Sundog

by Jim Harrison

  “I'm taking him away as soon as possible. You won't be seeing him again. That's final.”

  “Can the shit, Evelyn, I'm not the butler or the upstairs maid. You don't mean a fuck to me, if you mean that much to anyone. You know he won't leave without seeing me again.”

  Not surprisingly, tears were the next tack though she wasn't very good at them because, for obvious reasons, she only used them rarely; I poured her a big drink while the tears weren't working. I looked out through the screen door at the night where the northern lights were gathering in a fluttery green haze. I would miss them. I permitted myself a smile as my ballbreaker guest continued to snivel. The voice came hard and clear, though there was an effort at charm.

  “You can have one more day. I ‘m taking him to Switzerland. I stopped there for a week on the way back from Africa, and we've decided on a course of treatment.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Well, simply put . . .” She was gathering strength again. “In layman's terms it would require at least a year of absolute rest, of semisedation. His attempts at walking are horrible. We need to weaken the muscle groups and restructure them if he's ever to walk normally.”

  “Have you told him this?” I interrupted.

  “Of course not. He's not in his right mind, and he's not a doctor. He's certainly not able to determine his own best treatment, as you can see.”

  “That's quite a pile of negatives. It might be worth it if there was a positive chance of getting rid of the effects of that herb.”

  “That's, of course, the ultimate point.” It was as if we both exhaled and decided, at least for the time being, not to be contentious. “His medical history is a horror show and that's an understatement. The particular combination of tropical disease plus epilepsy makes the situation problematical. You doubtless know that epilepsy can't be cured, only the symptoms can be alleviated to the point that they don't exist. Sometimes it just disappears. The Swiss firm has done all the preliminary work on Aristolochia medicinalis, I mean the exhaustive process by which it's reduced to its pure form, also the whole battery of biological screens. We have nothing to really go on so we don't know if an important alkaloid might have been lost in the purification phase. They've just begun to run tests on animals, but these have been inconclusive. The herb has never been considered valuable by the field people who explore herbal passibilities, particularly in tribal cultures wherever, so none of the work had been done.”

  “What does it do to animals?”

  “In layman's terms again, they either die in a state of paralysis or go crazy. We're trying to define specific effects and determine dosages. The consensus of everyone involved is that a long period of rest under sedation, and reducing all stimuli to a minimum, would best prepare him for the eventuality of experimenting with antidotes.”

  “And he's not aware of what's coming?”

  “I wish you'd stop that for god's sake. I've told him the basic facts and he seems agreeable. Stop acting like I've come to take a prisoner. Simply put, I love him and want him to be well.”

  “Frankly, he seems well enough to me. There have been some occasional bad times but he seems quite happy, more so, in fact, than anyone I've ever met, including you and me.”

  “You have a charming circle of acquaintances I'm sure. I'm also aware of what people like you think is well. Just don't try to interfere.” And on she went.

  CHAPTER XIX

  * * *

  The good doctor Evelyn was no doubt doing the Third World countries a lot of good, I thought in the morning. One of the curious effects of a bad hangover it that you think you're wrong whether you are or not. Not wrong in particulars, but wrong in general, wrong about everything. If you had saved a baby from a rabid dog or a bull rattler the night before, it would still be wrong. The hangover had started early enough so I thought I was wrong before Evelyn left. There can be a desperate inelasticity in alcohol. Everyone has heard a drunk friend repeat a story until you want to jam him with a cattle prod with the voltage to the max. By the time she walked out the door, I was “feebed out,” as they say in Los Angeles. I had even consented to help her out if Strang proved recalcitrant. Marshall was sending up a plane in two days and would I take them to Manistique? Later I could drop the dog off with Emmeline or take it to the pound. She had a few drinks herself and there was a moment when I thought we were going to end up in bed, or on the floor, or on the Formica table, but now I guessed this flirtation was part of her art of persuasion. Such is our deference to the arrogance of doctors that the average mother might sit in an examining room and watch her child's limbs get hacked off without protesting. This overstatement is another symptom of a hangover. I was going to say that a mad doctor had finally been arrested in New Mexico for prescribing the ingestion of dog turds for cancer. He had been closely watched for seven years, had hundreds of patients with abdominal complaints, and a Lear jet.

