Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  “Get in here. You’ll be dry and warm.”

  Gretchen got out of her wet summer bag and wiggled into the plastic container. Quite suddenly the rain let up but not the cold wind. In the remaining twilight he could see the driving snow through a crack in the tent flap.

  “This is already working,” she said, curled deep in the trash container.

  B.D. leaned out and stirred the remaining fire coals and heaped on a pile of pine branches for quick kindling, then cross-piled bigger sticks of hardwood. He shed his soaked clothes.

  “Got room for me?” He had left the other trash bag in the truck hoping for companionship.

  “If you behave,” she whispered peeking out of the container.

  He slid in and grabbed the gin taking a couple of quick gulps. She took a few sips and rubbed his nude chest to warm him.

  “We’ll be snug as two bugs in a rug,” he said.

  “Of course, dear, if you say so.”

  They lay there and then the fire caught and the wind subsided. They were rubbing each other and she parted the flaps to watch the snow falling thickly on the fire. It was dark and the fire’s eerie orange light in the falling snow looked lovely to her. Now that the thunder was gone she was feeling better with the help of the gin. She took another slug and passed him the bottle. She slid her hand down feeling the closeness of his erection.

  “We could have a third session for insurance. We should stop on an odd number. Three not two.”

  “Fine by me.” For the first time he was being allowed to run his hands closely over her body which was warm and damp.

  She abruptly made a decision. She slid down her shorts and panties and turned her back to him, arching out her bottom and thinking wistfully that this was the way all mammals get their babies. He was thinking immediately that this was the grandest moment of his life. He attacked his job with affectionate energy. Afterward they dozed for a while and then he opened the flaps and studied the scene. The world was quiet but the snow was still falling thickly. These storms rarely brought more than half a foot of snow but he couldn’t be absolutely sure they wouldn’t get stuck there if the snow mounted to a foot.

  “We best get the fuck out of here. Sit tight.”

  He pulled on his wet clothes and boots and walked to the pickup, starting it and wiping the wet snow from the windshield. He would come back the next day and pick up his gear. Despite his wet clothes he was still warm from his exertions. When he turned around she was shining the flashlight on him and half out of the bag.

  “Stay inside. The pickup doesn’t have heat.”

  He picked her up in the bag and carried her to the pickup. It took nearly an hour to make their way along the log road to the blacktop that led to town. Off to the east the blackish clouds opened and the moon shone through. She was snoring lightly within her cocoon. He had the absurd feeling of a reverse Christmas in May and remembered the holiday line, “The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow.”

  The little village had never looked better and when he knocked on the motel office door he could see the bright lights and the snow-covered cars parked in front of the Dunes Saloon. The new owner of the motel looked at him askance but was pleased to take his cash. Early May was slow in the Great North. He carried her into the room like they were newlyweds. She sleepily got out of the bag and under the covers of the twin beds, getting out of her clothes under the sheets.

  “You sleep there,” she said, pointing at the other bed.

  “It wasn’t that bad, was it?” He smiled.

  “It was bearable but I’m not intending to do it again. I got this feeling I’m going to be pregnant.”

  “I did my best. I’m heading down the street for a few drinks.”

  “Suit yourself, darling.”

  His heart was light with pleasure as he walked toward the tavern, turning around once to look at his tracks then flopping down in a vacant lot to make a snow angel. It was a fine one and he smelled Gretchen’s sweet-smelling sweat on his hands. Somehow the big trash bag had been the perfect place.

  He Dog

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  It was late on a cold, windy March night and Brown Dog stood at the open door of the tar-paper shack listening to the dogs howl in chase from the swamp to the south. Above the wind and dogs he could hear the vast slabs of drift ice grinding against each other on Lake Superior a few miles to the north. This storm had come down from the Arctic and across Manitoba gathering force like a hurricane but without warm wind and rain, without a New Orleans to suffer, only Lake Superior and the vast tracts of forest. Trees would fall but not people.

