It was Saturday morning and the miracle was upon him through the open window of his upstairs bedroom. There was a balmy though brisk wind from the south and it was sixty degrees, much warmer than it had been in two weeks. Marion had told him about the incoming weather when they drove to the party at a big log cabin on a lake near Au Train but Sunderson barely took notice so great was his anxiety and irritation over attending his own retirement party. He had a fantasy temptation about jumping on the afternoon plane to Chicago, staying at the Drake, and spending a leisurely Saturday at the Newberry Library. He certainly wasn’t a party animal and shouldn’t his feelings have been regarded? Of course not. Diane was paying for the cook who normally only handled occasions for Marquette’s upper crust and certainly no one at the party had ever tasted her cooking. His ex-wife had also sent two cases of fine wine and a half case of top-shelf liquor to Marion who as a recovering alcoholic could be trusted with the bounty, he was so steadfast. This was a lot for fifteen men to drink but then the Upper Peninsula was a region of heavy drinkers and most of the men who were involved in law enforcement had arranged to be picked up by designated drivers. The entertainment was arranged by a younger officer whom Sunderson had originally disliked but then sympathized with over his rejection by the FBI because of a college prank. The FBI had altogether too many stiffs who couldn’t think, in that pathetic euphemism, out of the box. A little old lady FBI agent had seen 9/11 coming and had she worn a necktie thousands of lives might have been saved not to speak of the grotesque governmental aftermath wherein the constitution was sadly bruised and the fraternity boys realized their ambitions about torturing brown people. There were thousands of bright career tracks for sadists who knew no more about the Middle East than a Lubbock insurance adjustor.
Sunderson hastily had a cup of coffee and packed two sandwiches made of the party’s prime beef—it had been only the third time in his life he had eaten prime. He rechecked the gear in his day pack and decided to leave his service revolver behind. No more of that he thought though he would continue to possess a concealed-weapons permit in case any of the felons he had gotten convicted bore a grudge. On the way out the back door he had second thoughts and turned back, entered his studio, and pulled the Slotkin volume. It wasn’t a school morning and the odds on seeing a nude Mona were slim but why commit the sin of omission? There she was topless wearing a skimpy pair of panties. He took the monocular out of his jacket pocket and focused on her butt cleft in which the panties were drawn up tightly. Of all things she was reading Audubon Magazine. He focused on her breasts, then her face, utterly startled because she seemed to be looking at him. Of course his studio door was open and the kitchen light shone brightly. He had always been a bit clumsy at surveillance. There was a niggling suspicion that Mona was putting on a show for him. He ducked and smiled, questioning whether this was a proper way for a retiree to begin his first full day of freedom, a towering item in itself, but then he had long since admitted that he wasn’t particularly high-minded as he had proved the night before. A long day’s walk in wild country was clearly in order no matter that the day had begun humbly with an intense but guilty view of Mona’s butt crack. Like so many of us Sunderson wished to be brighter than he was, bright enough but not to the point that he could overcome his very human fickleness. Back in his sophomore year in college an acquaintance had loaned him Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer but Sunderson had finished less than half the book so fearsome was the disorder of the lives of the characters. Sunderson was the first in his greater family to go to college and to finish college and to succeed in life you had to keep the lid screwed on pretty tight, not a frequent modus operandi for a young man hailing from the Upper Peninsula.
Two hours into his journey he stopped in Bruce Crossing for a hasty Bloody Mary having admitted that though his hangover wasn’t in the top one hundred of his life it nevertheless existed and part of unscrewing the tight lid of his life involved the free following of impulses.
In truth his retirement party had fulfilled none of his anxieties. It began at seven with heavy drinks and hundreds of oysters, went on to rib roasts so fine that they were gorged upon, caramel sundaes, then two dancing girls in the overheated cabin, and the party was over at ten.
