by Jim Harrison
That afternoon in July before Bob and I took off for Chicago with the Chief we had more than a few cold beers to fight the heat, and me with a plumb empty stomach. The beer filled me with courage and I took an easy chair out to the truck and tied the Chief down on it so he wouldn’t be sliding around in an undignified way. A thing worth doing is worth doing well, they say. I also stuck in the blue eyes. It was then I made an important discovery I have divulged to no one. It was possible the Chief had been murdered because of the piece of frayed rope around his ankle. On a whim I ran my hand through his ice-cold hair until my fingers touched a hole that could have been made by a bullet. It was then I checked his trousers and came up with a thin wallet which never occurred to me before. Everything in the wallet had turned to mush except a plastic-coated driver’s license that read Ted Sleeping Bear and a Marinette, Wisconsin, address. The license had an expiration date of November in 1965 so the body wasn’t nearly so old as I thought, right around twenty-five years in Lake Superior. I pitched the wallet in the brush and hid the license in the outhouse where it still is today.
I drove first and only made it halfway between Grand Marais and Seney before the hot air and the truck’s bad exhaust system made me sick. I rinsed my face in some ditch water but it was warm and green. I was dizzy and my clothes stuck to me and Bob was anxious to get going. I said I’d ride in the back with the Chief and cool off and he said, “B.D., you got a real set of balls.” By this time, though, I wasn’t afraid of the Chief, and to be truthful, while riding back there in the cold dark I got to thinking he might be my dad. Of course I was half drunk and sick, also afraid of being caught, so my mind was a bit crazy. This is what the court called “delusional.” There was nothing to say the Chief wasn’t my dad. Marinette is across the river from Menominee which is less than fifty miles from Bark River. Of course Shelley has pointed out just about any man near sixty years old or older could be my dad. Be that as it may, the idea set itself in concrete in my mind, which shows again I had no talent for crime. All Grandpa would ever say was that his wife was a bad woman and so was their daughter, so he finally kicked them both out when I was a baby and raised me himself. Just before he died in the old folks’ home I tried to badger him out of more information but he just said, “B.D., cut that shit out,” and told the story he had told so many times about how he started to cut a big hemlock to get it out of the way for the skidder and it tipped over uprooting itself. Out popped a big bear that had been hibernating under the tree roots but the bear was still too sleepy to be pissed off. The bear just looked at him and walked away. Then when Grandpa was near death he was mumbling about Beaver Island. Sometimes in the summers we’d catch a ride with a fish tug out to Beaver Island and that was where I first learned how to dive. There’s nothing to equal being down there on the bottom looking around except walking in the woods on a cold morning. Shelley couldn’t quite believe how I’d take a stroll on a cold blustery night in just a T-shirt. Anyone who’s not a fool should try walking in the woods on a cold night when the moon is full. That’s when I learned most of life’s secrets that I know.
Sitting back there with the Chief I could tell when we hit Seney because Bob stopped and turned right, heading west on 28 on a part of the road called the Seney stretch. This country strikes some as a thirty-mile swamp but it is beautiful when you get inside it. We were about five minutes or so down the stretch and I was having a chat with my presumed dad when I heard the siren and knew the jig was up. As the truck slowed I scrambled around behind the Chief’s easy chair to hide which was pointless but I did it anyway. The truck stopped and in a minute or so I heard two voices besides Bob’s, then the door opened and flashlights shone in because it was evening. Partway as a dumb joke I let out a howl and the police yelled. I peeked out quickly and saw one cop throw his hands back, dropping the flashlight, and accidentally hit Bob square in the face. I’ll tell you that to hit Bob is to light a stick of dynamite because you better run for it. I jumped out and watched the three of them fight and it was quite a struggle. Just then I had the bright idea of jumping in the truck and taking off which is exactly what I did.