  That was the problem. When the storm had hit at twilight a dead oak had fallen across Brown Dog’s hastily devised fence impoundment and five dogs had escaped. They began to yip in the distance which meant like it does with coyotes that the dogs were closing in on their prey, likely a deer many of which were yarded up in the deep cedar swamp that offered some protection. The winter had deposited nearly three hundred inches of snow which now had a crust thick enough to support Bruno, the alpha male of the five, a diminutive mean-minded wirehaired fox terrier. Bruno had been abandoned to the dog pound by rich summer people the October before with an ample monetary gift to keep the dog from being euthanized. Bruno would try to bite his owners, often successfully, unless they grated an ample amount of Parmigiano-Reggiano on his breakfast kibble. Nothing could break Bruno’s will in this ugly habit until Brown Dog appeared on the scene. B.D. had acquired the dogs by virtue of a snowmobile accident that involved the animal control officer in this small town about thirty miles from Escanaba, the home of his beloved Gretchen and their one-year-old toddler Susi. Gretchen was widely connected through Social Services and wangled the job for B.D. who was connected to nothing practical but thought he should have a job what with being a father though he had no legal connection to the child. Being allowed after a decade of chase to close the deal was certainly one of a brief set of pinnacles in his rather mammalian romantic life.

  Frankly, Brown Dog had been stricken by difficulties since the onset of fatherhood. He ever so slightly remembered the story of Job in the Bible but mostly the part where God covered Job’s body with boils to test his faith which seemed small potatoes compared to B.D.’s problems. When he picked up the application and employment specs at the county office they were distressingly long. Why did they want to know his long gone mother’s maiden name? His only distinct tie to our society was a driver’s license. Should he admit his felonies? He doubted it, and there were great spaces in his employment history, which was negligible indeed. When he left the county office building he actually shivered in despair.

  The dogs eventually returned shamefaced with bloody muzzles. B.D. stopped at the liquor store not for his own want but to bring a stiff drink for his friend Rollo the former animal control officer, who was still in the hospital from the snowmobile accident. Soon after the first big blizzard in November Rollo had been driving down a county road shoulder at 90 mph and hit a snow covered abandoned vehicle on his Polaris ATV on which he had only made one payment. The state police measured Rollo’s trajectory at a hundred and eighty feet which was a record for the accident which was not at all rare. The previous year Rollo had broken a leg at a snowmobile rally on a frozen lake over near Sagola. He had rigged his steering and gas then bet the assembled drunks that he could pee standing on the backseat of his machine while going 50 mph. He succeeded but while taking too many waves and bows his snowmobile collided with a flimsy fishing shanty with someone in it. Rollo managed to jump free at the last moment breaking a leg. The demolished shanty caught fire boiling two pike the angler had in a pail. He was only badly bruised and put the boot to poor Rollo.

  In the hospital B.D. had to hand-feed two vodka shooters to Rollo who was hanging there in traction. Rollo was half Blackfeet from near Browning, Montana, and claimed to be the sole child of a wealthy rancher who had been struck dumb by an Indian maiden. To B.D., Rollo was quite the fi
bber. Rollo had been mostly raised, or so he said, by a dozen English setters in a pen with a platform for baby Rollo so he didn’t have to crawl in dog shit. To add credibility to his story Rollo had eaten a bowl of kibble and milk while they were drinking beer in his kitchen just before the big accident. B.D. had wondered why kibble for breakfast when you could have ham and eggs? Rollo had lost his inherited ranch in a succession of three bad marriages in a decade until one spring morning he found himself in his pickup heading east on Route 2, not unique as thousands of riffraff cross the nation back and forth on Route 2 between Coeur d’Alene in Idaho and Sault Ste. Marie in the Upper Peninsula, the northernmost cross-country route. Some are plain addicted to the north despite its absolute inhospitality. Despite being an outrageous fibber Rollo knew his dogs and was famed as a dog man who could correct the most obnoxious problems in hunting dogs and pets most often without saying a word. Rollo had equal success with women which upset B.D. with the mystery of it. Rollo could walk into a tavern on Saturday night and walk out with the best-looking girl or woman within a half hour saying next to nothing. Rollo claimed that he had learned the power of non-talk as a child from horses and dogs.

