Brown Dog: Novellas

by Jim Harrison

  “B.D., you fucking moron, I’ve been waiting an hour. You could have drowned.”

  “Sorry, sir, just trying to help a poor old fellow out.” He checked his own nonexistent watch as Bob had done earlier. “I’m an experienced diver.”

  “Fuck you, big shot,” the old man said to Bob.

  On the way east on San Vincente, a street B.D. found remarkable for its beauty, Bob had him pull over so he could point out the spot of his fatal D.U.I. There was nothing remarkable about the location except for the peculiar xenophobia of the one man showing it to another. Their stations in life couldn’t be much further apart but Bob was from up in Wisconsin and B.D. from the Upper Peninsula, so that rather irrationally meant something to both of them as if they had together been cast up on the wilder shores of Borneo.

  “Tell me about it, son,” Bob said, at least affecting a stone-serious mood of concern.

  “Tell you about what?” B.D. felt a little quavery when Bob used the authoritative “son” though Bob couldn’t be more than ten years older.

  “Tell me what you’re running from. I’m sure I can help. Occasionally I like to alleviate suffering, to remove my venal blinders and do a good turn.”

  That threw the raw meat on the floor. They got out of the car, crossed to the wide grassy median strip, and talked under the very same tree where Bob had been rudely handcuffed, then hauled away. Somewhat in the manner of the ruthless interrogators created in his fiction Bob put B.D. through the exhaustive paces of his story, his three brushes with prison, the first when B.D. was a salvage diver and found the dead Indian in full regalia down in fifty feet of water for fifty years, perfectly preserved in the icy water of Lake Superior, then stealing an ice truck in an attempt to transport the body to Chicago for profit, followed by arson of the anthropologist’s tent and camping equipment, all to protect his secret Indian graveyard from certain excavation, the only Hopewell site in the northern Midwest. B.D.’s so-called anthropologist girlfriend, Shelley, was right on the money as Eve in the original Garden, tempting the secret location of his graveyard with her body and that of her friend, Tarah, whose body was somewhat slimmer, a detail Bob drew from B.D. to get the whole picture, including the color of Tarah’s undies. The third felony had been the recent attack on the site where a group of archaeologists and anthropologists from the University of Michigan were doing preliminary work. B.D. and Lone Marten had mostly lobbed fireworks from a relatively safe distance while the rough stuff had been left to Rose and a group of Anishinabe warriors. The main problem here is that B.D. had been enjoined from entering Alger County for a year to let the university people work without interruption.

  B.D. tried to continue on with the flight west after swapping the hot Lincoln for a Taurus across the border in Canada, all engineered by the highly skilled criminal mind of Lone Marten. Bob held up his hand and rushed to the car to make a call. Out of sheer thirst they then went into a fancy Chinese restaurant in Brentwood where Bob was well known. Bob had a quick bottle of Puligny-Montrachet for a hundred bucks and B.D. drank three bottles of Kirin beer. Was there no end to the foreign beers available in this area? He did point out to Bob that L.A. lacked the wonderful bar life of Chicago where seemingly every street had its neighborhood tavern, or up in Wisconsin where apparently anyone could turn their home into a bar. Once over near Alvin when he had been fishing the Brule River he had sat drinking beer in such a house, took care of a pile of kids while the barmaid grandmother had cooked burgers for a crowd, and what’s more, he had eaten four burgers for free for helping out, which included carrying the town drunk back to a shack over his shoulder like a two-hundred-pound sack of oats.

  Bob wasn’t listening. He was all business though B.D. reflected Bob could handle a bottle of wine as fast as an ordinary mortal could drink a beer. When Bob rushed out to fetch his I.B.M. laptop B.D. looked at the notes Bob had been making but they were scrawled in what must be a secret code. The Chinese waitress brought him another beer and bowed, so he stood up and bowed back which she found amusing.

  “Welcome to our country,” B.D. said, with what he hoped was a seductive smile. She was a real peach, as exotic as the flora in the botanical gardens.

  “My family has been here since the 1870s. We came over to help build your railroads and mine your mines,” she said with a twinkle. There was a slit in her skirt that ran halfway up her thigh. She didn’t seem to mind the liability of his janitor’s suit but he guessed that was because Bob was a high roller. With Bob’s bankroll he probably got more ass than a toilet seat though there was the idea that it didn’t seem to be doing him any good.

