Driving west at 7:00 a.m. on Interstate 10 toward Willcox into the bright headlights of oncoming commuter traffic Sunderson recalled that as a child he had devoutly wished for summer solstice all year round, when at least minimal light would tip the scales at over eighteen hours a day in the Great North. By early November it was down to about seven hours, clearly not enough to keep the soul together and one treaded the dark water in despair until after December 21, the winter solstice, when a minute or two of additional daylight helped the soul regather. Way back at Michigan State Kaplan’s course on the Russian Revolution had enthralled him. One day this great professor of Russian history with his wonderful big bald head had given Sunderson a few minutes after class and Sunderson questioned the morale effect of so much darkness on far northern countries. Kaplan had said how interesting as he packed his briefcase and when Sunderson aced the course his skin had tingled with pride.
Not so this morning. He had barely made it out of the lobby and peeked around the corner to see Lucy coming toward the desk with a bellhop, then he had to hide in the bushes of the parking lot across the street as she got into a black sedan limo with a black driver. How much did this cost? What’s wrong with a taxi?
He hit the radio OFF button when someone on NPR used the word turd iconic. He used to keep track of these obtuse Orwellian nuggets. A few years ago it was the relentless use of the word closure that raised his ire and then with Iraq the silly term embedded. In general Sunderson had no use for pundits. It reminded him of a recent article in the Marquette newspaper interviewing a local girl who had tried to make it in Hollywood who said, “Just about everyone you meet out there is a producer.” Pundits reflected his idea that everyone in America gets to make themselves up whole cloth, and also the hideously mistaken idea that talking is thinking.
He had gotten up at 6:00 a.m. to call Mona before she was off to school. There had been a juvenile urge to ask her what she was wearing if anything but she beat him to it.
“Without you here I get dressed right away. Mom has the thermostat turned down to save money. Dad sent his annual note saying to keep my chin up. Can you believe that miserable cocksucker?”
Mona’s father had left them when she was ten. He was the usual young realtor slicker trying to create a big development out of air. Despite the overwhelming beauty of the area it was impossible because Michigan’s main population centers were at least a seven-hour drive away. Sunderson’s motive in the early morning call was to get Mona off her direct hacking with Dwight which was conceivably dangerous. He diverted her by asking for specific information on contemporary cults. Sunderson had felt his focus was too narrow. After all, so much of his work had been with the minor laws made by the state legislature, the county supervisors, and the city council to pester people, not to speak of the U.S. Congress, the members of which have been so deranged by lobbyist pressure that many forget which state they come from.
“That sounds fun,” she replied to the request for cult info. “Too bad you’re not here. Two of my friends stayed over for a pajama party and we drank the rest of your beer. They’re still here and they’re naked, aren’t you girls?” He heard shrieks of “naked nude.”
“Please behave, Mona. I checked out of the Arizona Inn so hold any research faxes until you hear from me.” He quickly hung up to the sound of more shrieks and laughter. In his own danceless life he couldn’t imagine anyone laughing on a November dawn but here it was. He tried to dismiss the image of three nude girls in the same bed but it was like trying not to think of a white horse. Now there was suddenly a white horse in Mona’s bedroom. It occurred to him while driving through Benson, a town that his brother-in-law Bob had bragged held thirty thousand Airstream trailers in the winter, that he hadn’t seen any boys visiting Mona for a couple of years, just her goth female cabal, the nature of which was beyond him. He did not want to wander into the territory of his average male ignorance of lesbianism.
When he took the Willcox exit he began to feel presumptuous, which meant he was losing his nerve. There was a sign saying that Willcox was the hometown of Rex Allen, the singing cowboy, and he was way back when in the world of the Saturday matinee when he and a hundred other kids would watch big Rex and a dozen other cowboys who were on horseback and would warble, “Get Along Little Doggie,” and then minutes later would be firing their six-shooters at a group of woebegone Indians. From the research Mona had faxed he knew there had been a scandal years ago about the Willcox cops using stray dogs for target practice at the town dump, which was not a good advertisement for law enforcement integrity. Another local problem, this one of a financial nature, was an oversupply of ostriches. Many people had bought breeding pairs for fifty thousand bucks hoping to raise broods of young ostriches for their hides, feathers, and meat to make their inevitable fortunes. This struck Sunderson as a mini–Wall Street scheme but too small-time to attract the likes of Bernard Madoff, just the usual millions of suckers who wanted to be sitting pretty.
