Brown Dog

  B.D. waded through the snow to his lonely bed with the honest thought that women in general were as devious as he was.

  When they reached Winnipeg early the next afternoon he was having an upsetting discussion with the Director about Berry and couldn’t quite separate the conference from a wild series of dreams he had just had during a nap. He had confused the roar of the bus engine with that of a female bear he used to feed his extra fish when he was reroofing a deer cabin. He had cut twenty-two cords of hardwood to get through the winter and when April came and the bear emerged from hibernation she was right back there near the kitchen window howling for food. Tim, a commercial fisherman, had given him a twenty-pound lake trout no one had wanted so he cut off a three-pound slab for dinner and tossed the rest to the bear who ate it in a trice then took a long nap in the patch of sunlight out by the pump house. One night when he heard a wolf howling down in the river delta the bear had roared back. She was simply the most pissed-off bear he had ever come across so he named her Gretchen.

  “What are you going to do when Berry hits puberty in the next year or two?” the Director asked.

  “The court appointed me to look after her,” he answered irrelevantly. He was still caught up in the dream where he was down on the edge of the forest on the Kingston Plains and he and Berry were chasing two coyote pups who dove down into their dens under a white pine stump and Berry suddenly became as little as the pups and followed them which was impossible.

  “What are you going to do when she reaches puberty?” the Director persisted. “I talked to your uncle Delmore on my cell and he’s obviously senile. He said he contacted Guam on his ham radio. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I talked to your friend the social worker Gretchen. She lives twenty miles away in Escanaba and only sees you two on weekends if then.”

  “Berry would have died at the school. It’s all cement around there.” B.D. was becoming irritated with the Director and wished he knew how to retreat to his dream state where when Berry came back out of the coyote den they had driven to his favorite cabin and fried up a skillet of venison.

  “What I’m saying is that you got your head up your ass. Time moves on. Berry is going to be nicely shaped. What are you going to do when boys and men come after her for sex?”

  “Kick their asses real good.” B.D. felt a surge of anger that accompanied the beginning of a headache. The Director reminded him of an interrogation with the school principal he and David Four Feet had undergone in the seventh grade when they had thrown chunks of foul-smelling Limburger cheese into the fan attached to the oil furnace in the school basement. All of the girls in the school had run screeching into the street while the boys had merely walked out to show that they were manly enough to handle a truly bad smell.

  “Well, I have a friend in Rapid City who runs a tribal program for kids with fetal alcohol syndrome and when we get there she’s going to look at Berry.”

  They were both diverted by the bus pulling into the arena parking lot in Winnipeg. There were even more hysterical fans than there had been in Thunder Bay. It was a mystery to B.D. because this horde of fans must know that the stars were arriving by plane. It reminded him from way back when, of a geek kid in the eighth grade who claimed that his cousin in California had seen the Disney star Annette Funicello in the nude. Boys would gather around the geek to hear the story over and over. This was about as close as anyone in Escanaba was ever going to get to the exciting life of show business. B.D. figured that to these thousands of fans the Thunderskins bus without the stars was better than nothing.

  In truth he found the noise of the fans repellent. The only loud sound he liked was a storm on Lake Superior when monster waves would come crashing over the pier in Grand Marais or Marquette. He also liked the sounds of crickets and birds, and a hard rain in the forest in the summer with the wind blowing through billions of leaves.

  The Director stood up to leave and B.D. shook her hand hoping that she would believe his heart was in the right place in regard to Berry. She gave him a hug and he held her as tightly as possible. A spontaneous hug from a woman always filled him with the immediate promise of life. Sure enough his pecker began to rise and she pushed him away laughing.

  “I’m fifty-nine and it’s been quite a while since anyone got a hard-on over me.”

  “My friendship is there for the taking.” B.D. wanted to say something proper far from the usual “Let’s fuck.” In truth she was more than ample and most would think her dumpy but he craved to get at her big smooth butt. She escaped all atwitter and he turned to see female fans staring in the window and he thought if the window would only open he could pop it in that brunette’s chops making sure to avoid her big droopy nose ring.

