Dawn in Thunder Bay. The two A.M. announced departure of the tour bus was delayed by a snowstorm but by dawn the wind had shifted to the south and the snow turned into an eerie thunderstorm so that Brown Dog peeking out the bus window was startled by a lightning strike glowing off white drifts in the parking lot. He had a somewhat less than terminal hangover and could easily see the dangers of life without the immediate responsibility of looking after Berry. It was quite literally a “blast from the past” what with B.D. not having had a hangover in his five months in Canada, certainly the longest period since age fourteen when he and David Four Feet had swiped a case of Mogen David wine from a truck being unloaded in an alley behind a supermarket in Escanaba. The aftermath had been a prolonged puke-a-thon in the secret hut they had built beside a creek outside of town.
B.D. lay there in his bus compartment watching the rain that had begun to lift so that he could see far out into Lake Superior to the water beyond the shelf ice. He diverted himself from the memory of last night’s mud bath by pondering the soul of water. He had meant for a couple of years to enter a public library and look up “water” in an encyclopedia but doubted that any information would include the mysteries of water that he so highly valued. Life could kick you in the ass brutally hard and a day spent fishing a creek or a river and you forgot the kick. Now, however, with no fishing in sight he could vividly remember the wonderful whitefish sandwich in the bar, and then meeting the two girls in their late teens who had spotted his “Backstage Crew” badge. The concert was sold out and they had no tickets. He was sitting there with a Lakota nicknamed Turnip who thought the girls “skaggy” but B.D.’s mouth was watering though one of the girls was a tad chubby and one very thin. B.D. thought that if you put the two together the weight issue averaged out. Playing the big shot he got them in a side door of the concert which was far too loud for him to endure and the flashing lights were grotesque. Berry was up on stage jumping straight up and down batting at a tambourine and looking very happy. The girls jotted down their address and phone number and said they’d see B.D. at their apartment after the concert. He left feeling smug about his worldliness. Back at the bar after having more drinks and playing pool with Turnip, who looked a bit like a turnip, he saw that the streets were filling up with the concertgoers so it was time to make a move. Unfortunately after walking around in the snowstorm and stopping at another tavern B.D. gave the slip of paper to a bartender who said there was no Violet Street in Thunder Bay and what’s more the phone number only had six digits. Turnip thought this very funny while B.D. was morose.
“I bet they’re backstage with the stars. We could check it out. Those guys get more ass than a public toilet seat,” Turnip said.
B.D. waded through the snow to his lonely bed with the honest thought that women in general were as devious as he was.
When they reached Winnipeg early the next afternoon he was having an upsetting discussion with the Director about Berry and couldn’t quite separate the conference from a wild series of dreams he had just had during a nap. He had confused the roar of the bus engine with that of a female bear he used to feed his extra fish when he was reroofing a deer cabin. He had cut twenty-two cords of hardwood to get through the winter and when April came and the bear emerged from hibernation she was right back there near the kitchen window howling for food. Tim, a commercial fisherman, had given him a twenty-pound lake trout no one had wanted so he cut off a three-pound slab for dinner and tossed the rest to the bear who ate it in a trice then took a long nap in the patch of sunlight out by the pump house. One night when he heard a wolf howling down in the river delta the bear had roared back. She was simply the most pissed-off bear he had ever come across so he named her Gretchen.
“What are you going to do when Berry hits puberty in the next year or two?” the Director asked.
“The court appointed me to look after her,” he answered irrelevantly. He was still caught up in the dream where he was down on the edge of the forest on the Kingston Plains and he and Berry were chasing two coyote pups who dove down into their dens under a white pine stump and Berry suddenly became as little as the pups and followed them which was impossible.
“What are you going to do when she reaches puberty?” the Director persisted. “I talked to your uncle Delmore on my cell and he’s obviously senile. He said he contacted Guam on his ham radio. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I talked to your friend the social worker Gretchen. She lives twenty miles away in Escanaba and only sees you two on weekends if then.”
“Berry would have died at the school. It’s all cement around there.” B.D. was becoming irritated with the Director and wished he knew how to retreat to his dream state where when Berry came back out of the coyote den they had driven to his favorite cabin and fried up a skillet of venison.
“What I’m saying is that you got your head up your ass. Time moves on. Berry is going to be nicely shaped. What are you going to do when boys and men come after her for sex?”
“Kick their asses real good.” B.D. felt a surge of anger that accompanied the beginning of a headache. The Director reminded him of an interrogation with the school principal he and David Four Feet had undergone in the seventh grade when they had thrown chunks of foul-smelling Limburger cheese into the fan attached to the oil furnace in the school basement. All of the girls in the school had run screeching into the street while the boys had merely walked out to show that they were manly enough to handle a truly bad smell.
