by Jim Harrison
Part II
WITH AN EYE TOWARD FREE DENTAL TREATMENT DELMORE had welcomed the idea of having the dinner for Belinda at his house. On getting out of her spiffy car she had made a faux pas by saying that the unsightly, abandoned trailer just down the road should be hauled away which Brown Dog corrected with “That’s where I live with the kids.” To get off the embarrassing hook Belinda had taken Red and Berry for a spin in her Mercedes convertible. Brown Dog and Delmore were left in an actual cloud of dust standing there next to the mailbox on the country road.
“I admire you,” said Delmore.
“I doubt that.” B.D. had noted that Delmore was less mentally solid than in former times but figured that with increasing age he had dropped all barriers that might impede his self-interest.
“Don’t doubt me, nephew. That is a lady of substance. Her ass is an axe handle wide.”
“Am I your nephew?” B.D. was stunned. Delmore had never called him nephew before and though it was no longer a large item in his life at age forty-nine, he was still curious about his own ancestry, the possible line of which had been purposely blurred by the grandfather who raised him, Delmore himself, and the pure-blood Doris whose passing at Christmas had left him musing what he thought of as a beloved aunt. B.D. had detected that he was a mixed blood but then so were tens of thousands of others in the Upper Peninsula. When the loggers and miners swept through the area on the path of conquest their sexual energies naturally sought out what was available, and that included Ojibwa (Anishinabe) women. But then so what? Delmore had once said that people willingly jumped into the Mixmaster of sex and the product was likely improved by the variety of ingredients. “If you keep breeding beagles to beagles you’ll get dumb beagles.” This had been after a day of unsuccessful rabbit hunting when the beagle had disappeared into a swamp near Rapid River and had been found two days later some twenty miles to the west sucking eggs in a farmer’s henhouse.
Dinner went fairly well with Belinda loving the chicken-and-Italian-sausage dish laden with what she called “the spice of life” which was garlic. By the time he had dished up ample portions for Belinda, Delmore, Red, and Berry, B.D. found himself with two wings but waxed modestly philosophical over the idea that a father must first provide for his family. Belinda had also done quite a job on the venison salami he had put out before dinner. The good news was that she would take a free look at the teeth of Red and Berry. The possible bad news was that she had had lunch with Gretchen and there was not much that could be done about Berry being sent off to school in Lansing in the coming September. It turned out that despite having married the incarcerated mother, Rose, to keep out of prison himself B.D. didn’t as yet have what constituted “clear title” to the children. There was a probationary period of a year which was only half over. He was obligated to provide for Red and Berry but Social Services and the educational system still held authority. Belinda said this would be very expensive to fight in court and Delmore choked on his single remaining strand of spaghetti.
While B.D. washed the dishes Delmore showed Belinda around the farmhouse bragging that nothing much had been changed since he had fixed the place up after coming back north in 1950s. The linoleum was original and he had hung the floral wallpaper with his own hands. Belinda was dubious about the anteroom filled with Delmore’s ham radio equipment, but then Delmore startled her by saying that like computers the process was more interesting than the content. Delmore put on his earphones, flicked some knobs, and quickly discovered that his radio friend in Mexico City had lunched on pork and vegetable soup, taken a two-hour siesta, and was dressing to go back to his dry-cleaning shop. When Belinda shrugged Delmore ominously warned her that in a time of worldwide crises it would be ham radio operators who would save the day.
B.D. was finishing the dishes and watching Berry do expert cartwheels in the backyard when Belinda said good-bye with a “You going to visit me later, cutie?” He was tempted but had to turn her down mostly because of a profoundly sore weenie from last night’s sensual acrobatics. Belinda admitted that she was also “saddle sore” and B.D. had a momentary and unconvincing glimpse of himself as a mighty stallion like a horoscope drawing of a half-man, half-horse.
* * *
There was an hour left of daylight so B.D. took Berry back to the creek partly to get her out of the hair of Red and Delmore who were playing chess. Delmore had Red River on the VCR and Red knew this was to throw him off his chess game. At age twelve Red was a child of his times with a fascination for the space program and all things technological and the cornball, lugubrious cowpokes of Red River filled him with a mixture of spleen and boredom. Even as a burgeoning star athlete Red had no tolerance for the mythology of “manly men.” Coaches were a necessary evil. He was pleased that his stepfather, Brown Dog, was a kindly fool, utterly without the silly macho characteristics of the Escanaba male population who affected total heartiness for hunting, fishing, and watching professional sports. Red listened to U2 while laboring over his homework with complete pleasure after which he would read a book by Timothy Ferris on astronomy. He had scant interest in his own purported father who was rumored to be a wandering botanist from Michigan State University his mother, Rose, met while berry picking. Before she died at Christmas his grandma Doris told him that he must be gentle about his mother’s energetic affection for the male sex. “Some of us gals are just like that,” Doris had said.