To build his nerve back to a functional level he stopped at a diner for the habitual heart-stopper breakfast of sausage, eggs, and crispy hash browns his doctor had warned about. While working at a bag of delicious local pistachios he noted the loose wattles of all the retirees eating big breakfasts and muttering with full mouths about the dangers presented by Obama. It had always mystified him why so many of the poor were right-wingers when with the Republicans the poor went totally unacknowledged. The poor are always betrayed by history he thought feeling both sympathy and empathy as his own interest in history seemed to be betraying him. On his coffee table he had counted nineteen volumes of an historical nature that he had bought but not yet touched. He had used reading to escape his job but as his job had withered toward his retirement party he had become less enthused. On the last day of brook trout fishing in September he had been thinking about the Etruscans while he waded a good stretch of the Chocolay River. He smelled marijuana before he rounded a bend and caught two young couples drinking beer and smoking pot on the riverbank. He flipped his badge and the girls began crying while the boys’ faces turned pale. He stared at them coldly while his mind wandered to a small Etruscan museum he and Diane had visited in Italy.
“Fuck it,” he said.
“Fuck what,” one of the boys croaked hugging his girlfriend.
“I don’t have time to take you in. I have to go fishing.” Sunderson was staring at a trout rising and feeding at the edge of the eddy. How happy he and Diane had been in the Guarnacci Etruscan Museum in Volterra.
He was struggling with shelling pistachios as he drove south from Willcox past the Dos Cabezas Mountains toward the immense and ominous Chiricahuas farther south. Perhaps shelling pistachios while driving was as dangerous as talking on a cell phone in heavy traffic. His mood of unrest and a somewhat cramped tummy from his huge breakfast was matched by the weather, a strong wind from the north and a temperature in the low fifties out in the valley that was twice the altitude of sunny Tucson. He couldn’t seem to keep up with the banks of clouds scudding overhead and it seemed to be snowing on the mountaintops of the Chiricahuas. His doubt came from recognizing his own hubris, the jump from busting young people for pot and meth or petty burglary to investigating the evils of religion too sizable to give him a sense of solid footing. His last burglary before retiring was an old man whose two jars of coins were stolen and Sunderson had busted the high school perps when they turned the coins in for cash at the bank the next morning. This was a decidedly nonreligious crime.
After nearly thirty miles he pulled off the blacktop at the intersection of a gravel road leading east toward the Chiricahuas. The MapQuest was fairly clear and the Google aerial showed a rather run-down ranch house with a number of corrals and ramshackle outbuildings but there was the question of whether it was a recent photo. A topographical map would have been handier and so would a 4WD he thought because the seven miles of gravel led into successively rougher country. He made his right turn and drove the mile toward the ranch thinking that the aerial had given no indication of the depth of the canyon on each side of the two-track, which showed signs of traffic in the dirt. He parked off to the side of a locked gate feeling a little naked without his .38, which was in a locked desk drawer back in Marquette, but then the Great Leader Dwight had always been friendly enough if somewhat distant.
He climbed the iron-bar gate with wobbly legs and headed up the road amused at the similarity of the landscape to the cowboy movies where Indians or outlaws would pop up from the uniform and phony-looking boulders and start shooting arrows or bullets at Gene Autry or Roy Rogers.
He stopped to look at a large gathering of varied birds on the bushes around a small spring, really a seep from the canyon wall, and then he was quite literally stoned. Stoned as happened in certain Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia where the woebegone malefactor tries to cover his face while being pelted by fair-sized rocks.