“Well, I have a friend in Rapid City who runs a tribal program for kids with fetal alcohol syndrome and when we get there she’s going to look at Berry.”
They were both diverted by the bus pulling into the arena parking lot in Winnipeg. There were even more hysterical fans than there had been in Thunder Bay. It was a mystery to B.D. because this horde of fans must know that the stars were arriving by plane. It reminded him from way back when, of a geek kid in the eighth grade who claimed that his cousin in California had seen the Disney star Annette Funicello in the nude. Boys would gather around the geek to hear the story over and over. This was about as close as anyone in Escanaba was ever going to get to the exciting life of show business. B.D. figured that to these thousands of fans the Thunderskins bus without the stars was better than nothing.
In truth he found the noise of the fans repellent. The only loud sound he liked was a storm on Lake Superior when monster waves would come crashing over the pier in Grand Marais or Marquette. He also liked the sounds of crickets and birds, and a hard rain in the forest in the summer with the wind blowing through billions of leaves.
The Director stood up to leave and B.D. shook her hand hoping that she would believe his heart was in the right place in regard to Berry. She gave him a hug and he held her as tightly as possible. A spontaneous hug from a woman always filled him with the immediate promise of life. Sure enough his pecker began to rise and she pushed him away laughing.
“I’m fifty-nine and it’s been quite a while since anyone got a hard-on over me.”
“My friendship is there for the taking.” B.D. wanted to say something proper far from the usual “Let’s fuck.” In truth she was more than ample and most would think her dumpy but he craved to get at her big smooth butt. She escaped all atwitter and he turned to see female fans staring in the window and he thought if the window would only open he could pop it in that brunette’s chops making sure to avoid her big droopy nose ring.
The ride through western Manitoba into eastern Saskatchewan had increased his homesickness to a quiet frenzy. Creeks, rivers, and lakes were everywhere in the forested landscapes. To a lifelong fisherman even a large mud puddle presents a remote possibility and the water he saw was overwhelming. Once when the bus slowed for a logging truck hauling pulp to make paper he saw an American redstart in a white pine, a wildly colored bird that he often saw near his favorite stretch of the Middle Branch of the Escanaba near Gwinn and seeing the bird enabled him to smell the river and the forest in that area which tingled his skin.
In Winnipeg the Director checked B.D. and Berry into a room that adjoined her own in a fancy hotel which added a different kind of tingle as B.D. assumed that at some point he might be able to pull off a quick one with the Director. He had hoped to take Berry to the zoo but by the time they got settled in and had a room service bite it was midafternoon and Berry and the Director had to go to a rehearsal. This was the last stop on the Thunderskins’ tour and they wanted to go out in a firestorm at the huge sold-out arena. Berry beat on her tambourine every waking hour but B.D. found it oddly pleasant since she did it so well which made him wonder about the intricacy of the rhythms she heard in her limited brain. Once in high school he had driven with a couple of pureblood friends way up to a powwow in Baraga and was amazed at how good it felt to dance for hours and hours, a state of being carried away that reminded him of the pleasure of being half-drunk rather than fully drunk.
While the Director and Berry were getting ready two of the stars dropped by but as with his other brief encounters their eyes passed over him as if he didn’t exist. B.D. figured this was what happened when you were around far too many people like when he had gone to Chicago at nineteen or more recently in Toronto. The only way people got along was by largely ignoring each other, a far cry from the Upper Peninsula where if you avoided the downtowns of Escanaba and Marquette you were never surrounded by people and on the rare occasion he saw another human in the backcountry he always hid until they passed from sight.
At present he was sick to death of people and decided to stay as far as possible from the music folks. He set off on a long walk mostly enjoying the vast railroad yards because there were no high buildings around to block out the late-afternoon sun though there was the troubling question of who could keep track of so many trains? He was somewhat disappointed that the fabled Red River wasn’t red and when headed back to the hotel he saw in the distance Charles Eats Horses enter a building he followed. It turned out to be an art museum with a large display of Inuit work. He was pleased with himself that he remembered that the Inuits lived up in the Arctic and were what most people thought were Eskimos. He noticed that when Eats Horses passed an attendant several rooms ahead she averted her eyes. She was, however, friendly to him and he took her short, round figure to be Inuit.
“Were you born in an igloo?” he asked.
