Brown Dog: Novellas

by Jim Harrison

  Berry took off her clothes and Delmore wrapped her in his warm flannel shirt and jacket and put her in the front seat directly behind the blower to the car heater to warm up her legs. While Delmore was preoccupied B.D. slid out a pint of schnapps hidden under the seat and took a healthy pull in the ditch with his back turned as if he was peeing. When he turned back to the car he was startled by the thinness of Delmore’s arms in his undershirt. Delmore used to be a muscleman and now time had begun to enshroud him.

  To the surprise of B.D. and Red, Delmore then suggested they take a spin to Lansing for a look at Berry’s upcoming school to see if it was acceptable. Lansing, the state capital, was about four hours to the south.

  “It’s Saturday. Won’t it be closed?”

  “You can find out everything by just looking at a building and its grounds. Are there bushes and trees and flower beds? Is there a thicket for Berry to visit? Is there a creek or river nearby? You’re a country bumpkin. You don’t know your basic buildings. If you were ever in Wayne County headquarters you’d fall to the floor in a dead faint.” Delmore liked to affect the “man of the world.” B.D. was pleased because it meant he wouldn’t have to save Berry’s life by himself.

  Red piped up that since they were headed that way he’d like to take a look at Michigan State University where he intended to enroll down the line. This irked Delmore who said that Bay de Noc Community College would be good enough. Michigan State was too expensive.

  “I can get a scholarship as a member of a disenfranchised minority,” Red said, returning to his book. He put his arm around Berry to calm her down. Berry always sensed the slightest quantity of tension in conversation which would make her tremble and her skin buzz. When old Doris died Berry had wrapped herself in one of Doris’s worn housedresses and lay in the corner for several days. B.D. had brought her back to life by driving up to Shingleton and spending a day’s wage buying her a child’s pair of snowshoes. A few days later she had returned from a snowbound trek with a dog collar with a license attached. He had called the owner who said the dog had run away several weeks before. This mystified B.D. so he followed Berry at a secretive distance taking along Delmore’s war-surplus binoculars. She always headed for their favorite brook trout creek which emerged from an enormous swamp, some seven by nine miles in size. A group of feral dogs lived there which a local sportsman’s group had tried to exterminate several times because the dogs killed deer for food not unlike the men themselves. Brown Dog sat on a hillside a half mile distant and glassed Berry in a clearing beside the creek. She was sitting on a stump with a half dozen of the normally unapproachable wild dogs milling around her. There were also a few ravens in the trees above that shared the dogs’ deer meals. It was at that moment that B.D. decided it would be better to get Berry her own dog.

  By the time they got south of Mount Pleasant the weather had turned fair and warm and B.D. reflected again on the brutish climate of the Great North where it had cost the town of Ishpeming an arm and a leg to replace pipes frozen eight feet in the ground after it had stayed below zero thirty days in a row.

  It was easy to find MSU because of a convenient highway sign. B.D. noted the campus was a pussy palace with college girls in summer skirts or shorts in full frolic, running, jumping, dancing. This clearly cast a different light on education and he offered himself a tinge of regret that he had barely made it through the eighth grade. A coach had beaten him nearly senseless before the pain made B.D. respond whereupon he had cracked the coach’s jaw with a short uppercut. Were it not for fifty witnesses on the ball field B.D. would have gone to reform school for this illegal act. Many coaches like to slap boys around from their position which offers impunity but this coach was a hard puncher.

  Navigating Lansing, the state capital, was a near disaster. Delmore insisted he knew Lansing like “the back of my hand” from visiting a girlfriend in the late 1940s but fifty years later they seemed to have changed the city. One-way streets, unknown in the Upper Peninsula, were an especial problem. Delmore fumed but then in the very shadows of the state capitol building, imposing except for what went on inside, a kindly and apparently gay policeman gave them directions. When they sped on Delmore said, “That fellow is light in his loafers.”