  The ride through western Manitoba into eastern Saskatchewan had increased his homesickness to a quiet frenzy. Creeks, rivers, and lakes were everywhere in the forested landscapes. To a lifelong fisherman even a large mud puddle presents a remote possibility and the water he saw was overwhelming. Once when the bus slowed for a logging truck hauling pulp to make paper he saw an American redstart in a white pine, a wildly colored bird that he often saw near his favorite stretch of the Middle Branch of the Escanaba near Gwinn and seeing the bird enabled him to smell the river and the forest in that area which tingled his skin.

  In Winnipeg the Director checked B.D. and Berry into a room that adjoined her own in a fancy hotel which added a different kind of tingle as B.D. assumed that at some point he might be able to pull off a quick one with the Director. He had hoped to take Berry to the zoo but by the time they got settled in and had a room service bite it was midafternoon and Berry and the Director had to go to a rehearsal. This was the last stop on the Thunderskins’s tour and they wanted to go out in a firestorm at the huge sold-out arena. Berry beat on her tambourine every waking hour but B.D. found it oddly pleasant since she did it so well which made him wonder about the intricacy of the rhythms she heard in her limited brain. Once in high school he had driven with a couple of pureblood friends way up to a powwow in Baraga and was amazed at how good it felt to dance for hours and hours, a state of being carried away that reminded him of the pleasure of being half-drunk rather than fully drunk.

  While the Director and Berry were getting ready two of the stars dropped by but as with his other brief encounters their eyes passed over him as if he didn’t exist. B.D. figured this was what happened when you were around far too many people like when he had gone to Chicago at nineteen or more recently in Toronto. The only way people got along was by largely ignoring each other, a far cry from the Upper Peninsula where if you avoided the downtowns of Escanaba and Marquette you were never surrounded by people and on the rare occasion he saw another human in the backcountry he always hid until they passed from sight.

  At present he was sick to death of people and decided to stay as far as possible from the music folks. He set off on a long walk mostly enjoying the vast railroad yards because there were no high buildings around to block out the late-afternoon sun though there was the troubling question of who could keep track of so many trains? He was somewhat disappointed that the fabled Red River wasn’t red and when headed back to the hotel he saw in the distance Charles Eats Horses enter a building he followed. It turned out to be an art museum with a large display of Inuit work. He was pleased with himself that he remembered that the Inuits lived up in the Arctic and were what most people thought were Eskimos. He noticed that when Eats Horses passed an attendant several rooms ahead she averted her eyes. She was, however, friendly to him and he took her short, round figure to be Inuit.

  “Were you born in an igloo?” he asked.

  “Were you born in a tepee?” she joked. Her smile was so glowing he felt the usual tremor. He wanted to tell her something interesting but she turned away to explain some whalebone and walrus-tusk carvings to some elegant old ladies. The art was so striking to B.D. that he felt hollow in his head and chest and he did not hear Eats Horses walk up behind him.

  “I just k
new you were an art lover,” Eats Horses said, half seriously.

  “I heard it’s all in the wrist,” B.D. answered, a little embarrassed at the strength of his emotions.

  Eats Horses put a heavy hand on B.D.’s shoulder. “I want you to listen carefully about Berry. I know kids like her and they don’t turn out well.”

  “Yes, sir. All I know is that she has to walk in the woods every day.” He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly that he felt a little dizzy and when he opened them to regain his balance Eats Horses was gone. B.D. doubted that Eats Horses was the ex-cop and house painter he said he was. Once over near Iron Mountain back near a beaver dam in the woods B.D. had run into this Crane Clan Midewiwin guy that he had seen years before at the Baraga powwow. It was generally thought that this man flew around at night and ate whole raw fish. The man was pleasant enough but when he reached under a submerged stump and caught a brook trout with a single hand B.D. had left the area.

