Brown Dog
Jim Harrison
Brown
Dog
Also by Jim Harrison
FICTION
Wolf: A False Memoir
A Good Day to Die
Farmer
Legends of the Fall
Warlock
Sundog
Dalva
The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Julip
The Road Home
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
True North
The Summer He Didn’t Die
Returning to Earth
The English Major
The Farmer’s Daughter
The Great Leader
The River Swimmer
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
The Boy Who Ran to the Woods
POETRY
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer and Ghazals
Letters to Yesenin
Returning to Earth
Selected & New Poems: 1961–1981
The Theory and Practice of Rivers & New Poems
After Ikkyū & Other Poems
The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems
Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, with Ted Kooser
Saving Daylight
In Search of Small Gods
Songs of Unreason
ESSAYS
Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand
MEMOIR
Off to the Side
JIM HARRISON
Brown
Dog
Novellas
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2013 by Jim Harrison
“Brown Dog” originally appeared in The Woman Lit by Fireflies,
copyright © 1990 by Jim Harrison
“The Seven-Ounce Man” originally appeared in Julip, copyright © 1994 by Jim Harrison
“Westward Ho” originally appeared in The Beast God Forgot to Invent,
copyright © 2000 by Jim Harrison
“The Summer He Didn’t Die” originally appeared in The Summer He Didn’t Die,
copyright © 2005 by Jim Harrison
“Brown Dog Redux” originally appeared in The Farmer’s Daughter,
copyright © 2010 by Jim Harrison
Jacket design by Charles Rue Woods; Artwork by Russell Chatham
For permission to publish “Brown Dog Redux” in Canada, Grove Press gratefully
acknowledges House of Anansi Press Inc, who originally published it there in 2010
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Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2011-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9300-1
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
To Silas
Contents
Brown Dog
The Seven-Ounce Man
Westward Ho
The Summer He Didn’t Die
Brown Dog Redux
He Dog
Brown Dog
Just before dark at the bottom of the sea I found the Indian. It was the inland sea called Lake Superior. The Indian, and he was a big one, was sitting there on a ledge of rock in about seventy feet of water. There was a frayed rope attached to his leg and I had to think the current had carried him in from far deeper water. What few people know is that Lake Superior stays so cold near the bottom that drowned bodies never make it to the surface. Bodies don’t rot and bloat like in other fresh water, which means they don’t make the gas to carry them up to the top. This fact upsets working sailors on all sorts of ships. If the craft goes down in a storm their loved ones will never see them again. To me this is a stupid worry. If you’re dead, who cares? The point here is the Indian, not death. I wish to God I had never found him. He could have drowned the day before if it hadn’t been for his eyes, which were missing.
These aren’t my exact words. A fine young woman named Shelley, who is also acting as my legal guardian and semi–probation officer, is helping me get this all down on paper. I wouldn’t say I’m stupid. I don’t amount to much, and you can’t get more ordinary, but no one ever called me stupid. Shelley and me go back about two years and our love is based on a fib, a lie. The main reason she is helping me write this is so I can stop lying to myself and others, which from my way of thinking will cut the interesting heart right out of my life. Terms are terms. We’ll see. Shelley believes in “oneness” and if we’re going to try to be “one” I’ll try to play by her rules.
I’m a diver, or was a diver, for Grand Marais Salvage Corporation, which is a fancy name for a scavenging operation. You’d be surprised what people will pay for a porthole, even though they got no use for it. An old binnacle is worth a fortune. We sold one last July for a thousand dollars, though Bob takes three quarters because he owns the equipment. Bob is a young fellow who was a Navy SEAL, the same outfit that lost the hero, Stethem, who was beat to death by the towel-heads. Bob is still damned angry and hopes to get revenge someday.
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord,” I quoted.
“Do you believe that, B.D.?” he asked.
“Nope. Can’t say I’m sure. But if you believed it, it would save you from going way over there and having the Arabs shoot your ass off.”
Bob is a hothead. A salvage bunch up in Duluth owed him a compressor so we drove over. The three of them were sleeping off a drunk so we took two compressors, and three portholes for interest. Two of the guys woke up punching but Bob put them away again. I’m not saying Bob is a bully, just a bit quick to take offense.
I’ve been reminded to get the basis of my salvation out of the way, to start at the beginning, as she says. Shelley is twenty-four and I’m forty-seven. That means when I’m one hundred she’ll be seventy-seven. Age is quite the leveler. She is a fair-size girl by modern standards, but not in the Upper Peninsula where you would call her normal-size, perhaps a tad shy of normal. In a cold climate a larger woman is favored by all except transplants from down below (the southern peninsula of Michigan where all the people are) who bring girlfriends up here who look like they jumped right off the pages of a magazine. Nobody pays them much attention unless the situation is desperate. Why take a little girl if you can get a big one? It’s as simple as that.
