by Jim Harrison
B.D. had a head-and-chest cold, an infirmity he only experienced every five years or so and which he blamed on his kidney stone exhaustion. He slept most of the day and a half it took to reach Thunder Bay, waking now and then to study the passing Lake Superior Provincial Park south of Wawa and the Pukaskwa National Park farther north along the lake. There were an unimaginable number of creeks descending from the deep green forested hills down to Lake Superior which tingled his skin despite the irritation of coughing and blowing his nose. He felt much better the second morning when they had stopped at a bar and restaurant and with several of the crew had drunk his meal in the form of three double whiskeys with beer chasers, a surefire cold remedy. Two of the Lakota crew members not realizing that B.D. was local to the other side of Lake Superior warned him that they were in “enemy territory,” the land of the Ojibway, the dreaded Anishinabe who had driven the Sioux out of the northern Midwest.
B.D. had never been more than vaguely aware of rock and roll and was ill-prepared for the spectacle that would meet him in Thunder Bay. He knew it mostly as the music heard in bars favored by young people in Escanaba and Marquette but then he had never owned a record player in its varied forms and had certainly never fed a jukebox with any of his sparse beer money. He couldn’t recall understanding a single lyric of this music except “You can’t always get what you want” which he viewed as the dominant fact of life. He was back asleep from his liquid lunch when the tour bus pulled into the arena parking lot. He awakened to an oceanic roar and screech that reminded him of a ninety-knot storm on Lake Superior hitting the village of Grand Marais. In the bright afternoon light out of the window thousands of young people, mostly girls, were jumping straight up and down in the manner of Berry and screaming, “Thunderskins, Thunderskins, Thunderskins!” Within minutes of leaving the bus it occurred to him that he should have taken up a musical instrument, say a guitar, when he was young and learned how to sing. The Director had put a small laminated card around his neck reading “Backstage Crew” and the frantic girls stared at him like kids looking at a gorgeous ice cream cone on a hot day. He felt a little embarrassed, actually unpleasant at this sense of power, quite uncomfortable over the way he was encircled by the most attractive females looking at him imploringly. He had always had more than a touch of claustrophobia and recalled his panic at nineteen when he had been caught up in a big Labor Day parade in Chicago and had run for it a few blocks down to Lake Michigan where he could breathe freely. When looking at the Tribune the next day he had figured out that there were many more people involved in the parade than lived in the entirety of the Upper Peninsula. Now it occurred to him that one girl was enough but thousands screaming like banshees made you crave a thicket.
“Hey, B.D., they just want a fucking backstage pass,” one of the Lakota crew yelled at him, noting his puzzlement.
B.D. made himself busy helping the crew unload the sound equipment, then when he found he was getting in the way drifted off toward the waterfront to get back in touch with Lake Superior which would likely calm his rattled brain. He was pleased to find Charles Eats Horses down near a pier sitting on a park bench.
“This water reminds me of the sea of grass in the Sand Hills of Nebraska south of Pine Ridge.”
“If I had a good boat I could head straight south to the Keweenaw Peninsula and be fairly close to home but then I don’t have a good boat and storms come up real sudden.”
Eats Horses explained to him that Berry would be staying in a nice hotel with the Director who had to watch the rock stars carefully. One of them was her son and he was crazy as a weasel in heat. B.D. felt mildly jealous about Berry but since he had grown up without a mother himself he figured Berry needed the company of a female. Looking out over the water toward his homeland he felt his homesickness become as palpable as a lump of coal in his throat.
Part II
Dawn in Thunder Bay. The two A.M. announced departure of the tour bus was delayed by a snowstorm but by dawn the wind had shifted to the south and the snow turned into an eerie thunderstorm so that Brown Dog peeking out the bus window was startled by a lightning strike glowing off white drifts in the parking lot. He had a somewhat less than terminal hangover and could easily see the dangers of life without the immediate responsibility of looking after Berry. It was quite literally a “blast from the past” what with B.D. not having had a hangover in his five months in Canada, certainly the longest period since age fourteen when he and David Four Feet had swiped a case of Mogen David wine from a truck being unloaded in an alley behind a supermarket in Escanaba. The aftermath had been a prolonged puke-a-thon in the secret hut they had built beside a creek outside of town.
