Sundog

by Jim Harrison

  My spirits seemed to drag under the car when I noted an Irish setter, a big male, trotting up the median strip with a jaunty gait, as if Route 75 had been created for him. As I passed, he darted toward the southern-bound lanes, where an immense semi struck him square and he was hurled brutally upward and out of view.

  It was a mile before I exhaled. My life narrowed to the gray, windswept highway, and my remaining support systems diminished into the ugliness of the blurred scenery. It was what a friend of mine, a former infantry lieutenant in Viet Nam, called the “old organ slide,” where all sense of a personal destiny is lost. For a moment the dog had become the Irish setter of my youth, but then he had died at the end of my bed one winter night. And what had become of that shy, red-haired girl I had loved as a young man in New York? It was Merlin who invented the yo-yo which mirrored so perfectly those mood shifts, before he sank wisely back into the ooze of history. Otherwise we would have had an Eichmann trial for Merlin, and the world would have been attentive for a change.

  I spent a disarming three days with my mother, mostly reading about the Upper Peninsula and studying maps, a wonderfully senseless vice. When a housecat can't figure out what to do, it merely sits down. We made an obligatory trip to the cemetery, since I wasn't going to be there for Memorial Day. (I had never been there for Memorial Day.) But first, at dawn, we went bird-watching, certainly her ruling passion. I had been worried about the apparent rate of her aging, but I could barely keep up with her as we looked for the first of the migratory warblers. These tiny birds, barely noticed by the world, were her obsession. We reached the cemetery before the gates were open and sat in the car drinking coffee from a thermos, waiting for the attendant. The earth had become lovely and pale green again after the storm passed through. A loutish gardener with a namepatch stating “Bert” appeared with keys, announcing to us, “The early bird gets the worm,” a statement Mother thought wonderful and I thought in bad taste. She saw a vireo near the ten-year-old grave which she had cultivated with flowering crab and a mountain orange. My father had been a botanist, and I came up short of knowing more than a few trees and plants. I was embarrassed to be hungry.

  “Let's go have breakfast,” she said. She was always on the money when it came to actualities: death, worms, food, Mozart, and birds owned their anointed places.

  Mother awoke me before dawn, under her lifelong conviction that all journeys should start as early in the day as possible. We were always the first to arrive at picnics, planes, ball games. I was red-eyed and frayed from a late night of studying notes and drinking an emergency pint of whiskey. The whiskey performed the function it was designed for—several hours of grace in which the drinker becomes convinced again of his viability as a human being; his personal narrative resumes structure, and the grace of knowing what one is doing returns.

  We crept out the back door after a bowl of oatmeal and fruit—I had stupidly shared with her Evelyn's diet. Our stealth was to be my brief good-bye shot at bird-watching. There was a myrtle warbler building a nest at the edge of the backyard. The bird was minuscule, somewhat like a smudgy mouse with wings. Then we made a skirmish in a clearing near a swamp to see a male woodcock in its mating flight. She told me that they perform the dance from evening until dawn for two months in the spring. I watched intently, mostly because I have eaten these birds in France, where they go under the name bécasse. I told her so.

  “How shameful, son. Think how they dance all night for love, month after month. You've certainly neglected God's plan for your life. You've been divorced twice, and your health is a mess. And you eat these unbearably lovely birds. I still love you, but it's not always easy.”

  She gave me a kiss on the cheek, then went back to the woodcock, who wheeled higher and higher in gyres, with odd little cries in the first light, then returned toward earth in an amazing, fluttering spiral. I wished him luck. I waved at Mother from my absurd vehicle, but she hadn't turned around. I wished myself luck.

  CHAPTER II

  * * *

  The lump in my stomach and chest, a combination of oatmeal and nerves, lifted after I passed Grayling and the forty-fifth parallel, a casual description of north. It was cool and clear, and the vast, hilly landscape of forest was a mottled canvas of hundreds of shades of pastel green, with tips of the taller trees buffeted and racked by a strong wind out of the northwest. The wind pushed up the paler undersides of leaves and made my vehicle buck and shudder in open areas. I listened to the notes I had made on my Japanese portable dictaphone and added to them. Large portions had been made rather optimistic and goofy by the whiskey.

