by Jim Harrison
About an hour before dawn a siren howled down Hilgard Avenue and through the foliage B.D. could see the flickering amber lights of an ambulance, the yowl the most ghastly of all human-produced sounds, which had barely subsided when a Medevac chopper fluttered and whacked overhead landing on the roof of the medical center that adjoined the gardens. Rather than being irritated B.D. had the feeling that these local people had the wherewithal to immediately take care of their sick or injured. A few winters before a logger friend had had some of his ass literally frozen off when he had been trapped by a fallen log for about eight hours before help came. Of course, he reminded himself, he had seen a great number of the miserably poor on his day-and-a-half walk who might be advised to walk in front of a car for a change of luck. There was an owl with an unfamiliar call directly above him and moments later the first stirring of dawn birds which always brought on an hour or so of the deepest sleep the outdoor sleeper can have, maybe a genetic remnant from a time when the predatory enemy was always nocturnal and first light meant the sweet dream of security.
Having finally figured out where he was Brown Dog was on his knees neatly brushing off and folding his garbage bags when he was approached by two garden workers, a young man and woman, who told him he wasn’t allowed to sleep there. “But I already have,” he said, adding that it was a truly wonderful place. They were botany graduate students and the lumpish girl tried to give him a dollar which he turned down saying he already had forty-nine dollars. He asked a few questions about the flora which they referred to as “Pacific rim,” a new term for him though in his mind’s eye he could see the black ink outline of the ocean in the atlas. He also asked if there was a nice woods in the vicinity where he could camp out and they thought not, though the young man added that he might check out Will Rogers State Park farther out Sunset. A mountain lion supposedly lived there, right smack-dab in Los Angeles, also lots of coyotes, not to speak of rattlesnakes and birds. This information made B.D. think that this wasn’t a bad place after all. He asked the whereabouts of the “Indian office” at the university in hopes of a starting place for tracking down Lone Marten. They only said that there might be one but they didn’t know where it was. They said good-bye then and when they walked off with their pruning shears the lumpish girl had begun to look pretty good. B.D. thought they could sit naked together in the carp pool near the bamboo thicket and it would be like some old movie set in a tropical island. On the way out of the garden he looked at the top of a very tall palm tree and it reminded him of one of Delmore’s favorite movies, Sands of Iwo Jima, which B.D. didn’t care for because of the endless gore. The stealthy Japanese hid at the tops of coconut trees because, according to Delmore, their heads looked like coconuts. Delmore’s own head looked like a beige bowling ball, size nine, in fact, on the top of a small wiry frame.
When B.D. emerged from the garden his heart jumped and his stride quickened. What luck! Right there across Hilgard, parked illegally, was the five-year-old dirty brown Taurus station wagon, Lone Marten’s car, and a rumpled and burly man was unlocking the car. Brown Dog dodged the early-morning traffic with difficulty and when he looked back at the Taurus a squad car had screeched up behind it and the burly man was leaning against the car in despair. Brown Dog’s momentum, caused by a leap to escape a yellow Ferrari, was such that he was nearly in between the burly man and the cop before he could stop himself. This was a collusion of fates that afterward would stun B.D. For lack of a better thing he opened his lunch bucket and swigged the last of his water, noting too late that it definitely wasn’t Lone Marten’s brown Taurus. Shit, he thought, as he smiled lamely at the burly man and the cop. At the very moment a half dozen U.C.L.A. coeds, definitely sorority girls, flounced up the sidewalk singing a merry tune, all with uniformly tan brown legs and trim bottoms. While the cop glanced at the girls the burly man winked frantically at B.D. and flashed a was of bills from his pocket. The cop looked back at the man and then at Brown Dog with irritation.
“I think you were going to drive. I could take you in,” the cop said.
“I was getting a manuscript out of the car while I waited for my driver, Ted. You really shouldn’t arrest me for my supposed intention. Besides, Ted drives me everywhere.”
“Get in the car and start it,” the cop said and Brown Dog took the keys from the man and started the car, so obviously not Lone Marten’s though it was even more of a mess. It didn’t, however, smell of Lone Marten’s main fuel, cannabis. The car phone, the first of his life, began to ring and the man jumped in the passenger side, saying, “It’s the coast.”
