Brown Dog

  After being called when the farmer shot one of the dogs, B.D. dragged the calf carcass into the barn and told the farmer to leave the milk stall door open accurately predicting that the other dog, Fred, would return to eat more veal. The farmer hid up in the mow and closed the door beneath him when the dog returned in the pitch dark.

  When B.D. arrived at the farm there was a deputy there with a rifle. B.D. was unarmed but told the deputy to put his rifle back in the squad car and that he as the Animal Control Officer was in charge. At first the deputy refused but then B.D. told the man that he might have to relearn to eat without teeth so that the deputy said “Fuck you” and drove off. The farmer said that the dog had been in the barn for at least ten hours and hadn’t made a squeak and was likely sleeping off his meal. B.D. went up the side of the barn to the open mow hand over hand with his Ketch-all pole to his side. He usually didn’t need it as he was skillful at keeping a dog docile but if the dog was pissed off he’d slap the loop of the Ketch-all pole over its head and tighten the loop which gave him relative control. Oddly his toughest catch had been Bruno the terrier who, though he only weighed twenty pounds, was fast and devious.

  Up in the mow B.D. shone his flashlight on the trap door and ladder where you threw down hay. He shone the light down and there was Fred dozing with his forepaws on the calf. B.D. had met Fred several times when he fished the confluence of the main branch and the west branch of the Escanaba River. The first exposure had been a little alarming: the sense of being watched then turning to see Fred’s shape emerging from a dark thicket of alders. At first B.D. thought he was a wolf, he certainly had the size, but he was too thickish which meant a wolf-dog hybrid. A generally unsuccessful breeding experiment. You think you have a nice dog and then it suddenly eats your calf or the neighbor’s dog. On the river he threw the dog a brook trout and the dog swallowed it whole and then sat down on his haunches next to B.D. who recognized that he had a new friend.

  He crawled down the mow ladder and stooped down beside Fred and petted him. Fred flopped his big tail and separated the calf’s head from its neck. B.D. attached a leash and led Fred out of the barn. The farmer retreated well back from the barn door and Fred gave an insincere, muffled growl with the calf’s head in his mouth.

  “Can I shoot it?” The farmer asked eagerly.

  “No, I’m obligated by law to painlessly euthanize the creature,” B.D. said pompously.

  Fred jumped in the open door of B.D.’s pickup and they were off with two worries in mind. Twice while fishing with Fred B.D. had read Fred’s collar tag but when he tried to turn on the road to return the dog and Fred growled thunderously at which point B.D. stopped and let him out near a cedar swamp. Taking him home seemed out of the question. Now he dreaded having him join the rest of the mutts at home, especially Bruno. He doubted that the rest of the dogs would pose a problem but the very thought of Bruno made B.D. stop at a country store for a six-pack. It was strictly forbidden for county employees to drink while working and most certainly in a company vehicle but B.D. thought of himself as man enough to say “fuck it.” A regular job had worn him thin of spirit and what’s more cut his spring brook trout fishing to the quick. The other day the sheriff had told him to wash his vehicle and B.D. had deftly replied that washing his vehicle wasn’t in his job description which pissed the sheriff off. He said, “Your days are numbered,” and B.D. said, “Go take a look at Rollo. That boy is looking at a lot of hospital time.”

  At his shack the four dogs in the pen barked happily until Fred got out of the truck with his calf’s head, then they stopped barking and lay down with their backs turned. Bruno was inside because he had been napping and always threw a tantrum when awakened from a nap. The only thing that placated little Bruno was a Kentucky Fried Chicken wing of which B.D. kept a box in the propane refrigerator and through the window he could see Bruno standing on the kitchen table.

  B.D. had the warrior courage of four beers when he turned the doorknob. Bruno shot out, leapt straight up, and sank his teeth into the calf’s head. He hung there in a standoff and then Fred dropped the heavy calf’s head, probably thirty pounds plus, and Bruno yelped when the head landed on him. Fred gave Bruno a look of consolation then lay down beside him. B.D. was waiting for disaster. The dogs touched noses and then Bruno was looking at Fred with a specific fondness as if he had been smoking weed. A goofy smirk to be exact. Had the nastiest animal he had ever met found love, albeit gay?