A modest revelation occurred on the drive to Au Train when Marion told him that as the school principal he knew that the eighth-grade daughter of a cult member was pregnant, at fourteen a different victim than the twelve-year-old. Sunderson pretended to be unconcerned and said that when he had seen the girl she had looked a tad blimpy and then he asked, “Who was the guilty party?” He was disappointed when Marion said that the girl had told the school counselor that it could have been any of four or five men but that her most persistent lover had been an Indian. Naturally Sunderson wanted to hear that her only lover had been the Great Leader himself. A firm charge of statutory rape would have nailed the sucker assuming that he was not dead and could be found. Sunderson was confident that Dwight wasn’t dead and had wondered if the man could fly a plane because an ultralight had been found by a grouse hunter two days before in a field near Bessemer a hundred miles from cult property. However, Roxie said that no pilot’s license had ever been issued in the name of any of Dwight’s aliases. He felt he was losing his incisiveness because he couldn’t remember if the other victim was twelve or thirteen. Did it matter? What was truly boggling was that the mother wouldn’t sign a complaint. What kind of religion condoned child rape?
When Marion pulled the car up to the cabin for the party he handed Sunderson an envelope from his ex-wife and turned on the interior lights. There was an intensely risqué photo of Diane he had taken the first year of their marriage with a Polaroid camera her parents had given them for Christmas. One evening, after they had drunk a good deal and smoked a whopper joint he had taken the photo as she lay naked and laughing on the sofa of their married student apartment. The photo excited him so much that they had made love twice and cooked midnight hamburgers for their poststoned hunger. In the morning he had furtively looked for the photo, which was gone, and she pretended she had no idea where it was. He had been furious and now more than forty years later he was looking at the photo. He handed it to Marion who said, “Jesus Christ but you were a lucky dog.” Sunderson read the note that began with “Dear Big Boy,” his nickname, but it only said, “Thought you might like this memento of our marriage.” She had always had a remarkably tricky sense of humor and now he felt a hopeless sense of desire for her. He knew he lacked the courage to throw the photo away. It was a totem for his life, simply enough.
In just short of three hours he reached the turnoff from the county road on to the lumpy five-mile two-track leading to the longhouse, disappointed that there was a single set of tracks in the moist soil leading in but not returning. He did not want to see anyone and had hoped for a day of solitude, quite understandable in the aftermath of his retirement party. He had a cup of coffee and half a sandwich leaning against the hood of the ancient Subaru that he used for his excursions into the immense outback of the Upper Peninsula. A nearby elderberry held a noisy group of cedar waxwings eating their berry fuel for the trip south. The sandwich meat was so delicious he wondered what kind of cattle gave up such flavor. He felt a bit stupid that he hadn’t brought along his fishing gear. The season was closed but he could have caught a few brookies for pleasure and released them and the thought of a brook trout’s cool slippery skin reminded him of the young woman the night before. The dancing girls who provided the entertainment turned out to be Carla, the young woman he had interviewed at lunch, whose dad spanked her bare butt, and Queenie, Dwight’s primary girlfriend from Bloomfield Hills who had provided the thirty grand toward the purchase of the cult property and other expenses. In Sunderson’s experience such young women generally turned out to be less than they appeared, pretty but no content. This also confirmed his suspicion that Carla was likely still in the cult. He had been startled by their immense physical presence in the not very large room. They began by sitting facing the banquet table on a sofa before the roaring fireplace. They were wearing the demure attire of the sorority girls of his distant past: pleated plaid skirts and white blouses. Carla turned on their boom box to the Grateful Dead and they danced with frantic but somehow graceful energy. The music segued into “Born to be Wild” and they began laughing and wrestling on the sofa, tearing at their clothes until they wore only tiny half-slips with no panties and began to neck passionately. Then on cue the cook turned out the lights though the girls were still visible on the sofa in the firelight dry humping with vigor. Suddenly they jumped up and ran out the door. Someone bellowed, “Jesus Christ, I can’t take it.” Sunderson whispered to Marion, “I’m going out for a pee,” and Marion said, “I’ll bet.”
