The Woman Lit by Fireflies

by Jim Harrison

  Part of the problem of handling the future of the Chief was the article I had read in the Reader’s Digest in a barbershop in Munising, where like Beatrice of yore the lead scalper thinks I have the worst head of hair in the Christian world. According to him, every single hair goes a different direction. This article said it is given to every man to have a few main chances in life, opportunities that will turn the whole thing around. While getting clipped it came to me my first chance had been when I sold Grandpa’s land cut-rate because I was in a rush to get to Alaska. This opportunity ended in the hospital in Bozeman. It was clear as day to me when I found the Chief that he was my second chance.

  My first problem was to get a hold of one of those small trucks that deliver bags and blocks of ice to gas stations and grocery stores. I would also need a piece of gill net for towing the Chief into Little Lake. The man looked pretty big but I was sure I could boost him up onto the dock and then into the back of the ice truck, the one I didn’t have.

  My ace in the hole was Avakian, the nautical artifacts dealer in Chicago. I always felt that he paid us fair prices though Bob wasn’t so sure and he was dealing from our side. When Avakian came to the U.P. on buying trips it was a top secret operation because, as I’ve said, everything we do is a tad illegal. We’d meet way out in the boonies, or in an odd place, and every time Avakian would be driving a different fancy car. Well, once this man got me aside alone and said if I came up with anything weird he’d be interested. When I asked him what he meant by weird he just said, “Think it over, think it over,” twice in a row in the slick way Chicago men talk which I could remember from so many years back. Being an honest fellow I later asked Bob what Avakian meant. Bob said Avakian had pretended he wanted an old-time body for science to study the qualities of preservation in cold water, but Bob had said to him, That’s bullshit. Then Avakian had said he’d pay twenty thousand for a shipwrecked body because a private customer wanted one to freeze in a big block of ice. When Bob had asked why, Avakian had just said, Who knows?

  The problem for Bob was that before he signed up for the SEALs he was in a different part of the Navy working for some dentists and doctors identifying dead men by their dental records and body parts. Bob signed up for this duty because he was tired of San Diego and wanted to travel. What happened was the Navy would have an accident somewhere in the world like a plane would crash or a part of a ship would blow up. Bob and another assistant would fly to the place with a doctor and dentist and figure out which victim was which. After a half year of this Bob got sick and tired of sorting body parts and loose teeth and signed up with the SEALs. I say this because when I cut Bob in on the action with the Chief he wasn’t much help because he had developed a phobia about dead bodies and he only looked at the Chief straight in his empty eyes once.

  The upshot was that the first of July I stole an ice truck in Newberry by hot-wiring the ignition. I drove the truck full of sacked ice cubes directly to the deer cabin where I repainted it with seven aerosol cans of camo green spray at five bucks apiece. The next day Frank drove me to Newberry to pick up my van. I told him it had broken down, not wanting him to be involved in my criminal activity. He was my only character witness at the trial and the judge wasn’t too impressed because Frank made it clear he wasn’t one bit impressed by the judge.

  Anyway, I switched license plates with my van and drove the ice truck to Little Lake at about three A.M. with the deflated rubber dinghy and the gill net squeezed inside with the cubes. I had told Bob I had an earache and couldn’t dive so he busied himself trying to fix the Evinrude. You shouldn’t dive on wrecks alone as there is too much that can go wrong. You develop an excess of nitrogen in your blood and you get what they call rapture of the deep which is about the same as smoking too much dope. I have nothing against smoking hemp except it puts me dead asleep and it’s not what you’d do right before diving.

  I found the Chief just after daylight as soon as I could pick out my triangulation points. I dove with a single tank and the gill net and a light to help me find the body. The Chief had tipped over on his side as if he were sleeping. There was a school of lake trout that looked like they were standing guard. I was all business and wrapped the big body in the gill net and towed it upward with a rope. I can’t tell you why things weigh less under water. I tied off the body at about fifteen feet to ensure clearance when I towed it through the channel to Little Lake.

