Sundog

by Jim Harrison

  * * *

  I was surprised by a long nap, waking to a beautiful late spring evening. I walked along the harbor beach to give an edge to my appetite. Someone's little mongrel followed me, and I was kept busy throwing sticks for it. Frankly, I was touched on some stupid level that this dog wanted to play. When it followed me to the steps of the bar, I bought a raw hamburger patty and took it back out the door, but the dog was gone. There was the question of what to do with the hamburger. I put it in the pocket of my bush jacket.

  Unfortunately, the evening special was the same as lunch —a move to a cabin with a kitchen was definitely in the offing. I had scarcely picked the batter off my first piece of fish when Eulia fairly strode into the bar, stopping in front of my table without a greeting. I stood up so precipitately that I spilled my beer. Her face was dark, and her eyes glistened with tears of anger.

  “You're to disregard what I said to you. Come out at daylight. Please don't upset him.”

  She rushed out before I could respond. I was so upset I only poked at the rest of my food. She had worn the same sort of fashionable, sporty clothes that my obnoxious ballerina had worn. I ordered the first of many double whiskies and spent the night chatting about the world at large with the bartender-owner, who had an insatiable curiosity which made me an insatiable talker. I got up to go at closing time, and he squinted at me in such a way that I knew either some advice or a pronunciamento was coming.

  “You be careful of those Strangs. They can be a rough bunch. I don't know nothing about Robert because he was always overseas. Now Ted got pissed off and moved up to Alaska a hundred miles from anyone. And Karl is over at the maximum security prison in Marquette. I'd a lot rather have an NFL football team after me than Karl.”

  “What's he in prison for?” I was a bit groggy from booze and incipient violence.

  “That's not for me to say.” He turned away and began counting the till.

  CHAPTER V

  * * *

  I arrived at Strang's at 6 A.M. sharp, with the buffered senses of the habitual tosspot. The pickup wasn't there, but I could see Strang sitting on the easy chair at the river's edge. I guessed Eulia had gone somewhere and suppressed a dangerous feeling of disappointment; few people other than true students of love, of which I number myself, can recognize the first discomfiting, almost hostile signs. Strang didn't turn at my approach, though the dog wiggled her fat butt frantically.

  “You should have been here a few minutes ago. Three otters swam by, really hauling ass. You know, jumping and diving as if the world were a circus. I'd like to introduce an otter to a porpoise. They might get along well.”

  “Why's that?” I sat down next to the snake-eating dog and flipped on the tape recorder.

  “I read that the less animals have to work for a living the harder they play. Life is fairly easy for otters and porpoises, which is the exception.”

  “I see that you never took any vacations. Are you good at play?” I was trying to throw a curve.

  “Oh, bullshit. People are quite different. You can only draw very simpleminded conclusions from animals. My work was my play in that it always gave tremendous pleasure.”

  “Marshall said you used to rappel down the faces of dams.”

  “I was looking for pressure cracks. Dams have cracks just like boats and ships, only you can't let it reach a bilge pump stage.” He laughed deeply at the idea. “I didn't like waiting for a sequence of hanging scaffolds so I borrowed this mountaineering equipment from an engineer. It was wonderful. I could bound around like a goat or bird. I had seven-league boots!” Now he turned and smiled as if I were a long-lost friend. “Eulia drove over to Marquette to get me some kneepads. I been wearing out my knees and trousers with this crawling.”

  “Should I ask you if you had a good crawl yesterday?” The dog eased herself into the river for no apparent reason.

  “You might say I had a fine crawl. I covered too much ground and then had to get back. I goddamn near croaked getting back, and Eulia was crying. She admitted she told you not to come back, and I said that was bad manners. Nothing upsets me besides my brain.”

  “Did you see anything extraordinary? How long did you crawl?”

  “About five hours or so. I was the hungriest I've been in weeks. Eulia made me a version of paella, and I feel asleep on a cushion before the fire. I dreamed about the time our whole family, all seven of us, went on a picnic because Dad's old Plymouth was going to turn over—you know, break a hundred thousand miles. Eulia wants to get another dog because Miss here is afraid of everything but birds. I said no, so she got me a machete to wear on a sling on my back. Yes, I saw something extraordinary. I was eyeball to eyeball with a fawn not more than a day old. I saw some bear poop that was steaming, so I changed course. I saw two male bluejays fighting. You're so low to the ground you revert a bit and you get some strange memories that could frighten you. There was this girl when I was twelve, the loveliest girl I ever knew on earth. . . .”

  Then he stopped and drew his breath in sharply.

  “What is it?” I had warmed to the conversation and hoped not to lose him after a half hour. There was also the consideration that Eulia wasn't there, and I had no idea what to do if he were to have a seizure.

