Brown Dog drifted away thinking of the village in the forest where the red-haired girl lived. When she had served them pie and coffee at a diner and a chocolate milk and cookie for Berry he had teased her by saying, “Cat got your tongue,” when she didn’t respond to his flirting. She had gestured to her mouth indicating that she was mute and when he hid his face in his hands in embarrassment she had come around the counter and patted his head and laughed the soundless laugh of a mute.
Now he was waiting for Deidre in a very expensive coffee shop in downtown Toronto in which he felt quite uncomfortable. He was nursing a three-buck cup of Americano, more than a six-pack of beer back in Escanaba where in some places a cup of coffee was still a quarter. He much preferred the diner with the red-haired mute girl up near Gamebridge where a kindly social worker had taken him and Berry for a Sunday ride in early March so that they finally could have their first trip out of the city in months. They had a fine walk on a snowmobile trail through a forest while Berry had run far and wide as fast as a deer over the top of the crusty snow. Berry’s legs were getting longer and when they visited nearly every day the lovely winter ravines in Toronto she’d run far ahead of him.
Now it was early April and he was getting an insufferable case of spring fever. The proprietor of the coffee shop, a big strong woman, was staring at him as if he was a vagrant. He avoided her glance by eagerly looking out the front window hoping to see Deidre, though his errant mind was back at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago thirty years before where in a dark hallway there was a painting called Ruth Amid the Alien Corn. At the onset the painting irritated him because it was obviously wheat, not corn. Ruth, however, was lovely and fine-breasted looking into the somber distance with teary eyes. Once while he was looking at the painting one of his devout teachers, Miss Aldrich, had happened along and explained that Ruth had been exiled and was terribly homesick thus the wheat or corn was “alien.” Brown Dog in Alien Toronto didn’t have a ring to it but it was on the money.
Finally Deidre appeared at the window and waved to him. Brown Dog was startled because she was talking to a man he recognized as her husband. They had all met two weeks before at the Homeless Ball, a fund-raiser for the indigent. The man, Bob by name, had a peculiar shape what with being thin from the waist up with a silvery goatee, and quite large down below with a big ass that even now forced the tail of his tweed sport coat out at a sharp angle. The question was, why was he here? He sat himself down at a table twenty feet or so away and glared at B.D. with the usual sullenness of a cuckold.
Meanwhile Deidre sat down all flash and bustle with the usual merry smile and began to unwrap her ten-foot scarf. When she ordered her double-decaf soy-milk latte with a pinch of sassafras pollen, B.D. momentarily forgot the glowering husband thinking that he would get stuck with the bill which would equal a good bottle of whiskey. The coffee fetish that was sweeping North America left him restless and puzzled. Like his uncle Delmore, B.D. would often use the same grounds for two pots.
Brown Dog was wise enough to understand that the presence of Bob meant that their two-week affair with a mere four couplings was over. He wasn’t really listening to Deidre as his mind rehearsed the four: once in his room while Berry was at speech therapy, twice in a modest hotel, and once in a snow cave he and Berry had carved into a hillside in the Lower Don Parkland. They screwed while Berry was running in the distance. The snow cave had been awkward because B.D. had to back in first and then Deirdre backed partway in and pulled down her trousers. There was very little room to maneuver and she was a big strong girl so that he was driven breathlessly into the narrow back wall of the cave freezing his own bare ass.
“Are you listening?” She waved a hand in front of his face. “I was saying that I think I must have taken an extra Zoloft by mistake. Bob made me a gin fizz before putting his salmon soufflé in the oven. Suddenly I became dizzy and weepy and just plain spilled the beans. Of course Bob was outraged and wanted the details. He thought it was strange that I was fucking a proletarian which is his professor language for a workingman. Anyway, we had it out and when we were finished the soufflé was ready to eat, an odd coincidence, don’t you think? You could use a shower.”
“I’ve been shoveling snow since seven this morning so I worked up quite a sweat in nine hours.” There had been a few inches of dusty snow and B.D. had wandered the streets of a wealthy neighborhood near the curling club. He would shake a little cowbell and those who wanted their walks cleaned would come to their front doors. This system had worked well the entire winter and he had made enough money to support himself and Berry in their ample-sized room in an old Victorian mansion in an area gone to decay.
“I have the distinct feeling you’re not listening to me,” said Deidre in a huff.
“You’re saying that our love is not meant to be,” B.D. said seeing a wonderful piece of ass disappear into the usual marital void. He could feel her heat across the table. She was a real burner and in the ice cave he had marveled at the heat her bare butt had generated during its strenuous whack-whack-whack. She seemed fit as a fiddle though she claimed to have allergies to peanuts, dairy products, and latex so that she carried nonlatex condoms for emergencies in a secret compartment in her purse. One afternoon they were at a sports bar watching football and he had eaten free peanuts while she went to the potty and when she came out she shrieked, “You could kill me.” If he so much as touched her arm, with peanut oil on a finger he could kill her, or so she said. His uncle Delmore was always watching the Perry Mason repeats on television at lunchtime and this peanut thing seemed like a good plot though B.D. regarded Perry as one of the most boring fucks in Christendom.