  The most critical problem of the animal control job was the employment specs that clearly stated that he must euthanize stray dogs after holding them a week for possible retrieval. B.D. couldn’t do it. He had managed in four months to talk people into adopting seven pups and nine strays through superhuman effort but these were hard times. The five he kept out at the shack, sure to grow in number, were absolute rejects. He couldn’t kill dogs because they were his spirit animal, or so he had been told at age ten by his closest friend David Four Feet whose uncle was a traditional Midewiwin who lived far back in the woods and had nothing to do with white people. This man had stared long and hard at B.D. and determined the appropriate animal from B.D.’s name, and by asking what creature appeared most in his dreams. B.D had answered “girls and dogs.” The man had wailed and sang a song in Anishinabe language and threw a burning log into the lake next to which they were camped.

  Now it was May and besides his job, the most insuperable problem in B.D.’s life was Big Cheryl. Her real name was simply Cheryl but she was a strapping woman and an endurance race champion which involved swimming, bicycling, and running for a total of a hundred miles. She and Gretchen had met at a Social Services convention in Duluth the subject of which was “How Can We Best Help Native Peoples?” That was on the marquee out in front of the convention center under which an Indian rebel had spray painted, “Go Home to Yurp.” Gretchen loved Cheryl’s whimsicality.

  In the months since B.D. visited Rollo after his accident, Gretchen and Cheryl had fallen head over heels in love, a homely metaphor if you visualize it. Cheryl was working in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, but quickly found a job in Mackinaw City on the Straits, a three-hour drive to Escanaba which meant for the time being the devout lovers could only be together on weekends.

  One weekend the second time they met Cheryl began to call B.D. “dirt bag” and he immediately responded by addressing her as “a cock-knuckling thunder pussy” which he had learned from Rollo. Cheryl promptly threw a five-punch combination which B.D. expertly avoided having been the U.P. champ street fighter in his late teens and early twenties, retiring after a battle in a bar parking lot in Sagola after throwing a hundred hard jabs into the face, stomach, and throat of a huge Finn named Feike Ferkema who had B.D. in a chokehold. The man’s head looked like a chunk of chuck roast and his little son was sobbing and yelling, “Kill ’im, Dad.” Feike kept charging and trying to get his fatal arms around B.D. who finished him with a gut shot that sent Feike to the gravel puking and flopping. That was B.D.’s last fight mostly because Feike’s kid had run in and bit him in the leg and soon after in an Amasa saloon he had seen the boxer Benny Paret die in a televised bout. B.D. never received more than twenty bucks for a bout which translated into ten six-packs, a can of Spam, and a box of Saltines. Why chance killing someone?

  “If you can’t behave I want you out of my life!” Gretchen said angrily which made little Susi begin to cry. Gretchen was sitting in a lawn chair in her green bikini and began nursing Susi who stopped crying.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll run it off.” Cheryl said with tears in her eyes. She took off at a sprint, leapt Gretchen’s picket fence, then headed down the street at an astounding speed. To B.D. Cheryl’s body was mysterious. At twenty feet Cheryl looked normal. Close up she looked normal but a lot more so. He figured she was his own size, about six foot and 185 pounds but she was half his age and in impeccable shape. True her butt and other parts were overlarge but they were smooth, solid muscle. B.D. dismissed Cheryl from his relentless sexual fantasizing because he felt a slight tinge of fear over the idea that this powerful woman could kill you while coupling if she so chose. A few weeks before they had all driven down to Charlevoix to see Cheryl compete in a triathlete contest wherein they watched a hundred women swim, bicycle, and run a total of a hundred miles. Two of the contestants even pooped their shorts. Cheryl wept piteously when she only took third because of a bone bruise on her foot. She and Gretchen embraced and wept while B.D. proudly held Susi who stuck a finger in his eye. On the way home Cheryl ate five hamburger deluxes to assuage her hunger. Later when B.D. told his uncle Delmore about the contest Delmore was cynical claiming the race must be “political.” B.D. was puzzled but then Gretchen had said that Delmore’s slippage indicated a bit of dementia. B.D. was unsure of the word but recalled that there was an Upper Peninsula rock band called Danny and the Dementias one of whose musicians in a drug haze had forgotten he was holding a lit firecracker and lost a thumb.

