Sundog

by Jim Harrison

  My adrenals were pumping out a hopeless amount of poison, so I studied my notes again. It had been over a decade since I had done anything vaguely journalistic, and this project was becoming more doubtful by the moment. Early in my career I had interviewed a number of famous sporting and political figures, and it was difficult to decide which produced the maximum emetic effect—the narcissistic athletes, one of whom frequently beat off in the showers after a successful contest until an injury turned him into the eight-year-old he always was, or those android parrots that pass muster as public servants. An important interview blew up when I finally said, “I'm going to make a preemptive strike and call you a lying crook and asshole, sir.” That brief moment of victory, however, didn't make up for years of boozy pressrooms and sodden by-lines.

  What I began to wonder in the middle of this sleepless night is if our man Strang ought not be allowed the grace of his private gestures. He had lived and worked in a world that no one but its inhabitants knew. Certainly the world itself must be more than the collection, the accretion, of all we read about it. It is, after all, The New York Times, the New York Newsweek, the New York Time, the New York-Washington NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS. Every summer there is a photo of a farmer in a drought-ruined cornfield in the Midwest. That's why I had lived on the East Coast for so many years—all of “us” were there. Movies and entertainment TV came from the other dream coast. Now there was the immediate question of going back where I belonged.

  It was my almost naive curiosity that kept me in town that night and the following weeks and months. By 4 A.M., with the gale outside subsiding, I began trying to sort out the ostensibly banal mysteries of personality. One need only dabble in psychoanalytic literature to see how deeply idiosyncratic we are. Catholics and Tantric Buddhists have been wise enough to accommodate this lustiness in human impulse; Protestants must subdue their heretical yearnings. They belong to the cult of self-improvement and hammer at their poor souls as if they were tract houses. The point is we are all quite different, and everyone tells us we're not. There is this inescapable, incredible variety of perception and sensation, the little parcels of experience that add up to a whole not necessarily typified by any sort of symmetric unity, but the urge of life herself.

  I put a pillow over my eyes in a vain hope of sleep. It became the kind of intensely private movie that no one but a professional would want to see. Then I heard a rooster crow for the first time in memory and was brought close to tears. A door slammed, and a diesel truck started. I went to the window naked and watched a logging truck roll out of town. In the first light the world was becoming red above the fog that eased itself across the lake, which for all purposes could be regarded as a sea or an ocean. I dressed quickly to enter this strange world. I waved good-bye to a magazine rump that stared, fleering up from the floor. It looked curiously more attractive than the night before.

  CHAPTER III

  * * *

  It was a dawn to remember with a smile on your deathbed. The sky was a vivid red as if the forest had caught fire. I drove through clumps of pink fog, recrossing the river of the day before which lividly reflected the sky. The roadside and small clearings in the forest were covered with white blooming dogwood, around which mist coiled and released like unraveling white satin. I stopped the car and shivered, imagining that I might have died and this was some sort of afterlife designed by H. Bosch and Magritte, much less vulgar than Dali; or it was life lived within a brilliantly colored seashell from which one might not emerge.

  As per instructions, I drove off the gravel road onto a two-track at exactly 15.2 miles on the odometer. There was a friendly sign that read KEEP OUT—TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT. The road was narrow and muddy, passing through a tamarack swale where the water from a small but overflowing creek crossed the road. I shifted into four-wheel-drive and roared through with a neck-snapping lurch, causing the accumulated fatigue of a sleepless night to descend with force. There was a small clearing covered with a pale, bluish moss that looked attractive for a nap. I hadn't been this sleepless since my student days, or on those rare times I experimented with Pharmaceuticals. It was a distortion similar to the actual hunger I had experienced in my late teens in New York City where as a neophyte bohemian I had bruised myself with what Rimbaud demanded of the poet, the “derangement of all the senses.”

  The Strang cabin was somehow more elaborate than I expected: first there was an open wooden gate, a grove of firs, then a large clearing on the river. It was an ample, old-fashioned, log house with a screened porch surrounding two sides and an enormous stone fireplace chimney from which friendly smoke emerged in a plume. The air smelled of dew, flowers, smoke, bacon, and coffee. Outside the door there was a battered, mud-covered pickup.