  The school and residential quarters were a stunning disappointment. The buildings virtually squatted in a cement-covered field beyond a cyclone fence. Beside the entrance were two starved maples in wooden planters. Off to the side a gaggle of children mooed and moaned on teeter-totters and swings. Delmore covered his face in his hands and Red said, “This place sucks.” B.D. remembered his early Bible studies well enough to think of the heap of beige bricks as the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel. He squealed the tires to get away and Berry waved at a little boy bleating and spinning in circles by the fence.

  They were a full hour north of Lansing headed home before anyone said anything about the school.

  “I wouldn’t send an Arab to that goddamned place.” Delmore’s voice fluttered with anger.

  The lump in B.D.’s throat had gradually dissipated through the grace of a sex fantasy about Belinda and now Delmore’s anger delighted him. Delmore had the wherewithal to give him a grubstake if he had to cut and run with Berry. B.D. wasn’t partial to television thinking of it as a time-gobbling machine but he had noted that when criminal types laid plans for escape they always headed south so he would confuse any authorities by making his way north. Belinda had referred to Berry as “mentally challenged” and so did Gretchen at Social Services. B.D. wondered idly who had come up with such a phrase which struck him as lame as a dead worm. In his terms a challenge preceded a fight and Berry didn’t seem to be quarreling with her mind but rather living with it in a separate world possibly more similar to that of an especially fine dog. It was clearly time to go to the humane society and get her some companionship.

  They got home around midnight and found Belinda asleep upright on Delmore’s porch swing.

  “You got your work cut out for you,” Delmore guffawed and tottered off to bed.

  Brown Dog took the kids over to the trailer. Red was asleep on his feet and when B.D. opened the door to Red’s tiny room, normally strictly off-limits, there was a line of garish photos from Penthouse on the wall above the bookcase of abstruse titles in the sciences. Gretchen had told him that he would have to give Red a chat about the birds and the bees because the school was “woefully lacking” on sex education. She had given B.D. a booklet on the subject that included unattractive and complicated diagrams of male and female plumbing as if they had been sliced in half sideways. B.D. figured that it would be better to use a naughty magazine which would offer up the beauty the subject deserved.

  B.D. walked back to Delmore’s where Belinda still snored softly on the porch swing, her head atilt so that moonlight shone down dreamily on her cheek. B.D. quivered in thanksgiving. His luck hadn’t run good in years but now before him was the gift of this great big girl who also happened to be a top-notch dentist. If he hadn’t abandoned his religion he would have knelt there in gratitude. He knelt there anyway and soon enough Belinda slid off the swing so they could go at it like love-struck canines unmindful of the noise they made. Soon enough Delmore appeared at the screen door and flicked on the porch light.

  “Jesus, I thought some animal was getting killed,” said Delmore, looking away in modesty.

  “We got carried away,” Belinda said demurely from her hands and knees. B.D. had collapsed on her back, his face buried in her hair.

  “Have fun, kids.” Delmore turned off the light and retreated.

  B.D. rolled off Belinda’s ample back with a thump on the porch boards. Her butt glowed mysteriously in the moonlight but he was plumb tired from mushrooming, the very long day, and the six-hundred-mile drive. He was fast asleep in a trice and Belinda covered him with an expensive comforter from her car trunk that had been used for less satisfactory assignations. She tingled all over with her good fortune at finding this won
derful backwoods nitwit. She had told Gretchen that B.D. filled her with an “inner glow,” which she’d regretted when Gretchen had looked off with melancholy having recently lost her own lover.

  All too bright and early Berry woke up B.D. on the porch with a fat, fresh garter snake wrapped around her arm. They were having a Sunday morning open house at the humane society and he knew it was time to fetch a pup after picking up Delmore’s Sunday Detroit Free Press which, despite the fact that Delmore had been out of the area for half a century, was read with exhaustive intensity. None of the contents meant anything to the rest of the family but Delmore liked to read aloud before Sunday dinner. “Five in Dope Gang Found with Severed Heads,” “Rouge River Catches on Fire,” “Road Rage Starts Fatal Fistfight.” In the relatively newsless area like the U.P. where “Old Finn Walks Twenty-five Miles to See Brother” made the headlines (when asked he said, “I don’t have no car”), the news from Detroit was as garish and unbelievable as anything on television.

