Brown Dog: Novellas

by Jim Harrison

  On the bed B.D. realized why the experience had come to mind, first discarding the beauty of the woman’s butt in her pale green trousers. It was because he feared falling apart now in L.A., delaminating as the man had done that day, including falling back and eating the rest of the sandwiches they had intended to share, hogging all the remaining water so that finding a creek or spring was immediately more important than finding the vehicle. The man’s five-hundred-dollar custom hiking boots were turning his feet to purple jelly and late in the afternoon he had burst into paranoid sobs, claiming that B.D. and his wife were trying to kill him so they could become lovers and get his money. All of this on a simple ten-hour walk, B.D. had thought, quite puzzled, though amazed that the wife remained curious about the flora and fauna and had pretended by midmorning that her husband didn’t exist. They were a full two hours from the car when B.D. figured out the specifics of where they were but he didn’t let on, wanting to stick it to the guy for his bad behavior. When nearly out of the woods the man had thrown his cellular phone out into the middle of an algae-laden pond covered with the white and yellow flowers of lily pads. “How ugly of you to throw your phone into the beautiful pond, darling,” the wife had said. A scant hundred yards from emerging the man had clutched his head and yelled, “I hear a roaring,” which was only a log truck on the road just ahead. Afterward the man had acted self-righteous rather than embarrassed, blaming the whole thing on an organic purge he had taken the day before to clean out his system. His wife and B.D. had watched in amazement as the man hogged nearly all the remaining water in the car and stuffed down two high-energy bars from the glove compartment without offering them a bite. For B.D. it was an incredible lesson on how you don’t want to act in your brief time on earth. She had dropped B.D. off at his tar-paper deer hunter’s shack, pressing a sweat-dampened fifty-dollar bill in his hand while her husband snoozed and moaned in the backseat. “Thanks for the wonderful day,” she had said, staring straight ahead as if windshield wipers were the most interesting things in the world. B.D. had eaten a three-pound canned pork shoulder for dinner, then hoofed it the five miles to town in the twilight. The carburetor in his van was on the fritz and he was a little weary, but who could resist Frank’s tavern when you had fifty bucks free and clear?

  The upshot of the memory was something biblical on the order of “gird up thy loins,” that is, stop your quavers and act like you know what you’re doing. Anyone could become a slobbering asshole, even a guy who could do yoga and owned a hundred-grand log cabin with two bathrooms. He had been on a seven-day fandango, covering two-thirds of the country, and it was high time he get his bearings. He didn’t know, of course, that by the time you truly felt the heartbreak of dislocation it has become the deep itch of getting better. And as the ceiling above him, speckled mauve, grew foggy and distant he entered sleep and the largely ignored arena of dreamtime wherein the simple little carp pond in the U.C.L.A. botanical gardens gradually became a mighty river on which he was floating on a log. Evil men in black uniforms followed in a boat shooting at him and forcing him toward an immense waterfall. At the last moment before being pushed into the thunderous cascade his body lifted up and he could hear the heavy creaking and flapping of his wings, his neck craned outward. He felt very heavy but maintained altitude and his flight pattern took him downstream far above the raging torrents. His wings became tired and heavy and he descended, landing at great speed but somehow clutching a large white pine tree at the edge of the river. Puzzled by his escape he looked down at his body and saw he was half bear and half bird.

  The phone rang and it was a paw that lifted it clumsily from the cradle on the nightstand. “Hello,” B.D. said in a throaty growl.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with your voice? It’s Bob reminding you that you’re picking me up at eight, about an hour from now. You got it?”

  “Of course. I just finished my yoga and I’m doing my hair,” B.D. said, clearing his throat of any bear remnants.

  “You’re fucking kidding. You’re doing yoga?”

  “Yoga and a gallon of yogurt a day keeps the doctor away,” B.D. said, thinking about how Shelley and her friend Tarah lived the life of health, though they had had a weakness for cocaine and champagne.