“Were you born in a tepee?” she joked. Her smile was so glowing he felt the usual tremor. He wanted to tell her something interesting but she turned away to explain some whalebone and walrus-tusk carvings to some elegant old ladies. The art was so striking to B.D. that he felt hollow in his head and chest and he did not hear Eats Horses walk up behind him.
“I just knew you were an art lover,” Eats Horses said, half seriously.
“I heard it’s all in the wrist,” B.D. answered, a little embarrassed at the strength of his emotions.
Eats Horses put a heavy hand on B.D.’s shoulder. “I want you to listen carefully about Berry. I know kids like her and they don’t turn out well.”
“Yes, sir. All I know is that she has to walk in the woods every day.” He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly that he felt a little dizzy and when he opened them to regain his balance Eats Horses was gone. B.D. doubted that Eats Horses was the ex-cop and house painter he said he was. Once over near Iron Mountain back near a beaver dam in the woods B.D. had run into this Crane Clan Midewiwin guy that he had seen years before at the Baraga powwow. It was generally thought that this man flew around at night and ate whole raw fish. The man was pleasant enough but when he reached under a submerged stump and caught a brook trout with a single hand B.D. had left the area.
On the walk back to the hotel he rejected the idea of the five double whiskeys he felt a need for and instead stopped at a diner for a fried T-bone. The Director had passed on a gift envelope from Dr. Krider with five hundred bucks in twenties which B.D. figured was the third-highest amount of money he had ever possessed. If you have five hundred bucks a ten-dollar fried T-bone seems less of a luxury. The meat was only fair but the potatoes were pretty good with ketchup. The waitress was a sullen, bony young woman who never met his eyes. It seemed to him that young women were getting more sullen every year for undisclosed reasons, all the more cause to keep the Director in mind as a possible target if Berry went to sleep. Grandpa had the theory that you should never go after a female with a bad father because they’re always pissed off. However mediocre the meal was B.D. figured it was better than the catered backstage buffet before the concert which, though it was free, featured food he didn’t recognize. Once Gretchen had served him a tofu burger that tasted like the algae that formed pond scum. Gretchen had mentioned dozens of times how awful her father was and also that an older cousin had tinkered with her pussy when she was eleven. There seemed to be no end to the problems that could arise in life. When he was eleven there was a neighbor girl who would show you her butt for a nickel but if you tried to touch it she’d smack the shit out of you. He’d heard that now she was a school principal up in Houghton.
Back in the hotel room he recognized that the quivery feeling was due to the idea that if things went well he would be back in the United States of America, more exactly North Dakota, in less than eighteen hours. He opened the minibar where he’d seen the Director take out cans of orange juice for herself and Berry. This was the first minibar of his life and he was amazed at the rack of top-shelf shooters on display. He went “Eeny meeny miney moe” and took out a small bottle of Mexican tequila which went down easy as pie. He snooped in the Director’s room and saw a rather large pair of undies she had washed out and hung up to dry on a towel rack. He felt a twinge of lust which he knew couldn’t be resolved. He sat down with the clicker and shooters of Johnnie Walker and Absolut vodka noting a sign on the television that first-run and adult movies were available at twelve dollars a crack which seemed outrageously expensive but then when would he ever stay in a fancy hotel again? Even the glasses were glass rather than cellophane-wrapped plastic. He was never allowed to touch the clicker for Uncle Delmore’s satellite television so he was very wary about its operation and it took some time to get it working. It was easy to reject Teenage Sluts on the Loose in Hollywood as porn made him feel silly and he had never regarded sex as a spectator sport. You simply had to be there with the raw meat on the floor as they used to say. The slightest peek up Gretchen’s summer skirt would set him churning but neither film nor the Playmate of the Month did the job. Unfortunately he selected a film called Pan’s Labyrinth because of the unknowable mystery of the title. It took a total of ten shooters to get through the film and he was frequently either frightened or in tears. He assumed that the film was a true story and he thought of the little girl as Berry and he was the satyr trying to help her get through life. By the time the film ended he was drunk with a tear-wet face. If this could happen in the world it was no wonder that he craved to live in a cabin back in the woods. He had done poorly in world history in high school but was aware of the twentieth century as a worldwide charnel house. His teacher who was a Democrat from the working-class east side of Escanaba had told the students that there were at least ten million Indians when we got off the boat and only three hundred thousand left by 1900. Now in the hotel room, however, the fact that this evil Spaniard had murdered the little girl, the Berry equivalent, sent a sob through his system and he finished his last shooter, arranged the bottles in a circle, and fell asleep in his chair.
