisable if you were going to get in a fight. Your opponent had only to grab your earrings and you were dead meat, or so he thought as he set out for the west with a somewhat heavy heart but down a road with a comforting name, Arrow Highway.

  The walk from Cucamonga to Westwood is some forty-seven miles, not all that far for a man often referred to in his home area as a “walking fool.” It took Brown Dog a rather leisurely thirty-six hours, making way for short cheapish meals and naps which he accomplished with the true woodsman capability of dozing with his eyes open. This didn’t seem the area in which you could safely close your eyes. When he had asked Lone Marten just how many people were in Los Angeles and Lone Marten had said, “Millions and millions,” the amount proved mentally indigestible. Not since the student riots in Chicago that took place while Brown Dog was a very casual student at the Moody Bible Institute had he seen this many people going to and fro. It was apparent that there was a lot going on but he wasn’t sure what. Another big crowd in his life had been the Ishpeming Bugle and Firefighters Convention a few years before but there the purpose had been quite specific. Brown Dog had stood in the garage parking lot waiting for the head gasket of his van to be replaced and had watched several hundred buglers take turns doing their best. This turned out to be more than enough bugling to last a lifetime.

  A forty-seven-mile walk offers plenty of time to think things over but it is the walking rather than the thinking that calms the spirit. Brown Dog had none of the raw melancholy that the well educated often feel when first encountering Los Angeles. His frame of mind was a great deal more functional with the single purpose being to retrieve his bearskin and head back to the country, wherever that might be, though he had pondered Canada as a haven that might be safe from the arm of the law, and not the lovely strip club in the Canadian Soo where the girls got down to no clothing at all, but perhaps way up on the Nipigon River on the north shore of Lake Superior. Sizable brook trout were said to be plentiful there and he could always go back to the obnoxious job of cutting pulp.

  B.D.’s last walk of this length had taken place a few years before when two Grand Marais girls he had driven over to Munising had ditched him there when he had drunk too much at the Corktown Bar and walked down a grassy knoll near the harbor for a snooze. He thought himself deeply in love with one of the girls, innocently named Mary, who originally hailed from Detroit and it was she with her own dark past who had hot-wired his van and taken off for a weekend in Iron Mountain. So deep was his grief and anger over this betrayal that he walked back to Grand Marais, taking a leisurely full two days, over forty miles and sadly, or so he thought in the present, about the same distance as Cucamonga to Westwood. But much of his Munising–to–Grand Marais hike had been cross-country and except for a stop at the small store in Melstrand to pick up a few cans of pork and beans he had not viewed another human being. It was mid-May and warmish with a big moon and by the time of his first campfire he had largely gotten over Mary. Frank, his true friend and the owner of a local tavern, had warned him that Mary was “fast,” the evidence being the morning that B.D. had sunk himself in Frank’s bathtub, the water to which had been added a potent anti-crab medicine. There weren’t any fleas that far north and Brown Dog had been puzzled by a buggy feeling all over his body, even in his eyebrows. Frank had worked construction way down in Florida and made the expert analysis from experience.

  A few hours out of Cucamonga he suddenly remembered where he had heard the name before. His grandfather had listened to the Jack Benny program on Sunday evenings on their battery-operated Zenith and Jack Benny himself had often traveled through Cucamonga on the train to Hollywood. Jack Benny’s buddy Rochester would sometimes yell “Cucamonga” for no apparent reason and one summer evening when there was a very small bear rummaging in their garbage pit at the far end of the garden the bear had suddenly looked up on hearing Rochester’s voice. He and his friend David Four Feet, who died in Jackson Prison, were full of envy at Rochester’s voice though they were incapable of imitating it and when they tried Grandfather would yell, “Batten your gob.”

  The memory of Jack Benny lifted his spirits and B.D.’s vision expanded from the cement beneath his feet and the narrow tunnel in front of him that his emotions up to this point had allowed. Before Jack Benny he had been trying to remember the gist of the biblical story about Ruth among the “alien corn.” During his brief period at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago th
e pastor from the church back home had sent a letter about Ruth among the alien corn to assuage Brown Dog’s possible homesickness. Unfortunately the church had mistakenly sent B.D. the entire tuition check rather than directing it to the institute and he had squandered the money on a black waitress. The expression “head over heels in love” had always puzzled him because, though love could be physically rigorous, it didn’t seem quite that acrobatic.

