by Jim Harrison
“I’m just curious.”
B.D. paid for his sins with a long wait for breakfast. Gretchen’s eyes were vaguely teary and she drove with concentration buffeted by a blustery wind out of the southwest. She pulled off the interstate in Sioux Falls for a large container of franchise coffee which he declined because he didn’t see the point of being that awake.
“Grandpa used to say, ‘I’m so hungry I could eat the raw pork around a sow’s ass.’”
She glanced at him with horror but stopped at a diner just over the Minnesota line when she turned to take Route 23 diagonally northeast across the state.
“You’re not very interested in reality,” she said, getting out of the car with a coolish smile.
“Define your terms.” This came from his civics class thirty-five years before.
“I’m not being mean. It’s just that you’re more mammalian than anyone I’ve met. My father and his friends were fake mammals. For instance I bet you didn’t notice that Berry scarcely recognized me.”
“Yes I did. Sometimes when I picked her up from the speech therapist in Toronto she didn’t instantly recognize me. I could see her mind saying to itself, ‘Oh, it’s you.’”
“Of course she was your pal more than anything.”
“I was a fairly good dad. She always had clean clothes. I cooked her food she liked. We went on walks and fishing. We played games and looked at books though she didn’t like words, only pictures. I let her have her garter snake on the table except when we ate at Delmore’s. What more could I do?”
“Nothing. That’s far more than most kids get. I mean my two cousins raped me over and over when I was ten and they were twelve and thirteen. I told my mother and she said, ‘No they didn’t.’”
“That’s pretty bad reality,” B.D. said looking up at the clouds scudding swiftly above them. She was shivering in the forty-degree wind. He tried to put an arm around her but she slipped away entering the diner. To his surprise she laughed at his “country boy special” which he covered with Tabasco and ketchup while she settled for a dry English muffin.
It was never the state, he thought, but the terrain. Once they were out of solid farm country and he saw birch, cedar, pine, and hemlock, his spirits lifted through the top of his head. A sign said that there were ten thousand lakes in Minnesota which he doubted but then he was more interested in streams and rivers. He noted that Gretchen was drowsy by midafternoon when they hit the Wisconsin border and he offered to drive. She reminded him that if a cop stopped them and ran a check on his license he’d end up in jail. The idea that everything with the police was connected by computer distressed him, remembering as he did a time when the world seemed friendlier and more haphazard. Delmore was always carping about Homeland Security but B.D. with his aversion to the news kept himself ignorant. Despite his bluster Delmore was rather timid about authority and kept badgering B.D. for not having a Social Security number. Nowadays, Delmore insisted that even babies are obligated to have Social Security numbers, adding that people in Washington, D.C., knew all of the considerable bad moves B.D. had made in his life to which B.D. had responded, “Why would they give a shit?” Delmore pretended to be an authority on Arabs having known a few in Detroit fifty years before and had told B.D. that the Arabs were pissed off because we had treated them as badly as we do blacks and American Indians. B.D.’s frame of reference was limited to a late-night movie where this sheikh in a huge tent had a harem of thirty women wearing see-through gowns. The women were always dancing and servants brought huge platters of food. B.D. had thought that thirty women was being a bit too ambitious if any were as energetic as Brenda, his big dentist, who had screwed him into the carpet.
Gretchen was suffering from road exhaustion when they entered Wisconsin and began maniacally dithering about her future baby perhaps to keep herself alert. She spoke of day care, the legalities of sperm donorship, and once again the specter of intrauterine pollution. B.D. liked the sound of the word “intrauterine” but didn’t care what it meant because he was betting on something confusing. B.D. thought of the outside of a woman’s private parts as lovely as a woodland but knew that just inside things got pretty complicated. Way back in biology class the illustrated cross sections of a woman were stupefying whereas a man’s pecker was as plain as day.
Near Rice Lake on Wisconsin Route 8 his attention was caught by the core of the legalities.
“You’re saying that though I’m the dad of the kid I’m not actually the parent?” She had used the new word “parenting” which seemed slippery.
“Well, yes.”
