Sundog (Contemporary Classics)

by Jim Harrison

  Karl ignored me and moved swiftly to Strang. They embraced warmly and kissed. When they released, Eulia offered her hand which Karl took, making a bow. “Jesus, what a beautiful niece,” he said, then turned tome. “Relax, I ‘m just a big old fucking kitten. You might say I'm rehabilitated.” I felt prepped for everything except his actual presence. Strang had told me that Karl had been a diver, an underwater welder, an oil roust-about on of f shore rigs, and most lately, a stevedore in Mobile and New Orleans. He certainly looked like all of these, though my frame of reference is limited in the areas involved. He reminded me most of those underground tunnel workers in New York City known as “sandhogs.” He gave me a broad toothless smile that crinkled an old scar that followed his jaw line until it flipped up toward his lower lip. There was a seemingly obligatory cobra tattooed on a big lumpish forearm as he offered his hand to me. In his mid-fifties he still presented a sense of threat, though his eyes twinkled. He was Strang's height, about six feet, but thickish, nearly massive, and the hand he offered had the heft of a shot put. Again, in contrast to his visitors he was warm, almost radiant.

  Strang launched into a soothing, but never pleading, number of reasons why Karl should accept Ted's custody. Karl smoked one of my cigarettes and blew childish smoke rings toward Eulia, who couldn't help but stick a finger in one of them.

  “Well, Corve,” Karl said, “Just sitting here looking at you I see you've got the living shit kicked out of you. Remember when we met in New Orleans and you weren't too impressed by my bimbos? That was three years ago. Right now I could cry seeing what's happened to you. I agree. I'll go up to Ted's. Maybe I'll start trapping again after forty years. Neither of us like the cold weather but it beats the shit out of this place. I just hope you get well enough to come for a visit. Bring Eulia here,” he pronounced it “yew-lee” like Bobby, “and maybe we'll find her a skull as big as a car.”

  They lapsed into a longish brotherly reverie ending with a discussion of Strang's physical condition and prognosis. They caught me glancing nervously at my watch. We only had an hour allotment and forty-five minutes were used up.

  “What did you want to know?” There was a slight edge to Karl's question so I decided I better go for the liver, reducing a dozen questions to two.

  “Why are you in prison?”

  “Dozens of reasons. I had a very happy childhood as Corve will tell you. My parents and brothers and sisters were marvelous. I had a long and wonderful war which I joined at fourteen, and stayed in until 1948. They wanted to send me to Korea and I said nothing doing, so I did six months in the brig. An officer friend interfered and I got an honorable discharge.”

  “Why did you refuse to go to Korea?”

  “The situation didn't appeal to me. Korea wasn't trying to take over the world like the Japs and Germans. The Pentagon, you know, all the officers, just wanted another war. It's their job.”

  “I'm not sure I understand. Could you clarify?”

  “Sure thing. You're Corve's age. When since World War II have they not been trying to get us in a fight somewhere on the planet? At the time I didn't feel obligated to take part. I don't feel obligated about a lot of things, you might say. I've been in jail and prisons here and there, to be sure, but you pay for the way you live. To be specific, two years ago I came up to see a girl friend in Detroit. Outside a club I was attacked by four plainclothes policemen. Me, an older man. I got in some good licks, too good in fact, so they had to set me up to look like a bad-ass to avoid embarrassment. So I got a three to five in Jackson Prison. While I was there, I heard about what that street gang did to my special niece, Ted's daughter, my darling, Esther. Sure enough those three guys got sent up to Jackson so I evened the score and was sent up here.”

  “I don't understand. What did you do? Were they black?”

  “No they weren't black,” Karl laughed. “What an asshole question. What does it matter when they raped your niece, give her a few cigarette burns, and stick a pop bottle in her ass? One by one I gave them a squeeze with this good right hand here. Burst their nuts is what I did. One of them damn near died, and the other gang members who were in prison got on my case. So the state sent me on up here for my own protection.”

  “Jesus, Karl, that was a terrible thing to do.” Strang was standing and shaking his head. “I'm ashamed.”

