The Summer He Didn't Die

by Jim Harrison

  Twenty-five years later while gathering his fishing gear on an early May afternoon he knew he was going to fish a stretch of creek that was favored by him and David Four Feet as a camping spot. The troubling idea arose when he looked into the darkness of his creel that we are mostly alive in each other’s minds and that we’re only dead when we’re dead to ourselves. This notion understandably made him reach for the schnapps bottle under the car seat. The liquor stung the three holes in his gums where teeth had once been but the sensation was tolerable in view of the coming desired effect.

  There was a dreaded gravel crunch behind him and he turned to see Delmore standing on the county road some fifty feet from the mobile home looking pensive which meant yet another request for brute labor was coming. B.D. decided on a preemptive strike.

  “Look. I pulled my teeth at no cost to you,” B.D. announced pointing at his own gaping mouth.

  Delmore nodded as if this feat of moral strength was small potatoes. What he wanted at the moment was for B.D. to transplant four birches and three cedars to a place behind the house as a small grove within which he would bury the urn of ashes that had once been Doris. B.D. readily agreed and added a spade to his fishing equipment withholding the information that cedars would only survive in clumps. He was in a hurry to go fishing and consent was the best tactic for escape.

  “Charlton Heston says the government is going to take our guns,” said Delmore, trying to prolong human contact.

  “Take them where? I didn’t know you owned one.”

  “Be that as it may I have a right to own one,” Delmore huffed.

  B.D. shrugged and got into the car but Delmore hung tight to the window continuing the usual blather. B.D. pointed out that Delmore could hide his nonexistent pistols and rifle in a hollow log. After all, the local police and rescue squad had been unable to find the kid down the road the summer before when he was supposedly lost in a forty-acre piece of swamp. While watching the situation B.D. had noted that four of the cops in separate squad cars were mostly talking to each other on noisy radios, and the rescue squad guys were doing the same on walkie-talkies so how could they hear the kid if he called out? B.D. knew the parents who were slovenly boozehounds well beyond his own questionable level of behavior. Just before dark when the collective rescuers broke for dinner B.D. called out, “Ralph, fried trout” and the boy emerged from the swamp green with algae-laden water and a face swollen by bug bites. When B.D. took Ralph to Delmore’s for dinner Delmore called the boy’s grandfather up in Baraga after seeing the bruises from the drunken beatings received from parents. After Ralph was fetched in the morning by the grandfather, B.D. drove Delmore down to the parents’ trailer where Delmore quietly told them they would go to jail forever if they tried to take back their son.

  On approaching a brook trout stream or beaver pond Brown Dog invariably got the jitters despite having troutfished on several thousand days of his life. He had reflected on the idea that these tremors were not unlike those preceding lovemaking wherein the heart quivered, the mouth dried, and the surroundings became diffuse. To calm himself he decided to first dig up the small cedars and birches, wrapping the roots in the pieces of wet burlap he had brought along to protect the tiny root hairs that drew in their food. While he dug he was diverted by thoughts of his impending date with Belinda that evening. The fact that she was a tad burly did not lessen the intensity of his fantasies, the idea that they might mate like bears in the moonlight of her backyard. He hoped he had a clean shirt left because Belinda was pretty high class though his experiences with the rich anthropologist Shelley had led him to believe that love could conquer his shabby wardrobe.

  Brown Dog was intensely wary and attentive in the woods except when in a pussy trance, thus he failed to see a man leaning against an olive SUV, and glassing him with binoculars two hundred yards down the road. B.D. put the trees in the trunk leaving the lid up but binding it to the back bumper with a bungee cord. He stepped back in alarm as Dirk the game warden swerved up, then jumped out with his hand on a holster. Game wardens in the Upper Peninsula had been especially careful since one had been murdered on the Garden Peninsula a few years before.

  “Dirk, it’s me,” Brown Dog whispered. Pistols frightened him, designed as they were for punching red holes in people.

  “I see it’s you. It could have been someone who looked like you,” Dirk said, taking his hand away from the holster. “Anyway, you’re under arrest for stealing from state property.”

