Chapter One
What is life that I must get teeth pulled? Brown
Dog thought, sitting on a white pine stump beside the
muddy creek with a swollen jaw for company. It was late
April and trout season would open in two days. Brown
Dog was a violator and had already caught two fine messes
of brook trout, not in contempt for regulators but because
he was hungry for brook trout and so were his Uncle
Delmore and his stepchildren, Red and Berry. Despite this
Brown Dog put the highest value on the opening of trout
season which meant the end of winter, though at his feet
near the stump there was still a large patch of snow decorated
haphazardly by a sprinkling of deer turds.
Here I sit in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, one
hundred eighty pounds of living meat with three separate
teeth aching and sending their messages of pulse, throb,
and twinge to each other, their secret language of pain, he
thought. Brown Dog was not what you call a deep thinker
but within the structure of aching teeth mortal thoughts
tended to arise in the seconds-long spaces between the dullish
and the electric, the surge and slight withdrawal. Sitting
there on the stump he blurred his eyes so that in his vision
the creek became an immense and writhing brown snake
emerging from the deep green of a cedar swamp. Until the
autumn before the creek had run clear even after big rains
but the bumwads from the County Road Department had
done a sloppy job on an upstream road culvert and now
the water was the color of an average mud puddle.
Brown Dog knew that teeth were simply teeth and
they shouldn’t be allowed to repaint the world with their
troublesome colors. When he had gone into Social Services
the week before more than curious about finding
help for his malady, he was not allowed to immediately
see his ally Gretchen but first had to pass the foamy gauntlet
of the Social Services director Terence Stuhl who always
reminded Brown Dog of the suspicious water of the
Escanaba River after it had been sluiced through the local
paper mill. Stuhl was more bored than mean-minded and
began chuckling the moment he spotted Brown Dog in a
mirror on the far wall of his office that reflected anyone
entering the lobby of his domain and was stuck there temporarily
dealing with the purposeful hostility of the receptionists
to whom anyone on any sort of dole was up to no
good and must be tweaked into humility. Along with his
relentless chuckling Stuhl sucked on a dry pipe sometimes
too deeply, whereupon the filter stem would hit his uvula
and he would begin choking and then draw on a bottle of
expensive water paid for by the taxpayers of Delta County.
Stuhl, however, was far from the biggest asshole
Brown Dog had to deal with in life. Stuhl merely drew
Brown Dog’s file, really a rap sheet, from a cabinet and
chuckled and choked his way through a recitation of
Brown Dog’s low crimes and misdemeanors: the illegal
diving on, stealing, and selling of old sunken ship artifacts
in Lake Superior, the stealing of an ice truck to transport
the body of a Native in full regalia found on the bottom of
Lake Superior, the repeated assaults on the property and
encampment of University of Michigan anthropologists
who were intent on excavating an ancient Native graveyard,
possibly the northernmost Hopwell site, the secret
location of which had errantly been divulged to a very
pretty graduate student named Shelley while Brown Dog
had been in the usual ill-advised pussy trance. There were
also small items like a restraining order keeping him out
of Alger County, the site of the graveyard and his former
home in Grand Marais, a lovely coastal village. Another
charge of flight to avoid prosecution for a trip to Los Angeles
had been dropped through the efforts of Brown Dog’s
Uncle Delmore, a pure-blood Chippewa (Anishinabe).
Delmore had managed to keep Brown Dog out of jail by
arranging the marriage to Rose, a cohort in the attack on
the anthropological site. Unfortunately Rose in a struggle
had bitten off part of the finger of a state cop and had another
year and a half to serve which seemed to be a long
time, two years in all, but then her court-appointed lawyer,
a dweeb fresh out of Lansing, far to the south, had
claimed the photos showed that Rose had also blackened
the cop’s eyes and ripped his ear after he had touched her
breasts. Rose had also intemperately yelled during the trial
that the judge was welcome to kiss her fat ass which
brought titters from the audience and angered the judge,
especially when Rose had turned, bent over, and showed
the judge the ample target. Brown Dog had regretted missing
this proud moment but he had been on the lam in L.A.
with Rose’s older brother, Lone Marten. Rose’s other
brother, David Four Feet, had died in Jackson Prison and
had been Brown Dog’s best boyhood friend. Rose had
behaved poorly in detention, so that when Delmore,
Brown Dog, and Rose’s children, Red and Berry, had
driven to the prison near Sault Ste. Marie the children
hadn’t been permitted to witness their mother’s marriage.
Rose hadn’t even kissed B.D. through the heavy metal
screen. She only whispered, “My heart and body still belong
to Fred,” another cohort in the attack on the anthropologists.
On the long drive home Brown Dog reflected
that the only marriage of his forty-nine years hadn’t been
very imposing but was better than being in prison himself.
