The evening had gone well until 10:30 when they finished Mona’s gorgeous pizzas and she had left with friends who picked her up for a dance.
He and Marion had been a bit melancholy after Mona’s departure as if a certain life force had left. Sunderson told him about the encounter with Carla and the preposterous ideology of semen. Marion guffawed and said that no religion could explain itself clearly. The need to feel ecstasy, the capacity to get out of ourselves was so great a need that we would buy the most ornately simpleminded beliefs. He said that Sunderson wouldn’t take in the idea until he gave up the concept of evidence that so pervaded his detective profession.
“It’s a hard habit to break,” Sunderson had said. “If only you could track gods in the snow. The Greeks and Romans tended to identify exact locations where the gods were thought to live.”
“Before I quit drinking, saloons were the home of my gods. They were the only place I felt good. Once on a Saturday in Iron Mountain I spent fourteen hours in a bar playing euchre and watching football. At closing time the bar owner told me that I had gone through two fifths of whiskey. That seemed too much even though I was a pretty big boy back then, which was in my midtwenties. I was a road man for a snowmobile company and driving, say, from Superior, Wisconsin, to Escanaba I’d stop at a dozen roadhouses as if they were chapels you’d stop at on a pilgrimage way back when.”
“Some of you skins would drink until just short of death and sometimes you made it all the way. Once on the way back from the Soo I got a call on my radio that a frozen Indian had been found near Rudyard. There was no evidence of foul play but the autopsy revealed blood alcohol of.44 which was a record. Dead Indians were always the toughest part of my job, probably a tinge of guilt like investigating a lynching down south.”
“There are many forms of Emmett Till. And maybe you folks would call Wounded Knee a still-open case a hundred and twenty years later.”
“Murder is never a closed case.”
When Marion left and he hurriedly cleaned up in the kitchen he remembered how much his dog had loved pizza crusts. This memory probably helped precipitate the weeping upstairs. Back at the window with his nightcap he watched Mona arrive home from the dance. If only she was ten years older but then she wasn’t. How fatuous. The fatality of time struck him suitably dumb. He had heard on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac on NPR how the famed German writer Goethe had fallen into a depression when at age seventy-three an eighteen-year-old girl had refused to marry him. There was evidence here that great writers could be the same variety of dickheads as ex-detectives. He slipped into a pleasant thought of a canyon near Aravaipa Creek he hadn’t had time to walk to the end of, only discovering it the last day. He had made his way fearfully down the sides where he had seen cattails at the bottom through his binoculars. There was a small spring with five species of birds he didn’t recognize flitting around. When he looked west where the canyon began in the mountains a few miles distant it was so enticing. Maybe he would go back someday and walk it out. Eureka, he thought, picking up his nightcap from the windowsill. He had never seen Au Sable Falls near Grand Marais in the winter. He would walk for a week. It had worked once, why not again? He had made real progress today on his case of the Great Leader what with getting Carla as a Judas spy. These pleasant thoughts, however temporary, put him into a tearless sleep.
He left at daylight, about 7:30, in a mild sweat from having uprooted so much junk in the rear of the garage to find his Bushwacker cross-country skis, relatively short and wide, to get through the trees in the woods. He only found one ski pole, which would be awkward but then the skis were only a substitute for conditions not suitable for snowshoes. While rummaging around and making a lot of noise he turned to see Mona watching from the open garage door. She was bundled up and when they embraced he smelled the incendiary odor, for him, of lilac from her hair damp from the shower. He was disappointed when his nuts clutched because he wanted his thoughts to be pure as the plenitude of fluffy snow not the product of the tub of guts that is the human body.
“Don’t go so far that you have trouble getting back,” she said, heading off for school at a walking pace that far exceeded his own. Diane’s comfortable pace had also been faster than his own. He recalled one of those PBS nature films that showed a huge shaggy-maned male lion pacing around slowly, almost lazily, protecting the territory while the females stalked and raced through the veldt snagging all of the food. When mating time came he couldn’t begin to catch them but had to wait for them to be ready and willing. Sunderson had always known that he wasn’t built for speed but a plodding steadiness. He was a tugboat not a Yankee Clipper.
On the way east on Route 28 along Lake Superior he turned off NPR in order to avoid the world’s plentiful bad news, and turned away from the state police building near the prison in order to enjoy the huge dark green Lake Superior where the swells from the storm were subsiding. Passing through Munising he had a sudden poignant memory of his mother’s best friend, their neighbor Mrs. Amarone, who had died in her fifties from breast cancer. She had taught his mother how to make a spaghetti sauce out of canned tomatoes and the local Italian sausage called cudighi. They had it every Saturday night and it was the family’s favorite meal. He would make the same sauce for camping trips with Diane, drenching a container of cooked pasta with olive oil so it wouldn’t stick. He and Diane would get out of work on a Friday summer afternoon, head out, and he would heat up the dish in a skillet over the campfire in the twilight. One summer they had camped a half dozen times near a small uninhabited lake, really a pond, near the west edge of the Kingston Plains between Melstrand and Grand Marais. The area wasn’t especially striking but they had counted at least a hundred sandhill cranes in the open field and if you were careful you could approach the young ones closely. On a warm evening they had listened to the raucous crane chorus and bathed nude in the pond. Diane had said, “We are naked apes,” and laughed. They made love without drying off, and drank a bottle of Barolo with dinner. She had always said the sauce with the pasta turned her on having grown up in a WASP family where the condiments tended to be limited to salt and pepper. They had made love again at first light when the cranes wakened them with their primitive yawp.
He pulled into the Township Park in Grand Marais and set off on his new snowshoes west down the shores of Lake Superior on the fairly hard-packed snow, stopping to stare at the latticed ice on the rocks at the water’s edge and the thirty-story precipitously high dunes in their light caramel color. He felt strangely blessed because the air was still and the mist was lifting off the lake, revealing blue water which had been greenish in Marquette and which he immediately gave up trying to figure out. He reached the mouth of the creek in a little more than an hour and headed up the trail along the creek floundering in the deep soft snow. Now the world was all blackish trees and white snow and it was much cooler in the shade of the deep gulley. He was sweating hard when he reached the waterfall and was amazed at the delight the thunderous falling water brought to his mind. He had always been aware how brutish his aesthetic sense was compared to his wife’s but at times rose to the occasion. He had admitted to her that when she played a certain Villa-Lobos composition on the stereo his skin invariably prickled.