He slept well from his walking fatigue from eight in the evening until midnight. The dinner of freeze-dried beef stroganoff had been wretched and his irritation over forgetting a bottle of Tabasco or a jar of dill pickles was outsized without the calming influence of a little whiskey. It was a feeling similar to losing all of your favorite marbles in a schoolyard contest. This was miniscule compared to the haunting feeling at midnight when he awoke and fed the fire. Alcohol had always worked fairly well in ameliorating or subduing his hair-shirt memories but now without a trace of it in his body he was struck dumb by the little movie his mind made of the morning after Thanksgiving when the Mayflower van had come and moved out Diane’s collection of fine antique furniture and her many boxes of art books. She was in Naples, Florida, with her parents and her stuff was being moved to a bungalow near the hospital from where she could walk to work. He had opened a bottle of cheap Early Times when the movers had left and it was gone by dinnertime when rather than dinner he had opened another bottle of whiskey. This had gone on a couple of days and when he didn’t show up for work Monday morning or answer the phone a colleague had checked up and found him facedown and comatose on the floor of the unheated enclosed back porch after a ten-degree night. There was a trip to the ER in an ambulance and two days in the hospital where Marion had visited.
“You should have called,” Marion had said.
“I didn’t have anything to say.”
That had been the longest winter of his life though from force of will he slowed down his drinking to a point short of passing out. Toward the end of April and the beginning of trout season he found that his fingers trembled so that he couldn’t tie a fly to his leader at which point he was able to cut back to his traditional two drinks after work and two in the evening. This would not have been possible had he not fished a hundred evenings and weekend days in a row. Moving water was the only workable tranquilizer for the central error of his life, the divorce.
The fire flared nicely after he added a large piece of juniper stump. He wondered at how the totally sober mind’s tongue reached the rawest spots. He should have known that Melissa was spying for her brother and not truly drawn to him, the Lone Geezer from the north. He still had the lovely memory of her crouched all nude and moist in the small clearing of the thicket in the estuarine area of the lake’s end. Part of him had known she was a spy but the stronger part chose to ignore it, led by vanity and the biological ring through his nose until the inevitable falling smack on his foolish face. A fool for love and lust or something like that. How absurd. As he drifted off he heard the howling of coyotes up the canyon break into yips, which meant they were closing in on the kill. He thought that the sex game must be about over for him but then it had never been much of a game, more like a mortal intrusion.
At dawn he shivered from the cold, the dew on his sleeping bag crisply frozen. Why hadn’t he set up the tent, where a single candle or two would have kept him warmish? He could just barely reach his pile of wood from the bag and flipped a few pieces on the coals. Ever the detective he had awakened thinking that if the Great Leader could be caught with the raised-skirt photo that his girlfriend Carla had taken of Mona he could be charged with possession of child pornography. That would put the sucker away for a while even though it was definitely pushing the envelope to think of Mona as a child except in the eyes of the law. He lay there brooding over the matter until the sun peeked through the Pinaleño Mountains to the east. Of course it had been okay for him to peek at Mona through his bookcase. It was easy in stray moments to forgive yourself.
He arose, his muscles creaking painfully, and made coffee and then scrambled eggs by adding water to the egg powder in the pan. How nasty and poorly planned. Why hadn’t he brought along a stack of the fine local tortillas? Why hadn’t he brought along a cooler full of steaks, chicken, pork chops, bacon, eggs, and cheese? This dried shit was for hikers who needed to travel light. He could easily have walked the half a mile back to the car once a day to pick up supplies. He had clearly lost his wits in this alien place called Arizona. He had to figure out how to pick up his new life from the ground where he had merely been walking on it and reshape it into a tolerable form.
Lucky for him he gave up thinking when he walked. His recent thinking always arrived at a pile of the same old compromised shit wherein the mistakes of the past readily suffocated the present. When he walked his level of attention was spread thinly but intensely over the entire landscape as it likely had been for walkers a million years before. His thoughts were idle little slips such as trees stay in one place and that even the smallest creeks or trickles follow declining altitude. His mistakes were those of a relative flatlander. If you climb a steep hill it doesn’t mean that like Michigan you can get down the other side. It took him a couple of days to figure out that there was no way to reach the top of the butte that capped the steep cliffs along Aravaipa Creek. He resented this then concluded that no one had ever been up there except birds.
As the days passed his sack of dried food diminished. On the fourth day he ate only two granola bars and he felt how far his trousers were loosening. He had worn holes in his only pair of heavy socks and instead put on two pairs of his cheap thin office socks. His feet became so sore he soaked them an hour each day in a pool of the cold creek. He snuck around a small Nature Conservancy cabin at dawn because you needed a permit to enter their land and he didn’t want to wake anyone up. He proceeded west increasingly intimidated by the steep canyon walls and wondering how the conifers, oaks, and mesquite seemed able to grow out of rock. There was certainly nothing comfortable about the heraldic land of the Apaches who in many ways seemed the tribe least like the white intruders. We made much of their savagery though indeed we cut off the head of their leader Mangas Coloradas and shipped it east to the Smithsonian in the name of science, a fact that made the Apaches improbably difficult to subdue. They wanted to enter the spirit world with their dead bodies intact. The West wasn’t settled by nice people.
He was fatigued by midmorning and forced himself to eat one of the two pathetic so-called energy bars he had carried along. He thought that just because you’re older doesn’t mean that death is imminent every day. There’s generally a tip-off when it’s coming. He sat by the creek chewing his food thinking that we’ll never understand anything. Here he was unable to name the hundreds of varied plants and birds he was seeing that had the solace of taking him away from the miserable world of men, his life in fact. He abruptly felt that even his habitual study of history was parasitic. Like the small leech his was a perfect parasite because he didn’t kill his host, merely attached himself and fed.
He had fed on history and sometimes the food nauseated him. For instance, several months studying the Indian Wars were disastrous. It reminded him of how Diane loved Mahler but Mahler severely jangled him. Composers attached clusters of musical notes to their large emotions but Sunderson didn’t want big emotions so he had truncated his study of the Indian Wars. He often wondered if this emotional timidity was part of the male ethic of the far north, that is, aim low and you won’t be disappointed. In retrospect his being the first college graduate on either side of his family seemed puny. He was amazed after sitting by the creek for fifteen minutes to finally notice the tracks of a big feline in the damp sand near his own feet, obviously a mountain lion. His skin prickled thinking that the beast might be watching him from any of a hundred hiding places along the canyon walls or from the verdant thickets. He didn’t carry his pistol on his walks but then decided he was likely too large to be easy prey. The many small hoof prints also in the damp sand were those of the small pig-like creature the javelina that he had read were the central food of the lion in the Southwest. His ex-landlord Alfred had said that a small number of jaguars, a much more ominous creature, had been migrating north from Mexico.