The deal Delmore had made with the prosecutor, thus
allowing Brown Dog to return from the not so golden
West, was simple enough: marry Rose and assume full
responsibility for raising her children, Red and Berry,
whose separate fathers were indeterminate, and save the
county a bunch of money. Red was twelve years old and
no particular problem while Berry at seven was a victim
of fetal alcohol syndrome, a modest case but debilitating
enough to prevent any chance at what our society clumsily
defines as a “normal life,” a concept as foggy as the
destiny of the republic itself. As a purebred and an enrolled
member of the tribe Rose had a few benefits, and
along with some help from Social Services and what he
made cutting pulpwood for Delmore, Brown Dog got
them by, with the only sure check being the fifty dollars a
week Gretchen and Social Services had helped extricate
from Delmore after a tree kicked back and crushed Brown
Dog’s knee.
In truth domesticity is an acquired talent and up
until his prison wedding Brown Dog had not spent more
than moments a day devoted to it. So much of his life had
been lived in deer cabins where he traded his handyman
services for rent. He was fairly good at laying out new but
cheap linoleum, reroofing, shoring up sagging bunk beds,
fixing disintegrating woodstoves, and cutting firewood that
he was never without a place to stay. This scarcely qualified
him to raise two children but then Rose’s mother,
Doris, though quite ill had helped him right up until Christmas
morning when she had died, an event that was the reverse
of Dickensian expectations. Delmore’s cabin back in
the woods was hard to heat by the beginning of November,
and too far to the road for Red to catch the school bus, so
Delmore had bought a repossessed house trailer which
was placed a hundred yards from the main house. Brown
Dog had pickaxed frozen ground to dig a pit for an outhouse.
There was electricity, and a propane cooking stove
and a heater, but water had to be hauled from Delmore’s
in a big milk can on Berry’s sled. The sled broke and he
had to buy a new one plus a toboggan for the water, all of
which had cost him two full days of wages.
In her last waning days Doris had been moved from
the trailer into Delmore’s house where he had patiently
nursed her. They had been friends since they were children,
over seventy years in fact, keeping in touch during
the long years Delmore had worked in an auto factory
four hundred miles south in Detroit, and had become
wealthy by default having bought a small farm during
World War II on land part of which became the wealthy
suburb of Bloomfield Hills.
Back at the creek Brown Dog sipped some whiskey
from a half-pint, then stuffed three fresh wet camphor
patches against his teeth, a patent-medicine nostrum for
toothaches, the relief offered of short duration. He was
tempted to take the ten bucks in his pocket straight to the
tavern and drink it up but he needed it for dinner groceries
for the kids and himself. Gretchen at Social Services
had given him Dad’s Own Cookbook by Robert Sloan as a
present and he was slow to admit that he had come to
enjoy this duty more than going to the tavern after a day
cutting pulpwood. There weren’t any tourist women to
look at in late fall, winter, and early spring, just the same
old rummies, both male and female, talking about the
same old things from bad weather to frozen pipes to late
checks to thankless children to faithless wives and husbands.
Since the arrival of the cookbook Delmore had
taken to strolling down to the trailer around dinnertime
sniffing the air like an old bear ready to gum chickens. He
would carry a Tupperware container for a handout because
he had a short fuse for Berry’s errant behavior, especially
when Red was late coming home from school,
Brown Dog was cooking, and Delmore felt defenseless in
the onslaught of Berry’s affection. Brown Dog thought of
Berry’s mind as being faultily wired so that if she peed out
of a tree, took a walk in the night, or sang incoherent songs
it was simply part of her nature while Delmore always
wanted the lid of reality screwed on real tight. He loved
Berry but craved a safe distance from her behavior. Delmore
had overexposed himself to the Planet of the Apes
movies on television and liked to say, “We’re all monkeys
only with less hair” and Berry was a further throwback
to ancient times. Brown Dog had noted a specific
decline in Delmore beginning at the time of the death of
Doris nearly four months before. On her sickbed he had
sung to Doris, “I’d love to get you on a slow boat to China”
nearly every day which Brown Dog had thought an odd
song to sing to a dying woman though Doris had enjoyed
it and joined in. The evening before when Delmore had
showed up for a serving of spaghetti and meatballs he had
intoned, “As a reward Prince Igor received as a gift his
choice of dancing girls. More sauce, please.” Delmore listened
to Canadian radio with his elaborate equipment and
Brown Dog guessed that certain things Delmore said came
straight from a program of high culture. Delmore liked the
idea that Canadian radio gave a lot of Indian news and
referred to them as “our first citizens.” When Doris was
on her deathbed and Brown Dog tried to get information
on his own parentage Delmore had turned the radio way
up so no one could think straight. It was a gardening program
about the care and planting of perennials, but then
Doris was unlikely to give him information anyway. Genealogy
was the last of her concerns. Delmore had been
somewhat miffed when Doris had given her medicine bag
to Brown Dog to keep for Berry until she was old enough
but to hide it away so Rose couldn’t sell its contents for
booze when she got out of prison. Doris had shown him
her loon’s head soapstone pipe that was made about the
time of Jesus, or so she said.
