Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  He did doze and he did fall over but only scraped one palm on the cement. The Director and Berry came back out for a few minutes and Berry was a tad cheerier, especially with Ethyl to pet.

  “Your surprise is getting closer. I just gave directions,” the Director said grabbing Berry’s hand and walking swiftly back toward the hospital. Ethyl tried to follow but there was a shrill whistle from a block away out beyond the parking lot. Ethyl took off toward the whistle and B.D. had the maudlin thought, Now I’ve lost my dog, but then he saw something that made his heart jump. Out in the parking lot a woman looking like Gretchen got out of a car that looked like Gretchen’s. Unable to believe this B.D. swiveled around until he was looking back toward the hospital. His skin prickled.

  “B.D., it’s me,” she called out. “I’m here to drive you home.”

  It was as if the sun had risen in the middle of a stormy night. He didn’t dare turn around and then a kind of paralysis seeped into his system. She sat down beside him and took his limp hand.

  “I know it’s been a hard time for you.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Everything is for the best. We’ve got to haul ass. It’s Friday afternoon and I have to be to work Monday.”

  They all had a goodbye lunch at a plastic picnic table outside a McDonald’s. Gretchen and the Director sipped sodas and ate granola bars while shuffling papers. B.D. and Berry ate with Berry sitting on his lap. She was fairly happy having perceived that she didn’t have to go back to the hospital. B.D. and Gretchen were quite overcome and plans were discussed to come back to South Dakota around the Fourth of July for a visit.

  Gretchen drove B.D. to the sleazy motel to pick up his bag and he had this idea that they should rest up because he had already paid for that day and night.

  “Just get your bag, you nitwit,” she laughed. She was wearing a blue summer skirt that thrilled him to the core.

  PART III

  “I was hoping to take a look at this Corn Palace.” B.D. had been dozing but it seemed like every time he opened his eyes there was a billboard for the Corn Palace, a building constructed out of ears of corn. Since he had worked often as a carpenter he couldn’t imagine corn as a building material. It was probably like cheap brick facing. “Why would they put up a building made of corn?”

  “So that geeks like you will stop in Mitchell, South Dakota, and spend money. The weather is shit anyway and I’m tired and hungry.”

  It was sleeting and the thermometer in her Honda Accord had dropped to freezing from forty in the last hour. She steered downtown encircling the Corn Palace which indeed was made of full corncobs though they were the only tourists and downtown was pretty much closed. Gretchen chose a higher-end motel back out by the interstate because there was a restaurant attached and she didn’t want to drive any farther.

  “We’ve been talking all afternoon but I can’t stop thinking about intrauterine pollution.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Chemicals from the environment get into the womb and affect the baby’s teeth. I live too close to that stinking paper mill.”

  While she checked them into the motel B.D. reflected on her endless monologue on possibly having a baby. Since he was to be the sperm donor he first had to have a physical checkup to make sure he wasn’t diseased.

  “I’m thirty-three. I have to come to a decision,” she had said.

  “That’s the age Jesus was when he died,” B.D. had said lamely.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. I’m confused about being a sperm donor.”

  “It’s easy. I don’t want to do it in a doctor’s office so it will happen at my house. After your checkup you’ll whack off into a syringe bulb and I’ll inject it you know where.”

  “I have my dignity,” he had said, copping the line from one of Delmore’s Perry Mason reruns.

  “You’ll get over it.”

  “Why can’t I just put it in for a few minutes?”

  “The idea is repellent to me.”

  While she was in the motel office it occurred to him that he associated repellent with the insect repellent he smeared on himself, especially in June when blackflies and mosquitoes were active in the trillions when he was fishing.

  “You could drink a bunch and take one of your tranquilizers,” he suggested.

  “I’m a victim of anhedonia which means my neutrality is probably an organic response to trauma.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I’ll explain it over dinner.”

  Their two rooms were adjoining but when B.D. opened his side he noted that hers was still locked.

  “Your door is locked.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She took a quick shower and he got a hard-on just listening to the water run. He would have perished from lust if he hadn’t found a two-ounce shooter of Canadian whiskey at the bottom of his duffel.

