The Summer He Didn't Die

by Jim Harrison

  The morning after his abortive swoon over Gretchen B.D.’s sore tooth pulsed erratically like Gene Krupa on his first drum set. At dawn on his narrow and shabby bed he thought he might levitate with the pain which exceeded that of his crushed knee the year before. You could somehow keep knee pain at a mental distance but the toothache embraced his consciousness so that he hoped he would be lucky enough to have a semitruck run into his face. His remnants of youthful religion were neither very broad nor deep and it hurt to talk but he found himself silently praying, “O God of heaven and earth heal this toothache.” Nothing much happened except that he remembered his baptism by immersion as a teenager and how a girl named Evelyn emerged from the tank in a wet white dress and you could see the whole works. The preacher had always prayed that the congregation be free of lust but that had seemed a dead-end project. He waited until six A.M. to call Belinda who said she had been up much of the night talking to her rabbi in Detroit about her sexual addiction. B.D. stared at the phone as if he were hearing information from outer space. Belinda told him to come in just before noon and in the meantime to indulge in ibuprofen and whiskey.

  “Your bicuspid is on the fritz,” Belinda said. “I’m going to have to jerk it.”

  B.D. stroked her bottom through her crisp green dentist’s smock as she slapped the gas mask on his face. When lunch hour was in the offing Belinda worked with greater energy and since this was Thursday the diner down the street would be offering meatloaf with generic gravy. B.D. had developed a courageous erection and she was amused to feel it wilt under the power of nitrous oxide. A girl had to love a man who caused so little work. Despite her two-hour chat with the rabbi she wasn’t fool enough to think her preposterously strong urges would dissipate overnight. The rabbi had put her in touch with a sexualaddiction encounter group up in Marquette less than a hundred miles to the north. She thought that the encounter group would doubtless be populated by people from the local university, the kind that were forever finding something wrong with themselves or others and frequently both at the same time. The most exhilarating aspect of living in the Upper Peninsula, unlike Ann Arbor, was discovering how slow the people were to complain about life’s brutal vagaries. The working class didn’t complain about hangovers because if you had enough money to get drunk in the first place you were in fine shape.

  Belinda jerked B.D.’s bicuspid in a trice, perhaps prematurely, but then she was anxious to meet Gretchen for lunch and it was hard to forget the time she’d arrived at the diner late and they had sold out the meatloaf special. When she had recently reached the age of thirty she had developed a taste for food not unlike her mother’s inept cooking. Gone were the days when she lived a block from Zingerman’s deli and the world’s best food was in immediate reach. Now she had to wait a whole day for FedEx. Only that morning she was dipping into her Vacherin cheese when Gretchen stopped by for a Percocet for her hangover. She once again lectured Gretchen on limiting her affections to one woman even though she admitted that her own versatility left her emotionally awry. There was always the chance she would meet Mr. Right in the sexual-addiction group.

  The girls were almost done with lunch when B.D. showed up with a cheek full of gauze and stupidly had a spoonful of Gretchen’s meatloaf gravy before Belinda could hoover all of it. The salt in the gravy soaked through the gauze and B.D. was left kicking the air. Bertie, the owner of the diner and an old friend of Delmore’s, brought over a water glass of schnapps from a secret kitchen stash. B.D. sipped it through a straw wedged well back in the good side of his mouth.

  “You didn’t do anything to me last night, did you?” Gretchen teased.

  “Nope. I’m not that low,” B.D. muttered.

  “Yes you are. The last thing I remember was when you shoved your keys off the table to look up my legs. Then I blacked out so you missed your chance if you’re being honest. I woke up and my robe was wide open and I thought, Oh no, have I committed a heterosexual act in my drunkenness?” She and Belinda laughed heartily while B.D. hid his face in his hands so that they couldn’t see his actually emerging tears. Had he tripped over his temporary nobility just because he had obeyed Grandpa’s dictum of not making love to a drunk woman unless you’re drunk yourself? Would a single kiss on the mons veneris have been amiss? Such ethical questions brought only despair and he drew deeply on his schnapps straw. He looked at Gretchen in her pale blue sleeveless summer blouse and his heart fibrillated. He wanted to say, “I know our love is never to be but why tease me?” Sometimes women were too vicious for words. It was like a Valentine where you got shot through the heart. Before coming to town that morning he had seen Bitch catch a woodchuck, then play tug-of-war with the carcass and Teddy, and then they sat down and ate the woodchuck including the feet. B.D. felt like the woodchuck and brushed away his tears. Belinda and Gretchen looked at him with uncertain sympathy and both reached out a hand for his. Despite their cruelty he trembled with either love or lust but then they seemed to be inextricably entwined.