On his way back to the car Brown Dog detoured
up a long hill, a place he favored when his heart and mind
required a broader view of life than that offered by the
pettier problems that were mud puddles not the free-flowing
creeks and rivers he cared so deeply for. You could
sit on a rocky outcropping and see the conjunction of the
West Branch and Middle Branch of the Escanaba River
miles away and in a thicket on the south slope there was a
Cooper’s hawks’ nest and a few hundred yards away a bear
den, both of which were used every year he could remember.
It was a hill that lifted and dispersed sadness and
when he had nearly reached the top it occurred to him that
while his teeth still ached the pain had become more distant
as if he were a train and the discomfort had receded
to the caboose. When he reached the top he did a little
twirl on the ball of one foot which he always did to give
himself the illusion of seeing 360 degrees at once. There
had been a brief spate of late April warm weather but
enough to cause the first faint burgeoning of pastel green
in the tree buds. He sucked in air to balance the arduous
climb and felt he was sucking in spring herself, the fresh
earth smells that were the remotest idea during winter.
Rare tears formed when he saw the back of the Cooper’s
hawk passing below him. If you hung out long enough in
the area the local hawks and ravens grew used to your
presence and resumed their normal activity though it was
fun to irritate red-tailed hawks by imitating their raspy
whistle. He dug under the roots of a stump and drew out
a metal box that contained marbles, arrowheads, and a
semi-nude photo of Lana Turner he had owned since age
twelve. He didn’t take a look but dug deeper for a leather
pouch that contained a half-full pint of peppermint
schnapps from which he took a healthy gulp then lay back
for a session of cloud study. Delmore had told him that
way out west in northern Arizona there was a tribe that
lived in cliffs and thought the souls of their dead ancestors
had taken up residence in clouds. It was pleasant to
think that his mother who he couldn’t remember lived in
that stratocumulus approaching from the west, and maybe
the father he had never laid eyes on had joined her in the
cloud. His grandfather who raised him had loved lightning
and storm clouds and would sit on the old porch swing
and watch summer storms passing over the northern section
of Lake Michigan. Brown Dog didn’t give a thought
to his own afterlife, the knowledge of which would arrive
in its own time. At the moment as the Cooper’s hawk
passed overhead for a quick study of the prone figure
Brown Dog thought heaven would be to live as a Cooper’s
hawk whose avian head was without the burden of
teeth.
Coming down the hill after a brief snooze and another
ample sip of the schnapps he paused for a moment of
dread, mere seconds of understandable hesitation at the
idea of returning to a domestic world for which he had had
no real training. The option of at least a full year in jail
reminded him of his grandpa saying, “Caught between a
rock and a hard place.” When he had visited arrested
friends jails were smelly, and full of the clang of gates and
doors closing. The food was bad, there was no place to
walk, no birds. His old girlfriend, the anthropology graduate
student Shelley, had told him that way back whenever
in the Middle Ages hell was thought to be a place totally
without birds. Jail was also a place without women, an
equally dire prospect, and more immediately punishing.
Brown Dog was greatly drawn to women with none of the
hesitancy of his more modern counterparts who tiptoed
in and out of women’s lives wearing blindfolds, nose plugs,
ear plugs, and fluttering ironic hearts. One warm summer
morning when a damp sheet was wrapped around the
knees of Shelley’s nude body Brown Dog had gazed a
long time at her genitals and then began clapping in
hearty applause. She was a little irritated to be awakened
thusly, then warmed to the idea that this backwoods
goofy thought a portion of her body about which she had
some doubt was beautiful.
When Brown Dog reached his car, a ’72 Chevelle,
the force of his aching teeth made him quiver. He took
four ibuprofen with a swig of water from his canteen.
Delmore had gotten the car in payment for a bad debt
from a cousin over in Iron River, not remembering that
the old brown sedan was powerful with a 396 engine, what
Red from the back seat called “kickass,” so that when
Brown Dog stomped the gas pedal to see what would happen
it was a neck snapper. Delmore was amused saying
the Detroit cops used Chevelles for chasing miscreants.
Brown Dog was appalled. Rose had wrecked his beloved
old Dodge van in a stupor, and after that had come the
Studebaker pickup with no side windows. On his grandpa’s
advice he habitually held his speed at forty-nine which, by
coincidence, was also his favorite temperature.
(Continues…)
Atlantic Monthly Press
Copyright © 2005
Jim Harrison
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-87113-892-1
Excerpted from The Summer He Didn’t Die
by Jim Harrison
Copyright © 2005 by Jim Harrison.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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