Brown Dog: Novellas

by Jim Harrison

  “I won’t miss my sky blue toothbrush,” he said.

  Berry was awake in the backseat and caught on to the difficulties. She looked stricken and made a snake motion with a hand. B.D. and Gretchen drove off Route 28 onto a two-track in a swampy area. Berry jumped out and within minutes returned with a small garter snake. She zipped it up in a pocket and grinned widely at them. Gretchen dried her tears and drove on with B.D. reassuring her that Delmore had given him a bunch of money and that there must be clothes to buy in Canada, but then he moaned that he had forgotten his fly rod and flies. Gretchen was wearing her patented black turtleneck and gray skirt and tugged the skirt up to divert him from his grief. He boldly pretended he was tired and curled up on the front seat with his cheek resting on her thigh.

  “You’re pushing it, kiddo,” she hissed, patting his cheek and tickling his ear.

  B.D. closed his eyes and felt her turn north on Route 123. It seemed altogether right to him that they would drive through the small village of Paradise. It would be hard to find someone less demanding of life than Brown Dog and his current position was beyond his most strenuous ambitions.

  The fish tug was just pulling into the dock with their arrival. Gretchen pinched B.D. awake from his phony sleep already having noted that his eyes were open to a slit for the view. He sat up with his face slack and moony.

  “I love you,” he whispered with the wind buffeting the car.

  “Go, for Christ’s sake.” She jumped out and drew Berry from the backseat, kissing her and pushing her toward B.D. who stood outside looking at the choppy waters of Whitefish Bay. He turned to the boat at the end of the dock and saw Mugwa waving, his pigtail whipping in the strong wind, and his three warriors beside him.

  “Go,” Gretchen yelled in his face, then gave him a quick open-mouthed kiss. B.D. took Berry’s hand and they trotted down the dock to the boat with Berry making loud seagull cries so that the local gulls responded.

  It was a very rough five-hour trip with the wind coming down the full four-hundred-mile fetch of Lake Superior. Within an hour out B.D. was hugging the commode and almost wanting to die but the memory of Gretchen’s thigh gave him mental balance. Berry, meanwhile, was jumping up and down with the pleasure of the trip, wearing a yellow slicker to protect her from the back-hatch spray. Mugwa scratched B.D.’s head when they rounded Cape Gargantua and surged on toward Wawa.

  “You’re only an hour from a six-pack, buddy,” Mugwa growled.

  B.D. peeked out the hatch and over the top of the furious waves at the steep green forested hills and granitic outcrops of Canada. Berry came over and tried to help him to his feet.

  Brown Dog Redux

  PART I

  Brown Dog drifted away thinking of the village in the forest where the red-haired girl lived. When she had served them pie and coffee at a diner and a chocolate milk and cookie for Berry he had teased her by saying, “Cat got your tongue,” when she didn’t respond to his flirting. She had gestured to her mouth indicating that she was mute and when he hid his face in his hands in embarrassment she had come around the counter and patted his head and laughed the soundless laugh of a mute.

  Now he was waiting for Deidre in a very expensive coffee shop in downtown Toronto in which he felt quite uncomfortable. He was nursing a three-buck cup of Americano, more than a six-pack of beer back in Escanaba where in some places a cup of coffee was still a quarter. He much preferred the diner with the red-haired mute girl up near Gamebridge where a kindly social worker had taken him and Berry for a Sunday ride in early March so that they finally could have their first trip out of the city in months. They had a fine walk on a snowmobile trail through a forest while Berry had run far and wide as fast as a deer over the top of the crusty snow. Berry’s legs were getting longer and when they visited nearly every day the lovely winter ravines in Toronto she’d run far ahead of him.

  Now it was early April and he was getting an insufferable case of spring fever. The proprietor of the coffee shop, a big strong woman, was staring at him as if he was a vagrant. He avoided her glance by eagerly looking out the front window hoping to see Deidre, though his errant mind was back at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago thirty years before where in a dark hallway there was a painting called Ruth Amid the Alien Corn. At the onset the painting irritated him because it was obviously wheat, not corn. Ruth, however, was lovely and fine-breasted looking into the somber distance with teary eyes. Once while he was looking at the painting one of his devout teachers, Miss Aldrich, had happened along and explained that Ruth had been exiled and was terribly homesick thus the wheat or corn was “alien.” Brown Dog in Alien Toronto didn’t have a ring to it but it was on the money.

