by Jim Harrison
Delmore was asleep in his chair so B.D. tiptoed off for his first actual freedom in six months. At the last minute he remembered to pack a couple of very large construction trash bags in case the weather turned bad so he could crawl into one when the tent began to leak. On the four-hour drive northeast he stopped at two creeks and caught a half dozen brook trout for supper. When he reached Seney with only twenty-five miles left to go to Grand Marais he relented and stopped to buy a fishing license on the off chance of getting stopped. It wouldn’t do to have a game warden calling headquarters for information. He also bought a cold six-pack reminding himself to keep the beer he was drinking out of sight when driving up a hill because there might be a cop coming the other way, an old survival trick of the North.
Feeling rather soothed by the beer B.D. still resisted stopping at either tavern while driving through Grand Marais. It certainly would be stupid to tie one on while it was still daylight. He greeted the lovely harbor and Lake Superior beyond and headed east for a few miles before turning south on a log road for seven miles to a place he loved not because it was the best fishing which it wasn’t but because of the gentle, unobtrusive beauty of the place. He was a little surprised about two-thirds of the way in when he felt an unexpected tremor of fear in his stomach. A mile off to the west was the location where years ago he had found a large wild cherry tree blasted by lightning, an object largely held to be magical by all Indians and a few whites. And not fifty yards away in a thicket of sugar plum and dogwood he had discovered a small ancient graveyard of seven graves. When he had told a very old Indian friend about the graveyard the man said, “Don’t even tell me where it is. If it’s found out college people will come with their evil shovels.” Sad to say B.D. had met a graduate student in anthropology from the University of Michigan who had come north to the Upper Peninsula to study possible battle sites of the Chippewa, known to themselves as the Anishinabe, and the Iroquois in the early nineteenth century. It was all in the way Shelley’s ample but well-formed butt handled the bar stool beneath it. He was smitten, not a rare thing, but this was a powerful smiting indeed. He almost prayed, “Please God, let it be me.” Suffused in the mixture of lust and alcohol he had spilled the beans and showed her the graveyard. How could he do such a pathetic and obvious thing? It was easy, though he tried to convince himself later that he had been caught up in a “whirl” whatever that was. He and Shelley became temporary lovers and in the following summer, sure enough, the University of Michigan began their anthropological “dig.” By then B.D. was involved with Lone Marten’s ill-fated and short-lived project of a “Wild Wild Midwest” tourist attraction. Lone Marten was David Four Feet’s brother but also a rotten-to-the-core scam artist and fake Indian activist. Their little Wild, Wild Midwest group attacked the dig one dawn with an improbably large amount of fireworks. Unfortunately the Michigan State Police got wind of the plot and in the ensuing melee Berry’s mother Rose had bitten off a cop’s thumb. Lone Marten and B.D. escaped and went on the lam with Delmore eventually bailing B.D. out. Rose was the only one to do hard time. B.D. was enjoined from entering Alger County west of Munising, his favorite spot on earth.
But here he was encamped several years later convinced that no one remembered that long ago because he rarely had reason to do so himself. These rehearsals of the past were brutal so he quickly gathered wood and started a fire. The concentration required to cook his trout properly would help abolish the past but then while he was setting up the pup tent and waiting for the fire to get right another behavioral glitch struck him hard. About ten years before in a bar in Sault Sainte Marie he had said something nice to a woman of about thirty who was drinking with her friends and she had responded by saying, “Beat it, creep,” and he had poured a big mug of beer down her neck and fled. Unfortunately at the time he was well known around the Soo and the cops quickly found him. Two nights in jail were unpleasant. He and a buddy who ran the job were notorious for illegally diving on old Lake Superior shipwrecks and pillaging what could be removed. An antique brass binnacle could bring a thousand dollars assuming that you didn’t get caught but they did get caught with the body of an Indian in full regalia B.D. had found on the lake floor.