Suddenly Bob was at the edge of their table and B.D. slid his chair back in case the dickhead made a move. “You cad,” Bob said, grabbed his wife’s arm, and then in a miraculous act grabbed the check for the Americano and the double-decaf soy-milk mocha latte with a pinch of sassafras pollen (two bucks extra). Despite being called a cad which he thought might be an old-timey swear word B.D.’s heart soared when Bob picked up the check which meant that he and Berry could eat out rather than cooking something in the electric fry pan in the room. How could he be a cad when it was Deidre who’d instigated the affair after they had foxtrotted in a dark corner at the Homeless Ball and she had been delighted when his wanger got stiff as a rolling pin?
On the way out of the coffee shop he discovered that someone had stolen the snow shovel he had left tilted against the building near the doorway. Maybe this was a good omen, a sign that it was time to somehow leave Canada? The blade was made out of plastic anyhow and didn’t make the old-fashioned grating noise on cement. After Deidre had slumped forward steaming in the snow cave she had said, “It’s so primeval,” and B.D. had began quoting Longfellow’s “Evangeline.” “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks . . .” As a high school teacher Deidre had been impressed but then B.D. told her the story of how in third grade he and five other skins, three mixed and two purebloods, had been forced to memorize the first pages of the poem for the school Thanksgiving program but on stage his friend David Four Feet had made loud farting noises instead. The assembly fell apart, laughing hysterically, and the teachers and principal ran around slapping as many students as possible. David Four Feet was severely crippled and got away with murder because none of the teachers wanted to beat up on a cripple. Since B.D. was David’s best friend he offered an alternative for their anger.
B.D. waited outside the lobby door until Berry’s speech therapist appeared with Berry leaping down the last flight of stairs crouched like a monkey. The therapist was terribly skinny and B.D. had the fantasy of fattening her up to a proper size. There was the old joke of getting bone splinters while screwing a skinny girl. He doubted that this was an actual danger but it was easy to see that this young woman was about thirty pounds on the light side. He thanked her profusely even though Berry hadn’t learned a single word. Berry was his stepdaughter and the victim of fetal alcohol syndrome due to her mother’s voluminous drinking of schnapps during pregnancy.
They made the long twilight walk to Yitz’s Delicatessen with growing hunger. More than ever before Brown Dog felt on the lam. Five months before, their entry into the safety of Toronto had been nearly jubilant. Their contact, Dr. Krider, who was a Jewish dermatologist, had taken them to lunch at Yitz’s and B.D. had eaten two corned tongue sandwiches plus a plate of beef brisket for dessert while Berry had matzoh ball soup and two servings of herring during which she made her perfect gull cries as she always did when eating fish. The other noontime diners were startled but many of them applauded the accuracy of Berry’s gull language. Dr. Krider for reasons of historical and political sympathies was an ancillary member of the Red Underground, a loose-knit group of activists on both sides of the border and extending nominally to native groups in Mexico. In recent years any action had been made complicated by Homeland Security to whom even AARP and the Daughters of the American Revolution were suspect. Dr. Krider had found them their pleasant room and had B.D. memorize his phone number in case he was short of sustenance money. B.D. had assured the good doctor that he had always been able to make a living which was less than accurate as this often meant the forty bucks he could make cutting two cords of firewood which he would stretch out for a week of simple food and a couple of six-packs in Delmore’s drafty trailer. The escape from Michigan into Canada had been occasioned by the state authorities’ impending placement of Berry in a home for the youthful mentally disabled in Lansing. B.D. and Delmore had made the eight-hour drive south from the Upper Peninsula to Lansing only to discover that the home and the school in which Berry would be stored was profoundly ugly and surrounded by acres of cement, an alien material, and thus the escape plan was made. Gretchen, B.D.’s beloved Sapphic social worker, had driven them over to Paradise on Whitefish Bay where they had boarded a native fishing boat, a fast craft that was sometimes used to smuggle cigarettes into Canada where they were eight bucks a pack. In the coastal town of Wawa they were met by a kindly, plump middle-aged Ojibway who was traveling to visit a daughter and drove them the two days to Toronto in her ancient pickup. The woman named Corva had drunk diet supplement drinks all the way and B.D. and Berry had subsisted on boloney and white bread because Corva had been forbidden by the Red Underground to stop for anything but gas. Since they were used to eating well on venison and trout and illegal moose and the recipes from B.D.’s sole printed volume, Dad’s Own Cookbook, they were famished when they reached Toronto, and Yitz’s was their appointed meeting place. It wasn’t until they passed the Toronto city limits that Corva turned to him and asked, “Are you a terrorizer?” and B.D. replied, “Not that I know of.” The few members of the Red Underground he had met in Wawa were terse and rather fierce and it had been hard to feel what Dr. Krider had called “solidarity.” Dr. Krider had said to him, “The weather has beaten the shit out of you,” and B.D. had replied that he had always preferred the outside to the inside. It was so pleasant to walk in big storms in any season and take shelter in a thicket in the lee of the wind. Once he and Gretchen had taken Berry for a beach walk and a violent thunderstorm from the south on Lake Michigan had approached very quickly so that they took shelter in a dogwood thicket. Berry had what Gretchen called “behavioral issues” and kept running around in the storm despite Gretchen calling out to her. Lightning struck very close to their thicket and in the cold and wet Gretchen came into his arms for a moment. She said, “How can you get a hard-on during a lightning strike, you goofy asshole?” and he didn’t have an answer though it was likely her slight lilac scent mixed with the flowering dogwood plus her shimmering wet body, the thought of which drove him sexually batty.
