Sundog

by Jim Harrison

  And then there was a beautiful day that helped change my life. It was late in October, during a respite from the winter to come called Indian summer. It was a glorious day, around fifty degrees with a clear sky and a dull, soft light in the late afternoon. We were late in our best hunting ever—we had thirteen woodcock and nine grouse, and I had mentally picked out a pair of lace-up, high-top boots I was going to order from the Montgomery Ward catalog with my earnings. We were a good way from town, and I knew we would have to ride back on Karl's bike in the dark, but I didn't care. Then I heard bells and was a little frightened, because I knew Karl was a long ways off and I couldn't figure out why there were bells way out in the woods.

  So I just sat there behind a downed tree looking up a culvert where the sound was coming from. The culvert was brilliant yellow from fallen maple leaves, and there was a large group of blackbirds, gathered to migrate south, feeding among the leaves. It was such a strange sight that I looked away, as I began to have that diffuse, dreamy feeling that often signaled a seizure. Then I would black out for a moment. I slouched down to further hide myself from the bells. It turned out to be two English setters with bells around their necks. The female pointed me in my hiding place because I had handled so many dead birds that day I smelled like one. The male honored her point, that is, he pointed on trust in her rather than scent. I'd be goddamned if I knew what to do. Then two men entered the clearing and readied themselves to shoot.

  “It's me,” I croaked.

  They both yelled in alarm, so I stood with my hands up like they did in pictures from the war. Then they laughed with surprise, only stopping when Karl swaggered into the clearing. Even at fourteen Karl was a showstopper. He had seen a movie about Jesse James with Tyrone Power and liked to affect the rakish manner of that outlaw.

  “Hello, gents. Those are nice dogs. What do you think of mine?” Karl said, pointing at me. “If you're short on birds, we got some to sell. A quarter per grouse, ten cents a woodcock.” Karl dumped our twenty-two birds out of the burlap sack for inspection.

  “You must have shot those out of the trees or on the ground,” one of the men said petulantly.

  “Got a few of the grouse that way, but I've never seen a woodcock, not in the air, have you? How many you guys get?”

  I picked that moment to have a fit, though not a bad one. I was petting the dogs, and one shook its head vigorously, and the flash of the shiny bell set me off. When I came to, moments later, the taller of the two men knelt over me. It turned out he was a doctor. The upshot was they gave us a ride home, and the doctor talked to Mother. Dad and Ted had returned to Manistique.

  Early the next morning I was driven, along with Karl, by a family friend who owned the hardware store, Brother Fred, over to the Soo to the doctor's office. Mother tried to pack us a lunch, but Karl insisted he wanted to spot me my first restaurant meal. In all my trips with Dad, testifying to the grace of God for not killing me with lightning, we had never eaten in a restaurant. As a youth in Chicago, he had suffered food poisoning, and God had not spared his life to repeat the mistake. Now Brother Fred was a sincere Christian but was a goofy sort, and he enjoyed the prospect of getting out of town. We weren't a tenth of the way down the road when Karl had him talked into going to a movie while I was at the doctor's for tests. We were sworn to secrecy, because Fred was an important force in our church, part of his power coming from his elaborate stories of his sinful past, including a trip to a burlesque show in Detroit, where shameless women “bared their parts for the world to see,” the latter being a favorite of the male members of the church.

  Sault Ste. Marie was a bit frightening to a boy during wartime. The Soo Locks handle more tonnage than Panama or the Suez Canal, and they were intensely guarded against sabotage by the Germans and Japs. This wasn't the usual paranoia, where even the smallest villages went through air-raid practice; a great percentage of the country's iron ore is from Michigan and the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, and it all went through the locks, and it was an armed camp.

  We had reached the Soo in time for our lunch before the appointment. We sat in the Ojibway Hotel dining room, watching an ore freighter pass, with my stomach hollow and jumping with the thrill of this giant ship so near to us. I offered a silent prayer that I might be allowed on a ship one day. So then Karl knocks our hats off by ordering a beer for himself and Fred, who looked off weakly as an innocent victim, though he was fifty to Karl's fourteen.