It is now nine-thirty A.M. and time to take my vengeance on Jerk and Jerkoff. I made sure I had what I needed in the van and took off for the woods. After I settled their hash I would take a powder and head over to Marquette to see Shelley and Tarah to try to lighten their hearts. I stopped short of the campsite, put on my camouflage suit, loaded my Colt .22 pistol and grabbed a gallon of gasoline I keep for the dinghy’s old three-horse Scott-Atwater. The can was red so I sprayed it green with the last of the aerosol paint I used on the ice truck four months before. Waste not, want not, they say. I moved silent as a shadow through the woods, then came down a dry, brushy creekbed that only carries water during spring runoff. Just as I thought, there was no one at the campsite. Their Toyota was parked far enough from the tent and for a moment I thought of burning that too, but settled for letting the air out of all the tires. I doused the tent full of expensive camping gear with the gasoline, threw on a match and leapt back, and she burned with a fine roar. With a forefinger I traced a skull on the dusty side of their Toyota though it looked a bit more like a shmoo. For no reason at all I fired three shots in the air and hightailed it for my van. From my reckoning they’d have a thirteen-mile walk on their hands, by which time I’d be in Marquette.
Somewhat to my surprise I didn’t get much pleasure out of the tent and equipment burning. On my way down toward Seney and over to Marquette I thought long and hard about protecting those ancient burial mounds. You better not hold your hand over your ass until you come up with thinking that makes a difference, that’s all I can say. Mine was the original sin of taking Shelley out there in the first place in my pussy trance. I knew Tarah had been confused enough afterwards, but maybe on the way in she’d been smarter than I thought. Country people are always underestimating just how smart outsiders can be. I’ve seen men come way up here from Flint, Grand Rapids and Detroit with a bunch of high-price bird dogs and shoot more partridge than any fifty locals. Sometimes these same folks catch more trout on flies that you can hardly see than anyone who fishes with worms. Maybe Tarah had one of those brains like a camera you read about. The fire might slow down the effort for a while but in the long run you couldn’t stop these people if they kept up their gumption. Sad to say, in my thinking there was no way to get myself off the hook.
I had to laugh when I crossed the Driggs River Bridge because this was where Bob had had his duke-out with the cops that got him two years along with illegally transporting a body. I wish I could have stayed to watch the fight. The one cop who was supposed to be the toughest around ended up in the Munising Hospital but so did Bob for a few days. While they were fighting I had turned off 28 and headed down the first of many log roads at top speed. I went so far into the brush I doubted the sunlight would ever reach me, deep into bug hell where you could grab a handful of mosquitoes out the truck window if you had a mind to. What’s more, I knew that at daylight the black-flies, horseflies and deerflies would join the cops and mosquitoes in the search for the truck. I had no insect repellent and nothing to drink but two beers that were getting warmer by the minute. There was nothing to eat and though I knew I was close to creeks, the Stoner and the Creighton, I had no fishing tackle. The fifty-one dollars in my wallet couldn’t buy a thing out in that black hell. If I needed to lose weight it would have been a fine time to diet.
Rather than tire myself out with fear I curled up and slept for a few hours until so many mosquitoes managed to get in the truck cab I awoke to a swollen face and hands. I got out and checked on the Chief and found it was warming up in there. Above the whine of the mosquitoes I could hear the ice melt. I started the truck and the refrigeration unit to cool it off which wasn’t taking much of a chance as the search for me probably wouldn’t start until daylight. I was disappointed to see that I had less than a half tank of gas which would limit the time I could hide out. I was pretty sure Bob would
n’t say anything as in the Navy SEALs he had been taught how to resist confessing under torture. And what could he say besides that he was driving a dead Indian to Chicago in a stolen truck? Of course he could name my name but everyone in Alger County knew we were partners and it wouldn’t take Dick Tracy to figure out I was involved.