  So far so good, you might say. I thought I was making smart moves while I was doing it, all cool as a cucumber. I pulled the body up to the dock where the ice truck was parked. How was I to know there was this old Audubon-type woman down the beach trying to find a kind of plover that is nearly extinct? She was watching me all the time through binoculars and she said in court that when she saw me load the Chief into the ice truck it struck her as “peculiar.” And there was another thing I was missing out on that would have given me cold feet. I always listen to country music on the Ishpeming station and never the Top Forty out of Newberry. Little did I know that the town of Newberry was treating the missing ice truck as the crime of the century. Not much has happened there since the state closed down the nut house. I bought a whole roomful of their furniture once for twenty bucks to fill an empty deer shack. I don’t know why but it was comforting to have furniture that was all worn out by crazy people. So there I was driving down a two-track in a dark green ice truck not knowing that an old woman was on her way to the Rainbow Lodge at the mouth of the Two-Hearted River to call the cops.

  When I reached the cabin I hid the truck in the woods and drove my van into town to the hardware store to see if the eyes had arrived by UPS. This wasn’t suspicious as Bob sends out artifacts through UPS all the time. The eyes had come and I opened them in the van and rolled them in my hand. They were sort of disappointing as they were blue and not too realistic. There was a note from Shelley that read: “Dearest B.D., Here are your eyes. My tits and pussy ache for you. Behave yourself. Your Love Pumpkin. P.S. See you this weekend.”

  Shelley is quite the potty mouth for such a high-class girl. I never ran into this before in a woman and it threw me off balance. After I met her in the bar that night two years ago we agreed to meet the next day. That was a downfall of sorts as I took her out to the burial mounds to impress her in order to screw her. In a way I was like Adam in the Garden I guess. We started necking out there in the clearing in the woods and she shrieked, “Stick your dick in me, you asshole,” and it stopped me cold for fifteen minutes or so. I never even heard the lowest-class lady talk like this when making love. This talk took some getting used to during a sacred act (or so I am told) but I’ve learned to like it a bit over the past two years.

  Anyway, I put the two eyes in my pocket and went in the Dunes Saloon to calm my nerves. The weather had turned hot which put me on edge and meant I’d have to keep the truck’s refrigeration unit running nearly full time. My nerves forced me into a double whiskey when I realized I hadn’t yet looked the Chief full in the face from close up, then I had to order a beer chaser because the whiskey was catching in my throat. Bob came in with grease to his elbows from working on the Evinrude. He asked about my earache and I said both of them were ringing. He was pretty upset because the diving season was just beginning and he didn’t have the money to replace the lower unit.

  “How about I offer you five thousand dollars for a day’s work?” I found myself saying. I sketched out the story in a whisper leaving out the fact that the truck was stolen. At first he was angry over my breaking the bonds of our partnership so I edged up his share to seventy-five hundred. All we had to do was drive the Chief to Chicago. He said he’d call Avakian and meet me at the cabin. Meanwhile, I should install the eyes as he didn’t want to fool with the body.

  I drove out to the cabin all warm with the feeling I was no longer in the scheme alone. It was easy enough to burn down a chicken coop years ago but now I was in the big time and I had to act strong like Robert Mitchum does in the movies. Just by the way Mitchum ta
lks or lights a cigarette you know he’s not fooling around. When I got to the cabin I stood there in the gathering heat and watched the last of the south wind stop in the trees. I could hear the soft putt-putt of the ice truck’s refrigeration unit in its hiding place out in the woods. I strode right toward it rattling the eyes in my palm as if they were dice. I paused at the back of the truck in full sweat because of the heat, then opened the door.

