Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  All of this passed through his mind with the speed of a full-length movie accelerated to a screen time of seconds. He turned off the ignition and tried to glare at Belinda and her affectionate friend who was a big sucker but with jelly around the waist. They advanced with smiles and she introduced her friend as Bob, a prominent writer who was doing a piece for a national magazine on the rural poor of the great north. Bitch had become unglued so B.D. got out of the car. She didn’t seem to mind Belinda so it was easy to see that Bitch would be a bit slow with men. She hung her head out the car window and growled until they withdrew to Belinda’s porch. Bob and Belinda had lived together in a communal house in Ann Arbor while attending the University of Michigan. Bob had covered war stories in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and different parts of Africa, but had recently married and decided stateside was a safer bet for a man who hoped to raise a family. B.D. couldn’t help but ask him about why all these warriors in foreign lands shot their automatic rifles in the air in celebration. The question was, didn’t they know that the bullets had to land somewhere and might kill innocent people? B.D. was mindful of this because once he and David Four Feet had shot arrows straight into the air and an arrow had stuck in David Four Feet’s head. When David had started screaming Bud the dog had bit him in the leg. Bud didn’t like loud noises and whenever possible enforced this aversion.

  “They don’t care if they kill innocent people,” Bob said with an air of such ineffable melancholy that B.D. regretted the question. “How much did you make last year if I may ask?” Bob continued, taking out a notebook.

  “I made about five grand cutting pulp for my Uncle Delmore but then you have to add in fifty bucks a week I get for an accident which pulverized my knee. A tree kicked back on me.”

  “Kicked back?”

  “The branches hit another tree which kicked back the one I was cutting. Sort of like getting kicked in the knee by a big plow horse.”

  “That amount is the same as a first-class ticket from Chicago to Paris,” Bob said to Belinda with a sigh.

  “I wouldn’t know, I fly business. But the flight’s ten hours and he makes that in a whole year,” Belinda said irrelevantly. Belinda caught B.D.’s longing glance at the refrigerator and fetched him an imported beer which B.D. noted cost as much for a single bottle as his discount six-pack preference. He then sipped his beer and listened carefully to a quarrel develop between Belinda and Bob about the usual social engineering in which creatures like B.D. were referred to as “the people.” The radical patois was unfamiliar to B.D. though he remembered a few phrases from his time with Shelley who had gone to the same college. Gretchen had told him that rich people always presumed to know how the dirt poor should live their lives. B.D. was aware that Bob’s deluxe SUV out in the yard had set him back fifty grand which would require the entirety of seven years of B.D.’s earnings, though that assumed that you spent nothing on food and shelter.

  “I’ll pay you five hundred dollars if you drive me around for two days to see the poor,” Bob said, then paused as if waiting for B.D. to bargain.

  “You should be able to do it in two days. It’s not like you’re overhauling an old Plymouth without the parts.” B.D.’s mind virtually swooned at the idea of five hundred bucks. Red wanted these special athletic shoes which were expensive because they were named after an NBA basketball player, and Berry needed a new winter coat because she had wrapped hers around a dead deer down the road from the trailer. An early April snowstorm had concealed both coat and deer and by the time B.D. discovered them in the melting snow the coat was odiferous. He would also secrete a few bottles of schnapps here and there in the woods for a rainy day, also buy a big ham to cook as Delmore was always coming home with a small smoked pork shoulder. Other items trailed off, like boots that didn’t leak and Red wanted a subscription to a magazine called Scientific American.

  Bob and Belinda sat there idly thinking about the relationship of the poor and overhauling an old Plymouth. Bob offered two one-hundred-dollar bills as a down payment for which B.D. signed a receipt. Bob suggested that they start “at dawn or a few hours thereafter” which puzzled B.D. so they settled on eight AM.

