Brown Dog

  B.D. spent a wonderful night sleeping only intermittently in order to keep track of the moon through the open face of the pup tent. He had largely missed the moon in Toronto and since his inner and outer child were pretty much glued together he had been quite disappointed. All that ambient light in Toronto had also made the night sky short on stars. From childhood on he had been an addict of “moon walks” not of the tawdry NASA golf-club-swing type but wandering in field and forest in strong moonlight say from the three-quarter phase onward. Grandpa never minded when his seven-year-old grandson would head out in the dark because there was a fence around eighty acres of pasture, woods, and swamp and the tyke could always follow the fence home.

  He fed the coals at the first glimpse of light and made his boiled coffee getting back into the sleeping bag to drink it and to study the fog that had dropped from the heavens. He wiggled like a caterpillar in his bag dropping a half pound of bacon in the iron skillet and opening a can of Mexican refried beans. He searched his mind for the remnants of a dream in which he was a baby sitting on a woman’s lap looking up but he could only see the bottom of her chin. Could this be his mother? he wondered. Life was so fantastically inconclusive. The dream was so much more pleasant than the recurrent seminightmare of being painfully thirsty with a wet ass in a crib and looking up at a rough cabin ceiling at boards that varied from narrow to very wide. He’d asked Gretchen about this one and she said it was likely he had been abandoned.

  He reserved his grease, pushed the bacon off to the side, and heated the refried beans. This magical combination allowed him to fish eight hours without hunger at which point a thick Spam-and-onion sandwich would fuel another six hours at which point twilight arrived.

  Sad to say but in a flat hour he had ripped his cheap Japanese waders on a snag while trying to reach a late lake-run rainbow of a couple of pounds. The fish had snagged the leader on a deadfall across the river and he couldn’t jerk the line free. His aim was brook trout but a spring rainbow made a nice chowder fish. When the waders ripped he expelled his air in a whoosh and floundered toward the bank falling forward in the swift waters. Both the air and the water temperature were about forty and he shed the waders and trotted toward camp a half mile away, shuddering with cold but still amused that when he reached the bank the fish had managed to free itself.

  He stoked up his campfire to a roar, peeled off his wet clothes, and danced around the fire buck naked to warm up, rather unconcerned because he had dunked himself dozens of times during his fishing life and only irritated at himself because one durable pair of hundred-dollar waders would have lasted through the long chain of cheapies. He generally avoided powwows but danced some Native steps he had learned, laughing at the memory of when he was about ten and told Grandpa that he wanted to be a wild Indian when he grew up and Grandpa had said, “You already are.” B.D. frankly didn’t see much difference between Indians and the rural poor of the Great North except that the relatively purebloods tended to hang together as if they were members of the same isolated church.

  He bank-fished until about noon becoming pissed off because there were so many good riffle corners he couldn’t fish without waders. He headed to town to buy another pair of the twenty-five-buck model. At a bridge on the main road he thought he recognized a very old man and stopped to say hello. The old man was trying to fish off the bridge in a hole behind a culvert and it turned out that the man was ninety-two and had been a friend of his grandpa’s before he had moved to Muskallonge Lake near Deer Park in the late fifties. The man said he had known B.D. when he was “knee-high to a grasshopper,” the kind of thing old men said. He paused a moment looking at B.D. as if questioning whether what he had to say was appropriate.

  “I was around that day that your dad came up from downstate all dressed up like an old-timey Indian. His car broke down in Newberry and he stole a pickup. The cops chased him up to Deer Park where he stole Clifford’s canoe and went paddling straight out into Lake Superior on a stormy day. They found the canoe miles down toward Crisp Point but never him. I imagine you knew that?”

  “Nope,” B.D. said, “but thanks for the info.” In a lifetime of hearing very slight and flimsy rumors this was the most concrete story yet. He wasn’t exactly startled, just a little ruminative and melancholy imagining what it would be like to try to keep a canoe upright in a storm on Lake Superior. His grandpa was his true father. His mother was a whore of sorts but since she was a drunk nothing was probably better having known Berry’s mother Rose too well. Who needs someone who could throw a naked kid into a snowbank?

  At the hardware store he ran into Big Marcia who was buying some plumbing supplies. “B.D.! It’s been years,” she said, embracing him. “Maybe we can have a brewski tonight?” He watched out the window as Marcia got into her newish pickup. She always was a hard worker if a little forgetful.

  He tossed the new waders into the pickup and walked across the street to call Gretchen thinking that if he fished until dark he might feel up to coming to town tonight. He caught her at lunch on her cell.

  “B.D., darling, I’m sorry I hung up on you. I was having issues. Anyway, Thursday and Friday are prime times for conception. I thought I’d take two days off and come over. I’d need directions.”

  B.D.’s innards began a small spin which actually reminded him there at the phone booth of a big round childhood top where you pumped down on a knob and it began to spin at great speed and make a moaning sound that was supposedly musical. He told Gretchen that he would meet her at noon on Thursday and then walked over to the IGA grocery store to buy a bar of soap. He wished he had a better tent but when he’d checked tents out at a Marquette sporting goods store a good one cost the equivalent of seventy-five six-packs. Gretchen had slept in the pup tent the summer before with Berry when they camped out at Twelve Mile Beach east of town while B.D. had curled up by the fire in an old green army blanket. The very thought that he’d be in this severely confined space doing whatever with Gretchen caused his heart to jiggle.