  They were early at the humane society, a visit to which is to encompass a miniature Treblinka where neglected creatures awaited the gas chambers except for the few lucky enough to be selected as pets. To get a female spayed often meant half a week’s pay. Growing up in the waif category and having spent time in jail on several occasions put Brown Dog in a state of double emotional jeopardy. The elderly male attendant offered them tepid lemonade and a store-bought cookie from a card table festooned with yellow crepe paper. B.D. had seen the attendant, a retired schoolteacher, shuffling around town with his own three mutts on leashes. Off to the side at the end of the small building a large brindle dog was barking and Berry rushed over.

  “I don’t recommend that pup for a young lady,” the attendant said, taking B.D.’s arm.

  This naturally made B.D. curious and he walked over to where Berry stooped beside a cage. The female was a large three-legged mixed hound, a bear dog that had lost a limb in an encounter. The pup, about six weeks, had a walleye and big feet. The attendant muttered on about the irresponsibility of bear hunters who hauled hounds north then lost or abandoned them. He guessed the father to be a wild half-Lab, half-Catahoula wild-hog dog a farmer had shot for killing a calf that April. The mother growled at B.D. and the attendant while she licked Berry’s proffered fingers as if she were a long-lost puppy. The mother had been owned by a pulp cutter who had given her up after she ate a dozen of a neighbor’s laying hens. The female pup was still and taciturn in the cage and then raised its head and began howling.

  B.D. lost himself in thought. How could you separate a mother from the pup? Not having had one of his own B.D. had a weakness for the idea of motherhood. Two dogs would complicate life but then life was always complicated. Berry had entered the cage and was holding the pup who had stopped howling. The mother licked the pup and Berry hugged her large head. B.D. certainly didn’t know the word but the mother could best be described as “baleful” as she neared the end of the long hunting life for which she had been genetically designed. Bear dogs are at best canine guided missiles who, once they learn the scent of their prey, are forever fixed on pursuing bear of which the U.P. had an abounding population. B.D. figured that since the mother was reduced to three legs she shouldn’t be too hard to handle. With the pup it was simply a matter of banishing interest in bear and deer and fixing its predatory interests on harmless species such as red squirrels, chipmunks, and rabbits, or even the local raccoons who had prevented Delmore from raising sweet corn in his garden.

  “What’s their names?” Brown Dog knelt down by the pen and Berry led the mother over for an introduction. She sniffed his hand and perceived the connection to the girl.

  “The mother’s name is simply Bitch which of course you’ll change to something suitable for the young lady,” the attendant huffed. “The pup is nameless.”

  “Ted,” Berry said, one of the few words she could say. She seemed to pick up about twenty percent of any adult conversation and Ted was the name of her favorite brown-and-black teddy bear. The fact that the puppy was female was meaningless to B.D. and Berry but not the attendant who was nonplussed. Berry carried the pup toward the car and Bitch followed wagging her tail as if she knew her liberation was at hand.

  “Is your daughter O.K.?”

  “Nope. The mother drank too much schnapps when she was carrying her.”

  “She should have her butt kicked. Can you offer a contribution?”

  B.D. had seven dollars and gave the attendant five because he had to keep two bucks for Delmore’s Sunday paper. There went his Sunday six-pack. He’d have to grill the pork steaks without a beer. Delmore did most of the grocery shopping and was always on the lookout for meat bargains. He usually bought less than enough but excepted Sunday dinner from his penurious impulses. A black crony from his years at the auto factory in Detroit used to barbecue him pork steak cut in two-inch slabs and fifty years later still sent along jars of his private sauce. His name was Clyde and he visited once a year usually around July 4th. B.D. was amused at the way the ancient black man and the old Anishinabe would sit on the porch swing mixing Guckenheimer whiskey (the cheapest extant) with lemonade arguing about religion, race relations, and politics. Clyde was deeply Christian while Delmore remained proudly heathen which was fodder for quarrels far into the night.

