Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  It was a fairly long stalk with lots of mosquito bites from crawling on the forest floor. He edged his head cautiously out of the two-track and saw Gretchen’s car near the house. She was sitting on a porch chair with a notebook on her lap sunning her legs in an old pale blue frock he revered that she wore for housework. The blue set off her brown eyes just so. He did his best imitation of a basso growl and she shrieked and ran into the house. He was inordinately pleased. A new career in frightening people.

  He walked up on the porch and she stuck her head out the door and yelled, “Asshole, you scared me.”

  He sat down on an actual leather sofa and she plunked down beside him waving her tablet.

  “Your eyes look awful. That’s quite the girlfriend I have.”

  He couldn’t respond. He was still angry.

  “It’s almost Memorial Day. If we want a spring cabin next year we better get started.”

  “I don’t want a baby unless I’m the legal father on paper. What am I to Susi? Or what will I be?”

  “She’ll know.”

  “I want to be a legal father.”

  “My dad’s attorney thought we should do it this way. Lawyers are always thinking about money.”

  “I don’t give a shit about lawyers. I grew up not knowing who my parents were. It makes you feel bad.”

  “I’m sorry, darling. This one will be proper. I can also have you adopt Susi. We’ll pretend we’re married.”

  “Will that make it legal?” Tears were falling profusely which had the residual effect of making his jalapeño eyes feel better.

  “Of course,” she said unconvincingly.

  They embraced and she dabbed at his eyes with a tissue. In the ten years she had known him she had never seen him shed tears. It was curiously upsetting and she tried to imagine growing up without actual parents but couldn’t do so. She recalled his profound attachment to his adopted daughter Berry and how long it took him to recover from losing her. A note would come from Rapid City every month or so, often with a photo of Berry on horseback and he would be quite overcome by the messages. “Berry is already the best rider in our 4-H club. Horses love her,” or “Berry loves garlic and the family is trying to get used to it. They don’t eat it out here.” He did not seem to have a wide or deep emotional life but he was thrilled to the core when he taught Berry numbers with garlic cloves when the school had failed to teach her anything standard. But then no one but he and Delmore could make Berry remotely cooperative except for running around the woods on Delmore’s eighty acres.

  Gretchen walked into her spacious bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed stiffly confessing that Cheryl had opened a letter for him from Long Rita. She took the opened letter from her purse and handed it to him. He wasn’t angry because he was stuck back on the issue of not having any regular parents, just old Grandpa. He glanced at the note seeing a passage where she said she missed his body which embarrassed him and Gretchen admitted it made her jealous. “How could it?” he asked. “I’ve always been yours for the taking.” She flopped back on the bed with the blue dress halfway up her thighs and for the first time ever he didn’t feel stimulated. It was startling. The spring light was eerie and misty with many musical warblers through the screened window.

  “You don’t want another baby?”

  “I’m confused. My mind is jumping around. I might have found my father’s body way back when I was diving for salvage. He was an Indian radical. I saw a photo of my mother in Grandpa’s secret things after he died. It was in a metal box. She was his daughter or Delmore’s daughter I was never sure. So there it is.” He was feeling that very mortal sense of the loss of love. A hollow chest and pain in the temples and looking at her a sense of the fragility of mere beauty.

  “You don’t love me anymore?” she said blankly.

  “I don’t know if I should. You’re like absent parents. It’s painful. Once I found a perfect hidden cabin and then I never found it again. I wondered if it was a cabin I stayed in with my mother with the memory of extreme thirst. The furniture was small and so were the windows. It was hot.” He frequently returned to this cabin in his dreams. Could the dream woman be his mother from fifty years ago?

  She hated the feeling that he was drifting away. It was painful. “What do you want from me except sex?”

  “I want to be a family with Susi and whoever else comes along.”

  She was startled. Her sexual predilections passed through her mind and she couldn’t summon up what mattered anymore except Susi and, somewhat, this man.