He awoke at four A.M. to pee and in the bleary toilet mirror he saw that there was a note pinned to his chest. It was from the Director and only said, “Shame on you.” Soon after daylight Berry and the Director were having room service in the other room when he came fully awake and examined his mind for vital signs. Berry came in and kissed his forehead and headed into the bathroom with her armload of rubber snakes which she always played with in the tub. On this morning the two-headed cobra didn’t look good to B.D.
“Are you up for it, Lone Ranger?” the Director asked standing in the doorway of her room.
“Come to think of it I am,” said B.D. squirming slowly out of the easy chair. During even minor league hangovers sudden movements cause sudden pain, the physical equivalent of a blowing fuse.
They had to arrange themselves near a dresser to keep an eye out the nearly closed door of Berry’s bathroom. The Director’s butt was large indeed but as marvelously smooth as B.D. had hoped for. In his not limited experience Indian women had the smoothest butts though this was a Lakota, the ancient enemy of B.D.’s half-Chippewa blood. Let there be peace in the valley he thought. The only drawback was the mirror over the dresser. He certainly didn’t want to see himself what with being the least narcissistic of all modern males. The Director let out a few muffled yelps and he hissed, “Sssh” and then it was over and a sharp pain descended into his noggin from the heavens.
He pulled up his trousers and quickly moved to the room service table for some lukewarm coffee, cold sausage, and sodden toast.
“It’s so like a man to go from fucking to eating in a split second,” the Director giggled, rearranging her clothes.
“What was I supposed to do?” B.D. said with a full mouth.
“You’re supposed to say ‘Thank-you ma’am’ and give me a heartfelt kiss.”
B.D. swallowed a mouthful of food, choked a little, and gave her a passionate heartfelt kiss, dipping her as one does a woman on a dance floor. Lucky for her he was strong.
Shortly after noon the tour bus followed by the equipment semi turned off on a gravel road south of Boissevain. The moves were well planned and the crew unloaded two big ceremonial drums and hoisted them onto the long luggage rack on top of the tour bus. The Director took the tambourine away from Berry and B.D., Berry, and Eats Horses went up the ladder and Eats Horses got under one drum and B.D. and Berry under the other. Two crew members beat tentatively on each drum with Lakota wails and laughter. For some reason Berry responded with the chirping of a cricket until B.D. said no, mourning the effect of the drumbeats on his hangover.
The bus took off hitting the border of the United States near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. The drumbeats softened while the Director talked to the customs agents whom she knew from other crossings there.
“You know my boys are clean. No drugs or alcohol on the bus or they get their asses kicked off.” The customs agents were eating their lunch sandwiches and were quite bored with trying to catch putative terrorists who were unlikely to come their way.
The bus roared off and the drummers beat hard and wailed loudly as they entered the promised land which had been less than wonderful to the Lakota in recent centuries. A dozen miles south in a cottonwood grove the rooftop passengers climbed down the ladder and the Director returned Berry’s tambourine which made her happy. B.D. was a little dizzy and nauseous thinking that seven shooters would have been adequate rather than ten, and slightly disappointed that North Dakota looked identical to Manitoba but it might have been due to the way one hangover resembles another. Nothing helped until he had pork liver and onions and two beers in Rugby which was supposedly the geographical center of North America. Out in the restaurant parking lot he lamely tried to figure out how they’d determined this. He also wondered how he would protect himself from his excesses if Berry went under the Director’s care for a while. The answer was to live so far back in the woods that you only went to the tavern once a week. Maybe twice. When he got back on the bus the Director teased him in a whisper about his short “staying power” then punched him so hard in the arm it went numb. He reflected from experience that you never quite knew if an Indian woman would make love or beat the shit out of you.
At nightfall the tour bus was camped at the site of Wounded Knee. Charles Eats Horses went off and spent the night sitting up wrapped in a blanket. The crew started a fire to cook the steaks the Director had bought along with a case of beer to celebrate the end of the tour. B.D. was mournful that a single case only offered two apiece, scarcely enough to wet your whistle. As much as possible he avoided remembering when he was sixteen and Grandpa had given him a lecture on the dangers of liquor saying that it had killed B.D.’s mom and dad. No more information on them had ever been forthcoming from Grandpa though B.D. had heard that his mom, Grandpa’s daughter, had danced for a while in a strip club in Escanaba. Since Grandpa was mostly Swede and Irish the skin blood had come through his dad who had taken off for Lac du Flambeau. Right now at Wounded Knee he surely didn’t care if he was part Indian or in his private thicket on the edge of the Kingston Plains where he could watch breeding sandhill cranes. Uncle Delmore was always watching horror films on television. Berry liked them but B.D. had an aversion to being frightened. He had peeked in from the kitchen during a werewolf film and decided he would a lot rather be a werecoyote assuming they existed.