Back at streamside B.D. and Berry sat on a grassy swath watching the water for signs of brook trout activity. Berry had the trembles so B.D. put his hand gently on her head to calm her down. Berry was a regular fish hawk who could see into the water far beyond B.D.’s capacity or anyone else’s for that matter. She pointed to a riffle corner beneath a dense overhanging alder and it was a while before he could see the trout sliding back and forth in the varying shapes of the current. With a hand on her head he wondered, What does she know and what doesn’t she know with a head full of short circuits? What will become of her in a world that has so little room for outcasts? Why does the government have the right to take her away? She’s a woodland creature as surely as the little year-old bear she had spotted sleeping against a stump on a walk a few weeks before. At first to B.D. the shape of the bear had only appeared as a black peppercorn in the pale greenery of spring.
He got up and deftly caught the fish with a fly called the muddler. Berry, meanwhile, quickly plaited and braided marsh grass, forming a small green sack to carry the fish home which the only father she knew would cook her for breakfast. She had thrived with her mother in prison. One winter when she had peed her bed and Rose was drunk on butterscotch schnapps Berry had been thrown naked out the back door into a snowbank. Now when her brother, Red, chewed on his favorite butterscotch candy Berry fled the immediate surroundings. The scent of butterscotch clearly presaged evil in her neural impulses.
Saturday dawned windy and cold, with rain driving in sheets against the mobile home which rocked in the gale on its cement-block foundation. Brown Dog watched the rainwater ooze through the cracks around the aluminum casement window above his head, noting the ghastly cheapness of the construction. Aluminum had to be an enemy of civilization. He lay in his cold bed remembering his grandpa’s “joke”: “It’s darkest before it gets even darker.” His sleep had been interrupted several times by worries about Berry though he was consoled by the idea that he had four months to resolve the problem. The government already had the somewhat justified idea that he was a total miscreant and there was nothing to prevent him from taking Berry and making a run to Canada in August. Doris had liked talking about her relatives in Wawa on the east end of Lake Superior, and also her dear cousin Mugwa who trapped up on the Nipigon. Mugwa was a U.S. citizen but had flown the coop to avoid the Vietnam War, rare for an Ojibwa who like the Sioux farther west were always ready for a good fight even when it was on the behalf of their ancient enemy.
By seven A.M., the appointed time, they were all ready for the trip to the Boyne City area to pick mo
rel mushrooms. Berry had decided to wear her best red dress over her trousers and she and Red were sitting in the back of the Chevelle. Delmore was in a snit because he had intended to make Spam sandwiches to avoid the expense of a lunch stop but the Spam had disappeared from the pantry. They had been through this before on outings and B.D. knew Red was the guilty party because Red hated Spam and liked the luxury of a restaurant hamburger. Red was an inquisitive boy and knew that Uncle Delmore carried hundreds of dollars in his wallet and thus his tightwad nature was inscrutable.
Three hours later they were at the Straits of Mackinac with the wind whipping over the water so strongly, say upwards of fifty knots, that semitrucks were prevented from crossing the Mackinac Bridge, known widely as the “Mighty Mack,” the largest suspension bridge in the world until the building of the Verrazano in New York City. Brown Dog had never met anyone who had seen the Verrazano, the idea of which was ignored by the locals who preferred to think of their bridge as the biggest.
They stopped at Audie’s in Mackinaw City for lunch and B.D. reflected again on how once you crossed the straits the women looked different, not exactly scrawny, but definitely more slender. You went over a five-mile-long bridge and suddenly women looked more like they did in magazines. Their waitress was so attractive that Red blushed. B.D. sat at such an angle that he could see back into the kitchen where the waitress squatted down on her haunches to retrieve something from a drawer. She swiveled and said something he couldn’t hear and he had a momentary glimpse up her pale green waitress dress. His heart perked and his bollocks twinged. There was enough of his early religious phase left in him that he could again give thanks for the mystery of female beauty, her graceful butt protruding like a barnyard duck’s. A little badge on her chest gave her the soft name of Nancy and she was doubtless the type that took a shower and changed her underpants every single day. His mind drifted back to his schoolboy days when the lyrics of “Four-Leaf Clover” had been changed to “I’m underlooking a two-legged wonder . . .”
“Pay attention,” Delmore barked at him. “I’ve been trying to tell you that the price of cheeseburgers has gone up twenty cents from two years ago. Inflation’s eating up my savings.”
They hit the mother lode pronto a few miles north of Thumb Lake. Rather, B.D. and Berry hit the mother lode because it was still raining and Delmore and Red wouldn’t get out of the car. Delmore was engrossed in his morel mushroom notebook in which he had logged his mushroom locations since he was a boy while Red was reading about galaxies.
B.D. and Berry managed to pick a little less than a bushel in an hour by which time they were dripping wet and Berry had uncontrollable shivers. She was an ace mushroom picker what with being closer to the ground in height and picking at a trot. She would whistle when she found a good group among the miniature fiddlehead ferns, wild leeks, and trillium. B.D. also pulled a bushel of the leeks to make vinegar as Doris had done where you boil the leeks with white vinegar which added a fragrant and wild taste and then you got to eat the pickled leeks which could save a dish as dull as the meatloaf he made for Delmore who said the dish firmed up the wobbly backbone of America.