  He fished hard throughout the afternoon and evening and resisted the urge to go into town for a few drinks. He ate a mediocre pork steak and took a long moonlit walk and the next morning was ready to fish at first light. He headed off toward an area he hadn’t seen in a decade past a hilly few hundred acres where the watersheds of three rivers began, the Fox, the Two-Hearted, and the Sucker. He got turned around for a couple of hours near the roots of the Two-Hearted because he had become inattentive in the middle of a pussy trance over Gretchen. It was inevitable that he would see parts of her nude body in the tent and maybe she would hear a bear and throw herself into his arms. Or better yet a big thunderstorm which she was afraid of would cause her to crawl into his sleeping bag. He got a boner while crossing a neck of a swamp which didn’t help his sense of direction. Seven years of totally unrequited love and lust and you inevitably build up quite a head of steam. He cooled off and collected his thoughts while sitting on a hardwood knoll eating his squashed Spam-and-raw-onion sandwich. Spam is a decidedly nonsexual meal and he immediately received an insight on just where he was. He walked south about a mile and then traced a small creek that led to the Sucker stopping to catch two fair-sized brookies in a beaver pond. He was thankful to finally hit the Sucker and turned north for a mile until he reached his camp. When you’re lost you avoid panic by not quite admitting it but when you finally reach camp you’re relieved indeed.

  He spruced up his camp and gathered an immense pile of wood because Gretchen liked campfires. He washed some clothes with his bar of Ivory in a river eddy saving his own cleansing until just before he left to pick her up in the morning. They would have to leave her Honda in Grand Marais because the log roads were too rough for its low-slung frame. He made a mental grocery list remembering her fondness for Sapphire gin, expensive but then it might turn the sacred trick.

  On a rather timid evening hike to another beaver pond it occurred to him that Gretchen had made a shambles of his fishing trip and that after he ha
d fulfilled his destiny as a sperm donor he’d have to take off on an old-time, full-blast jaunt. It was unthinkable to miss two nights in a row at the tavern but then Gretchen was difficult enough to manage without a hangover. He remembered the Valentines from a distant past where a fat, naked kid with wings would shoot an arrow through a heart which stood for love. The pain was certainly there and its emotional havoc colored everything. For example on his third cast of his fly rod with a No. 12 brown Woolly Bugger fly his backcast was snagged fairly high in an alder bush and it was a fucking chore to untangle it. Just before dark he hooked a fine fish, possibly a rare two-pounder, but the fish wound the leader around a protruding tamarack root and broke off. He howled. He had been visualizing Gretchen on her hands and knees in the tent and he was behind and under her watching the firelight shimmer off her tummy and breasts. If he had been keeping track of his line and fish rather than this the brook trout would have been in his hands. For a millisecond he thought he heard a distant wolf howl, not an infrequent night sound in the area, but it turned out to be the much more comforting coyote. It was a mildly spooky place. A few years back he had fled after hearing two bears fight back in the forest, likely over a female. Even bears are pussy-crazed, he thought, walking swiftly back toward camp so he wouldn’t have to wait for moonlight to find his way.

  Dawn came bright and clear and he spent a long desultory morning rather aimlessly gathering more wood than they could possibly use. Some puffy clouds moved in from the southwest and he quickly walked to the river to catch a half dozen trout for their dinner. He took off his clothes and soaped himself down in a shallow eddy and when he dunked to rinse himself the water was pecker-shrinking cold. All the tree birds were urging themselves forward into a pastel green mist. He was feeling ever so vaguely religious and remembered a friend from the sixth grade named Skinny who was the Baptist preacher’s son. Skinny was always praying aloud for everyone at recess but was indulged because he was by far the fastest boy in class. He would say stuff like, “Who are we that God is mindful of us” which one day B.D. mixed up and said, “Who is God that we are mindful of him,” and Skinny was shocked to tears. B.D. had tried to pray when Grandpa was dying but was unsure of the process. Now standing naked by the river he had vague thoughts of how the prayer of love is answered in coupling.

  Before noon he was standing on the hillock overlooking the harbor with the gin in a paper sack and studying the weather which was discouraging. It was still warmish with the wind from the southwest but way out there hours and hours away there was a bank of darkness to the northwest above Lake Superior. As a student of weather he knew that it could be the last Alberta clipper until mid-October, wherein the temperature borne by howling winds could drop forty degrees in minutes. Two fishing boats were speeding back into the harbor having noted the oncoming weather.

  Gretchen pulled her Honda up beside his pickup, all smiles in blue shorts and carrying a flowery suitcase. There was certainly no point in discussing the weather with her.

  “This is the biggest step of my life,” she said, cozying up to him on the seat of the pickup.

  “It sure is.” She likely knew that her blue shorts would prime the pump as it were.