Now the air was warmish in a breeze from the south in the twilight and walking through a small park Berry incited a male robin to anger by making competitive male calls. B.D. held up his hand to protect them from the shrieking bird and said, “Please, Berry, your dad is thinking,” which was not at all a pleasant process. As they neared the delicatessen, he remembered two rather ominous things. In their good-byes Corva had said, “Don’t hurt no innocent people. You’re with a rough bunch.” And Dr. Krider had told him, “Since you entered Canada illegally you’ll have to leave Canada illegally. You don’t have any papers so you’re limited to odd jobs.” The latter part of the admonition didn’t mean much because all he had ever done was odd jobs except for cutting pulp for Uncle Delmore, a job abbreviated when a falling tree bucked back from the spring in its branches and busted up his kneecap.
This hard thinking made B.D. hungry so he ordered both a corned tongue and a brisket sandwich plus a plate of herring and potato salad for Berry. Berry refrained from her gull calls waiting for this old man to enter wearing his Jewish black beanie. They would spend a few minutes across a table from each other exchanging different birdcalls. The old man was some kind of retired scientist and tricked Berry by doing a few birdcalls from a foreign country which at first puzzled her but then made her laugh. B.D. watched them at play pondering the obvious seventy years’ difference in their ages. He wondered where the word “Yitz” came from because he associated it with one of the best things in life, good food. It wasn’t like one of those Michigan diners with a barrel of generic gravy out back connected by a hydraulic hose to the minimal kitchen which heated up grub from a vast industrial food complex named Sexton. B.D. could imagine the actual factory with cows lined up at a back door waiting patiently to become the patented meat loaf and their nether parts stewed into the barrels of gravy.
It was at three A.M. that his destiny changed. He awoke with an insufferable pain in his lower unit accompanied by a dream in which he had been kicked in the balls by a cowboy as he had been so many years before in Montana. As life would have it things suddenly began to happen. Since he was moaning when he turned the light on, Berry was hovering over him and started singing one of her verbless songs. Her words were not quite words but were always pleasant.
He couldn’t stand up straight but managed to slink down the stairs and drop Berry off with Gert, the landlady, a horrid old crone who, however, adored Berry for playing by the hour with her two nasty Jack Russell terriers. The dogs loathed everyone including their owner but liked Berry whom they perhaps regarded as an intermediate species.
Luckily the closest hospital was a scant five blocks away and B.D. trotted through the night bent over from the waist in the manner of a Navajo tracker. He tripped over a couple of curbs with his eyes closed in pain soaking himself in a puddle from yesterday’s slush. It was not in his nature to be fearful and he had anyway guessed a kidney stone as the grandfather who’d raised him experienced a kidney stone about once a year whereupon he would take to bed with a fifth of whiskey which he quickly drank. Grandpa would howl, roar, and bellow in drunken rage and then after a few hours of this would fall asleep and on waking act fit as a fiddle.
The emergency room was fairly crowded and B.D. was out of luck because he didn’t have a Canadian health card with a photo ID. He also made a mistake by acting manly despite the pain which made his eyes roll back in his head. This faux manliness was typical of some men in the Great North who pull their own bad teeth with the aid of whiskey and grip-lock pliers. He was slumped in a chair in a far corner pondering his lack of options when a diminutive young woman in a gray dress and white hat stooped beside him. She had been near the front desk and had overheard his ID problem and asked him if he knew a private doctor. He said no but then remembered his Red Underground contact Dr. Krider who was a skin doctor. He had written Dr. Krider’s number on the back side of a photo he had begged off Gretchen, hoping for a nude though he knew it was unlikely. Instead he got a photo of Gretchen on the beach in a two-piece blue bathing suit, a towel wrapped partly around her hips, but clearly showing her slightly protuberant belly button. This photo and his Michigan driver’s license and an old brass paper clip to hold cash were the sole contents of his pockets except for a lucky Petoskey stone with its pattern of ancient invertebrates. Unlike most of the rest of us except the homeless, B.D. had no Social Security card, draft registration card, credit or insurance cards.
Despite her miniature size Nora, his immediate savior, drove a large Plymouth station wagon, sitting on a stack of cushions to see out the windshield. B.D. slumped on the seat beside her, tilting sideways until his head rested against her thigh. Despite the near delirium of his pain he was always one to take advantage of any possible physical contact with a woman. He looked up at the passing streetlights determining that Nora’s scent was wild violets. Another surge of pain prevented him from trying to turn over so he could be facedown on her lap, since his teens a favorite position.
When Nora pulled to a stop at Dr. Krider’s home an immense man appeared and carried B.D. inside the house, impressive B.D. thought since he weighed one-ninety. He also noted that he was in the posh neighborhood of his snow shoveling. The huge man lowered him to a sofa at which point B.D. could see that he was an Indian with a pock-marked face and a bushy ponytail. Dr. Krider poked and probed B.D.’s lower stomach and bladder, determined that he had a sizable kidney stone, and administered a shot of painkilling Demerol. Nora had retrieved a warm washcloth and had bathed B.D.’s face and now he had it buried in her neck, a vantage point from which he could see down under her blouse to a single peach-shaped breast. Krider had pushed up his shirt and pulled down his trousers and as the Demerol slowly took effect B.D. was embarrassed that he was wearing wildly colored Hawaiian underpants which Gretchen had sent him for Christmas as a joke. He was also chagrined that the peek at Nora’s titty had given him a boner.
“I can’t believe that a man passing a kidney stone is tumescent,” Dr. Krider chuckled, “but then I’ve seen geezers in hospitals minutes from death still trying to pat a nurse’s ass.”