  As his vision widened somewhat his native curiosity, surely the most valuable thing one can own, took over and he began to observe this foreign country of Los Angeles more closely and certain things became clear. For instance, millions of new cars were supposedly sold every year but you saw few of them in the Upper Peninsula except on Routes 2 and 28 during tourist season where they were collectively parked in front of the more expensive motels in the evening. Here in Los Angeles there were countless thousands of new cars which meant the locals must be making money hand over fist. But standing on an overpass stretched above the San Gabriel River Freeway and staring down at six lanes of jam-packed traffic going bumper to bumper in both directions, he wondered why the drivers on each side of the highway just didn’t trade jobs and avoid the mess. B.D. also read the sign twice but couldn’t find the San Gabriel River and there were no other pedestrians to ask the river’s whereabouts.

  Hours before he had stopped in a small park and had been rather amazed at the flora, none of which he recognized, though he knew the names of hundreds of trees and bushes in the Upper Peninsula. The birds were also a mystery and he wondered idly at God’s messiness in inventing so many species, then decided it was the messiness of nature that gave it such beauty.

  He tried to extend his pursuit by the law into a gentler region of his mind to avoid the sensation that he should be looking over his shoulder even though the scene of the crime was two thousand miles to the east. He had burned the tent of two evil young anthropologists to protect his Indian graveyard, also with Lone Marten had lobbed cherry bombs and M-80 firecrackers into a protected archaeological site, the graveyard, in an attempt to drive away the despoilers. This was scarcely a high crime but his probation had dictated he could not enter Alger County though the attack engineered by Lone Marten had strayed only a few hundred yards from Luce County into Alger. The point in Brown Dog’s mind was that if only the law imitated the gorgeously messy aspects of nature the judge might say “Let bygones be bygones” or something on that order. And then he could go back home, assuming that he recovered his bearskin. Delmore had mentioned that a bearskin should never be taken away from the region in which the animal had been killed because the skin sometimes still contained the spirit of the beast though B.D. suspected that Delmore often made up Indian lore when it suited his purpose.

  The biggest problem on the long walk had been water. They weren’t exactly giving it away in this area. He had been charged fifty cents at a fast-food place for a large Styrofoam cup of water and hadn’t been able to drink it because it seemed to contain some weird chemicals. The girl behind the counter had been sympathetic to B.D.’s startled look when he tasted the water and pointed out a cooler that contained quarts of the stuff at over a dollar apiece. It was a warm day and he had no choice. He wasn’t quite prepared for this experience but recalled a quarrel in Frank’s Tavern over the matter of bottled water that had recently entered the Upper Peninsula. At the time he had been struggling to hear his all-time favorites, Patsy Cline and Janis Joplin, on the jukebox and Ed Mikula, the chief of the local Finns, was hollering that God’s own precious water was now being sold in bottles for more than beer or gasoline per ounce. Who was behind this crime was the question at hand? When asked his opinion B.D. said that water, gasoline, and beer were equally important but not interchangeable, and he was up to walking to any number of springs he knew of to get first-rate water even in the dead of winter, a fine notion though springs in Los Angeles were unlikely so he paid the full price for a quart of water that the label said had been shipped all the way from France, a boggling idea. He imagined some secret enormous burbling spring in far-off France and wanted to question the store clerk but she was now busy. There was the immediate notion that when he got back home he need only bottle twenty quarts of water from one of his springs to make a living wage. He had stuffed a fifteen-foot pole down in one of them and it had shot back up in the air from the force of the water. If you had a hangover you could just lie there on the soft green moss, drink plenty of the cold water, and after you were still for a while the brook trout would begin swimming around again.

  After the first twenty-four hours of walking the map he had bought for yet another dollar at a service station had turned soft from his sweaty hands. He had passed the confusing place where César E. Chávez Avenue became Sunset Boulevard and had bought a black lunch bucket and a green janitor’s uniform at a secondhand store, the lunch bucket to carry his water and any leftovers from his snacks. He was down to forty-nine dollars but then forty-nine was also his age so this collusion somehow appeared fortuitous at least for the time being. The problem was that he was beginning to stink and needed a place to suds off before putting on the clean clothes. The janitor’s shirt had the name “Ted” stamped on a pocket but then he felt it was unlikely that he’d find a shirt with his own name on it. He made his way up to Silver Lake Reservoir, clambered over the fence, and had a short swim. A number of hikers and dog walkers had hollered at him because swimming was forbidden in the city’s water supply but he ignored them. The objectors had withdrawn for the same reason that two unfriendly Mexican fellows had withdrawn back near Monterey Park when Brown Dog had asked for directions. First, to all he looked rather goofy, and second in modern terms he was quite a physical specimen from his lifelong work in the woods. He didn’t have the big breasts of the many bodybuilders he had seen on the streets in their tight T-shirts, but he could unload a four-hundred-pound iron woodstove from a pickup all by himself and other men tend to notice those capable of such feats. But more important, B.D. lacked a single filament of hostility in his system. Even way back in his teens when he was a champion bare-knuckle fighter in the western U.P. he was not prone to anger unless an opponent poked him in the eye. Even his anger over the soon-to-be-desecrated Indian (Anishinabe) graveyard was directed more at himself for betraying the location. In addition, he had what used to be called a “winning smile,” though that wouldn’t be true as he drew near the Pacific and the more prosperous areas because two teeth were prominently missing.

