by Jim Harrison
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 boloney 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 good-byes 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 hose 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 A.M. 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 drunken rage and then after a few hours of this would fall asleep and on waking act fit as a fiddle.
The emergency room was fairly crowded and B.D. was out of luck because he didn’t have a Canadian health card with a photo ID. He also made a mistake by acting manly despite the pain which made his eyes roll back in his head. This faux manliness was typical of some men in the Great North who pull their own bad teeth with the aid of whiskey and grip-lock pliers. He was slumped in a chair in a far corner pondering his lack of options when a diminutive young woman in a gray dress and white hat stooped beside him. She had been near the front desk and had overheard his ID problem and asked him if he knew a private doctor. He said no but then remembered his Red Underground contact Dr. Krider who was a skin doctor. He had written Dr. Krider’s number on the back side of a photo he had begged off Gretchen, hoping for a nude though he knew it was unlikely. Instead he got a photo of Gretchen on the beach in a two-piece blue bathing suit, a towel wrapped partly around her hips, but clearly showing her slightly protuberant belly button. This photo and his Michigan driver’s license and an old brass paper clip to hold cash were the sole contents of his pockets except for a lucky Petoskey stone with its pattern of ancient invertebrates. Unlike most of the rest of us except the homeless, B.D. had n
o Social Security card, draft registration card, credit or insurance cards.
Despite her miniature size Nora, his immediate savior, drove a large Plymouth station wagon, sitting on a stack of cushions to see out the windshield. B.D. slumped on the seat beside her, tilting sideways until his head rested against her thigh. Despite the near delirium of his pain he was always one to take advantage of any possible physical contact with a woman. He looked up at the passing streetlights determining that Nora’s scent was wild violets. Another surge of pain prevented him from trying to turn over so he could be facedown on her lap, since his teens a favorite position.
When Nora pulled to a stop at Dr. Krider’s home an immense man appeared and carried B.D. inside the house, impressive B.D. thought since he weighed one-ninety. He also noted that he was in the posh neighborhood of his snow shoveling. The huge man lowered him to a sofa at which point B.D. could see that he was an Indian with a pockmarked face and a bushy ponytail. Dr. Krider poked and probed B.D.’s lower stomach and bladder, determined that he had a sizable kidney stone, and administered a shot of painkilling Demerol. Nora had retrieved a warm washcloth and had bathed B.D.’s face and now he had it buried in her neck, a vantage point from which he could see down under her blouse to a single peach-shaped breast. Krider had pushed up his shirt and pulled down his trousers and as the Demerol slowly took effect B.D. was embarrassed that he was wearing wildly colored Hawaiian underpants which Gretchen had sent him for Christmas as a joke. He was also chagrined that the peek at Nora’s titty had given him a boner.
“I can’t believe that a man passing a kidney stone is tumescent,” Dr. Krider chuckled, “but then I’ve seen geezers in hospitals minutes from death still trying to pat a nurse’s ass.”
Nora blushed and snapped B.D.’s dick with a forefinger, wilting it. This was a well-known nurse’s trick to control excitable patients.
“Nora! That was unkind,” Dr. Krider said. “Surely a penis isn’t a threatening object to you?”
“Bitch!” said Charles Eats Horses, the big Indian who was a Lakota.
“You could make it up to me later,” B.D. squeaked in his drug trance as Nora rushed from the room in tears.
B.D. dozed for a few minutes then lapsed back into pain. The stone was making its determined way down his urethra, propelled by satanic forces. He flapped his hands wildly in the air as does a dying grouse its wings. He crooned a song of pain which resembled Berry’s verbless melodies. In short, he flopped and writhed. Dr. Krider gave him another quick shot and Charles Eats Horses put on a CD of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Charles had heard his oldest sister die giving birth in a remote shack on the Rosebud Reservation and the savagery of B.D.’s personal sound track was close to home. B.D. himself was sure that he was giving birth to an unadorned concrete block and if a river had been available he would have gladly rolled into it in a fatal winter swim.
Finally the stone emerged, rough-hewn and the size of a smallish marble.
“I’ll have this set in a ring for you,” Nora joked washing away a splotch of blood.
“Will I ever love again?” B.D. croaked.
“It might be a few days,” Krider said, yawning.
B.D. fell asleep wonderfully without pain for the first time in half a dozen hours. Dr. Krider and Charles went back to bed and Nora settled in at the far end of B.D.’s sofa with an afghan throw after covering him with a duvet. To be sure this man’s penis was decidedly more ample than her boyfriend’s. He wrote book reviews and everything else in the catchall category for the Toronto Globe and Mail and she felt lucky indeed that he was a compulsive oralist who also sang in an Episcopalian choir. Only last week he had started singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” while going down on her. A former boyfriend with an XXL wanger had caused her discomfort and she had dropped him like a spoon when the smoke alarm goes off. As her eyes closed she tried to erase the vision of the half dozen silly-looking penises of her past in favor of a cinnamon sticky bun at the airport. The mind can become so tiresome when it comes to sex and the man at the far end of the capacious sofa mystified her until she remembered the louts up on Manitoulin Island when at thirteen she had gone to the cabin of a friend’s parents. She and her friend had been sunbathing on the cabin’s deck and a mixed-blood had brought a cord of wood in a battered pickup and when stacking the wood had said, “How about a blow job, cuties?” They were shocked but then laughed when her girlfriend replied “Beat it, jerk-off.” The man had swarthy good looks but at the time she couldn’t imagine herself ever following through on such a request.