Nora blushed and snapped B.D.’s dick with a forefinger, wilting it. This was a well-known nurse’s trick to control excitable patients.
“Nora! That was unkind,” Dr. Krider said. “Surely a penis isn’t a threatening object to you?”
“Bitch!” said Charles Eats Horses, the big Indian who was a Lakota.
“You could make it up to me later,” B.D. squeaked in his drug trance as Nora rushed from the room in tears.
B.D. dozed for a few minutes then lapsed back into pain. The stone was making its determined way down his urethra, propelled by satanic forces. He flapped his hands wildly in the air as does a dying grouse its wings. He crooned a song of pain which resembled Berry’s verbless melodies. In short, he flopped and writhed. Dr. Krider gave him another quick shot and Charles Eats Horses put on a CD of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Charles had heard his oldest sister die giving birth in a remote shack on the Rosebud Reservation and the savagery of B.D.’s personal sound track was close to home. B.D. himself was sure that he was giving birth to an unadorned concrete block and if a river had been available he would have gladly rolled into it in a fatal winter swim.
Finally the stone emerged, rough-hewn and the size of a smallish marble.
“I’ll have this set in a ring for you,” Nora joked washing away a splotch of blood.
“Will I ever love again?” B.D. croaked.
“It might be a few days,” Krider said, yawning.
B.D. fell asleep wonderfully without pain for the first time in half a dozen hours. Dr. Krider and Charles went back to bed and Nora settled in at the far end of B.D.’s sofa with an afghan throw after covering him with a duvet. To be sure this man’s penis was decidedly more ample than her boyfriend’s. He wrote book reviews and everything else in the catchall category for the Toronto Globe and Mail and she felt lucky indeed that he was a compulsive oralist who also sang in an Episcopalian choir. Only last week he had started singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” while going down on her. A former boyfriend with an XXL wanger had caused her discomfort and she had dropped him like a spoon when the smoke alarm goes off. As her eyes closed she tried to erase the vision of the half dozen silly-looking penises of her past in favor of a cinnamon sticky bun at the airport. The mind can become so tiresome when it comes to sex and the man at the far end of the capacious sofa mystified her until she remembered the louts up on Manitoulin Island when at thirteen she had gone to the cabin of a friend’s parents. She and her friend had been sunbathing on the cabin’s deck and a mixed-blood had brought a cord of wood in a battered pickup and when stacking the wood had said, “How about a blow job, cuties?” They were shocked but then laughed when her girlfriend replied “Beat it, jerk-off.” The man had swarthy good looks but at the time she couldn’t imagine herself ever following through on such a request.
B.D. slept for an hour or so waking at the first peek of dawn through an east window when he felt the toes of his right foot touch what was obviously smooth skin toward Nora’s end of the sofa. He was instantly alert enough to be cautious, squinting in the dim light and noting her soft feminine snore and answering with his fake snore to show her if she awoke that anything was an accident of sleep. The drugs had worn off and his hardening dick was painful but then one must be brave. The hurt reminded him of his early teens when he and his friend David Four Feet who was crippled and walked like a crab would have off-the-cuff masturbation contests and on the way to school would mysteriously yell, “Four times,” “Five times,” or less. B.D.’s record was seven and it had caused the kind of pain similar to the passing of the kidney stone.
Now he moved his toes lower until he encountered the magic area and it felt like his big toe was touching a mouse under a thin handkerchief. He snored louder in a proclamation of innocence. Dare he wiggle his toes to offer her pleasure? he wondered. She stopped snoring and pushed her vulva against his talented toes. From the other room a clock alarm rang. She stopped moving but he didn’t, his destination now dampish. They heard Dr. Krider’s padding feet in the hallway and she moved well back into her corner of the sofa. His friend David Four Feet used to say, “Drat it, foiled again,” when one of their pranks went awry. B.D. never gave time much thought but it occurred to him that if Krider’s clock had delayed itself ten minutes she could have been slowly spinning on his weenie like a second hand. Time is a bitch, he thought, his right toes feeling absurdly lonely. He continued to fake sleep until he dropped off listening to Nora and Dr. Krider talk. She said something about visiting Berry to tell her that her daddy was okay.
When he woke again there was only Eats Horses offering a breakfast tray of a bowl of oatmeal pleasingly piled with sausage links to counter the banality of oats. B.D. was still morose about his lost opportunity with Nora and the obvious healing power of a good fuck. Now that the white people were gone Eats Horses dispensed with the Indianness of his speech, the peculiar way our characters offer people what they expect.
“We have to get out of Dodge pronto,” Eats Horses said.
“Why?” B.D.’s first thought was, Why leave an area with such fine pork sausage?
“We’re both illegal and Dr. Krider is too valuable to the movement. He could be busted for harboring illegals. We have to leave Canada.”
“I can’t figure out how,” B.D. said. “Trout season starts in two weeks and here I am high and dry.” He had finished the sausage and now the oatmeal looked real ugly.
“Fuck your trout season. First you trade in illegal shipwreck artifacts, then you try to sell a frozen body, then you violently raid an archaeological site. You become a phony Chip activist and befriend a convict named Lone Marten. You steal a bearskin from a fancy home in L.A. You smuggle your stepchild out of Michigan in defiance of state laws. A criminal like yourself is no help to us.”
“How do you know all this shit?” B.D. was appalled.