  * * *

  TAPE 1: She's gone to bed with the usual string of wise instructions. I'm in Dad's study, looking at the glass cases of botanical specimens and the two walls of books, none of which piques my interest. Imagine at my age feeling vaguely naughty being here with a large glass of whiskey on the gradually warming track of Robert C. Strang. I have been given his employment folder by Evelyn's father, though with his remuneration politely blacked out. This isn't the case in the book or movie business where figures, generally inaccurate on the high side, are bandied about readily. Born in Engadine, Michigan, in 1935. Education limited to kindergarten and first grade by seizures caused by accident. Petit mal epilepsy now totally controlled by Tagonet and other drugs. After a half hour's study I see there has been no time allowed for vacations between 1953 and 1983. Holy Jesus. Started working for his older brother, a subcontractor, on the Mackinac Bridge. By age twenty he is helping building schools and missions in Kenya for the United Nazarene Mission, whatever that is, then on to Sudan on an irrigation project off the White Nile. Then to Amritsar for another irrigation project for a Swiss company, down to Hyderabad for a flood control project. Hospitalized for amoebic dysentery, returned to Miami for treatment. Then on to Baja California for work on La Paz Reservoir, a dam in Costa Rica, more dams in Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, becoming in his thirties somewhat a trouble-shooter for——Corporation—it would identify our tycoon. Two years in Uganda working on a dam project for the French, left when Amin came in. Back in Venezuela with a year's stop in Holland on their immense storm surge barrier called the Delta Project. Back to Brazil on the Tucurui Dam on the Tocantius River. Last two years ending with disaster in Venezuelan highlands. Whew. Old Pasternak said it takes a lot of volume to fill a life. Another glass of whiskey and a peek in the refrigerator. Part of a ham with a Do Not Touch sign. Ripped at it shamelessly. Back at the desk, I incriminate myself with a smear of ham fat on the glass top. What can one make of these incredible spiderwebs on the world map? Not much yet. I think of my own rather tepid trips, other than stray fishing and bird hunting expeditions. Dove hunting from a villa in Colombia, fishing from posh hotels in Ecuador and Costa Rica are not quite the same thing. Neither is sand grouse hunting in Kenya when your clothes and boots are warmed by a native in early morning chill. On down the employment record I see checks are regularly sent from the Houston office to Emmeline Strang in Manistique, Michigan, and to Allegria Menquez Strang in Puntarenas, Costa Rica. Nothing sent to Evelyn for obvious reasons. Two children by Emmeline, one by Allegria. A sudden image sends me whirling, so I pour an ample nightcap. It was against this desk at seventeen that I almost made love to my first love, “almost” because she was Methodist, thus the undies stayed on. Mom and Dad were at a convention in Ann Arbor. Over twenty-five years ago, Sheila was grinding against me, and we toppled over the chair. She wondered if she could get pregnant through undies. I brought a washcloth, and she rinsed off, rather prettily, right before my eyes.

  * * *

  There was a short traffic jam at the Straits of Mackinac approaching the bridge, and I nearly hit a station wagon in my Sheila reverie, swerving off into an exit as if that was what I meant to do all the time. At a combination coffee shop-restaurant I was told that the bridge was temporarily closed because of the gale. Once the wind dropped below fifty knots, the bridge would reopen. I felt more than a touch of claustrophobia in the
crowded place. It was unlikely that anyone among the burly truck drivers, construction workers, sportsmen read novels. Not that they made a point of it, but save for one pudgy, manic waitress there wasn't a friendly face. I left and pushed against the wind down to the shore looking out over the Straits. The waves were mountainous, and the center suspension section of the immense bridge swayed a little through the binoculars. The sand stung my face, and I felt an intolerable loneliness. I might have been born up here, but I didn't belong. I couldn't begin to imagine Strang working on this bridge any more than I could imagine writing anything about such a person. We seem to live in unapproachable little arenas, none of them touching upon one another beyond some fragile, nominal sense of a language that isn't in itself especially common.

