Free Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison Page B

janitor’s closet and when Dad came home from work at the Burketts’ and I wasn’t there he went to the school. The principal was still in his office and when he found me in the janitor’s closet he wasangry at the teacher but nothing came of it except she was nicer after the incident. I was embarrassed because I’d been in there about five hours and had peed my pants. Melvin played an old-fashioned Halloween trick on this teacher where you put a paper sack full of dog shit on the porch, light it on fire, ring the doorbell, and run for it. The teacher came out and stomped the little fire getting her shoe covered with dog shit. I suppose it’s not too funny but Melvin wanted vengeance on this teacher. Melvin had a bad end on the Seney stretch, which is fifty miles of straight highway between Seney and Shingleton. Melvin quit high school when I ran off with Cynthia. He became a pretty good mechanic and drove in demolition derbies, where they get about thirty old cars ramming into each other to see who lasts. They draw pretty big crowds though I didn’t like them because of the noise. Melvin was liquored up and drove his hot Pontiac Trans Am about a hundred miles an hour down the Seney stretch with the state police giving chase. They said Melvin swerved to miss a deer and rolled the car about a dozen times including end over end near the Driggs River turnoff.
    So K drove me up to Baraga last August so I could kick Floyd to death like he did to my puppy. Nothing about the day was what I expected. First of all it was real hot with a south wind and I had imagined killing Floyd on a cool day. We stopped at a gas station and convenience store outside of Baraga for directions and K bought a twelve-pack of beer saying that Floyd might want it as a last meal. We drove down this gravel road a few miles with my anger rising so that the edges of my sight were blurred. Floyd’s place wasDepression brick, that fake brick made out of tar paper, the whole house tilted a bit to the south from a weak foundation and north winds. There was what we call a car garden with a half dozen old cars and pickups sitting in a wild raspberry patch. Floyd was sitting on the front porch next to a big electric fan with an orange extension cord coming out of the house window. Three old, fat dogs got up and barked once when we pulled up and then the dogs lay back down near Floyd’s wheelchair. Floyd yelled out, “Donny Injun” and started laughing as if this was a social visit. There were no steps up to the porch but a sheet of plywood so he could get his motorized wheelchair up and down. K sat down on a rickety porch swing and petted the old dogs. He put the twelve-pack on the table, on which there was a big package of sweet rolls and bottles of Floyd’s medications. You couldn’t imagine a man my age in worse disrepair than Floyd. He had a bad case of the bloat and I guessed him to be well over three hundred. He had so much fat around his neck that you couldn’t have strangled him. I was leaning against a porch post because I was feeling dizzy. He said he’d heard through a cousin in Marquette that I was sick and was sorry about it. I was losing my anger but said in a rush that I had come to kill him and he laughed and said, “Why bother?” I had to move because the fan was blowing my way and Floyd smelled bad. He drank three of the beers in no time at all. He talked baby talk to the dogs and showed us how they would all roll over in unison after which he gave them each a piece of sweet roll. Floyd leaned over and turned off a country music station so we could hear a group of sandhill cranes squawking in a field full of big stumps to the west ofthe house. I couldn’t collect my thoughts. Floyd opened his fourth beer and said he was sorry about the puppy and that dogs were his favorite things. The county welfare people wanted him to move down to the VA hospital in Iron Mountain but he