by Jim Harrison
He awoke at four A.M. to pee and in the bleary toilet mirror he saw that there was a note pinned to his chest. It was from the Director and only said, “Shame on you.” Soon after daylight Berry and the Director were having room service in the other room when he came fully awake and examined his mind for vital signs. Berry came in and kissed his forehead and headed into the bathroom with her armload of rubber snakes which she always played with in the tub. On this morning the two-headed cobra didn’t look good to B.D.
“Are you up for it, Lone Ranger?” the Director asked standing in the doorway of her room.
“Come to think of it I am,” said B.D. squirming slowly out of the easy chair. During even minor league hangovers sudden movements cause sudden pain, the physical equivalent of a blowing fuse.
They had to arrange themselves near a dresser to keep an eye out the nearly closed door of Berry’s bathroom. The Director’s butt was large indeed but as marvelously smooth as B.D. had hoped for. In his not limited experience Indian women had the smoothest butts though this was a Lakota, the ancient enemy of B.D.’s half-Chippewa blood. Let there be peace in the valley he thought. The only drawback was the mirror over the dresser. He certainly didn’t want to see himself what with being the least narcissistic of all modern males. The Director let out a few muffled yelps and he hissed, “Sssh” and then it was over and a sharp pain descended into his noggin from the heavens.
He pulled up his trousers and quickly moved to the room service table for some lukewarm coffee, cold sausage, and sodden toast.
“It’s so like a man to go from fucking to eating in a split second,” the Director giggled, rearranging her clothes.
“What was I supposed to do?” B.D. said with a full mouth.
“You’re supposed to say ‘Thank-you ma’am’ and give me a heartfelt kiss.”
B.D. swallowed a mouthful of food, choked a little, and gave her a passionate heartfelt kiss, dipping her as one does a woman on a dance floor. Lucky for her he was strong.
Shortly after noon the tour bus followed by the equipment semi turned off on a gravel road south of Boissevain. The moves were well planned and the crew unloaded two big ceremonial drums and hoisted them onto the long luggage rack on top of the tour bus. The Director took the tambourine away from Berry and B.D., Berry, and Eats Horses went up the ladder and Eats Horses got under one drum and B.D. and Berry under the other. Two crew members beat tentatively on each drum with Lakota wails and laughter. For some reason Berry responded with the chirping of a cricket until B.D. said no, mourning the effect of the drumbeats on his hangover.
The bus took off hitting the border of the United States near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. The drumbeats softened while the Director talked to the customs agents whom she knew from other crossings there.
“You know my boys are clean. No drugs or alcohol on the bus or they get their asses kicked off.” The customs agents were eating their lunch sandwiches and were quite bored with trying to catch putative terrorists who were unlikely to come their way.
The bus roared off and the drummers beat hard and wailed loudly as they entered the promised land which had been less than wonderful to the Lakota in recent centuries. A dozen miles south in a cottonwood grove the rooftop passengers climbed down the ladder and the Director returned Berry’s tambourine which made her happy. B.D. was a little dizzy and nauseous thinking that seven shooters would have been adequate rather than ten, and slightly disappointed that North Dakota looked identical to Manitoba but it might have been due to the way one hangover resembles another. Nothing helped until he had pork liver and onions and two beers in Rugby which was supposedly the geographical center of North America. Out in the restaurant parking lot he lamely tried to figure out how they’d determined this. He also wondered how he would protect himself from his excesses if Berry went under the Director’s care for a while. The answer was to live so far back in the woods that you only went to the tavern once a week. Maybe twice. When he got back on the bus the Director teased him in a whisper about his short “staying power” then punched him so hard in the arm it went numb. He reflected from experience that you never quite knew if an Indian woman would make love or beat the shit out of you.
At nightfall the tour bus was camped at the site of Wounded Knee. Charles Eats Horses went off and spent the night sitting up wrapped in a blanket. The crew started a fire to cook the steaks the Director had bought along with a case of beer to celebrate the end of the tour. B.D. was mournful that a single case only offered two apiece, scarcely enough to wet your whistle. As much as possible he avoided remembering when he was sixteen and Grandpa had given him a lecture on the dangers of liquor saying that it had killed B.D.’s mom and dad. No more information on them had ever been forthcoming from Grandpa though B.D. had heard that his mom, Grandpa’s daughter, had danced for a while in a strip club in Escanaba. Since Grandpa was mostly Swede and Irish the skin blood had come through his dad who had taken off for Lac du Flambeau. Right now at Wounded Knee he surely didn’t care if he was part Indian or in his private thicket on the edge of the Kingston Plains where he could watch breeding sandhill cranes. Uncle Delmore was always watching horror films on television. Berry liked them but B.D. had an aversion to being frightened. He had peeked in from the kitchen during a werewolf film and decided he would a lot rather be a werecoyote assuming they existed.