Outside in the dim porch light Carla was standing near the woodpile staring at him and Queenie was dressing in the interior light of her Yukon. He felt a little faint as he walked slowly toward Carla who was hugging her chest in her slip and waiting patiently. They embraced and her back was slippery with cooling sweat. He wanted to go down on her but she turned her back and leaned against the woodpile. In a moment he was in like Flynn as they used to say and she whispered, “Slap my ass,” which he did with gusto. It was a brief mating and then she ran off to her car. He stumbled and then sat down heavily on a pile of wood to light a cigarette. A number of men waved from the cabin windows but he didn’t wave back now feeling a rush of embarrassment. Oh well, he thought, and when he managed to make his way back into the cabin the men absurdly sang, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Sunderson poured a tumbler full of whiskey and drank it with another bowl of caramel ice cream after which he chewed on a bloody beef bone. In technical terms he was not fully conscious. Marion said, “You’re entitled,” thinking him morose rather than dumbstruck. Normally he was no more spontaneous than barbed wire.
His temples tingled in embarrassment as he finished the first half of his sandwich. Once a Lutheran, forever a Lutheran, his family’s nominal faith, which mostly meant the women and children went to church and the men stayed home Sunday morning, went fishing or did yard work or shoveled the snow. Religion was merely there like cod liver oil, taxes, the beginning of school.
Now he heard a vehicle coming up the miserable road from the compound, a two-track that only sportsmen with 4WDs would gamble on what with getting stuck being a central facet of the U.P. experience. Sunderson was irritated because he had called and requested that an Ontonagon County deputy secure the crime scene with a piece of yellow tape across the road. He had made the call the day before but his real motive had been that he wanted to wander the full section of cult land, 640 acres, in solitude unbotched by grouse hunters or the bow hunters who had an early deer season or those who drove their junkers around on Saturdays working on a case of beer and pretending they were looking for a big buck for the oncoming gun season in November.
It turned out to be a realtor and client in a spiffy but now mud-spattered newish Tahoe. He flipped his expired badge in his billfold and they got out of the car, the realtor reddening, and the client, a man in his fifties, yawning in his expensive Orvis-type sporting wear.
Sunderson was fatigued with protocol and simply said, “What’s up? You violated a crime scene.”
The upshot was that the deputy had neglected to tape the entrance to the cult compound. The confrontation became civil out of necessity. The realtor said he had received a phone call asking him to show the property.
“Who was the owner?”
“A guy named Dwight Janus.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know,” the realtor said then began fiddling with his cell phone. “The area code is five-two-zero.”
“That’s the Tucson, Arizona, area code,” the client said gazing north down the two-track. “What a frightful road.”
“What would you do with the longhouse?” Sunderson asked.
“Sit in it with my English setter and forget the world. You have any idea of grouse and woodcock populations in the locale?”
“Should be good. The cult shot and ate everything except birds. The Great Leader proclaimed that killing birds was taboo. He called them avian messengers.”
“How delightful. It will be odd to buy a section of land for less than a pathetic house in Minneapolis.”
The realtor was beaming. The recent financial collapse had brought his best efforts to a standstill and he had a son and daughter in college.
They all shook hands. Sunderson gave the realtor his own numbers to pass along under the pathetic idea that Dwight might call him. He was pleased to see them drive away and imagined the effort the client would make putting up NO TRESPASSING signs, which would be ignored by locals. He stood there at high noon with the eerie feeling that only his curiosity was still ambitious. It would be a pleasure to never arrest anyone again or write a report beginning with, “The stolen ’73 Dodge was found abandoned two miles SW of Gwinn. The perp or perps left behind eleven empty beer cans and someone had shit on the backseat.” Crime did pay but usually very little. He began smiling with the thought of his lovely library and then the fact that Dwight’s most recent alias was Janus, a double-faced, fascinating prophetic figure from mythology. It was nearly as good as his claim that his mother was named Nokomis from Longfellow’s doggerel Song of Hiawatha. Behind his pomp the Great Leader had a sense of humor. Historically the mysteries of religion, sex, and money tended to accumulate pontifical phlegm rather than humor. And as a student of history Sunderson had been mystified since college with the particularities of the relationship between money, religion, and sex—in fact, obsessed.
