“We’ve failed each other,” she wailed.
In answer he turned on the TV to Anderson Cooper who at the moment reminded him of a chipmunk. He segued to a film with a boatload of naturalists chasing a pod of killer whales off the coast of Alaska and hoped that the beasts would turn back on the boat and have a naturalist meal. He split the last of his travel pint into two drinks and she poked her head out from under a pillow at the rattle of ice.
When she finally walked out the door he looked at the whiskey bottle and was pleased that it was only half gone, which meant he wouldn’t have a hangover in his top five hundred. He thought of what his dad would say if he knew his son paid sixty bucks for a bottle of whiskey. Likely nothing. Lucy had eaten only half of her cheeseburger so he took a cold bite to get full value. With the light out and chewing slowly he remembered a professor saying that carefully read history will tell us everything. This seemed not to be true. This was one of those times when he felt the utter exhaustion of not making love as if he were a teenager necking in a car. She had ended up talking so glowingly about her children he once again wished that he and Diane had had a child.
Chapter 5
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.