  “Cut the bullshit. Just be here. We have to go to the set. We’re night shooting.”

  “What set?” B.D. asked, looking at his erection and wondering if there was bear power in it. Bears were notorious for endurance fucking.

  “Just be here you goddamned fool.” Bob sounded a bit speedy.

  “Use the word ‘fool’ again and I’ll give your Taurus to a poor person of color.”

  “I’m sorry. I apologize. Anyway I got Lone Marten pinned down to a speech he’s going to make tomorrow evening. I’m hoping that they’ll find out where he’s staying. It’s better if the showdown isn’t public.”

  “Thanks, Bob. I better get my tux on.”

  “Don’t wear a tux for Christ’s sake.”

  “Okay.” B.D. hung up, still feeling strongly the power and insouciance of his dream. Who’s going to fuck with you if you’re half bear and half bird?

  In the lobby of the Westwood Marquis both guests and staff nodded and smiled at him under the careless assumption that he might be an important rock musician, many of whom stayed at the hotel, while B.D. was confident that it was the combination of the tropical shirt and his natty fedora. When he found Bob in the lounge drinking a martini out of a beer mug Bob looked at the hat and said, “Nifty.” The hat had the extra advantage of hiding his stiff and unruly hair. During his childhood visits to the barber for his twenty-five-cent haircut the barber would whine that it would take a quarter’s worth of Brylcreem or butch wax to mat down B.D.’s hair.

  The hardest thing for a rural stranger in a huge city is to figure out the relationship between what people do for a living and where they live. On home ground you can drive down a street and say butcher, baker, candlestick maker as you pass successive houses. In Los Angeles, of course, you immediately give up to the nagging grace of incomprehension, as you do in New York City, with its layered oblong onions of life, its towering glued-together slices of separate realities held together by plumbing pipes and brittle skins of stone. In New York you can at least imagine you are way up in a childhood treehouse and those far below are not woodland ants but asthma-producing roaches. But then a pretty girl walks by with nine goofy dogs on tethers and you can get the feeling that these folks know what they’re doing. In Los Angeles any sort of comprehension is out of the question for the initiate, though after a number of visits there are certain buildings, streets, and restaurants that become comforting landmarks. This is also true of the locals, most of whom become quite blind to their surroundings, like, say, the citizens of Casper, Wyoming. The sophisticate, the student of cities, soon understands that Greater Los Angeles resembles the history of American politics, or the structure of American society itself. The connection between Brentwood and Boyle Heights is as fragile as that between Congress and the citizenry though the emotional makeup of both resembles the passion and power of the Jerry Springer Show.

  Thus it was on the way between the Westwood Marquis and the Sony Studios in Culver City that Brown Dog could bark out fondly on passing the Siam Motel, “That’s where I live,” to Bob Duluth who had his nose in his brightly lit laptop computer.

  “Ah, yes, the wonderful Siam. Beware of a faux-French girl who lives there. That means she’s not actually French. She’s from Redondo Beach. Real French girls find it impossible to get green cards, you know, permits to get work. I was deeply in love with Sandrine for about three days. I introduced her to a couple of friends from Paris and they were amazed. They thought Sandrine was more French than the French with an impeccable Auvergne accent to boot. Whenever any filmmakers have a bit part for a French girl Sandrine gets the call. Her scam is to plaintively ask a gentleman to help her get a green card. Of course I tried. A lawyer charged me a grand to look into the matter for ten minute
s. The immigration people told him that I was the thirty-seventh person trying to help Sandrine get a green card. Be careful about your wallet if you meet her.”

  “Not if you keep your money in a sock,” B.D. quipped.

  “A sock is an obvious place to hide money. Ask any girl in Vegas. She checks the socks first.”

  “I mean the socks you are wearing. You tend to limp a little so you don’t wear out the money.”

  “What if you need to buy a hot dog or a drink?” Bob closed the computer top. His mind thrived on doses of inanity.

