The Woman Lit by Fireflies

  Shelley and I had a terrible shitstorm of an argument. She hates animal cruelty and the story about Sam. I said that I was only writing what had happened. The argument went on to my other shortcomings and my lack of sympathy for her work. She wants to dig up this old burial mound I found way back in the forest exactly thirteen miles from the nearest people. She said it dates from the time of Columbus. I showed the burial site to Shelley the day after we met so she’d make love to me which she did on the spot, so she fulfilled her side of the bargain. The trouble is that when I had showed the spot to Claude he asked me never to disturb it and I promised. My word is not too reliable in most matters but this one was important. I took the precaution of using a roundabout way and Shelley could never find her way back. Now she nags at me like a sore tooth over this matter. The Chippewa are tough folks and won’t stand still for the digging up of their relatives like they do out west.

  After the big argument I ran off to the bar, which violates my probation. I came home just before dawn smelling of perfume. Who wore the perfume I can’t say except she was not local. I finally made peace with Shelley when I got up in the afternoon. She is to continue probing me an hour a day but will not interfere in or read this story until I’m done. In turn I had to promise to drive her down to Escanaba and Bark River to see where I grew up, something I don’t want to do. When Grandpa died about ten years ago I sold both places for a total of thirteen thousand dollars, bought my vehicle and took off for Alaska to seek my fortune. I never made it past Townsend, Montana, where I got beat up by some fellows in a misunderstanding about a girl. The money went for repairs at the hospital in Bozeman, but that is another story.

  I was just thinking that my mind became a tad criminal after my dog was shot. Shelley told me that suffering, as opposed to what they say in the newspapers, does not necessarily make you a better person. I’d have to agree with that notion. I waited for two months before I burned down the deputy’s chicken coop, though at the last moment I took mercy and opened the coop door so the chickens could escape. My friend David Four Feet, who was Rose’s brother, stood watch. He got his name Four Feet because when he was a little kid his spine was haywire so he scampered around on his hands and toes like an ape. Then the government took him away for a year and when they delivered him back he could walk, only the name stuck.

  The deputy had a pretty good idea who burned his chicken coop but he couldn’t prove it. I hoped it would make me feel better but it didn’t. You can’t compare a chicken coop to a dog.

  For Christmas that year Grandpa bought me a big heavy punching bag. He knew I had set the fire though he didn’t say anything, and I think he wanted to get me interested in something, which was the sport of boxing. But boxing turned matters worse. I worked so hard on it for two years I became a bit of a bully, winning all my bare-knuckle fights in the area. I wasn’t any good at anger so I had to rely on technique, most of it taught to me by an Italian railroad worker from the east side of Escanaba. My fighting career ended when I was seventeen one night over in a field near Iron Mountain. My Italian railroad worker organized the thing to win some betting money. I only weighed about 170 at the time and my opponent was a big pulp cutter in his thirties, real strong but too slow. There were two rows of cars lined up to cast light. It was supposed to be a boxing match but right away the guy choke-holded me in a clinch and I got the feeling he was trying to kill me. I got free by stomping on his instep and then, since he smelled real beery, I worked on his lower stomach and then his throat. The feeling of nausea and choking will weaken a man faster than anything else. Finally the guy was down on his knees puking and holding his throat. What ended it all for me was when a little kid about five ran to the guy and hugged him, then came at me and hit me in the legs with a stick over and over. I never knew my own father but if I had I sure wouldn’t want to see him get beat up. The whole thing was awful. I never fought again except on the rare occasion when I was attacked by surprise in a bar.

  It just now occurred to me that Bob was right when he yelled at me during a recess in the trial. He said that if I had acted like a real partner we wouldn’t be in this mess. The afternoon I found the Chief I was off by myself in the rubber tender dinghy near the Harbor of Refuge at Little Lake. Bob was farther down west in the main skiff with a metal detector where the Phineas Marsh went down in 1896. Mind you, everything we do is against the law as all sunken ship artifacts are the sole ownership of the state of Michigan. When I made it up to the surface and to the dinghy I rigged the smallest buoy I had so it wouldn’t be noticed, then thought better of it. Any diver will check out a stray buoy and I didn’t want the straight arrows over at the Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point to find my prize redskin. I sat in the dinghy for a long time making triangulation points on the shore about a mile distant.