  “You build your own cabin. You can make money, then we’ll have a pretend marriage but a real family. I’ll hope I don’t fall in love again. Does this work? You can have me now and then. We could have a big family or not. I don’t want us to lose each other because I’ve been mean.” She got some more wet cotton to dab his eyes. She stared at him trying to figure out this newish mood.

  He was trying to figure it out too. He was totally unaccustomed to his feelings plummeting to the bottom of their reservoir toward the hidden places we all keep, but also where we protect and try to hide from ourselves and others. Now he felt thoroughly numb as if it were a photo of her next to him rather than her body and a breast wagging next to his chin. Could he remember his mother’s breast? He asked her. Maybe in your memory storage, she lied. He tongued a nipple and she wiggled then placed it between his lips. Normally this would have made him feel explosive but he was still remote.

  “Playing hard to get?” She teased and unbuckled his belt which worked because it was so unlike her. He sighed a long sigh as she pulled his pants down. “Do you want a boy?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Just a child.” He thought that for a man who loved the natural world Berry had been more than enough what with fooling the bird-watchers in Toronto with her uncanny chirping. He missed Toronto a bit partly because of the food and in part because of the nice people who seemed to know what they were doing. Why did they watch birds more in Toronto than around here where there were so many?

  Before she left to pick up Susi from the babysitter they walked out a hundred yards to the cabin site half encircled by a grove of hardwoods and firs that would give nice wind protection. They wrangled a bit but then agreed on a north-facing front which was unorthodox but had the only clear view of Gretchen’s house which he wanted. Gretchen had gotten rid of the architect and had found a set of plans from the Vermont border. The plans must have spread because he had seen such an old-time cabin over near Ontonagon on Lake Superior. He would start tomorrow working ten-to-twelve- hour days then fish for three straight through. He had done this before and it worked fine. Fishing places popped up haphazardly from dozens of years of wandering in the U.P. Right now he was thinking of the Grand Marais area and taking a short canoe called a Sportspal and paddling through five sections of land, five miles, through a particularly dense area, on a deep creek. Other anglers were unable to penetrate this area without physical suffering but he was conversant enough with the area to take hidden channels. Years ago he had seen a photo of a record brook trout of six pounds taken by a trapper who shot under the fish with a thirty-thirty stunning it, a questionable manner of angling.

  B.D. stood in Gretchen’s shower wondering at the femininity of the bathroom. He was standing in a warm hard rain with a big lump of melancholy in his chest. His was not a life of thought and he had felt his innards were strangling when he said, “I want a family.” He certainly was inexperienced sinking that deep into his own soul if that was where it was. How could a thought cause that much emotion? The dream image could slip in at any time. The woman in a hot cabin giving the baby, him, a nippled bottle of cold water that he guzzled, then washing his sticky face. Later in school an irate principal said, “You’re as wild as your father,” and then, “It’s the twentieth century, the warpath is over.”

  At that moment an animal lunged through the shower curtain at his dangling pecker. It was Bruno. He swatted him away and Bruno floundered nipping his ankles. B.
D. hadn’t realized she had brought him out but then there was no possible babysitter for Bruno. Meanwhile big Fred was standing on his hind legs outside the bathroom window watching the violence with bright eyes. He dried off with one of Gretchen’s huge expensive towels, snapping at Bruno in the air with it and careful not to get bushwhacked in the ankles. Outside he set up his transit and staked the corner borders of the cabin. He would do two rows of cement blocks and then a plate to make it easy if the cabin ever had to be moved. He was pretty fast at building forms, lowly work. He would pour cement tomorrow and have his list of supplies trucked in. He would leave time for a snack this afternoon because Gretchen had said she was making chicken curry which he didn’t like. She merely bought a supermarket roasted chicken, chopped it up, and mixed in a little curry powder and chicken stock. She had no real interest in cooking only eating and he could see a long trail into the future of doing the cooking. If you got good at anything you were in demand. Delmore had left word that he wanted a slow-cooked chuck roast on Sunday in two days. Gretchen had called to say they were married and Delmore had asked, “What are you, stupid?” Luckily, Delmore didn’t mention that B.D. might still be married to Rose.

