The Farmer's Daughter (13 page)

“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 surefire 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.

Part II

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.