B.D. had set up camp and cooked his supper fish hundreds of times and now this simple act soothed him at least temporarily. The beans were in a saucepan off to the side and he scooped some bacon fat into his iron skillet and put it on the coals. He took a handful of watercress and put it on his tin plate which kept the trout from congealing against the metal. He looked up to see the last of the sun’s top dropping over the ridge to the west. He saw an evening grosbeak land in a chokecherry and a group of cedar waxwings were doing their twilight limb dance.
He ate quickly and was still hungry wishing he had kept a portion of the pork chops and potato casserole he had cooked for Delmore. Or the chicken and Italian sausage stew. He took a swallow of the peppermint schnapps and made his way down a gulley perhaps fifty yards to the river hidden by alder and sweet-smelling cedar. He flopped down on a grassy patch of bank, a slight groan on his lips, thinking, You may as well fully accept how awful you’ve been and entertain good thoughts like the glimpse of Gretchen’s bare butt just before you handed her the fine-smelling pizza. Finally he was released into the beauty of the river for the last hour before dark. Through the trees on the other side of the river there was still a patch of snow on a north-facing hillside though it was May 5. The river was still high and strong from the snowmelt runoff and he was amazed as ever by how wonderful it sounded, perhaps the best sound in the world this water noise. He heard the drawn-out sound of a whip-poor-will which always made his skin prickle. He hoped to hear a wolf in the five days he intended to camp there as a den was less than a mile away.
The Dunes Saloon was far less idyllic. Taking care of Berry had made him lose his touch at nighttime bars. You had to pace yourself and too many acquaintances from years ago bought him drinks. Three doubles in thirty minutes was too fast and when Gretchen called at eleven-thirty he was less than lucid.
“How could you do this to me?”
“What did I do to you?”
“You were rude to the doctor.”
“The dickhead treated me like mixed-blood trash. I’ve been through this before.”
“You were supposed to let him examine your penis for possible herpes warts.”
“My penis doesn’t own any herpes warts. It’s pure as the driven snow.”
She hung up on him and he was sorrowful for a full minute but then Big Marcia snuck up behind him and grabbed his wanger. He turned with a smile to see that Big Marcia had gotten even bigger. B.D. thought she had maybe reached two fifty and lost some of her attractiveness. At two hundred she hadn’t looked that bad. She wore the T-shirt of the girls’ softball team, the Bayside Bitches, and now was perilously drunk and smelling of a cocktail called the Tootsie Roll which was a mixture of orange pop, Kahlúa liqueur, and whatever Dave the bartender might mischievously dump in. Dave was a fan of mayhem. Marcia wanted to go outside and “smooch” and since B.D.’s true love had hung up on him he felt justified in tagging along. However, outside in the yard in the shadow of the tavern she started to waver in his arms and gradually lost consciousness. Her back was sweaty and his hands were losing their grip. She had no belt to hold on to and his hands couldn’t get a big enough piece of her capacious ass. He quickly thrust an arm under her crotch and as gently as possible lowered her to the ground. Now he was sweating and there was a twinge in his back. He looked out toward the harbor to the moon above the streetlight and decided to go back to his camp.
B.D. spent a wonderful night sleeping only intermittently in order to keep track of the moon through the open face of the pup tent. He had largely missed the moon in Toronto and since his inner and outer child were pretty much glued together he had been quite disappointed. All that ambient light in Toronto had also made the night sky short on stars. From childhood on he had been an addict of “moon walks” not of the tawdr
y NASA golf-club-swing type but wandering in field and forest in strong moonlight say from the three- quarter phase onward. Grandpa never minded when his seven-year-old grandson would head out in the dark because there was a fence around eighty acres of pasture, woods, and swamp and the tyke could always follow the fence home.
He fed the coals at the first glimpse of light and made his boiled coffee getting back into the sleeping bag to drink it and to study the fog that had dropped from the heavens. He wiggled like a caterpillar in his bag dropping a half pound of bacon in the iron skillet and opening a can of Mexican refried beans. He searched his mind for the remnants of a dream in which he was a baby sitting on a woman’s lap looking up but he could only see the bottom of her chin. Could this be his mother? he wondered. Life was so fantastically inconclusive. The dream was so much more pleasant than the recurrent seminightmare of being painfully thirsty with a wet ass in a crib and looking up at a rough cabin ceiling at boards that varied from narrow to very wide. He’d asked Gretchen about this one and she said it was likely he had been abandoned.
