“Jizz. Cum, for Christ’s sake. It’s the stuff of life,” Carla said loudly.
“Of course.” Sunderson felt this was the moment of truth. He reached into his sport coat and took out the folded e-mail and raised-skirt photo of Mona he had found on the cult site in Arizona.
“Where did you get this?” Carla asked looking overlong at the photo of Mona. She wadded up the material and dropped it into her Caesar salad, looking pale and staring at the ceiling.
“I have twenty copies. Perhaps we should talk in private.” He had, in fact, forgotten to make copies. He reached for the wadded paper and dabbed the salad dressing off with his napkin, glancing at Carla’s face which had hardened and become hateful.
“Fuck you!” she screamed with alarming volume. She grabbed for her coat and fled toward the door. He stood, deciding not to look around for reactions, dropped two twenties on the table, and followed. Outside the wind had subsided but thick snow was falling straight down and there was a half foot of fresh snow on the recently plowed parking lot. He tracked her easily to Queenie’s Range Rover, which she had started. He wiped away fluffy snow and got in the passenger side hoping the heater was fast because he had left his coat in the restaurant. She was curled up fetally on the driver’s seat sniffling with her back turned to him and her skirt pulled up the undersides of her thighs. Here we go again, he thought coldly, staring at the marvelous rump he had banged away at against the woodpile.
“What are you going to do?” she asked in a hushed voice.
“I don’t know. Maybe put you away for a few years. Maybe not. Mona’s not excited about testifying.”
“What’s that mean?” She curled up tighter, more fully exposing her butt in pale blue panties.
“For the time being it means it’s your duty to stay in close touch with me via cell and e-mail. Any dereliction of duty on your part and I meet with my friend the prosecutor. You are my slave informant. Agreed?”
“Yes. Get a card out of my wallet.”
When he leaned to retrieve the wallet from her purse he got a better view of her bottom, which all in all was the best in his experience. His feelings were mixed but he was becoming tumescent. His general disgust for her didn’t seem to include his dick, which was an independent compass.
“Marion said you could easily start a religion with the world’s shortest man or the world’s tallest woman. She’s seven foot eight and Chinese.”
“Fuck Marion,” she squawked. “You can play with my ass if you want.”
“I’ll pass for now.”
He was nearly to the high school, shivering and feeling virtuous. His mind, such as it was, had been diverted. He didn’t want to go back into the restaurant and face the stares which, though after the fact, were a consideration.
Mona and the gentleman were already in a small office at a desk when a secretary showed him in.
“Hey Daddy. This is Mr. Schmidt.”
“Your daughter is top-notch!” Mr. Schmidt barked. “I’m sure we can make things easy for you financially.”
“She always was smart as a whip and cute as a button,” Sunderson said stupidly.
“I find her interest in both musicology and botany fascinating. What universities is she looking at?” Mona was sitting too close to Schmidt, which seemed to be making him uncomfortable in front of her putative father.
“I’ve checked out Harvard, Tufts, and Macalester on the Web. Also the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. The trouble is that a wadded Kleenex can look like a white rose and a white rose can look like a wadded Kleenex,” Mona said thoughtfully.
“Really?” Schmidt raised his eyebrows.
Sunderson was wondering about this tangent, feeling crummy possibly because he was crummy. The work at hand was to de-crummy himself.
“Make me an offer I can’t refuse. Ann Arbor is attractive because of all the music in the area. I’d like to meet my heroine Aretha Franklin in person. Music soothes the savage beast inside me.”
“Really?” Schmidt said again.
Afterward Mona took the rest of the afternoon off from school and they drove to the hotel so she could run in and pick up his coat and then they went to the New York Delicatessen down the street so he could order chicken soup and a massive corned beef sandwich. “Don’t trim the fat please.” Real life wasn’t exactly panning out and a very long nap was always a primary solution. He toted up the figure and realized that he had only been retired for thirty-three days.
“My parents are so worthless you wonder why they bothered having me,” Mona said plaintively, then dug into her sandwich with a grin.
“People don’t think far ahead.”
“Diane called me this morning. I’m sure you know they’re moving back up here from Florida because her husband wants to be treated by doctors he can trust.”
“I heard that. I’m not sure I can bear to see her.”
“Of course you can. She’s going to be my surrogate mother. I could use one.”
“Me too,” Sunderson laughed. He was tired of swimming in a cold swamp of ideologies hopelessly connected to money. He had never thought of Mona as a semidaughter like Diane did. When Mona’s mother was absent Diane had been extremely attentive to her, becoming a combination big sister and parent in absentia.
“I never made you your homemade birthday pizza. I’ll do it tonight.”
“Make it later,” he said, already drowsy from the soup and massive sandwich. Marion made his own corned beef in order to get the Jewish flavor he remembered from going to college in Chicago.
“I feel rejected that you don’t peek at me anymore.”
“You’ll have to get used to it. How can I get after King David for his penchant for underage girls if I’m peeking at you?”
“The Great Leader goes real young to catch them at the right formative time with his semen, the mightiest fluid in the world. That’s what Carla told me. I’m not really that young. I easily pass for eighteen.”
“That’s what I heard.” Sunderson ignored her comments wondering where the Great Leader got his semen theories.
Sunderson had a four-hour nap waking at eight, made fresh coffee, and smelled his stack of books. Why smell books? A habit. He waved from his kitchen window to Mona’s kitchen window where she and Marion were rolling dough and getting ready to assemble the pizzas. He was on page 37 of Deloria’s Playing Indian, feeling the usual dread. To Sunderson the Indians were the monstrous skeleton in the American closet. He always imagined stretching a white sheet across the United States and historically seeing all of the hundreds of locations where the Indian blood seeped through. At Michigan State he had felt nauseous when a professor had explained the Sand Creek Massacre. As the Russians said, consciousness can be a disease.
He impulsively called Carla and was surprised that she was in Los Angeles and sounding stoned.
“We left by private jet right after our lovely lunch. You didn’t eat your chili. We picked up Dwight and tomorrow we’re heading for Maui to discuss the movie and the future of our religion. Satisfied?”
“Not quite. I need to know how much he’s bilked out of his followers so far.”
“Don’t say bilked. They’ve freely given contributions. About four million but he spends money fast. I can’t wait to hit the beach.”
Chapter 15
At midnight he was sitting in his dark upstairs bedroom looking out at the snow falling softly and straight down under the streetlight, thinking of winter as a vast dormant god of sorts. He had been in bed a mere fifteen minutes or so when he began to weep. The weeping was unacceptable so he had gotten out of bed and gone downstairs to pour the nightcap he had forgotten which now sat on the windowsill reflecting the streetlight in an odd way as if the light were drowning in amber whiskey. He occasionally had wondered if his pillow was haunted though he readily admitted that the notion was goofy. It was his childhood pillow and Diane had teased him about how ratty and lumpy it was even in a fresh pillowcase. He suspected that he was weeping because his brain was melting into a kind of clarity that unnerved him. Since the divorce he had become quite lucid right down to the burying of his dog Walter which had felt like burying his marriage.