  “Voilà!” Bob roared, rushing in with the laptop and tapping out some codes in front of B.D. Right there on the screen was the record prepared by Michigan State Police Detective Schultz on Marten Smith, a.k.a., Lone Marten, ex-member of the American Indian Movement (purged for embezzlement), expert at getting National Endowment funds for dissident films that didn’t eventuate, wanted for credit card fraud, larceny by conversion, a dropped charge for manufacturing crystal methamphetamine, and having raised funds for a supposed Native radical group called the Windigos of which he was the only proven member, his main henchman a local fool with the unlikely name of Brown Dog, to be considered unarmed but nevertheless dangerous due to an early career as a bare-knuckle fighter.

  Tears nearly formed at the sight of the word “fool.” B.D. pointed out that Detective Schultz had been removed for illegally spying for political purposes which the state police had been forbidden to do. Bob countered that there had been the not so small item of sexual photos of Schultz and Rose, B.D.’s ex-girlfriend. A frame-up engineered by Lone Marten.

  B.D. was amazed and disgusted that Bob had all of this information at his fingertips. Up until two years ago when he had met Shelley he had led a totally private life, mostly because, he now supposed, nobody was interested. There was a specific sorrow and yearning to find a truly remote deer cabin, and trade the off-season rent of it for some maintenance. He had reroofed many deer cabins, liked the smell of tar paper and shingles, and the bird-level view of the world a roof offered. Now tears of frustration actually did form which made Bob nervous indeed in this city where actual emotion is indeterminate.

  “Stiffen up, bucko,” Bob said, signaling the waitress for another bottle of wine. “We’ll nail this miserable fuck to the wall.”

  “I just want my bearskin back.”

  “Of course you do. You didn’t view Lone Marten as dangerous because he was the brother of your boyhood friend David Four Feet. Few of us will admit it to ourselves when our friends are evil, or maybe that all our friends are evil, including our parents such as my beloved though promiscuous mother, or all of our forefathers and foremothers back to page one in human history. You know the Bible, right? I’ve read the Gideon Bible in a thousand hotel rooms because television repels me except, say, Mexican or French television because I don’t know what the fuck they’re saying. Then it’s okay. You tend to blame your erstwhile anthropologist lover, Shelley, for leading you astray but she didn’t do it, your weenie did. Weenies and vaginas are the heart of the great mystery of life. They are our glory and our doom. Some eminent theologians have suggested that Adam and Eve didn’t have genitals when they entered the original Garden but we must discount this as the thinking of dead-pecker old suits like we have in Congress. It’s my contention that life as a whole might be much less than the sum of its parts and its most reliable content is evil. Right now we are sitting here having beverages in what may be thought of as the heart of the Evil Empire. Out here we stretch people’s dreams and leave them only with stretch marks. Of course we’re just making a living like anybody else, only more so.”

  Not surprisingly B.D.’s attention span had weakened though he affected concentration. The lovely Chinese girl was setting up tables across the room of the empty restaurant. The question was partly why people from all foreign lands, including America, looked so different. Frank had told him it was climate, r
eferring to the hot sun in Africa, but B.D. was suspicious of that explanation. None of the Orientals he had run into in Chicago years back had looked yellow, nor did this girl. And none of the hundreds of Native Americans he knew looked red. A veterinarian from Charlevoix had told him in Frank’s Tavern that if all of the dogs in the world were left in free concourse, down the line they’d all be medium-sized and brown.

  Bob Duluth was waving his hands in the face of B.D.’s reverie, and sliding over the laptop for a closer view. A friend of Bob’s at the L.A.P.D. had run a check on Lone Marten, and his local record was mostly concerned with wholesaling Formosan-made Navajo jewelry as the bona fide goods. This had pissed off the real Navajo. As a radical dissident Lone Marten was also under “light surveillance” in Los Angeles where it was also illegal. But hadn’t these people taken over the empty prison, Alcatraz? There were also a number of addresses and phone numbers where he stayed when in the Westwood area, usually with other Native dissidents connected with the basketball powerhouse U.C.L.A. Bob suggested that he had an Italian friend named Vinnie who might retrieve the bearskin but Brown Dog said no. He’d do it himself. All of this stuff was going much too fast for his taste. Lone Marten would give him the skin if he hadn’t already sold it.