He reserved his grease, pushed the bacon off to the side, and heated the refried beans. This magical combination allowed him to fish eight hours without hunger at which point a thick Spam-and-onion sandwich would fuel another six hours at which point twilight arrived.
Sad to say but in a flat hour he had ripped his cheap Japanese waders on a snag while trying to reach a late lake-run rainbow of a couple of pounds. The fish had snagged the leader on a deadfall across the river and he couldn’t jerk the line free. His aim was brook trout but a spring rainbow made a nice chowder fish. When the waders ripped he expelled his air in a whoosh and floundered toward the bank falling forward in the swift waters. Both the air and the water temperature were about forty and he shed the waders and trotted toward camp a half mile away, shuddering with cold but still amused that when he reached the bank the fish had managed to free itself.
He stoked up his campfire to a roar, peeled off his wet clothes, and danced around the fire buck naked to warm up, rather unconcerned because he had dunked himself dozens of times during his fishing life and only irritated at himself because one durable pair of hundred-dollar waders would have lasted through the long chain of cheapies. He generally avoided powwows but danced some native steps he had learned, laughing at the memory of when he was about ten and told Grandpa that he wanted to be a wild Indian when he grew up and Grandpa had said, “You already are.” B.D. frankly didn’t see much difference between Indians and the rural poor of the Great North except that the relatively pure bloods tended to hang together as if they were members of the same isolated church.
He bank-fished until about noon becoming pissed off because there were so many good riffle corners he couldn’t fish without waders. He headed to town to buy another pair of the twenty-five-buck model. At a bridge on the main road he thought he recognized a very old man and stopped to say hello. The old man was trying to fish off the bridge in a hole behind a culvert and it turned out that the man was ninety-two and had been a friend of his Grandpa’s before he had moved to Muskallonge Lake near Deer Park in the late fifties. The man said he had known B.D. when he was “knee-high to a grasshopper,” the kind of thing old men said. He paused a moment looking at B.D. as if questioning whether what he had to say was appropriate.
“I was around that day that your dad came up from downstate all dressed up like an old-timey Indian. His car broke down in Newberry and he stole a pickup. The cops chased him up to Deer Park where he stole Clifford’s canoe and went paddling straight out into Lake Superior on a stormy day. They found the canoe miles down toward Crisp Point but never him. I imagine you knew that?”
“Nope,” B.D. said, “but thanks for the info.” In a lifetime of hearing very slight and flimsy rumors this was the most concrete story yet. He wasn’t exactly startled, just a little ruminative and melancholy imagining what it would be like to try to keep a canoe upright in a storm on Lake Superior. His grandpa was his true father. His mother was a whore of sorts but since she was a drunk nothing was probably better having known Berry’s mother Rose too well. Who needs someone who could throw a naked kid into a snowbank?
At the hardware store he ran into Big Marcia who was buying some plumbing supplies. “B.D.! It’s been years,” she said, embracing him. “Maybe we can have a brewski tonight?” He watched out the window as Marcia got into her newish pickup. She always was a hard worker if a little forgetful.
He tossed the new waders into the pickup and walked across the street to call Gretchen thinking that if he fished until dark he might feel up to coming to town tonight. He caught her at lunch on her cell.
“B.D., darling, I’m sorry I hung up on you. I was having issues. Anyway, Thursday and Friday are prime times for conception. I thought I’d take two days off and come over. I’d need directions.”
B.D.’s innards began a small spin which actually reminded him there at the phone booth of a big round childhood top where you pumped down on a knob and it began to spin at great speed and make a moaning sound that was supposedly musical. He told Gretchen that he would meet her at noon on Thursday and then walked over to the IGA grocery store to buy a bar of soap. He wished he had a better tent but when he’d checked tents out at a Marquette sporting goods store a good one cost the equivalent of seventy-five six-packs. Gretchen had slept in the pup tent the summer before with Berry when they camped out at Twelve Mile Beach east of town while B.D. had curled up by the fire in an old green army blanket. The very thought that he’d be in this severely confined space doing whatever with Gretchen caused his heart to jiggle.
