Brown Dog: Novellas Read online

  “First things first.” Terrance chuckled, pushing a long form across the desk for B.D. to fill out. B.D. had an aversion to such forms, in fact had never completed one, in part because he didn’t know his father’s name and had never seen his mother, so her name didn’t mean much to him beyond giving him mental quavers. Besides this, he didn’t have a Social Security number, which invariably closed the business of the day and he was sent packing off to the Social Security office to get one, which he never did. All through his youth his lumberjack grandfather had railed against Social Security as being communist inspired, and what’s more, the government had no right to keep track of its citizens, a caveat that included the census and voting for any of the “mind controllers.”

  “I guess there’s no point in this. I don’t have a Social Security number,” B.D. said, flushing at his hair roots. He ached to be in a swamp cutting cedar for fence posts. You didn’t need a number for that.

  Stuhl looked up from his morning Detroit Free Press. “You what? You don’t have a Social Security number?”

  “Nope. Never had a use for one.”

  “Then how do you pay your taxes?”

  B.D. stonewalled, and then Stuhl threw back his head, laughing with his mouth wide open so that B.D. could see down his pink throat past the twittering gizmo known as the uvula. It was curiously the flip side of a porn magazine where you could see way up inside women. Stuhl wheezed as he picked up his fallen pipe and turned the Free Press and shoved it at B.D.

  “So we have a felon with no Social Security number. You’re out of my department, bub!” Stuhl continued to chortle as B.D. hastily read a large article in the Outstate News section featuring a big photo of Shelley with the rubric U.M. STUDENT DISCOVERS ANCIENT INDIAN BURIAL GROUND. The article went on to say that it was the northernmost Hopewell site and plans were being made, of course, to begin excavation the following summer. Off to the side there was a small photo of B.D. himself and a paragraph describing him as a “grave robber’’ who had attempted to sell the body of a dead Indian chief found at the bottom of Lake Superior, and that his further activities would be under surveillance by the State Police.

  “Gretchen, Gretchen,” Stuhl brayed into the intercom. “I’ve got a live one.” He turned back to B.D. with a not unkindly look. “We’re not involved in law enforcement here. I suspect you’ve never even filed for income tax, which could make you liable for twenty years in federal prison. Rest assured, your secret is safe with us. Our aim is to make you self-supporting, not to punish you.”

  B.D. sat there feeling, in a general sense, like he was leaking, his life’s fluid draining away. When he stood he could not feel his feet. Twenty years in federal prison would just about take care of the whole thing, yet how could he make a run for daylight with only seven bucks in his pocket?

  “I’ve got you an unemployable,” Stuhl said, and B.D. turned to see the same young woman who had defended him and Berry at the Burger King, still dressed in a black turtleneck, all angles but with a fine set of breasts. Stuhl handed her the newspaper. “A little background.” He chuckled.

  Gretchen looked at Stuhl as if he were a dog turd and led B.D. out into the hall. “I’m tied up until after lunch,” she said. “Could you come back at two?”

  “Count on me.” B.D. was wary but at least he was talking to a woman.

  “That asshole put you in a state of panic. You’re not coming back, are you?”

  “Nope.” B.D. began to edge backward down the hall.

  “How’s your little girl doing?” She took his arm, restraining him.

  “I bought her this bike but she can’t get the hang of it,” B.D. said lamely, desperate for escape.

  “You just come back and I’ll find you something. Do you understand?”

  He mopped the frightened sweat off his brow with his coat sleeve, returning her direct glance just to get some courage back. She had the aura of a man but a lot nicer. He nodded then and rushed off, grabbing the pull tabs for snow-shoveling jobs as he left the lobby. You’ll never starve if you’re a good shovel man, he thought, out in the cold sunlight that glistened off the snow, the working folks leaning into the cold wind as they would for the ensuing six months or so until spring came in May. The wind rejuvenated him, made him a man to be reckoned with, somewhat the desperado what with his mug shining from the Detroit Free Press, a desperado falsely accused, but then he never put any stock in the offense of being misunderstood. As Grandpa used to say, it is not in the nature of people to understand each other. Just get to work on time, that was the main thing.