B.D. lay there in his bus compartment watching the rain that had begun to lift so that he could see far out into Lake Superior to the water beyond the shelf ice. He diverted himself from the memory of last night’s mud bath by pondering the soul of water. He had meant for a couple of years to enter a public library and look up “water” in an encyclopedia but doubted that any information would include the mysteries of water that he so highly valued. Life could kick you in the ass brutally hard and a day spent fishing a creek or a river and you forgot the kick. Now, however, with no fishing in sight he could vividly remember the wonderful whitefish sandwich in the bar, and then meeting the two girls in their late teens who had spotted his “Backstage Crew” badge. The concert was sold out and they had no tickets. He was sitting there with a Lakota nicknamed Turnip who thought the girls “skaggy” but B.D.’s mouth was watering though one of the girls was a tad chubby and one very thin. B.D. thought that if you put the two together the weight issue averaged out. Playing the big shot he got them in a side door of the concert which was far too loud for him to endure and the flashing lights were grotesque. Berry was up on stage jumping straight up and down batting at a tambourine and looking very happy. The girls jotted down their address and phone number and said they’d see B.D. at their apartment after the concert. He left feeling smug about his worldliness. Back at the bar after having more drinks and playing pool with Turnip, who looked a bit like a turnip, he saw that the streets were filling up with the concertgoers so it was time to make a move. Unfortunately after walking around in the snowstorm and stopping at another tavern B.D. gave the slip of paper to a bartender who said there was no Violet Street in Thunder Bay and what’s more the phone number only had six digits. Turnip thought this very funny while B.D. was morose.
“I bet they’re backstage with the stars. We could check it out. Those guys get more ass than a public toilet seat,” Turnip said.
B.D. waded through the snow to his lonely bed with the honest thought that women in general were as devious as he was.
When they reached Winnipeg early the next afternoon he was having an upsetting discussion with the Director about Berry and couldn’t quite separate the conference from a wild series of dreams he had just had during a nap. He had confused the roar of the bus engine with that of a female bear he used to feed his extra fish when he was reroofing a deer cabin. He had cut twenty-two cords of hardwood to get through the winter and when April came and the bear emerged from hibernation she was right back there near the kitchen window howling for food. Tim, a commercial fisherman, had given him a twenty-pound lake trout no one had wanted so he cut off a three-pound slab for dinner and tossed the rest to the bear who ate it in a trice then took a long nap in the patch of sunlight out by the pump house. One night when he heard a wolf howling down in the river delta the bear had roared back. She was simply the most pissed-off bear he had ever come across so he named her Gretchen.
“What are you going to do when Berry hits puberty in the next year or two?” the Director asked.
“The court appointed me to look after her,” he answered irrelevantly. He was still caught up in the dream where he was down on the edge of the forest on the Kingston Plains and he and Berry were chasing two coyote pups who dove down into their dens under a white pine stump and Berry suddenly became as little a
s the pups and followed them which was impossible.
“What are you going to do when she reaches puberty?” the Director persisted. “I talked to your uncle Delmore on my cell and he’s obviously senile. He said he contacted Guam on his ham radio. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I talked to your friend the social worker Gretchen. She lives twenty miles away in Escanaba and only sees you two on weekends if then.”
“Berry would have died at the school. It’s all cement around there.” B.D. was becoming irritated with the Director and wished he knew how to retreat to his dream state where when Berry came back out of the coyote den they had driven to his favorite cabin and fried up a skillet of venison.
“What I’m saying is that you got your head up your ass. Time moves on. Berry is going to be nicely shaped. What are you going to do when boys and men come after her for sex?”
“Kick their asses real good.” B.D. felt a surge of anger that accompanied the beginning of a headache. The Director reminded him of an interrogation with the school principal he and David Four Feet had undergone in the seventh grade when they had thrown chunks of foul-smelling Limburger cheese into the fan attached to the oil furnace in the school basement. All of the girls in the school had run screeching into the street while the boys had merely walked out to show that they were manly enough to handle a truly bad smell.
“Well, I have a friend in Rapid City who runs a tribal program for kids with fetal alcohol syndrome and when we get there she’s going to look at Berry.”