  “I just saw a bad picture. I was back in the woods on a cold, windy day late in October. I was near her house, the shack she lived in with her parents and sister. I was watching them pack their belongings on this flatrack truck. When they were nearly done, she went in the house and out the back door. She came out in the woods and kissed me good-bye. She knew I was back there because we had this signal like a raven's voice. That's where I was just now. I hope I'm not driving you crazy along with myself.”

  “Not at all. I find it interesting.” I was making a vain attempt not to sound like a psychiatrist. He read my thoughts and laughed.

  “I had to talk to a lot of those boys when they were trying to find something to counteract my self-doctoring.”

  We took a break, went into the cabin and cooked some breakfast. He positioned himself before the stove and expertly cooked some brook trout and scrambled eggs, warming some tortillas that Eulia had made. He rambled on about specifications for company jets, Central American politics, the machinations of the biggest of all construction firms that had been much in the news, I was more than a little amazed by the breadth of his reading. He was, after all, self-educated, according to the vitae that Marshall had given me.

  “The thing is you have to read books or you'll drive yourself up the wall. All the locations are remote and have the aura of a huge hunting, or oil, or army camps where there's not going to be a war. We have all the movies and videotapes of sports and that sort of thing, but that becomes tiresome. So there's always a bunch that reads a lot on the professional staff, which I'm on by default, because I don't have any engineering degrees. This friend of mine broke into tears one day when the chopper didn't bring in his package of books. He got drunk and drove a dozer into the river.”

  “Wasn't he fired?”

  “Of course not. Everyone thought it was funny.”

  We had a long, bizarre conversation about Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. Humboldt himself seemed to represent Strang's notion of a writer, along with Thomas Wolfe. Talking about books drew out of him an unnerving idea of the nature of personality: We achieve our dimensions for very specific reasons we ourselves ordain. In other words, we already are, at any given moment, what we, in totality, wish to be. There were addenda to this pessimistic core, such as: Scarcely anyone at any given time can locate himself in a meaningful sense. He thought this was wonderful, and I took the brunt of this Socratic mood.

  “You don't seem to know what you're doing up here, do you?”

  “Of course not. I thought I'd do some journalism. Write about a subject I've never written about before.”

  “Pretty good, but you need some nouns in there for fuel. I can tell you think you're in either over your head or under your head. I can tell by th
e way you ate that you're worried about what you're going to do about food in town, and by the way you look at my daughter I can see you're worried about getting laid. Right?”

  “That's one of the limits of out-of-the-way journalism.” My ears were tingling, and if I weren't of a dark complexion, I would have been blushing. “I'm being active so I don't catch myself sitting around regretting. If I'm active rather than self-absorbed, then my regrets can't catch up to me. How about your regrets?” I made a lame attempt to get him off my case.

  “The usual ones, like standing there in the woods with that girl. I really think the self-destruct system is something we build in.” He gestured to his broken body. “It was about 1942 when I got my brother Karl to find out what petit mal epilepsy was. Dad wouldn't let me go to school for his own reasons. Karl was about five years older than me and tried to be as worthless as possible, like many preacher's kids do, but I loved him and he was my hero. So in the school library he tore out a page, page 654, of the 1929 Britannica, which was medically way out of date, but I didn't know it. It said if you had my disease you lost the last twenty years of your life. Karl said that wasn't too bad if you thought it over and he'd teach me how to really step on the gas. And he did in his own way. You might say he met the problem of my longevity head-on. I was about seven and he was twelve at the time. Now Karl pretended to be a little slow-witted so that they'd leave him alone at school, which he hated, but in reality he was full of all sorts of theories. He might have inherited this propensity from Dad, who was once a guest preacher over in Negaunee to a church full of Finnish Lutheran miners. He harangued them for hours, convincing a lot of the audience that Finns were the long-sought, lost tribe of Israel. Karl's favorite books were by Richard Halliburton—you know, The Royal Road to Romance, The Complete Book of Marvels. We were always going on hikes in the furthest reaches of the forest, looking for the lost temples of ancient tribes of Indians. Anyway, Karl busied himself on what he called equations to make my life livable. Since I would surely die, according to the Britannica, by the time I was forty-five, I had to speed up all the processes; he seemed like a bully to others, but he was full of compassion, at least to me. I kept those rules, written in a code gotten out of a comic book, until my luggage was stolen in Hyderabad. I didn't begin to understand India until—”

  “Would you mind telling me some of the rules?” I had to interrupt, in that I am a perpetual creator of rules, codes of honor, programs, dos and don'ts, Calvinist self-laceration routines (without any ostensible results).

  “Of course. They were partly childish nonsense about thirty percent less sleep, thirty percent more exercise, more hunting, more fishing, more adventure and travel, more money, and more sex—because Karl was somewhat a sex maniac.”

  “So did you follow this program?” I had one of those free-floating hangovers that made these adolescent dicta attractive.

  “Seems like I did. I'm pretty wore out, aren't I? I'm forty-six, and I'm told I'll be lucky to see forty-seven. That puts me right on schedule.”