“We’re already on the coast, fuckhead,” the cop said and then demanded B.D.’s driver’s license. “You’re the driver. Where’s your license?”
“Yes, sir,” B.D. said, knowing with cops that politeness was the primary move. He was somewhat proud that he kept his driver’s license current though in fact the renewal form constituted the only mail he ever received, not being a member of any organization or even owning a social security number. The cop appeared as if he were going to return to his squad car to check the license, then changed his mind saying that he was originally from Livonia which was part of Detroit and had been up deer hunting around Curtis which wasn’t all that far from Grand Marais. The cop had also fished perch at Les Cheneaux and walleye near Rapid River, two species that bored B.D. though he didn’t say so. B.D. asked him why he had moved to L.A. and the cop said he had always wanted to become an actor. As they shook hands the cop stooped and looked over at the burly man who was in the middle of saying on the phone, “If you think I’d do a rewrite for a hundred thou you can suck a Republican’s dick.”
“Bob, shut up and listen to me. Don’t ever in your wildest dreams try to drive a car in this city again. You’re grounded forever, Bob. You’d do a year minimum no matter what lawyer you got. If you so much as touch a steering wheel you’ll be eating and shitting with beaners and jigs for three hundred and sixty-five days.”
“You shouldn’t talk to me like that, you blue-belt pansy. I was a United States marine,” Bob said, hanging up the car phone.
“You were never a marine, Bob. We know your record. You’re only a writer.” The cop walked off as if he had won the day and B.D. turned to Bob wondering how he dared call a cop a “blue-belt pansy,” so he asked him.
“The U.S. Constitution. Also he wants a part in a movie. He tried to get my last D.U.I. reduced but lower-echelon cops can’t swing anything. I went over the curb on San Vincente onto the median because it was hot and I wanted to park under a tree for shade.”
“What did you blow?” Brown Dog asked. Driving under the influence was a big-ticket item in the U.P., especially around Marquette and Escanaba.
“I blew a point two three which is slightly major.” He gestured for B.D. to get moving and they headed north up Hilgard toward Sunset. “The name’s Bob Duluth. Where do you want to go?”
Brown Dog said “the ocean” but the question was puzzling in that he had supposed Bob had places to go for meetings or whatever. There was also the unnerving idea that this was the most unlikely way he had ever gotten a job and there was the question of whether life should be changing this fast. He explained to Bob his theory about not driving over forty-nine and Bob said if you did that on the freeways you’d get your basic tailpipe up your ass. Bob’s language was a strange mixture to B.D., half the low-rent vulgarity of pulp cutters and construction workers, and half the peculiar kind of elevated talk B.D. identified with woods yuppies, as they were called, richer people that built in remote places way up north in order to be close to nature. These were often nice enough folks but their conversational patterns were quite intricate. B.D. had cut firewood for a couple in their thirties who had had a top-rate crew come all the way from Minnesota to build them an elaborate log house. They overpaid him for firewood and he had tried to give them some venison (illegal out of season) in return, but they were devout vegetarians. This was quite odd to B.D., one of whose ambitions was to eat a p
orterhouse every day for a week if he ever had the wherewithal. The couple had even invited him to take a sauna with them and the woman was absolutely bare naked and a knockout at that. He feared he’d get an erection but then he had a hangover and they raised the heat level to an unbearable degree to “purify their bodies.” They fed him a vegetarian meal with some vegetables and grains dressed up like meat which was pretty good though later in the evening he had one of Frank’s special half-pound burgers. They had become distanced when he had run into the woman outside the I.G.A. grocery store and she had said, “I feel good about myself.” B.D. had simply asked, “Why?” and she had totally delaminated and started screeching that he was a “thankless bastard” right there on the street which made the locals think he’d had an affair with her. Sadly, this was not true. Once when he had delivered firewood the couple had been doing their yoga exercises on the sun deck and the woman who was wearing a bikini had her heels locked behind her neck when she waved at him. He unloaded and stacked two full cords of beech while they were flopping around on the sundeck and he was quite amazed at their contortions.
