Sundog

by Jim Harrison

  Back to the cabin, finally, with my legs wobbling from fatigue. Though famished, I napped on the couch in my mud-soaked clothes and dreamed of an unapproachable woman I had loved from afar. We are naked and fucking with an energy I have never known in my waking life. I wake up in tears and cook my trout, make some coleslaw, and warm the bread. I leave the coleslaw in the kitchen and take my plate of fish and bread, a cold beer, outside to watch the evening sun go down. There is no miracle of loaves and fishes because I am alone. There is a kingfisher above the lagoon that gets used to my presence. We are both eating fish. Once again I see Strang with his brothers and sisters, his mother, his father trying to summon God down to the meal. Strang with his tidal insistence that life allow him to continue to work.

  * * *

  The next morning the cabin, the yard, the river, all looked the same, but there was the sense that a set had been completely restored after a disaster. Strang seemed happy enough, though dark around the eyes, and Eulia was grooming that fat dog as if she were a doll. I was relieved when Strang said it might be a good day to drive down to see Emmeline. All the questions I had prepared were unanswerable, and I wanted to get back to the story he was in no shape to continue.

  We stopped in the village on the way through to Manistique so Eulia could call Emmeline. Meanwhile, I picked up their mail, which Strang crammed in my glove compartment without so much as a glance.

  “Nice thing about being on a project is that you only get mail once a week. That way it isn't a daily irritation. We used to get mail by company plane on Friday, then you have the weekend to think it over. After work on Monday I'd respond to it all, including a long letter to Emmeline, Bobby and Aurora. Then it was Allegria and Eulia, though I'd still write Emmeline. After that, Evelyn and all the others, plus friends I had made throughout the world, including children and students I was helping. It was damned hard work, this writing letters, if you got beyond the chatty. I'd hate to make a living at it.” He laughed and patted my shoulder.

  “It can be terrible when you're not in the mood. Then it's like a root canal at a dentist's. At Harvard in the nineteenth century there was a scientist named Agassiz. In fact, he made an expedition to this very area. He'd make his students do involved descriptions of natural objects to make sure they were truly seeing the objects. He wrote one himself on the common bluegill that is breathtaking.

  “I'd like to see it if you can get it for me. I tried to describe an anaconda to Bobby and ended up sending him the dried head and skin.”

  The anaconda head and skin were on the wall of Emmeline's combination motel—restaurant—service station. It was a much less modest establishment than I had expected and was crowded with cars, patrons and employees. Emmeline was in her office studying for a real estate broker's license.

  “If there's money around here to be made, I'm making sure it passes this way.”

  We made a short tour of the place, mercifully abbreviated in lieu of Strang's walker. It was on Route 2, the main east-west artery through the U.P., a well-traveled road in the summer. The kitchen was huge and gleaming, in direct contrast to the minimalist menu I couldn't help but speed-read.

  “You screw up our turkey, Florence, and your big ass is out the door,” Emmeline said to the cook with her trademark guffaw.

  We drove out to see Bobby and his new skidder. Strang sat up in front while I was wedged between Aurora and Eulia in the back.

  “I bet you hate to leave this beautiful place?” Aurora was leaving to go back to Italy that evening.

  “Are you kidding? I grew up in these sticks looking at world maps, just like Dad. I might come back here after I see the world. That's why I joined the service.”

  “Aurora's a real little snot-nose about her hometown. It's not like I didn't go to Hawaii last year.” Emmeline was a regular stock car driver on the gravel roads. We fishtailed out of a four-wheel drift.

  “Up here in the snowbelt they all want to go see Don Ho, or they go to Las Vegas and see Wayne Newton,” Aurora whispered to me.

  “I hear you, you little shit. I won't spend money on a dirty place like Italy.”

  “It's not dirty, Mother. In fact, Italians invented soap.”

