by Jim Harrison
Occasionally, as many of us know, our government can be quite literally an instrument of torture. I had to caution myself a bit here as I’ve always felt more confidence in the civil service than the collective citizenry. The upshot of the whole officious mudbath was that I lost the trail of a fantasy I was having about Ann where we were snuggled in bed at the Hotel Europa in St. Petersburg on a snowy night with my Viagras on the nightstand gleaming like jewels.
Ann as a sex object quickly dissipated when I reached the Rathbones and both Ann and Edna were sniveling at the kitchen table. Ann and Edna had gone grocery shopping in Seney and Dick was supposed to be keeping an eye on Joe but he didn’t do so because Joe was in the little guest hut and Dick figured he was fine there. Well, they chorused, wait until I see the damage done. Dick now had Joe out for a dune walk trying to calm him down because Edna had “over-reacted” by screaming.
I followed the righteous ladies out to the guest cabin, not all that enthused about viewing something disgusting. The ladies were infuriated when I began laughing so hard my stomach muscles ached. What Joe had done was to totally take apart a dozen nature guidebooks—mammals, insects, birds, wildflowers, trees, etc.—and had covered walls, ceiling, and even the floor with the colorful photos. Unfortunately, Edna said, Joe had used something called Krazy Glue so his decorating job was there to stay unless it was all entirely re-done. I said I rather liked it which sent them away, but then I finally noticed that there were also a few risqué photos of Ann included, and some decidedly meat-market-type photos clipped from men’s magazines, more pronouncedly visceral than erotic. A photo of an actual beaver was pasted near a very distant cousin. Oh well, I thought, it could be worse. A photo of Ann’s butt was surrounded by those of daisies and Indian paintbrush. No conclusions were required.
We had coffee until Dick and Joe returned, my mind still trapped by the room-sized collage, the improbable wild profusion of the natural world visually concentrated. While the ladies dithered on I began thinking that perhaps 99.9 percent of us have no idea where we are in the terms of Joe’s decorated world made large. Books and television can’t really extrapolate a world you must learn on foot as our ancestors learned it. True comprehension requires all of the senses. Joe was simply trying to surround himself with “beloved objects” as the Austrian poet Rilke put it. My mind fairly crackled with the possibilities offered by both the natural world and poetry. Typically I wondered if something was wrong with me. I had sat in this kitchen more than fifty years before and now Edna had replaced her mother. Who was this Ann with the beautiful neck? A new girl in town.
Dick and Joe came in the back door from the beach. Now the sky was reddish in the early evening through the screen door behind them. I normally wouldn’t bet a penny on my talent for intuition but looking at these two men I sensed the middle of the end.
Dick and the lawyer sat with their backs to the window in the front booth of the tavern. I was facing them so I could look out the window at the street and harbor during the inevitable tedium of legal chat. We talked for a few minutes with a nearby table of old bear hunters, having known them for decades. Everyone in town by now knew about the bear wearing cowbells and these old woodsmen thought it quite funny, speaking with great admiration of anyone who could manage the trick. These men simply ran bear with their hounds and didn’t shoot them because over the years each had taken a bear and in the ethic of their region, they were from Tennessee, a man was only entitled to one bear in his life. One of them talked about an old game biologist over in Ely, Minnesota, who was able to put telemetric collars on bears without “doping” them because the bears had known him so long. Dick told about a friend of his who lost fifty chickens to a toothless old bear who simply gummed them for their questionable juices.
We had just begun talking about the legal ramifications of Joe’s stunts when I saw Joe and Ann walking down the far side of the street in front of the Bayshore Market. Two burly hunters had finished gassing up their truck and were entering the store when Joe stopped to pet the bear hounds tethered in the truck, not necessarily a smart thing to do, as tethered dogs, not able to escape, are often ornery. Dick and the lawyer turned in their seats to see what I was watching just as the two hunters came out of the Bayshore. I could hear one of them shout at Joe who turned, startled, and the second one pushed Joe roughly away from his dogs and Joe tripped over a gas hose falling flat to the cement. Ann slapped the hunter in roundhouse fashion and he pushed her violently away.