Bob fell asleep in the car after using words as varied as “etiolate,” “shitsucker,” “fractious,” and “motherfucker.” Brown Dog turned off into the Will Rogers State Park out on Sunset just to check it out as he had a feeling the job might not last and he might need to set up camp. The park fairly made his mouth water as there were few people around and the hills looked endless. Just the idea that there was a mountain lion roaming around made all of the multimillion-dollar homes in the distance look rather toylike and puny. The yoga couple never had any houseguests at their “retreat, “ or so they called it, and the locals wondered why they had two bathrooms.
Before Bob dozed off B.D. had heard a few items from his past that seemed a bit jumbled and possibly fibs. Bob said that he initially meant to be a scholar of real old literature from England, had taught in Ashland in northern Wisconsin, then at the University of Wisconsin in Madison which he considered his home. His wife and the son and daughter attending college were all fatally ill. This raised a lump in B.D.’s throat though only moments later Bob said his son was a Big Ten gymnast and his daughter a long-distance runner who had placed high in the Chicago Marathon, and his wife ran her own landscape gardening business. B.D. tried to imagine them all plodding to their strenuous activities shot through with mortal illness. No matter how well they were doing Bob felt that it behooved him to make money to insure comfort in their doomed futures. In successive summers Bob Duluth had written three mystery novels that did very well that featured a midwestern professor who was alone among all men in sensing the true and pervasive evil in the world. For the past few years Bob had been in and out of Hollywood to make the vast sums of money required to pay for the treatment of his gymnast, runner, and businesswoman. He dared B.D. to ask how much and B.D. asked, “How much?” and Bob said, “Over a grand a day,” an inconceivable sum to B.D. It was, however, in this matter and Bob’s current occupation as a “screenwriter” that B.D. sensed the skunk in the woodpile. Back in high school there had a been a teacher fresh out of the University of Michigan, rather than one of the state’s many teachers colleges, who was much disliked by the other staff for being too smart for his own good. This young teacher knew how everything in the world worked and, what’s more, could explain it to his students. He cut up a bunch of movie film and somehow developed it, put it on a wind-up roller and spun it, showing how moving pictures worked. It was still as impressive to B.D. years later and the teacher hadn’t made any mention of anyone writing the spinning film. Even though Bob Duluth said he only invented the entire stories for films he still seemed on thin ice. Unfortunately this beloved teacher had been caught tinkering with Debbie Schwartz on a woodland field trip, the same girl who made pin money showing her underpants. Debbie was fifteen at the time, though in most respects older than the teacher. The students widely protested the teacher’s firing but the school board was adamant. Brown Dog and David Four Feet did their part by throwing dog shit and Limburger cheese in the blower down in the school’s furnace room which evacuated the school. B.D. heard that years later Debbie and the grand teacher had been married and were living in a mansion near San Francisco, the teacher having invented new functions for computers.
As they continued on toward Malibu, Bob Duluth was still asleep, snoring in fact, with an unattractive bubble of sputum on his lips. B.D. figured the man must work pretty hard because there were bags under his eyes and he twitched in his sleep like Grandpa used to when he worked two straight shifts, sixteen hours, at the sawmill.
B.D. wasn’t quite ready for one of the signal experiences of his life. He had been following a slow-moving green Chrysler driven by a blue-haired lady when he looked up on a rise in the road and there was the Pacific Ocean. He drove off on the narrow shoulder, got out, and leaned against the car hood, at first with his face in his hands and peeking out between his fingers because the view was far too much to be absorbed wide open. He felt choky as if there were a lump of coal beneath his breastbone and his body buzzed in a way not unlike the minutes before sex. If he had known Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy” he would have been hearing it, and the vast, rumpled bluish green water drew on his soul so that his soul only spoke the language of water, forgetting all else. He simply couldn’t wait to touch it with his hands, so he jumped back in the Taurus and sped off with Bob Duluth opening one eye in careless non-recognition Who is driving me and who cares? I’ve been up all night eating what’s left of my heart, over an actress at that. A Brown Dog driving a brown car.
