Halfway out to Marion’s shack on the snowy two-track at daylight Marion braked and jumped out of his ancient, boxy Toyota Land Cruiser with his.30-06 and shot the doe, which was down a slope between a grove of small white pines and alders beside a tiny creek. Sunderson could barely see the deer, which dropped in its tracks. Marion said, “Poor girl” while he gutted it with Sunderson holding the hind legs splayed to make it easier for Marion’s knife to avoid the anal sack. She was fairly healthy he thought examining her shattered knee, which he deduced came from a shot earlier in the two-week season. While Marion skinned the doe Sunderson had stoked the woodstove until it reddened. He guessed that he had gotten the cabin up to fifty degrees by the time they ate the liver off warmed tin plates.
“You have totally fucked up my schedule with your pursuit of this nitwit,” Marion laughed.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not. I’ve done a fair load of research while you were in Arizona possibly drinking and chasing pussy not to leave out getting the shit kicked out of you. Yours is the first American case of stoning I can recall.”
Marion had been helping his wife Sonia who, though lily white, had been a crack tribal administrator until she had taken a long leave to aid in the research in the nationwide lawsuit against the Bureau of Indian Affairs to recover billions of lost royalties coming to the tribes. A few years before, after Sunderson dealt with a particularly gory case of spousal abuse, he had been deeply puzzled how Marion had come up with a thick pile of articles on the subject along with a lengthy bibliography. Sunderson was still married to Diane at the time and she had hidden the material fearing another of his March depressions. A good deal of his puzzlement on the matter came from his father teaching him that it was forbidden to ever strike a female even if she hit you first.
“I think I’d have a much better grasp of the Leader, now King David, if I had his hundred stages of spiritual development in writing.” Sunderson swabbed up his butter and liver juices with a piece of mediocre white bread.
“No, that’s the wrong track. They probably don’t exist in writing. Maybe a number of them in his noggin. His power comes from the idea that he’s the only one in the know. He’s the judge. His followers must be kept off balance in their strain to prove their spiritual accomplishment.”
“But then what is he offering for their time and money for Christ’s sake?”
“The ecstasy of belief. That’s what we want from religion. Something we can count on as helpless children in the face of ninety billion galaxies. In a despondent culture he is telling them how to live, how to get out of their very limited bodies into an arena of spiritual confidence.” Marion was grinning as he turned down the damper of the stove which was now putting out too much heat.
“But how do you tie in the sexual thing?”
“That’s an attractive come-on. Remember that guru in Oregon, the Baghwan what’s his name? His followers had absolute sexual freedom for a while then out of fear of disease he promulgated that they had to wrap themselves in plastic for sex. He went downhill after that and lost his thirty-two Rolls-Royces. I think our government shipped him back to India.”
“He’s certainly an effective predator. I’m a bit mystified by his interest in females that are too young.” Sunderson took Carla’s e-mail and the photo of Mona from his jacket and slid it across the table to Marion who was startled.
“This is hot stuff. I’d make copies. The young girl stuff is at least partly biological, you know, like Warren Jeffs and those apostate Mormons. Without knowing it men want to continue their own genetic line so they try to get there first by even getting rid of the young men. With mammals as varied as antelope and mountain lions the alpha male chases off the competition. It’s quite a battle in the so-called natural world. Male bears kill the cubs fathered by other male bears to further their own line. With humans some stepfathers are notably unkind to children sired by previous husbands.”
“What a fucking mess.”
“Not at all. It’s just us. Certain scientists are now positing the biological origins of religion. We’re perfect parasites when we maintain order in society and maintain the host that feeds us, and religion is an essential way of maintaining order.”
“The Lutheran church is a biological organism?” Sunderson laughed.
“At least partly. Bring it all home. Look at yourself. Consider what either of us do to conduct our lives in terms of sex, finance, and religion. We’ve been friends for more than twenty years. We talk about everything. You’ve said that after your divorce you felt sexually deprived scurrying around looking for a good piece of ass. You’ve said that money has always made you nervous and you try to ignore it because you’ve made five times as much as your poor father did without even trying hard. You’ve never said much about your religion, though you’ve inquired about mine a lot.”
“I thought it over quite a bit in the Nogales hospital when I was trying to organize an interest in continuing my life. Of course the drugs helped but they’re mostly a lid over the pain like a manhole cover and you remain aware of the surge of pain underneath. Anyway I’d keep making a list of my favorite brook trout creeks, nine of them in fact. Also my favorite landscapes, maybe a half dozen, two of them from boyhood on Grand Island, and also that long gully you showed me west of here. I’d go over these places in my memory for hours and was surprised how well I remembered them right down to the minutest detail. The day I left the hospital it occurred to me that these places were the location of whatever religion I had. This started when I was a boy. In these places I never think of anything except where I am, sometimes for hours. I remembered that Mother said that when you pray you’re not supposed to think about anything else, which was a trick I never could manage but can in these places. I found another one when I camped out for a week in Arizona.”
They walked for two hours on this rare windless day, normally a period when northwest winds off Lake Superior pound the locals senseless with their fury. It was a little odd not to find any wolf prints in the fresh snow but Marion said that here on the eastern edge of the Huron Mountains the wolves retreated far into roadless areas at the first shot of deer season.
Back at the cabin Sunderson fried up the sliced doe heart for a snack and then they dozed in their chairs after a few exhausting sentences about Mona’s future.
Chapter 13
After their nap Marion and Sunderson took Mona to the Verling for supper. Sunderson was frantic for a mess of fried whitefish. A “mess of fish” was a localism. People would say that they “fried up a mess of brook trout” they had caught. Sunderson was in a peculiar mental state not having totally awakened from his nap and a dream in which he was a god in the sky but hadn’t done anything with his godhead except wander around the heavens. He had returned to earth in his mortal body and was relieved.
Mona was stunning in a black pantsuit she said a “friend” had given her. She was pouty because her father had called from Cleveland for the first time in months and had said he was buying her a car. She had told him “I don’t want your fucking car” and had hung up. She changed the mood by taking out a page she had ripped from Vanity Fair to which her mother subscribed. She read aloud to them an item that said that at an auction of the belongings of the deceased fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, a single chair had gone for twenty-four million dollars. Marion had laughed so explosively that he alarmed the adjoining tables while Sunderson was merely puzzled to the point of melancholy and also irked that his whitefish and glass of beer had arrived and he had forgotten to order his habitual double whiskey. He thought he was losing his grip and corrected his error. Meanwhile Mona was thrilled at Marion’s laughter and asked him why he thought the chair’s price was so funny.