  Out in the yard Berry played with Bitch and Teddy. Bitch got along pretty well what with missing a hind leg. Belinda served her a pot of chicken soup after quarreling with Bob over whether or not to warm it up. B.D. noted that they quarreled like old lovers over matters as remote as whether they had taken five or seven hits of LSD before a Detroit rock concert. Bob wandered off in some ornamental bushes and sipped from a flask he took from his back pocket which meant he was a not-so-secret drinker. When he said goodbye and got back into the car B.D. was momentarily puzzled over what Bob was after in the local poor. Did he just want to look at them and describe them in the written word? Who would want to read about these people among which B.D. numbered himself? Who were the folks that found this interesting and why? His friend Danny had lost a leg the year before when his crushed foot had caught an infection and he couldn’t afford a hundred and fifty bucks for an antibiotic. B.D. had seen Danny’s foot which looked like a red-and-gray catcher’s mitt and stunk to the high heavens. What was the point in reading about Danny’s foot? B.D. reminded himself to ask Gretchen about this matter.

  When B.D. arrived back at Belinda’s house at eight the next morning Bob looked a bit rough with pinkish eyes and ultraslow movements. He was leaning against his SUV’s fender speaking into a Dictaphone: “I am embedded in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a little-visited area of characterless landscapes, of impenetrable forests and vast swamps laden with algae and densely populated with virulent flying pests of every description. On a hike at dawn I was lost in a local swamp and my face is now puffy and ravaged by bug bites . . .”

  Bob went on and on and B.D. looked at the tiny slough at the back of Belinda’s yard and figured that was how Bob had gotten his pants wet to his knees. Belinda had already left for work and B.D. stood there gnawing on a messy chunk of leftover pork steak he had brought along and listening to Bob continue with the Dictaphone: “. . . and on this rutted dirt road which reminds me of the Mississippi Delta are the tar-paper shacks of pulp cutters who supply logs to the local paper mill which may very well supply the paper for the magazine you now have in your hands, gentle reader. Must our forests be cut for this purpose? Advanced environmentalists think magazines should be limited to the Internet while paper companies point out that the trees are going to die of old age anyway and thus loggers can be thought to be merely euthanizing our forests. Meanwhile whole families live in these tar-paper hovels and beat-up trailers where the children are poorly clothed and fed and education is paltry within this ancient triage of survival.”

  B.D. was confused because Belinda’s home was smack in the center of Escanaba’s most expensive housing development, but then he figured it was not for him to question the procedures of a famous writer though he was irked by Bob’s final Dictaphone sally: “I am being escorted today by a big, rawboned Indian logger who looks like he could make mincemeat out of Mike Tyson. He has been clearly brutalized by the hardest labor possible and is functionally illiterate. You who live on the Mary Poppins playground of the eastern seaboard are in for a tough ride as I offer you material to soil your lily-white left- and right-wing hands . . .”

  B.D. was pissed because to his mind only Indians were Indians, those who practiced the life and religion like the Chippewa people he had met at the winter powwow including the mysteriously traditional Midewiwin tribal members. Even Uncle Delmore barely made the cut though Aunt Doris had certainly fit the definition. B.D., despite the high probability of his mixed blood, simply thought of himself as a backwoods workingman. He was also irritated at being described as illiterate because every few years he took an evening off to write down his thoughts and he had read all of his grandfather’s library of Horatio Alger, James Oliver Curwood, and Zane Grey. Alger had advised “hard work and pluck” though pluck seemed to be a hard-to-define item. He had also spent idle
time in the past decade reading over half of One Hundred Years of Solitude a rich cottager had given him when he delivered a couple of cords of firewood. B.D. knew he couldn’t last a minute with Mike Tyson who could knock down a dairy cow with a body punch. It was clear that Bob didn’t know the first thing about the sport of boxing.

  Their workday continued poorly with a visit to Doris’s cousin Myrna up north of Gladstone. Myrna lived near a shabby rural enclave but her own cabin was as neat as a pin. Myrna served them a slice of blueberry pie and Bob seemed disappointed that she owned a computer and was well versed in the lawsuit against the BIA over unpaid or lost royalty moneys. Myrna was steamed because she had knitted four hundred pot holders for a home-work company and never got paid. Bob swiftly offered to look into the matter but Myrna seemed to doubt his effectiveness and said that the company had a Chicago address and a nephew was a steelworker in nearby Gary. The nephew intended to look into the matter armed with a ball bat just like in The Godfather which she thought was a wonderful family movie. When Bob began to quiz her on the life of poverty Myrna was less than cooperative though she said that she had started paying her own way at age seven and since she was currently seventy-seven she had worked nearly seventy years in what she called the “free-market economy.” The local tribal council had bought her the computer so she could e-mail relatives. Myrna felt lucky she had been smart enough to make a living. She said it was harder in the old days when one winter there were few deer and her family had had to eat their plow horse.