  B.D. waited until the Fourth of July weekend for his reconnaissance trip to see Mugwa in Canada. Delmore had become more traditional referring to Mugwa as “Frank” so as not to enrage the bear spirits. B.D. noted that Delmore had begun to use more and more Chippewa phrases remembered from his youth. Red was snarky and embarrassed when Delmore began praying and burning some cedar branches at dawn but then Red had won a scholarship to a science camp and went away for three weeks. Berry was lonely for her brother who treated her with uncommon kindness for an obnoxious teenager. B.D. had some doubts about leaving Berry alone with Delmore but figured that the weekend of the Fourth was best for the Canadian trip. He’d have to buy a new shirt and trousers and perhaps a fly rod because his old one was so wrapped with duct tape it made him look low-rent. It amazed him to see how expensive fly rods had become but then he hadn’t owned a new one in over twenty years. New clothing was even more problematical until on a side street he found a fly-by-night shop featuring “discounted items” including everything from plastic dishware to tires to vitamins to clothes. He felt lucky to buy a khaki fedora with a fishing theme, an embossed trout leaping for a bumblebee, and a Hawaiian shirt with a print of young folks in an old Ford convertible riding down a road under palm trees. At first he resisted the five-buck price tag on a green polyester sport coat that had the added advantage of making him invisible in a thicket but then bought it when the diminutive olive-skinned clerk assured him that he would look “swell” in it. Also it was the same shade of green as Gretchen’s bikini when they had taken Berry on a swimming picnic on the shores of Lake Michigan the week before. They were afflicted by sand flies and B.D. got to rub some bug dope on Gretchen’s back while she took care of the rest. She’d laughed when his hands had trembled. After they had eaten their fried chicken and deviled egg picnic Gretchen had slept on the blanket for a while and B.D. had brought his head very close to her body and fluttered his eyes in order to take hundreds of mental photos of her body. He paused overlong on her belly button as if to parse the mystery of birth reflecting again how he’d never known the woman out of whom he had popped. He felt blessed when Gretchen turned over and he was able to take frameable mind shots of her backside. His heart swelled and he waved away Berry who was trotting from a path of beach grass with a large black snake wrapped around her arm. He was uncomfortable with his tumescence and slow to admit that Gretchen might as well be another species. Ever since Belinda had joined the sexual-addiction encounter group he had come up short on the lineaments of gratified desire. The group had agreed Belinda should limit herself to twice a week which didn’t quite do the job for either of them. She had also become angry at him when he’d laughed at her melancholy story of an English professor who masturbated relentlessly over a student he loved. New rules were in force making it illegal for a professor to have an affair with a student so the girl had given the poor teacher nude pictures of herself in order that he might abstractly consummate their love. Belinda had tried to help the man but his ta
ste was limited to small, skinny females. B.D. had thought this very funny and Belinda had shoved a large cinnamon roll in his face. Professors were in the same boat as he was with Gretchen.

  The road to Sault Ste. Marie lifted his spirits. In a lifetime noteworthy for its lack of domesticity the last nine months had nearly crushed him. He had developed an intense sympathy for all of the ordinary folk who had followed the nesting imperative and spent so much energy raising another generation. It simply enough filled their lives like it did his own and there were no longer those thousands of hours indulged in the dimension of stillness, the fishing and hunting and directionless wandering with the only route offered by curiosity, living in borrowed deer camps which he’d fix up for rent. Not counting beer money you could live on a few bucks a day. A can of Spam, a can of beans, and a head of cabbage filled your tummy supplemented by fish and venison and berry picking. Once in the fall a hunter had given him a bear heart which he had slow-roasted but the night had haunted him with bear dreams. That was what worried Delmore about his Canadian relative they had chosen to help save Berry. If you owned bear medicine it was to be treated with total secretiveness and modesty or you were asking for trouble. It seemed proper, however, to have a nephew with a blood connection be central to the project.