Anyway, on a rainy June evening two years ago Shelley came into the Dunes Saloon with two fellows who wore beards and hundred-dollar tennis shoes. They were all graduate students in anthropology at the University of Michigan and were looking for an old Chippewa herbalist I was talking to at the bar. They came over and introduced themselves and Claude announced it was his birthday.
“How wonderful,” said Shelley. “How old are you? We’ve driven three hundred and fifty miles to talk to you.”
Claude gazed at the
three of them for a full minute, then sped out of the bar.
When the screen door slammed Shelley looked at me. “What did we do wrong?” she asked.
“Goddammit, we blew it,” said the redheaded fellow with a big Adam’s apple.
“You missed your cue. When Claude says it’s his birthday you’re supposed to ask if you can buy him a drink. If someone else is buying he drinks a double martini,” I said.
“Is there a chance we can make up for this?” said the third, a blond-haired little fellow in a Sierra Club T-shirt. “We were counting on talking to him.”
Shelley pushed herself closer, unconsciously using her breasts to lead. “Are you related? I mean are you an Indian?”
“I don’t talk about my people to strangers.” Now I’m no more Indian than a keg of nails. At least I don’t think there’s any back there. I grew up near the reservation over in Escanaba and a lot of Indians aren’t even Indian so far as I can tell. What I was doing was being a little difficult. If you want a girl to take notice it’s better to start out being a little difficult.
“We’re really getting off on the wrong foot here. I didn’t mean to intrude.” She was nervous and upset.
“How the hell could we know he wanted a double martini,” whined the redhead. “You don’t push drinks on an old Indian. I’ve been around a lot of them.”
“What do you know about my people, you shit-sucking dickhead?” I yelled. The three of them jumped back as if hit by a cattle prod.
I moved down to the end of the bar and pretended to watch the Tigers-Milwaukee ball game. Since we are much farther from Detroit than Milwaukee there are a lot of Brewers fans up here. Frank, the bartender, came over shaking his head.
“B.D., why’d you yell at those folks when the lady’s got beautiful tits?”
“Strategy,” I said. “She’ll be down here with a peace offering pretty soon.”
The three of them were huddled by the window table, no doubt figuring their next move. I began to question my yell. In fact, I’m not known to raise my voice unless you set off a firecracker right behind me. Finally she got up and walked down the bar toward me with a certain determination.
“I’m Shelley Newkirk. Let’s start all over again. The three of us have a great deal of admiration for Native Americans. We love and respect them. That’s why we study them. We want to offer you an apology.”
I stared deeply into my glass of Stroh’s while Frank darted into the kitchen. When she spoke I thought he was going to laugh, but he’s too good of a friend to blow my cover.
“The name’s B.D.,” I said. “It stands for Brown Dog, my Anishinabe name.” At this point I wasn’t bullshitting. Brown Dog, or B.D., has been my nickname since I was in the seventh grade and had a crush on a Chippewa girl down the road. I played ball with her brothers but she didn’t seem to care for me. Their mother called me Brown Dog because I was hanging around their yard all the time. Once when she was slopping their pigs this girl, Rose by name, threw a whole pail of garbage on me. I actually broke into tears on the spot though I was fourteen. Love will do that. Her brothers helped clean me off and said they guessed their sister didn’t like me. I didn’t give up and that’s why the name stuck with me. I was sort of following her around before a school assembly to see where she was going to sit when she hit me on the head with a schoolbook and knocked me to the floor. “Brown Dog, you asshole, stop following me,” she screamed. I got to my feet with everyone in the gymnasium laughing at me. The principal tapped the microphone. “Rose, watch your language. Mr. Brown Dog, I think it’s evident to all assembled here that Rose wishes you would stop following her.”
So that’s how I got my name and how, much later, I met Shelley. Right now it’s October outside and already snowing though we’re sure to have a bit of Indian summer. I don’t care because I like cold weather. The farthest south I’ve ever been is Chicago and it was too goddamned hot down there for me. It was okay when I got there in March but by June I was uncomfortable as hell with the bad air and heat. That was when I was nineteen and was sent off on scholarship to the Moody Bible Institute, but then I got involved with the student radicals who were rioting and my religion went out the window. It was actually a fire-breathing Jewish girl from New York City who led me astray. She wore a beaded headband and flowers in her hair and kept telling me I was “one of the people,” and I had to agree with her. At her urging, when we were camped in the city park, I led a charge against the cops and got the shit kicked out of me and got stuck in jail. She bailed me out and we went off to a commune near Buffalo, New York, where they didn’t eat chicken or any other kind of meat. They supposedly ate fish though I didn’t see much of it around, but that’s another story. At honest Shelley’s insistence I will add here that I was kicked out of the commune because I snuck off to a bar, got drunk and ate about five hamburgers. They didn’t drink either.