  “Of course you're ashamed. You're a fine Christian person. I'm not. I didn't think eighteen months of free meals and sleep were an adequate punishment for those fuckers. The counselor asked me if I didn't think the world would be a horrible place if every one acted like me. I agreed, but said everyone is not me. I teased him by saying I had read too many Zane Grey novels. Besides, they all know worse things than that happens in prisons. I had seriously considered killing them. ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,’ Dad used to say. I just helped the process along.”

  “Would you mind leaving the room for just a minute?” I asked Strang.

  “That's okay. I know what you're going to ask. Was Violet my mother?”

  I nodded assent. For the first time Karl looked very grave. He took another cigarette and stared long and hard at Strang, then at me. I was more than ready to withdraw the question when he began to speak.

  “I promised Violet never to tell even after she died. Remember when you asked me in New Orleans when we were drunk? At least I was. I didn't say a thing because she was still alive.” Now he gave a weird smile that reminded me of Corve's stories about their youth. Karl stood, closed his eyes, swaying his head back and forth, “O dearest Violet, O beautiful Violet, wherever you are in the spirit world, but probably right here, I feel your soul right in this room. Forgive me now for breaking my vow to you. Yes, Violet was your mother.” Now he opened his eyes with a full smile. “When she was fourteen she worked over at this camp on the other side of Kingston Lake where university students come in the summer to study the flora and fauna of the area. She worked in the kitchen and was real proud to have a job. I was only five or six at the time. She fell in love with this college guy. I found out much later that it went on all summer. So he left and she was pregnant. Mother and dad up and moved us all away down to Moran so mother could pretend it was her baby so as not to spoil Violet's life just because she fell in love with someone. I'm the only one now who knows the guy's name because I found Violet's diary in her bed springs before I went off to war. Her secret interest in the mail used to drive me crazy with anger because she never got an answer to the few letters she sent. In the early fifties I tracked the guy down to East Lansing where he was a professor of botany or horticulture, something like that. I was drinking a lot at the time. I sat across the street from the guy's house. In fact, I held a tire-iron in my hand as he walked his kid down the sidewalk. Something held me back, probably the kid. Years later, when I visited Violet out west I confessed this and she made me promise on the Bible that I would never harm this man. Not ten years ago, I passed again through East Lansing intent on killing him because number one, I don't believe in the Bible, and number two, Violet was in Montana and would never hear of the murder. But he was dead already, so I sold the rifle and scope and got drunk. She certainly was a good mother to you Corve, a fine mother. I wish you had got to be her son, but people did such things back in those days.”

  “You have to let me ask this. My dad taught botany. Who was the man? He had to be a friend of our family.”

  “Nothing doing. I broke one promise and I couldn't break another. Besides he's dead.” Karl was impassive.

  Out in the parking lot, after the farewells, there was the unendurable sensation that I had just swallowed a chunk of ice. Of course there were no sidewalks where we lived in Bircham Woods in East Lansing. I knew my father had been to that camp as a student because he tried to get me to go, but I was interested in James Joyce not plants and trees. I quickly computed that the timing was right, then dismissed it all as rather breathtaking nonsense. Who knows the actual lives of our parents? I sorted through the memories of my fathe
r's colleagues wondering who could have been Violet's lover and Strang's father. In the somewhat hysterical aftermath of the funeral, my mother had assured me that she was the only woman my father ever “knew” in the Biblical sense.

  Strang's arm was around my shoulder when I returned to Earth. I was evidently mumbling and staring at all the storm-ripped maple leaves pasted against the cement at my feet. “Is something wrong?” he asked. We drove home in almost total silence and now I ‘m sitting here before the fire, wondering how close this story has come to me. I see Karl standing there, impassive as a pre-Columbian, or Oriental figurine, neither of which are known for the answers they offer.