He was washing up in his compartment when he heard the Director enter. She looked out the window at Berry and two crew members dancing around the fire.
“I’m going to make that girl into a fancy dancer. She’s real good.”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” B.D. said patting the Director’s ass and hoping to redeem the idea that he had no staying power.
“Back away, dickhead,” she chortled at him and made for the door. “You remind me too much of my husband. He was drunk and the police clocked him at over a hundred miles per hour outside of Chadron before his pickup flipped about twenty times.”
She had left in a virtuous huff and B.D. remembered a conversation when he and Berry and Delmore were eating Sunday dinner at Gretchen’s. Delmore had taken Berry for a ride down to the harbor and B.D. had whimsically asked Gretchen why no woman had ever asked him to marry her.
“You’re a biological question mark,” she had said. “Women in general want some romance but when they look for a mate they most often estimate the man, at least subconsciously, as a provider. You present yourself as a fuckup but the reason you can get laid is that you intensely like women without irony.”
B.D. had reminded himself to look up “subconscious” and “irony” in Delmore’s dictionary. Gretchen had been wearing pale blue fairly tight shorts and when she vigorously mashed potatoes at the stove her butt cheeks jiggled so attractively that B.D. felt tears arising. He had stopped well short of persisting on the marriage issue because Gretchen could be a little cruel. Years before, she had used her authority to thoroughly review his school records and discovered that his intelligence was well above average which made her question him sharply.
“Why live like you do? You’re smart enough to do otherwise.”
“I just slid into it,” he had answered nervously.
“Well, you flunked English literature but you aced geometry.”
“Geometry was real pretty.”
It occurred to him then that she would never understand the deep pleasure of spending a whole day in the company of a creek. If he could make a subsistence living repairing deer-hunting cabins, cutting firewood or pulp why should he do more? He spent the rest of his time wandering in the woods and following creeks to their source. When Gretchen had said that he was frozen in place at age twelve he had reflected that that had been a good year. He had caught his first brook trout over three pounds on a beaver pond north of Rapid River, he owned a little terrier that rode in his bicycle basket and could occasionally catch a flushing grouse, and he had gotten to screw a beered-up sixteen-year-old tourist girl down on the town beach. The accusation of being frozen at age twelve did not seem to be a serious charge. Once when he got winter work at about age twenty as a janitor at a bowling alley he didn’t think these fully employed men at their weekly bowling league were having all that much fun trying to break 200. They mostly had fat asses and when they jumped up and down they didn’t jump high.
Now out the tour bus window it was pleasant to watch Berry and Turnip dancing at top speed. Turnip always looked ungainly but turned out to be a fine dancer. B.D. left the bus and moved hot coals off to the side and arranged the grill face so that it was well balanced on rocks, electing himself as the steak cook. Not so far off in the moonlight he could see Charles Eats Horses sitting in the cemetery with his hands pointed up toward the sky. The Director sat on a lawn chair guarding the beer and B.D. decided to drink his share of two real fast to acquire a modestly good feeling. The meat was real fatty rib steaks, his favorite cut, and the bone made it possible to eat with your hands rather than struggling with plastic knives and forks. Everyone was so tired that they ate fast and went to bed. When he went into the dark to pee B.D. was thrilled to have Turnip pass him a pint of schnapps for a couple of deep swigs. Berry continued to dance in the firelight without drums, banging on her tambourine, until the Director led her off to bed. Up home Berry tended to avoid all strangers but B.D. admitted to himself that she was having a good time with these people. She seemed to love music just like she was enchanted with birds. The Director had said that there were a lot worse things than being mute.
They got an early start in the morning and B.D. was upset when saying good-bye to Charles Eats Horses who was still sitting out in the cemetery but seemed to be in some sort of trance though he hugged Berry. The tour bus stopped in Pine Ridge and dropped off three crew members including a very strong young man named Pork. B.D. had learned that Pork had gotten his name when he had run away to Pierre when he was twelve. He was very hungry and went in to the supermarket to steal a pound of hamburger to eat raw but had grabbed a package of pork sausage by mistake. Ever since then Pork had had an affection for raw pork. He seemed fairly smart and said at one time raw pork could be dangerous but trichinosis was a thing of the past. Out the window in Pine Ridge, which was a dreamy place surrounded by beautiful country, B.D. saw Pork embrace his wife and son and get into a fairly new Chevy pickup.