He was washing up in his compartment when he heard the Director enter. She looked out the window at Berry and two crew members dancing around the fire.
“I’m going to make that girl into a fancy dancer. She’s real good.”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” B.D. said patting the Director’s ass and hoping to redeem the idea that he had no staying power.
“Back away, dickhead,” she chortled at him and made for the door. “You remind me too much of my husband. He was drunk and the police clocked him at over a hundred miles per hour outside of Chadron before his pickup flipped about twenty times.”
She had left in a virtuous huff and B.D. remembered a conversation when he and Berry and Delmore were eating Sunday dinner at Gretchen’s. Delmore had taken Berry for a ride down to the harbor and B.D. had whimsically asked Gretchen why no woman had ever asked him to marry her.
“You’re a biological question mark,” she had said. “Women in general want some romance but when they look for a mate they most often estimate the man, at least subconsciously, as a provider. You present yourself as a fuckup but the reason you can get laid is that you intensely like women without irony.”
B.D. had reminded himself to look up “subconscious” and “irony” in Delmore’s dictionary. Gretchen had been wearing pale blue fairly tight shorts and when she vigorously mashed potatoes at the stove her butt cheeks jiggled so attractively that B.D. felt tears arising. He had stopped well short of persisting on the marriage issue because Gretchen could be a little cruel. Years before, she had used her authority to thoroughly review his school records and discovered that his intelligence was well above average which made her question him sharply.
“Why live like you do? You’re smart enough to do otherwise.”
“I just slid into it,” he had answered nervously.
“Well, you flunked English literature but you aced geometry.”
“Geometry was real pretty.”
It occurred to him then that she would never understand the deep pleasure of spending a whole day in the company of a creek. If he could make a subsistence living repairing deer-hunting cabins, cutting firewood or pulp why should he do more? He spent the rest of his time wandering in the woods and following creeks to their source. When Gretchen had said that he was frozen in place at age twelve he had reflected that that had been a good year. He had caught his first brook trout over three pounds on a beaver pond north of Rapid River, he owned a little terrier that rode in his bicycle basket and could occasionally catch a flushing grouse, and he had gotten to screw a beered-up sixteen-year-old tourist girl down on the town beach. T
he accusation of being frozen at age twelve did not seem to be a serious charge. Once when he got winter work at about age twenty as a janitor at a bowling alley he didn’t think these fully employed men at their weekly bowling league were having all that much fun trying to break 200. They mostly had fat asses and when they jumped up and down they didn’t jump high.
Now out the tour bus window it was pleasant to watch Berry and Turnip dancing at top speed. Turnip always looked ungainly but turned out to be a fine dancer. B.D. left the bus and moved hot coals off to the side and arranged the grill face so that it was well balanced on rocks, electing himself as the steak cook. Not so far off in the moonlight he could see Charles Eats Horses sitting in the cemetery with his hands pointed up toward the sky. The Director sat on a lawn chair guarding the beer and B.D. decided to drink his share of two real fast to acquire a modestly good feeling. The meat was real fatty rib steaks, his favorite cut, and the bone made it possible to eat with your hands rather than struggling with plastic knives and forks. Everyone was so tired that they ate fast and went to bed. When he went into the dark to pee B.D. was thrilled to have Turnip pass him a pint of schnapps for a couple of deep swigs. Berry continued to dance in the firelight without drums, banging on her tambourine, until the Director led her off to bed. Up home Berry tended to avoid all strangers but B.D. admitted to himself that she was having a good time with these people. She seemed to love music just like she was enchanted with birds. The Director had said that there were a lot worse things than being mute.
They got an early start in the morning and B.D. was upset when saying good-bye to Charles Eats Horses who was still sitting out in the cemetery but seemed to be in some sort of trance though he hugged Berry. The tour bus stopped in Pine Ridge and dropped off three crew members including a very strong young man named Pork. B.D. had learned that Pork had gotten his name when he had run away to Pierre when he was twelve. He was very hungry and went in to the supermarket to steal a pound of hamburger to eat raw but had grabbed a package of pork sausage by mistake. Ever since then Pork had had an affection for raw pork. He seemed fairly smart and said at one time raw pork could be dangerous but trichinosis was a thing of the past. Out the window in Pine Ridge, which was a dreamy place surrounded by beautiful country, B.D. saw Pork embrace his wife and son and get into a fairly new Chevy pickup.