  The trouble was, no one was home. A peek in the dark cabin revealed only the glowing coals in the fireplace. I carried my briefcase down to the river, where on a small platform an easy chair sat rather absurdly facing the river. I made myself comfortable, stared at the river, and opened my briefcase. The river looked wonderful while the briefcase appeared silly and alien, so I closed it and fell asleep, thinking of George Sand's notion that the world is divided between those who want to live in palaces and those who would prefer cabins.

  First there was sun warm on my face, the itch of mosquito bites, and the cries of ravens overhead, and a soft voice. Later on she told me that my snoring had irritated the ravens and alarmed both of them as they approached from downstream. At first they had suspected a bear with its head in the garbage can. When I opened my eyes, I saw a lovely girl, medium in height, rather slender, with dark hair and eyes and olive skin. Behind her was a fat yellow Labrador in the river, swimming upstream with effort and trying to bark but choking on the riffles of water. Just behind the dog was a man standing thigh-deep in the water in a three-sided aluminum walker, the kind very old people or the injured use to get around. He held a bamboo flyrod. The man's appearance alarmed me: His hair was medium length but seemed to bristle in every direction, and his eyes were hazel-colored but cold, though this proved to be a misapprehension. He managed to give the impression of someone who is at the same time enormously vital and gravely ill: His skin was a splotched and faded bronze from the tropics, and his convalescence had taken too much of his weight, which made his wiry, corded musculature more apparent. I knew he was a little older than me, but I have never seen a man who looked so totally “used” by life.

  “May we help you, sir? You're the writer?” she asked.

  “Who else could it be? We thought you were a goddamned bear. This is my daughter Eulia. She's from Costa Rica, and she's here to see that her old man doesn't die alone. I'll shake your hand in a minute.” The punctuation is my own, as his voice tended to end a sentence on the upswing and rush onward. He literally dragged his legs out of the water and threw himself down on the bank. Eulia stooped and drew off the hipboots, revealing a maze of braces on both legs. Then the fat yellow dog shook the water off herself and lay down next to Strang, nuzzling and licking his neck. He didn't seem to mind.

  “Eulia, love, I'd give one hundred dollars for a cup of coffee with some rum in it and one for the writer if he hasn't taken the pledge.”

  “That would be fine. I was a little startled by your sign out on the road about trespassers.”

  “Not mine. This place is my oldest brother Ted's. He retired up to Alaska. He hates the world because his daughter got attacked in Detroit by this gang of young hoodlums. She wrote me down in Brazil that she got over it by spending a month in this big church in Detroit where she's the organist. She just sat there and played Bach for a whole month without hardly sleeping. I'll play you one of her tapes.”

  Eulia was partway out the porch door with the coffee. She heard Strang and turned around to put on the tape. I trembled involuntarily as the music boomed out into the glade, complementing the purling sound of the river.

  “Made you shiver, didn't it? Of course, Bach didn't get Esther over getting raped, he only helped he
r accommodate it. Tell me one real bad thing you ever got over?”

  “Give me a minute. . . .” I was startled by the question. I accepted the coffee from Eulia, whose brow was knotted with concern. “Well, yesterday I got pretty upset that my folks moved from Marquette to East Lansing when I was twelve. That's not in the league of your niece, but it was real enough to me.”

  He had pushed himself up on an elbow to drink his coffee, then he averted his eyes which were squeezed shut in evident pain.

  “Of course, those situations are pretty dramatic. They can be figured out. The worst suffering I sec back here in the States is another matter. People here suffer terribly without knowing why. They suffer because they live without energy. They can't get anything done. They lame around. It's the real and secret source of their anguish. If you think a factory smokestack is ugly, just look at one with no smoke coming out of it. These folks have trapped themselves with the help of the government and companies. We had some of those Polish boys from Detroit down in Brazil, welders and iron workers, and they'd put a harder day in than anyone I'd ever seen. They were scared of snakes, so I brought over a small anaconda to show them how sweet they could be, but one guy just plain shit his pants and fainted on the spot.”

  Now he laughed as I leaned over and flipped on my tape recorder.

  “If you don't mind?”

  “Not at all. I can't comprehend why you and your people might be interested in what I say. In the old days some companies would request that we allow the CIA to debrief us as if we'd been in some place they were interested in. I'd sit there with a guy in a hotel room and he'd crank up a recorder like that one. Maybe I'd have been on a dam in Costa Rica or up the Amazon basin or in Nicaragua. So the guy would ask me questions and I'd answer the best I could. But he would quite often disagree, even if he hadn't been there. And I would say, I really don't know politics, but I'm just giving you observations. Are your Costa Rican workers unhappy with their government? I would answer that they rarely spoke of their government because they pretty much have always had a good one. Now my dad was a goofy, old creature, but he was somewhat of a follower of Thomas Jefferson, who said the government was a mechanism to allow us to live our lives freely. . . . But you know all of this. I doubt I can tell you anything you don't already know.”

