Sunderson watched the fire die. He shivered and anticipated the soup Mona said she would make out of venison shanks and neck plus barley and his favorite vegetable, rutabaga. Sunderson didn’t realize that he had been a good detective because he was utterly ordinary like a root vegetable. He didn’t separate himself from others like the Romantic hero, writers, painters, famed athletes. He made warm eye contact and spoke slowly in the grungy local accent. “Let’s have a brewsky, hey?” People were disarmed and told him everything. His day job had been total consciousness.
Chapter 18
Winter passed quickly. He hit a long stretch of the best aspect of retirement which was freedom, the texture of which he had never totally experienced since before the age of twelve when he had begun working. He studied maps over breakfast and when he arrived at various destinations the only significant decision was whether to use cross-country skis, snowshoes, or whether there were solid enough snowmobile trails to go on foot. He had an upsetting pratfall with Roxie one evening when he couldn’t get it up, rarely a problem. The throbbing, warm clothes dryer didn’t work and she was chewing and snapping Dentyne the odor of which he never cared for. She wept and lapsed into bad grammar. “I don’t turn you on no more.”
And the novel Lolita was nearly unreadable what with the hero Humbert Humbert being a perverted nitwit bapping a thirteen-year-old girl and covering up his crime with layers of intricate thought and language. Marion counseled him on this problem.
“Fucking is fucking but what adds a good measure is the aesthetic backdrop. There are a dozen reasons for his criminal lust but they are inseparably intertwined. Remember what you said after talking to that drug cartel guy in Nogales, about sex, religion, and money being knotted together and impenetrable like the structure of a bowling ball? Desire is like that and the cues are subtle and infinite.”
Sunderson mentally backpedaled when he recalled making love to a slumming sorority girl he had met in a boring but required sociology class. He had bought sandwiches and a six-pack and they took a long car ride. It was early June and they had made love in a foot-high wheat field near a creek out near Fowlerville. It was her idea and they had never made love again but this one occasion was lunar. When they had finally risen it looked as if deer had bedded in the wheat.
He had become obsessed with Deloria’s Playing Indian until he had to put it away for a while. And Mona required time. Her mother had made a horrid three-day visit and her father had the dealership deliver a compact Honda which Mona had left in the drive until it was covered with four feet of snow. She had also begun dating a freshman from Northern Michigan University, a diminutive but bright physics major from Newberry. Sunderson was embarrassed over his vague jealousy when he detected they were sleeping together. During a brief thaw he had grilled steaks for himself and Mona and described to her a peculiar case near Detroit where a boy barely over eighteen had made love to a girl barely under eighteen and had been prosecuted for statutory rape.
“Hey, fuck you fucking hypocrites. You’d love to lock up Romeo and Juliet,” she exploded.
It took a full half hour to calm her down decisively. She ate with her hands and chewed at her rib steak angrily. He reflected how intolerant the young are of adult ironies and that a compendium of our sexual laws might exceed the size of the Chicago phone book. The effort to keep us from maiming each other often goes awry. The mating schedule of dogs and cattle seemed more reasonable and depended on a biological alarm that only rang once or twice a year. Humans were cursed with the sexual persistence of mice.
Chapter 19
Sunderson kept a terse journal of the season, a “winter count” in native terms, biding his time until he could drive to Arizona in April and track the departure of the cult from Tucson to Nebraska.
He had a close call near Grand Marais while heading the few miles down the beach to revisit the dunes and Au Sable Falls. He should have known better on the bright sunny afternoon that he might not beat the massive black front coming from the northwest toward town. He didn’t and the fifty-knot winds and driving snow made him fearful. Luckily he could hear the harbor foghorn above the wind and there was a jumble of ice near the shore so when his way was blocked by ice piles he bore to the right. There were frozen tears of pleasure when he reached the township park and could see the lights of the tavern. Driving home was plainly impossible so he checked into a motel and headed to the bar questioning what he loved about his bedraggled landscape aside from its carpet of forest and clearings, the rivers, creeks, swamps, countless beaver ponds, and the terrain, occasionally rolling and hilly but mostly flattish in western terms. It had been entirely cut over by the timber barons except for a few minimal shreds of land, and after that pulped relentlessly of its second, third, and fourth growth for the paper mills, and mined to exhaustion of its iron and copper. Maybe it was the hundreds of miles of Lake Superior shoreline, much of it undisturbed, that saved the area, or even the Lake Michigan coast to the south, more pleasant, much less ominous than Superior so that even the people a hundred miles to the south were gentler and less cranky. He also thought his love for the area rose from the indefatigable creature life, his beloved trout and the thousands of bear, deer, otter, wolves, beaver, and other creatures, even loving the ugly and slow porcupine, the millions of birds and wildflowers. It was so good to live in a place largely ignored by the rest of the world.
Chapter 20
He rather liked the idea that he was leaving for Arizona on April Fool’s Day, a Saturday. He had hoped to leave at dawn but Mona who had come over to make him a cheese omelet and fried spuds had become clingy, a homely little word but au point. She was in her robe, pj’s, and bunny slippers at the stove sniffling a bit and he thought goddamn the lame parents who abandon their children. One generation teaches the next to behave poorly ad infinitum. It all made him recall Dickens’s Bleak House, which he had read in college and which made him feel like he was trapped in a dentist office every time he picked it up. Given how Sunderson had grown up with empathy for the poor it was not a far reach. His mother was always making truly poor families mountainous casseroles and his dad would deliver a couple of cords of split hardwood to keep them warm.
While eating breakfast his emotions were in his throat so he looked at topographical maps of the Chadron and Crawford area in Nebraska that Mona had ordered for him with the cult’s one hundred sixty acres north of Crawford highlighted in pink. Mona pretended to be reading a book about the human genome but he had noted during the half-hour breakfast that she hadn’t turned a page. They had embraced at the front door with his hands around her waist through her open robe encircling her flannel pajamas. He was startled when her body appeared to be humming.
“Come back to me. Don’t die,” was all that she said and he was well west of town before the lump in his throat began to disappear. Why wasn’t she a sensible age like forty-five? Time herself was askew on this spawned-out earth.
The little good-bye supper the evening before had been confusing. Marion’s wife Sonia had brought over the same Mexican dish, carne adovada, that Melissa had made in Nogales and Sunderson was goofy enough to wonder if this coincidence was a good or bad omen. Sonia was always pissed off in her life’s work of defending Indian interests but this evening she concentrated her angry energies on Dwight and the cult. Marion had idly mentioned the Jim Jones massacre in South America and Sonia tore off like an ICBM on the evils of a religion that could con over nine hundred people into cyanide suicide. Marion and Sunderson had tried to slow her down by raising the point that Dwight aka King David hadn’t been very successful, never managing more than a hundred followers. This didn’t work but then Sunderson knew the secret through Marion that Sonia had been misused as a girl by an uncle. Sonia drank her wine in gulps and shrieked that since Dwight would be arriving in Lakota country she hoped they would “scalp the motherfucker.” Mona, meanwhile, had been unusually quiet struggling with the melancholy of Sunderson’s leave-taking so that when they kissed good night she didn’t try to put any hip into it but had looked at him so somberly that he had doubled up on his nightcap when she left. The extra whiskey had a negative effect when he reached bed as his mind kept bringing up the old photos of the bloated bodies of Jonestown with the deliquescent flesh bursting against the confinement of the clothing.