  Canadian customs passed B.D. through with a few questions and a wave. “I’m here for the lunkers,” he said, meaning large trout, adding he was headed up to Wawa and maybe the Nipigon. On the other side of the barrier the line of Canadian cars trying to enter the United States was massive. Delmore had explained that ever since the disaster of September 11 the U.S. had tried to tighten its borders but the three-thousand-mile line shared with Canada was an improbable task. Delmore claimed that he could drive a herd of elephants from Canada into Minnesota unnoticed. To be sure terrorists could cross Lake Superior into the U.P. but Delmore questioned what they would find worth blowing up. B.D. strenuously ignored the news. With little solid knowledge but possessing a large imagination the idea of killing thousands of innocent people was far beyond his ken to be stored with the other immense question marks life so generously offered.

  When B.D. pulled into the parking lot of the Black Cat Strip Club he guessed that the large round man sitting on an old Harley was Mugwa. The man had a shaved head except for a long pigtail and was shirtless with a dirty leather vest. Driving closer B.D. could see an amateur RED POWER tattoo on his shoulder which was massive at close range.

  “That’s a dumb-looking hat, cousin,” Mugwa said in greeting.

  “I’m disguised as an American fisherman.” B.D. took off the hat and stared at it. He was startled when Mugwa embraced him.

  “I kept telling Delmore on the phone that Mugwa is my actual name. I tried to steal a bear cub when I was a boy and got mauled.” He turned and lifted up his vest revealing the scar tissue of claw marks which were whitish against his brown skin.

  “Delmore doesn’t listen too good,” B.D. said.

  “You’re supposed to say, ‘Delmore doesn’t listen too well.’ Bad grammar is just another excuse white men use to hold us down. I was a bouncer here for two years. I still get a discount on drinks.” He lit a joint and took a mighty suck in the broad daylight of the parking lot, then handed it to B.D. who took a small polite puff. “This shit keeps me from getting drunk.” Mugwa then made a gesture toward an alley and three more large Natives came toward them on motorcycles. “Our brothers. They’re involved in the plan.”

  Inside the club and after two beers it occurred to B.D. he had never felt safer in a drinking establishment. Delmore had told him that when he was a boy on Beaver Island they once got a thousand pounds of lake trout and whitefish in their net on an overnight drop. Unlike many tribes in the U.S. they rarely suffered a protein shortage. Mugwa’s three “brothers” said nothing though one offered B.D. a big piece of moose jerky that was delicious with cold beer.

  “It’s a nothing muffin. We’ll pick you and the girl up on Whitefish Point and run you over to Batchawana Bay or up to Wawa, and then you can stay with me until this blows over. We’ll run an American flag on the fish tug. I went a step further than Delmore and talked to my cousin Rose in prison, your so-called wife. She signed her permission to have Berry carted off to Lansing. She’s a drunken bitch and doesn’t want to take care of her own daughter when she gets out next year. She told me that she’s going to rob banks when she gets out. She always was a pissant. When we were little she beat my tricycle to pieces with a ball bat.”

  B.D. was agitated. They had finished their business but the dancing girls weren’t due to appear for nearly another hour, at five P.M. Delmore had demanded that he come back that evening if humanly possible whatever that meant and now B.D. was facing a four-hour drive without an ounce of hoped-for stimulation.

  Mugwa guessed the source of B.D.’s unrest, went backstage, and retrieved a stripper still in her street clothes.

  “This is Antoinette. She’s from Quebec City and won’t speak English for moral reasons. She’s going to give you a grand deluxe fifty-buck lap dance.”

  Antoinette moved a chair free from the table and gestured B.D. over. She wore a white blouse and a loose summer skirt and looked like an especially irritated coed. B.D. felt a smirk rising on his body and bowed to Antoinette who glanced away in boredom and said something in French to Mugwa.

  “The rules are you can’t touch her. Keep your hands at your sides,” Mugwa explained.