He fished hard throughout the afternoon and evening and resisted the urge to go into town for a few drinks. He ate a mediocre pork steak and took a long moonlit walk and the next morning was ready to fish at first light. He headed off toward an area he hadn’t seen in a decade past a hilly few hundred acres where the watersheds of three rivers began, the Fox, the Two-Hearted, and the Sucker. He got turned around for a couple of hours near the roots of the Two-Hearted because he had become inattentive in the middle of a pussy trance over Gretchen. It was inevitable that he would see parts of her nude body in the tent and maybe she would hear a bear and throw herself into his arms. Or better yet a big thunderstorm which she was afraid of would cause her to crawl into his sleeping bag. He got a boner while crossing a neck of a swamp which didn’t help his sense of direction. Seven years of totally unrequited love and lust and you inevitably build up quite a head of steam. He cooled off and collected his thoughts while sitting on a hardwood knoll eating his squashed Spam-and-raw-onion sandwich. Spam is a decidedly nonsexual meal and he immediately received an insight on just where he was. He walked south about a mile and then traced a small creek that led to the Sucker stopping to catch two fair-sized brookies in a beaver pond. He was thankful to finally hit the Sucker and turned north for a mile until he reached his camp. When you’re lost you avoid panic by not quite admitting it but when you finally reach camp you’re relieved indeed.
He spruced up his camp and gathered an immense pile of wood because Gretchen liked campfires. He washed some clothes with his bar of Ivory in a river eddy saving his own cleansing until just before he left to pick her up in the morning. They would have to leave her Honda in Grand Marais because the log roads were too rough for its low-slung frame. He made a mental grocery list remembering her fondness for Sapphire gin, expensive but then it might turn the sacred trick.
On a rather timid evening hike to another beaver pond it occurred to him that Gretchen had made a shambles of his fishing trip and that after he had fulfilled his destiny as a sperm donor he’d have to take off on an old-time, full-blast jaunt. It was unthinkable to miss two nights in a row at the tavern but then Gretchen was difficult enough to manage without a hangover. He remembered the Valentines from a distant past where a fat, naked kid with wings would shoot an arrow through a heart which stood for love. The pain was certainly there and its emotional havoc colored everything. Fo
r example on his third cast of his fly rod with a No. 12 brown Woolly Bugger fly his backcast was snagged fairly high in an alder bush and it was a fucking chore to untangle it. Just before dark he hooked a fine fish, possibly a rare two-pounder, but the fish wound the leader around a protruding tamarack root and broke off. He howled. He had been visualizing Gretchen on her hands and knees in the tent and he was behind and under her watching the firelight shimmer off her tummy and breasts. If he had been keeping track of his line and fish rather than this the brook trout would have been in his hands. For a millisecond he thought he heard a distant wolf howl, not an infrequent night sound in the area, but it turned out to be the much more comforting coyote. It was a mildly spooky place. A few years back he had fled after hearing two bears fight back in the forest, likely over a female. Even bears are pussy-crazed, he thought, walking swiftly back toward camp so he wouldn’t have to wait for moonlight to find his way.
Dawn came bright and clear and he spent a long desultory morning rather aimlessly gathering more wood than they could possibly use. Some puffy clouds moved in from the southwest and he quickly walked to the river to catch a half dozen trout for their dinner. He took off his clothes and soaped himself down in a shallow eddy and when he dunked to rinse himself the water was pecker-shrinking cold. All the tree birds were urging themselves forward into a pastel green mist. He was feeling ever so vaguely religious and remembered a friend from the sixth grade named Skinny who was the Baptist preacher’s son. Skinny was always praying aloud for everyone at recess but was indulged because he was by far the fastest boy in class. He would say stuff like, “Who are we that God is mindful of us” which one day B.D. mixed up and said, “Who is God that we are mindful of him,” and Skinny was shocked to tears. B.D. had tried to pray when Grandpa was dying but was unsure of the process. Now standing naked by the river he had vague thoughts of how the prayer of love is answered in coupling.