  In the next four hours B.D. earned thirty dollars by shoveling five walks and two driveways. Rather than striking a deal before he started, he had depended on people’s generosity, a specific mistake during the recent hard times. One old woman had given him only a buck for shoveling her walk, telling him he was probably going to spend it on liquor anyway. He didn’t mind, assuming she was covering up for being broke herself. He ran out of work at about one o’clock when the wind clocked around to the south and Lake Michigan’s waters raised the temperature to over freezing, and it occurred to everyone at once that the first big snowstorm of the year wasn’t going to stick around. It was a disappointment to B.D. to see his employment begin to melt away. Before having lunch he went to a grocery store and bought pork chops, a pot roast, salt pork, potatoes, rutabaga, and pinto beans, plus a six-pack of orange soda for the kids. There was always the danger of stopping at a bar and getting carried away and he didn’t want to face Doris without a sack of groceries.

  He stopped at Shorty’s, a crummy old diner he remembered from his youth as being famous for large portions, and ordered the hot pork sandwich at the counter. On Saturday afternoons his lumberjack grandpa and his cronies used to sit at a big table in the corner, drink coffee, and argue, allowing B.D. to walk down to the harbor if it was summer and watch rich folks fooling with their boats. It was unlikely that any of the local boaters were actually well heeled but to B.D. anyone who owned a boat must be rich. Boats, unfortunately, reminded him of diving for the dead Indian chief and he deftly cut a miniature trench in his mashed potatoes so that the gravy could sweep out over the fatty pork. He paused after his first taste, though ravenous, determining that it wasn’t, in fact, pork gravy.

  “Something wrong, dear?”asked the waitress, who was saucy and well built, if slender, though one of her legs was shorter than the other and there was a light hobble to her walk. She also spoke with a peculiar accent he couldn’t trace, but then he had only been out of the Upper Peninsula twice.

  “The gravy on the hot pork sandwich is not pork gravy,” he said. An observation, not a complaint.

  “Like it or lump it, dear. It’s generic gravy and we use it on everything. It comes in thirty-gallon barrels straight out of Chicago. You’re new here, so don’t complain.” She tapped her pencil and tried to stare him down. There was a grease stain about where her belly button would be and he lifted his eyes from the grease to her neck and lovely pale skin.

  “Didn’t say I didn’t like it. Only said it wasn’t pork. Besides, I was eating Saturday lunch in here when you still had pot rings on your ass.” Quite suddenly the idea of any mark on her ass seemed desperately attractive.

  “Should I call the manager?”She was smiling now in the curious way of women with not very straight teeth.

  “What you should do is have a beer with me after you get out of work. Where’d you get that way of talking?”

  “Louisiana. Near Bayou Teche. I come up here with my husband who’s up at Sawyer Air Force Base.”

  She went off to service other customers and B.D. noted how trim her waist was in contrast to her firm but ample bottom, then he remembered his hunger and cold wet feet and shoveled the pork home, daubing up the gravy. Fuck, he thought, fondling the pepper shaker, I forgot to put pepper on it. He felt a hand on his shoulder and swiveled on the counter stool to face the breasts of the waitress. With a goofy edge he decided not to look up but to kee
p his eyes on the prize.

  “What can I do for you? I hope it’s something,” he quipped.

  “Nothing, you dickhead. Chief wants to see you.” She gestured over at a very old man drinking coffee at a table in the corner, the same table at which his grandpa sat when he was hanging out with his cronies.

  B.D. approached cautiously with a weather eye on the exit, but then this ancient creature couldn’t very well be from the IRS. The man gestured at him to sit down and pulled a silver flask from his well-tailored, if rumpled, three-piece suit. B.D. swigged deeply and the whiskey hit the pork with a pleasant thump.

  “This is not a good time to be wearing tennis shoes, you fucking numbskull. Doris called and said you were back in town. And I don’t believe this for a moment.” The old man pushed the morning Free Press toward B.D. “For Christ’s sake, don’t you recognize me?”