  Another violent mood swing, but this one surprisingly positive: I had got back in my machine and treated myself to a sporty Bordeaux and a long nap. When I awoke I noted that the bridge was still not open. There was a group of north-woods types looking at my vehicle with envy. They wanted to know if I had a one- or two-ton winch. I only added it for pulling the tarpon skiff out of the water in Key West. If you leave a winch attached to your boat trailer, someone will quickly steal it for dope in that island paradise. I went in the bar and had drinks with these friendly yokels, who turned out to be from Detroit and headed north for brook trout fishing. After a number of rounds they admitted that when they became exhausted in their cross-country treks looking for fresh brook trout creeks, they would stop for a coke break, that is, a big snort of cocaine. I was amused by this new twist in the sporting community.

  The real thrill was crossing the bridge, where my dogged spirit felt true fear again. I could barely hold the lane and was whipped back and forth with my stomach and heart jumping and thumping and sweat itching around my ears. The tumultuous water below looked at least a mile away. I yelled at the toll attendant on the far side, then sped off. I somehow enjoyed being frightened in something other than a plane—an Aeroflot in a runway pirouette in Leningrad, an engine aflame over the Sahara. The only other true fear I could remember was when I had taken what turned out to be a rather nasty ballerina down to Dominica in the Windward Islands. She had one of those improbable Degas physiques, with dimples on each side of her spine above her buttocks. We had gone on a hike to look at the flora and fauna and had become lost until after dark, and she had prattled incessantly about the dread fer-de-lance, which I had thought was only a resident, among the islands, of Martinique. By nightfall she had me convinced. We finally stumbled onto a road where, according to this dancing herpetologist, these giant vipers traveled at night. At her insistence, I shipped the little tart home the next morning.

  By twilight, almost nine in the evening in this latitude, I was within an hour of the village of Innisfree—a devised name to hide its identity. I stopped and peed by a giant river, then crossed it, tipping my hat to a sandhill crane down in the elders. On the other side of the river, the road entered an enormous swamp some thirty miles in width, with very few other cars on the road. For a while the lack of any traffic caused a vertigo as if I had been abandoned. Apparently on a Thursday night in May in the Upper Peninsula no one goes anywhere, but then where would they go? You could enter schizoid Michigan in the Detroit metropolitan area, where the old West replays itself with over six hundred murders a year, the new mythology, not the quick-draw face-off, but the squalor of anonymous slaughter; then out Michigan's nether end, the U.P., as it's called, you enter a timbered-over, rock-strewn waste, a land so dense and desolate it became obvious to me that the most redoubtable survivalist couldn't survive.

  Now I was driving straight into half a red ball that was the sun; immense crows swooped back and forth across the road looking for carcasses to pick. I remembered in a confusing moment that Mother had told me to look for the ravens that favored northern climes: My confusion was over a feeling of déjà vu, of a twelve-year-old boy being driven east, then south in 1953 to a faraway home he neither desired nor would ever feel truly at home in; and the boy in a state of petulance and anger staring out of the back scat of the car at this self-same swamp, and how he may have blocked those memories of the first twelve years until he no longer understood their language, which still somehow emanated, however weakly, but was suffocated with irony and mock sophistication. Now the ravens, the puddle ducks in the swamp, the geese wheeling to land in the distance, the dead raccoon and the setting sun, the road itself, cut clumsily but forcibly through the thirty intervening years, leaving them as badly lit photos. There was then, and there was now.

