by Jim Harrison
He did not want to change that much. He was comfortable like most of us in his sloppiness except he didn’t want to be drunk anymore. He was tired of being drunk in the evening at his kitchen table with tears in his old retired eyes over his lost wife.
Marion showed up very muddy after two hours with a nice creel full of brook trout for dinner. He was proud to have stalked and caught a big one, about two pounds, nearly a trophy for a brook trout, and a few smallish others, enough for lunch. Sunderson was mildly jealous but there was no way his cripple body could reach the beaver pond in the center of the swamp. Sunderson faltered and Marion carried him piggyback. He was always surprised by Marion’s massive strength, which Marion explained by describing a long youth spent as a farm laborer often for twenty-five cents an hour. Indian kids were cheap he said because they were so poor. He spent most of what he made on food because his family had so little, his father gone long ago. He told Sunderson now how proud he was to one day have brought home to his mother a big beef roast from the butcher. His brothers and sisters were delighted with everyone sitting in the kitchen watching TV while the roast cooked with a delicious odor. Once for Christmas dinner they had eaten three roast chickens that Marion had bought live from a farmer and killed. He and his mother plucked them outside on a snowy day laughing at the cold.
His little sister Susan had been in prison ten years for shooting a man who had raped her but Marion felt there was a chance of getting her out this year.
They napped after lunch then drove a few miles to a bigger stream that also had rainbows and brook trout. Sunderson immediately caught a nice brown trout of about two pounds, less impressive than a brookie but it put him in a glowing mood with his actual life left well behind. He slipped the beautiful wildly colored fish back into the current. Brown trout weren’t nearly as good to eat as brook trout. Maybe he could catch him here next year when he gained a pound. A thought that goes with all released fish.
Chapter 4
Sunderson was roasting a chicken for lunch six months later in January when he was startled to hear a car. He went to the window then quickly bundled into a coat and went out on the porch. It was Diane and she was crying. She whispered through her tears that she had gotten an email and then a phone call from Mona in Paris. She was sick with hepatitis, the boyfriend had abandoned her in a hotel, and she wanted to come home.
“I’ll go get her,” he said.
“Are you well enough?” she wondered.
“It doesn’t take much to ride on an airplane,” he said. In fact his back was aching and he dreaded the idea but Diane was the manager of the hospital, it was a busy time of year, and she couldn’t get away. He was counting on an extra pill to take care of the pain. The reservations were for tomorrow morning fairly early and Diane had gotten money in anticipation. She also got him a reservation for a night in Mona’s hotel before leaving the next day.
Diane drove him to the airport in the morning saying he smelled like a distillery. He didn’t reply but he had had more than a touch of whiskey the night before. He had been full of anxiety over going to a foreign country without a word of their language. He reminded himself that lots of people do it but that didn’t help much.
He flew via Chicago and felt nervous and out of place in the fancy Air France lounge. In consideration of his bad back Diane had bought him a business class ticket for the spacious seats. When he looked closely at the ticket he had been appalled at the price. In the lounge he limited himself to a single Bloody Mary in penance for the night before. He asked the bartender to go a little heavy on the vodka as a precaution, a steady drinker’s trick. It was a dark dull day and he had hoped for a weather cancellation due to ice or snow but no such luck.
He had been brooding about the word “hepatitis” in connection with Mona. The disease was common among heroin users with dirty needles and he kept thinking of the death of his beloved brother through heroin in Detroit. His brooding circled back to Mona’s boyfriend because musicians were big users of heroin.
On the plane he was diverted by what he thought was a pretty good dinner, washed down by several glasses of wine, and the fact that he was surrounded in his seat by French people. This was good as he didn’t want to talk to anyone and he also liked the sound of the French language. He became a child who understood nothing. They drank a fair amount of wine but less than he did. He had never been successful at sleeping on long flights so he was pleased to cover himself with a blanket, push the seat well back, and sleep until nearly morning when they were only two hours out of de Gaulle.