  They both looked at the forty acres from which B.D. had dug up the birch and cedar saplings. The land had been pulped in the winter and no self-respecting hurricane or tornado could have done a better job of laying waste to forty acres of woods. There were piles of tops strewn about and water-filled trenches dug by the giant tires of the log skidder. Many of the younger trees had been fatally scarred by the falling older trees when they had been cut.

  “It’s the law,” Dirk added.

  “The law sucks shit through a dirty sock,” B.D. offered.

  “Be that as it may I’ve already radioed in the offense. I have to take you in.”

  “You want me to spend a year in jail for digging up a few saplings? I’m already on probation. I got eleven teeth pulled this morning.” B.D. pointed at his widely opened and still bloody mouth at which Dirk recoiled. “Red and Berry will be sent off to foster homes. Remember after Thanksgiving and just before she croaked Doris gave you a pound piece of chocolate cake? Delmore gave you a bonehandled knife and an eagle whistle his great-grandfather made before the Civil War. Last week Berry showed your wife a place to see all the spring warblers. We’re an American family and now you’re pissing in the whiskey? I even bought a fishing license this year in your honor.”

  Dirk was stricken, shuffling his feet in a clumsy two-step. Being a game warden could be real hard. In March he had chased a drunken snowmobiler who had hit a bump and when his outflung leg struck a light pole guy wire the force had torn the leg nearly off. Dirk had stupidly opened the snowmobile suit and once again discovered how much blood a body contained. He had gone without dinner. And then there was Doris who had been his favorite old woman on earth including his mother who was still a virago docent at the local hospital. Doris told him wonderful stories about the old days, how in the Depression when deer were scarce she and her brothers had helped their father dig up and kill three denned bears for food and how consequently the family had been afflicted with bear nightmares so severe a Medewiwin shaman had to be called in to purge them. Doris had added that a cousin over near Leech Lake in Minnesota had been so hungry he ate a trapped wolf and the next day had torn out his own dog’s throat with his teeth. Her cousin had never recovered but had disappeared north hopping on one snowshoe. Doris had finished the story by telling Dirk, “You have to be careful what you eat.”

  A compromise was reached. Dirk helped B.D. replant the trees back in their holes with the burlap intact so that B.D. could retrieve the saplings without too much labor after he fished and Dirk was in another part of the county. When finished they both looked at their surroundings without comment. Nothing man does to nature is very pretty, or adds rather than subtracts, and though B.D. earned his livelihood cutting pulp the immediate ugly results singed his brainpan. Of course within a year or two the land would begin to repair itself with new growth but the purpose of paper for newsprint, cardboard boxes, sacks, shiny sheets for magazines seemed suspicious at best.

  While Brown Dog floured and seasoned the dozen brook trout he rehearsed the catching of them. The first four had come from a cloudy eddy with worms and a Colorado spinner for visibility, the next five were caught on a Taiwanese bumblebee imitation, and when that delaminated in the manner of cheap flies from Taiwan he caught the last three trout in a tail-out with his favorite fly of all, a No. 16 female muddler with a tiny yellow tummy that he regarded as his most stable girlfriend. In another large black skillet, an iron Wagner of his grandfather’s, he made Sloan’s “Home Fries Supreme” from Dad
’s Own Cookbook with potatoes, onion, green pepper, garlic, and a little paprika. Red and Berry insisted on these potatoes often and they had the grace of being easy to make compared to the special-occasion spaghetti dish that involved frying up a whole chicken plus Italian sausage which was then added to a marinara sauce. Like any working housewife Brown Dog got home tired so did a lot of his cooking prep work the evening before. For instance he had already started a pot of “Dad’s Own Chili” for tomorrow because his hot date with Dr. Belinda was coming up, the thought of which palpitated his loins.

  He turned from the stove and saw that Berry was playing with her largish pet garter snake on the table of the trailer’s dining alcove. She was actually trying to feed the snake a browned garlic tidbit, originally a product of a cooking accident that he liked to snack on though not as much as Berry who would devour a cupful. Berry’s teacher in “special education” had sent a note home asking, “What is this young woman eating?” and B.D. called the teacher to explain the passion.