  My attention glided because Eulia's cotton summer skirt was pulled well above her knees as she swiveled to look at the scenery. And Aurora, plump as she was, full-chested and jolly, would accentuate a point by squeezing my leg. Sexually, the U.P. was a sensory deprivation tank. That's why they sedated themselves with booze, my own special poison, and what a friend called “the writer's black lung disease.” The moment you left any settlement up here you were smack-dab in the middle of the forest. In the old days there were nymphs and bacchantes in the forest, but they seem to have disappeared to better weather, probably California.

  Bobby was delighted to see us at his logging site. There were three other workers who hung back at the edge of the site, bespeaking a certain lowering of the genetic pool in the area. Bobby grabbed Strang's arm and pointed to a huge yellow machine.

  “Dad, that's my 130-XL Franklin Skidder. You might say you're looking at twenty grand right there.” Strang nodded upwards at the machine, and Bobby grabbed him by the waist and hoisted him up toward a step so Strang could pull himself onto the seat. In his soiled T-shirt, Bobby had the sort of massive build that might give Muhammad Ali pause. He stepped up to join his father, and they went off in a deafening roar. Eulia walked over to greet the workers.

  “Isn't it somehow sad to cut down these trees?” I heard her say.

  “Guess no one looks at ‘em anyhow. Plenty around here, you might say.” The worker turned crimson.

  When they returned, I politely declined a ride on the skidder. Bobby wondered if it might be possible for Aurora to take a photo of Eulia and the machine for a keepsake.

  “All these loggers have closets full of dirty pictures. Don't give him any skin, darling.”

  “I won't,” said Eulia, leaning against a muddy tire. She opened her blouse until a nipple was visible, then raised her skirt just far enough for us to know she wore no panties. She smiled a fake-shy, madonna smile, and the contrast was wonderfully sluttish.

  “Corve, what chance does a grown woman have in this world?” Emmeline shrieked.

  “Jeezo-peezo,” said Bobby.

  The lunch was pretty good, if you like hot roast turkey with trimmings and cold beer on a hot afternoon in late June. Bobby said he only killed the turkey on his farm after they had received our phone call. He shot it from a distance in the pen with his .22 because “Fear ruins the meat when you chase them.” His two small children were there, and Strang doted on them, his first sight of his first grandchildren. The little boy fell asleep on Eulia's lap. No mention was made of the wife, who had run off with the cosmetics salesman. The stepfather, Emmeline's second husband, was a mousey, strangely elegant little man, who carved a deft turkey but was given to inanities.

  The real shock at the lunch was the presence of Emmeline's Uncle Earl, replete with hair dyed black and a mechanic's jump suit, probably in his mid- to late-sixties, with not more than a vague resemblance to Tyrone Power. He was seated next to me, and his conversation was engaging, given certain allowances to the locale. He told me that he was kept busy by keeping the service station tidy and leading a golden-years polka band. There was the slightest chance, if Emmeline would allow it, that he would play us a tune after lunch. He gestured secretively to an accordion case under an adjoining table. Yet this was Emmeline's seducer! At least thirty-five years ago this old geezer had licked her bottom and put his wanger in her mouth for the price of a prom formal. I was somehow boggled by the idea that these momentous occasions in people's lives usually go unremarked. There is a universe of love and betrayal and death that no one notices. The principals merely yielded to age and, since they weren't particularly attractive or dramatic in the first place, except to themselves, the emotional content of their lives had vaporized. Except to them. Uncle Earl gave me to understand that he was still s
exually active. He nodded at a rather doughish waitress who would fuck for twenty Michigan lottery tickets. When this self-same waitress served me a piece of homemade Michigan cherry pie, I looked at her closely for some outward sign of deviance. Uncle Earl added that he and the girl split on any winning tickets. Just last March there had been a fifty-dollar winner, which had somewhat amortized his lust.

  After lunch Uncle Earl could not be denied and uncased the dread accordion. He began with “In Heaven There Is No Beer” ("That's why we drink it here"), and Aurora and Emmeline, at her insistence, taught Eulia how to polka. A born dancer, she picked up the steps in moments. I made one pass with her around the restaurant—everyone from Michigan knows how to polka even though they've raised themselves on Monteverdi and James Joyce. I could feel the turkey thigh and its dark freight of gravy swirling in my gut. In my mind, I could see Eulia's beige thighs and a tad of furze against the muddy tires of the 130-XL Franklin Skidder. The question of what we were all doing there only occurred to me much later. I was having a wonderful time, dodging Formica-topped tables with a Costa Rican dancer in a motel restaurant outside of Manistique, Michigan.