When he reached the gate of the cult’s property he felt a curious lightness descend upon him. He was properly suspicious of moods but figured this one had a pretty solid base. Since childhood he couldn’t remember ever having been free of multiple obligations and here on an early Saturday afternoon in late October he had no more duties than a cedar waxwing, in their case, to fill their tummies and head south.
The trees were leafless and he intended to head up the creek to check for beaver ponds for possible future brook trout fishing but first he had to check out the longhouse. Three of the four doors were lockless and open but the fourth door in the back had its lock broken. What was the point? The fresh tracks in the moist earth told him that the realtor and his client had entered by the southward-facing front door. The broken lock was senseless and therefore worthy of investigation. The interior of the longhouse was cooler than the balmy outside air and the floor was covered with the discouraging remnants of domestic life: sneakers, baby shoes, unmatched socks, plastic dishes, cut-rate skillets, cotton gloves. In a food cache there was a case of canned peaches apparently deemed not worthy of hauling out and a few broken sacks of white flour, rice flour, and rice. Three mice looked up at him from deep in the bag of rice. The only thing he could determine that had real value in the long rectangular room were the six big potbellied stoves each with a large wood box beside it. Some local human scavengers were sure to carry off the stoves, which were easily worth a grand apiece. The last stove at the back was the nearest to Dwight’s quarters where the door with the broken lock was opened to the river thirty yards away down a slope. Dwight’s wood box turned out to have a false bottom and he cursed himself for not having searched the abandoned longhouse the week before. Someone had beat him to it, pushed the logs aside, opened the hinged boards, and rifled the contents. All that was left were environmental books and a stack of journal notebooks unused except for one that had a name and address inside the front cover: Philippe Desarmais, 13 rue Arenes. Sunderson recalled that Roxie had found a map of Arles on the computer and that particular street led to a coliseum still in use after two thousand years. With the help of a French teacher at the local Northern Michigan University Sunderson had written a letter of inquiry to the Arles municipal authorities and had received an answer in faultless English saying yes, the American Desarmais had created a modest stir in the area before being “urged” to move on. He had rented halls and gave well-attended speeches (free wine, cheese, and charcuterie) proposing the overthrow of the government of the United States, which, during the first term of Bush Jr., did not seem irrational. Dwight wanted the 512 tribes of Native Americans to be able to reclaim their ancestral land and the capital of the U.S. government to be reestablished in the more central location of Chicago. According to the Arles authorities Dwight had been there in April, out in the Camargue watching migratory birds returning from Africa. During an interview with an operative from French intelligence and representatives of local police Dwight, who seemed to be a bit drunk at the time, would not disavow the possible use of violence. With European financial help he planned on arming Indian tribes. The police, who had noted that Dwight spoke good schoolboy French, had him pack his bags and then put him on the train to Marseilles, which was being indulgent of international riffraff.
Back home in Ontonagon someone had also taken the bearskin and other fur decorations from the longhouse and Sunderson wondered idly about the still enduring human preoccupation with fur. Once he and Diane had made love on a bearskin in a friend’s cabin and the fur seemed to invigorate him.
Sunderson stood at the open back door leaning against the wall next to the doorjamb and noted a small latch on the wall. He popped the latch and there was a tiny closet containing a stack of bird books and, of all things, a dozen expensive, lacy nightgowns.
The whole thing was giving Sunderson a headache so he took an hour’s walk up the creek and back. The wind began clocking from the south to the west, which meant it would likely be out of the north by nightfall bringing the normal ghastly weather of the season. Sure enough there were two fine beaver ponds with fine brookies rising to the year’s last insects. He meant to use his spotty introduction to the realtor’s client to gain access during the coming year’s trout season.
On the way out he noted that he still felt a delicious lightness reminiscent of his childhood when the last day of school brought on a near frenzy of happiness. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old when he and two friends had begun camping out but then that was well before parents monitored their children so carefully. They would pack a few cans of beans, a skillet, salt and pepper, a loaf of bread, and a baby food jar of bacon grease to fry their fish catch. To Sunderson that beat the hell out of softball and besides he was too busy mowing lawns and washing cars for quarters to give him time to be on a team like the kids from better-heeled families.
