The Summer He Didn't Die

  “I had this dream,” the waking Delmore said hesitantly, “that you and Berry were in a cabin up on the Nipigon with that chiseler social worker.”

  “I doubt that. She told me that when she was a girl this Canadian schoolteacher tampered with her so she’s not warm to Canada.” When B.D. had tried to find out exactly what the teacher had done Gretchen had demurred with “just what men do” but then that seemed to cover about everything.

  “I’m only telling you what I dreamt not offering you a bone of contention.”

  Berry offered them each a blackened marshmallow which might be as close as she ever came to cooking. They ate with relish.

  Suddenly it was August and a letter came from the school in Lansing enumerating the things Berry would need when she came south in September. It was two pages long and included everything from three toothbrushes, three pairs of shoes and a pair of rubber boots, six skirts and seven blouses, and so on to the question, “Has this child received sex education?” Berry was playing Chinese checkers while her pet snake slept curled up on the game board. B.D. and Delmore glanced over at Berry before Delmore touched a match to the list and threw it off the porch. Bitch and Teddy came out from under the porch, looked at the burning paper and then up at Delmore for an explanation. He was upset with Bitch who that morning had crushed a mud turtle in her strong jaws. B.D. had struggled to get the turtle away from Bitch and Delmore buried it out by the ashes of Doris near the clump of red cedars.

  The letter from Lansing had stated that they must deliver Berry by three in the afternoon the day after Labor Day. Delmore said that that meant they would have to get up at five in the morning assuming that they obeyed the letter which they weren’t going to do. Such errant thinking had distressed B.D. who already had too much on his tin plate. Life had been easier when he was cutting pulp ten hours a day. He was inexperienced at thinking ahead. For instance, a few days earlier Delmore, who had been in communication with the people who ran Red’s science camp, had announced that he was sending Red off to Cranbrook, a private school in Detroit, in the fall. Brown Dog was stunned by this news but then Delmore reminded him that he would be hiding out in Canada with Berry. Delmore explained that Red was “the future of the family” and couldn’t very well live with a back-road geezer like himself. B.D. was embarrassed that he had forgotten to make any plans for Red but chalked it up to his love problems which were the lack of love in nature. One night after a prodigious romp on Belinda’s carpet she had announced that the affair was over. She had convinced the English professor in their encounter group to try a woman in a larger package and they were headed to Las Vegas for a week’s vacation together. She said she needed a “real boyfriend,” one that she could introduce to her parents.

  “I’m not real?” B.D. had said and she had burst into tears of class-conscious shame then assured him that he and his stepchildren still had a lifetime of free dentistry ahead of them. Immediately feeling good about herself Belinda reminded him to bring in Berry for a teeth cleaning before she went off to Lansing. B.D. had wisely not disclosed his Canadian plans to Belinda whose emotional volatility spooked him. One late evening over a post-love snack (bagna cauda) she had questioned his feelings about her Jewishness and he had said he didn’t have many which upset her. People like Belinda with her lifelong exposure to the media and the educative process couldn’t comprehend the airy lacunae in the minds of someone like B.D. For instance, he knew Jesus was a Jew who had been executed by the Romans. Delmore had said that Americans were the new Romans so B.D. had imagined that prominent local businessmen might string up a rabble-rouser like Jesus. The itinerant life he had led in the great north simply enough hadn’t exposed him to Jews, or blacks for that matter. Thirty years before during a few months at a Bible college in Chicago he had fallen in love with a black woman and several times had eaten blintzes at a Jewish delicatessen and considered the blintzes a considerable step up from Christian pancakes.