  Chapter 2

  It was twilight when B.D. was wakened from his nap by chickadees and song sparrows, that and the bladder pressure of a six-pack. In the dim light he could see Bruno and Fred nestled together on Bruno’s sofa that B.D. had bought for ten bucks at a yard sale. It smelled a little peculiar and a bartender at the local saloon had told him that a very fat bachelor farmer had died on the sofa though he had been discovered by his sister in two days. “It adds up,” the bartender said. The sister who was known as the loudest voiced woman in the county was selling off everything and getting a little retirement apartment in Pasadena, California.

  B.D. occasionally thought about the provenance of furniture because he had never owned any new furniture. In the tenth grade when a very pretty teacher had stepped out of the classroom B.D. had rushed up and kissed her chair seat and all of the boys had cheered and laughed. Unfortunately a minister’s daughter loudly told the teacher when she returned and B.D. was sent to the principal who was fresh out of University of Michigan and was totally puzzled by how to handle the problem. He finally said, “Civilized men don’t act out their gross desires.” “Yes, sir,” B.D. said unsure if a comment was expected from him.

  He warmed up some venison stew he had made out of a hindquarter of roadkill after pitching the rest of the carcass to the dogs. Venison was too lean in spring to be good for anything but stews and then you had to add some cubed salt pork to counter the dryness of the wild meat. Gretchen would add a cup of red wine but B.D. was rarely capable of making the twenty miles home from the grocer’s with a bottle of wine. There was always a good reason to drink.

  As the stew warmed he was trapped once again by thinking. He could have used a beer though he knew that a beer didn’t necessarily lead to clear thinking and never in his life had he felt so under the gun. Perhaps the lowest point had been in March when he had had a two-week case of shingles and couldn’t see Gretchen in person because shingles would somehow expose little Susi to chicken pox. B.D. wasn’t afraid of shingles and he knew it was what he had because he could recall clearly Grandpa once having a case where big red welts grew out of his chest and back and three times he drank most of a quart of whiskey and rolled naked in the snow on a below zero night. Another night he found Grandpa on the floor of his bedroom chewing on the leg of his bedstead. Great Aunt Doris would come over once a day and rub on Chippewa salve and several times had whipped up a poultice made of oatmeal and tea which had a good though temporary effect.

  B.D. had been diagnosed at a saloon by an ex-doctor who had been kicked out of the profession for too liberally prescribing narcotics. Gretchen took B.D. to her doctor who said cheerfully, “You’re in for a ton of shit, kiddo,” but B.D. gutted it out without too many drugs. The drugs made him feel half dead so he tried to walk off the pain a half dozen hours a day. March is the time of frozen snow so that often you were five feet farther up in the world. And he found a hibernating bear’s blow hole, the breathing tube shaped up through the snow through which you learn that bears have very bad breath. The breath seemed to come about once a minute in time with the throbbing sores of the shingles. His back was the color of meat spoiling. Then there was a slight movement far beneath him and the soft moan. Yes, it was March and time for the bear to start thinking of waking up if bears could be considered thinking specifically or was it just an upward urge?

  The worst evening he actually began to cry a bit pretending he wasn’t. He stripped off all of his clothes and ran the hundred yards down to a pool in the creek where he drew his water and
jumped in rolling around. Then he flopped around in the snow noting that the dogs hadn’t jumped into the creek and Bruno had furiously barked his disapproval. He would have to make cocoa for Bruno who expected a treat for being irritated. The dog was mad as a hatter but then so was he. He walked slowly back to the shack until he couldn’t feel his extremities which was the condition he wanted. It was luckily less than zero.