  Finally Deidre appeared at the window and waved to him. Brown Dog was startled because she was talking to a man he recognized as her husband. They had all met two weeks before at the Homeless Ball, a fund-raiser for the indigent. The man, Bob by name, had a peculiar shape what with being thin from the waist up with a silvery goatee, and quite large down below with a big ass that even now forced the tail of his tweed sport coat out at a sharp angle. The question was, why was he here? He sat himself down at a table twenty feet or so away and glared at B.D. with the usual sullenness of a cuckold.

  Meanwhile Deidre sat down all flash and bustle with the usual merry smile and began to unwrap her ten-foot scarf. When she ordered her double-decaf soy-milk latte with a pinch of sassafras pollen, B.D. momentarily forgot the glowering husband thinking that he would get stuck with the bill which would equal a good bottle of whiskey. The coffee fetish that was sweeping North America left him restless and puzzled. Like his uncle Delmore, B.D. would often use the same grounds for two pots.

  Brown Dog was wise enough to understand that the presence of Bob meant that their two-week affair with a mere four couplings was over. He wasn’t really listening to Deidre as his mind rehearsed the four: once in his room while Berry was at speech therapy, twice in a modest hotel, and once in a snow cave he and Berry had carved into a hillside in the Lower Don Parkland. They screwed while Berry was running in the distance. The snow cave had been awkward because B.D. had to back in first and then Deirdre backed partway in and pulled down her trousers. There was very little room to maneuver and she was a big strong girl so that he was driven breathlessly into the narrow back wall of the cave freezing his own bare ass.

  “Are you listening?” She waved a hand in front of his face. “I was saying that I think I must have taken an extra Zoloft by mistake. Bob made me a gin fizz before putting his salmon soufflé in the oven. Suddenly I became dizzy and weepy and just plain spilled the beans. Of course Bob was outraged and wanted the details. He thought it was strange that I was fucking a proletarian which is his professor language for a workingman. Anyway, we had it out and when we were finished the soufflé was ready to eat, an odd coincidence, don’t you think? You could use a shower.”

  “I’ve been shoveling snow since seven this morning so I worked up quite a sweat in nine hours.” There had been a few inches of dusty snow and B.D. had wandered the streets of a wealthy neighborhood near the curling club. He would shake a little cowbell and those who wanted their walks cleaned would come to their front doors. This system had worked well the entire winter and he had made enough money to support himself and Berry in their ample-sized room in an old Victorian mansion in an area gone to decay.

  “I have the distinct feeling you’re not listening to me,” said Deidre in a huff.

  “You’re saying that our love is not meant to be,” B.D. said seeing a wonderful piece of ass disappear into the usual marital void. He could feel her heat across the table. She was a real burner and in the ice cave he had marveled at the heat her bare butt had generated during its strenuous whack-whack-whack. She seemed fit as a fiddle though she claimed to have allergies to peanuts, dairy products, and latex so that she carried nonlatex condoms for emergencies in a secret compartment in her purse. One afternoon they were at a sports bar watching football and he had eaten free pea
nuts while she went to the potty and when she came out she shrieked, “You could kill me.” If he so much as touched her arm, with peanut oil on a finger he could kill her, or so she said. His uncle Delmore was always watching the Perry Mason repeats on television at lunchtime and this peanut thing seemed like a good plot though B.D. regarded Perry as one of the most boring fucks in Christendom.

  Suddenly Bob was at the edge of their table and B.D. slid his chair back in case the dickhead made a move. “You cad,” Bob said, grabbed his wife’s arm, and then in a miraculous act grabbed the check for the Americano and the double-decaf soy-milk mocha latte with a pinch of sassafras pollen (two bucks extra). Despite being called a cad which he thought might be an old-timey swearword B.D.’s heart soared when Bob picked up the check which meant that he and Berry could eat out rather than cooking something in the electric fry pan in the room. How could he be a cad when it was Deidre who’d instigated the affair after they had fox-trotted in a dark corner at the Homeless Ball and she had been delighted when his wanger got stiff as a rolling pin?

