In Thompson’s field, I could relate to Tollund Man.

9

I used to be well acquainted with this bog girl resting silently up in the scrub pines overlooking Lake Michigan from St. Ignace. She’s up there waiting, as is the wont of all of us, to be exhumed, revealed. Her wrists are tied with yellow nylon tow rope. She’s the albino white of subterranean cave dwellers. The wings unfolding from her spine are the petrified remains of her rucksack. She had one of those neat army-issue sacks that matched her fatigue pants and her commando jacket—the same one she said her brother brought back from the war. Her fine blond hair is twirled up into what seems to be an ancient Swabian knot, held secure by a little leather hook and a wooden needle. The serenity of her face reminds one of Joan Baez when she was singing one of her protest songs. The position of her body in relation to the north-south axis, facing the lake, indicates that a drug rite might have transpired. A cheap nickel zodiac symbol (Libra) adorns her neck.

10

Coincidentally, Thompson grew up near the bog girl in Michigan, not far down the road, just above the bridge past rinky-dink tourist traps meant to look like authentic Indian lodges. She was just another trippy barefoot tourist girl up from Chicago, hiking the spur line that cupped Little Traverse Bay, smoking doobies with the townies. She had a worldly, assured bounce to her walk and was the first girl he’d met who had fringe on her bell-bottoms and smoked hash, not grass.

11

My old man would take this hat box down from the closet and remove this skull and hold it out to me and say he was going to do the same thing to my head if I didn’t shape up, Thompson’s saying. He stops for a moment to light his pipe, drawing the big flame down into the bowl. Thompson is versed in the art of maintained pipe smoking, packing the bowl just right and drawing the correct amount of air to keep it lit for an hour. Old man hit the Jap with his bayonet, thrust and twist, as he liked to say. He’d go around the house saying it over and over. Thrust and twist. Thrust and twist. Hand-to-hand on Iwo. Chopped it clean off for trophies. Lots of the men did that. Bleached it, dragged it behind the ship to let the fish pick it clean, packed it up and shipped it home to wife back in the States. Even showed me this photo of a woman and her skull in Life magazine.

For a second I worry. I imagine Thompson decapitating my bog head and carrying it around in a bowling bag like Perseus, appropriating my protective powers.

12

With the sky overhead I conjure a bog dream: my intact genetic material will provide a full history—tooth formation (gnarly); propensity for gallstones; rectal fissures; cancerous skin, liver. They take the stored genetic material and clone me. Elyria Man, thin, wan, with a hankering for stimulants, narcotics, and with a propensity for finding solitude, for thriving on solitude, for sleeping in haylofts, for hiding from the police. Gaunt and deprived-looking no matter how much food is brought to me. A smoker, too, taking long solemn drags on the cigarettes, pipes, cigars, bongs. I’ll be known as the E. man, yet another clone product escaped from the lab in Cleveland.