“I’m just a piece of meat that shot off into a gizmo that you squirt into yourself?”
“That’s essentially it but I’m choosing you because you’re interesting genetically. I’m not picking a white-bread, white-car, white-house American like my dad and his awful friends. Once when I was having a pajama party and they were playing poker his friend named Charley shone a flashlight under the sheets when he thought we were asleep.”
“Can’t say that I blame him.”
“You’re disgusting. We were only fourteen.”
“They used to say that if a girl is big enough she’s old enough.”
The car swerved when she swatted at him. She had raised his ire and he was baiting her.
“In other words when I see this baby I’m not supposed to think or say that I’m his dad?”
“It’s better that way since we’re never going to be married. I also liked the idea that the baby would be one-quarter Chippewa.”
“Oh bullshit. I was a fine dad to Berry.”
There was silence for many miles and by the time they passed through Ladysmith she became a little jealous of the landscape which had him sitting on the edge of his seat. It was the same latitude as the southern tier of the Upper Peninsula and he was seeing his homeground flora for the first time in nearly six months. At his insistence she stopped the car at a little tourist park near a river outside of Catawba so he could wander around breathing in the pungent smell of cedar and alder along the water and look up at the green buds of birch and aspen. The flowing water made his brain jiggle and he fondled the thin branches of willow and dogwood. At the edge of the woods he lay down on his stomach to smoke a cigarette with a ground-level view. She had followed and stood over him with her arms wrapped across her chest, a defensive posture against the cool spring air and her own out-of-control feelings.
“You seem to think I’m marginalizing you.” She stooped down beside him and scratched his head.
“What the fuck else?” he muttered, not quite knowing what “marginalizing” meant except that she was pushing him off to the side. On Grandpa’s sofa back home there was an embroidered pillow that said “Love Conquers All.” He thought, I’m not so sure. He could tell his huffiness was paying off because he had a clear view up her skirt and he would bet she was doing it on purpose to win him over.
“I’m so sorry. I’m just not explaining it in the best terms.”
He buried his face in his hands but not so completely that he couldn’t see up past her inner thighs to the delightful muffin captured by white panties.
“Got you.” He suddenly reached out and grabbed her ankles.
She pitched over sideways twisting her legs to get loose. He had a quick fine view of her butt before he let go of her ankles. She ran laughing toward the car and he scrambled after her on his hands and knees like a dog barking and howling. She was thinking that her old shameless prick-tease moves had at least changed the mood and he was thinking that playing difficult had paid off.
They reached Ironwood by nightfall still happy though Gretchen was so tired she asked him to pick her up some takeout. Many copper and iron miners had arrived from northern Italy in the mid-nineteenth century and maintained their interest in their own food so the U.P. abounded in Italian restaurants. B.D. walked down the road a scant half mile and ate a large order of lasagna with a whole bottle of acrid red wine and waited for a pizza to take
back to Gretchen. She wanted double anchovies and onions and he thought, Strong flavors for a strong woman. He’d drunk the bottle of red at warp speed and treated himself to a double whiskey thinking unpleasantly of the time he came home drunk from an evening with David Four Feet. His grandpa was angry and told him that his mother was a drunk and he didn’t want B.D. to die from the same “curse.” Grandpa said that his daughter still made his heart ache so that was the most that was ever said about B.D.’s mother. Grandpa had emerged from World War II with a number of bullet holes in his legs and ass but they made out okay on half disability from the government and Grandpa’s ability as a part-time cabinetmaker. He couldn’t stand up for long but tended a fine vegetable garden on his hands and knees.
When B.D. got back to the motel with the pizza he knocked at Gretchen’s door.
“A peek at your beautiful ass for a pizza,” he hollered.
“Of course, darling.” She opened the door, flipped the back of her nightie up, took the pizza, and slammed the door, leaving him with burning skin.
“I wish to dine alone. Good night, love.”
B.D. recalled that there was a smart-ass guy from near Traverse City who used to hang out in the Dunes Saloon in Grand Marais in the summer who had said, “How does a woman’s butt crack capture our imaginations? It’s only negative space, in essence, a vacuum.” This was puzzling and really made you think it over.