  Fatty came chugging up in an ancient war surplus Jeep saying the sheriff needed to talk to B.D. immediately. B.D. felt a tremor of fear but it proved worthwhile. The sheriff was willing to drop charges over the stolen cell phone if B.D. would take care of a “vicious Lab” at a public beach at a local lake. The current substitute dogcatcher was a “chickenshit.” B.D. said okay never having heard of a vicious Labrador retriever.

  When he reached the beach he immediately perceived that the dog was only trying to bully bathers to throw a stick in the water for him to retrieve. There were two squad cars with flashing lights and cops with drawn pistols. B.D. borrowed a nearby rowboat and rowed down the lake where the dog had cowed a little girl into throwing the stick for him. She was plainly getting tired of the snarling dog. B.D. rowed nearby and whistled. No Lab could turn down a boat ride. The dog came at a dead run and jumped into the boat with the stick in its mouth, then lay down for a quick snooze. B.D. could think of nothing else to do so he rowed out in the middle of the lake and dozed himself. The dog had one eye open and was growling lightly, staring at him as a possible enemy. After about an hour a motor boat headed toward them from shore. The boat pulled near and an elderly couple began yelling, “Wolfie,” the woman in a high screeching voice. The dog ignored them, looking the other way. Evidently they had failed him by not throwing the stick often enough. When Wolfie was immovable the man offered B.D. twenty bucks to dock in the distance which translated into five six-packs. B.D. rowed in but Wolfie wouldn’t get out of the boat. The old couple knelt and begged him as he chewed his beloved stick to pieces. Finally B.D. stepped out of the boat, took the man’s twenty dollars, and walked to his car saying that he had to catch a plane. Bruno wasn’t the only dog asshole, Wolfie was the master of that family.

  On the drive to Gretchen’s he stopped at a bar for two doubles and a cheeseburger to make up for the curry lacuna. He felt airy from the pleasure of rowing a boat and the mystery of dog behavior; all a guy wanted was someone to throw a stick. And the extreme pleasure of owning your first cabin. He had often regretted selling Grandpa’s little farm but what did he know then? And only a bit more now. It had been a yearlong booze and pussy run and then he woke up broke. Now at age fifty the love of a woman and your own cabin sounded dandy and best of all, a family. A wife and two children whom Gretchen said would take care of him in old age. He had always been able to take care of himself but not necessarily well. Over the years he had remodeled dozens of deer cabins in exchange for staying there off-season. The trouble was waking in a cabin in January when the interior temperature was only ten degrees and it was a couple of hours before it was warm enough to hold a hammer. Also the appetite developed was enormous. He’d put a pork shoulder with lots of fat in the oven on waking and work on it all day, then start eating the minute it was done. You often had to begin the day by shoveling the heavy snow off the roof, scarcely a dream life but quite solitary and independent. He once shot a mostly albino deer but was too superstitious to eat it. Because of the message from David Four Feet’s relative by the lake he was superstitious about the spirituality of dogs except possibly Bruno. Maybe Bruno was sent to haunt him because he, B.D., had acted like Bruno in school. On the last of the drive to Gretchen’s B.D. felt wary of the cabin wondering if it could be compared to his ill-advised job as a dogcatcher to prove his worth after Susi was born. No, all his life he had wanted his own cabin in the forest. The only fear is that she would fall in love with another woman but then it was his cabin, and also his kids, and it was certainly better than her falling in love with another man.

  Gretchen was planning a picnic at the new house tomorrow or Sunday. They would put the chuck roast in Delmore’s oven and take him along. She also insisted that he show Susi, at one, how to catch a fish, plainly impossible, but no point in arguing about it. He had a difficult night on the sofa from the abominable curry plus he ate an entire four-dollar bottle of chutney which she warned him about. She had told him that Delmore had a surprise for him about which he lacked optimism.