  B.D. sat down with Berry who gave him a hug. She would never be able to read, write, or actually talk but B.D. communicated with her perfectly. At the Christmas program for her special education class Berry had held up pictures of fifty different birds and imitated the songs of each so that it sounded like the birds were in the Christmas tree behind the podium. When he had taken Berry and Red walleye fishing over on Big Bay de Noc Berry had confused the gulls with her imitations so that they had followed their boat in a huge flock, driving B.D. crazy until Berry sent the gulls packing with a goshawk shriek. All birds were frightened of goshawks. Berry liked to eat raw slices of walleye with salt and Tabasco but Red wouldn’t touch it.

  “You better put the snake away, dear heart. Delmore and Red will be here for supper in a minute.” After school Delmore helped Red with his homework and now Red was getting mostly A’s. He was also the captain of the seventhgrade football and basketball teams which was pretty good for a mixed-breed boy.

  While he watched Berry put the snake away in its arranged nest in her dresser B.D. felt a blurred pang for his former undomesticated life. In one deer camp he had reroofed for rent between hunting seasons there was a big garter snake that hung out coiled around the pilot light of the propane cookstove for warmth. When B.D. would put down a skillet for breakfast the snake would vacate for the day, slithering out a burner, down the counter to a place behind the breadbox that was near the woodstove. When the days were warm enough the snake would crawl to a corner mouse hole that led to the outside world. Tavern tarts visiting for the night were horrified by the snake except for a 4-H girl from Germfask who sat by the woodstove rehearsing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” on the saw for the talent show at the county fair. The snake seemed charmed by the musical saw which was wavering and querulous as if it were a metal loon. The girl was too young at seventeen for B.D.’s taste but she avoided sexual contact in high school to maintain her reputation. B.D. didn’t mind the saw music. It wasn’t something you wanted to hear every day but at least this girl Rhonda didn’t screech at the poor snake.

  He turned to see Berry jumping straight up and down as high as any seven-year-old in far-off Africa. He had promised her a puppy after they all went down to Antrim County for the long Memorial Day weekend to pick morel mushrooms with some Pottawatomie friends of Delmore’s. Watching Berry made B.D. angry at Rose. Her mother, Doris, had described Rose as “a big rock on a narrow shelf.” You stay drunk when you’re pregnant and you got a baby girl maimed in the head. Berry’s teacher said they were lucky as far as fetal alcohol syndrome usually went because Berry was a happy child enclosed in her own world, a woods nymph whose curiosity made the natural world an endless source of pleasure while most victims of the infirmity were uncontrollable and sullen, sensing their difference from others. The teacher loaned him a book by Michael Dorris but B.D. couldn’t read it because each page gave him a heavy heart. He was at least halfway through a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude a tourist had given him ten years before. He never read more than one page at a time but the book made him want to head down that way, noting on the map that there was plenty of water in Colombia and doubtless the fishing was pretty good. The trouble was he wouldn’t be going anywhere until Rose got out of prison. He couldn’t forgive Rose for Berry but then she was scarcely asking his forgiveness, or God’s for that matter. Larger questions led his thoughts to crawl toward a vision of Dr. Belinda in a garter belt. He turned up the heat and flipped the brook trout for the extra skin crunch the kids liked.

  After dinner and a lukewarm dribbly shower from a hotwater tank recovered from a junkyard Brown Dog emerged to find Delmore playing Chinese checkers with Red and Berry who hadn’t the foggiest notion of what was going on but loved the game. Delmore and Red were tolerant as long as Berry didn’t throw or swallow the marbles. Delmore was impressed that B.D. was going off to seduce a “professional woman” and had suggested that if he did a good job Dr. Belinda might take a budget look at the kids’ teeth. They were spending the night with Delmore because of their stepfather’s hot date and Red was already protesting that they might have to watch John Wayne’s Red River for the hundredth time. B.D. had kissed the kids good night and was at the door when Delmore remembered and handed him a letter from the school district that said that in the coming September Berry was to be transferred to a public boarding school down in Lansing that specialized in her kind of infirmity. Locally they were at their wits’ end with Berry, plus their budget was being severely cut by the state but they were confident that Berry’s “socialization skills” could be increased in Lansing and one day she would find her place in society. This is a translation of the dreadful “education speak,” a language as otiose as legalese.

