Brown Dog: Novellas by Harrison Jim

Author:Harrison, Jim [Harrison, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2013-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

The Summer He Didn’t Die

PART I

What is life that I must get teeth pulled? Brown Dog thought, sitting on a white pine stump beside the muddy creek with a swollen jaw for company. It was late April and trout season would open in two days. Brown Dog was a violator and had already caught two fine messes of brook trout, not in contempt for regulators but because he was hungry for brook trout and so were his Uncle Delmore and his stepchildren, Red and Berry. Despite this Brown Dog put the highest value on the opening of trout season which meant the end of winter, though at his feet near the stump there was still a large patch of snow decorated haphazardly by a sprinkling of deer turds.

Here I sit in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, one hundred eighty pounds of living meat with three separate teeth aching and sending their messages of pulse, throb, and twinge to each other, their secret language of pain, he thought. Brown Dog was not what you call a deep thinker but within the structure of aching teeth mortal thoughts tended to arise in the seconds-long spaces between the dullish and the electric, the surge and slight withdrawal. Sitting there on the stump he blurred his eyes so that in his vision the creek became an immense and writhing brown snake emerging from the deep green of a cedar swamp. Until the autumn before the creek had run clear even after big rains but the bumwads from the County Road Department had done a sloppy job on an upstream road culvert and now the water was the color of an average mud puddle.

Brown Dog knew that teeth were simply teeth and they shouldn’t be allowed to repaint the world with their troublesome colors. When he had gone into Social Services the week before more than curious about finding help for his malady, he was not allowed to immediately see his ally Gretchen but first had to pass the foamy gauntlet of the Social Services director Terence Stuhl who always reminded Brown Dog of the suspicious water of the Escanaba River after it had been sluiced through the local paper mill. Stuhl was more bored than mean-minded and began chuckling the moment he spotted Brown Dog in a mirror on the far wall of his office that reflected anyone entering the lobby of his domain and was stuck there temporarily dealing with the purposeful hostility of the receptionists to whom anyone on any sort of dole was up to no good and must be tweaked into humility. Along with his relentless chuckling Stuhl sucked on a dry pipe sometimes too deeply, whereupon the filter stem would hit his uvula and he would begin choking and then draw on a bottle of expensive water paid for by the taxpayers of Delta County.

Stuhl, however, was far from the biggest asshole Brown Dog had to deal with in life. Stuhl merely drew Brown Dog’s file, really a rap

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