B.D. slept for an hour or so waking at the first peek of dawn through an east window when he felt the toes of his right foot touch what was obviously smooth skin toward Nora’s end of the sofa. He was instantly alert enough to be cautious, squinting in the dim light and noting her soft feminine snore and answering with his fake snore to show her if she awoke that anything was an accident of sleep. The drugs had worn off and his hardening dick was painful but then one must be brave. The hurt reminded him of his early teens when he and his friend David Four Feet who was crippled and walked like a crab would have off-the-cuff masturbation contests and on the way to school would mysteriously yell, “Four times,” “Five times,” or less. B.D.’s record was seven and it had caused the kind of pain similar to the passing of the kidney stone.
Now he moved his toes lower until he encountered the magic area and it felt like his big toe was touching a mouse under a thin handkerchief. He snored louder in a proclamation of innocence. Dare he wiggle his toes to offer her pleasure? he wondered. She stopped snoring and pushed her vulva against his talented toes. From the other room a clock alarm rang. She stopped moving but he didn’t, his destination now dampish. They heard Dr. Krider’s padding feet in the hallway and she moved well back into her corner of the sofa. His friend David Four Feet used to say, “Drat it, foiled again,” when one of their pranks went awry. B.D. never gave time much thought but it occurred to him that if Krider’s clock had delayed itself ten minutes she could have been slowly spinning on his weenie like a second hand. Time is a bitch, he thought, his right toes feeling absurdly lonely. He continued to fake sleep until he dropped off listening to Nora and Dr. Krider talk. She said something about visiting Berry to tell her that her daddy was okay.
When he woke again there was only Eats Horses offering a breakfast tray of a bowl of oatmeal pleasingly piled with sausage links to counter the banality of oats. B.D. was still morose about his lost opportunity with Nora and the obvious healing power of a good fuck. Now that the white people were gone Eats Horses dispensed with the Indianness of his speech, the peculiar way our characters offer people what they expect.
“We have to get out of Dodge pronto,” Eats Horses said.
“Why?” B.D.’s first thought was, Why leave an area with such fine pork sausage?
“We’re both illegal and Dr. Krider is too valuable to the movement. He could be busted for harboring illegals. We have to leave Canada.”
“I can’t figure out how,” B.D. said. “Trout season starts in two weeks and here I am high and dry.” He had finished the sausage and now the oatmeal looked real ugly.
“Fuck your trout season. First you trade in illegal shipwreck artifacts, then you try to sell a frozen body, then you violently raid an archaeological site. You become a phony Chip activist and befriend a convict named Lone Marten. You steal a bearskin from a fancy home in L.A. You smuggle your stepchild out of Michigan in defiance of state laws. A criminal like yourself is no help to us.”
“How do you know all this shit?” B.D. was appalled.
“Until a year ago I was a cop in Rapid City and when you got here I had a buddy on the force check your rap sheet. You’re poison. That’s why we never got in touch with you. I quit being a cop and went into the house-painting business with my cousin but we were going to paint a shed and got caught with seven gallons of red paint and Homeland Security entered the picture. For years the Lakota have been threatening to give those
presidents on Mount Rushmore a dose of blood-red paint. We’d bought ours in Denver to escape the hassle. The paint store in Denver must have tipped the cops off. Anyway I was accused of plotting a terrorist act but after a month in jail the ACLU bailed me out. I made my way here but now I have to leave. Your uncle Delmore made a contribution to the movement so the leadership instructed me to take you and your stepdaughter along.”
“Were you, in fact, going to paint a shed?” B.D. was suddenly thinking of Delmore watching the Perry Mason reruns and thus he asked a Perry-type question.
“None of your business,” Eats Horses said.
“How come you’re called Eats Horses?”
“Many years ago in the time of my grandparents the rez got cheated out of its government-allotment food and people were dying of starvation so some started eating their horses.”
“Why go back if we’re only going to get arrested?” B.D. was horrified at the idea of jail having been there a number of times. He’d also heard that you could no longer take Tabasco with you to jail so how could he eat jail food?
“I have a new identity and I think Krider is arranging one for you. I’m going to be security and a bouncer at a strip club in Lincoln, Nebraska. I got a poet friend Trevino Brings Plenty who says, ‘Alive in America is all we are.’”
Eats Horses lapsed into a melancholy silence and B.D. joined him. They were clearly homesick men on the run.
“When I was a kid I told my grandpa who raised me that I wanted to be a wild Indian when I grow up and he said, ‘If you do keep it under your hat.’ I guess I’m only about half anyway.”
“I’m three-quarters and that doesn’t make it easier. If my brain was white my ass would only be in a different kind of sling. A white friend got his house foreclosed and I said, ‘At least I don’t have a house.’” Charles Eats Horses laughed hard so B.D. joined him while thinking of the five-hundred-buck trailer he had lived in with Berry before escaping to Canada.