He was nearly to his vehicle when he turned to have a last look at the bathhouse. He believed in thoroughness rather than hunches or intuition and it occurred to him that if Dwight’s members survived on wild meat and foraging plus the usual staples of rice and flour there should be some indication of hunting like ammo or shell casings. Dwight was wise enough to limit the hunting to a half dozen Indian employees who had tribal rights in the area. They were doubtless aware of Dwight’s phoniness. Sunderson had talked briefly to a game warden who had done some snooping and had said the cult was circumspect in this matter.
In the bathhouse were thatches of dried wildflowers hanging from the walls that pretty much absolved the place of the odor of human sweat. He turned on a shower that kicked in a demand generator for the pump. There was no hot-water tank so he presumed that they had settled for cold showers. There was a potbellied stove to keep the pipes from freezing. Even with the reputed free-for-all sex it must have been a dismal place in the winter. He had heard that Dwight made three-hour speeches in the manner of Fidel Castro. Dwight had told him that monotheism was destroying the world and that his people worshipped dozens of gods like many ancient societies. On the verge of leaving the bathhouse he lifted the lid on one of the box benches noting that the piles of expensive towels were the name brand favored by his wife. He dug deep under each of the three benches and on the third came up with an M-16 rifle wrapped in oilcloth. On close inspection he noted this one was full automatic, making it a highly illegal weapon. It was easy to shoot a deer with this because you could fire off a banana clip of thirty cartridges in seconds. What to do? Nothing. He was no longer a cop but a curious citizen and gun laws are widely disregarded across America. His friend Marion who had been a marine told him that a good shot could stand at the end of a runway and conceivably bring down an airliner by firing a full clip of an AK-47 into the undercarriage beneath the pilots where the plane’s brain center was located. Sunderson had known many cops who owned illegal, full automatic weapons and it was hard to take the law seriously when owners were overwhelmingly nonfelons.
Sunderson finished his lunch and had his last cup of lukewarm coffee. He glassed a distant hill with his binoculars. There was a mob of northern ravens circling and the hill was reachable from an overgrown two-track near the gate. This was doubtless the location of the cult’s gut pile and boneyard for the game they shot. He decided not to visit primarily because of the queasiness engendered by his hangover. Along with the modest ill feelings, he did not want to see a pile of desiccated deer carcasses, probably a few beaver, raccoon, even porcupine thrown in. Marion had once made a porcupine stew that was quite good if a little fatty. He doubted that there would be any bear skeletons as the more traditional Chippewa (Anishinabe) were hesitant about killing bear for religious reasons. It had to be done just so.
The vagaries of a hangover included gratuitous guilt and he speculated at the speed the news of his misbehavior the night before would spread. As he hit the uncomfortable muddy potholes on the way out he could imagine that everyone at the party except Marion would be busy sending out the news of his coupling with Carla over the woodpile. Men in general were far worse gossips than women. There were a dozen or so Munising–Au Train area retirees out in Tucson and it was not unlikely that his iron mother would hear the story. She thought of herself as very religious but she loved bawdy gossip as long as it wasn’t connected with a member of her own family. He didn’t want to imagine his arrival in Tucson for Thanksgiving if she knew the story, which he suspected she would. The comic aspects of a sixty-five-year-old man being intimidated by his eighty-seven-year-old mother were not lost on him.
On the drive home he pondered his confusion about whether or not to learn how to operate a computer. Roxie had been badgering him on the issue because she would no longer be at his service. She figured she could teach him the essentials in a couple of weeks during the evenings but he was resisting on the basis of not wanting any more obligations. The phone was bad enough and he had noted the general slavery of e-mail in people he knew. His neighbor Mona, the goth hacker, had told him he could just do research and avoid e-mail. She needed pocket money and had offered to help him for ten bucks an hour. There had been a confidentiality issue but now that he was retired it was no longer relevant.