Dick yelled “Jesus” and then the three of us were up and rushing out of the tavern followed by the old bear hunters, but by the time we hit the street Joe was wrestling half in a mud puddle with one of the hunters and the other was on his knees slugging at Joe. Ann jerked him by his hair and ear and he screamed holding a hand to his bloody ear. He lunged at Ann but by this time Dick had reached the scene and gave him a good boot to the side of the head. The very large hunter had Joe in a bear hug as they rolled in the middle of the puddle but Joe bit off the tip of his nose, the only thing in reach. The gouting red blood contrasted oddly with the dark brown mud. He released Joe with a bellow and they both stood with the man rubbing his bloody face. Ann and Dick pulled Joe away as he spit out the man’s nose tip which looked very odd on the cement.
What a mess, a grim euphemism at best. Someone had inappropriately called the town deputy. Such fisticuffs up here are generally treated as a private matter. The hunters wanted to press charges but there were ample witnesses to the first shove and there was the xenophobic advantage that Joe was local. Besides we had a lawyer at the ready. Meanwhile, Joe and Ann had walked down the grassy bank to the beach and harbor. Joe dove in to rinse off the mud and by the time I got there he was sitting in the sand with Ann. Marcia had arrived with three town dogs and Joe was back petting dogs where it had all started. He was laughing and, if anything, looked better than he had earlier. I was utterly nonplussed and sat down beside them thinking that he really couldn’t belong in this world. He might have had a chance fifty years earlier, or further back in time.
After Labor Day the weather warmed up again. Another aspect of xenophobia is that every locale seems to think its weather is particularly interesting. Three days after the fight Dick had come out with an assortment of news with possibly legal consequences. The D.N.R. had claimed to our lawyer that they had a legal right to keep Joe out of both state and federal forestlands in areas where any game-management experiments were taking place. Our lawyer disabused them of that idea in that no charges had been brought due to insufficient evidence on the telemetric collars and the cowbell matters, and the set-line infraction was a paltry misdemeanor. When Dick had tried to explain to Joe that he couldn’t put out set-lines Joe had ignored him at first, then pointed at his mouth as if to say, “I have to eat.” The plot had thickened at noon today. A logger had told Dick he had seen many armed D.N.R. officers in Joe’s area which evidently startled Joe because today the collar and cowbells were found by the game warden’s wife in their rural mailbox. For some reason this didn’t make the posse happy.
Ann stopped by yesterday to say good-bye on her way back to East Lansing. Joe was with her but disappeared with Marcia while we were having coffee. He looked fine and she looked both exhausted and exasperated. She simply couldn’t bear their redecorated quarters but anyway had to get back to her schoolwork. Joe spent hours going from glued photo to photo, she said, even staring at them when she thought it was far too dark for him to be able to see them. Was it possible, she asked, that he could see in the dark better then she could? I said that I had no idea. I sensed that her romantic feelings for Joe were finally being crippled by her inability to imagine any sort of future for them. I certainly didn’t bring up the subject of pregnancy but she did just before she left. At this state of her desperation it didn’t hurt me to be kind so I said I’d marry her if she was pregnant in order to make her life easier with her parents. I’d even send her off for a year’s solo trip to Russia and Europe whether or not she w
as pregnant, quite a honeymoon! This improved her mood and she was kind enough to say that I was welcome to come over for a visit.
Joe arrived at dinnertime today with two brook trout, one about a pound and a half and the other a trophy-sized three pounds. There was still enough of the fisherman in my past that I got out my topographical maps and he pointed dead center in a five-square-mile swamp not all that far away, certainly an unavailable location to a geezer. While I was grilling the trout over a wood fire Joe and Marcia took a skinny dip in the river and I noted that Joe’s legs were even more extremely muscled than those of the NBA basketball players I had seen. I idly thought that maybe Dick would consent to dropping Joe off in northern Ontario and I would pay a Cree family to look after him. Life in the present-day Upper Peninsula no longer seemed possible. The day for the freedom he required was past in the United States.
The early evening was warmish but somehow still autumnal. I gave Joe back his notebooks but when he tried to throw them on the still-hot coals I took them back. When he left for town, refusing a ride, he shook hands with me for the first time since before his injury, a civilized good-bye gesture. My throat thickened a bit as he and Marcia walked off down the two-track.