  Now he was staring down into his venison stew supper and Fred had gone to the door wanting to pee. This meant he’d have to put the stew bowl on the fridge to keep it safe from Bruno but then Bruno wanted to take a pee with his new friend. It was then that B.D.’s brain lit up remembering that there were a few ounces of schnapps left in the fishing tackle box under his bed. There was one solid four-ounce gulp, the “nectar of the gods” as Grandpa called whiskey. He lightened up but only temporarily because he thought of what Gretchen and Cheryl would be doing at the moment now that they had put baby Susi to bed. B.D. had always been preoccupied with sex and this was a euphemism but he also understood that sexual behavior wasn’t susceptible to clear thinking. Maybe the girls were running around the yard in the dark playing kick the can or watching “Dancing with the Stars” or stuck together in bed with Krazy Glue. B.D. hadn’t done any reading on the matter.

  When he was cured of his shingles in late March B.D. lucked out. Cheryl had to cancel her weekend trip from Sault Ste. Marie to Escanaba to fly home to Bemidji, Minnesota, to see her seventy-year-old father who ran a sawmill. Dad had written a naughty letter to Sarah Palin in Alaska and the law had landed on him with its big boots. First Gretchen and Cheryl were enraged and bitter about losing a love nest weekend when all Dad had written was, “I’d love to go hiking on a glacier with you and see your pooter and butt.” This seemed harmless to B.D., Gretchen, and Cheryl. In fact B.D. was given to saying such things at the drop of a hat. Cheryl had retained a lawyer who intended to explain that Dad had been depressed for a decade since his wife had left him for an Amway salesman with whom she now lived in Honolulu. The upper Midwest is saturated with women itching to move to Hawaii. If you don’t like pan fishing, ice fishing, snowmobiling, or applying mosquito dope you’re out of luck in that area.

  It was a bright clear late morning when Gretchen, Susi, and B.D. drove west to Iron Mountain for an outing and early dinner. They would eat at Ventana’s where B.D. would have his favorite dinner, a two-pound rare porterhouse, a bowl of spaghetti with red sauce, and a bottle of red vino. Throughout the drive they would stop where the road crossed creeks and rivers so that B.D. could study the massive runoff of the melting snow and the possible effect on trout season. There wasn’t even a trace of green in the landscape but then it smelled like spring in the fifty-degree temperature and the sight of the mounds of snow on the north sides of houses, shacks, and log cabins, and the drifts along fence rows, and the glistening drift ice far out on Lake Michigan and the ice piled on shore on the westerly sides of the forested peninsulas out into the lake. Everything looked raw except when you knew what it meant.

  Gretchen meant to give B.D. a pep talk but the question was how to approach this creature despite having counseled thousands of Social Services clients. He was uniquely poor and she had long supposed that this was what drew her to him. Having been raised in a very rich white suburb of Detroit her rebellion was to loathe her own class that was notable for lining up at the car wash Saturday mornings. It was a suburb loaded with auto executives who were only mildly embarrassed over losing market share to the Japanese. Even the parking lot of the high school was stuffed with new cars and to her parents’ disgust Gretchen would only drive a used Subaru with rusty fenders. Midway through high school she had developed a fascination with the poor and woebegone that continued into college. She had read hundreds of books on the worldwide poor and to the embarrassed dismay of her mediocre teachers she had her facts completely assembled. Naturally, she wanted to be a peasant but was honest enough to recognize playacting.

  “How much money do you have in the world?” She broke the ice.

  “Check.” He flipped her his wallet. He was nervous because she was nursing baby Susi with a protuberant nipple and he speculated whether it was proper to desire a nursing mother. He was relatively inexperienced in self-criticism but then figured if Gretchen was that proud of her rejuvenated tits they deserved his attention.

  “Forty-nine bucks and a driver’s license.”

  “Payday’s in six days. I’ll be fine. Dog food is setting me back quite a bit. Bruno has to have this special kind or he’s wildly pissed off. He costs nearly as much to feed as me.” B.D. laughed.

  “I’m concerned because you’ve been drag-ass all winter.”

  “It was the shingles that set me back.”

  “Nonsense. It was before Christmas that you took a dive.”

  “Maybe. I was doing well shoveling walks but then Rollo got hurt and I took my first actual job.”