  Now the waitress brought a platter of ribs for a snack. Bob fell upon them but B.D. was capable of only a few, however delicious. Bob had claimed at lunch out in Malibu that he had pioneered the concept of multiple entrées, doubtless because he hailed from the Midwest where overeating is frequently regarded as an act of heroism. The waitress returned and asked Bob shyly if B.D. was famous? Her name was Willa and Bob said “definitely not” to her question. At the introduction B.D. dropped to a knee and kissed her hand, something he had seen in a movie.

  * * *

  They found B.D. a not so cheapish room between Westwood and Culver City at a place called the Siam, a motel with a modestly Oriental decor which made B.D. ponder the odds of getting Willa over for a visit. On the way out of the restaurant she had mysteriously refused to give him her Chinese name, much less her phone number. Bob said it was because he wasn’t famous. They stopped at a convenience store and bought two cases of Evian for what Bob called B.D.’s “water fetish.” When he drove Bob back to the Westwood Marquis, Bob told him to pick up some duds and gave him a five-hundred-buck advance on his salary which, though a great deal of money, didn’t alleviate B.D.’s unrest.

  Before he headed back to the Siam he took another quick walk in the botanical gardens. Bob had said one of the main secrets to his success was the nap he took every afternoon of a minimum of four hours duration. Deep in the foliage near the bamboo thicket he wondered if there were any possible secrets in his own life or was he simply an open, used paperback? This self-doubt quickly passed when he noted that the orange carp invariably swam counterclockwise in their miniature shaded pool. The carp were definitely more interesting to watch than the vagaries of doing a rundown on yourself. Like the rest of us B.D. didn’t know what life was about, and now the lead carp made a graceful U-turn and slowly drew his school clockwise. That had to be one of the answers to the millions of questions life didn’t really ask.

  Before returning to his room at the motel B.D. picked up two nice outfits at a used-clothing store, colorful Hawaiian-style shirts and brown chinos, plus an attractive but dusty old fedora that reminded him of the hat his Grandpa wore to the fair and funerals. Bob had taught him how to use the car phone so he called Delmore back home and immediately wished he hadn’t. Old Doris was in the Escanaba hospital with a heart attack and Rose was in jail for biting off the finger of a cop in the mayhem B.D. and the “evil” Lone Marten had started at the graveyard archaeological site. Delmore was taking care of Rose’s two children, Red and Berry, the latter, however charming to B.D., a retarded and unmanageable victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. Delmore had hired a full-time babysitter for the kids and he described the young woman as a real “peach,” a white girl who wanted to devote her life to helping Natives. She even tried to get Delmore to eat yogurt. The upshot, though, was that B.D. must come home immediately and act the father for Rose’s children. Rose would have to do a couple of years for the missing finger even though she claimed the officer had bruised her tits. “But how can I come home,” B.D. asked, an unpleasant quaver rising in his chest. Delmore had a lawyer looking into whether B.D. was actually over the Luce County line into Alger when he lobbed the firecrackers. With the recent advent of laser surveying many county lines were in question, especially in this particular locale which was a dozen miles from any human habitation. B.D. insisted that he’d die of heartbreak in jail like Delmore had told him had happened to incarcerated Apaches. Delmore said that he could at least come as far as the Wisconsin border and call in for instructions. The conversation had all the disadvantages of the telephone where there’s no time to digest the information before the next load arrives.

  Back at the motel the desk clerk, a tiny man from Laos, was apologetic over the fact that the television in B.D.’s room didn’t work and when he was told that was fine because B.D. hated television the man laughed long and hysterically. It was a morale raiser to tell a successful joke, even though you didn’t know what the joke was.

  In his room he chugged a bottle of water to try to tamp down the troublesome remains of the huge lunch. This was his darkest hour in most respects and he had only his twenty-three bottles of water for solace. He intended to try Bob’s secret of success and take a long nap but first a shower was in order. Just before he turned the water on a slight noise caught his attention. He checked the door and peeked out the window at the parking lot blazing in the sun. There was a muffled scratching at the wall near his bed and the sound of a woman singing softly. It sounded like the French of the strippers in the Canadian Soo, all of whom came from Montreal. How nice, he thought, then returned to the shower. Five minutes later he heard the neighboring door slam and again peeked out the window, seeing a trim girl in a cream-colored outfit getting into a Mercedes-Benz convertible.