It was well after dark when Dick drove out to tell me that Joe had disappeared at sea. A group of brain-damaged older folks who live at what is wittily called our limited-care facility were walking down Coast Guard Point when they saw Joe dive into the harbor. Marcia was already out there swimming after geese who amused themselves by staying a dozen feet ahead of her. The chaperone of the group hadn’t been too alarmed when he saw Joe swim out of sight in a half-hour or so. By the time he called Dick it was dark and several boats were launched for a desultory search because it was everyone’s conviction that Joe had probably returned and headed into the woods.
It was about eleven when Dick first arrived and I asked him why he seemed to think Joe had kept swimming north to Canada. He said it mostly was a matter of thirty-three dollars tied up by a red ribbon on the table in Joe’s cabin, not exactly a suicide note but a gesture in that direction.
We had a few drinks of whiskey until about two in the morning questioning ourselves on why we assumed the worst, coming up with not all that much that was specific other than feeling that Joe himself had sensed that the arc of his life was over. We chided ourselves about this flimsy conclusion but couldn’t come up with anything else. As an old fish and game pro Dick came up with the dubious notion that Joe had run out of suitable habitat. I said, “But he’s a human being,” without a great deal of conviction. Perhaps inspired by the whiskey I rambled on with a mishmash drawn from the brain books and my own dimmish experience with the absolute sense of dislocation felt by many comparatively normal folks let alone those with closed-head injuries. It had occurred to me that Joe had lost a lifetime of habituation and conditioning when he hit the beech tree on his motorcycle. After nearly a year of insignificant help by the medical community through no fault of their own (there are limits to optimism not felt by the financial community) Joe set off on foot to re-map the world, or the only world his senses could tolerate. Ultimately there was not enough of this world to make his life tolerable. I had read that such people in New York City often live in subway tunnels if they are not confined in Bellevue.
I was losing Dick in my pompous droning. I said, “Oh fuck it” and our mutual tears fell. “He was a wild one, that boy,” Dick said, pouring us what he called “a final nightcap.” He began to talk about our own youthful antics in the woods but stopped himself. The simple and obvious fact was that we always had a return ticket, that we hadn’t suffered any metamorphoses by fate. Dick somewhat comically began to massage his head as if questioning its true contents. We laughed over his gesture. He decided to walk the five miles home in the middle of the night, not wanting to run into a tree and wreck his head and pick-up. Dick always said that walking for him was not much more tiring than sleeping.
When I went to bed I fretted over who would have to call Ann. Me, naturally. When nearly asleep I consciously watched dream images arise from my gray matter, from stray dogs to the time my wife, after two gin fizzes, climbed a tree in our backyard. This isn’t permissible, I yelled up to her. Clouds rolled. The moon shone. Joe laughed. Ann cried. Joe shook my hand with his hand. My dad died yet again. I looked down in the water and couldn’t see the bottom.
Some lake trout fishermen found Joe at Caribou Shoals at noon the next day, thirty miles out in Lake Superior, certainly not an impossible swim as Joe had proven. One of the fishermen claimed Joe was “nearly alive” when they pulled him aboard but the two others weren’t sure. I called Ann immediately and she said, “No, he isn’t” and hung up.
Now it is early October, dear Coroner, and I have finished my chore far beyond the call of spurious duty. His mother agreed with me that his remains should be cremated and I will go with Dick Rathbone and Ann out to his cave and scatter the ashes. Ann is angry, of course, that she isn’t pregnant. We figure some adoring, late-season tourist has packed up Marcia who would never tolerate a collar and will be quite happy with anyone who feeds her properly. Like any other mammal I am trying, moment by moment, to think of what I should do next. Joe had left us to ourselves.