  The Chief was still wrapped in the gill net and the sunlight struck across his chest, his head still in the shadows. It occurred to me I shouldn’t have painted the truck camo green from its original white because it was absorbing too much sun and heat. I got halfway in and unwrapped part of the gill net around the Chief’s head and slid him down so I could see better what I was doing. He owned the biggest head I’ve ever seen on a man so there would be plenty of room for the eyes. I looked down and saw there was some water on the floor which told me I was dealing with meltage. This didn’t bother me too much as we would be driving mostly at night which would cool it off. I figured after I got the eyes in I would throw some boughs and bed sheets on the truck top for the time being. Just then, as I was looking up the Chief let out a moan and some air which flubbered his lips. Suffice it to say I threw myself backwards out the door, knocking my wind out when I hit the ground. I felt like I was full of hot jelly I was so scared. I hadn’t even moved a minute later when Bob drove up and came down the trail into the woods.

  He looked down at me, then in the truck door at the Chief, quickly slamming the door. “Jesus,” he said, “that’s fucking Frankenstein.” He helped me up and I told him what happened. “Just gas,” he said, having seen it before in dead bodies. Bob suggested we start right away instead of waiting for dark so the wind could help cool off my paint job. Avakian wanted us there before dawn and the trip was over five hundred miles. I’d wait and see if Avakian would pay extra for the eyes. Little did Bob and I know that bodies aren’t a case of finders-keepers.

  Right now I am back in present time with my rabbit stew bubbling on the stove. Old Claude just walked in without a knock. He said he smelled something to eat a half mile away, then asked for a drink. There is something in the air up here that makes us lie a lot. For instance, if you catch three brook trout you say you caught fifteen, and if you caught fifteen you say you caught three. If things are terrible you pretend you’re okay, but if things are going too smoothly you tend to piss in the whiskey and create a problem. I’m not sure why this is true. I told Claude I didn’t have any booze in the cabin and he started sniffling loudly and said he smelled schnapps, McGillicuddy’s Peppermint Schnapps, in fact. I got the bottle out of the cupboard and took a big swig first in case he had it in mind to hog the rest. When I handed him the bottle he sat by the stove and just looked at it for a long while before drinking. He always acts like this when he has something important to say.

  Claude is in his mid-seventies and he just walked seven miles out here to tell me something but he was in no rush. He carries a big garbage bag folded up in his pocket to crawl into in case it rains or the snow is wet, or he just wants to take a nap. Claude’s the one who told me that every tree is different from every other tree. I thought about this for a week, then told Bob who didn’t think it was such a big deal. Claude has a weak spot for Shelley even though he thinks she’s up to no good. He tells her a lot about the old ways of the Chippewa though I know he makes most of it up on the spot.

  It wasn’t until I set out two bowls for supper that Claude told me the news. First of all Shelley wanted me to come over to Marquette tomorrow because she and Tarah were feeling blue. Claude said they were at the Ramona Inn but I was pretty sure it was the Ramada. Then came the shocker. Just this afternoon while Claude was wandering around in the boondocks for reasons of his own, he came upon two fellows setting up camp despite the bad weather. It just so happened that the two guys were Shelley’s friends and classmates, the asshole with the red hair I’d met several times and the small blond fellow who walks around being sincere about everything. The blond guy had given me a book of poetry by a fruitcake Arab by the name of Gibran that I couldn’t understand, so I gave it to a tourist girl and it made her horny as a toad.

  When I heard about the camp certain things were clear. Claude said when they drove off he came out of hiding and snooped in their tent, finding a whole tube of marked-up topographical maps. It dawned on me Shelley wanted me over in Marquette so I wouldn’t run into the two guys looking for my burial mounds out in the woods. I got so angry that I couldn’t eat my rabbit stew, then I calmed down in a few minutes and it was so good we finished the whole pot. Sad to say we didn’t have a single beer to go with it, and the schnapps was gone.

  I drove Claude back to town and we decided on the spur of the moment to have a nightcap at the Dunes. Sure enough Shelley’s friends were there. To protect their identities I’ll call them Jerk and Jerkoff. They were all smiles and pretended surprise that Shelley was in Marquette. After buying us a drink they said they were headed back to the Superior Hotel for a night’s rest. When they left Frank came over and warned me that the two of them were talking about me to Shelley on the pay phone. I felt my muscles tighten as if they were steel. “I’m going to deal hard with those shitsuckers,” I said. Frank offered to loan me an axe but I thought that was going a little far. You never know when Frank is kidding.