They reached Delmore’s at noon and were promptly attacked by the pup Teddy whom B.D. hadn’t seen since leaving for Toronto. Teddy had grown much larger. B.D. asked about Teddy’s mother and Delmore looked into the air while responding as if the mother had ascended.
“She got shot while eating sheep down the road. We saved the hindquarters of the sheep. You owe me a hundred bucks.” Delmore was busy giving Gretchen an overfond hug so that she finally pushed him away.
They sat on the porch swing talking and drinking Delmore’s poor man’s lemonade—too little lemons and too much sugar. It was Sunday and even the landscape was snoozing in premature warmth. The peepers, tiny frogs, were trilling from the swamp down the road in an evident state of spring fever. B.D. had a lump in his throat about life itself and the sight of Delmore sitting in the ragged old easy chair at the end of the porch with the dog in his lap. Gretchen began to fall asleep on the porch swing, then got up and reminded B.D. that he was due at the doctor’s at nine in the morning for his checkup.
“Who’s paying?” Delmore barked.
“I am, sweetheart. I’m sending him to a vet.” She kissed Delmore on the forehead and escaped his attempt to give her a pat.
“She’s going to be your stepmother when I pass on,” Delmore said as Gretchen drove off down the gravel road with stones tinkling under the fenders. “I’m hoping that you’ll fix me some fried chicken and noodles for Sunday dinner?”
B.D. nodded staring at his favorite hill about three miles off to the north. Gretchen wanted him to teach her how to catch a fish and he was busy concocting a fantasy about a riverside seduction. Meanwhile he was going to head for the hill to breathe air where others weren’t breathing it. About three-quarters of the way up the hill there was a fine thicket in the middle of which there was a white pine stump to sit on. So much of his life had been solitary that the crowded nature of the past six months had been confusing. He could be confused enough when alone and the addition of the company of others raised the ante exponentially. For instance he didn’t really want to teach Gretchen how to catch a fish. Love was love and fishing was fishing, an almost religious obsession that had added grace to his life for more than forty of his nearly fifty years. Sitting in the car with Gretchen from Ironwood to Delmore’s a dozen miles from Escanaba had been difficult. By count the highway had crossed eleven streams that he had fished and each stream held a reverie of the experiences on the stream: “Small bear crying at twilight meant get out of there ASAP as the mother would be irritated. Left two trout behind as peace offering.” But with Gretchen in the car he would turn away from the bridges, look down at her when she uttered the word “baby.” The hugeness of the idea of a baby filled the speeding car and the world around it and the clarity of trout fishing disappeared despite her strange assurances that the baby had “nothing” to do with him. He had long since accepted that she was by far the most hopeless love of his life, for practical purposes as remote as the princess of Spain or a creature from outer space. He was one of those very rare men who, for better or worse, knew exactly who he was.
He reached his thicket in a fast-paced hour wiping the sweat from his face with his shirt and was pleased to find that a female Cooper’s hawk still returned to the area, probably recently, and was not disturbed by his familiar presence. Before he could fully relax he checked the contents of his wallet for what was left of Dr. Krider’s gift and discovered three hundred and seven dollars, a virtual fortune. If he was careful and avoided too much time in bars he could possibly fish for a month. He would do a little of it locally because Delmore was bitter about his lack of home-cooked meals. He was too far out in the country to be reached by Meals on Wheels and his fridge’s freezer compartment was full of Swanson chicken pot pies which were sometimes on sale three for a dollar, and in the pantry there was a long neat line of cans of Dinty Moore beef stew. When B.D. went to the doctor in the morning he would pick up a few things to cook and freeze before he took off on his fishing trip.
Sitting uncomfortably on his stump B.D. lapsed into a state much envied by the ancients. He thought of nothing for an hour and merely absorbed the landscape, the billions of green buds in thousands of acres of trees surrounding him. Here and there were dark patches of conifers amid the pale green hardwoods and far off to the south a thin blue strip of Lake Michigan. He had never thought a second of the word “meditation” and this made it all easier because he was additionally blessed with no sense of self-importance or personality which are preoccupations of upscale people. Within a minute he was an extension of the stump he sat upon. After about an hour he was aroused by the Cooper’s hawk flying by a scant ten feet away after which B.D. reached into a hole at the base of the stump for a pint of schnapps he stored there and was delighted by the wintergreen berry taste.