  When I joined up with Bob an hour later at the Little Lake dock I had good reasons, or so I thought, for not telling him about my find. I was still sore over my arrest in the Soo (Sault Sainte Marie) a few weeks before. Bob had sent me over to sell a brass ship’s whistle to a nautical antiques dealer. Most of the time we work through a dealer in Chicago to escape detection, but we needed some quick cash as the lower unit of our Evinrude was in bad shape. I dropped off the ship’s whistle and got the cash in a sealed envelope which was an insult in itself. I said, How’s a man to count the money? The dealer said he was just told to give a sealed envelope to a messenger.

  The downfall in this situation was that I only had gas money to get back to Grand Marais and I was hungry and thirsty. I went into the bathroom of a bar down the street, opened the envelope and took out a well-deserved twenty. I had a few shots and beers and went over to a cathouse for a quick poke with a black girl I knew there. This girl has three years of college yet works in a whorehouse, which shows that blacks don’t get a fair shake. Maybe I just liked her because she reminded me of long-lost Beatrice, though like Beatrice she wasn’t especially fond of me. Anyway, it was slow time in the afternoon and I worked up an appetite doing “around the world” instead of the usual half-and-half. It cost me an extra twenty bucks but I was still within my share of the take on the brass ship’s whistle. Then I figured Bob wouldn’t want me to drive home hungry so I went out to the Antlers and had the Deluxe Surf ‘n’ Turf for the Heavy Eater, which was a porterhouse and a lobster tail, and a few more beers to fight the heat of the evening. I had every intention of leaving town, but was struck by the notion I could get some money back by going to the Chippewa casino and playing a little blackjack. Wrong again. I was out another hundred bucks when I walked over to the bar at the Ojibwa Hotel for a nightcap to help on the lonely ride home. This turned out to be the key mistake of the many I made that cursed day.

  The seafood had given me a tingle of horniness which it is famous for and I asked a real fancy woman to dance. She and her girlfriends were all dressed up from their bowling league banquet, and her pink dress was open-necked like a peck basket. She said, “Get out of here, you nasty man.” I went back to the bar feeling my face was hot and red. I admit I wasn’t looking too good in my jeans and Deep Diver T-shirt. I hardly ever get turned down when I’m in fresh, clean clothes. Sad to say, the weight of failure of the day was pissing me off so I went back over to the table and asked her to dance again. She said the same thing and all the women at the table laughed, so I poured a full mug of cold beer down that big open neck of her pink dress, then I said something impolite and stupid like “That should cool off your tits, you stupid bitch.” I was not prepared for what happened next. All five of these women jumped me as if they were one giant lady. They held me down with the help of the bartender until the cops came and hauled me off.

  The upshot was that the next morning in jail when I called my partner Bob to come bail me out he wouldn’t do it. He said, “Use the money from the ship’s whistle and bail yourself out.” I had to explain over half of it was gone which left me fifteen bucks short of bail. He yelled “Then fuck you, sit there” into the phone and let m
e cool my heels for three full days. A lesser man might have sat there and moped, and I could have called Shelley down in Ann Arbor, but I decided to guts it out. Grandpa used to say “Don’t Doggett,” meaning don’t act like his second cousin with the truly awful name of Lester Doggett from Peshtigo, Wisconsin. Lester used to stop by for a visit and piss and moan about the likelihood of a forest fire. That’s about all he talked about, and true, his grandparents had died in the great Peshtigo fire which killed thousands, but that was over seventy years before. “Don’t Doggett” was what Grandpa said to me when I whined, complained or expressed any self-pity. It still means to stand up and take your medicine, though it doesn’t mean you can’t get even, and that’s what I was doing two weeks later when I didn’t tell Bob about finding the Chief.