“Until a year ago I was a cop in Rapid City and when you got here I had a buddy on the force check your rap sheet. You’re poison. That’s why we never got in touch with you. I quit being a cop and went into the house-painting business with my cousin but we were going to paint a shed and got caught with seven gallons of red paint and Homeland Security entered the picture. For years the Lakota have been threatening to give those presidents on Mount Rushmore a dose of blood-red paint. We’d bought ours in Denver to escape the hassle. The paint store in Denver must have tipped the cops off. Anyway I was accused of plotting a terrorist act but after a month in jail the ACLU bailed me out. I made my way here but now I have to leave. Your uncle Delmore made a contribution to the movement so the leadership instructed me to take you and your stepdaughter along.”
“Were you, in fact, going to paint a shed?” B.D. was suddenly thinking of Delmore watching the Perry Mason reruns and thus he asked a Perry-type question.
“None of your business,” Eats Horses said.
“How come you’re called Eats Horses?”
“Many years ago in the time of my grandparents the rez got cheated out of its government-allotment food and people were dying of starvation so some started eating their horses.”
“Why go back if we’re only going to get arrested?” B.D. was horrified at the idea of jail having been there a number of times. He’d also heard that you could no longer take Tabasco with you to jail so how could he eat jail food?
“I have a new identity and I think Krider is arranging one for you. I’m going to be security and a bouncer at a strip club in Lincoln, Nebraska. I got a poet friend Trevino Brings Plenty who says, ‘Alive in America is all we are.’”
Eats Horses lapsed into a melancholy silence and B.D. joined him. They were clearly homesick men on the run.
“When I was a kid I told my grandpa who raised me that I wanted to be a wild Indian when I grow up and he said, ‘If you do keep it under your hat.’ I guess I’m only about half anyway.”
“I’m three-quarters and that doesn’t make it easier. If my brain was white my ass would only be in a different kind of sling. A white friend got his house foreclosed and I said, ‘At least I don’t have a house.’” Charles Eats Horses laughed hard so B.D. joined him while thinking of the five-hundred-buck trailer he had lived in with Berry before escaping to Canada.
The phone rang and it was Nora. She was sending a cab for B.D. because she had to be at work in an hour or so. Berry was fine and playing with the terriers. A letter had come from someone named Gretchen.
While B.D. dressed he thought how dramatic life had become. He had never ridden in a cab and there was a letter from his beloved Gretchen whom he hadn’t heard from since Christmas. He dressed hastily still feeling spongy from the drugs, the railroad spike in his bladder having become a thumbtack. While waiting at the door Eats Horses told him to get packed up as they would be leaving in a few days and B.D. replied that since they owned practically nothing he could pack in minutes.
It was a fine glittery late morning with a specific warmth in the sun not felt since the autumn before. In the cab B.D. had a rare sense of prosperity sniffing the air which had that new-car smell. The driver was from far-off India and was nearly as small as Nora. They didn’t understand each other but that was fine. The driver pointed up through the windshield and said, “Sun,” and B.D. said, “You got that right.”
Up in the fourth-floor room Nora was kneeling sideways on a kitchen chair, her body halfway out the window, watching Berry far below leading the terriers around with grocery string for leashes. B.D. couldn’t help but make contact with Nora’s jutting butt which she wiggled a bit.
“I feel bad about snapping your weenie so go ahead if you wish. I have a boyfriend so I’ll pretend it’s an out-of-body experience.”
He felt like the luckiest man in the world as he lifted her skirt. Her rump was so pretty his skin tingled. There was a song he should be singing but he couldn’t think of what one. He pulled down her delicate panties and planted a big wet kiss on target and then stood remembering that in his narcotic haze early in the morning Nora had drawn a small vial of blood while Dr. Krider watched.
“Why?” he had asked.
“To check your PSA, your prostate.”
“You don’t have one,” he’d said, a little smug in this rare piece of knowledge.
“I’ve got other stuff,” she’d laughed.
“I’m aware of that,” he had said dreamily.
B.D. liked this kind of confab, this banter or repartee, a word he didn’t know, because it meant the world was going along okay. Now he began to do his job admirably, staring down at the sacred mystery and beauty of female physiognomy, trying to divert his enthusiasm so he wouldn’t come too quickly. His mind started singing a song they sang in fourth grade, “A Spanish cavalier stood in his retreat and on his guitar played a tune, dear.” The kids sang this loudly though the meaning of “Spanish cavalier” was in question. Nora began to furiously rotate her butt counterclockwise and that was that. B.D. was in no way prepared for the pain caused by his urethra so abraded by the kidney stone. He yowled and fell backward on his ass, the passage of the sperm raising the image of the hot liquid lead Grandpa poured into molds to make fishing sinkers.
“I could have told you the last part wouldn’t be fun but I was looking out for number one,” Nora said, looking down at him with a merry smile.
“I forgive you,” he said, jumping up at hearing Berry climb the stairs. He recalled a magazine article in the office of his ex-lover the dentist, Dr. Brenda Schwartz, that said, “No gain without pain.” “I just pray we get another chance.”
“This was a one-shot deal, kiddo.” Nora let Berry in the door and embraced her, then left.
The blues descended lower than his sore dick with Nora’s departure. Never in his life had he been attracted to a small woman and the idea that it was a “one-shot deal” left him bereft. He was nearly irritable with Berry which was unthinkable. When she had nothing else to do she would jump straight up and down in place and in the year this habit had begun she had acquired the ability to jump astoundingly high. “Too bad she’ll never make a living out of her jumping and birdcalls,” Uncle Delmore had said.