  The next day dawned bright and clear. I wasn’t feeling great but a lot better than the day before. I made a thick bacon and raw onion sandwich which always gives me energy. It was about seven and I knew I should wait until ten before I checked out their camp as they would likely be out on their burial search at that time. If Shelley was blue I was a whole lot bluer. I’m not talking about feeling betrayed, because I saw that coming, but the idea that far too much had been happening in the past four months for me to get my balance.

  When Shelley probes me she can’t get over what she calls my “preferences” and “life choices.” For instance, my favorite thing is just plain walking in the woods. I can do it days on end without getting tired of it. I mix this up a bit with fishing and hunting. Of course I like to make love and drink. That goes without saying. Before I started diving for Bob I sometimes had to cut pulp which is hard work. When I cut pulp my favorite moments were drinking cold water, making my dinner, then falling asleep because I was bone tired. I think I’ve seen every bird up here but I don’t know their official names which irritates Shelley. Perhaps no one is who they seem to be. Shelley also thinks that what with my being pretty much an orphan, and with an old man as a parent, I was raised as if I myself were an old man with no expectations, no drive and ambition. When I agreed she didn’t want me to, so I said I’ve been around a bit and there’s a lot worse things than that. To be sure, it is strange to be an orphan and have to invent yourself because you don’t know the facts. Having parents would give you an anchor on earth, but when you’re an orphan you’re always dreaming about how you came to be, and you could well pass your life dreaming. Or walking around in the woods.

  This reminds me of the finest thing I ever saw, and which upset Shelley so much we skipped the next day’s probing. I was about ten at the time and we were living over west of Escanaba. It was the day before school let out before Christmas vacation and a storm had begun in the morning so we were let out of school early. The problem was that the wind had been coming from the south up across Lake Michigan bringing in rain because the lake hadn’t completely cooled down. But then the wind, as it always does, came around to the west, then the northwest, increasing to about fifty knots and we had a full-blown gale and blizzard sweeping down all the way from Manitoba. First it was the rain turning to ice, then a foot or so of wet snow freezing up as it turned cold, then another foot or two of dry snow casting in drifts so it came halfway up the kitchen window. It was a hellish storm and by late afternoon the electricity went off. That didn’t matter to us as our heat was wood anyhow and we had twenty cords stacked against the back of the house, with another tw
o cords of dry maple in the pump shed. We just lit the oil lamps and continued to play cribbage which we always did during storms.

  Somewhere in the middle of the night the wind stopped and moonlight came in my frosted-up window. I blew my breath on the window to make a peephole in the frost. I remember staring at the field outside and the woods beyond and feeling quite satisfied that I wasn’t an animal freezing my ass off. Then I saw a movement way out in the field near the edge of the woods, a black shape wobbling around and coming slowly toward the house. My skin pricked up with fright before I realized it had to be our neighbors. I also remember Grandpa was worried about David Four Feet’s mother because she was due to have a baby and her husband was in jail for getting drunk and slugging the deputy. The upshot was that I woke up Grandpa and he got dressed in a hurry and went plunging through the deep snow to help out. It was David, his two brothers and sister Rose dragging a toboggan with their mother aboard. She was in labor and the kids, none of them over ten, were upset and their legs were bleeding from the crusted snow. Grandpa put the mother in his bed and the kids in the parlor where he attended to their wounds with me helping out and fetching hot water, bandages and iodine.

  He made the kids stay in the parlor, then put another pot of water on the stove, and we went in to help the mother. I mostly stood there and let her squeeze my arms and hands and within a half hour out came a baby girl with the help of Grandpa giving a tug or two. When he held the baby up and cleaned the gunk off and it started crying he said to me that this would be the finest thing I’d ever seen and this was how every person came into the world. I believed it though my arm hurt and was all bruised up from her squeezing. They all stayed with us for four days and we had a grand time playing games and cards and tobogganing though it didn’t make Rose and her mother like me later on. I must have been an unlikable kid.