  “Would you mind telling me how you handled the sexual problem if you were in the jungle or desert or whatever?” I was eager to follow this direction, remembering Evelyn's note.

  “It's easy. You save it up and bury yourself in your work. Then every month or so they let you out, and then if you like, you can cut loose. It's not like this country, where the truly ordinary problems of love and death get suffocated. You people are partly at fault. An article about what women are really all about is as likely to be as inaccurate as one on what men are all about. Women are quite a bit different in every country. In most places, they've consolidated their power. A smart woman, or a black, or an Indian, has the perfect duty to go into the Lincoln Monument late some night when no one's there and blow the fucker sky-high. You get what I mean?”

  “I suppose so.” I paused, trying to think of a maneuver to get him back to sex.

  “You want me to talk about my sexual experiences because you're hung over and ideas bore you at the moment. Right?”

  “Absolutely. Isn't it where we're all the most confused?” I could see he had begun to frazzle.

  “Maybe so. First, you come out of the jungle. Say you're in Caracas or Baranquilla, or Panama City or up in San José in Costa Rica. You're a bit like a hunter looking over a new territory. You don't get drunk because alcohol is mostly a sedative and you lose all your elasticity and resilience. You probably know some people, and you meet a woman, preferably not in a bar or lounge, because that puts an uncomfortable onus on the whole thing. You remember again what your oldest sister Laurel told you one New Year's Eve when she was drunk on homemade choke-cherry wine. You were about thirteen, and you stood there on the back porch watching the snow fall, and she said Corvus, she called me by my middle name, don't be like Karl. If you are kind and good and honest with a woman, and if she's not too screwed up herself, you'll get all the loving you can handle. I said what if they're screwed up, not quite knowing what it meant. Then you'll have to get quite dramatic if you want to love them, but you're better off looking elsewhere. That's all Laurel said. Anyway, you take them to a movie, an opera, a folk ballet, an art museum. You buy them some flowers and go to dinner. Make sure it's the very best dinner available. By now you will know by a look or a gesture if she's going to make love to you. It isn't mechanistic, because you like to do all of these things anyway, especially after months of mud and jungle, cement, roaring machinery and exhaustion. In other words, you're full of delight or, as the Bible called it, jubilance. You go to her place or to your hotel, and you kiss her. You kiss the soles of her bare feet and her toes and her ears, her neck and under her chin, her knees and the backs of her knees, her belly and bottom and sex and breasts and armpits and thighs, and then you lick all these places with all your heart, over and over. When you rest, sometimes you brush her hair, because your sisters taught you how. You listen carefully to what she says, and she listens to you. You keep this up as long as you can, or time allows, as long as she wishes to, because you just entered her life, and she might not want you to know the rest of it.”

  There was nowhere to go after that, so we just sat there staring off into the greenery across the river. An alder branch partly submerged in the current bobbed in the surge, but not metronomically. My first feelings of nearly bitter envy subsided as I stared at the moving branch. A group of ravens flew from their rookery down toward the delta, exploding in mock ire at our presence. The dog was stalking a frog lunch in the reeds, her body all aquiver as if her life depended on it. Strang's eyes were closed, and I looked with no little pity at his legs in their braces, the way they were twisted limply askew, and the ragged hole in one of the knees. I could imagine him strolling down an avenue in Caracas in a tropical suit with a senorita on his arm, or perhaps a wayward senora. He would be all eagerness and curiosity, a half-starved vassal being led into the castle's kitchen before a Renaissance feast. I began to wonder about how many men like him there might be, building dams and suchlike, that the rest of the world was largely ignorant of, like some crazed draft horses of progress. The dog turned suddenly from her frog-stalking and ran barking out the drive.

  “My mind was so full of passion I fell asleep. That must be Eulia. I bet you didn't read those books I gave you.”

  “I'm trying.” We turned to watch Eulia swerve into the yard with Latin aplomb, barely missing the picnic table. She stooped, then went to her knees to pet the dog. The glimpse of thighs beneath her skirt brought back the conversation with uncomfortable force. She flashed us a smile and drew some packages from the truck.

  “I know you gentlemen have been talking wisdom, and how Robert is making sure there are twelve light bulbs in every house in the world.” She knelt by his chair and watched him unwrap a package of knee pads. His face glowed with pleasure: Like all members of big families of reduced circumstances, Strang took great pleasure in giving and receiving gifts, however small. She turned to me and shook her head. “I can tell by your eyes
that you misbehaved. Your body is full of poison. . . .” She ran up to the cabin, returning with a rum bottle full of green liquid and leaves and a small glass. Strang, meanwhile, had tried on the sort of knee pads some basketball players wear and was circling the lawn at a swift crawl. “Drink immediately!” The greenish liquid in the glass she offered looked worse than Pernod, “Drink it now. My grandmother taught me how to make it.”