  On the walk back to the hotel he rejected the idea of the five double whiskeys he felt a need for and instead stopped at a diner for a fried T-bone. The Director had passed on a gift envelope from Dr. Krider with five hundred bucks in twenties which B.D. figured was the third-highest amount of money he had ever possessed. If you have five hundred bucks a ten-dollar fried T-bone seems less of a luxury. The meat was only fair but the potatoes were pretty good with catsup. The waitress was a sullen, bony young woman who never met his eyes. It seemed to him that young women were getting more sullen every year for undisclosed reasons, all the more cause to keep the Director in mind as a possible target if Berry went to sleep. Grandpa had the theory that you should never go after a female with a bad father because they’re always pissed off. However mediocre the meal was B.D. figured it was better than the catered backstage buffet before the concert which, though it was free, featured food he didn’t recognize. Once Gretchen had served him a tofu burger that tasted like the algae that formed pond scum. Gretchen had mentioned dozens of times how awful her father was and also that an older cousin had tinkered with her pussy when she was eleven. There seemed to be no end to the problems that could arise in life. When he was eleven there was a neighbor girl who would show you her butt for a nickel but if you tried to touch it she’d smack the shit out of you. He’d heard that now she was a school principal up in Houghton.

  Back in the hotel room he recognized that the quivery feeling was due to the idea that if things went well he would be back in the United States of America, more exactly North Dakota, in less than eighteen hours. He opened the minibar where he’d seen the Director take out cans of orange juice for herself and Berry. This was the first minibar of his life and he was amazed at the rack of top-shelf shooters on display. He went “Eeny meeny miney moe” and took out a small bottle of Mexican tequila which went down easy as pie. He snooped in the Director’s room and saw a rather large pair of undies she had washed out and hung up to dry on a towel rack. He felt a twinge of lust which he knew couldn’t be resolved. He sat down with the clicker and shooters of Johnnie Walker and Absolut vodka noting a sign on the television that first-run and adult movies were available at twelve dollars a crack which seemed outrageously expensive but then when would he ever stay in a fancy hotel again? Even the glasses were glass rather than cellophane-wrapped plastic. He was never allowed to touch the clicker for Uncle Delmore’s satellite television so he was very wary about its operation and it took some time to get it working. It was easy to reject Teenage Sluts on the Loose in Hollywood as porn made him feel silly and he had never regarded sex as a spectator sport. You simply had to be there with the raw meat on the floor as they used to say. The slightest peek up Gretchen’s summer skirt would set him churning but neither film nor the Playmate of the Month did the job. Unfortunately he selected a film called Pan’s Labyrinth because of the unknowable mystery of the title. It took a total of ten shooters to get through the film and he was frequently either frightened or in tears. He assumed that the film was a true story and he thought of the little girl as Berry and he was the satyr trying to help her get through life. By the time the film ended he was drunk with a tear-wet face. If this could happen in the world it was no wonder that he craved to live in a cabin back in the woods. He had done poorly in world history in high school but was aware of the twentieth century as a worldwide charnel house. His teacher who was a Democrat from the working-class east side of Escanaba had told the students that there were at least ten million Indians when we got off the boat and only three hundred thousand left by 1900. Now in the hotel room, however, the fact that this evil Spaniard had murdered the little girl, the Berry equivalent, sent a sob through his system and he finished his last shooter, arranged the bottles in a circle, and fell asleep in his chair.

  He awoke at four AM to pee and in the bleary toilet mirror he saw that there was a note pinned to his chest. It was from the Director and only said, “Shame on you.” Soon after daylight Berry and the Director were having room service in the other room when he came fully awake and examined his mind for vital signs. Berry came in and kissed his forehead and headed into the bathroom with her armload of rubber snakes which she always played with in the tub. On this morning the two-headed cobra didn’t look good to B.D.

  “Are you up for it, Lone Ranger?” the Director asked standing in the doorway of her room.

  “Come to think of it I am,” said B.D. squirming slowly out of the easy chair. During even minor league hangovers sudden movements cause sudden pain, the physical equivalent of a blowing fuse.