  This did not help him sleep. He was outside of his tolerance in terms of time for lack of affection. Perhaps the new clothes, not to speak of the slick fedora, would help. The janitor’s outfit was neatly folded on the dresser in case he needed to disappear again while stalking Lone Marten. The fact of the matter is that he felt utterly dislocated, a rapacious modern disease. The only familiar part of his surroundings was when he raised his hands from the bed, stared at them, and said “hands.” The slump was a palpable weight on his chest and forehead. Grandpa used to say that life wasn’t a bowl of cherries which was okay by B.D. because he didn’t like cherries. Bob had flippantly asked him if he was afflicted with “dementia pugilistica,” then explained the term by asking him if he was punch-drunk from his early fisticuffs. “Nope,” B.D. had replied. He had rarely been hit in the face and that’s why he always won. A good face blow disarms all but the most experienced. Now he flipped through a short list of assessments. Money. With about four hundred seventy bucks separated into several pockets and one sock for safety he was nearly as rich as he had ever been. Someday he hoped to buy a used yellow pick-up, a simple Ford 1500 would do. He would like a nice girlfriend but assumed so would everyone else. It really came down to the bearskin which was his single prized possession. Early in life Delmore had given up his bear medicine and turned to turtles, giving the skin to B.D. with ceremony.

  He tossed and turned on the bed, ripping the thin sheet beneath him. They’d probably charge him an arm and a leg for the torn sheet. This was not the proper time but he was tempted to look at the nude photo of Shelley in his wallet for strength. A different kind of strength was needed for L.A. and it was scarcely a stiff pecker pointing at the snarling leopard lamp on the night table. Indeed, what power could the lonely wanderer summon that would be adequate for this vast tormented city sprawled around him, with its ten thousand laminae of sophistication and wealth, its venality and hatred, the million attractive women whose peculiar language h
e did not know? What he did know, though he had never collected his thoughts on the subject, which Shelley had him do on other matters, was that he was ill suited to leave the “back forty” as they used to call it. It had long ago occurred to him that the woods only prepares you for more woods. His expertise as a subsistence hunter and fisherman did not ready him for anything other than eating fish, venison, or grouse and woodcock. The end of that story was a full tummy and the memories of the splendor of the day.

  In a way you didn’t enter the woods, the woods entered you, and its presence did not make you more operable at the business at hand. Up until a few years ago game biologists had visited him to get the locations of bear and wolf dens in exchange for a six-pack or, in the case of wolves, a whole case of beer. He had given up this practice when Frank warned him that all the biologists were going to do was put telemetric collars on the animals so that they could keep track of them without effort like animal police. In other words, though Frank didn’t say it that way, perhaps B.D. was betraying the creatures without knowing it. Naturally it was hard to turn down a six-pack or a case but he was full of enough remorse to meet all future biologists with a “get the fuck out of here” and a slammed door. And he had graduated in terms of human failing to gambling his knowledge on the Native graveyard for sex. It was certainly time to act noble but the training wasn’t quite there, and perhaps nobility wouldn’t help get back the bearskin.

  Jesus H. Christ, he thought, hearing the roar and beeping of rush-hour traffic. How can they live with this fucking racket? He got off the bed and tried the radio built into the broken TV and had a thrilling moment when it worked. He tuned in some Mexican music loud enough to drown out the traffic noise. The yoga couple with whom he had had the parting over questioning why the woman felt good about herself possessed hundreds of records they played day and night, drowning out the birds and coyotes, and even a possible wolf. She was a tad thin for his taste but back in bed he recalled how pleasant she had looked when he had taken them on a day-long hike at their request. They had become a little lost on a series of ridges above a swamp that formed the headwaters of the Two-Hearted River and her husband, who had been irritated all day over the fact that the cellular phone attached to his belt didn’t work in this location, totally lost his composure. B.D. claimed that they weren’t lost, they just couldn’t find their vehicle and said that he had happily wandered around a couple of days in this sort of situation. He knew the area well in May before all the foliage was out, and October when most of the leaves were down, but now the thickness of the greenery and the dull overcast hiding the sun’s true position had made the route difficult.