When he pulled into his drive just before dark Marion was finishing raking the yard and Mona was picking up windfall apples near his Jonathan tree, which yielded only every few years due to late frosts. Sunderson remembered that Marion’s wife was in Milwaukee on tribal business and Marion was going to grill his signature Hawaiian pork chops. Mona put her hand on his shoulder and said she was going to make an apple tart. There was a new twinkle in her eye and he wondered again if she was wise to his window peeking. There was certainly no way to correct his stupidity in not turning out the lights. Of course this is what the Great Leader Dwight was talking about: to make the present and future a far better place to live you must change your past, which is to say, before window peeking make sure there’s no backlight.
He poured himself a drink and watched Marion and Mona out the kitchen window. There was no dealing with Marion’s peculiarities. Fifteen years before when Marion had quit drinking after a single AA meeting he felt he had to keep himself busy and so did such things as mow and rake Sunderson’s yard, replace the garage roof, build new steps to the basement because the old ones had become rickety—though as a middle-school principal Marion had always made more money than Sunderson who still resented mowing or raking lawns for a quarter in his childhood.
Sunderson also resented biology when Mona came in and began peeling and coring the apples at the kitchen table. He sat down across from her and made his employment proposition. He would construct an exhaustive list of questions about Dwight and turn her loose on her computer. She was happy because her mother’s on-the-road cosmetic business wasn’t doing well during the financial collapse, and then she said blankly that her mother was conducting an affair with a rich old businessman in Charlevoix. She had read some of her mother’s filthy e-mails and she then did a mocking imitation of her mother’s chirpy voice, “Oh Bob, I love the way you lick my pussy for a whole hour.” Mona added that she had found out via her computer that Bob had been making their mortgage payments for the last three months.
Sunderson felt his face redden as he stared down into his whiskey. The frankness of young women these days always caught him off guard and made him feel like a middle-aged antique, or like a diminutive football player without a face guard on his helmet.
Now Mona took off her sweater and she was wearing a beige T-shirt with no bra underneath. Not wanting to confuse himself further he inspected Marion’s extra thick pork chops on the kitchen counter and out the window could see him cranking up the Weber grill with his usual mixture of charcoal with split oak for extra heat. It was then that Sunderson had the peculiarly unpleasant notion that he knew nothing about religion much less the spirituality that carried the outward form of religion. How then could he understand Dwight and his erstwhile followers when he had no real conception of their spiritual impulses? He then realized that if at gunpoint it was demanded of him he likely couldn’t define the word “spirituality.” The idea was simply enough not something that held his interest.
“Daddy, are you depressed about retirement?” Mona embraced him from behind and he stared down at the tiny gargoyle tattooed on her arm. At times she jokingly, or so he thought, called him “daddy.” She smelled sweetly of the windfall apples and he felt her breasts against his back. His embarrassment about lust was clearly a Lutheran hangover from childhood when a Sunday school teacher, an obviously gay young man, had told the roomful of little boys that they must treat girls as if they were their sisters. In other words Sunderson knew religion as a systematic description of right and wrong behavior. Historical religion was mostly another power to be reckoned with. This diverted him to a book he had read about the criminal uselessness of the Catholic Church in saving Jews during World War II. All of those bleeding Jesuses on the cross he had seen with his wife in Italy had left him cold as an ice cube while the emerging Venus at the Uffizi had given him half a hard-on.
He turned but Mona didn’t let go. She put her face in his neck and said, “You didn’t answer me.”
“I’ve never been happier in my life,” he lied.
“Oh bullshit,” she answered as Marion walked in through the porch door to the kitchen.
“Sixteen will get you twenty,” Marion laughed, meaning that if Sunderson and Mona continued on to the biological conclusion he could go to prison.
“He’s a stuffy old prick and would never fool with me,” Mona joked. “I did get some gossip about him this morning, though.”
“It’s not true!” Sunderson barked, reddening. He had been thinking about something the great luminaire Sir Francis Bacon said but it had slipped away. He couldn’t help but presume that Dwight understood the conflict between religion and sex and had simply decided to meld the two.