  CHAPTER XVI

  * * *

  I awoke at noon to a cold, blustery day, wrapped in fetal delight with every blanket in the cabin piled on me. I had just had one of those undeservedly pleasant dreams our brains give us to keep us from ending it all. I decided not to go out to Strang's since I was already five hours late. There was an ugly knock at the door and I trotted through the frigid cabin, wondering why pioneers had stuck it out in a place where good tomatoes couldn't be grown. It was only the landlord asking if my propane heater was working. Frankly, in two months in the cabin I hadn't noticed the contraption. He lit it, departed, and soon the cabin was toasty. I had eaten less the day before than any day since a severe bout of flu years back. I set about making a “putanesca” sauce for pasta, a kind of Italian version of soul food that lifts the spirits of weary streetwalkers, not an inaccurate metaphor for journalism: the sauce includes sausage, wine, capers, anchovies, tomato paste, a liberal sprinkling of hot pepper flakes. When it was done and the pasta was nearly cooked, I opened my last bottle of Barbaresco. How can I convince anyone of the splendor of this breakfast when I ate it alone and shot back to bed?

  My second sleep was interrupted at midafternoon by Eulia, who was giddy and full of frippish excitement. She brought a bottle of cheapish champagne, the only available in the area, stuck in a sack of ice. She pushed me back to the bed and joined me with two glasses. The joggled bottle fired a Freudian squirt against the far wall. There's nothing quite like twelve hours of sleep to get you ready for love. It lacked the blurred, fumbling of the post-multi-cocktail-dinner-drinks-nightcaps-half-mast screwing stupidity. The occasion was the new that she had been accepted into the dance troupe in Costa Rica. Later on I would question a certain artificiality in her whole performance that afternoon, a quality of design. For the time being, I was a carb-loaded marathoner, at least for my age. The first one was accomplished with me in my robe, and Eulia bent over a chair with her jeans around her knees in front of the door mirror. This was her idea, and after our eyes met in the mirror I was sent reeling backwards like a squid in the general direction of the bed. There's no question that dancers are different. An hour later, when she left me steaming there like freshly butchered beef, I was able to sleep again.

  Quite naturally I was trying to avoid the loss of coherence brought on by the day before. Now, I've never been tempted to write a detective or mystery story but I've read hundreds of them. I don't care for the English style where, in a state of bedtime drowsiness, I never get to figure things out. I prefer the riper colors of evil, sex, utter mayhem; I want the characters to remind me of those I've known or seen. No one can have read John D. MacDonald and not cast a colder eye on the citizens of Florida. But the genre was limited and, finally, tended to attach itself to an excitement with a rather low metaphysical lid. Strang's story was immersed in love, work, and death; its lack of decor was made up for by the tired, aforementioned saws of wholeness, harmony, and even, at least for me, a modicum of radiance. In short, the mystery of personality, of life itself.

  My wariness began with Eulia's behavior, that of a not quite well-trained actress, the kind that can talk about her problems with intensity but can't deliver a convincing, “Hello. How arc you?” Throughout the late afternoon and evening I tried to lucidly identify all of the elements of the situation. Eulia was leaving in two days to be replaced, according to her, by Evelyn, Marshall's daughter and Strang's third wife, who had taken a month's leave. Allegria was coming back, and Emmeline was in Manistiquc. There was me, at least temporarily. It's a cliché that truly sick people don't appreciate visitors to the extent that visitors think they do, that a sick dog seeks the solitude of his hiding place under the porch, or in the clump of burdocks behind the barn. Strang in his right mind couldn't really think he'd be ready to join a new crew in New Guinea this winter. How, if, and when, was he in what one might think of as his “right” mind? Where was the still and stable point, or could there be one for any of us? He was in an obvious cul-de-sac with friendly attendants massing at the entrance, but also blocking the way. I was there taking it all down, which was of questionable help in the situation, though it passed for the idea of work he so much admired. There was, however, nothing in his life that bespoke the sedentary victim. What was to become of him when the story, unlike a river, ended with the present? What is he thinking about tonight in the cabin now that he knows his beloved, dead sister is his mother?