  B.D. ducked when it looked like Antoinette was going to kick him in the head. She slowly raised a foot high above her own head and lowered it softly on B.D.’s She slipped her skirt and blouse upward in this precarious position and threw them in B.D.’s face. Now she stared into his eyes as if with evil intent like Faith Domergue in Delmore’s favorite old movie, Kiss of Death. Her body was similar enough to Gretchen’s to further unnerve him. She slipped out of her bra and panties and put them over his head and around his neck in an aggressive parody of strangulation, then flopped onto his lap writhing then suddenly yawned and pretended to sleep. He caught her scent of moist lilac and despite his swoon he reminded himself to keep breathing. If only it were Gretchen! Antoinette deftly swiveled until she was crouched yowling like a lust-maddened female cat with her bare butt in his face. He was achieving a permanent memory. His warrior friends at the table laughed in unison with her feline yowling, and then B.D. began to black out forgetting to breathe. Mugwa jumped forward and caught him in mid-fall. B.D. stood there dizzily. Antoinette kissed his cheek then snapped the head of his protuberant penis under his trousers with her fingers as if it was a large marble. She flounced toward the backstage door letting off one more feral yowl that shivered what was left of B.D.’s timbers.

  “I made love to her once and afterwards I spent a whole hour in the St. Marys river before I resumed my human shape,” Mugwa said. The warriors nodded sagely.

  B.D. reached home just after darkness fell parking at the trailer in case Delmore and Berry had gone to bed early. The road home had stretched his nerves thin, with the warm confidence engendered by Mugwa and his warriors disappearing in the frightening performance of the stripper. When they all had parted in the parking lot they’d stood in a circle holding hands and making shattering war whoops except for B.D. who could only manage a screech. To B.D. these guys were “old-timey” Indians who did not fit under his easygoing social umbrella of hard work, poverty, alcohol, cooking for the kids, gathering enough firewood for two homes for winter. They had an extra inexplicable feral edge not totally unlike the stripper. All women were potential members of his fantasy life but if Antoinette walked up to one of the many tar-paper hunting shacks of his life he’d have to climb through a window and run for a swamp. There had also been a close call on reentering the United States when an INS officer started barking at him and he was saved by another INS officer whom he used to talk to about fishing at the Elks Tavern on the American side of Sault Ste. Marie. This brought up the question of if he escaped to Canada would he ever be able to
return? He had a hard enough time in America let alone a foreign country though the U.P. and nearby areas of Ontario surely looked the same. This brought up the immediately unsolvable question of why they were different countries. Delmore liked to listen to CBC on the radio and it took a while to determine specific differences. Canada certainly carried far less of the attitude of the world big shot.

  Walking down the dark gravel road B.D. was struggling to remember the words to the national anthem when he thought he perceived an orange blur of flame at the far front corner of Delmore’s house. He broke into a short run but then saw two shapes around a campfire half-shrouded by the lilac grove. Coming closer he saw it was Berry roasting marshmallows and Delmore sleeping sitting up wrapped in his bearskin. Berry waved a burning marsh-mallow at him and grinned. She was wearing Delmore’s old fur-collared bathrobe which Doris made for him. According to Doris turtle clan people were always cold like their amphibian counterparts. B.D. was embarrassed to see the contents of Doris’s medicine bag spread on Delmore’s lap. He didn’t know much about such matters but the bag had been willed to Berry and needed to be protected from Rose if she ever returned after getting out of prison. He had heard about the soapstone loon pipe that was said to be a thousand years old. There was also Berry’s dried umbilical cord, a few bear claws, turtle scales, and an eagle-bone whistle sent by a cousin of Doris’s out in Frazer, Montana. A hunting party of Chippewas had gone west out of curiosity and the U.S. government wouldn’t let them return to the U.P. so they had to stay in Montana. Some were Windy Boys who had relatives in Peshawbestown, north of Traverse City. B.D. had no idea what to do so he settled on worrying about Berry and her marshmallows and how all that sugar was liable to keep her up late into the night whistling her repertoire of birdsongs. It wasn’t bad listening but you kept waking up thinking it was early morning.