Delmore, meanwhile, was brooding in the car. He had decided against visiting his relatives over between Petoskey and Walloon Lake. Some of these relatives were fine, especially the older ones, but the younger tended to be low-rent chiselers with a fondness for narcotics and rock and roll. The Berry worries had also struck Delmore hard. Berry reminded him of his own sister who had run off to Milwaukee at age fourteen and had never been heard from again. Delmore had ample funds from the sale of his small farm near Detroit and his UAW pension, plus social security, but couldn’t resolve his old man’s tremulous worries over his remaining family, Brown Dog, Red, and Berry, not counting Rose in prison or the phony activist Lone Marten. There were also numerous cousins beyond his sphere of interest. He felt responsible for B.D., Red, and Berry but B.D. had to be kept on the shortest string possible. B.D.’s legal scrapes had cost him a pretty penny, and a possible court case over Berry was a nightmare source because you could pay all that lawyer money and still lose. It was as bad a bet as loaning money to relatives which at base was the reason he didn’t want to head toward Petoskey. Delmore as a child of the Great Depression had an ocean of empathy within him but it was only allowed to emerge in trickles or else it might run dry. The memory of boyhood dining on beach peas, soft turnips, withered carrots, and moldy shell beans did not urge him to openhandedness with money.
When Brown Dog and Berry returned to the car with their leeks and morels they were in high spirits despite being cold and wet. There is something inscrutably satisfying about finding a good patch of morel mushrooms that travels far beyond their excellent flavor, perhaps a trace of the glad hearts of hungry earlier gatherers in the long weary path of evolution. To Brown Dog, success in fishing, hunting, or gathering always reminded him of when he was a teenager and his grandpa who raised him was mortally ill in August and had made a request for venison on his deathbed. A half hour later B.D. was skinning an illegal doe in the pump shed and fried up the liver for dinner. A young doe liver is better than calf’s liver and Grandpa said that the doe offered him another month of life, in actuality three weeks.
Berry took off her clothes and Delmore wrapped her in his warm flannel shirt and jacket and put her in the front seat directly behind the blower to the car heater to warm up her legs. While Delmore was preoccupied B.D. slid out a pint of schnapps hidden under the seat and took a healthy pull in the ditch with his back turned as if he was peeing. When he turned back to the car he was startled by the thinness of Delmore’s arms in his undershirt. Delmore used to be a muscleman and now time had begun to enshroud him.
To the surprise of B.D. and Red, Delmore then suggested they take a spin to Lansing for a look at Berry’s upcoming school to see if it was acceptable. Lansing, the state capital, was about four hours to the south.
“It’s Saturday. Won’t it be closed?”
“You can find out everything by just looking at a building and its grounds. Are there bushes and trees and flower beds? Is there a thicket for Berry to visit? Is there a creek or river nearby? You’re a country bumpkin. You don’t know your basic buildings. If you were ever in Wayne County headquarters you’d fall to the floor in a dead faint.” Delmore liked to affect the “man of the world.” B.D. was pleased because it meant he wouldn’t have to save Berry’s life by himself.
Red piped up that since they were headed that way he’d like to take a look at Michigan State University where he intended to enroll down the line. This irked Delmore who said that Bay de Noc Community College would be good enough. Michigan State was too expensive.
“I can get a scholarship as a member of a disenfranchised minority,” Red said, returning to his book. He put his arm around Berry to calm her down. Berry always sensed the slightest quantity of tension in conversation which would make her tremble and her skin buzz. When old Doris died Berry had wrapped herself in one of Doris’s worn housedresses and lay in the corner for several days. B.D. had brought her back to life by driving up to Shingleton and spending a day’s wage buying her a child’s pair of snowshoes. A few days later she had returned from a snowbound trek with a dog collar with a license attached. He had called the owner who said the dog had run away several weeks before. This mystified B.D. so he followed Berry at a secretive distance taking along Delmore’s warsurplus binoculars. She always headed for their favorite brook trout creek which emerged from an enormous swamp, some seven by nine miles in size. A group of feral dogs lived there which a local sportsman’s group had tried to exterminate several times because the dogs killed deer for food not unlike the men themselves. Brown Dog sat on a hillside a half mile distant and glassed Berry in a clearing beside the creek. She was sitting on a stump with a half dozen of the normally unapproachable wild dogs milling around her. There were also a few ravens in the trees above that shared the dogs’ deer meals. It was at that moment that B.D. decided it would
be better to get Berry her own dog.
By the time they got south of Mount Pleasant the weather had turned fair and warm and B.D. reflected again on the brutish climate of the Great North where it had cost the town of Ishpeming an arm and a leg to replace pipes frozen eight feet in the ground after it had stayed below zero thirty days in a row.
It was easy to find MSU because of a convenient highway sign. B.D. noted the campus was a pussy palace with college girls in summer skirts or shorts in full frolic, running, jumping, dancing. This clearly cast a different light on education and he offered himself a tinge of regret that he had barely made it through the eighth grade. A coach had beaten him nearly senseless before the pain made B.D. respond whereupon he had cracked the coach’s jaw with a short uppercut. Were it not for fifty witnesses on the ball field B.D. would have gone to reform school for this illegal act. Many coaches like to slap boys around from their position which offers impunity but this coach was a hard puncher.