They were both diverted by the bus pulling into the arena parking lot in Winnipeg. There were even more hysterical fans than there had been in Thunder Bay. It was a mystery to B.D. because this horde of fans must know that the stars were arriving by plane. It reminded him from way back when, of a geek kid in the eighth grade who claimed that his cousin in California had seen the Disney star Annette Funicello in the nude. Boys would gather around the geek to hear the story over and over. This was about as close as anyone in Escanaba was ever going to get to the exciting life of show business. B.D. figured that to these thousands of fans the Thunderskins bus without the stars was better than nothing.
In truth he found the noise of the fans repellent. The only loud sound he liked was a storm on Lake Superior when monster waves would come crashing over the pier in Grand Marais or Marquette. He also liked the sounds of crickets and birds, and a hard rain in the forest in the summer with the wind blowing through billions of leaves.
The Director stood up to leave and B.D. shook her hand hoping that she would believe his heart was in the right place in regard to Berry. She gave him a hug and he held her as tightly as possible. A spontaneous hug from a woman always filled him with the immediate promise of life. Sure enough his pecker began to rise and she pushed him away laughing.
“I’m fifty-nine and it’s been quite a while since anyone got a hard-on over me.”
“My friendship is there for the taking.” B.D. wanted to say something proper far from the usual “Let’s fuck.” In truth she was more than ample and most would think her dumpy but he craved to get at her big smooth butt. She escaped all atwitter and he turned to see female fans staring in the window and he thought if the window would only open he could pop it in that brunette’s chops making sure to avoid her big droopy nose ring.
The ride through western Manitoba into eastern Saskatchewan had increased his homesickness to a quiet frenzy. Creeks, rivers, and lakes were everywhere in the forested landscapes. To a lifelong fisherman even a large mud puddle presents a remote possibility and the water he saw was overwhelming. Once when the bus slowed for a logging truck hauling pulp to make paper he saw an American redstart in a white pine, a wildly colored bird that he often saw near his favorite stretch of the Middle Branch of the Escanaba near Gwinn and seeing the bird enabled him to smell the river and the forest in that area which tingled his skin.
In Winnipeg the Director checked B.D. and Berry into a room that adjoined her own in a fancy hotel which added a different kind of tingle as B.D. assumed that at some point he might be able to pull off a quick one with the Director. He had hoped to take Berry to the zoo but by the time they got settled in and had a room service bite it was midafternoon and Berry and the Director had to go to a rehearsal. This was the last stop on the Thunderskins’ tour and they wanted to go out in a firestorm at the huge sold-out arena. Berry beat on her tambourine every waking hour but B.D. found it oddly pleasant since she did it so well which made him wonder about the intricacy of the rhythms she heard in her limited brain. Once in high school he had driven with a couple of pureblood friends way up to a powwow in Baraga and was amazed at how good it felt to dance for hours and hours, a state of being carried away that reminded him of the pleasure of being half-drunk rather than fully drunk.
While the Director and Berry were getting ready two of the stars dropped by but as with his other brief encounters their eyes passed over him as if he didn’t exist. B.D. figured this was what happened when you were around far too many people like when he had gone to Chicago at nineteen or more recently in Toronto. The only way people got along was by largely ignoring each other, a far cry from the Upper Peninsula where if you avoided the downtowns of Escanaba and Marquette you were never surrounded by people and on the rare occasion he saw another human in the backcountry he always hid until they passed from sight.
At present he was sick to death of people and decided to stay as far as possible from the music folks. He set off on a long walk mostly enjoying the vast railroad yards because there were no high buildings around to block out the late-afternoon sun though there was the troubling question of who could keep track of so many trains? He was somewhat disappointed that the fabled Red River wasn’t red and when headed back to the hotel he saw in the distance Charles Eats Horses enter a building he followed. It turned out to be an art museum with a large display of Inuit work. He was pleased with himself that he remembered that the Inuits lived up in the Arctic and were what most people thought were Eskimos. He noticed that when Eats Horses passed an attendant several rooms ahead she averted her eyes. She was, however, friendly to him and he took her short, round figure to be Inuit.
“Were you born in an igloo?” he asked.
“Were you born in a tepee?” she joked. Her smile was so glowing he felt the usual tremor. He wanted to tell her something interesting but she turned away to explain some whalebone and walrus-tusk carvings to some elegant old ladies. The art was so striking to B.D. that he felt hollow in his head and chest and he did not hear Eats Horses walk up behind him.