  “What did you do about the CIA people?”

  “Oh, I pulled their legs a few times and they stopped bothering me. I invented a guerilla nicknamed Geronimo. I've read a lot about Indians, so I gave this imagined revolutionary group all the characteristics of the Mescalero Apache. You better keep alert, I'm a bit of a fibber.”

  Now he alarmed me again. He began to scat, to sing nonsense syllables along with the Bach, rather well, [ thought, but his eyes weren't right. Eulia quickly gathered his head to her lap and tried to soothe him. She held a finger to her lips to silence me. Strang's right arm twisted and bulged; he tore up a sizable chunk of sod by main strength as his voice grew louder. In some very poignant way he had become the music, a sensation we have all approached, but not this violently. Eulia leaned over and kissed his mouth passionately, suffocating his song. It was not a daughterly kiss, and sweat popped out of my forehead and around my neck. Mercifully, the Bach tape ended though the kiss continued. I got up and strolled around the cabin with the dog. There was a small, lovely gaiter snake sunning itself near the woodpile. I leaned over to peer at it more closely, but the old dog darted in and ate it. I began to wish I was elsewhere. I decided to go back to the riverbank and excuse myself for the day, or forever.

  Strang, however, had become the soul of composure. Eulia was singing him a Spanish nursery rhyme when I approached to say good-bye.

  “I'm sorry.” He turned to me and raised on an elbow from her lap. “Evelyn probably told you that before I hurt myself I took this medicine. I ran out of my regular prescription, and I only had a week to go, so I took a local remedy. Sometimes I'm not too goddamn smart. They had this flume problem over in Venezuela on the Rio Kuduyari. It was only a month's job, but I ran out of my pills. Well, these Kubeo Indians have this astringent root that they pulverize that they call “dakootome” for people who have seizures like my epilepsy. Afterwards, the company got some doctors and botanists to figure out what this Aristolochia medicinalis, as they call it, does to a person in the wrong dosage. It can be both insanity and paralysis. It can let up or not. So they haven't figured out if my legs are just injured from the fall or the herb, though with my mind it is obviously the herbal remedy, but—”

  “It must be terrible,” I interrupted, trying to put him at rest.

  “Of course it is. But I figure it's my brain or my heart and soul, whatever. It's a bit like having a monster in your head that takes you everywhere, whether you want to go or not.” Now he was laughing again, and Eulia looked desperate. “What do you know about irrigation and dams? Probably nothing. I got some books for you if you still want to talk.”

  He grabbed the aluminum walker and was up in a single movement. We made our way to the cabin as he continued talking.

  “We better do our business early in the morning as I tend to short-circuit around noon. Then I have to crawl. A few weeks ago this doctor was sent up from Ann Arbor, and he started me crawling, which is supposed to repattern my brain and body to walk, if you get what I mean.”

  I had heard of the treatment and muttered something reassuring. I was given a stack of books. The cabin was full of stuffed animals and birds, and the railing and chairs had different furs covering them. Only the well-equipped kitchen was comforting. It was as if some half-crazed taxidermist had been turned loose, a hunch that later proved true in the person of Strang's brother Karl.

  “I like this crawling.” Eulia took his hand with a sudden movement, as if anticipating something unpleasant. “Eulia drives me to someplace of interest every day. I've been working on this particular creek. Me and the dog are going to trace it back to its first trickle. I've always been a creek and river walker. All land is determined by which way the water goes. I like to look at moving water. It comforts me deeply. I used to be a night swimmer, too, but my legs have gone bad. Once when I was a little boy I was swimming at night. I was trying to swim up on a loon, which is my favorite bird. The loon kept laughing and moving. It was wonderful with these northern lights shimmering back and forth across the sky at the speed of light. It helped me see where the loon was going, though she told me by her laughter.”

  He abruptly stood still as if he had become stone. Eulia led me to the door. “Please don't come back,” she said. “You'll make him sicker. He becomes too excited.”

  When I drove away, my breath returned to normal. I was wet with nervous sweat and badly needed a drink, something to eat, and a long nap.