  All of these considerations, understandably, brought up the question of whether I had reached any conclusions. That's my job, I thought; it's premature to try to foreshorten all of the perimeters of what could happen. I then lapsed into the vertigo of Karl outside a house in East Lansing years ago. It wasn't the thousand-to-one shot that my own father had been involved—I had tried to comfortably dismiss this possibility. It was the utter proximity, the onset of the chill when life loses its flippant anonymity and all faces become recognizable; that life, which passes us by so casually, could try to draw us into its current.

  CHAPTER XVII

  * * *

  It was the coldest morning yet; my fingernails made a bad implement so I used a spatula from my cabin to scrape the frost from the windshield. As a friend in college once said, “everything was new, like a warm rain after a movie.” It wasn't surprising to me when Strang was evasive about continuing his story; or not so much evasive, as lacking any current specific interest in his past. Years back I had interviewed a prominent French politician who spoke with delight and animation of his youth in Castelnaudry, but treated his central five-year role in Indochina as a slice of torpor, and dismissed his heroism during the Algerian crisis with a series of filthy quips.

  Sitting before the fire with Strang, I waited patiently for the strong coffee to take effect. Perhaps the knowledge that Violet was truly his mother had released the tension essential to his telling the story. Meanwhile, he told me about M. Freyssinet, a Frenchman who was, of all things, the “father of prestressed concrete,” who consequently made possible such items as bridges, air terminals, parking ramps; the sort of things I think of, being literary, as urban eyepoppers and neo-blight. But if nothing else, this story had taught me that such attitudinizing was of no particular value other than as fodder for witticisms. Then he took a peculiar turn into a Tolstoy version of Christian behavior: what Karl had done to the three young men was horribly wrong, and his own feelings about vengeance in Central America and for blacks and Indians was wrong headed, keeping as it did, the wheel of Kharma spinning out its usual freight of human guts. Without knowing it, he presented a fresh but classic defense of nonviolence.

  “There, now I feel better.”

  “Why? Vengeance is usually thought of as satisfying while forgiveness is an intellectual effort.”

  * * *

  I feel better because I changed my mind. It always works that way. It removes a clot in your head and shoots in a little oxygen. When you didn't show up yesterday, not that I blame you, I was overcome by the idea of how much illness and injury limits freedom. This was propelled by a curious insomnia the night before, where all my thoughts illustrated themselves by vividly colored pictures. I'm sure this happened because the truth of Violet, long vaguely suspected, was finally revealed. Freedom was that day fishing at the spring with Edith. I could see her tummy as if it were just an inch away. And the op
posite of freedom was digging a well-pit with pneumonia after Edith left. I would lay my forehead against the cool striations of earth down in the hole and wonder why all my strength had left me. I could barely pull myself out by the rope I used.

  It was the same in the hospital in Miami, you know, when they were curing me of that severe case of amoebic dysentery, and a half dozen other parasites and elements the flesh is heir to in the tropics. The trouble was, I couldn't accommodate my emotions to hospital life because my body was too weak to organize a feeling of hope. Then one day Marshall, who was in mid-career in making his company one of the best, showed up, saying he was a friend of one of the owners of the British firm. This friend had asked as a courtesy that Marshall look in on me. Two of his aides stood in the doorway waiting, but Marshall and I hit it off for some reason. He gave me his card and told me to call the moment I was ready for work. “It's time for you to change continents,” he said. So I had a glimmer of hope despite the deenergizing character of my treatments. A day or so later several cartons of brand new books arrived with his compliments. I began to get better faster. Then a series of specs were sent over of different projects up for bidding in Mexico, Central America, and South America. I could see what he wanted was the opinion of a working foreman, rather than the readily available ideas of engineers. The upshot was that Marshall put me on the payroll for a full month before I got out of the hospital, then moved me over to an apartment in Coconut Grove for my convalescence. I drove the yachtsmen down at the marina there a bit crazy trying to figure out the specifics of why one sailboat was better and faster than another. Several of them took me out on rides, and I became much in demand for my ability to repair diesel engines, especially for free.