  Berry’s teeth cleaning had gone poorly. B.D. had been in the waiting room reading about emperor penguins in National Geographic and how the males suffered tending the eggs while the female was off feeding on krill whatever that was when he heard Belinda scream. The problem was that after a few minutes in the torture chair Berry had waited until Belinda’s back was turned, shot toward the open window, pushed out the screen, and was gone. B.D. and Belinda gave chase without knowing what direction to go. Belinda stopped at Social Services to get Gretchen to help out. B.D. headed for the marina figuring Berry’s love of water might take her there. Berry never got lost in the woods but then he was unsure if this fine sense of direction applied to the city of Escanaba. The sensation of looking for Berry was even more desperate than the week before when he badly needed a six-pack and had spent three hours looking for the car keys which he finally found in Berry’s tiny bedroom in a dresser drawer with her pet snake. The snake clearly understood B.D. wasn’t Berry because it bit him in the finger when he retrieved the keys.

  He was searching the marina area when Gretchen joined him breathless and crying. He tried to calm her down by saying that he was sure Berry would show up but it turned out that Gretchen had gotten another venomous letter from her ex-mate so that two events together had sunk her graceful ship. B.D. put an arm around her shoulders feeling in his arm and hand the same shimmer and buzz he sensed in Berry when she was grief-laden or frightened. It was then he heard the untender cry of a goshawk, a sound that frightens every creature the size of or smaller than a snowshoe rabbit. He heard it again and was thinking of the profound irritability of the goshawk when he suddenly wondered what this reclusive hawk was doing in Escanaba? He looked up and there was Berry at the very top of a tall fir tree where she waved and started down. Gretchen caught her in her arms on the last branch, hugging the only living soul that made her feel motherly.

  * * *

  By the end of the first week of August Delmore had begun marking the days on the calendar, “just like they do in the movies,” he said. Red was home from science camp and terribly excited about going away to a good school. They didn’t see much of him because Delmore had relented and bought him a budget laptop which made Red oblivious not only to them but to the world at large. Berry could sit beside him for a full hour watching the screen. B.D. had taken Red into his confidence on the Berry rescue plan.

  “I’m proud of you, Dad” was all that Red had said before returning to his computer. B.D. had felt a lump in his throat and went out on the porch. He couldn’t remember a single time in his life when anyone said they were proud of him. Of course he admitted to himself that he hadn’t given anyone an occasion for such an emotion.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, time went barreling along. In mid-August Gretchen was still in a state of despondency over the unfairness of love and B.D. for obvious reasons was deeply sympathetic. He invited her out to the house for dinner so that they could plan a camping trip up to the shores of Lake Superior where the renowned poet Longfellow had gotten his secondhand information for his doggerel poem “Hiawatha.” Delmore pretended to be huffy about having Gretchen in his home since she had cost him money enforcing certain regulations concerning B.D.’s crushed knee, plus the plumbing and heating in the trailer. That evening, though, the heart had gone out of his cheapskate anger. After all, his dream had presented Gretchen as an ally. Once again B.D. had cooked the chicken-and-Italian sausage concoction from Dad’s Own Cookbook and once again he was left with two wings for his own portion. He didn’t mind because he was concentrating on Gretchen’s morale without probing too deep. The unworded question was why she bothered opening mail when the consequences were so ugly. The only mail B.D. received was every few years he got his driver’s license renewal form sent to the Dunes Saloon in Grand Marais, thus escaping the ill tidings that pursued Gretchen. She told B.D. that at least once a month her mother would write begging her for a grandchild despite problematical sexuality. B.D. had naturally offered his services for a nickel which she thought quite funny questioning whe
ther he thought of himself at the top of the genetic heap. “Yup,” he had said. B.D. only knew about genes because of Delmore prating about his theory that all of the world’s problems were caused by notions of ethnic virtue and that if marriages were limited to interracial lovers there would be peace on earth.

  There was the boon, balm, elongated serenity of three days of camping east of the outlet of Beaver Lake in Beaver Basin. They never saw a single soul except a park ranger who harassed them just as they were leaving on the last evening. The uniform made B.D. nervous as he was still on probation and had four more months before he was legally allowed back in Alger County. Gretchen in her green bikini easily diverted the ranger’s interest in B.D. by saying that their camping permit was in the parked car five miles distant in a Jiffy bag with her lipstick, mascara, and vibrator. The ranger reddened and scooted off down the beach.