On the way up toward Rapid City, B.D. sat up front with Turnip who invited him to stay at the condo he had inherited from an aunt who had been a school principal and a successful horse trader. Turnip said the group of condos shared a heated pool and when the weather was warm he would sit by the pool in Vuarnet sunglasses with a handtooled leather briefcase a rich white woman had given him down in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when the band toured there. Pretty girls and women would come up to him at the pool and chat because he looked like a big shot. He would tease his neighbors because the briefcase was full of R. Crumb comic books. He showed one to B.D. who thought it was the best comic book he had ever read.
They stopped at a country gas station for fuel and coffee and in an adjoining field two girls were practicing barrel racing with their quarter horses. B.D. was appalled at the speed at which the horses were running and turned to the Director beside him.
“They could die if they fell off.”
“They don’t,” she said but then she yelled at Berry who vaulted the fence and ran toward the girls who now were taking a break. Berry went past them doing a top-speed figure eight around the barrels and then she stopped by the girls and petted the horses while she cooed like a dove. B.D. told the Director that he didn’t think that Berry had ever been near a horse. They crawled through the fence and made their way to the girls. Berry was rubbing her nose against the nose of one of the horses who seemed to like it.
“She ain’t right in the head,” the girl said to the approaching B.D. and Director.
“That’s true but she’s a sweetheart. How about giving her a ride? She’s never been in the saddle before,” the Director said.
The girl gestured to Berry who leapt on with one flowing move.
“That’s quite a trick,” the girl said leading the horse by the reins then handing the reins to Berry. “I bet she can handle it.”
The horse took off for the far barrel and B.D. covered his face with his hands and peeked through his fingers. Berry was pasted to the saddle and neck of the horse like a decal but when the girl whistled and the horse ran back toward them abruptly stopping Berry slid forward and hung there with her arms around the horse’s neck. She was all aglow and crooning. B.D. reached for her and she dropped into his arms.
“Now she’s both a dancer and a cowgirl. All is not lost,” the Director said.
B.D. paused halfway crawling under the fence watching Berry grab a post and vault over the top wire the same way he used to do when he was young. Way too much had been happening in this life and there under the bottom wire he was suddenly trying to focus.
“How am I supposed to get back home?” he asked almost plaintively.
“Well you can’t fly because the computer at the airport might pick up the Michigan warrant. They might not still be looking for you but we can’t take a chance. The jail in Rapid City is full of drunk Indians. Your uncle Delmore is sending someone out to pick you up. He says you’ll owe him big.”
“He always says that,” B.D. said thinking he’d have to find a good hiding place back home. Delmore had plenty of money but like many old people he was fretful about it. “During the Great Depression I couldn’t afford the hole in a doughnut,” he would say.
B.D. pretty much sat for two full days on a cement park bench on the grounds of the Rapid City hospital. He packed along sardines, cheese, crackers, and Bull Durham. He was rolling his own cigarettes from Bull Durham and though there was a mysterious sign saying “Smoke-Free Zone” he couldn’t imagine anyone would object on these warm windy days of early spring. He was wrong. A security man approached and said he could be arrested which caused a quiver of fear. B.D. played dumb when the security man pointed at the sign ten feet away.
“Not too good,” B.D. said as if trying to parse the sign.
The Director was running Berry through a battery of tests. B.D. had tried to give the Director the five-hundred-dollar gift from Dr. Krider but the Director had refused saying, “You can’t give me all your money. Are you stupid?”
This seemed possible. He hadn’t been able to reach Uncle Delmore or Gretchen on the phone and her answering machine said she would be away for a week. Turnip had dialed the numbers for him on his cell phone and when B.D. worried about the expense Turnip said that he got a deal for three thousand minutes. B.D. wondered how they could possibly keep track of such things at the same time thinking that Delmore rarely answered the phone because bad news always came over the phone. He didn’t watch television news because he said he didn’t need to know all of the bad news in the world in ten minutes. Delmore listened now and then to Canadian news on his big powerful radio because things didn’t seem to be going so bad up that way.
B.D. hung out on the bench in front of the hospital because the medical tests made Berry so unhappy that she cried which she never did normally. She was so sad that when she and the Director came out for a break from the tests she didn’t even make gull cries when she shared sardines with B.D.
“Sardines have gone up from nineteen cents to a dollar in my lifetime,” B.D. reflected. He was remembering his youth when toward the end of the month Grandpa’s pension money ran low and they would eat five tins of sardines and boiled garden potatoes from the root cellar. It was their “dollar meal,” better in the summer with added onions, radishes, and tomatoes from the garden.
“Christianity might be bullshit but I heard a priest say that greed was the Antichrist.” The Director hugged Berry who was trembling.