Just four months ago in late June was when I found the Indian. You’ll have to understand how the cold at the bottom of Lake Superior preserves things. It was hard on my partner Bob. On one of our first dives together off Grand Island near Munising he came across a Holstein cow as big as day and looking damn near alive. He said the cow scared him as much as any shark he’d seen in the tropics. Then, as if to cap it off, a week later we found a new wreck off Baraga and the cook was still in the galley of the freighter. The cook didn’t look all that unhappy in death except for his eyes, which like the Holstein’s plain weren’t there. The cook seemed to be smiling but it was the effect of the icy water tightening his lips. After the Holstein and the cook Bob was ready for anything, which didn’t prove true when he saw the Indian.
Shelley just came in from the cold and sat down next to me. Before I get on to our drowned Native American friend, she wants me to lay down a few more background effects, partly so I won’t appear to be worse than I am when we get to what I did. I keep wanting to get to the Chief, he was dressed in the old-time clothes of a tribal leader, but she says my actions will not be understood without an honest “confrontation” with the past.
To me the past is not as interesting as finding a three-hundred-pound ancient Indian chief sitting bolt upright on the bottom of Lake Superior. Your average man on the street doesn’t know that the hair continues to grow after death and the Chief’s long black hair wavered in the current. Besides, you can’t walk right up to your past, tap it on the chest and tell it to “fess up.” It has reason to be evasive and not want to talk about the whole thing, which for most of us has been a shitstorm.
Luckily there are methods for digging up the past and confronting it, and Shelley knows these methods like the back of her hand. This knowledge didn’t come from her university training but from her troubled youth. Her dad was and is a big deal gynecologist in the Detroit area and his overfamiliarity with women on the job made him act remote and impersonal to Shelley. Or so she tells it. “Too much of a good thing?” I offered, which she didn’t think was funny. The upshot was that Shelley went to psychiatrists, therapists and psychologists, and learned their methods. How you tell the difference is the first can give medicine (not cheap), the second goes deep into your past, and the third offers cut-rate tips on how to get through the day. That’s my rundown on it anyway.
So we set aside an hour or two each day and she asks me questions in a professional manner. She calls this “probing,” just as she was probed because of her haywire times with her dad. They’re in fine shape now. He even gave her a new 4WD made in England when she got her master’s degree. I’d call that a top- drawer relationship for a father and daughter on a certain level. Anyway, Shelley was probed from eight to eighteen at who knows what cost because she says there’s no way to add it up. It seems the real problem was that her mother’s younger brother, Uncle Nick by name, used to make Shelley play with his weenie on camping trips. Between this and her father’s occupation father and daughter kept their distance until it all came out in the wash. I suggested we go find Uncle Nick and kick his ass but she sa
id that was missing the point. What’s the point then, I wondered. She’s pals with her dad and fearless about weenies? That was part of it but mostly it’s that she’s not upset for mysterious reasons. That made a lot of sense to me because you can’t even shoot a grouse or a deer properly if you’re upset about something vague.
And now that she’s at one with herself and the world she can work my brain over with high horsepower energy. For instance, she nailed me to the wall on the story of how the student radicals in Chicago had ruined my future in Christian work. She got me all soothed on the sofa by talking about things I love like all the different kinds of trees and fish in the U.P. Sometimes her voice gives me a boner but I’m out of luck because this business does not allow a quick time-out, sad to say, for fucking.
We went back to the ordinary sadness of those hot days in Chicago and what really happened, not all of it my fault. The church treasurer in Escanaba had made a mistake and sent the scholarship check directly to me instead of to the Bible Institute. I didn’t even open the envelope right away because I thought it was just another letter saying that everyone in the congregation back home was praying for me. I just sat on my bed in the Christian rooming house (no smoking or drinking) and had a sip of after-school peppermint schnapps. I remember I was thinking about Beatrice who was a bubble-butted waitress at a diner near the school. She was a dusky beauty but when I asked her what nationality she was she said, “What do you care, you snot-nosed little Bible thumper?” We had to carry our Bibles (King James Version) at all times. I guess I looked so downcast that she came over when I finished my oatmeal and said she was part black and part Italian. I told her that to me she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I’d have my oatmeal and breakfast coffee and spring a hard-on just watching Beatrice wipe off a table.
So I was sitting there in my room thinking of Beatrice, and not wanting to exhaust myself on unclean thoughts I opened the letter from the church. It was a check made out for three hundred and ninety dollars. The possibilities hit like lightning so I dropped to my knees and prayed for strength which did not arrive.
