“I haven’t had a drink in twelve days.”
“Oh bullshit,” Marion laughed.
“Truly. I actually forgot in what they call my post-concussive state.”
“I take it you’ll miss deer cabin this year?” The two of them never really hunted unless a deer approached an illegal salt block in Marion’s cabin clearing.
“I can’t cut and run after getting the shit kicked out of me which is a euphemism.”
“If you shoot Dwight you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison. I heard the food is bad.”
“His name is Daryl now.”
“I know. I had dinner with Mona. She’s having problems with her mother.”
“That’s what she told me. Do you figure she’s a lesbian?” Sunderson had brooded about the question for some time.
“Maybe. Who knows what you are at sixteen? At that age my music teacher was blowing me and I turned out hetero.” Marion laughed hard. “He was real good at it.”
“You’re a man of wide experience. I was thinking you could send me some books. There are twenty-nine I haven’t read on the coffee table. Send seven at random. Seven is my lucky number.”
Sunderson hung up after they talked about the ramifications of Diane moving back to town. There were none except that it would be painful to run across her. He was wobbly when he got up from the table and sat down and finished the lukewarm soup, like it or not. What he really wanted was a nap but it was only a little after midmorning. A walk was in order. He spread out Alfred’s map and felt good when he found his own location. There was a town called Patagonia about fifteen miles down the road, the name of which jogged his memory. The thirty-year Cochise Wars had their inception about three miles southwest of town. A low-rent rancher had claimed that the Apaches had kidnapped his child, which proved to be untrue but the war continued. It was akin to Bush thinking that the Iraq war was God’s will. The utter irrationality of the human species continued to leak into Sunderson’s wounded brain as he drove toward the mountain community of Patagonia.
His walk went poorly. He found a place Alfred had marked, the small road up Red Mountain, but the relatively tame incline was too much for him. He turned away, went through a cattle gate, and walked about four hundred yards, preoccupied with his thoughts, until he was on the verge of stepping into a hole covered sparsely with brush. The hole was a pipe about three feet in diameter and led straight down into the center of the earth or so he thought. As a citizen of the Upper Peninsula he was accustomed to the trashed landscape left behind a century ago by mining companies. It was a fine place to dump the body of Dwight-Daryl if it ever came to that. This thought shocked him into a sweat and when he turned back toward his car he realized that he had failed to acknowledge the depth of his anger over being nearly stoned to death.
He stopped in Patagonia and ate a big bowl of menudo, the tripe stew that Melissa had told him to eat daily to regain his strength. How could he do otherwise? He wasn’t sure he liked the dish never having eaten tripe before, but that was beside the point. The big though lovely waitress told him the bone in the stew was a calf’s foot for extra flavor. He mulled over the idea that he was attracted to Mexican women because of his inexperience with them. You would see a few now and then in Marquette, especially students at Northern Michigan University, but he had never actually known any. A Marquette bartender who had been to Mexico said that the women down there would fuck you until your ears flew off but bartenders were notoriously short on credibility. The base of male fantasy life was silly indeed he thought with the image of ears flying through the air like sparrows.
Out on the street he decided he liked this village. He rechecked Alfred’s map and decided to take a back way, first stopping at a tavern called the Wagon Wheel Saloon. It seemed important not to delay his reintroduction to alcohol. There was an older man behind the bar, likely the owner, who seemed to immediately make him as a cop, a beat-up one at that. Sunderson downed his double shot of Canadian whiskey and took his beer out to the backyard smoking area. Arizona had been unable to slow down any of its public bad behavior except smoking according to Berenice who had told him not to smoke in her house. He had gone outside and his mother had bummed one. It was wonderful watching an eighty-five-year-old woman smoke a cigarette. His mother had been quitting all of her life and Berenice had said that Mom was down to a few a week.
There was a table full of construction workers, gringo and Mexican, drinking their lunch, who fell silent when Sunderson came into the yard. Was he that obvious in his ratty khaki sport coat that Diane had bought him from Orvis and he had worn until it was only a single step up from a rag? Fuck ’em he thought, taking the plastic table farthest away from them in the yard. He was busy brooding about the realities of Mexican women. He had noticed that right down to his young neighbor Mona that females had a sense of reality that no matter how widely varied was at odds with his own. Diane had bought the Sunday New York Times at the newsstand where it arrived on Monday. She also subscribed to the New Yorker and neither of these publications held any interest for him, lacking as they did the solidarity of books. The last thing he wanted in life was to be current. Despite Diane’s urging he had never gone to New York City and she settled for traveling there with friends every couple of years. He could be such a stodgy prick that it amazed him. No wonder Diane had flown the coop.
The double shot of whiskey and single bottle of Mexican beer were more than enough and he walked a bit dizzily out of the Wagon Wheel. He took a back gravel road marked on Alfred’s map past a mile-long Nature Conservancy property, slowing to watch a balding young man get on a tractor, put on a slouch cowboy hat, and begin mowing a big field of weeds. Sunderson continued on enchanted by the road. There were fairly dense woods surrounding a creek on the left, and on the right a series of small canyons leading to the mountains. He loved gravel roads, which were a trademark of his youth when there were far more of them. Gravel roads were easier in the winter because of the traction offered through the snow. He turned left to get back to the highway but then stopped in a large pool of water when the road forded the creek, wondering if his compact rental could handle it. Off to the right less than fifty yards away a man was throwing food to a group of ravens from the patio of a small house mostly hidden in a thicket of bamboo and trees. Sunderson was instantly homesick because he and Marion would collect roadkill if it wasn’t too rank and hoist it up on a platform at the edge of the woods near Marion’s cabin. The ravens kept an eye out and would quickly appear.
“Just keep to the right and you can make it,” the man yelled.
“Thanks. What are you feeding them?”
“Tripe. They love it.”
“Just had some myself.” Sunderson waved and got back in the compact, fording the creek slowly so the water wouldn’t surge upward and drown his engine.
Back at the apartment he took a deeply wonderful hour’s nap truncated by a call from his mother who was very angry.
“That little bitch Berenice took my cigarettes,” his mother practically yelled, her voice a little slurred by her stroke. “She also took my goddamn car keys.” His mother only swore when she was very angry.
“Calm down. I’ll drop some off in the morning.” It was time to make a few notes in his journal.
There is the sudden troubling thought that my pursuit of Dwight-Daryl has a religious motive, however slight. I’d rather think that it’s strictly a law enforcement matter but that is no longer my job. I’m morally pissed off, which makes it quasi-religious. This is mildly embarrassing.
Post-concussive state causing some new memories as if clusters of neurons were reactivated. Mother was in hospital having just given birth to Bobby. Dad went with his friend Big Frank down to Trenary to pick up a sow’s head to make what they called souse or head cheese. I remember I was sitting in the backseat with Berenice in the old Dodge. It was a cold November day and they had just butchered at the farmer’s and I stomped on a frozen pool of pig blood until the ice broke. Back at Frank’s house they boiled up the huge sow’s head in a scalding pot over a fire. I remember I cried because I wasn’t strong enough to pick up the sow’s head at the farmer’s. They boiled it all afternoon then chopped it up and put it in the pan with liquid and next day it was like pig-meat Jell-O and tasted good.