He was deeply intimidated by customs and showed his badge with his passport but it went smoothly. He caught a cab and had time to dread seeing Mona. Their conversation in New York had been discouraging. She was staying in a pretty little hotel near the Théâtre Odéon on the Left Bank. A desk clerk showed him to a room next to Mona’s on the fifth floor. It had a wonderful balcony on which he intended to smoke and drink. He slipped his revolver from his luggage into his shoulder holster. Handguns were strictly forbidden in France but he did not intend to be unprepared as he had been in New York. He felt icy cold when he knocked on Mona’s door. He heard a wispy Qui est là and correctly answered “Dad, from America” and she opened the door. She looked thin, sallow, slightly fatigued in a dark nightgown. They embraced and collapsed backward on the bed. He held her while she cried and mumbled. Her boyfriend paid for the room for a month but abandoned her. He wanted her to help him seduce the young French girls who followed the band. She did it once but was hurt and disgusted. They separated. She became ill after using drugs. He found her a doctor and that was that. He was having a good time and she became disposable.
Dizzy with jet lag Sunderson fell asleep and when he awoke she had his penis out and was sucking it. He tried to withdraw and she suddenly sat on it. He was trapped he thought. “I want someone to want me not a fucking twelve-year-old,” she said, grinding away. He had his hands on her buttocks but his back was too weak to lift her off. Shame nearly overwhelmed him. Finally he came off with a mighty groan but she continued. Afterward they slept for a while then she led him down to Café de Flore for a snack. He admitted to himself that his guilt intensified the pleasure. The ham and salad were delicious. She slowly ate a bowl of onion soup while he had some glasses of Brouilly. She looked better now, more alive. He hastily got up and went to talk to two cops standing out in front. She watched him show his identification and they talked animatedly. One cop wrote in a notepad and they left in a hurry. They agreed not to make love again and he felt the heat and sweat gather in his face. They took a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. The gravel paths were free of ice and the day was bright. They held hands on a bench near the fountain and she confessed that she felt stupid. She wanted to get well and go back to college. He said that was certainly possible. Sparrows chased each other around the fountain. Sunderson pictured how lively it must be in the summer and wondered why America didn’t create such pleasures.
Back in the room they decided it was a “French thing” that would certainly go away back in America. Sunderson was mystified by his painful vigor. He must have been saving up, he thought. He remembered his vow to limit the amount of messiness in his life and worried about the chance of catching hepatitis from her.
At the Charles de Gaulle he was delighted when Mona translated an article from the newspaper about an “American rock star” being caught in a hotel room with two nude twelve-year-olds and an eleven-year-old. He would be able to get bail but would have to surrender his passport. The paper went on to discuss the seriousness of the charges that would merit fifty years in prison. It was now an international charge and if he made it back to the United States he would have to serve the time there. There was currently through the United Nations an effort to fight sexual predators throughout the world including the men who traveled to Southeast Asia to sexually abuse children there. “He’s in deep shit,” Mona said. “His mother won’t be able to ge
t him out of this one with all her money.” Sunderson kept thinking that it was the seemingly harmless mother who was responsible for his wretched back. He was however pleased that he had tipped off the French police to Mona’s rock drummer. That took care of him for a long time. The little girls had told the police that he had given them heroin which increased the charges.
When they made it back on the long ride to Marquette Mona was put in the hospital immediately with her hepatitis and Sunderson took three days to regather his back strength. He was put in elaborate traction which was terribly uncomfortable but solved his back pain without medication. He was less dopey but still terribly guilty about his sexual behavior. The guilt swirled through his mind and increased when he saw Diane. He and Diane had adopted Mona, so how could he have committed this crime? Marquette brought him back to the unpleasant earth. His guilt was all the more repellent because there was nothing to do about it. There was also the additional niggling foul thought about how wonderful it had been. It occurred to him it was his all-time record for sloppy behavior. What do you do when you wake up and a beautiful woman is blowing you? Run for it? Get out of there! He mourned for the simple time when Mona was only the girl next door he watched through his secret library peek hole. He had always been a bit ashamed of himself about this but not to the point it stopped him even though he had arrested window peepers on occasion.