  They had to arrange themselves near a dresser to keep an eye out the nearly closed door of Berry’s bathroom. The Director’s butt was large indeed but as marvelously smooth as B.D. had hoped for. In his not limited experience Indian women had the smoothest butts though this was a Lakota, the ancient enemy of B.D.’s half-Chippewa blood. Let there be peace in the valley he thought. The only drawback was the mirror over the dresser. He certainly didn’t want to see himself what with being the least narcissistic of all modern males. The Director let out a few muffled yelps and he hissed, “Sssh” and then it was over and a sharp pain descended into his noggin from the heavens.

  He pulled up his trousers and quickly moved to the room service table for some lukewarm coffee, cold sausage, and sodden toast.

  “It’s so like a man to go from fucking to eating in a split second,” the Director giggled, rearranging her clothes.

  “What was I supposed to do?” B.D. said with a full mouth.

  “You’re supposed to say ‘Thank-you ma’am’ and give me a heartfelt kiss.”

  B.D. swallowed a mouthful of food, choked a little, and gave her a passionate heartfelt kiss, dipping her as one does a woman on a dance floor. Lucky for her he was strong.

  Shortly after noon the tour bus followed by the equipment semi turned off on a gravel road south of Boissevain. The moves were well planned and the crew unloaded two big ceremonial drums and hoisted them onto the long luggage rack on top of the tour bus. The Director took the tambourine away from Berry and B.D., Berry, and Eats Horses went up the ladder and Eats Horses got under one drum and B.D. and Berry under the other. Two crew members beat tentatively on each drum with Lakota wails and laughter. For some reason Berry responded with the chirping of a cricket until B.D. said no, mourning the effect of the drumbeats on his hangover.

  The bus took off hitting the border of the United States near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. The drumbeats softened while the Director talked to the customs agents whom she knew from other crossings there.

  “You know my boys are clean. No drugs or alcohol on the bus or they get their asses kicked off.” The customs agents were eating their lunch sandwiches and were quite bored with trying to catch putative terrorists who were unlikely to come their way.

  The bus roared off and the drummers beat hard and wailed loudly as they entered the promised land which had been less than wonderful to the Lakota in recent centuries. A dozen miles south in a cottonwood grove the rooftop passen
gers climbed down the ladder and the Director returned Berry’s tambourine which made her happy. B.D. was a little dizzy and nauseous thinking that seven shooters would have been adequate rather than ten, and slightly disappointed that North Dakota looked identical to Manitoba but it might have been due to the way one hangover resembles another. Nothing helped until he had pork liver and onions and two beers in Rugby which was supposedly the geographical center of North America. Out in the restaurant parking lot he lamely tried to figure out how they’d determined this. He also wondered how he would protect himself from his excesses if Berry went under the Director’s care for a while. The answer was to live so far back in the woods that you only went to the tavern once a week. Maybe twice. When he got back on the bus the Director teased him in a whisper about his short “staying power” then punched him so hard in the arm it went numb. He reflected from experience that you never quite knew if an Indian woman would make love or beat the shit out of you.

  At nightfall the tour bus was camped at the site of Wounded Knee. Charles Eats Horses went off and spent the night sitting up wrapped in a blanket. The crew started a fire to cook the steaks the Director had bought along with a case of beer to celebrate the end of the tour. B.D. was mournful that a single case only offered two apiece, scarcely enough to wet your whistle. As much as possible he avoided remembering when he was sixteen and Grandpa had given him a lecture on the dangers of liquor saying that it had killed B.D.’s mom and dad. No more information on them had ever been forthcoming from Grandpa though B.D. had heard that his mom, Grandpa’s daughter, had danced for a while in a strip club in Escanaba. Since Grandpa was mostly Swede and Irish the skin blood had come through his dad who had taken off for Lac du Flambeau. Right now at Wounded Knee he surely didn’t care if he was part Indian or in his private thicket on the edge of the Kingston Plains where he could watch breeding sandhill cranes. Uncle Delmore was always watching horror films on television. Berry liked them but B.D. had an aversion to being frightened. He had peeked in from the kitchen during a werewolf film and decided he would a lot rather be a werecoyote assuming they existed.