  “Sure you're old enough, cutie?” asked the waitress.

  “Old enough to handle the likes of you any day of the week.” Karl flashed a smile and patted her butt. Fred buried his face in his hands. I watched intently, not wanting to miss the ways of the world. We had big steaks, and they had several beers. Karl gave me a teaspoon of his, and it was made delicious by the fact that it was so evil. Then they dropped me off at the doctor's office with instructions to meet them at a neighboring park.

  Well, I went through a number of simple tests. The doctor and his nurses were kind, and I was given an enormous canister of pills to take, one a day. The doctor said I'd eventually be able to function as well as anyone, but the cure would be gradual. Even now, he said, there was no reason I shouldn't be in school the same as anyone else, because I only had blackouts rather than true seizures. Then the doctor tried to throw a curve by hauling out a county map, and trying to get me to mark Karl's best bird-hunting areas. Now this is something one never gives away and shouldn't be asked, so I just marked places that were down the road from the good ones. Brook-trout spots are the same way: Breathe a word, and they'll be wiped out by those too lazy to hike for their own. I thanked the doctor, and he said he'd check me out next October when he was out our way.

  Luckily, I was dressed warm, because I waited in the park until dinnertime for them to show up, and then it was only a weeping Brother Fred, who, so he told me, had fallen asleep only to find Karl gone. There was a note, however: “Dear loved ones. I have gone to serve my country whether at land or sea or air. Duty called me and my courage answers with a forthright yes. May the eagle ever fly above the flagpole. Your son and brother, Karl H. Strang.” I was sent into a diner to get a sack of hamburgers for the beery, fat, tearful Fred. On our slow way home I had to reassure him a hundred times that it wasn't his fault. I had known, anyway, that something was afoot, because Karl had taken along his secret kit that held his hunting knife, arrowheads and dirty pictures.

  It was probably good for me, because that winter I began reading and studying in earnest. Not that I didn't miss Karl terribly. In fact, I wrote him letters in wait for such a time that we'd hear from him. There is also the thought that occurred to me later in my life: Karl, as noble as he seemed to me as a boy, always ran so stridently counter to all authority, to the way we structure society, that he was doomed from the beginning. I don't just mean the cliché of the Midwest preacher's son sowing wild oats; I mean a hard-core, violent man, at odds with the world. I've wangled him out of prison twice, but I'm afraid this third time might be beyond anything I can do. Much has been made of Viet Nam returning us a lot of psychotics and uncontrollable young men. So did World War II, though not much was made of it because the currently popular cry from the heart was not in fashion then. Some of the crews I've worked on have their share of these men, now in their late fifties, and they're still a rough bunch, though most of these unregenerate types don't live all that long.

  By this time, the middle of World War II, my sisters Laurel and Ivy were downstate with their husbands, working at the Chrysler Tank Arsenal. When the husbands were drafted, the girls kept on working in the factories. Laurel sent me a new book every week, a thrill not to be underrated during a U.P. winter. Ted was bitter about being rejected for the service, because his building abilities were such that he was put to work building primitive radar facilities all across the northern Midwest. Dad was with Ted most of the time, preaching wherever he could find a welcome and making more money than he had in a lifetime. If it weren't for Ted's efforts,
Dad would have given it all away, a propensity I seem to have inherited.

  That left Mother, Violet, Lily and me at home for the winter. Then Lily, who was only seventeen, ran off with a commercial fisherman from Naubinway. I was thankful that Violet stayed home, because she paid the most attention to me and was by far the best and most faithful teacher of the lot. Something just occurred to me: brushing hair. I always brushed the girls’ hair for them in the evening from the time I was small. I remember a potbellied stove, a table with an oilcloth, and a radio which Dad wouldn't listen to except for, later, the war news as broadcast by Gabriel Heatter. I would brush all of their hair except Mother's They all had long hair, but Violet's was the longest. What wonderful sisters they were! I must be boring you. Just because we have invented clocks and calendars doesn't mean that's the way people keep track of their lives, do you think? One winter might be the winter you see through ice. You go out on a lake, and if it hasn't sleeted and blurred in freezing, you can wipe away the snow and look down through the ice as if it were a horizontal window. I saw muskrat and beaver swimming this way, also large pike, which was what we were looking for. It was Dad's favorite food, a mess of fried pike, and it was the single, truly pleasant thing Karl would do for Dad. Once I read a story about a farm kid whose pig broke through the ice of the farm pond and the kid could see the pig swimming under the ice, looking for a way to get out.