  Brown Dog paled and handed the letter back to Delmore. As he opened the car door he looked up at the stars beginning to gather in the spring twilight and howled at the heavens, “NO GODDAMNED WAY!,” then gave the thumbs-up sign to Delmore who was peering from the doorway with Red and Berry beside him. Berry returned B.D.’s howl with her patented whip-poor-will imitation, the melancholy musical plaint of a rarely seen avian creature, a twilit sound that introduces us to the coming dark that we forget during the day.

  Belinda, dressed in a fuchsia peignoir, answered the doorbell at nine P.M. sharp. She lived in a development called Nottingham Hill though there was no hill in the immediate area and Nottingham itself was some five thousand miles to the east. After her scruffy student days in Ann Arbor and dental school in Detroit, she wanted not only the new-car smell but the new-house smell. She wanted something charmless but efficient which wouldn’t further exhaust her after a full day spent with her hands in people’s mouths. Dental care wasn’t a high priority in the Upper Peninsula, an economically depressed area dependent on mining, logging, and tourism, and of late she had dealt with some toothy horror shows, including Brown Dog, who now stood on her doorstep looking more concerned than lustful.

  “Come in, darling.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” Passing through the foyer it occurred to him that he couldn’t recall ever having been in a new house. Above the odor of Belinda’s heady perfume the house smelled like a new car that he had recently sat in out of curiosity at the Chevrolet dealer’s. There was low music that resembled the muffled harmonies he had heard in Belinda’s dental office.

  “Is something wrong?” she blurted, having expected some kind of brazen gesture. “Do you want a drink?”

  B.D. accepted a glass of whiskey on the rocks and quickly told her of the threat against his stepdaughter, Berry, all the while staring at a far corner of the ceiling as if it might hold an answer.

  “They can’t do that. My cousin’s a big-deal lawyer down in Detroit. We won’t let it happen, kiddo.” Belinda meant to change the emotional texture of the evening.

  B.D. finished his drink and looked at Belinda through tears of gratitude. He had found an ally and they fairly collided in the middle of the living room before falling to the carp
et which he thought might be made of cat hair because it was so soft.

  When B.D. left at dawn he felt at one, or maybe two, with the loud profusion of spring songbirds, his skin pricking at the warble of warblers. Of all the nights of love in his life Belinda had proven the sturdiest combatant. He aimed to take a bedroll with his chain saw to the woods because he knew that exhaustion would set in at some point. During a halftime break they had eaten some cold roast chicken with mayonnaise that smelled and tasted like garlic. He told Belinda of little Berry’s affection for toasted garlic. It seemed obvious that females who like garlic might have some sympathy for each other. They danced naked in a circle to mysterious music that Belinda said was Jewish. True, the spectacle wasn’t ready for film but it was nonetheless joyous.

  Rather than wake the kids Brown Dog slept a couple of hours sprawled in the back seat of the car wondering if there might be a salve appropriate for his sore weenie. He put a stray jacket of Berry’s over his face to protect himself from the loud whining of mosquitoes. He had invited Belinda for dinner and supposed she might like the chicken-and-sausage recipe favored by the kids and Delmore. She likely wouldn’t be impressed by their humble trailer and maybe Delmore would consent to dinner at his house though he had an aversion to messes. The main thing was to get Belinda interested enough in Berry to help out against the government, a shadowy monster the nature of which Brown Dog had never been able to locate. B.D. thought it would be nice if there was a simple recipe book that explained the government to innocent citizens interspersed with good things to cook including photos. It seemed a raw injustice that he had only been Berry’s father for six months and now the government was bent on taking her from him, a problem that couldn’t be resolved by a few hours of fishing followed by drinks.