  When they left Myrna’s cabin Bob and B.D. had a modest squabble over Bob’s desire to meet someone who was more of an “Indian Indian” and B.D. said that Indians were just people and didn’t go around acting Indian all day long. Their conversation further declined when Bob whined that he had had to devour three Viagras during his night with Belinda to “achieve parity” with her rapacious sexual needs. Back in their university days other young men in their communal household had barred their doors while Belinda stalked the halls looking for an angry sex fix. B.D. had long since ceased to judge women as sexually promiscuous as himself but this news about Belinda hurt a bit because he felt they were still on the first flower of their love. There was the question that he had become so domestic what with raising Red and Berry and trying to make a living that he was no longer a lover known far and wide (in the U.P.) for his considerable bed energies. A select few women like Belinda required extra effort and he had fallen short.

  This maudlin mood kept getting interrupted by Bob working his cell phone and his OnStar phone at the same time. Bob talked to people in New York and D.C. while B.D. drove the fancy Land Cruiser, the dashboard of which reminded him of the gizmos in the cockpit of the plane when he had had his own jet trip. Rather than seeking out the poor Bob kept having him drive up high hills for better phone reception. At one point he was impressed when Bob shouted, “Tell National Geographic to kiss my ass.”

  B.D. had assumed that they might share a six-pack on their journey but Bob insisted that alcohol even in its slightest form could steal the incentive for the work at hand. This was after B.D. had driven into the yard of a casual half-breed acquaintance known as Larry Big Face and they were met at the fly-covered screen door by Larry’s old mom who had a goiter under her chin as big as a football. She heated them up some beavertail stew but when Bob started asking questions all she would say was “Fuck you, white boy” which Bob found discouraging. Her son Larry was in jail for throwing someone out through the window of a bar up in Ishpeming. Bob offered her his hip flask and she downed its contents in seconds but still wouldn’t answer any questions. “Mind your own fucking business,” she screeched. They left in a hurry when her pet, a vastly overweight raccoon, waddled snarling out of the bedroom. Out in the yard Bob said he suddenly had to go to the toilet and B.D. pointed to the outhouse over near a pen that contained a furious billy goat.

  B.D. doubled back from Sagola over through Crystal Falls to Iron Mountain so that they could have lunch at Fontana’s and hopefully a beer. Bob was talking on his cell phone when they walked into the back of the restaurant and he collided with a doorjamb but seemed not to notice. B.D. had observed that when cell phones weren’t working properly people would hold them up and stare at them in betrayed puzzlement.

  In the restaurant their workday effectively ended when Bob noted a locked cabinet of expensive wine, then sniffed the air and smiled his first smile since arriving in the great north. B.D. ignored him and chatted with a foxy waitress he had bedded years before during a women’s bowling tournament in Escanaba. B.D. had visited the restaurant several times when flush and had always ordered the “Roman Holiday” which included a meatball the size of a baby’s head, a big link of Italian sausage, plus gnocchi and spaghetti all drowned in an excellent but not very subtle tomato sauce. In the old days you could get a side dish of half a garlic-roasted chicken for two bucks if you were really hungry.

  After washing up in the toilet B.D. paused extra long for an unwise, critical look in the mirror. He tried very hard to ignore a twinge in his jaw which might mean yet another tooth had armed itself and was ready to attack its owner. He was also worried about a local news item on the radio he had heard while Bob was in the outhouse wherein a fishing friend Marvin, also known as Needle Dick, had been apprehended on his motorcycle with a female passenger going 120 miles per hour in a 25 miles per hour speed-limit area up in Marquette. Marvin had resisted arrest by throwing the cop over the top of his squad car and would miss Christmas this year.

  “I’ve designed a meal for us,” Bob said when B.D. arrived at the table. B.D. thought, There goes my Roman Holiday, but then in the darkish corner of their banquette he saw three opened bottles of wine and Bob was starting with a martini. The alcohol embargo had been lifted and what’s more Bob slid three hundred dollars across the table.