  There was a blatant, sour note on the way home. I had let Eulia drive because Uncle Earl had come up with a bottle of the Yugoslavian brandy and nostrum, Slivovitz, and the many toasts had left me sleepy. The problem was that Strang had drawn the mail out of the glove compartment and announced that Allegria, his second wife, was coming for a short visit.

  “I'll kill her,” hissed Eulia, stomping down on the gas.

  “You won't kill anyone. She did as much for you as any human being can do for another.”

  “She let my little brother go to El Salvador to fight—”

  “On the wrong side—”

  “You know nothing of Central American politics—”

  “Yesterday you told me I was a true native. I do know that there's a streak of cruelty down there that would gag the worst Sicilian.”

  “I'll slap her face.”

  “Which would get you a quick plane trip to Puntarenas.”

  Now Eulia slowed the car down and wept a bit. Strang put his arm around her.

  “She'll only be here a few days. Typically, she said she had to be in Miami, anyway.”

  * * *

  TAPE 6: Midnight. Hope to get Strang back to his story at dawn. This everyday reality pudding is insufficiently soothing. I was a little alarmed to discover when I got back to the cabin that my belt and pants felt loose. My first concern was cancer, then it occurred to me that my drinking and eating habits had been severely tampered with. For nearly a month there had been the long morning talks, the afternoons of organization of notes and possible questions, hikes, walks to the bar. Could it be I was engaged in a project superior to my stomach? Perhaps, but there was also a paucity of rawmaterials. Romaine lettuce meant a 110-mile round trip. I couldn't loiter at Dean & Deluca's, double-park in front of Zabar's, or stare in the window of Loebel's until I went in and bought something unnecessary. There were no cronies to lunch, dine, and cook with. Yesterday afternoon, while working, I ate my first tunafish sandwich in years. It was a day without garlic. If I lost fifteen pounds a month for a year, I'd only weigh thirty pounds. I could complete this book by November, then spend a month in France playing catch-up football, as it were. There is also the fact that Eulia arouses me far more than is normal for my age, but then what is this passion to avoid feeling foolish? Who cares? Eulia would be the final diet. I'd come crawling back to NYC invisible sideways, scrawny as a POW, a heart like tar-tare, a literal gruel of longing.

  I rowed a boat! Up and down the long lagoon, the first time in thirty years, until some skin started coming off my hands. I did so because of a wave of vertigo over the idea that I had been behaving out of character because there was no one around that I knew, hence no one who expected me to act in character. While rowing, I thought about a floating group of writer friends who would get together once a month or so for dinner at one another's apartments. Even the dinners were competitive. Much of the anxious gossip was who was being paid what amount for what: articles, screenplays, nonfiction, novels—the last had been nearly abandoned as too chancey these days. I brought up an item I had read in one of those travel guide books—I once owned a closet full—wherein it was stated that there was nothing “interesting about Encarnacion,” a city of fifty thousand souls in Uruguay. To my shock, they all agreed. No one in the group had ever been to South America except myself and that by virtue of a fishing trip to Ecuador. South America hadn't been “hot” for years. There were mumblings about Mengele, the architecture of Brasilia, the movie Black Orpheus, mardi gras, Gabriel Marquez's Nobel Prize, Cortazar lives in Paris, that sort of thing. Writers can always make more out of less, so I knifed in with Burgundy energy, fulminating about gauchos, pampas, the Amazon basin, tropical nights full of gorgeous whores and cheap cocaine (this perked them up), Macchu Picchu under a full moon, five-pound steaks for five dollars, cheap rubies, that sort of thing. But then one of these acerbic wags shut me up by saying that he was sure that the group could guarantee a kitty of fifty thousand dollars, to be repaid by advances, articles and so forth, to ship me to Encarnacion for six months. I bargained them down to three months, saying six months would be a financial sacrifice. In the harsh light of morning, I made reservations for Palm Beach for medical reasons. Now, while rowing, it seemed that writers, unlike Strang, were more than willing to neglect whole continents. Strang had quipped one day he had never spotted one of our congressmen in either South or Central America and had seen no evidence to the contrary that they were simply a bilious clot of lawyers. There were water blisters developing on my hands. I imagined both Congress and the Soviet Presidium being packed off to a boatless Elba. I saw Reagan and Andropov mooning each other across the Atlantic, asses up like huge, pink, metallic scorpions, while the other continents waited in terror for the results. I wish Karl would answer my letter. Think of a man who loved the woods spending his summers, his Mays and Octobers, in prison.