  “You keep a little spare in your front pockets. It’s close enough to your weenie so no one can get at it. It’s a real sensitive area. My old girlfriend Shelley told me it’s like my religion but she was dead wrong. I keep my religion secret.”

  “Not a bad idea, I mean secrecy in this town. With actresses I recommend talking about religion as a sexual ploy. Just ask them what God’s specific purpose was in creating the movie business, and I don’t mean it cynically. Stay earnest and a bit above the idea of sex. Probe for their deepest hopes and fears and tie it into the higher purpose, whatever that might be.”

  “Is my neighbor Sandrine religious?” B.D. wanted to bring it closer to home.

  “She claims to be a French Huguenot. That’s where the Arcadians, or Cajuns, come from. More to the point, she doesn’t allow entry which at first made me think she was a transvestite. A closer look told me no. She seems to deeply enjoy sixty-nine, though I think she uses a thin plastic liner in her mouth. Once when she was in the bathroom I saw a packet of them in her purse.”

  “You don’t say.” B.D. was a little unnerved by this information. It smacked of the Twilight Zone repeats that Delmore occasionally watched at dinnertime. “You mean you snooped in the poor girl’s purse?”

  “Just checking for a pistol or switchblade. I have trouble performing the sex act if I feel threatened in any way. We grow up haunted by the tales of easy sex that don’t eventuate. If you’re in Eau Claire they tell you all the girls in Oshkosh fuck at the drop of a hat so you drive your old Plymouth to Oshkosh where they say it’s Milwaukee, and in Milwaukee they say the college girls in Madison will leap on your head if you whistle, but in Madison you’re assured that Eau Claire is stuffed to the gills with dumb secretaries who will fuck you silly for a three-course meal at McDonald’s.”

  “You just went in a circle,” said B.D. who was a student of road maps. A cabin owner had given him an old Rand McNally and B.D. had spent many an evening studying it.

  “That’s what I mean. Now I offer girls modest scholarships which keeps it on a higher plane. Before I forget, don’t admit to anyone you’re my driver. It has to do with labor relations. The teamsters might slit my tires.”

  “What will I say I am?” B.D. pulled up at the Sony security gate which protected Tri-Star and Columbia from Greater Los Angeles.

  “El don Bob,” said a Mexican security officer poking his face in the window.

  “Qué pasa, baby?” Bob waved. “Give my aide-de-camp here a badge for the set.”

  B.D. pinned on his “VIP” badge, not quite remembering what it meant. Also “aide-de-camp” seemed a step up in the world from “driver” which he had also done for Lone Marten in the semi-hot Lincoln Town Car which they swapped even up for their escape vehicle, the brown Taurus.

  At the set, the front of a fake small hotel, Bob was met by the director and producer and he handed over a paper with the new line. B.D. was standing close enough to hear the director summon over the star actor who was darkly tanned but looked a bit like a bloated peanut. Now instead of the actor saying to the doorman “Call me a cab,” he would say “Get me a cab.” The reason behind the change, Bob was explaining, was because the actor was a distraught and impulsive lover and would not be in the mood to be polite to a hotel doorman. It didn’t seem a very interesting point to B.D. but both the director and the producer liked the idea and Bob beamed. The actor wasn’t quite sure but after an initial frown he prepared himself emotionally for the next take.

  B.D. was amazed at the hundred or so people working on the set, the grips and gaffers, makeup people, continuity girls, assistant directors, wardrobe ladies, and a few important studio executives who stopped by for a few minutes before driving home from work. Everyone seemed to greet Bob as if he were a big shot, and smiled at B.D. as he drifted toward the caterer’s table, as if the VIP badge might mean something. Bob, still beaming, slapped him on the shoulder, “All in a day’s work,” he said, grabbing B.D.’s arm as he reached for a hot dog and soft drink. “Save your appetite for dinner, plus we got work to do.” Another fucking food bully, B.D. thought as Bob led him to the entrance of the fake hotel. Shelley had been like that, forcing him to eat a big bowl of Tibetan boiled grain that you had to chew on a long time like a cow does its cud. Don’t eat a hot dog kiddo, it will rot your insides out.