  That winter damn near killed Mother, Violet and me and is the reason, I suppose, that I've spent my life working in the tropics. What happened is that we had a rare January thaw, then an ice storm that knocked out the power, not all that rare an occurrence. Violet had a bad case of the flu, and then Mother caught it. They could barely get around, so I took care of them as best I could, bringing them water and aspirin and emptying the chamber pots, because we had just got electricity out in the country and didn't yet have inside plumbing. I'd warm up chicken soup for them, but they couldn't hold food down. My main job was to feed the woodstove and keep a lantern lit. It was lonely with no radio and no one to talk to. Without thinking, I stupidly used all the dry wood from the woodshed. After the ice storm, the wind shifted north and we had the great blizzard of ‘44, which was a three-day blow with mountainous snows and subzero temperatures. I could barely see the drifts through the heavily frosted windows. Violet would stumble out, pat my head, and tell me to get at my lessons. I sat there with a world map and H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, looking at a dead radio and listing to the wind howl, the house shudder.

  Well, when I got around to replenishing the wood supply, I could barely get the door open, and the woodpile was under a big drift. I wasn't too concerned until I dug down and discovered the wood was all stuck hard toge1ther by the ice storm that came before the blizzard. I could barely knock off a single piece with continual swings of a sledgehammer. Now, to be frank, the shit was scared out of me. I had no one to turn to, what with two sick ladies on my hands, whom I loved and felt responsible for. I sat there in the pumpshed, looking at the three lonely pieces of maple I had left, crying and praying, neither of which did any good. It was midafternoon and early dark. It was obvious to me we would be frozen dead by morning even if I burned the furniture. The drafty old house required about a half-cord a day during a winter storm when you're talking fifty knots and up off Superior.

  What saved us was the sudden memory of one of Karl's pranks. We loved to watch Ted blow stumps or dislodge boulders with dynamite—everyone in the construction business up here uses it because the U.P. is mostly rock. Karl wanted to blow up a beaver dam and lodge that was no longer in use; he had this elaborate notion, unless he was pulling my leg, that beavers lived in quarters that included a death room (where we would find bones and skulls), a kitchen for eating saplings, and a sleeping room. We stole a half a dozen sticks of Ted's dynamite and rigged it to a fuse, stuffing it a few feet into the dam. We used about four sticks too many—the whole setup became airborne, as it were, and a search of the area revealed no bones, or at least none that were intact.

  I wiped away my tears and got the flashlight. I wallowed through the drifts out to a locked shed where Ted kept his gear, broke a window, and got two sticks of dynamite and a section of fuse. I dug well down beside the woodpile, chipped away the ice, stuffed the sticks into an opening, and rigged the fuse. I felt I should go in and warn the ladies. Mother was asleep, but dear Violet lay there bathed in sweat.

  “There's going to be some noise, Violet.”

  “You go ahead and play. The noise won't bother me. You get some venison from the crock, and maybe I'll have some, too.” We kept venison buried in rendered beef fat to preserve it. I heard the French still do this with geese and duck.

  Here goes, I thought, going back outside and lighting the fuse. I hoped the charge was deep enough not to break the windows, and I prayed not to have a fit and get my ass blown off. I scrambled for cover, and there was an immense, satisfying WHUMP as the woodpile rose up a few feet above the snow and settled, all broken apart. Then I spent an hour or so, until I couldn't move from cold and exhaustion, filling the pumpshed with wood. I couldn't have weighed more than eighty pounds at the time. Violet had a plate of venison and potatoes ready for me.

  “I see you got us all the wood we need,” she said. I never much liked winter after that nightmarish incident.