  At dinner her soapy smell made his tummy quiver. So did his Seafood Medley for $9.95 for different reasons. It was all deep-fried and tasted like it had spent a lot of time on the bottom of a boat in the hot sun. Gretchen was kind enough to give him one of her two very tough pork chops though there was no gravy, just a slice of apple dyed red. She had ordered a bottle of white wine but he had never thought of white wine as actual alcohol so he opted for a couple of double whiskeys.

  “You could say that whiskey is my wine,” he said raising his glass and she clicked it with her own.

  “Apparently.”

  “I’ll pay for it,” he said drawing out a ten-spot.

  “Delmore gave me enough to bring you home. He’s getting sentimental. We met a number of times and even danced at the American Legion fish fry to a band called Marvin and His Polka Dots.”

  “It’s true if you say so.”

  “He even asked how women make love to each other and I said, ‘Mind your own beeswax,’ and then I told him I had given up sex for the rest of my life. He said he gave it up at age seventy because women kept borrowing money from him.”

  “I can’t believe you two being friendly.”

  “He has a motive. He’s eighty-eight years old and he’s worried about you and Berry. He’s not worried about Red who Cranbrook wrote him about and said was the best young math student they’ve ever had. Anyway as his nephew you’re his only close living relative. I had to tell Delmore that it’s unlikely that Berry has any memory of her brother.”

  “He never admitted I was his nephew.”

  “Well, you are and we agreed you need a short rope so I’ll likely end up as your guardian.”

  B.D.’s mind whirled and he signaled the waitress for a third whiskey. Most of everything was going over his head because he was not one to think of the future. Up until Berry had entered his life the future was limited to the next day at most. Nearly every day he cooked food when he was hungry and slept when he was tired.

  “You were going to tell me why sex is repellent.” B.D. could practically smell 6-12 and Muskol in the air though you had to be careful about getting it in your eyes or you couldn’t tie a fly on your leader.

  “I’m tired of being sunk in mental shit. I can’t talk about it now. Besides, you don’t look so physically repellent after three glasses of wine.” She leaned back, yawned, and stretched revealing her belly button, that sacred nubbin that connected her to a thousand generations before her.

  “I’m telling you that if you drink two bottles of wine you’d be on me like flies on a cow’s ass.” He knew his words weren’t quite right but the sight of her belly button was a jolt to his inner and outer beings.

  “You can do better than that.”

  “Like a monarch butterfly on a daisy.”

  “You’re a daisy!” She shrieked with laughter.

  “Like an old maid sitting on a warm cucumber in her garden.”

  She leaned forward smirking and parted her blouse so he could see her left braless titty.

  “In high school I was known as Miss Prick
Tease,” she laughed.

  B.D. felt he was bubbling inside as Gretchen walked toward the cash register. Her body mystified him as it was far too slender for his normal taste. She had told him she had taken dance classes for fifteen years to “burn off anger” and that likely accounted for her tight build. On the way back down the hall to their rooms she stumbled and he caught her. She gave him an almost hug at her door and he thought of breaking his plastic key so he could enter through her door but she grabbed it and opened the door for him when he fumbled.

  “We could have a nice glass of water for a nightcap,” he said through her adjoining door.

  “Sorry, kiddo. Right now I’m undressing. The squeaking sound you hear is my butt rubbing against the door.”

  “You can’t do that to me. I won’t sleep. I got a hard-on like a toothache.”

  “Just whack off. Get in practice as a sperm donor. Say your prayers. Think about your mom.”

  “I don’t have a mom.”

  “I’m sorry. I misspoke.”

  He lay down on the rug and squinted through the quarter-inch space under the door. He heard her lights turn off. Lucky for him that he had darted next door into a liquor store when they had stopped for gas in Chamberlain and she had gone to the toilet. He sipped at the first of three shooters staring up at the creamy void of the ceiling. He slept on the floor until five AM then rushed to the bed to get fair use of the room cost.

  Mum was the word in the morning except when he couldn’t work the coffee machine and called out to her.

  “Is this a rapist trick?” She rushed in wearing a short robe and while she got the machine going he leaned far over from his position at the end of the bed to get a peek up the back of her robe. His vision reached midway up her thighs so the effort was worth it except that she turned around and caught him.

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  “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 catsup 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 Belinda, 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 h
is 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.