B.D. took a large package of pork steak from the mini-fridge and decided to cook it all in his outsized electric fry pan. Once the pork began to brown he opened Gretchen’s letter with a bit of dread. Delmore maintained that no one in the United States complained as much as those who’d graduated from college and that sure was true of Gretchen. Despite her beauty and good job as a social worker she was often lower than a snake’s ass, B.D. thought. Once a week she’d drive all the seventy miles up to Marquette just like Brenda the dentist to see a psychoanalyst. Brenda went for what she called her “eating disorder” and she had wept hysterically when B.D. had said, “You’re fine, you just eat too much.” Gretchen on the other hand was lithe and beautiful but beginning with her Christmas letter she’d said she was discovering in therapy that she was sexless and it was driving her batty. After college she had discarded men as “horrid” and B.D. remembered poignantly her nitwittish young woman friend who had discarded Gretchen. Once when he and Gretchen had had a couple of drinks in her kitchen he had asked about the mechanics of Sapphic lovemaking and she only said, “You’re disgusting.” Now in her early thirties Gretchen was thinking about having a baby and was seriously considering B.D. as a sperm donor. He was proud as a peacock but couldn’t understand why she would refuse him the pleasure of slipping it in for a minute rather than an artificial method.
While chopping a head of garlic to add to the pork steak, B.D. meditated on the letter. Gretchen’s analyst had said that her sexless nature was “rare but not unheard of.” Once when they had taken Berry swimming Gretchen had fallen asleep on her huge flowery beach towel and B.D. had slowly studied her body from the vantage point of an inch distance trying to memorize it for recall on cold winter nights. She had awakened and looked down under her sunglasses and thought he was on the verge of probing her pubis with his nose.
“What are you doing?” she’d shrieked.
“I’m memorizing your body for cold winter nights. Turn over because I’m missing the butt side.”
“You asshole,” she’d said, raising her foot and pushing him away. Her soft warm insole against his neck was one of his most cherished memories.
Berry nudged him to remind him not to burn the garlic. She used to like burned garlic but now she wanted it softened. They ate the entire pan of pork steak with a loaf of the French bread he bought daily from a bakery down the street, the likes of which was unavailable in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The bread was so delicious it mystified him. They were always passing stupid laws, why not make it a law that this sort of bread be available everywhere in America?
B.D. began to doze in his chair from his long uncomfortable night and full stomach. Berry was making a variety of birdsongs and he knew she was begging for an afternoon walk. She also made a couple of guttural mutters, a struggle for the “b” consonant that might mean she was on the verge of saying “bird” after nearly four months of speech therapy. Berry loved the teacher which led B.D. to the obvious fact that Berry at age ten needed a mother and the sadder fact that her own birth mother would be in prison a couple more years for, among other things, biting a thumb off a cop when a group of malcontents had raided an archaeological site. The therapist had pointed out that Berry hadn’t felt an urgency toward speech since B.D. was basically her only current human reality and they communicated perfectly well. B.D. had nervously confessed that he had whisked Berry out of Michigan rather than subject her to a state school and the therapist had said Berry would still need “socialization” with kids her own age in some community. B.D. had thought of moving her over to the Sault Sainte Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians rez near Sault Sainte Marie but he was persona non grata in the Soo area for reasons of past misdemeanors.
He dozed for a few minutes while she brushed his hair and brought him his coat, and then they headed out for the Lower Don Parkland. Outside, B.D. wasn’t sure of reality because the long night of pain and narcotics made the world uncommonly glittery and vivid. There was also a brisk southwest wind and suddenly the temperature was in the low seventies. It was Saturday afternoon and the streets were full of nearly frantic walkers trying to shake off the lint and cobwebs of a long winter. Younger people, say under twenty, were moving into dance steps as they walked and kids were jumping up and down a bit envious of Berry’s jumping power. It all reminded B.D. in his floating body of those musical comedies from the forties that Uncle Delmore loved on television. Delmore’s highest admiration was saved for Fred Astaire. He would say, “Just think if Fred had learned Indian dance steps and showed up at the Escanaba Powwow!” B.D. admitted it would be quite a show. Delmore also loved Gene Kelly who could run up a wall, do a flip, and land on his feet. It would be fun to do that in a tavern, B.D. thought when he saw the movie.
When they reached the area Berry ran up the gully to their snow cave. B.D. followed slowly noting that the snow and ice had collapsed part of the cave and if he had been in there with Deidre when it happened they might have been suffocated or, more likely, he would have pulled an Incredible Hulk move and burst upward through the snow and ice saving his true love. Only she wasn’t much of a true love. She and her turd husband were going to a place called Cancún to renew their vows. At least Nora, who had also removed herself from the list of possibles, wouldn’t die if she touched a peanut butter sandwich. Nora had said she was a gymnast in high school and could move her butt like a paint mixer in a hardware store.
B.D. sat on a big rock while Berry called in groups of crows, not a difficult thing to learn to do as the Corvidae are curious about why humans might wish to talk to them. What’s the motive? they wonder. Soon enough, though, Berry had attracted a massive number of crows and a group of bird-watchers, those cranky coup counters known as twitchers to the Brits and some Canadians, made their way up the gully and scared the birds away. Birds have finely honed memories for people and they were familiar with Berry from the dozens of trips into this part of the Lower Don Parkland. Berry was irked and crawled into what was left of the cave.