  On the way out of the coffee shop he discovered that someone had stolen the snow shovel he had left tilted against the building near the doorway. Maybe this was a good omen, a sign that it was time to somehow leave Canada? The blade was made out of plastic anyhow and didn’t make the old-fashioned grating noise on cement. After Deidre had slumped forward steaming in the snow cave she had said, “It’s so primeval,” and B.D. had began quoting Longfellow’s “Evangeline.” “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks . . .” As a high school teacher Deidre had been impressed but then B.D. told her the story of how in third grade he and five other skins, three mixed and two purebloods, had been forced to memorize the first pages of the poem for the school Thanksgiving program but on stage his friend David Four Feet had made loud farting noises instead. The assembly fell apart, laughing hysterically, and the teachers and principal ran around slapping as many students as possible. David Four Feet was severely crippled and got away with murder because none of the teachers wanted to beat up on a cripple. Since B.D. was David’s best friend he offered an alternative for their anger.

  B.D. waited outside the lobby door until Berry’s speech therapist appeared with Berry leaping down the last flight of stairs crouched like a monkey. The therapist was terribly skinny and B.D. had the fantasy of fattening her up to a proper size. There was the old joke of getting bone splinters while screwing a skinny girl. He doubted that this was an actual danger but it was easy to see that this young woman was about thirty pounds on the light side. He thanked her profusely even though Berry hadn’t learned a single word. Berry was his stepdaughter and the victim of fetal alcohol syndrome due to her mother’s voluminous drinking of schnapps during pregnancy.

  They made the long twilight walk to Yitz’s Delicatessen with growing hunger. More than ever before Brown Dog felt on the lam. Five months before, their entry into the safety of Toronto had been nearly jubilant. Their contact, Dr. Krider, who was a Jewish dermatologist, had taken them to lunch at Yitz’s and B.D. had eaten two corned tongue sandwiches plus a plate of beef brisket for dessert while Berry had matzoh ball soup and two servings of herring during which she made her perfect gull cries as she always did when eating fish. The other noontime diners were startled but many of them applauded the accuracy of Berry’s gull language. Dr. Krider for reasons of historical and political sympathies was an ancillary member of the Red Underground, a loose-knit group of activists on both sides of the border and extending nominally to Native groups in Mexico. In recent years any action had been made complicated by Homeland Security to whom even AARP and the Daughters of the American Revolution were suspect. Dr. Krider had found them their pleasant room and had B.D. memorize his phone number in case he was short of sustenance money. B.D. had assured the good doctor that he had always been able to make a living which was less than accurate as this often meant the forty bucks he could make cutting two cords of firewood which he would stretch out for a week of simple food and a couple of six-packs in Delmore’s drafty trailer. The escape from Michigan into Canada had been occasioned by the state authorities’ impending placement of Berry in a home for the youthful mentally disabled in Lansing. B.D. and Delmore had made the eight-hour drive south from the Upper Peninsula to Lansing only to discover that the home and the school in which Berry would be stored was profoundly ugly and surrounded by acres of cement, an alien material, and thus the escape plan was made. Gretchen, B.D.’s beloved Sapphic social worker, had driven them over to Paradise on Whitefish Bay where they had boarded a Native fishing boat, a fast craft that was sometimes used to smuggle cigarettes into Canada where they were eight bucks a pack. In the coastal town of Wawa they were met by a kindly, plump middle-aged Ojibway who was traveling to visit a daughter and drove them the two days to Toronto in her ancient pickup. The woman named Corva had drunk diet supplement drinks all the way and B.D. and Berry had subsisted on baloney and white bread because Corva had been forbidden by the Red Underground to stop for anything but gas. Since they were used to eating well on venison and trout and illegal moose and the recipes from B.D.’s sole printed volume, Dad’s Own Cookbook, they were famished when they reached Toronto, and Yitz’s was their appointed meeting place. It wasn’t until they passed the Toronto city limits that Corva turned to him and asked, “Are you a terrorizer?” and B.D. replied, “Not that I know of.” The few members of the Red Underground he had met in Wawa were terse and rather fierce and it had been hard to feel what Dr. Krider had called “solidarity.” Dr. Krider had said to him, “The weather has beaten the shit out of you,” and B.D. had replied that he had always preferred the outside to the inside. It was so pleasant to walk in big storms in any season and take shelter in a thicket in the lee of the wind. Once he and Gretchen had taken Berry for a beach walk and a violent thunderstorm from the south on Lake Michigan had approached very quickly so that they took shelter in a dogwood thicket. Berry had what Gretchen called “behavioral issues” and kept running around in the storm despite Gretchen calling out to her. Lightning struck very close to their thicket and in the cold and wet Gretchen came into his arms for a moment. She said, “How can you get a hard-on during a lightning strike, you goofy asshole?” and he didn’t have an answer though it was likely her slight lilac scent mixed with the flowering dogwood plus her shimmering wet body, the thought of which drove him sexually batty.