In Malibu, B.D. parked in the nearly empty lot of a restaurant, locked the car, and made his way down to the beach. He knelt and felt the water, colder than he expected, about like Lake Superior in May. A wave submerged his shoes with a delicious feeling, his feet, so unused to cement, still sore from the jaunt from Cucamonga. A big sailboat came by, its rail nearly buried in the water. B.D. waved and two folks in yellow slickers waved back, which gave him a good feeling about the human race. He sat on the beach for an hour in a state of total forgetfulness about his new job, watching seabirds that resembled the rare piping plover but were a bit larger, no doubt cousins. His mind was a peaceful blank other than thinking that after he retrieved his bearskin and before he headed back to Michigan to face the music, or better yet northern Ontario which was the U.P.’s cousin, he’d spend a couple of nights on the beach wrapped in his bearskin, and also a couple of nights on the ridge he had seen up in Will Rogers State Park. Of course there were many signs that said “No Camping” but then the world had become full of signs that said “No Something,” so to avoid suffocation you generally had to ignore them. In the Upper Peninsula such signs were generally filled with bullet holes from those acting out of resentment or for convenient target practice. During the worst of the bug season, late May and June, when the mosquitoes and blackflies could be irritating, B.D. on breezy nights liked to sleep on a stretch of fifteen miles of deserted shore of Lake Superior, a different place each time, though most of the routine was invariable. First he’d get a loaf of homemade bread from an old lady he cut wood for, catch a few fish, buy a six-pack, start a driftwood fire, fry the fish in bacon fat in an old iron skillet, and eat it with the bread, salt, and the bottle of Tabasco he always carried in his old fatigue jacket, wrapped in duct tape so it wouldn’t clink against his pocketknife. He’d finish the six-pack in the late twilight near the summer solstice that far north, nearly eleven in the evening, scrub the pan with sand, then get naked and scrub his body in the cold surf. A lady might come ambling along though this had never happened and it wouldn’t do to be unclean.
When he reached the car and unlocked it Bob Duluth was still sleeping and now sweating profusely because the car was very hot in the mid-morning sun. B.D. started the car but the air conditioner made a weird noise and wouldn’t work so he opened all the windows. Bob had begun to make a keening noise in the midst of a bad dream and his hands flapped and clutched
his face. At first B.D. couldn’t think of what to do other than run for it, but opted for turning on the radio real loud. Luckily the dial was on a Mexican station and a woman’s voice was full of passion and deep lyrical sobs, then she would lilt off into high beautiful notes. The music seemed to go with the wordless, verbless immensity of the ocean thought B.D., though not in that specific language.
“I was never the man I used to be,” Bob said, opening his eyes and mopping his face with a handkerchief, looking out at the water. “When I die I will disappear at sea. A hot sea.”
“In a boat?” B.D. asked, a bit unnerved by memories of choppy, rolling Lake Superior.
“I’m not at liberty to say. Let’s have a beer. This fucking car is a steam bath. At a garage in Ensenada some fucker stole some parts from the air conditioner.”
“It’s not open until eleven,” B.D. said, having checked the lounge door after his beach-beer reverie. B.D. followed Bob around to a service entrance where Bob banged at the door and gave a kid in dirty white kitchen clothes twenty bucks for two Tecates. B.D. was pleased to drink his first foreign beer while looking at the ocean.
* * *
“Feminine ambrosia. Seaweed trace. Nipple taste. A bit of tire,” Bob said, tasting the wine.
“Oh Bob, you big dork,” the waitress shrieked, tapping him on the noggin with her ballpoint.
The first beer seemed to have given them a certain momentum. B.D. thought other people might join them when Bob ordered five complete meals plus bottles of both red and white wine. B.D. stuck with Mexican beer, his wine-drinking career having ended young when he and David Four Feet had stolen a case of Mogen David which made them quite ill though they had drunk it all so as not to be wasteful. The very long lunch required seven beers which B.D. had always thought was a perfect number. Bob liked the number seven, too, noting that he had ordered five lunches rather than four because odd numbers were better than even. He had sworn, or so he said, during his impoverished youth never to get stuck with the wrong lunch which would leave you depressed the rest of the day. By ordering five you vastly increased the odds of getting something good to eat. B.D. raised the issue of the expense of this custom and Bob replied that his agent had negotiated a per diem of a thousand dollars a day which was peanuts compared to what certain actors and actresses required.
