Time was misarranged, a quirky idea but unavoidable. If the timing had been right Diane would likely have been able to save Bobby in his heroin narcosis but toward his last years he wouldn’t come home or see anyone except Roberta. Sunderson had driven himself into a depression investigating heroin, even snorted a dose, but only came up with the idea that the drug worked for those who want to feel nothing. A blank page. Zero. The emotions were all cessations of emotion. Life became white on white paper. There was an intriguing notion that life became photographs and for once all horrors were at safe removal, totally immovable and at rest. But then parts of the photograph began to move and you needed more of the drug and finally you wiped reality clean.
At the very top there was a mound with a flat space where he collapsed and slept for an hour waking sore but refreshed with the unnerving perception that he could see nothing but sky. This was an odd experience as waking always offered peripheral objects such as a pillow’s edge, a night table, a door, a wall. He wasn’t dead because the clouds were moving and there was a huge front far to the south moving from southwest to northwest that he hoped wouldn’t push his way. He had no idea what time it was because he had left his cell phone with its clock back in the room with the pint of whiskey. He smiled at the idea that what he was doing was a vague parody of what Marion described as an Anishinabe or Chippewa power vision where you spent three days and nights on a hill without food, water, or shelter waiting for vision. The possible grandeur of such an experience was alien to him. He had always refused the sophomoric notion that life was a process of settling for less in favor of the idea that sometimes life was good, sometimes bad. He mildly teared thinking how much Diane would have liked it up here.
He had to sit down because his legs trembled with exhaustion so that even seated they jerked and flopped. “How could she have saved Bobby when she couldn’t save me” was the question that gagged his mind. Halfway through the marriage Diane had tried to convince him to quit and get a graduate degree in history. Her best friend at the time was the wife of the superintendent of schools so it wouldn’t be hard to get him a high school teaching job. The trouble with this idea, and it was hard to admit it to himself, was that in twenty years of cop work he had become a bit of an adrenaline junkie. A classroom smelling of chalk dust and the Spanish rice wafting up from the lunchroom and possibly the ozone odor of sloth emerging from the skulls of students was a poor substitute for playing Lone Ranger in a souped-up Crown Victoria chasing a perp on a log trail through the woods throwing out a rooster tail of mud, or taking a photo of the son of an obnoxious politician making a cocaine buy outside a bar. This wasn’t the kind of thing you could explain to Diane simply because she was a hundred percent grown up. Her ducks were in a row, as they say, and she was a genuine public servant.
Turning this way and that he had a clear view of the four directions: east toward Chadron and far away home, far south toward the ominous roiling storm, west toward Fort Robinson and the murder of Crazy Horse, and north where the Lakota had been driven and resettled for the third time in a short period simply because we wanted the land. He made out the speck of Adam’s trailer in the distance and was a little consoled that you couldn’t kill a people unless you killed all of them. The exception of reading Deloria’s Playing Indian was tolerable because it was a clinical study of the absurd ways we tried to adopt customs of the people we had attempted and failed to turn into permanent ghosts.
He had read the histories of the main Indian tribes before he took a course in Greek myth and history so that he tended toward the error of seeing the Greeks in American Indian terms. No groups could be less similar than the Greeks and the Hopis and a twenty-year-old student brain became goofy trying to force them to cohere. His favorite professor had advised him to back away and gave him a monograph with limited conclusions on how one year the United States government failed to give the Lakota their food allotment. Some ate their horses and survived but others refused and starved. The professor’s point is that you can’t draw large conclusions unless you can draw small, accurate conclusions. Sunderson was unsure as he had noted that academics were forever carping about large-scale brilliant writers like Bernard De Voto in favor of their own minimal conclusions about the Westward Movement.
He was pleased when his legs stopped trembling, which put him in mind of all of the variations of his own hubris. His daffy Uncle Albert, his dad’s oldest brother, made it through World War II poorly, losing a dozen friends at Normandy and was over the hill far enough that he survived on half-disability. He was married for years to an Ojibway woman way up in Mooseknee on Hudson’s Bay but she drowned while fishing and Albert moved back close to home over north of Shingleton and east of Munising. Albert was plainly odd, walking in the woods and chanting nonsense and fishing. It was he who got Sunderson started on his lifelong brook trout obsession, a beautiful fish indeed and also delicious. Sunderson and his father would take a casserole to Albert on Sunday or Albert would drive his old Model A crusted with swallow shit from sitting in a barn near Trenary for twenty years. Albert would pick Sunderson up at dawn and they would be off for the day exploring creeks with a bag of sandwiches. The damage was done by a ditty Albert sang incessantly in mocking tones, “Just make the world a better place.” The trouble was that at age seven Sunderson took these words seriously from his insane hero and never questioned his abilities. Of course he could climb Crow Butte at age sixty-five. Of course he would make the world a better place. Of course he had to destroy the Great Leader to save the innocent, both children and adults. The worst criminals were those who took advantage of weakness through greed, lust, and religion. The fact that many of the cult members were college graduates stymied him. The fact that someone could get an A in biology at University of Michigan and not understand their own biology left him quite muddy. Dwight was beating the child because it was a child.
But how about retirement? How about letting the mind rest? How about moving over toward L’Anse or Iron Mountain and escaping the scenes of crimes, his own and others. At least Mona was becoming part of his own extended family and disappearing as a sexual being. She was the only example he could think of that showed self-control. You could think it through all you want and you’re still going to get a hard-on over the wrong person and human peace is blown away. At least a tinge of incest made it taboo. Quitting drinking was out of the question. His cop mind needed a constant supply of adrenaline.
Just before dark he cooked his steak over a small fire of pine, never done in his homeland because the meat would taste like pine resin. His dad used to say, “A Saltine is a feast to a starving man,” but the crackers and cheese were nearly impossible because his mouth couldn’t raise enough spittle to effectively chew them. He coughed over and over and a small group of crows that had been hanging around since his arrival scolded him. The tough steak was better because it had some juice and despite the fact that the pine flavor and lack of salt would normally make it intolerable. After this supper and one of the best cigarettes of his life he took his leftovers thirty yards down the slope, returned to his perch, then watched the crows haggle over the food. They were survivors.
Curiously, rather than thinking through the case of the Great Leader, he could think of nothing, not even Diane or his long life. His mind was full of only the grandeur of where he was as if he was trout fishing in the sky. His muddled brain couldn’t begin to compete with the rising three-quarter moon and the immense thunderstorm far to the south.
He tried to fall asleep too early without success and felt he’d pay a thousand bucks for a few aspirin. He got up and walked in circles and tried to stretch out his lumpy muscles. He kept being revisited by the image of time going out the door but never back in. Where did this come from, this huge wooden door? The image arrived because it was true. It wasn’t an abstraction. The neurons made a painting of his anguish. It was the nursery rhyme where all of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men couldn’t put their marriage back together again. Diane’s face was a dozen miles south near the actual storm and the upcoming storm of her new husband’s death. Twenty years before they were visiting her parents near Ludington and went for dinner and dancing at a restaurant on the shores of Lake Michigan. They danced at least an hour to a rather schmaltzy Glenn Miller orchestra but loved it. Diane wouldn’t make love in her parents’ home so they stopped at a motel when they left the restaurant. It was a sublime night and the memory of it made him think his head would burst with tears. It was he who caused their marriage to stop dancing. Now his only fallback position with Diane and Mona was to become a perfect gentleman. After a single beer crazy Uncle Albert would walk in tight circles moaning and after a bender had to be confined in the VA for the last three years of his moaning life. When he was growing up everyone local remarked on Sunderson’s father’s good manners, now called for in his son’s life.