  CHAPTER IX

  * * *

  I was disappointed when this winter incident ended. There was a wonderfully infantile pleasure in being told a story so directly from someone's life. The trouble with television, movies, most novels, with the rarest of exceptions, is that nothing is true to the life you have experienced, or true to a life you could conceivably comprehend: The pope conceals a bomb beneath his vestments that will blow up our president because the pope's hearing aid is controlled by the KGB, who also control the prez's harem of starlets with vaginas wired for sound; if the KGB pulls it off, the Arabs will give them fifty billion in free crude, plus this year's Canadian wheat harvest. That sort of thing.

  Anyway, Eulia interrupted us, saying she wanted to cook and would I take Robert for his stroll? Of course. A little earlier, when she had returned from the post office, I had watched her out of the corner of my eye open a large package out of which emerged the vapor of dry ice. I sidled into the kitchen for a disinterested snoop.

  “A little package from Marshall. Some boring food,” she teased.

  I spotted duck, veal chops, lump crabmeat, oysters, and stone-crab claws before I turned away with a yawn.

  “You must crawl for your dinner.” She slapped an extra set of knee pads into my hand with a trill of laughter.

  “By all means.” She had hit some seedy chord of masochism; my stomach quivered, and my ears reddened. Any literate man over forty-five is not a beat away from his own Blue Angel.

  “These Latin girls know how to pique your interest, don't they? It took me years before I dared sit down and play a game of Chinese checkers with one of them. It either costs you a fortune, your heart, or you simply die when the game is over. A schoolteacher jumped off a cliff because of Eulia's older sister.” Strang had noted my discomfort.

  “He was a monster. He seduced a reasonably innocent student. Besides, the cliff was his idea, not hers. He had been warned against reading too much poetry.” There was a mocking sadness in her voice.

  I followed Strang toward the door, with an uncomfortable memory of my single year of teaching. “This is the race that gave us bullfights, the Inquisition, the gay colors of Goya and El Greco, the aural torture of flamenco, Franco, whatever.” She gave me a harsh goose and pushed me out the door.

  It was quite a trip, what with the dog wedged between our bucket seats like an overbearing tour guide. Strang made me a little uncomfortable by asking some highly technical questions about my vehicle, none of which I could answer. He studied the owner's manual, spieling off data on gear ratios and that sort of thing.

  “Why did you buy it if you don't know anything about it?” He seemed genuine
ly puzzled rather than critical.

  “I was in Key West. I was under stress from a northeast front that knocked out our tarpon fishing. It's the shore time that drives you crazy. I liked a woman who didn't like me. I saw a TV ad. The salesman bought me a drink. I had the money.”

  “Good answer. I was in Key West once to hire some divers for a project. There were an extraordinary number of homosexuals there in one place. It was like university people, or farmers, or rich people, you know? They all wanted to be in one place. I drove past the house of Tennessee Williams because a civil engineer friend of mine studies his plays. This engineer has been writing these plays on dam projects all over the world. His father wanted him to do something sensible. I like the one called The Rose Tattoo."

  “How about the plays of the engineer?” The fact that Strang had read Tennessee Williams disturbed me.

  “They are truly awful. Down in Brazil he had us all reading different parts out loud. It gave this welder, a top hand, the notion he could be an actor, and he disappeared. People can be truly amazing. For instance, you don't even understand the internal combustion engine that's been hauling you around all your life. I got this little theory, an utterly unimportant theory, that most people never know more than vaguely where they are, either in time or in the scheme of things. People can't read contracts or time schedules or identify countries on blank maps. Why should they? I don't know. There's a wonderful fraudulence to literacy. Yet these same people have emotional lives as intricate as that Bach piece my niece played.”

  Strang used the fact that my vehicle had four-wheel drive to get us into a nasty swamp he was curious about. Too wet for crawling in June. Then we went up a long grade through hardwoods and out into an immense barren area dotted with decayed white pine stumps, some over six feet in diameter. The amount of virgin timber left in Michigan wouldn't cover Central Park. It is a shameful heritage, as if someone in North Dakota might brag, “My ancestors killed all the buffalo to make Fargo and sheep possible.”