After he got out of traction he needed several days of hard rest to get his wretched back workable and then he took to the woods like a madman every day from dawn to dark. He was fairly safe from Mona while tramping around but invariably each day several times he’d be stopped in his tracks streamside to mull over his guilt, churning his stomach and dizzying his brain.
One early evening just as he returned and poured a sturdy drink Diane stopped by with a roast beef she had cooked with some potatoes and onions. Sunderson was suddenly tearful and confessed he had made love to Mona in Paris. “That’s disgusting. You’re quite the father,” she said coldly. “She likely seduced you which couldn’t be hard. She was angry over losing her lover to kids.” She stopped and stared at him in contempt. “You may not have started it,” she added, “but you truly are a sucker, letting a sick girl twist you this way and that.” She handed him a tissue to wipe his tears then walked out without looking back.
Sunderson felt better as he ate his dinner, the questionable relief of confession. This is not to say that he didn’t also feel stupid but there was a sense that he could also breathe freely again. He reminded himself errantly that he intended to read the New Testament again to see if he still believed any of the stuff from his childhood churchgoing. There had been an unpleasant reminder early that morning when he had pulled the book in his library to watch his neighbor’s wife doing some yoga in her nightie and got a clear view of her nude butt reared up in posture. He gasped from the strength of his lust. She seemed to look at him and he wondered if she had caught on. He thought of masturbation but look what his peeking had got him.
Almost comically he began with his last bite of dinner to think of spiritual life. He certainly wasn’t sure what it was except in a literary sense. It was the one thing Marion wouldn’t talk about. He claimed that the spiritual life gained power by being kept secret. Once they were having a roaring political argument while having lunch at Marion’s cabin when Marion had suddenly stopped and laughed. He wouldn’t continue to Sunderson’s disappointment who was enjoying himself. Marion said, “Nothing but child abuse is more disgusting than the U.S. Congress. Just now I remembered I was having a nice lunch in the middle of a galaxy. Each night before bed I step out and look at the stars. It’s good for humility. If it’s cloudy I have a childish faith that they are still there so it doesn’t matter that it’s cloudy.” That was as close as Marion had ever come to saying something spiritual. That afternoon while hiking Sunderson remembered what Marion had said about being in the middle of a galaxy. He was an earthbound man and if he had any spiritual life it came from close observation of the natural world. The stars were beyond him. Diane had a nice telescope but he almost never looked through it. Once he had looked at the full moon and it frankly scared him. How can this be, he wondered. The mystery in his life came from water. In school they had clumsily just said H2O, but from early on Sunderson had been hypnotized by creeks, rivers, lakes, though it was mostly moving water that mystified him. He was openly frightened by Lake Superior which had killed men in his family who had been commercial fishermen. Even on a placid summer day Lake Superior seemed endlessly ominous. Maybe it was the moving water being frozen that made him so restless over Mona.
Chapter 5
That spring Sunderson found himself an inexpensive cabin on a small lake two counties to the west in the area that the Great Leader, a cult leader that Sunderson had investigated, had had his headquarters and longhouse. Marion deeply disapproved saying the area had too much bad blood. Two game wardens had been killed there in the past twenty years, there were many marijuana plantations, and there were quarreling families, all marksmen who were given to shooting at each other, not to kill but the bullet landing close enough to be an effective warning. Marion even told him the middle school had had problems with sixth graders carrying pistols. There had been a nonfatal shoot-out in the school yard between children of opposing families. With all of the mass shootings in the news everyone thought the situation was bound to escalate but there wasn’t anything obvious to cure the situation. The reason the cabin was so cheap was that the owner from Iron Mountain was eager to get away from the unpleasant surroundings. Sunderson was not dissuaded because he wanted very much to fish the area and the price was right, about thirty thousand, which would leave him some to spare from the blackmail money, plus as a local he had always been able to get along with backcountry people. In all his years with the state police he had always been known as a peacemaker. The significant thing to Sunderson was that the bullets always missed because prison was dreaded, the loss of freedom the most fearsome thing in life.