I turned off the ignition and the refrigeration unit and got in back with the Chief to avoid the warm night and the mosquitoes. I thought of moving him off the easy chair and taking a snooze but it didn’t seem right, so I sat on the arm and leaned back just touching his left side. It remains to be seen if I was asleep or awake, and maybe I’ll never know, but the Chief spoke to me there in the ice-cold dark. It didn’t seem to be in English, though that’s the only language I know by heart. Some of it was in a jumble but I remember it pretty well. “B.D., my son, you haven’t exactly panned out but then you didn’t start with much. To whom the Lord gives much, much is expected so you are not on the hot seat in regard to gifts. Someday branches and leaves will grow out of you and you’ll understand how fish, birds and animals talk and I don’t mean in chirps and growls. You’ll be a green man is what I mean, with leaves coming out of your ears. Don’t cross the Mackinac Bridge and don’t go south of Green Bay toward tropical places. Your greed got you into this. Beware of women with forked tongues. Buy yourself a hat because your hair is thinning on top. Don’t rely on alcohol so much for good times. Sneak up on animals and just say hello. Don’t try to take vengeance on those who killed me or they’ll kill you too. It wouldn’t hurt you to read a book about nature cover to cover. Remember when you were so good at square dancing in the seventh grade?” How did he know this? “Well, don’t come tromping into the Halls of Death, but live your life with light feet. Before I forget, bury me in the forest where I belong, not with the fish.”
That’s pretty much what he said. I started to relax when he stopped talking and he sang me a few songs like nursery rhymes which were beautiful. I imagine this is what fathers do for sons who are hurt and grieving.
I awoke bone-chilled on the Chief’s lap to the sound of water trickling on the inside and bird songs on the outside. I opened the door to let the light in and heard the first of the spotter planes above the bird sounds. The treetops above formed a pretty good canopy and I added to it with brush. It was about six A.M. and already warm and the breeze was from the south so I knew it would be a hot one. This made my heart ache for both myself and the Chief. I cranked up the truck and sat on a stump trying to make a plan, mindful that the original one had been short on good sense. I quickly drank the two warm beers out of thirst and for courage. Why hadn’t I put the beers inside with the Chief to cool off? It showed that in desperate straits you can’t think clearly. By and large, though, I felt pretty strong from my talk with the Chief. There was no way I was going to get away scot-free, and the best plan had to take this into account. We should have been leaving Chicago now with a paper sack full of twenty thousand dollars. I was going to buy a newish used van and check out some locations in Canada as the U.S. seemed to be filling up. Shelley was due in the evening and would get her ears full of my fuck-up. In short, the whole damn situation didn’t look good.
I opened the door and it was cooling down nicely. About all I could manage by way of a plan was to bury the Chief properly and turn myself in. I decided to remove the blue eyes but they were stuck so it meant the Chief was swelling up. I took off on foot out of the woods and across the marsh and the Stoner Spreads toward Worchester Lake where I hoped to break into a cabin and find something to eat. It was a tough walk as the marsh was spongy and two of the creeks were neck deep. I watched an otter family fooling around so long I about forgot what I was doing, but was brought awake by the DNR (Department of Natural Resources) spotter plane. I wriggled under a clump of elder until the plane got tired of crisscrossing the area. At the Stoner Spreads I drank my fill at a cold spring I knew about from brook trout fishing and smeared some silt mud on my face and arms to try to slow down the blackflies.
The cabin I had in mind hadn’t been used yet this year so the pickings were slim. I ate at a can of baked beans and a can of green beans until I was all beaned out. I took a bottle of water and half ran back the Creighton truck trail because the Chief would need cooling off. Twice I had to jump off into the brush, the first time for a State Police cruiser with a big German shepherd tracking dog in the back, and the second time for a County Sheriff’s car. It made me feel important for about ten minutes, then I saw the back end of the deal. I’d hate to miss the big storms of winter in a jail cell.