  As you can see, my drive to Strang's hadn't been going well. I stopped and opened all the windows to increase the oxygen. Nothing would work. It wasn't just the hangover. I found myself wishing that Strang were my brother so the story wouldn't have to end, so that I would have a brother's definite and legal prerogatives in the matter.

  At the cabin I was shocked to see that Evelyn already had a number of cartons packed in back of the truck for shipping. She was extremely cheery and treated me as a coconspirator. It was a fine morning so we sat by the river for our final session. The dog brought me a stick to throw in the river. She made one of those grand, absurdly energetic leaps into the current that made me feel better. Strang gave no visible evidence that he was being bullied into a long trip to Switzerland, and I deduced she had prepared him for the inevitable in correspondence.

  * * *

  This is a melancholy occasion isn't it? Dire portents, as Dad used to say. My memories of the accident aren't very precise; the event that might have ended my career is more a series of fractional images. I had a small crew up on the Rio Kuduyari putting the final touches, some cosmetic and some necessary, on a dam in preparation for a government inspection and ceremony. I remember talking to an electrician from Wyoming who was busy rigging a cable and switch for the usual general to pull from the usual platform. It was near the end of the rainy season and I had a number of worries. The project engineer was vexed beyond belief because the volume of runoff in the watershed had somewhat exceeded all predictions. You had to shout to communicate anywhere in the vicinity of the dam because the overflow and the river were far beyond the thunderous. Dams don't stop rivers, they just control them on a temporary basis and the control in this case didn't seem much beyond the tentative. My main worry, I think I mentioned this before, is that I had been without my seizure prescription for three days, having forgotten it in Caracas. I had tried to radio it in by chopper, but the weather had been so foul with wind, rain, and fog, that the safety factor prevented the use of helicopters. What I did sounds incredibly stupid but it seemed better than staying in bed when there was work to be done. I had done the same thing in India when I had run out of pills with no adverse effects. Now the presumption of the act boggles me, but I suppose it was in character.

  Here's what happened to me. I had dinner every evening with this Venezuelan engineer who was also an amateur anthropologist. He was an outsider, partly because no one shared his interest in the local Kubeo Indians, The day before I had asked him to check out what the medicine men gave their people for epileptic seizures. He showed up with this small packet of ground root, and after I talked to the electrician that day, I went to my office and took a minuscule portion. The engineer had no real notion of dosage and had advised against the whole thing as foolhardy. At one time he had eaten a mushroom the medicine man had given him for depression and it had radically altered his mind for some months. The cure had been almost unendurably strange, he said, and for a while he yearned for the simplicity of depression.

  So I swallowed the tiniest mound of bitter powder and drove my je
ep over to the dam. For some reason people think that dams are concrete all the way through, but there are tunnels, passageways, for a variety of maintenance reasons. I entered the main tunnel where security is quite stringent for obvious reasons: a guerilla group could only truly damage a massive dam from inside. I walked through the narrow tunnel at the dam's base for about three hundred yards. It was dimly lit and fogged by condensation. My stomach was quavering a bit, but I attributed it to a local hot pepper sauce I was fond of. You could feel the vibration of the river and overflow despite the immensity of the structure. I took the elevator up about twelve stories, or two hundred feet to the top of the dam.

  Now the top was only a hundred or so feet across, enough for a roadway but not much more. My crew was winching up the guardrails that had arrived by barge across the reservoir. It was not a place for anyone with a fear of heights, what with no guardrail. It was a smooth concrete surface with the reservoir on the upstream side a hundred feet below, and the river at least two hundred feet down on the other side. Not far under us the overflow passed in huge flumes, increased vastly by the rains. The overflow dropped until it hit what we call the flip-bucket, which is an upturned lip, an energy dissipator, because straight falling water at this location would undermine the foundation of the dam.