  The next shot would be in a mock-up of a hotel room, Bob explained, stepping over tangles of cables and wires that looked dangerous to B.D. who always felt nervous over something so simple as plugging in a lamp. This was doubtless due to all the ranting his Grandpa had done about the destructive powers of electricity and automobiles. B.D., however, was pleased when a gaffer said, “Great hat” and a makeup man screeched “I love that hat, darling.” It was a little disappointing, though, when he found out that the actress they were about to meet wasn’t the one who demanded that her hamburger be ground before her very eyes, and had her parts exhaustively shaved. This one was named “Shoe” which seemed odd, but then he had gone out with a barmaid over in Neguanee whose last name was Foot who was first-rate, if a bit on the hefty side.

  And there she was sitting on a rumpled bed in a bra and a half-slip, a bottle of whiskey and a full glass of the precious amber liquid on the nightstand beside her. While she talked to the director a makeup girl further tousled her blond locks. She stood up and gave Bob a peck on the cheek, nodded at B.D., and said, “What an adorable hat.” He flushed deeply and bowed, then stepped backward toward the door, well behind the huge million-dollar camera, at least that was the price Bob put on it. Bob and the director and Shoe were discussing the upcoming scene and then went through the actual paces. She stood grief-stricken at the window as her lover drove off in the cab, came back to the bedside where she tossed off a glass of whiskey, screamed, “Goddamn you, Richard,” then threw herself sobbing on the bed. B.D. quickly made note of the idea that movies were made of discouragingly small pieces and also, what kind of stupid shit could walk away from this woman? His eyes bugged in alarm when she tossed off the full glass of whiskey in rehearsal and the assistant cameraman whispered that it was tea. It was beautiful indeed when she threw herself on the bed and her sobs were so convincing that you wanted to rush to her side and comfort her. The slip nudged up the back of her legs so far that you could almost see her fanny and a smallish lump arose in his throat when he realized that such beauty was not for the likes of him.

  After five of the eventual nine takes of the scene B.D. drifted back outside because the hot lights caused sweat to trickle down his back and legs and from beneath his magic fedora. The hundred or so employees were still milling around outside and when he emerged from the hotel several of them asked him how the scene was going. He said, “Swell” as he stared out over the assembled crowd from the foot-high vantage of the hotel’s steps which he noted were not real cement though they looked like it. Oh sons and daughters of man, under the vast and starry night though the stars are invisible, what are you doing here while your histories moment by moment trail off behind you like auto exhaust, he thought though not quite in those words. What wages did they draw to endure such torpor, though he couldn’t say they looked more miserable than most hardworking folks. At least they could feel there was glamour in the end product, which was hard to envision cutting pulp on a cold snowy day, somewhat stunted third-growth timber that might very well end up in a newspaper after being extruded from the mill. Maybe these workers felt like tho
se in an absolute assembly line in an auto factory and though they were remote from the end product they were confident that out would pop a Cadillac. Cast in the best light, B.D. decided, this work could be likened to his years as an illegal-salvage diver, bringing up antique booty from the depths. Some people would pay top dollar for a binnacle brought up from an old freight schooner resting in peace in the depths for over a hundred years.

  Brown Dog stared out at the crowd for a long time with the nonconceptual attentiveness of a child. In terms of local social mores such stillness was extralegal and many in the crowd found themselves staring back. Was this fucking goof really important they wondered? They all knew from common gossip that the screenwriter, Bob Duluth, wasn’t dealing from a full deck, didn’t have both oars in the water, but they were bright enough to also know that he was the origin of their employment. In the parlance of the industry, screenwriters were an unfortunate necessity, or “just writers” as the executives tended to refer to them.