“I’d trust him with a whole squad of naked cheerleaders,” Marion said. He was expertly chopping a handful of garlic. Marion tended to be obsessive about recipes and a current favorite of a year’s duration was a side dish of pasta, minced garlic, olive oil, parsley, and a type of parmesan that he ordered from Zingerman’s way down in Ann Arbor. Sunderson figured that since Marion had quit drinking he had spent as much money on fine food as he himself spent on books.
“I don’t care what consenting adults do at retirement parties.” Mona patted him on the head, then slid her apple tart into the oven. She walked into the living room and then through the door into his studio. He imagined her pulling a book from the case above his desk and gazing through the slot into her own bedroom. He tried not to give a shit but was unsuccessful. Roxie had showed him some extraordinary filth on the computer and he had wondered at the time about the possible ill effects of the populace viewing this sexual mayhem. Mona likely had a wider knowledge of weird sex than he did. His wife Diane had said that the computer would be the death of the erotic imagination of our time. He was exempt from the funeral, watching Mona stretch when she came out of his study. Her nubbin belly button suggested to him the fact of human continuity. We begin in one place with sore belly buttons and end in another, in his case about fifty miles east of his birthplace.
Dinner was fine indeed though Sunderson drank too much of his cheapish red wine and since Mona and Marion were abstaining his wavelength differed from theirs. He asked them to define “spiritual” but they both ignored him as if he were proposing an inane parlor game. Mona and Marion were talking about torture, which had been much in the news of late but this was dropped when Marion began exclaiming about the deliciousness of the apple tart.
“You’ll find a husband, that’s for sure,” Marion said with a mouthful of tart.
“It’s more likely that I’ll be looking for a wife,” Mona said blithely.
Marion was a little embarrassed but Sunderson didn’t catch on completely being sunk in the idea that he might have been able to keep his wife if he had been spiritual.
“Why would you want a wife?” Sunderson asked stupidly.
Mona’s voice became cool and level. “When I was twelve and living in Escanaba with my aunt while mother was in beautician school in Lansing my two cousins would make me blow them while they watched porn films. Girls seem nicer.”
Sunderson squeezed his eyes tightly shut at the sheer muddiness of human behavior while Marion became angry.
“You should have told someone!” he almost shouted.
“Who? Hey, you guys, I didn’t mean to upset you. These things happen.”
The room fell silent as if each of them were sorting through possible things to say.
“I’m getting over it and everything else through witchcraft. I’ve cursed both of their lives and it’s working. One spit on a cop and lost quite a few teeth.” Now Mona was smiling and got up to clear the table. Marion ran dish water and Sunderson folded his arms on the table, cradled his head, and fell asleep.
Later, he wasn’t sure how long, he heard their laughing voices and then felt Marion lift up the kitchen chair he was sleeping on and carry it into the living room where he was helped onto the sofa. Up until the age of thirty when he finished college at night school Marion had been a block mason and was still massively strong with the fifty-inch chest frequently found in Chippewa-Finn mixed bloods. Sunderson again heard Mona laugh.
“Look at the big baby sleeping,” she laughed.
He awoke about six hours later at 3:00 a.m. knowing in his entire body that he must fly the coop, abandon his nest of nearly thirty-five years, at least for the time being. Staying here at this time would mean desuetude, a boneyard existence. He better leave early for Thanksgiving in Arizona. He decided to clarify his head by making notes, which always had a carbonating effect on his brain, or so he thought.
1. Just noticed Jack Beatty’s overwhelming Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865–1900, on the coffee table. This book has been an off and on obsession. We have an oligarchy not a democracy. We are ruled by the moneyed class.
2. This said, my opinion is not worth a cup of coffee. We are helpless. When asked at lunch Carla said that Dwight was not particularly drawn to money. To him sexuality is the core of existence.
3. This makes me wonder how he can make a philosophical system out of sexuality.
4. I have to get out of town as I sense the possibility of a prolonged drinking binge, which could kill me. Almost did after divorce. The doc said I stopped barely short of doing myself in, which many do intentionally with booze.