  In the morning he hated pouring an entire half bottle of good red wine in with the chuck roast but that’s what the recipe called for. Once he’d been unable to see the point of good wine, but Gretchen had had an influence. He saved a goodly swig for himself like a Frenchman would. At Delmore’s he slid the chuck in the oven before he noticed something covered with a pillowcase on the sofa. Delmore made a little inappropriate speech about Brown Dog’s mother traveling all the way to Frazer, Montana. A lot of Chips lived there, having migrated after the whites strongly invaded the U.P. in the nineteenth century. She had fallen in love with a Lakota, the enemies of the Anishinabe, a member of the famed He Dog family (He Dog was Crazy Horse’s best friend). Delmore claimed the match was a “bad mix” and the young man as a Lakota was warlike and contentious. It was thought that he drowned in Lake Superior in a canoe while being pursued by the police up north of Newberry. He had assaulted a number of police officers. B.D. had once found the body of an Indian in the lake but it was never proven it was his father.

  Delmore took the hands of Gretchen and B.D. “Since you are married I’m giving you the wedding painting of B.D.’s parents.” The painting was amateurish but still powerful. It answered some questions and opened up more. A very big Indian in traditional dress and a lovely girl with long sweeping black hair. B.D. had had no idea his father was a Lakota but had heard rumors that he was a Montana Chip. He felt his chest would burst. Why did they have to die so young?

  “It’s for your cabin,” Gretchen said, noting that B.D. was overcome. They all drove over to Gretchen’s. Susi liked to hold Delmore’s hand when she walked which gave him an elaborate sense of self-importance. Bruno kept a sharp eye on him.

  When they got to Gretchen’s B.D. led Delmore and Susi down to the forest pool formed by the creek and tossed out a humble worm with his fishing rod to show Susi how to catch a fish. He hooked a small brook trout immediately. Unfortunately Bruno saw it as a threat when B.D. swung the fish toward the laughing Susi. Bruno leapt through the air and ripped the small fish from the hook, ground it in his teeth, and swallowed, spitting out most of it in dismay as he did with the snakes he tried to eat. B.D. jumped in the pond to rescue Bruno who had never shown signs of having figured out how to swim. B.D. rescued the head of the brook trout for Susi who put it in the pocket of her playsuit for Gretchen to hopefully find in a few days. It was a local joke to slide a fish under someone’s car seat in the summer. Quite a find for the owner.

  They nibbled on some wretched hors d’oeuvres Gretchen had bought at a deli except for one pan of oriental chicken livers she had made herself which were good. She had hung the painting of his parents temporarily in the living room. One lifelong puzzle resolved. What his parents looked like. His father was obviously a hard-ass as r
umored. Delmore said he had a book about the He Dog family but B.D. felt intimidated about reading it. He was aware of the Lakota dying violently in the old days. That was over now though peace was rarely grand. The living room was a tableau of everyone watching shyly as B.D. stared at the painting. There was the worry that if he came from the famous He Dog family who helped defeat Custer he might try to do something famous. He knew it was always a grave danger to raise your head up above others. People who get their names and picture in the paper are always fucked and always get picked on. The rule was to run to the forest at the sign of any ambition. He once saw four men fishing together which is three too many.

  That night when he dreamed he didn’t have that semi-empty place. His mother had long black hair and maybe dad was outside cutting wood for the oncoming autumn or fishing for dinner. He felt cool water in his throat. They were looking after him.

  The next day at Delmore’s for the chuck roast Delmore whispered to him at the stove, “I didn’t mean to knock you off your feet.”

  “No, it was good. Everyone wants to know where they came from.”

  “It wasn’t pretty. Your dad was a hard man. Imagine a Lakota leading us Chips. He wouldn’t take any shit from the county or state about any of our rights. It was only a matter of time before they cornered him. He’s buried in Lake Superior which is big enough for him.”