Westward Ho
In Westwood Brown Dog recognized a cloud as one he had seen several years before over two thousand miles to the east out near Fayette on Big Bay de Noc. The cloud was sure enough the same one, no question about it. The question was what route did it take to California, to Westwood in particular? This cloud sighting was not remarkable in itself. In a lifetime in the woods he had witnessed three different birds (a raven, a red-tailed hawk, and a lowly robin) drop dead off their separate perches, and once while illegally pillaging a shipwreck in Lake Superior at a depth of a hundred feet or so, a very large passing lake trout had picked that moment to drop, wobbling slow and lifeless to the lake’s floor. There was a moment’s temptation to pluck it up and stow it in his diving bag with some brass fittings from the sunken ship, but then it occurred to him that the fish had achieved a peaceful death and it wouldn’t be quite right to fry it up, douse it with hot sauce, and eventually turn it into a turd. As a child his grandfather was wont to say when B.D. was sullen or depressed, “Keep your chin up, Bucko. We all end up as worm turds.”
The cloud passed away, replaced by blue. B.D. stretched in his nest beneath the immense leaves of the taro bush (Colocasia esculenta) in the U.C.L.A. botanical gardens, a bush, he decided, that was one of God’s most peculiar inventions, so unlike his native flora in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as to be from another planet. But beautiful as his dome of vast green leaves was it did not help Brown Dog locate himself as was his habit on waking. This was to break the thrall of his vivid dream life, a spell that dissipated easily when you said, “I’m in the cabin where it’s about forty degrees. The wind out of the northwest at thirty knots. November first and if I hadn’t had the extra poke of whiskey I would have got up in the night and fed the stove and it would have been fifty in here instead of forty, a weenie-shrinking dawn.” That sort of thing. How can you start the day without knowing where you are?
Or, perhaps more important, why? The answer to which is bound to be lengthy, imprecise, blurred by the urge to think that where you are is bound to be the right place on your short and brutish passage. Seven days ago he had been in the Upper Peninsula and now he was under a taro bush in Westwood in what is euphemistically called greater Los Angeles (what with lesser Los Angeles throbbing to be released on a moment’s notice and frequently springing free).
Frankly, Brown Dog was on the lam, having flown the Michigan coop with Lone Marten, an erstwhile though deeply fraudulent Indian activist, after a series of petty misdemeanors and relatively harmless felonies. His original crime had been pillaging Lake Superior shipwrecks, even removing a Native body from one, a corpse he had eventually decided might have been that of his dead father, though this conclusion was based on circumstantial evidence. Like the
proverbial collapsing dominoes, this first crime seemed to lead to others, though in his own mind he was altruistic because his abrasive brushes with the law had come from his efforts to protect a secret Indian graveyard, the presence of which had been betrayed in a pussy trance with a lovely young anthropologist. Concurrent with these legal problems was the fact that Lone Marten had abandoned him in Cucamonga two days before. Brown Dog had gone into a rest room to pee and when he came out Lone Marten was gone, and when Brown Dog had asked the attendant about Lone Marten’s whereabouts because his precious bearskin was in the trunk the attendant had said, “Beat it or I’ll call the cops,” not a very friendly welcome. He persisted, asking directions to Westwood whereupon the attendant merely pointed west. Brown Dog was a bit transfixed by the attendant’s large hoop earrings which seemed inadvisable if you were going to get in a fight. Your opponent had only to grab your earrings and you were dead meat, or so he thought as he set out for the west with a somewhat heavy heart but down a road with a comforting name, Arrow Highway.
The walk from Cucamonga to Westwood is some forty-seven miles, not all that far for a man often referred to in his home area as a “walking fool.” It took Brown Dog a rather leisurely thirty-six hours, making way for short cheapish meals and naps which he accomplished with the true woodsman capability of dozing with his eyes open. This didn’t seem the area in which you could safely close your eyes. When he had asked Lone Marten just how many people were in Los Angeles and Lone Marten had said, “Millions and millions,” the amount proved mentally indigestible. Not since the student riots in Chicago that took place while Brown Dog was a very casual student at the Moody Bible Institute had he seen this many people going to and fro. It was apparent that there was a lot going on but he wasn’t sure what. Another big crowd in his life had been the Ishpeming Bugle and Firefighters Convention a few years before but there the purpose had been quite specific. Brown Dog had stood in the garage parking lot waiting for the head gasket of his van to be replaced and had watched several hundred buglers take turns doing their best. This turned out to be more than enough bugling to last a lifetime.