  I stood on the unprotected edge staring down at the ponderous overflow. There was a Spanish worker next to me who was always singing love songs. Sometimes I would tease him by singing Emmeline's favorite, “Sh-Boom,” the only popular song I could remember, or some hymn. He didn't speak English but I told him the Doxology was a famous love song and we'd often bray out together, “Praise Cod from whom all blessings flow. . . .” We were laughing and doing that while watching the overflow, though we weren't audible above the noise. Then I cursed, because there was a thunderstorm moving up river toward us from the west. I motioned to the Spanish worker, Luis was his name, to get the crew off the top of the dam since it was the highest point and lightning would be a factor. It was twilight anyway and they weren't far from dinner break. I was alone then, and though I don't remember feeling immobile, I just stayed there watching the marvelous bolts of lightning against the black clouds. Even the thunder was drowned out by the power of the water.

  Then it was that the drug must have struck hard into my system because I felt violently sucked outward into the storm as if I were seven years old again, flying outward and down into the lip with the water moving so quickly I didn't penetrate it, then shooting up and out as if I were taking a catapulting, tumbling ride on a flume of water. The velocity from the rainy season was such that I was shot far out into the turbulence of the river. Any other time of year the life would have immediately been crushed out of me. I remember in the river that my legs wouldn't work but my arms would, so I swam a long time with the rushing current until it eased and I nudged against something solid and fell unconscious. I guess it was lucky for me that I was a night-swimmer because I swam toward the ease of pressure in the current until I reached an eddy and the bank of the river. A Kubeo Indian found me seven miles downstream at dawn.

  That's all there is to say. And now I'm here. Five months in a hospital and four months here. Do you realize how unspeakably grand it was to come up to this cabin, the area of my youth, after that long in a hospital, which is so often—and I thought it would be for me—the house of death. That's why I refused all those drugs after a while. I had to be conscious. That's all. How could I bear not being conscious? Last night I was swimming in the dark in my dreams and it was wonderful.

  * * *

  Doctor Evelyn interrupted us for lunch but we all knew the story was over, especially the smiling Evelyn who saw no reason for me to tarry though she was being civil. Her cooking was Waspish—a cold cucumber soup, a sprig of broccoli, a minuscule, unadorned veal chop. She reminded me that I had agreed to pick them up at ten the next morning to meet a charter at the Manistique airport. I had been so subdued that she allowed me a few minutes alone with Strang when he walked me out to my vehicle.

  “We might not have much of a chance to talk tomorrow. I'll keep in touch. Meanwhile, have a good year at that Swiss hospital.” I blurted the latter out with an ache in my temples. Strang embraced me, then held me at arm's length and smiled. That's all. Not even an enigmatic smile, just a smile.

  CHAPTER XX

  * * *

  I went home and began my minimal packing. I was giving up the cabin the next day, after nearly three months, for an elderly couple who had spent their anniversary week there for the past forty years. Being a resolute sentimentalist about such matters, how could I interfere with this precedent? My mother's comment about how unfavorably I compared to a dancing woodcock came back to me. If nothing else, the summer had made me fifteen pounds closer to flight. The heat had returned so I reread Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces for the umpteenth time. Mythology is a soothing hobby. There aren't any old myths, just new people.

  In the evening I fished for a while without success, then went to the tavern for my last all-you-can-eat whitefish special. I took the precaution of carrying a bottle of Pickapepper sauce and waded through five pieces, which would serve as a sleeping pill. Home to the cabin and a single nightcap while reading an interview with a porn star named Rhonda in one of the magazines I bought the first evening in town. And hence to sleep with a vision of a buttocks as big as the Ritz.

  There was Evelyn, beside the bed at first light, her hiss rising to a shout. “He's gone. Where is he, goddamn you! He's gone.”