  One afternoon it was wet and windy and we were almost done with our probing when Shelley’s cousin Tarah and her boyfriend Brad showed up at Shelley’s cabin. I had heard about this Tarah and was curious to meet her. Tarah is not her real name but was given to her during a ceremony of “empowerment” in a place called Taos in New Mexico. That’s what Shelley told me anyway. I could believe it as this Tarah had green eyes that could almost hypnotize you. She was a bit thin for my taste but her satin gym shorts pulled up her butt in a pretty way. She was brown as tobacco and had a clear musical voice. The minute they arrived this fellow Brad unloaded a thick-tired bicycle from his van and dressed up a bit goofy in black, shiny stretch shorts, a helmet, goggles and special shoes. He was a real ox and I asked him what the bike set him back and he said a thousand dollars. I was not inclined to believe the figure and I said for that amount they should throw in a motor. He said “Ha-ha,” asked directions and rode off at top speed on the dirt road, farting like a bucking horse.

  Back inside Tarah made us some tea out of secret Indian herbs and we sat before the fire. I can’t say I felt anything different from the tea but I had high hopes, sobriety being a tough row to hoe. Then Tarah spread out a velvet cloth and put this rock which she said was crystal in the middle of the cloth. She stared at Shelley and me and said in a soft, whispery voice, “You are more than you think you are.” I didn’t exactly take this as good news because what I already was had gotten my ass in enough of a sling. Then Tarah said a whole bunch of what sounded like nonsense symbols as if she were trying to make a rabbit jump out of a top hat, though maybe it was another language. I wasn’t concentrating too well as Tarah was sitting cross-legged like an Oriental and you could see up her crotch past her shorts to where we all come from. I already said she was a bit thin but she was also smooth and healthy. She had Shelley and me put our hands on the crystal. “We all go back many, many eons. We started when time started and we end when time ends. We have been many things. We have been stones, moons, flowers, creatures and many other people. The source of all beingness is available to us every day.”

  I admit I was a bit swept away, at least for the time being, by this mystical stuff. We had to sit there in complete silence for a half hour just like you do for long periods when you deer hunt. It sounded good because since I was a kid I wanted to be a bear or a sharp-shinned hawk or even a skunk. If someone gives you a hard time you just piss in their direction and they run for it. At one point Shelley frowned at me, thinking I was looking up under Tarah’s shorts when I was supposed to keep my eyes squinted almost shut. “Seeing but not seeing,” Tarah called it. I was wishing my old buddy David Four Feet were here. We used to spend money we earned hoeing at a raspberry farm to send away for books we saw advertised in Argosy or Stag or True magazine that would give us what they called secret powers. If you’re hoeing raspberries for thirty cents an hour in the hot sun what you want is secret powers. We never got back anything we could understand but neither of us was good at school. The toughest book was about the Rosy Cross put out by the Rosicrucians. It mostly reminded me of David’s sister Rose, the one who knocked me down and also threw pig slop on me.

  Tarah rang a little chime to end the period of silence. I remembered when the bell rang that what I was supposed to be doing was getting in touch with a past life. Shelley went off to start supper because Tarah wanted a private time with me. Tarah moved closer to me and held my wrists. She was sitting in what she called a “full locust” and you couldn’t help but wonder what was possible with a woman with that much stretch in her limbs. She fixed her green eyes on me.

  “What did you become? I could see your trance state was very deep.”

  “I became a big condor from olden times. I was feeding on a dead buffalo I scared off a cliff.” I fibbed, remembering a trip to the Field Museum when I was on the bum in Chicago. If you’re in Chicago you should go see these ancient stuffed animals.

  “That’s truly wonderful, B.D. It means your spirit wishes to soar far above your current problems. Your spirit wishes to use your condor being and blood to help you. In order to do this you must not deny the proud heritage of your people. You must let us help you rediscover your heritage.”