On the way up toward Rapid City, B.D. sat up front with Turnip who invited him to stay at the condo he had inherited from an aunt who had been a school principal and a successful horse trader. Turnip said the group of condos shared a heated pool and when the weather was warm he would sit by the pool in Vuarnet sunglasses with a hand-tooled leather briefcase a rich white woman had given him down in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when the band toured there. Pretty girls and women would come up to him at the pool and chat because he looked like a big shot. He would tease his neighbors because the briefcase was full of R. Crumb comic books. He showed one to B.D. who thought it was the best comic book he had ever read.
They stopped at a country gas station for fuel and coffee and in an adjoining field two girls were practicing barrel racing with their quarter horses. B.D. was appalled at the speed at which the horses were running and turned to the Director beside him.
“They could die if they fell off.”
“They don’t,” she said but then she yelled at Berry who vaulted the fence and ran toward the girls who now were taking a break. Berry went past them doing a top-speed figure eight around the barrels and then she stopped by the girls and petted the horses while she cooed like a dove. B.D. told the Director that he didn’t think that Berry had ever been near a horse. They crawled through the fence and made their way to the girls. Berry was rubbing her nose against the nose of one of the horses who seemed to like it.
“She ain’t right in the head,” the girl said to the approaching B.D. and Director.
“That’s true but she’s a sweetheart. How about giving her a ride? She’s never been in the saddle before,” the Director said.
The girl gestured to Berry who leapt on with one flowing move.
“That’s quite a trick,” the girl said leading the horse by the reins then handing the reins to Berry. “I bet she can handle it.”
The horse took off for the far barrel and B.D. covered his face with his hands and peeked through his fingers. Berry was pasted to the saddle and neck of the horse like a decal but when the girl whistled and the horse ran back toward them abruptly stopping Berry slid forward and hung there with her arms around the horse’s neck. She was all aglow and crooning. B.D. reached for her and she dropped into his arms.
“Now she’s both a dancer and a cowgirl. All is not lost,” the Director said.
B.D. paused halfway crawling under the fence watching Berry grab a post and vault over the top wire the same way he used to do when he was young. Way too much had been happening in this life and there under the bottom wire he was suddenly trying to focus.
“How am I supposed to get back home?” he asked almost plaintively.
“Well you can’t fly because the computer at the airport might pick up the Michigan warrant. They might not still be looking for you but we can’t take a chance. The jail in Rapid City is full of drunk Indians. Your uncle Delmore is sending someone out to pick you up. He says you’ll owe him big.”
“He always says that,” B.D. said thinking he’d have to find a good hiding place back home. Delmore had plenty of money but like many old people he was fretful about it. “During the Great Depression I couldn’t afford the hole in a doughnut,” he would say.
B.D. pretty much sat for two full days on a cement park bench on the grounds of the Rapid City hospital. He packed along sardines, cheese, crackers, and Bull Durham. He was rolling his own cigarettes from Bull Durham and though there was a mysterious sign saying “Smoke-Free Zone” he couldn’t imagine anyone would object on these warm windy days of early spring. He was wrong. A security man approached and said he could be arrested which caused a quiver of fear. B.D. played dumb when the security man pointed at the sign ten feet away.
“Can’t you read?”
“Not too good,” B.D. said as if trying to parse the sign.
The Director was running Berry through a battery of tests. B.D. had tried to give the Director the five-hundred-dollar gift from Dr. Krider but the Director had refused saying, “You can’t give me all your money. Are you stupid?”
This seemed possible. He hadn’t been able to reach Uncle Delmore or Gretchen on the phone and her answering machine said she would be away for a week. Turnip had dialed the numbers for him on his cell phone and when B.D. worried about the expense Turnip said that he got a deal for three thousand minutes. B.D. wondered how they could possibly keep track of such things at the same time thinking that Delmore rarely answered the phone because bad news always came over the phone. He didn’t watch television news because he said he didn’t need to know all of the bad news in the world in ten minutes. Delmore listened now and then to Canadian news on his big powerful radio because things didn’t seem to be going so bad up that way.
B.D. hung out on the bench in front of the hospital because the medical tests made Berry so unhappy that she cried which she never did normally. She was so sad that when she and the Director came out for a break from the tests she didn’t even make gull cries when she shared sardines with B.D.
“Sardines have gone up from nineteen cents to a dollar in my lifetime,” B.D. reflected. He was remembering his youth when toward the end of the month Grandpa’s pension money ran low and they would eat five tins of sardines and boiled garden potatoes from the root cellar. It was their “dollar meal,” better in the summer with added onions, radishes, and tomatoes from the garden.
“Christianity might be bullshit but I heard a priest say that greed was the Antichrist.” The Director hugged Berry who was trembling.
“Berry’s mom used to throw her naked out in the snow when she peed the bed. Back then Berry was always trembling but she lucked out when her mom
got sent to prison.”
“I’d like to slit that cunt’s throat,” the Director said matter-of-factly.