“Berry’s mom used to throw her naked out in the snow when she peed the bed. Back then Berry was always trembling but she lucked out when her mom got sent to prison.”
“I’d like to slit that cunt’s throat,” the Director said matter-of-factly.
Berry began to cry again when the Director led her back toward the hospital. B.D. wasn’t feeling well having had one too many with Turnip and his anger over Berry’s trials exacerbated his discomfort. He had stayed two nights in a sleazy motel because he hadn’t wanted to stay at the Director’s because she wouldn’t allow alcohol in her home and Turnip’s condo made him too nervous. Turnip had had some young lady neighbors in for drinks in the late afternoon when they got home from work. They were dressed slick and neat and were professional women working in real estate and one was a teacher “looking for something better.” The problem was that B.D. couldn’t get a fix on what they were talking about and Turnip had put on loud rock-and-roll music. They fawned over Turnip but let their eyes pass quickly over B.D. They were technically real pretty but he didn’t feel a true-to-life nut itch over a single one of them. When they entered a tall one name Deedee had approached him.
“What do you do?”
“Cut logs. A little carpentry when I can find it.”
“You Indians are so devil-may-care,” she giggled chugging her Budweiser.
“I’m not a real Indian like Turnip. I’m just a mixed breed like most dogs.” He was tempted to tell he was a wanted man on the run but she had quickly turned away.
Turnip had made them a batch of margaritas and winked at B.D. when he poured most of a bottle of tequila into the shaker. “I’m sending these bitches to the moon pronto. We’re in for some C-minus fun,” he whispered.
B.D. took a couple of gulps of tequila and then when the rest of them went out to see someone’s new leased car he slipped out the back door and headed for the scrungiest side of town where he had a fry bread taco covered with hot sauce. After dinner he bought a pint of McGillicuddy’s schnapps to settle his stomach, then headed back to his motel room where there was a big photo of Mount Rushmore. He tried to imagine Charles Eats Horses pouring a gallon of blood-red paint down along George Washington’s nose. Every movie on cable TV seemed to involve people shooting each other and he wasn’t up to being a witness to malice of any sort. Finally on the National Geo channel he found a documentary on Siberia which seemed a totally wonderful place, the kind of country he’d learn to love in three minutes flat. He sipped out of the 100 proof bottle disliking plastic glasses because years ago one had sprung a leak and left a last drink on his wet lap. There was an improbable surge of homesickness and he made do by reliving a long trek west of Germfask in search of a rumored beaver pond which was actually in a federal wildlife area where it was illegal to fish, the smallest of considerations because on the sparse two-tracks you could hear the rare federal vehicle a half mile away and merely step into the brush. At the beaver pond he hooked what he thought would be the largest brook trout of his life but after a prolonged struggle the fish turned out to be a pike of a half dozen pounds. He would have preferred it to be a brook trout but gracefully accepted its pikedom. It was June and pike are quite tasty from the cool waters of the early season. By the time he got back to the car it was nearly dark, after ten this far north in June. He drove over to near Au Train where an old Indian lady he knew lived far back in the woods in a tar-paper cabin. His grandpa and this woman were sweet on each other and when he was a boy he’d fish a nearby creek while the two had their monthly assignation. When he arrived just before midnight with the pike her cabin was dark and it scared the shit out of him when he heard a growl from a nearby thicket. She was playing a joke on him after she had been out night walking. She cooked up the pike and they ate it with bread, salt, and some elderberry wine she had made the autumn before. She sang along with the country station from Ishpeming and was particularly good at duets with George Jones and Merle Haggard.
The reverie put him in a fine mood though the Siberian program segued to heart surgery on a zoo elephant and he turned off the television not wanting to know if this elephant failed to make it through the operation. The heart was red and huge and its beating was tentative. B.D. recalled that once when Grandpa was telling his World War II stories there was one about a whale seen in the North Pacific that had a heart big enough for a man to sleep in.
He managed his second long day of vigil fairly well. The Weather Channel predicted a storm by evening but the day had a warm breeze from the south. The hardest part was when the Director and Berry came out and Berry closed down and became stonelike. Due to some blood test she wasn’t even allowed to eat the Big Mac with extra onions he had bought her. Berry’s only sign of life was to point straight up at the tiny specks of hawks making their spring migration.
“She’s not looking too good for a normal life,” the Director said.
“I already knew that,” B.D. said, his gorge rising.
“So did I but they have to figure out what’s possible. She won’t ever be able to talk but she’s physically coordinated, strong, and agile.”