  “Now I do. You’re Delmore Short Bear, my grandpa’s friend.’’ Delmore was famous for being the only rich Native anyone had heard of when B.D. was young. Delmore had worked in the auto factories of Detroit for years and bought a farm just north of the city because he couldn’t stand cities. His farm was now part of the swank suburb of Bloomfield Hills and it was well known that Delmore had sold it off for a pretty penny.

  “Delmore Burns to the world at large. You can’t have people knowing your medicine. Now Doris told me you spent all your money on them. I assume the anthropologist paid you off. You’re a goddamn nitwit like your friend David.”

  B.D. stood abruptly and turned to go. He was used to taking criticism but the mention of Rose’s brother and his boyhood friend caused a lump in his throat. David Four Feet had died in a fight in Jackson Prison, a fact that had been easier to accept before B.D. came back to home territory and saw reminders of David in every thicket, on every street.

  “Guess I don’t care to hear another rundown of me,” B.D. said. “I help out a family, then wake up to see I’m known far and wide as a grave robber. If all you got is criticism, why don’t you go fuck yourself. I don’t need some mouthy old geezer with a fat wallet giving me a hard time.” B.D.’s umbrage grew with his speech but had no apparent effect on Delmore.

  “Twiddle-twaddle. None of us believe you’re a grave robber. I owe it to your grandpa to keep an eye on you. How come you think the judge let you off so easy and gave your partner time when you stole the ice truck to sell the body in Chicago? It wasn’t just that Republican cunt friend of yours and her rich father. You’ve always been up to nothing over at Grand Marais and I’m here to help you get good at it.”

  “Good at what?” B.D. slumped back to his chair.

  “Good at nothing. It takes talent to be good at nothing. You were a master at it out in the boondocks but now you have to deal with Escanaba, a big city to you.”

  “I handled Marquette okay,” B.D. said without conviction.

  The waitress brought him a cup of coffee and a giant wedge of apple pie “to make up for the pork,” she said. He watched her wobble to the end of the counter where she sat down with the Free Press, then glanced back at him. Word was getting around and he didn’t give a shit. Beneath the odor of fried food, he detected the faint scent of lilac on her skin. His balls gave a pleasant twitch.

  “You’re pussy-struck is your main problem, among hundreds,” said Delmore. “I want to warn you about Rose’s boyfriend, Fred. He’s a phony pulp cutter over in Amasa. He’s mean and he’s a lot bigger than you.”

  “How can you be a phony pulp cutter? There can’t be a worse job other than pumping septic tanks.” The pie wasn’t much good but B.D. ate it so as not to offend her.

  “He went to college and played football, I hear. Then he read a few books and is trying to go Native. He likes to get in fights and thrown in jail in order to have genuine experiences. It’s our times that cause people to act this way.”

  This notion transcended that of imminent danger to B.D. He liked the surprises offered by odd behavior himself, and he remembered waking early one morning a couple of summers before when he was supposed to help Frank, the owner of the Dunes Saloon, roof his house. Instead, he ate a can of beans and walked in a straight line for eighteen miles, over hill and dale, through gullies and creeks, skirting tamarack swamps, to a hummock he liked near the roots of the Two Hearted River. He carried a giant Hefty bag folded in his pocket for instant shelter, on the advice of old Claude, a Chippewa herbalist. At dark he drank a lot of cold spring water, climbed into the bag, and watched the first full moon in August out the hole near the drawstring, smoking an occasional cigarette to keep out mosquitoes. Before dawn he poked a hole and peed right out of the garbage bag.

  “I like the way you think things over before you talk,” said Delmore, watching B.D. think. “You’re wondering why this guy Fred is after Rose if he went to college? Imagine Rose as an evil mudhole and men are pigs and can’t help but wallow there. That’s your basic answer. Women are a machine with a big panel of buttons like a drop forge. You can’t ever hit the right combination of buttons without getting one of your limbs cut off. Meanwhile, stop by my place and get some boots and warm clothes.”

  Delmore got up and took both of their checks from the waitress, adding, “I’m not loaning you a penny so don’t get any ideas. I just don’t want you to get left sucking the mop.” On the way out Delmore gave the waitress a five-spot as tip and pinched her butt. B.D. quickly followed to pick up on the good will.

  “So your alias is Brown Dog?” she said, waving the paper at him.