Sunderson had decided to look for a cabin after a week when he had visited Mona in the hospital twice at her request, before she moved to drug rehab. This was nerve-racking to him but seemed not to bother her at all. She was looking much healthier than in France in her little white hospital nightie. She got out of bed for the toilet and purposely gave him a little flash of her bare ass which made him almost nauseous with desire. Diane remarked at a restaurant dinner that Mona would always use her sex as a weapon. Sunderson choked on his food and Diane laughed bitterly. It was time to get out of town.
So Sunderson bought the cabin and felt strong and independent. On his second day there when it was finally warm enough to go he was cleaning up, taking down some stupid beer company decals and joke posters of immense fish, when he noticed a pickup at the end of his drive and a tall man in his thirties standing beside it. There was a rifle in the back window gun rack, technically illegal in Michigan but not much enforced.
Sunderson walked out to greet the man, who was sullen and withdrawn, finally saying, “Wood, two cords, thirty bucks.” Sunderson asked him to unload the pickup near the front door but the man started to pitch the wood right where he was parked. Sunderson said nothing figuring the man might be deaf or retarded. Besides he was getting flabby after his injury and hauling the wood shouldn’t hurt his back. On the way back to the house he stopped when he thought he saw movement to the west of the far corner of the property. A hunter’s penchant is to look long. A deer or a human? He felt a shiver when he thought of the local tendency to shoot. Had he made another sloppy decision? He dropped the thought when he stared at the beauty of the cabin. He would play his cards close to the chest and mind his own business. He was here to fish and relax.
Inside he called the previous owner for the lowdown. The man was voluble about fishing then cooled down a bit on the problematical neighbors. “I didn’t sell because they spooked me. My daughters are living in Montana. My wife wanted to move there to be clo
se to the grandchildren. My great-grandfather built the cabin in the 1890s. Later on members of the Ames family bought several miles of land between the cabin and the village. The family were distant relatives of the Ames who invented and manufactured the shovel in nearly every household. There were many problems including grazing their cows on State Forest land. They split the land into three sections with more than six hundred acres per family. The families never stopped quarreling and their behavior became more cantankerous. There was an early unexplained death, a dog was shot for tailing cows, tearing the tail off. They were all NRA marksmen and took to shooting at each other, not to kill but landing the bullets close, sort of a coup-counting shooting. Got you! Anyway you’re better off avoiding them totally, don’t even talk to them.” Sunderson mentioned the wood. “That’s Ike. He’s been brain damaged and was shell shocked in the Gulf, his legs severely burned. He’s a harmless sneak but he’s got good wood.” Sunderson agreed, relieved that he had made the call. “The main worry is that the families will get totally out of control. They’re near it. Avoid them.”
Sunderson was appalled but pleased to have made the call. He intended to also check it out with several policemen he had known in the area years ago. He could check the names with his old secretary in Marquette. Meanwhile he decided to drive into the village for a drink at the tavern he had seen there. In a nod to sobriety he hadn’t brought any liquor with him but now he felt his body needed a drink.
The day was too bright and clear for fishing until late in the afternoon. Meanwhile he’d spend his time getting the cabin in shape and heat up the pasty he had bought when leaving Marquette early that morning amid disturbing religious thoughts. Marion had been talking about the evolutionary nature of religion according to a social scientist that such items as the Ten Commandments and Seven Deadly Sins in the Judeo-Christian tradition had evolved to keep the human race in check, to ensure good behavior and prevent self-destruction. The Muslims had proscribed alcohol and pork which historically were a notorious cause of disease in hot climates. Politicians even learned from religions. For instance the Gin Tax in England was necessary because gin was too cheap and people were drinking too much to go to work. Raise the price and people drank less. Adultery is generally destructive in a society so forbid it. Anyone with a dull eye for the financial markets could see the horror of greed. Sunderson in a somewhat Marxian drift took the thinking into the economic arena: people must be good boys and girls for economic balance.