As B.D. dozed in the sun his half-dream thoughts turned to Deidre’s heat source. A thousand Deidres making love in a gymnasium would melt candles. He opened his eyes to the departing birds not knowing that their raucous cries were his Canadian swan song. In his view far too much had been happening and he craved the nothingness of the Upper Peninsula, a feeling he shared with the ancient Chinese that the best life was an uneventful one.
They walked. And walked and walked. Because of his tough night B.D.’s feet were marshmallows which nonetheless dragged him along. Berry teased the bird-watchers along the paths by hiding in thickets and making the calls of dozens of northern songbirds that had not yet arrived from their winter journey south. A man with thousand-dollar binoculars told B.D. that Berry could be a “valuable resource” and B.D. agreed, lost in his diffuse homesickness for brook trout creeks and the glories of snowmelt time when the forest rivers raged along overflowing their banks, and bear fed happily on the frozen carcasses of deer that had died of starvation, and icebergs bobbed merrily in Lake Superior on huge waves often carrying ravens picking in the ice for entombed fish. On this afternoon Toronto seemed vividly beautiful, a characteristic in the perceptions of those who had endured extreme pain and survived it. The world, simply enough, became as beautiful as it does to many children waking on a summer morning.
By late afternoon Berry had shown no signs of tiring while B.D. was barely shuffling along. He saw a young man taking a Tums and asked for one.
“My fried pork lunch is backing up on me,” B.D. said, explaining himself.
“I had pizza with too many red pepper flakes,” the young man said in a strange accent. They spoke for a few moments and it turned out that he was a country boy from near Sligo in Ireland. B.D. had been amazed by how many of the foreign-born he had met in Toronto and had often wished he had recorded the nationalities in his memory book which, of course, he didn’t own. Geography had been his best subject in high school but he had found to his dismay in Toronto that someone had changed many of the names of countries in Africa after they gained their independence.
He was asleep on his feet by the time they reached Yitz’s for supper. He settled for a bowl of beef borscht while Berry had three orders of herring and a serving of French fries which she ate at a back table with the children of a couple of waitresses who were kind to her. B.D. in his semi–dream state was thinking that it was only ten days from trout opener in Michigan which seemed so fatally far away. The first week of the season he often visited a daffy hermit north of Shingleton who was a fine angler but had some peculiar ideas. One of the theories the hermit mourned over was that there was a hidden planet in our solar system that contained an even million species of birds but we would never be allowed to visit them because of our bad behavior as earthlings. The hermit painted watercolors of these birds and one that B.D. especially liked was a huge purple bird with an orange beak that had three sets of wings. Who was to say it didn’t exist? B.D. had never cared for the naysayers of the world of which there were far too many.
They took a cab home after they proved to the driver that B.D. had the estimated ten-buck fare. Berry was frightened of the driver who was angry over the war in Iraq and decidedly anti-U.S. B.D. was helpless to say anything but “It’s not my fault.”
B.D. fell asleep in his clothes while Berry danced for an hour or so to country music which she did every evening. He drifted off to Patsy Cline singing “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.” It was a full seven hours but seemed only moments when there was an alarming knock on the door, startling because it was the first time there was a knock at the door in their five months of residence. B.D. heard Nora’s voice and his heart took flight as he turned on the lamp. She had obviously returned for more of the same and in his pleasant drowsing head he had a vision of her delightful paint shaker doing its sacred job. But no, when Berry opened the door it was not only Nora but Charles Eats Horses and a sturdy Indian woman in her fifties who wore a business suit and was introduced as the Director.
“We move out at dawn,” said Eats Horses. “I heard that line in a movie once and always liked it.” Eats Horses was wearing a leather jacket with beaded lightning bolts and looked ominous. Berry who was wary of strangers went to him and took his hand. He picked her up. “We’re going home.”
Nora and the Director helped them in their hasty packing. B.D. was miffed when they said there wasn’t room for his big, used electric fry pan which had set him back five bucks. The Director also shook her head no when he tried to put the last remaining beer from the fridge in his jacket saying that no alcohol was allowed on the “tour bus.” B.D. was confused and picked up Gretchen’s letter and sniffed it for signs of life feeling an ever more insistent tug of homesickness. Nighttime wasn’t his time for clear thinking. In troubled times B.D. tended to cut way back on alcohol to avoid feeding the fire of chaos but at the moment he felt the need for a double whiskey because Nora was sniffling at the door and bounteous tears were falling.
“You poor redskins. I love you.”
“I can’t be more than half. I’m just a mongrel,” B.D. said, embarrassed.
“My great-grandmother was married to a Jewish peddler in Rapid City in 1912. There aren’t hardly any Lakotas with a streak of Jew,” Eats Horses joked.
“I’m a mean-minded, ass-whipping pureblood,” the Director said, embracing Nora.
It took only minutes to arrive at the arena parking lot a dozen blocks away. B.D. was irritated because the Director beat him to the front seat where he had fully intended to feign sleep and let his head fall onto Nora’s lap.