There’s not a lot more to this part of the story. As soon as it got dark I drove over to the Bear Trap Inn near Melstrand. I knew the bartender and he sold me a six-pack and fifteen bags of ice through the side door, and let me use the phone in the back room. He said I was getting real popular with the police as they had stopped by three times that day to check on my whereabouts. I called Frank and asked him to drop off a shovel and a bottle of whiskey at a certain part of the woods. Frank said, “B.D., you got your ass in a sling.” I asked if there was a reward for my capture because I wanted him to have it, but he hadn’t heard of any reward. Shelley was in the Dunes Saloon waiting for me to show up and Frank put her on. “B.D., I beg you to give yourself up, my darling.” I told her where she could meet me at dawn with the cops and hung up. I instantly regretted this as I had a hard night of work ahead of me and would need a nap before I turned myself in. Then I tried to call David Four Feet to see how you went about burying an Indian chief. There was only one number under their American name and I got an older woman. I said this is B.D. and she said “I know it.” This was the same woman who I had helped have a baby over thirty years ago. Sad to say, she told me my buddy David had got himself killed in Jackson Prison ten years before. She said Rose was living in the house with her two kids and I asked to talk to her. There was a pause and voices, then she said Rose was watching L.A. Law and wouldn’t come to the phone. Maybe if I stopped by someday with a present she’d be likable. I hung up the phone with a bad feeling in my stomach from Rose just like in the old days. The power of love to make you feel awful is something to see.
I took log trails all the way to Grand Marais and past it, picking up the shovel on the way. There was a note from Frank taped to the shovel handle: “Do not shoot it out as if you get your ass shot off we will not get to hunt and fish anymore. There is no cold beer in hell. Yr. friend, Frank.” This note scared me a bit as it had not occurred to me that the cops would shoot me.
I reached the location a half mile past the burial mounds and spent the next four hours digging a hole the size of a well pit for the Chief. I hauled him out and set him down, then sat next to him and had a cigarette and a cold beer. I put my arm around him and looked up at the moon, listening to some whip-poor-wills from along the river, and way in the distance a gang of coyotes yipping after a rabbit. I said “Goodbye, Dad” and almost cried, and gave him a shove so he toppled into the hole. By the time I filled in the hole there were the first traces of daylight in the eastern sky and I knew I had to give myself up to the law.
Now it’s October and I am a free man driving to Marquette to see the woman who saved me, Shelley, and her dingbat cousin, Tarah. I imagined Brad might be having problems getting his ten pounds of vegetables per day at the hospital. I stopped at the Corktown in Munising for a pick-me-up and felt lust in my heart for the barmaid who had a large, solid fanny. I was nervous as the thought came to me that burning up the tent and expensive equipment might be a violation of my probation. No doubt it was, but someone has to stand up for what’s right. For some reason I couldn’t remember why Jesus came into Jerusalem on a donkey and why they threw palm branches in front of him. There was the idea that back then they maybe didn’t have riding horses. Grandpa bought me a horse once for twenty bucks and you could hardly ever catch him, but you could see him at dawn and in the evening from the kitchen window, way out at the end of the field hanging out with the deer.
Shelley closed the door on her and immediately became crosser with me than ever before. She accused me of playing a trick on Tarah so that she heard a voice when she lay face down on the burial mound. This had given her a nervous breakdown as she had never got an out-loud response from the spirit world before. Shelley said she thought of herself as a scientist type and didn’t believe in this bullshit but I had to have done something to freak out her cousin who was also her best girlfriend. I said I couldn’t throw my voice like Edgar Bergen did to Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, but she had never heard of these people, which shows the difference in generations. I explained like I did to Tarah that the noise was just a bear cub crying for its mother. Then Shelley accused me of fucking Tarah when she was practically passed out from fright. Shelley was standing right in front of me so I had to stonewall it by saying that Tarah was “delusional” just like they’d said about me at the trial. It seemed to work as Shelley gave me a beer from a tiny refrigerator like a boat refrigerator over in the corner. She took a vial from her purse and snorted white powder that I knew was coke with a miniature spoon. This was out of character, I thought, as she is usually down on drugs. She said she and Tarah had been tired and sad from their problems so they bought a bunch. She offered it to me and I said no. A few years before, Bob and me met some tourist girls in the bar and went to their motel room and did some coke and whiskey. I got real excitable but my weenie wouldn’t stand up so I got drunk. The idea of paying a hundred bucks for a half-master is beyond me. My head hurt so bad the next morning I rolled around in the weeds next to the cabin and yelled.