  I dropped my head as if lost in thought. Despite how many times I’ve told Shelley I don’t have a drop of Chippewa blood in me she refuses to believe it. She feels I am ashamed of my roots and how do I know anyway since I’m not all that sure who my parents were? I’ve said I’m just as likely to be an Arab or a Polack, but she won’t hear of it. All of her anthropology friends think I’m at least half Chippewa but she’s told them I won’t talk about it. I’ve been tempted a few times but then was worried about being caught out. After all, these people know more about Indians than any Indian I ever met, except what it is like to be one. I never saw David Four Feet’s family having all that much fun.

  “It would be nice if you’d give me a hand during these troubled times,” I said. “Sometimes this probing I do with Shelley just wears me out.”

  “There are many ways rather than a single Way. Shelley is dealing with your past and I’m trying to reach into the past before your past. Do you understand?”

  I nodded as she stood up stretching a few inches from my nose. I breathed deeply so as to catch a general whiff. It was somewhere between watercress and a rock you pick out of a river, way up near the top along with wild violets and muskmelon.

  “I sense that you are responding to my womanness,” she said, twisting at the waist to loosen up. “But you are not responding to me, Tarah, but to the female porpoise that has been my other mode for the last month or so. Porpoises are deeply sexual.”

  Then Brad came in from his bike ride. It turned out he had ridden all the way to the Hurricane River and back on a dirt road in less than two hours. That happens to be about thirty miles which I found amazing. I got out my topo maps and he was thrilled to see that there were hundreds and hundreds of miles of small dirt roads in Alger County. I was brought up short when I asked him if he had seen the moose that had been hanging around the Hurricane. “I see nothing but the road,” he said. Then he grabbed a towel to go swim in the bay even though the temperature was only in the mid-forties and the foghorn was going full blast. I watched him through binoculars and he swam all the way out to Lonesome Point and back which was three miles. I didn’t bother asking him if he had seen any fish.

  It was during my after-dinner nap that I got a real eye opener. Tarah and Shelley had fixed the food of far-off India which didn’t sit real well in my stomach, mostly because there was no meat, chicken or fish, just rice and vegetables. Old Brad really tied on the feedbag. It was the most quantity I had seen anyone eat since I watched a friend of mine eat twenty-three whitefish fillets. It was all-you-can-eat for a fixed price and he wanted to get a deal. Tarah said Brad needed ten thousand calories a day while he was in training. Brad didn’t talk while he ate or after he ate. Anyway, while I was napping and trying to digest the food I heard my name mentioned through the thin wall by Shelley and Tarah who were in the kitchen cleaning up. I pretended I was snoring to urge them on. I just heard bits and snatches but it was a plot for me to take Tarah out to my secret burial mound and for her to try t
o remember the route. Shelley knew I’d never take her back there and here she was trying to rig it for her cousin to do the job. My feelings were so hurt I eased out the window and walked down to the Dunes Saloon.

  Morning dawned bright and clear for me, if a little late. Shelley couldn’t very well say anything about my getting drunk when she was busy hatching a plot. She sat at her desk surrounded by a pile of books, writing a semester paper on how Indians preserved their medicine herbs for use in winter (they hung them out to dry after they picked them). Tarah was in the kitchen packing a knapsack of food for Brad’s all-day ride. While I poured my coffee I saw her stick in twelve apples, a sack of carrots, a head of cabbage and a jar of honey. She wondered if I could catch some fresh fish for dinner and I said yes. She was all dressed up in the Patagonia clothes that Shelley wears, including green shorts that did a good job on her rump. She had on great big hiking boots that looked funny at the end of her brown legs. Meanwhile, out the window I could see Brad stretching with a leg so far up a tree you’d think he’d split himself. Two old Finns I knew were standing out on the road on their way for the morning opening of the bar. They were watching Brad with polite interest.