  After finding some change on the car floor and buying the paper B.D. had enough left for a single beer. Berry sat in the backseat fairly glowing with the puppy asleep on her lap and the mother curled beside her. A man emerging from the store came close to their car and Bitch rumbled like a distant thunderstorm.

  On the way home the idea of grilling without beer overwhelmed B.D. and he detoured toward Belinda’s to borrow enough for a six-pack. He heard a whimper and turned to see if it was Berry or the pup. The pup was hungry and Berry had parted her blouse to let the pup nurse at her barely existent breasts. It was startling but being a new parent B.D. hadn’t any idea what to say. He stopped on the road’s shoulder by which time Berry had placed the pup against its mother’s teats. This girl is a lot smarter than the school people think B.D. once again decided. Berry smiled broadly and B.D. reached back to squeeze her hand. Bitch growled at the gesture as if she had decided that Berry was also her pup.

  His ignorance on how to be a parent did not stop B.D. from seeing Berry in himself as many parents note in their children when certain actions cast them far back in their own past. He became suddenly teary when he remembered his grandpa bringing home a mongrel pup they named Bud who grew up a tad feisty. Bud was thought to be a boxer-terrier mix and once when he and David Four Feet who was crippled and couldn’t run crossed a pasture to fish, a dairy bull had given them a hard time. Bud had leapt up and grabbed the bull’s ear which had changed the bull’s malevolent intentions. One of the few books B.D. had read as a child was Brave Tales of Real Dogs. Bud could go halfway up an apple tree to catch a squirrel which was somewhat less than heroic as was his tendency to make love to a garbage can.

  Just as they reached Belinda’s B.D. became unsure if it was proper to borrow from a new lover to buy a six-pack. Delmore was late on his pay for cutting pulp, also the fifty bucks per week he had coming for the shattered knee the year before. He never understood why Delmore delayed his pay so that he felt like he was sitting in a dentist’s chair. He had gone so far as to refuse to make Delmore his favorite macaroni and cheese covered with a thick lid of fatty bacon until he coughed up the money. Delmore would then set up the card table in the parlor, put on a pair of dime-store reading glasses and a visor he didn’t need, and count out the musty ones, fives, and tens from a coffee can.

  It wasn’t until he turned into Belinda’s driveway that he saw her leaning against the back of an expensive gray Toyota Land Cruiser with an arm around a burly man in a khaki outfit who seemed to teeter on a pair of ornate cowboy boots. There was a rusty twinge of jealousy in B.D.’s heart and a flash of knowledge swept through him in microseconds, a talent of our neural impulses that is either good or bad
depending on the situation. His first thought was, Another one is gone. He tended to lose women in their mating age when their biological subconscious rang a buzzer and told them he wasn’t future material. They could be drawn to him sexually but then he knew it was on the order of Ripley’s famed Believe It or Not. He tended to have brief forays with women like Belinda or Shelley, the anthropology graduate student, or with tavern tarts who were drawn to men who worked in the woods. The middle range of women with upward fantasies considered him invisible. His purest love was for the social worker Gretchen who was beautiful and intelligent but also a devout lesbian. Once when painting the interior of her house he had seen her backside in undies while she made morning coffee and his knees had wobbled so that he had to grab the doorjamb for support. That was love! Recently when he had had a drink with Gretchen to discuss Berry’s predicament he nearly brought up the idea that he could dress up in women’s clothing and she might find him temporarily acceptable. He only held his tongue because she said, “Life sucks” so loudly it drew the attention of everyone in the tavern. There were tears in her eyes from the loss of her long-term lover which he noted seemed the same as straight folks getting a divorce. When she took his hand in her grief an electric jolt went to his heart and also helplessly to his weenie.