  Gretchen fell silent thinking it was her fault wangling him the dogcatching job. He did okay shoveling walks in the winter. Work was work and he had no real concept of the menial. He was without self-pity or any sense of being put upon. Grandpa always insisted that if you were good with a shovel you’d never lack food on the table. B.D. was much different than Gretchen’s Social Services clients who tended to think that they had been victims of bad breaks. In truth they actually were but mostly it was sloth and sometimes illness. Gretchen was weekly amazed in her job at how much could go wrong with the human body. Meanwhile on B.D.’s snow-shoveling route there was a daffy old lady who paid for the work with Monopoly money and a piece of bread and butter which B.D. thought was funny. If there was an especially large amount of snow B.D. would also get a small glass of cooking sherry which was much appreciated. He never skipped her walk because she might fall. When Gretchen heard this story she felt deeply hopeless thinking that her friend would always be a corgi in deep snow. Nothing let her off the hook because of her exhaustive knowledge of the despised and rejected. She fell silent because the year before her nutcase uncle, the black sheep of the family, had sent her a poem in an e-mail. Tom pretended he was a cowboy poet in New Mexico but once she passed through she discovered that Tom was a line chef at a wonderful restaurant named Pasqual’s in Santa Fe and was obsessed with bird-watching, and on his days off would trailer his horse far into the country and ride around reciting his poems as if he were a troubadour which he thought he was. Gretchen could only remember a single line of the poem but now it struck her hard:

  Birding is time out

  from the heavy lifting of being who we are not.

  She thought that was the crux of her sin against B.D. She presumed he needed guidance because guidance was her job. When the chance for substitute dogcatcher came up the lowliest part of her professional training popped up with “gainfully employed” as if it were the ultimate grail. He thought he was doing the right thing as a responsible father but simply wasn’t equipped for the job any more than he would be a maître d’ of a New York French restaurant. The salary was pathetic and he was expected to answer a cell phone as if it were Mozart. But Mozart didn’t call anymore. He had been getting along well with his odd jobs and hunting and fishing and chasing ladies, cooking and looking after his great uncle Delmore who wouldn’t last much longer as his only living relative. Gretchen with her access to records had some knowledge of B.D.’s background but not much. His mother died in her twenties and his father a year later drowning in Lake Superior north of Newberry. B.D. had been raised by his grandpa. Early on Gretchen figured B.D. was just another low-rent playful malcontent. She met him at Burger King where he was struggling with his stepdaughter who Gretchen accurately diagnosed as having fetal alcohol syndrome, and in the ensuing years had become part of his small family. Berry and her older brother Red were both off at private schools now and he missed them.

  Gretchen became miffed because B.D. got up to go to the toilet and baby Susi grinned and reached out for him which she rarely did for Gretchen. This a
lways pleased B.D. who had said, “We might not be married but we’re cut from the same cloth.” B.D. came back to the table and his steak and pasta were there. He plowed through the meal with energy and included the leg and thigh of Gretchen’s roast chicken. Curiously he was far away transfixed by the odor of pussy willows along the creeks in the woods. They were the first true smell of spring and since childhood the sweet odor had swollen his chest.

  “Yup, I took a dive. Two things actually. Or three. First there’s Cheryl, and on my job I’m always getting bossed around. And I hardly get to fish. I’ve been fishing all my life.”

  “What about my Cheryl?”

  “I’ve been tagging you for years and I’m just beginning to understand. I’m about where I started. That’s hard. Of course I had my one fine best night of my life but that’s gone.”

  “I never promised you a thing. I explained to you clearly I don’t like men. I like women. It’s not my fault. It started early. You know I love you as a friend. I’d do anything for you but I’m not going to sleep with you and it seems that after ten years you could accept this.”

  “It’s always been said that I’m not too good at reality. When I was twelve my dog died and my throat closed up and I couldn’t talk for two months. The school made me talk to this expert in psychology.” He was embarrassed that his eyes were misting up. So were hers.

  He had pulled off the road near the Ford River and the water was so high it seemed unlikely that a trout could live in it. She moved closer and embraced him. He looked down at the baby peeping up at them with a smile.

  “I’m sorry you love me,” she said.

  “I’ll live with it,” he said.