  “You might say that. What’s yours?”

  “Maybe it’s Pink Pussy. Maybe it’s Happily Married.”

  “Which is it today?” They were nearly nose to nose and the lilac scent now was working up through the sheen of cooking oil.

  “I’m not sure. My husband, Travis, is way over in Somalia helping to feed black folks. It wouldn’t be real patriotic to fuck you, would it?”

  “Depends on how you look at it. I could just lay next to you. I wouldn’t do nothing. In fact, we could leave our underpants on.” B.D. was feeling like a smooth talker but it didn’t seem to be registering with her. She looked off out the window, then made her way around the corner and poured herself a cup of coffee, paused with her back to him, then turned.

  “If I go to bed with you, kiddo, I’m going to be in your face. Now get out of here. Check me tomorrow if you like. No promises.” She limped into the kitchen without turning again.

  He fairly pranced the first block toward his van. This was the promise of American life. You wake up wishing you were back in the cabin near Grand Marais. You have your ups and downs. You’re down in the cold dumps of the employment office. You shovel snow after being slandered in the newspaper. You have a hot pork sandwich and love strikes you deep in the gizzard, besides which blessing your disappeared nine hundred dollars is just another burnt-out bulb. He nearly swooned with the thought of balancing the waitress on his nose when he was brought back to earth with a shrill cry.

  “There you are! Where the fuck have you been? Hurry, goddammit.” Gretchen grabbed him by the arm and dragged him up the street to the employment office. “You’ve been the victim of a media rip-off and you’ve got to stand up for yourself and your people.” She batted at him with a rolled up Free Press for emphasis.

  Parked before the office was a van from the local television station. Gretchen rapped at the window and out came the cameraman and the newsman, the latter chortling like Stuhl but with the dank, mellifluous baritone of his trade. B.D. got prickly heat when it occurred to him he was going to be on TV, but then summoned up the training he got from church, plus his aborted stay at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago where he had enrolled in Preaching 101. The newsman did a flimflam intro including the notion that a local citizen had been accused of a “grave, possibly heinous crime,” though in fact he had been convicted of nothing, due to an agreement between the “aggrieved parties.”

  B.D. closed his eyes and leaned against the van in the attitude of one lost i
n thought. He strained to come up with a Chippewa word to use other than “wagutz,” a real nasty thing to call a female; all his other words in Anishinabe were names Claude taught him for birds, animals, and plants which would be hard to drag into this situation. The point would be to present oneself as the wronged party, coupling this with quiet moral superiority. He opened his eyes to the baffled mike approaching his face, and to the question, in a game-show timbre, “And what do you have to say for yourself?”

  “Sure, I brought the body of one of our grandfathers up from about a hundred feet. I was a salvage diver making a living before all this happened. I wanted this chief to have a correct burial. We’re land animals and don’t want a watery grave. As far as the ancient burial mounds are concerned, I’m the only living person who knew their location and I was sworn to secrecy by a medicine man. I was tricked by these Ann Arbor anthropologists, including the famous wagutz Shelley Thurman, and then framed for burning one of their tents. I was facing thirty years in the slammer. Now the sacred ground is frozen, but by next late April and May these college folks will start digging up the graves of our relatives. I call upon all Ojibway peoples in the U.P., even Wisconsin and Minnesota, to defend this burial mound—”

  “Do you advocate violence?”the newsman interrupted, a little embarrassed by B.D.’s quaking voice and the tears streaming down his cheeks.

  “What would you do if you went to the cemetery on Memorial Day and discovered a bunch of folks with shovels digging up your grandpa who died in the war to keep this country free?” B.D. waved the newsman and camera away, realizing he was about to lapse into nonsense, though he couldn’t resist finishing with a quote a woods hippie had taught him which he brayed into the mike: “Don’t forget, stagnant water cannot contain the coils of the dragon.”

  An hour later, after dropping off the groceries with Doris, B.D. was making himself busy cleaning up a partially flooded church basement. The church janitor hadn’t drained the outside faucet used to water the lawn, and the pipe had broken with the early storm and hard freeze. Gretchen had got him the job, demanding for him in advance fifty bucks cash on the barrelhead.