  I followed her to Strang's cabin, half wishing that the old pickup she pushed to sixty would go into one of those endless cinematic tumbles. Sure enough, there at the riverbank were Strang's clothes and leg braces.

  “He's gone,” I said with purposeful vengeance.

  “Oh god, he's dead. It's your fault. He fixed me the rum drink we used to have and made love to me. He put something in my drink. I finally woke up before dawn and he wasn't there.”

  She began weeping and I couldn't help but put my arm around her. She got control of herself, then ran to my car, swerving out of the yard. I stooped beside Strang's clothes and petted the dog, who was lying there looking disgruntled that she hadn't been taken along down river. I looked in the door of the pumphouse and saw that the wet suit was still hanging on the wall. This depressed me for a moment, but then I noticed the can of grease Strang used before the wet suit arrived looked recently opened. For some reason I closed the can and stuck it behind some paint cans on the shelf. Then I made my way with the dog through the swamp down to the log jam. The dog scrambled out on the pile of half-submerged logs wagging her tail excitedly at the scent. She looked at me to see if I understood. I walked back up to the cabin, poured a drink, and looked at a topographical Strang had showed me of the area. It was an extremely unfriendly stretch of water, but not impossible for a man of his capabilities.

  * * *

  TAPE 9 : I am in the motel now with a soundless television on for comfort, my first viewing in nearly three months. I had pretty much forgotten television existed and now it has all of the charm, but none of the color, of a city dump. Evelyn returned with two squad cars in tow, one was a county sheriff, and the other was from the Michigan state police, a stunning title if you think about it, but an efficient group of professionals. I was questioned for an hour, then sent on my way.

  The town was abuzz with excitement the next few days. Drownings are not uncommon in the area but no one had ever seen, including me, this kind of search. By late afternoon a private jet made several passes down the river and over the town. I properly guessed it to be Marshall, who had flown in from a horse sale in Saratoga, New York. By dark Marshall had managed to summon in three helicopters, which swept up and down the river and bay with spotlights before landing on the beach for the night. There were state police divers and a diving club from Marquette. Marshall's efforts reminded me of the news stories of Nelson Rockefeller combing New Guinea's beaches in a chartered 707 looking for his
lost son.

  Not surprisingly I was cast as the villain. I waited to be summoned or questioned again, and when nothing happened, I drove out to the cabin in the middle of the next afternoon. I was met by what is called unbridled hostility from Evelyn, Emmeline, and Bobby, though I noted that Bobby was a little less than convincing. There was the Slightest tinge of the soap opera to his anger.

  I walked over to the picnic table where Marshall was having a pow-wow with the police and a detective brought up from Lansing. Marshall somehow had managed to wear one of those Orvis outfits, viyella shirt and pressed khaki trousers, not to be cynical. His aide was in the usual MBA, not quite tailored, suit. The detective was saying that there were tire tracks on the two-track going to the river about a half a dozen miles downstream, the next access below the cabin. This was inconclusive as it could easily been a trout fisherman. Again, I was surprised that no one bothered asking me any more questions though I suspected Evelyn had poisoned that well. The police accorded me the respect given to a cub reporter with a bad complexion, though Marshall gave me a seemingly friendly nod.

  I drove to the bar but left immediately when it was full of diver, pilots, and onlookers, one of whom said to me, “This beats the shit out of the Fourth of July.”

  Back at the motel I had my own, private victorious wake. Of course I couldn't be absolutely sure that strang hadn't been swept by the current out into Lake Superior, where he rested cold and intact in two hundred feet of water. I doubted it. I constructed a scenario where Eulia got on the bus in Engadine and got off in Manistique, where she was met by Bobby. I could see Bobby standing there in the glare of headlights at the end of the two-track waiting for his father to come down the river. I didn't in the least feel bad about being made the villain. I felt quite calm, in fact. It had happened frequently: You write about something that happens and, for various reasons, people are so forgetful they confuse you with the cause.