  “I’m having to cancel us until a later date. I’m headed for Afghanistan on a fifty-grand story.” He was pounding the table with his cell phone for emphasis then gestured at the wine. “I haven’t had a decent meal in nearly two days. We’re celebrating by trying out a lot of the menu.”

  What a day. What a night. They were frazzled after lunch and slept for a while in the car in the restaurant parking lot. B.D. judged the meal as wonderful indeed until halfway through and two bottles of wine, which Bob drank like beer or cool water, when Bob began to cry. Bob had been in Rwanda and told B.D. that he had no idea what it was like to see thousands of men, women, and children who had been hacked to pieces. B.D. agreed, but that didn’t close the matter the descriptions of which scarcely jibed with the marinara on the gnocchi. B.D. thought, The man has been on the go for a decade and though he’s thirty-three he looks like he’s pushing fifty and when he eats it’s as if the substance is far greater than the food mixed with his falling copious tears. Delmore had spoken of his nervous crack-up before leaving Detroit and B.D. figured that was what Bob was experiencing. B.D. made bold and asked if this was the right time for Bob to return overseas. “I’ve spent all my earnings on wine, women, and song in the capitals of Europe. Now I have to feather my nest. My wife, Tanya, likes five-hundred-dollar scarves and shoes.” B.D. was working on his T-bone and couldn’t digest Bob’s information. The T-bone was aggravating his newly sore tooth though Bob’s word paintings of the outside world made his own life appealing.

  It was just before dark when B.D. dumped Bob off in Belinda’s yard. Bob had bought and drank an additional two bottles of wine for the drive home. Belinda didn’t want him carried into the house because he had pissed his pants. It was a muggy evening so she covered him with a pink sheet to protect him from mosquitoes.

  “I was unfaithful to you with Bob,” she said, shaking with tears.

  “I know it.” B.D. gave her a hug. It had been since Christmas and the death of Doris that he had seen anyone cry and now even educated people were falling apart.

  “That asshole told you, that fat-assed motormouth. Now you probably think I’m a catcher’s mit
t,” she sobbed.

  “I’ve never once thought of you as a catcher’s mitt, darling.” He held her tightly while watching Bob roll over in his pink cocoon. It was hard to get a clear view of what was going on in his life.

  Delmore was miffed when B.D. got home. He said he had prepared a fine dinner but Red and Berry had given their portions to Bitch and Teddy who had taken up residence under the porch rather than in the brand-new doghouse Delmore had bought. B.D. glanced at the wastebasket beside the kitchen counter and noted the three empty cans—one had contained a popular beef stew, the others corn and tomatoes. The fact that the kids steadfastly refused to eat Delmore’s “secret recipe” did not prevent him from trying it again. B.D. figured you didn’t have to be a great cook, just passable. In between sexual bouts at Belinda’s they had watched her favorite programs on the Food Channel and B.D. realized he would never be able to chop onions like Bobby Flay or the burly, red-haired Italian.

  “The daughter of Sappho called. She says she needs you badly. To mop her floor or what?” Delmore’s dislike of Gretchen was boundless.

  B.D. called Gretchen who was capable of only sobs and hiccups, then said good night to Red and Berry who were watching the kind of contemporary horror movie where a monster shoots out of a woman’s bare chest and bites off the head of her fatally startled lover.

  “We must learn to accept our losses.” Gretchen’s voice was slurred. There was a bottle of Canadian whiskey on the kitchen table before her and she wore a loosely wrapped violet-colored robe which bespoke spring in B.D.’s heart. This was the rarest of all occasions when he didn’t feel like drinking. He had been well behind Bob in the wine sweepstakes at lunch but still had had enough to want to avoid a “doubleheader” which is what getting drunk twice in one day was called in the U.P.

  In truth B.D. was being thrown about Gretchen’s kitchen like a ping-pong ball by moral ironies. On the one hand Gretchen had always admired his great talents as a listener which centered itself in actual curiosity about what people said, a rare claim in itself. While he sipped his whiskey and she gulped hers she compared her loss of her lover Karen to his coming loss of Berry. This made B.D. bilious with anger so that he finally downed his drink in one gulp. Gretchen’s Karen had written her a taunting and cruel letter from New York City where she was ensconced with a soap opera starlet.