  CHAPTER IV

  * * *

  When I got back to the hotel I washed up for lunch—certainly an unnecessary gesture—and called our tycoon—henceforth to be called Marshall—in Palm Beach. He was in a jolly mood as if he had conned this not totally anonymous writer into a state of distress in the most remote part of the United States.

  “But the whole point is that his daughter from Costa Rica told me not to come back.”

  “Strang doesn't have any daughter from Costa Rica. He has a daughter in the navy, but she's stationed with NATO in Italy. Pretty, plump like Emmeline, a first-rate kid named Aurora, an awful thing to call a girl.”

  “I take it he likes the northern lights.” I was making time, trying to get over the confusion about daughters. “What's the prognosis on this drug thing?”

  “We haven't heard. There's a drug firm in Switzerland I have an interest in that's trying to isolate the nature of its effect. My daughter's sending you a medical history. I don't want you to lose interest. Frankly, I've known him almost twenty years, however slightly at the beginning, and I'd like to see him figured out.”

  After I hung up the outdoor pay phone, I looked up into the sun and pondered the manipulative powers of the very rich. I had always been s
ecure in my trade, and a man had averred that I was a fop and said my life's work had been “nice,” certainly the feeblest of intensives; then casting about for something to do I thought of a series about real life, a series about people who do the actual work of the world but are never written about. Years ago, for a lavish sum, I wrote a screenplay for an ultramogul about thoroughbred horses. This mogul never said anything much to me before or after the project except “Make sure our horse wins.” Maybe he just needed something to read. If you have hundreds of millions of dollars, the true price of a screenplay is like a trip to a bookstore. And Marshall would be getting his story for free.

  Lunch at the bar offered a rise in spirit. It was all-you-can-eat of fresh-caught whitefish, and I polished off five delicious pieces with cold beer. The rather ample waitress told me the record was twenty-three pieces, eaten by a four-hundred-pound logger, while the women's record was seventeen. An actor once said to me that only in the Midwest is overeating still considered an act of heroism. In any event, my dad had always insisted that fish was brain food, and I felt properly stoked for an afternoon of study, reserving the evening for snooping.

  * * *

  TAPE 2: Strang's books are nearly a dead loss: Golze's Handbook of Dam Engineering, Irrigation Principles and Practices by Hansen, Israelsen, and Stringham. The third book, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's On Growth and Form is the only one more than vaguely accessible to the layman. It is about why everything on Earth is shaped the way it is, an idea that naturally never occurred to me. But what a tremendous idea! My only viable scientific observation is that I dream more on the waxing than on the waning of the moon. But dreams are certainly a dreary mess compared to the reasons why all things, animate and inanimate, are shaped the way they are. Of course, twenty pages of the book gave me a headache—such abstruse reading isn't my habit. It is midafternoon, and I wonder if Strang is crawling through the brush in search of his legs. There is nothing pathetic in the thought because there is nothing pathetic in the man. I was struck by his essential kindness toward me, toward his daughter, toward the dog, and this after being intimidated by his appearance and his comments on energy. But then I am sensitive to implied criticism to such a degree that I might roll or wobble through life like a perpetually intact egg. When I came back to the hotel after lunch, I looked overlong at a group of young nymphets playing computer games, one of whom could be best described as a ball-buster. My hostess behind the counter frowned on this stare, but it doesn't matter. What would I say to these girls? “What's your favorite color?” I have the distinct feeling that I'm in a foreign country, the sensation that this place has blurred my peripheries. It is strange how the world we think we know, the world we perceived in school, no longer exists. We think colonially. Perhaps the northern Midwest is another country, as is the Northeast, the deep South, Florida by itself, the Southwest, California by itself, and the Northwest. Why do they bother reading the Detroit Free Press up here when Detroit is four hundred miles away? Most of them don't. I am beginning to feel this disassociation strongly. When I got back to the room, my skin magazines had been stacked neatly next to my pillow. There is a sense of humor afoot. If I squint my eyes, crystalline Lake Superior could be the Caribbean. Only it isn't. Since I brought along two cases of well-joggled wine, my main problems will be food and sex. Not oddly, they're the same problems a lot of people have everywhere on Earth. This gives me a slight sense of community, the march of the codeprived. If I touched a nymphet downstairs, I'd get a bullet from a deer rifle from an enraged father. Does Eulia ever crawl through the ferns and up the creekbanks?