“I just knew you were an art lover,” Eats Horses said, half seriously.
“I heard it’s all in the wrist,” B.D. answered, a little embarrassed at the strength of his emotions.
Eats Horses put a heavy hand on B.D.’s shoulder. “I want you to listen carefully about Berry. I know kids like her and they don’t turn out well.”
“Yes, sir. All I know is that she has to walk in the woods every day.” He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly that he felt a little dizzy and when he opened them to regain his balance Eats Horses was gone. B.D. doubted that Eats Horses was the ex-cop and house painter he said he was. Once over near Iron Mountain back near a beaver dam in the woods B.D. had run into this Crane Clan Midewiwin guy that he had seen years before at the Baraga powwow. It was generally thought that this man flew around at night and ate whole raw fish. The man was pleasant enough but when he reached under a submerged stump and caught a brook trout with a single hand B.D. had left the area.
On the walk back to the hotel he rejected the idea of the five double whiskeys he felt a need for and instead stopped at a diner for a fried T-bone. The Director had passed on a gift envelope from Dr. Krider with five hundred bucks in twenties which B.D. figured was the third-highest amount of money he had ever possessed. If you have five hundred bucks a ten-dollar fried T-bone seems less of a luxury. The meat was only fair but the potatoes were pretty good with ketchup. The waitress was a sullen, bony young woman
who never met his eyes. It seemed to him that young women were getting more sullen every year for undisclosed reasons, all the more cause to keep the Director in mind as a possible target if Berry went to sleep. Grandpa had the theory that you should never go after a female with a bad father because they’re always pissed off. However mediocre the meal was B.D. figured it was better than the catered backstage buffet before the concert which, though it was free, featured food he didn’t recognize. Once Gretchen had served him a tofu burger that tasted like the algae that formed pond scum. Gretchen had mentioned dozens of times how awful her father was and also that an older cousin had tinkered with her pussy when she was eleven. There seemed to be no end to the problems that could arise in life. When he was eleven there was a neighbor girl who would show you her butt for a nickel but if you tried to touch it she’d smack the shit out of you. He’d heard that now she was a school principal up in Houghton.
Back in the hotel room he recognized that the quivery feeling was due to the idea that if things went well he would be back in the United States of America, more exactly North Dakota, in less than eighteen hours. He opened the mini-bar where he’d seen the Director take out cans of orange juice for herself and Berry. This was the first minibar of his life and he was amazed at the rack of top-shelf shooters on display. He went “Eeny meeny miney moe” and took out a small bottle of Mexican tequila which went down easy as pie. He snooped in the Director’s room and saw a rather large pair of undies she had washed out and hung up to dry on a towel rack. He felt a twinge of lust which he knew couldn’t be resolved. He sat down with the clicker and shooters of Johnnie Walker and Absolut vodka noting a sign on the television that first-run and adult movies were available at twelve dollars a crack which seemed outrageously expensive but then when would he ever stay in a fancy hotel again? Even the glasses were glass rather than cellophane-wrapped plastic. He was never allowed to touch the clicker for Uncle Delmore’s satellite television so he was very wary about its operation and it took some time to get it working. It was easy to reject Teenage Sluts on the Loose in Hollywood as porn made him feel silly and he had never regarded sex as a spectator sport. You simply had to be there with the raw meat on the floor as they used to say. The slightest peek up Gretchen’s summer skirt would set him churning but neither film nor the Playmate of the Month did the job. Unfortunately he selected a film called Pan’s Labyrinth because of the unknowable mystery of the title. It took a total of ten shooters to get through the film and he was frequently either frightened or in tears. He assumed that the film was a true story and he thought of the little girl as Berry and he was the satyr trying to help her get through life. By the time the film ended he was drunk with a tear-wet face. If this could happen in the world it was no wonder that he craved to live in a cabin back in the woods. He had done poorly in world history in high school but was aware of the twentieth century as a worldwide charnel house. His teacher who was a Democrat from the working-class east side of Escanaba had told the students that there were at least ten million Indians when we got off the boat and only three hundred thousand left by 1900. Now in the hotel room, however, the fact that this evil Spaniard had murdered the little girl, the Berry equivalent, sent a sob through his system and he finished his last shooter, arranged the bottles in a circle, and fell asleep in his chair.