He was the doctor’s first patient on Monday morning and the doctor was in a pissy mood because he was a friend of Gretchen’s and her choice of a sperm donor was inscrutable to him. He carelessly drew blood from B.D.’s large forearm as if wanting to punish the nitwit.
“Sperm donorship is a serious thing,” the doctor said. “It’s better if it’s anonymous.”
“Why?” B.D. knew that he was normally invisible to the doctor and had decided to play dumb in hopes of getting out of the office as soon as possible.
“Obviously there are emotional issues. Have you been sexually active?”
“Now and then whenever it’s possible. You can’t always get what you want. It’s better not to aim too high.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” The doctor was clearly irritated.
“If you go to the bar at the alley on women’s bowling night you’re not likely to score one of the top ten ladies out of thirty so you aim low.”
“Have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease?”
“None other than crabs in Chicago thirty years ago.”
“Stand up and drop your trousers. I need to check you for herpes and warts.”
“No.”
“I insist.”
“I don’t give a fuck if you insist. I’m familiar with my dick and I don’t have any warts.” B.D. had never been to a doctor in his life except the time when a tree he was cutting down bucked back and shattered his kneecap and then the orthopedic doctor hadn’t been curious about his dick.
“I’m afraid I can’t recommend you to Gretchen as a sperm donor.”
“Fuck you and the train you rode in on.”
B.D. left the office whistling a merry tune and headed for the supermarket. Delmore had given him fifty bucks and he figured he could cook u
p a half dozen dishes from Dad’s Own Cookbook, put them in the freezer, and still get over to Grand Marais before dark assuming the old Studebaker pickup didn’t break down. Delmore had kindly had the windshield replaced the evening before and B.D. had packed his meager camping equipment including a seventy-year-old heavy canvas pup tent from World War II. He had slept outside because the things of Berry’s left behind gave him a severe lump in the throat.
Leaving the supermarket he sorted out his own cans of beans and Spam putting them in a wooden potato crate in the pickup bed. Delmore didn’t like him driving the old Studebaker except when B.D. used to visit Brenda, the big dentist, the thought of whom agitated his loins. They both got some serious knee burns on her fluffy white carpet. He was supposed to stop by Gretchen’s office and tell her how things had gone with the doctor but he was willing to bet top dollar that the doctor had already called Gretchen. The obvious solution was to leave a message on her home phone saying that he could be contacted at eleven-thirty any evening this week at the Dunes Saloon in Grand Marais. Gretchen’s office made him dry-mouthed and nervous. It was the rows of file cabinets that put him off along with the many computers. Why keep records on everyone? How could the contents of so many lives be kept in the cabinets and computers? Way back when, a teacher would show them the contents of his “frozen zoo,” all the marvelous dead songbirds he had found which he kept in the freezer. His own records began with when he and David Four Feet were caught at age thirteen throwing cherry bombs under squad cars in Escanaba, and went on to include every pissant scrape with the law since then.
He was soothed cooking Delmore’s dinners for the week with Delmore sitting there at the kitchen table making uninformed suggestions while flipping through the satellite channels. Delmore talked back to the television. If a character, say in a spy movie, were imperiled Delmore might holler, “Watch out behind your back you fucking nitwit!”
After a couple of hours B.D. was finished making six stews, two each of pork, chicken, and beef, mindful to keep the bites small as Delmore’s teeth were sparse among his gums. B.D. slid the Tupperware containers into the freezer, then called Mike in Grand Marais and was pleased to hear the area was currently shy of a constable or deputy though one might be hired in June for the summer when tourists arrived. Tourists were appalled when there were fights at the taverns and someone was needed to unsuccessfully keep the lid on tempers and extreme public drunkenness. B.D. was still legally enjoined from the area due to a past mud bath and the unfairness of the law.