  She had brought along his favorite sandwich, liverwurst and onion with hot mustard, and a hummus-and-lettuce for herself. They ate while he drove and had a modest wrangle when he contended that when she became pregnant she should eat lots of meat to make the baby grow in her stomach.

  “It will be in the womb, darling.”

  “I meant the general area,” he said, backing away. “I just know that Rose took on the wrong fuel when she was carrying Berry.”

  “I’m charmed by your concern but I’m thought to be quite smart.”

  They pulled into the campsite and she floated around in a state of delight while he took her flowery little suitcase out of the pickup bed. He suspected that the contents wouldn’t be on the money for the coming weather.

  “Let’s get the show on the road,” she said, kneeling and crawling into the open tent.

  “Maybe we should have a little drink first,” he said, unscrewing the gin bottle. He felt butterflies and needed liquid courage.

  “A small one. We don’t want to subvert your motility.”

  He had no idea what she meant but knelt at the front of the tent and poured two drinks in paper cups. She waved the syringe drawn from her big purse.

  “That’s a bulb baster like I use for roasting a turkey.” He backed into the tent beside her.

  “It’s not for cooking. It cost seventy bucks.”

  “Wonderful.” He wanted to say, You paid the equivalent of thirty six-packs for that fucking thing, but held back.

  “Just take out your penis and get started.” She sounded a little floaty like she had taken a tranq.

  “I thought this over. I’ve never whacked off in front of anyone. You’re going to have to do it and also show me some skin for inspiration.”

  “Do you have a glove?” she laughed.

  “I don’t carry gloves in May.”

  “Well, anything for the cause. I did this for a boy after the junior prom and he shot all over the place.” She opened her blouse and slid down her shorts revealing bikini panties. She grabbed his penis and paused.

  “You don’t shoot like you did in high school.” His voice was quivery as he stared at her body and she began to pump his penis holding the bulb of the syringe near the head. It didn’t take long and she caught most of the fluid.

  “Turn around and close your eyes.”

  “Okay.” But he didn’t. He couldn’t help but peek as she slid down her panties and injected the fluid. She caught him looking.

  “You cheated, you fucker.” She scrambled out of the tent giving him the rear view he so desired. “We’ll wait an hour and try again.”

  He lay there in his depleted postcoital state thinking that this was almost as good as the real thing. Sort of kinky and fun.

  They took a slow stroll and then walked down to the river where he gave her a first fishing lesson. She was well coordinated and after a little while could make a modest cast. She checked her watch.

  “Let’s get down to business.” She hadn’t noticed that the wind was picking up in the ridge across the river and that the sky was getting fuzzy. She crawled into the tent and stayed with her head and shoulders toward the back. “I need to be near the source.”

  This time it took longer and the view of her cocked legs and tiny undies so close to his nose beat the hell out of any Hawaiian sunset. He groaned but it certainly wasn’t heartbreak.

  “You didn’t do as well this time,” she chided.

  “I can only do so much.” Without asking permission he took a glug of gin. He was disappointed when she covered herself with her light summer sleeping bag to make the injection.

  They napped for nearly two hours waking to the roar of wind and Gretchen had trouble locating herself.

  “What the fuck is happening?” she pouted when she heard distant thunder.

  “A little storm.” He took a wake-up swig of gin and prepared the fire to cook supper before the strongest part of the squall was upon them. She poured herself a drink and looked fearfully at the sky. It didn’t take long to cook the brook trout and a can of beans. She wolfed her food as if already pregnant or, more likely, frightened at the rolling thunder in the west. B.D. knew the rehearsal having been caught by such storms a number of times in the Upper Peninsula in spring and fall. It could be real ugly if you were a couple of miles from your car. First came a driving rain and then the wind got colder and it would snow. It could go on for three days in the fall but in the spring it was usually only a matter of hours before it cleared.

  They had barely finished their meal when there was a slash of lightning on the ridge across the river and a monstrous crash of thunder. She shrieked, dropped her plate, and burrowed into the tent. B.D. piled an armload of wood on the fire as the first sheets of rain hit.

  When he got back
in the wind was buffeting the tent and Gretchen was sniveling. He hugged her while listening to the rain pouring heavily onto the tent, knowing where the main leaks would begin. As if on cue he felt water dripping onto his face. Despite the closed flaps there was enough twilight in the tent for him to see the leaks nearest them. He shone the flashlight down the roof line and detected some major problems just as lightning sizzled the air and there was a hollow, raspy crash of thunder.

  “I’m supposedly smart so why does this scare the piss out of me?” she said clutching him closer. She craned her neck up. “My feet are getting wet.”

  “Everybody gets a little scared. Delmore says it’s the ‘thunder beings.’” He could see in the flashlight glare that they were fucked. The tent was leaking everywhere. Also through the front tent flap he could feel the temperature dropping precipitously. “Just a minute.”

  B.D. burst out of the tent, trotted to the pickup, and grabbed a big trash bag from his catchall box in the pickup bed. He stooped and shoved the big pile of wood closer to the tent entrance. When he got back in the water was falling everywhere. He shook open the Visqueen bag.