The tour bus was an immense affair with THUNDERSKINS painted in large red letters on the side surrounded by yellow lightning bolts, all on the black metal skin of the bus which was lit up like Times Square and ready to go. The Director explained that the Thunderskins was a Lakota rock-and-roll group with only two more stops on a month-and-a-half tour, one in Thunder Bay, on the north shore of Lake Superior, and the last in Winnipeg, after which they would head south to Rapid City and Pine Ridge to drop everyone off, “everyone” being the usual assortment of roadies and soundmen, both skins and whites who were now outside drinking from pints and perhaps dragging at joints before entering the bus where the Director manned the door like a guard dog. The four stars of the band would fly on a plane to Thunder Bay and the Director explained to B.D. that the plane wouldn’t work for him and Berry and Eats Horses because of the tight security at all airports. B.D. noticed that the small crowd of employees all nodded to Eats Horses and then averted their eyes.
“They think I might be a wicasa wakan but I’m not,” Eats Horses whispered to B.D. who was even more confused not knowing that wicasa wakan meant medicine man, often a somewhat frightening person like a brujo in Mexico.
Eats Horses took over the door frisking while the Director showed B.D. and Berry to a small compartment at the back of the bus across the aisle from her own. There were two cots, an easy chair, a miniature toilet, and a window looking into the night. Before B.D. fell back to sleep after a cheese sandwich and two cups of strong coffee he wondered how so obvious a bus was going to smuggle himself and Berry back into the United States. He was diverted by seeing Nora drive away and how when they’d kissed good-bye she had rudely pushed his hand off her ass when only yesterday at high noon she had allowed him to grip her hip bones like a vise. Berry was sitting on her cot looking frightened and B.D. held her hand but the Director came back and got Berry saying she needed some mothering. B.D. fell asleep to the wheezing of the big diesel engine beneath him as the bus moved north on Highway 400 toward the landscape he called home, dense forests of pine, hemlock, tamarack, and aspen surrounding great swamps and small lakes that had wonderful fringes of reeds and lily pads. There were creeks, beaver ponds, and small rivers where B.D. would always find complete solace in trout fishing. He was observant of the multiple torments people seemed to have daily and felt lucky that he could resolve his own problems with a couple of beers and a half dozen hours of trout fishing and if a female crossed his path whether fat or thin, older or younger, it was a testament that heaven was on earth rather than somewhere up in the remote and hostile sky.
B.D. had a head-and-chest cold, an infirmity he only experienced every five years or so and which he blamed on his kidney stone exhaustion. He slept most of the day and a half it took to reach Thunder Bay, waking now and then to study the passing Lake Superior Provincial Park south of Wawa and the Pukaskwa National Park farther north along the lake. There were an unimaginable number of creeks descending from the deep green forested hills down to Lake Superior which tingled his skin despite the irritation of coughing and blowing his nose. He felt much better the second morning when they had stopped at a bar and restaurant and with several of the crew had drunk his meal in the form of three double whiskeys with beer chasers, a sure-fire cold remedy. Two of the Lakota crew members not realizing that B.D. was local to the other side of Lake Superior warned him that they were in “enemy territory,” the land of the Ojibway, the dreaded Anishinabe who had driven the Sioux out of the northern Midwest.
B.D. had never been more than vaguely aware of rock and roll and was ill-prepared for the spectacle that would meet him in Thunder Bay. He knew it mostly as the music heard in bars favored by young people in Escanaba and Marquette but then he had never owned a record player in its varied forms and had certainly never fed a jukebox with any of his sparse beer money. He couldn’t recall understanding a single lyric of this music except “You can’t always get what you want” which he viewed as the dominant fact of life. He was back asleep from his liquid lunch when the tour bus pulled into the arena parking lot. He awakened to an oceanic roar and screech that reminded him of a ninety-knot storm on Lake Superior hitting the village of Grand Marais. In the bright afternoon light out of the window thousands of young people, mostly girls, were jumping straight up and down in the manner of Berry and screaming, “Thunderskins, Thunderskins, Thunderskins!” Within minutes of leaving the bus it occurred to him that he should have taken up a musical instrument, say a guitar, when he was young and learned how to sing. The Director had put a small laminated card around his neck reading “Backstage Crew” and the frantic girls stared at him like kids looking at a gorgeous ice cream cone on a hot day. He felt a little embarrassed, actually unpleasant at this sense of power, quite uncomfortable over the way he was encircled by the most attractive females looking at him imploringly. He had always had more than a touch of claustrophobia and recalled his panic at nineteen when he had been caught up in a big Labor Day parade in Chicago and had run for it a few blocks down to Lake Michigan where he could breathe freely. When looking at the Tribune the next day he had figured out that there were many more people involved in the parade than lived in the entirety of the Upper Peninsula. Now it occurred to him that one girl was enough but thousands screaming like banshees made you crave a thicket.
“Hey, B.D., they just want a fucking backstage pass,” one of the Lakota crew yelled at him, noting his puzzlement.
B.D. made himself busy helping the crew unload the sound equipment, then when he found he was getting in the way drifted off toward the waterfront to get back in touch with Lake Superior which would likely calm his rattled brain. He was pleased to find Charles Eats Horses down near a pier sitting on a park bench.
“This water reminds me of the sea of grass in the Sand Hills of Nebraska south of Pine Ridge.”
“If I had a good boat I could head straight south to the Keweenaw Peninsula and be fairly close to home but then I don’t have a good boat and storms come up real sudden.”
Eats Horses explained to him that Berry would be staying in a nice hotel with the Director who had to watch the rock stars carefully. One of them was her son and he was crazy as a weasel in heat. B.D. felt mildly jealous about Berry but since he had grown up without a mother himself he figured Berry needed the company of a female. Looking out over the water toward his homeland he felt his homesickness become as palpable as a lump of coal in his throat.