  The days were warm and clear and the nights resplendent with their deep throw of stars which, without ambient light, were a creamy blanket of glitter above them. Gretchen remembered a line of Lorca’s from her college Spanish class, “the enormous night straining her waist against the Milky Way.” B.D. thought it over and said, “He got it right.”

  Gretchen and Berry slept in a small mountain tent with a cloth floor while B.D. rolled up in a blanket near the driftwood fire he enjoyed tending through the night. He felt they were lucky because Lake Superior had been uncommonly surly throughout the summer. One especially blustery day the marine forecast had predicted winds of sixty knots and waves of twenty to twenty-four feet, weather to be expected in October and December but not usual in the summer.

  The second morning at dawn B.D. had awakened Gretchen and Berry so they could see a sow bear and two cubs bathing far down the beach, and that night while watching the grandest northern lights he could remember they had heard a single wolf howling to the southwest. B.D. was amazed because he didn’t know of a den in that area—there were two dens closer to Grand Marais—but then a conservation officer had told him that a dominant male might walk seventy-five miles in a night patrolling his territory.

  To B.D. the only mildly sour note was all the packets of freeze-dried food Gretchen had packed along. He caught a few coasters, lake-run brook trout, off a creek mouth and that helped. They picked enough blueberries for one enormously thick pancake B.D. made in his iron skillet which they ate with spoons, squatting around the pan. Gretchen only suffered two emotional lapses which weren’t helped by the fifth of schnapps B.D. had brought along. A few gulps of schnapps and Gretchen would begin sniffling and Berry would pet her as if she were a dog.

  “How can I endure you and Berry taking off for Canada and leaving me behind?”

  “You’re welcome to come along. We could be like old-timey pioneers,” B.D. offered.

  “And give up my career?” Gretchen kept reminding herself to toughen up but these silent admonitions weren’t panning out.

  B.D. noted that every time he said something to Gretchen of late she turned it around. This didn’t used to be so. As a social worker she had been helpful over the years. He remembered the golden day when he was broke that she got him snow-shoveling jobs and he made seventy bucks. He had desperately wanted to make her feel better but knew he was flunking the job. Looking across the campfire where Gretchen had her arm around the snoozing Berry B.D. couldn’t think of a thing to do except maybe take a bus to New York City and drown Gretchen’s ex-lover.

  Gretchen, however, was sitting there wondering just how she came to be camping in the wilderness with this mixed-breed pulp cutter and his brain-damaged stepdaughter whom she couldn’t help but love. Of late she had been profoundly sunken in what she perceived as the accidental nature of life. If she hadn’t gone to that stupid sorority mixer a decade ago she would never have met Marcia. When Gretchen had brought the subject up with Belinda she felt a sense of mutual misfortune akin to looking for solace in chaos theory. Now before the fire there was this intriguing nitwit who didn’t resemble anyone in her upbringing and the dear little girl who, in addition to being herself, struck Gretchen as an apt metaphor for the human condition. For instance, that morning she and B.D. had watched Berry way down the beach chatting with a flock of ravens which had struck Gretchen as far more interesting than talking to her fellow workers or fundamentally hopeless clients. Of course when she and B.D. approached Berry and the ravens the birds had flown away.

  “Delmore told me this woman got pregnant standing on her head using a bulb baster. Maybe you should have your own personal baby if you can’t be Berry’s mother.” B.D. bravely continued trying to think up solutions for the life of the woman he adored.

  “That seems a little abstract.” Gretchen appreciated his caring nature. Did she really want to live and die a social worker with no one to love her? Was having a baby a solution?