  “Are you paying attention?” Gretchen snapped her fingers to jolt B.D. from his reverie. She was concerned about the chicken he was grilling, two halves for Cheryl, and one half apiece for them. Rollo had spent two years on the lam in Taos, New Mexico, selling fake crystals to religious nuts. He said he wore a turban and sold the rocks which he advertised as being from Kathmandu for a good price. He went out with a waitress in Santa Fe who taught him how to make red chili and he in turn taught B.D. Gretchen sent off for fifty pounds of dried chilies and the die was cast what with the girls demanding genuine Mexican dishes every weekend. They had had Sunday dinner last week in early May at Delmore’s and B.D. made tamale pie and had to struggle to get his share. Gretchen had said that when Cheryl was in full training she had to eat five thousand calories. The notion of calories was beyond B.D.’s ken or interest. He had been brooding over the idea that Gretchen was further away from him than ever before. He was now only a cook, handyman, and put-upon uncle despite being an unrecognized parent. Meanwhile at the far end of the table Delmore was questioning Cheryl about the political aspects of her being a triathlete to which she responded with, “You goofy old fuck.” For inscrutable reasons they liked each other and after dinner Delmore put in a DVD starring Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor and managed at eighty-six to get Cheryl to dance saying that back in the forties in Detroit he was known as Delmore the Dancing Wonder. When Delmore played the movie Singin’ in the Rain B.D. headed outside and into the woods no matter the weather. Delmore was a child again liking the same movies and songs (“I’d Like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China”) and books (Your Income Tax Is Unconstitutional) over and over.

  Gretchen had lined a refrigerator shipping box with aluminum foil for comfort on cool days with wind off the lake and a weak sun. Suntan lotion was an erotic key for B.D. but far less so with baby Susi around, and the equally powerful depressant of having the first actually, bonafide job of his fifty-four years. At that moment, B.D.’s cell phone rang, the call coming from the sheriff’s office, his primary obligation as a dogcatcher but Gretchen leapt up from her aluminum foil cave, grabbed the cell phone, and shrieked, “No talking with meat on the grill.”

  He carried the chickens in the house as Cheryl came bounding up the steps. She looked like she was steaming but it was smoke from the barbecue fire behind her. B.D. mo
ved his plate of chicken and red chili sauce and potato salad to the corner of the kitchen to protect it from Cheryl while he returned the cell call. She was definitely a grabber.

  “Chief. You’re to answer all calls pronto.”

  “The Weber tipped over. My baby was in danger.”

  “That’s a personal problem. You’re on duty.”

  “I’ll send you photos of her burns. We’re at the ER right now.”

  “Be that as it may the other dog is trapped in the barn. Pick him up. Terminate if necessary.”

  “Of course. Have a nice day.”

  “Fuck you, nitwit.”

  “Let a smile be your umbrella.”

  B.D. hung up with this salutation from his fourth-grade teacher remembering when his best friend David Four Feet wouldn’t smile and the teacher, Mrs. Schmeltzer, grabbed him and with her forefingers in the corners of his mouth stretched out a smile. One of her fingernails cut his lip deeply so he bit down. Mrs. Schmeltzer fell to the floor howling. Two other teachers and the principal rushed in and started beating on David Four Feet despite his bloody face. David kept shrieking “Fuck you wasichus,” which meant “white people.” This was good old golden school days.

  B.D. was pondering strategies and eating quickly because Cheryl was eyeing his plate from the table. The sheriff had called about two big dogs who had escaped three days before and wandered over from Arnold to Perkins and had killed and partly eaten a calf. The dogs were in training as guard dogs and owned by a man from downstate Flint who without market research had decided to go into the guard dog business. In a couple of years he had sold only one to a young man who had a meth lab in the woods near L’Anse. Few if any see the need for a guard dog in the relatively crime free Upper Peninsula, especially with a shotgun and a deer rifle in the front closet, and the guard dog business had fallen into neglect.