  CHAPTER XII

  * * *

  I don't want to get ahead of myself, but last night I dreamt about ships. Remember when I told you about sitting at the Ojibway Hotel with Karl and Fred and seeing the ships pass? Well, years back Marshall wangled me a ride on this immense oil freighter carrying a full load from Venezuela up to New Jersey. Strange as it seems, I've found few men in the oil business I really cared for. I mean, I'm still open about it, but I've had contact with these people throughout the world, and they're hard to like. I've traced it to the utter greed, the direct venality of the business, plus the idea that there's always been a preconception afoot, an image of what an oil worker is supposed to act like—you know, the hard-working gambler-lover-cowboy with Texas mannerisms, even if they're from Wisconsin. One of our civil engineers formed a small group in a club we used to visit in Caracas called the Society to Prevent Texas. Anyway, I got a ride on this freighter, and what thrilled me most was the engine, a German-built MAN diesel, actually a K2 93/170, twelve cylinders capable of generating upwards of twenty-five thousand horsepower. The engine itself weighed about twelve hundred tons, you know, equivalent to the weight of twelve hundred Volkswagens, or six hundred regular cars all in one place. I've got the specs and photos somewhere in my papers, and I'll show them to you. I spent a long time looking that diesel over, hoping all the while that it would get me over Allegria, but it didn't. I'll tell you about that later. That engine somehow got into my soul. If you know about such things, you just stand there utterly astounded. The Iracu Falls in Brazil did the same thing, also a blind—they're born that way—freshwater porpoise we saw up a tributary of the Amazon. I'm sure everyone has had these experiences. They pop you right out of your shoes. The same thing happened to me when Ted got me into the real nerve center for the Mackinac Bridge before they really got started building it. You could look out at the empty Straits, five miles wide and hundreds of feet deep, and then look around the room at the architect's ren
derings, and it was inconceivable that they could put a bridge across it. That day sort of passed as a religious experience. In fact, I was wearing my suit, that light blue preacher suit Mother ordered from the catalog, but I had grown a lot, so it was ill-fitting. I didn't say much that day but hoped I cut a bit of a figure. That must have been about in 1954 when Ted managed to get all sorts of subcontracts for the bridge, from housing to maintenance, to hauling limestone. Ted seemed to know everyone. We ate in a St. Ignace restaurant with a bunch of engineers, and I could hardly swallow food. There was so much excitement in the air and, what with working for Ted, I was to be a small part of it.

  But I'm getting ahead of myself. After Violet left for North Dakota, I went to live with Ted and his young wife, Rachel, over in Marquette. We were still late in the postwar housing boom, and I spent three years helping Ted put up houses and buildings. Ted had the only eye for business in our family, and I couldn't begin to estimate the amount of money he socked away. I can't say, though, that he was ever happy except during the building of the bridge. I saw him in Miami last year before he moved to Alaska, and he was a goddamn mess. Of all things, he was envious of my lifelong involvement with irrigation projects and dams. Ted had built literally thousands of tract houses and, later, fancier models. After the bridge he moved to Lansing, then to Detroit. Of course, when I saw him, it was only a few months after his daughter had been raped, There's no underestimating what this can do to a father, let alone the girl herself. Ted wanted to talk about the good old times in Marquette and over in St. Ignace working on the bridge. I have a pretty accurate memory, and talking about the good old days is my weakest point.