  Innisfree barely existed, defying the prominence of the name on the map. Ever faithful to appearances, I neglected to check the population figures. Under a single streetlight—one of the crossroads was gravel—there was a motel that wouldn't be open for the season for another week, a wooden frame hotel with a single yellow light in the back, a darkened combination gas station-general store, a well-lit bar with a pickup and logging truck in front. Radiating out from this “hub,” there were a dozen or so visible, modest houses, interspersed with the ubiquitous house trailers with their various, junky additions. Beyond this there was nothing but a hard, driving rain and the roar of what I knew must be Lake Superior out there in the night. In the darkness it all had the aura of one of those cheapish, gothic novels. Perhaps a little girl, possessed by demons or whatever, would eat off my tires by morning. I began banging on the door of the Idylwild Hotel, my only port in this particular storm. A middle-aged lady of Scandinavian descent answered. She was so dour it would not have surprised me had she flipped a hatchet from beneath her robe and sunk it into my forehead. She literally ripped open the door.

  “What do you want, hey?”

  “A room for the night. Please.”

  “Do you have a reservation?”

  “No, but I'll take the room for a week.” I brandished a fifty.

  “You should have called ahead. I'm closed for the night.”

  “But I didn't know your name.” I still hadn't been allowed across the threshold.

  “I don't know why I pay good money to the Yellow Pages.” She looked down at my expensive luggage, which was getting wet. “Your luggage is getting wet. Next time come earlier or sleep in your car.”

  “Thank you.” I pushed in with a glad heart. Nobody could get me out of there now. In a grandiose gesture, I bought a half-dozen skin magazines from a rack.

  “Hunters and fishermen buy those. Nobody from here ever bought one of those.”

  I looked down with despair at fifteen bucks worth of porky rumps with splayed apertures. Maybe there would be some articles. “I need directions for the morning to the cabin of Robert Strang—”

  “Absolutely not,” she interrupted. “He won't see anyone but these specialist doctors his company sends. You're no doctor, that's for sure.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I've never sold a filthy magazine to a doctor. They come up here for natural beauty.”

  I drew some folders from my brass-latched Buitoni briefcase. “It is of the utmost urgency that I see Mr. Strang in the morning. There is a considerable amount of money at stake.” She peered at the papers doubtfully, but I could see that she needed glasses by the red mark on her nose bridge. She drew a precise map, showed me to my room, and said, “Good night, don't let the bedbugs bite,” one of my mother's perpetually repeated witticisms.

  It was a night I would remember poignantly but not wish to repeat. Insomnia opens the door to previously untraced memories, makes a mockery of the good sense that possesses us at high noon, and any effort we make to channel our thoughts twists the energy, rebukes us with half-finished faces, sexless bodies; we learn again that our minds are full of snares, knots, goblins, the backward march of the dead, the bridges that end halfway and still hang in the air, those who failed to love us, those who irreparably harmed us, intentionally or not, even those we hurt badly and live on incapsulated in our regret. The past thrives on a sleepless night, reduces it to the awesom
e, distorted essence of all we have met.

  These thoughts left me staring at my travel clock and listening to the gale on Lake Superior, which owned all the harsh throatiness of Kenya's grandest male lion, one of which had roared at our Rover's headlights, his entire massive head and mane drenched with blood.

  Then it was that I heard an honest-to-god scream that jellied my bowels. I leapt to the window, grabbing the sill to steady the dizziness caused by the sudden motion. The bar was closing, and you could see the moon above the streetlight, and the sheen of the moon off the whitecaps foaming over the breakwall in the harbor. At first I couldn't see anyone, but then there was another scream, and a woman followed a large man into the circle of light. I couldn't see their faces, but her voice was hard and clear. “I know you fucked my little sister, you sonofabitch—” She dashed in and slapped him hard. He continued walking up the centerline of the highway through town. “I've got proof. She told me herself. ‘I fucked him, Charlene, what you going to do about it?'” Now Charlene kicked her husband in the ass and grabbed his hair. He somehow continued walking, now nearly at the edge of the dark. “You did it to my little sister, you cocksucker, and I'm going to fuck everyone in town. I might just cut off your dick when you're sleeping. You'll be sorry.” He had disappeared into the dark up the road when I heard him bellow, and she streaked back through the circle of light as fast as a deer. What did this Charlene's sister look like that this lummox gambled on endless grief?