  Under his poi or taro leaf in the botanical gardens there were a number of things to take pleasure in. He had had enough sense not to discard the neatly folded garbage bag in his back pocket. “Just when you think you won’t need it anymore you will,” old Claude liked to say. Claude would get in his garbage bag when he was out in the backcountry and it began to rain, or if the wind was cold he would step into his, hunch down, and pull the drawstring and have a nice curled-up snooze. Claude insisted the garbage bag was one of the great inventions of modern man along with toilet paper and galvanized buckets. Brown Dog tended to agree but mostly when he needed one. The Westwood night was tolerably warm for a northerner but the laid-out garbage bag made a nice ground cloth to protect him from moisture. His pleasure was not diminished by the fact that Westwood didn’t seem to have much in the way of woods, and just before dark he noted that the small pond with a feeder rivulet contained only a dozen or so lethargic orange carp. It might have been nice to cook one on a bed of coals but a fire would doubtless draw attention and the botanical park was officially closed for the night.

  A good share of his pleasure under his leafy blanket came from his grandfather’s notion that you had to make the best of it wherever you were, and throughout the long hike from Cucamonga he had been pleasantly boggled by all the colors of the people he had seen who must come from many lands. Way back in school he had never been quite taken with the idea of America as a boiling pot, partly because his grandpa had used a boiling pot to scald pigs at butchering in order to scrape
off the hair. Despite his hard knocks he felt a specific pleasure in all he had seen, especially along the busy part of Sunset Strip as he had continued heading west late in the afternoon. There had been literally hundreds of beautiful women though they tended to be uniformly quite thin in his terms. Delmore liked to say that you should avoid women who don’t enjoy their food because that means they have real problems, but even old Delmore would have had his head turned by this plenitude. To be sure, not one of them gave him a glance but he suspected this was because of the green janitor’s suit and the black lunch bucket which had the good quality he noted of making him invisible to the many police he had seen.

  In fact he had become quite invisible to everyone except for a few other menial workers who nodded in greeting. When he had made his way farther west into the swank residential area of Beverly Hills he fairly had to wave in the face of a girl selling star maps which he quickly perceived had nothing to do with the constellations. He repeated his question about the whereabouts of Westwood three times before she deigned to take notice. Her eyes focused past his neck as she said that a few miles farther on he should take a left on Hilgard. There was something distinctly familiar about her and he remembered that last winter when a tree he was cutting had kicked back and injured his knee, during his convalescence Delmore had rented him a video called Butts Galore and this girl sure looked like one of the “butts” in the film. He couldn’t help but ask her and she replied, “Maybe yes, maybe no,” but a slight tinge of blush entered her cheeks. He would have tried to continue the conversation but a carload of older tourists pulled over wanting to know where Fred MacMurray lived so Brown Dog moved on. You couldn’t say Butts Galore was a top-drawer movie but it was certainly amazing to just get into town and meet an actress you recognized. The fact of the matter was that Brown Dog hadn’t seen many movies. The closest theater in one direction was in Newberry and that was over fifty miles distant, and in the other direction Marquette’s theaters were over a hundred miles to the west. Delmore played old westerns on his VCR because they were cheap to rent and he hated them which gave rise to a much needed emotional life. There was also the additional shortcoming to Brown Dog who lived on a subsistence level that a price of a movie was a price of five beers at Frank’s Tavern. Once as an early teen he and David Four Feet had hot-wired a Plymouth and gone to a drive-in theater to see what was advertised as a daring sex movie. Part of it was a cartoon showing a phalanx of sperm traveling up into the womb and David had hollered out the car window, “That’s me in the lead,” to much general laughter and horn beeping. The movie ended with a rather skinny woman giving birth in a rather frightening close-up that could not readily be distinguished from any of the farm animals they had seen giving birth. They both agreed they could have used the fifty cents apiece to see the genitals of a classmate, Debbie Schwartz, which is what she charged, a buck a look.