5. Beatty’s book can drive me batshit like the NPR morning news. All the issues become dumbfounding. I have to change to the Ishpeming country station and become the white-trash nitwit I occasionally am. Once a peasant, always a peasant.
The airline answered in a mere twenty-three rings. Yes, there were plenty of seats available in these troubled times. There were a few minutes of economic commiseration with a sleepy man at the other end of the line while Sunderson sipped his syrupy coffee feeling insincere because he had a more than adequate pension and a fair amount of savings. He could never sell the house because his faithful books needed a dwelling. The books were an immediate problem because he intended to travel light with one suitcase and had decided to carry only two. Mona could send more when needed. At the instant of thinking her name tears arose at her abuse by her cousins mixed with an ample dose of guilt at his window peeking. Jesus Christ what a nightmare. Luckily his sleep had been dreamless except for a brief vision of trying to keep up with Diane on the sandy shores of a lake up near Big Bay. With a longer inseam and in better condition she could walk faster than he could. On this occasion she was chasing a male grebe that was buzzing along ahead of them on the water, keeping itself aloft in the manner of a dolphin skidding along the sea’s surface by tail power.
The book choices were obvious: Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and Richard White’s “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. The American West was the major lacunae in Sunderson’s knowledge for arcane reasons. As a boy their neighbors three doors down were the Mouton family who had four large sons. The Mouton boys were big, strong bullies and when all the kids in the neighborhood gathered for play at the main game of that period, cowboys and Indians, the Mouton boys were cowboys and everyone else had to be an Indian, hence a pummeled victim, and thus Sunderson carried into adulthood a marked dislike for cowboys and their culture. Of course he knew this distaste was childish and was aware of the West through reading Bernard De Voto but he could not overcome his early prejudices. When he explained himself on this issue Marion as a mixed-blood thought it quite funny as he felt the cowboys were the western proletariat and nearly as woebegone as the Indians.
He went into the study to fetch the two books and on impulse decided on a last good-bye look next door. It was 4:00 a.m. and to his surprise she was awake and nude on her tummy with her laptop open and beaming in front of her. She turned, looked in his direction, and waved. Of course the lights in the studio were on. He dialed her number and watched as she rose to her hands and knees to pick up the desk phone.
“Hi. I knew you’d be up early because you fell asleep drunk at eight.”
“I apologize.” He was having difficulty breathing.
“It’s just a game. No harm done.”
“I shouldn’t be peeking.”
“Well, you have been and are right now. Men like to see nude girls. You’re nice to me so what’s the problem? I don’t think you’re a pervert.”
“I was half awake part of the time. Why were you and Marion laughing?” He was desperate to change the subject.
“I told Marion that my story was bullshit. I don’t have any cousins in Escanaba. It took a while but he thought my lie was funny.”
“Why in God’s name would you do that?”
“I like to explore men’s emotions. I actually did have a bad time with my stepfather.”
“I don’t want to hear about it. I mean, Jesus Christ, you’re like my daughter. Don’t tease me please. Meanwhile, I’m taking an early plane. You have the key. Keep an eye on my house and I’m leaving the whole Dwight file on the desk. Hack away and keep track of your hours. I’ll leave a couple hundred bucks.”
“I’ll come over and say good-bye.”
“No. Please don’t. I’m not too stable. I’ll call every few days.”
“Okay, but I’m not going to bite you. You’re the best friend I have.”
“Good-bye. I’ll miss you.” He hung up the phone but continued to look another minute wondering what it would be like to feel full of firm moral resolve. He was a little amused to remember the Bible story about King David seeing Bathsheba bathing and then sending her husband off to war so he could get his hands on her. Sunderson was sure he would cut off his own hands before he would touch Mona but then he wondered how one would go about cutting off his own hands? There was also the unpleasant thought of how Mona actually saw him. A college roommate liked to play a wretched blues song about a motherless child. What about a fatherless daughter? He had stopped short of explicitly fantasizing about making love to her knowing that it was morally wrong not to speak of being illegal. There was a specific cruelty to unattainable beauty that he felt now in his spine. Time to flee, he thought. A waffling geezer can talk himself into anything.