  When Gretchen dropped off B.D. and Berry in the midafternoon there was a firm sense of zero hour closing in. The dining room table was covered with topographical maps and navigational charts. Delmore played the general to the hilt and even mentioned Rommel’s invasion of Egypt referring to James Mason in the movie rather than a historical text. Red showed B.D. a number of e-mail exchanges between Delmore and Mugwa, most of them reassuring Delmore that Berry and B.D. could safely be transported to Canada by a souped-up fishing tug that could outrun the local Coast Guard launch. Cigarettes cost three dollars a pack more in Canada so Mugwa by exploiting tax-free cigarettes through the Bay Mills Reservation had been running loads to Canada and making thirty bucks a carton on a thousand-carton load. B.D. was amazed by this and wondered why he himself had come up so short on earning a solid dollar. This questioning over his lack of venal talent quickly passed into the real complications of cooking the extra-thick pork steaks Delmore had arranged in their raw state. By sheer luck a bear had killed two of a cousin’s pigs up by Trenary and one of them was salvageable though messy indeed. When Delmore had reached the farm the day before the bear had returned to his second carcass and had been shot at twilight by Delmore’s cousin Clarence. They were both distressed that the bear was very old, hairless in places, and his teeth ground down into dark stumps.

  “He’s us, Delmore,” Clarence had said and Delmore had felt his old body shudder.

  The pig meat, however, looked lovely to B.D. after his freeze-dried camping trip. Delmore sat on the porch and watched the barbecuing critically. He didn’t like the idea that he’d have to go back to his own cooking when B.D. flew the coop. Like nearly everyone else Delmore was from the school of why do something if you can get someone else to do it. Sitting on the porch steps with Bitch leaning affectionately against him he wondered what could possibly become of his nephew. That morning a mailman had hit a raccoon down the road which Delmore had skinned, boiled, and fed to Bitch and Teddy who now looked at Delmore like a boy does a sexy aunt.

  “Whatever do you do with that left-wing lesbo?” Delmore asked teasingly as B.D. sauced the pork.

  “A gentleman never tells.” B.D. recalled the line from a Cary Grant movie Delmore favored.

  “I suppose your horse doesn’t exactly jump out the barn door anymore,” Delmore continued to tease.

  B.D. suspected that Delmore had had a drink from his secret stash of whiskey and demanded one for himself. Despite exhaustive searches he had never found this whiskey which was hidden inside a piece of ham radio equipment. While Delmore fetched him a drink B.D. sipped his discount beer and wondered if there was a better smell on earth than sizzling pork fat. Gretchen’s neck. He turned and Gretchen was coming down the road and stopped out near the mailbox where Berry was bathing her pet snake in ditch water. Gretchen was wearing her heartlessly seductive blue shorts the soft material of which outlined her sacred muffin. The shorts combined with the pork made B.D. feel faint but the largish glass of whiskey restored him. While he finished the barbecue Gretchen and Berry were on their hands and knees playing with the pup Teddy and Gretchen’s arched butt seemed to be aimed at his heart. His lonely penis moved in h
is trousers as if awakening on a lovely May morning. She turned and flashed him a bright smile over her shoulder. He would never know that when she had reached home from their camping trip that afternoon she had clocked her menstrual cycle on a calendar to check for the prime dates for conception. She was of more than two minds about the matter but sensed that evening that this mortal decision shouldn’t be precipitous. While eating her pork barbecue she looked across the table and met B.D.’s eyes wondering if she could make love to this absurdly endearing man. Maybe if she got real drunk, she thought. She seemed to be recovering from her crack-up over lost love and the timing for actually losing her virginity seemed all wrong.

  Delmore ended the evening by ceremonially handing B.D. and Berry the passports he had secured, then taking them back. You didn’t need a passport for Canada but Delmore proudly defined how far ahead he was thinking. If the authorities were in hot pursuit to retrieve Berry for their “Nazi”-inspired school B.D. would simply fly with her to Mexico where Delmore’s ham-radio friend would look after them.

  “My people have been harassed by the white devils since they got off their crummy boats. I am making my stand,” Delmore said toasting the air and B.D. “You must act with the courage of your forefathers.”