  Now the air was warmish in a breeze from the south in the twilight and walking through a small park Berry incited a male robin to anger by making competitive male calls. B.D. held up his hand to protect them from the shrieking bird and said, “Please, Berry, your dad is thinking,” which was not at all a pleasant process. As they neared the delicatessen, he remembered two rather ominous things. In their goodbyes Corva had said, “Don’t hurt no innocent people. You’re with a rough bunch.” And Dr. Krider had told him, “Since you entered Canada illegally you’ll have to leave Canada illegally. You don’t have any papers so you’re limited to odd jobs.” The latter part of the admonition didn’t mean much because all he had ever done was odd jobs except for cutting pulp for Uncle Delmore, a job abbreviated when a falling tree bucked back from the spring in its branches and busted up his kneecap.

  This hard thinking made B.D. hungry so he ordered both a corned tongue and a brisket sandwich plus a plate of herring and potato salad for Berry. Berry refrained from her gull calls waiting for this old man to enter wearing his Jewish black beanie. They would spend a few minutes across a table from each other exchanging different birdcalls. The old man was some kind of retired scientist and tricked Berry by doing a few birdcalls from a foreign country which at first puzzled her but then made her laugh. B.D. watched them at play pondering the obvious seventy years’ difference in their ages. He wondered where the word “Yitz” came from because he associated it with one of the best things in life, good food. It wasn’t like one of those Michigan diners with a barrel of generic gravy out back connected by a hydraulic ho
se to the minimal kitchen which heated up grub from a vast industrial food complex named Sexton. B.D. could imagine the actual factory with cows lined up at a back door waiting patiently to become the patented meat loaf and their nether parts stewed into the barrels of gravy.

  It was at three AM that his destiny changed. He awoke with an insufferable pain in his lower unit accompanied by a dream in which he had been kicked in the balls by a cowboy as he had been so many years before in Montana. As life would have it things suddenly began to happen. Since he was moaning when he turned the light on, Berry was hovering over him and started singing one of her verbless songs. Her words were not quite words but were always pleasant.

  He couldn’t stand up straight but managed to slink down the stairs and drop Berry off with Gert, the landlady, a horrid old crone who, however, adored Berry for playing by the hour with her two nasty Jack Russell terriers. The dogs loathed everyone including their owner but liked Berry whom they perhaps regarded as an intermediate species.

  Luckily the closest hospital was a scant five blocks away and B.D. trotted through the night bent over from the waist in the manner of a Navajo tracker. He tripped over a couple of curbs with his eyes closed in pain soaking himself in a puddle from yesterday’s slush. It was not in his nature to be fearful and he had anyway guessed a kidney stone as the grandfather who’d raised him experienced a kidney stone about once a year whereupon he would take to bed with a fifth of whiskey which he quickly drank. Grandpa would howl, roar, and bellow in a drunken rage and then after a few hours of this would fall asleep and on waking act fit as a fiddle.