“I already knew that.” The anger was a knot in B.D.’s throat so that he couldn’t swallow.
“These are specialists in this infirmity, B.D., so you’ll have to be patient. We’ll be finished by three and then I’m going to take Berry out north of Sturgis toward Bear Butte to see some baby buffalo. You got a big surprise coming about that time.”
A doctor walked by and Berry shoved her head into B.D.’s jacket. He patted her back and her muscles were tight as a drum.
“I don’t want no surprise. I want to head home with my daughter.”
“You can’t. We’re already processing with the state of Michigan for the change of guardianship. Her mother has consented. Eventually the state of Michigan will withdraw the charges against you. Her mother got another five years for biting off a guard’s ear. You know this is best. What would you do when she got pregnant at age twelve by whomever?”
“Likely kill whomever.”
“Then she would have no one. She’s going to live with my cousin’s family north of here. They got cows, horses, and dogs and she’ll go to this special school part-time.”
B.D. began to cry for the first time he could remember. The Director hugged him and dabbed his tears with a good-smelling handkerchief and Berry came alive enough to hold his hand. They left and he quickly finished the bottle of schnapps, reached into his pocket, and rolled a cigarette and lit it. Suddenly the security guard was in front of him.
“I’m going to have to call the police, I warned you.”
“It would be the last number you ever dialed,” B.D. said levelly.
“How come you’re crying?” The security man shrugged, not wanting to get his ass kicked.
“They’re taking my daughter away from me,” B.D. said.
“That’s an awful thing to have happen,” the guard said and walked away.
B.D. saw a black dog out in the parking lot. He whistled and the dog trotted over with its long rabbit ears and ungainly body what with its front rather slender compared to its big back end. B.D. unwrapped Berry’s Big Mac and was amazed when the dog ate the burger in polite bites rather than gulps. The brass collar said that her name was Ethyl, a fine match he thought between name and this peculiar beast. Here Ethyl was out on a stroll and lucked into a burger. The basis of a friendship having been made Ethyl hopped up onto the bench, circled a few times, and nestled in for a snooze. From her somewhat distended teats it was apparent that Ethyl was a mother and B.D. mentally bet that she was good at it as he stroked her long floppy ears. Turnip had said that the Director had raised five kids, the last being a member of the Thunderskins. How could I know how to be a mother when I didn’t even have one myself, he thought. He knew he was better than Berry’s criminal mother Rose but that might be like comparing cat and dog turds. He leaned forward trying to prop his elbows on his knees for a little snooze. There was a chance of falling on his face if he fell asleep but that might be fun compared to the rest of what had been happening. He was not under the illusion that most of us are that he was in control, that he was in the driver’s seat, as they say. And a wide streak of the dour Lutheran ethos of the Great North said that it is always darkest before it gets even darker. His last hope was to get home and have a life that the ancient Confucians thought was the best life, one in which nothing much happened.
He did doze and he did fall over but only scraped one palm on the cement. The Director and Berry came back out for a few minutes and Berry was a tad cheerier, especially with Ethyl to pet.
“Your surprise is getting closer. I just gave directions,” the Director said grabbing Berry’s hand and walking swiftly back toward the hospital. Ethyl tried to follow but there was a shrill whistle from a block away out beyond the parking lot. Ethyl took off toward the whistle and B.D. had the maudlin thought, Now I’ve lost my dog, but then he saw something that made his heart jump. Out in the parking lot a woman looking like Gretchen got out of a car that looked like Gretchen’s. Unable to believe this B.D. swiveled around until he was looking back toward the hospital. His skin prickled.
“B.D., it’s me,” she called out. “I’m here to drive you home.”
It was as if the sun had risen in the middle of a stormy night. He didn’t dare turn around and then a kind of paralysis seeped into his system. She sat down beside him and took his limp hand.
“I know it’s been a hard time for you.”
“You could say that.”
“Everything is for the best. We’ve got to haul ass. It’s Friday afternoon and I have to be to work Monday.”
They all had a good-bye lunch at a plastic picnic table outside a McDonald’s. Gretchen and the Director sipped sodas and ate granola bars while shuffling papers. B.D. and Berry ate with Berry sitting on his lap. She was fairly happy having perceived that she didn’t have to go back to the hospital. B.D. and Gretchen were quite overcome and plans were discussed to come back to South Dakota around the Fourth of July for a visit.
Gretchen drove B.D. to the sleazy motel to pick up his bag and he had this idea that they should rest up because he had already paid for that day and night.
“Just get your bag, you nitwit,” she laughed. She was wearing a blue summer skirt that thrilled him to the core.