by Jim Harrison
Diane had made his favorite pot roast, a beef chuck cooked slowly with potatoes, onions and red wine to which she had added rutabaga out of habit, a U.P. peasant food sturdy enough to grow in the wretched climate. Sunderson would tease her about her lack of peasant roots and she resented this so in went the rutabaga whenever possible. In fact, Diane disliked rutabaga but he and Mona loved it.
Marion had said on the phone that Diane seemed to have a lot of suitors. This was highly irritating to Sunderson who knew it was related to the rumor that Diane had private money, exciting to any bachelor who wanted to be supported. At dinner Sunderson told Mona that she could slow down on her Ames research and she repeated an ancient rumor obviously nerve-racking to Sunderson that early on in Kentucky Simon Sr. had fathered a child with his oldest daughter. He was prosecuted for this but the daughter went mad and couldn’t testify. Simon celebrated, then a local took a shot at him which winged his shoulder. Simon was all outraged innocence though most people stopped talking to him. He simply could not take his crime seriously though the daughter never recovered.
Sunderson continued to have premonitions through the largely happy dinner. Mona was up from University of Michigan where she was studying art history and musicology. Sunderson stupidly asked her what kind of job that would get her. She pertly replied that she planned on living in France on his retirement money going to museums and classical music concerts. She wanted to hear a famous organ down in Aix-en-Provence. Sunderson felt chastened by her answer. They talked late and when he got back to his house he noted that a raw chicken he had forgotten to put in the freezer was stinking and bluish. He threw it in the backyard hoping a stray dog would eat it. If he had put it in the garbage the whole kitchen would have stunk in the morning. He put an open box of baking soda in the fridge which Diane said consumed odors. The phone rang and he was tempted not to answer it but then it might be Marion. It was Monica who said that Tom had died that morning in the hospital from poisoning. The police said no one had visited him. The authorities refused to announce the murder for a while until the local police could get the state police up to speed. Sunderson remembered that Tom’s room was on the ground floor and that next to the large open window there was a blooming lilac bush, always a treat after winter. Anyone could have entered that way. Sunderson was embarrassed that he smiled about the murder but then he had valued Lily highly. He had glanced at Tom’s X-rays when he had visited and noted the femurs blasted to shreds by the AK-47 and thought it would be difficult to learn to walk again but now the asshole was dead, and he was sure meek Lemuel wasn’t the only person who’d wanted him gone. Any agile person could have crept in concealed by the lilacs and shoved some cyanide in his mouth.
When he drove to the cabin the next afternoon after spending Saturday morning with Marion he took along a cooler of fresh meat for his stay, including a big roasting chicken. He was still pleased that Tom was dead and something, presumably a dog, had run off with the stinking chicken in the backyard, two events of equal value in his mind. Rotten Tom, rotten chicken. His name would be on the register at the hospital and a cop visit was to be expected.
Marion was in fine fettle after fishing with the mosquitoes early in the morning. He cooked half a dozen brook trout for lunch with homemade bread and butter. His wife wouldn’t eat brook trout being Apache who he knew didn’t eat fish at all, but in their area they weren’t in large supply. The Great Lakes tribes were lucky. If deer were scarce you could eat five pounds of fish for dinner.
Marion did not share his curiosity about the Ameses. He said that in his reading every state seemed to have a couple of such families. Marion also explained that he grew up on a reservation full of malcontents so it was a family that behaved well that had his curiosity. Sunderson couldn’t argue with this it was so novel. Marion said that such people always seem to end with a virtual explosion and thought Tom’s death might be the first of many.
Chapter 8
The next was Levi. No one thought anything of not seeing Levi because he often spent the whole day drinking in his room or out in the box stall in the barn with Ralph the aging gelding draft horse, an immense but absurdly friendly animal who enjoyed Levi’s drunken company. Levi was found on the floor of the box stall by one of Bert’s irascible twin sons. Their mother had given up on the hyperactive and uncontrollable twins who often injured themselves. Simon hated medical expenses thinking that everyone should suffer in silence. He claimed to be keeping track of the expenses and the twins would have to pay up when they became adults.
So there Levi was on the box stall floor among the horse turds deader than a doornail, as they say. The county coroner said it was a clear case of poisoning with traces of cyanide in the half gallon of vodka which he had barely started before the poison took effect. Monica looked down at him without pity thinking that the horse was the only one who liked Levi. His wife certainly didn’t.
Naturally with three down recently paranoia arose in the family at large. Two dead had dug quite a hole in the daily familiarity and no one had taken over all the work Tom had done with the cattle. This was a danger to the general livelihood. No one was totally above suspicion except each to themselves. The idea of a second family murder got the state police interested without results. Some in the family suspected that one of the wives was guilty and they were treated even worse than usual. There was something feminine about poisoning compared to a club or gun.
Sunderson spent a long time thinking about the crime and came up with John for no solid reason other than he was the most decent of the males, a sort of reverse logic wherein the most unlikely seems most likely. Others thought of Levi’s widow Sara who seemed to hate everything and everybody to do with the Ames family. Having been deprived of sexuality by her drunken husband she had an open affair with Tom when he was still in his teens. Levi never noticed. Tom screwed Sara and moved on to raping Lily, but the rape alone was worth his eventual execution not to speak of Lily’s murder. Sad that someone can’t be executed twice.
He fished farther downstream than ever before, well into the Ames property. Their water wasn’t as fine as his own, being too straight and monochromatic to be good trout habitat, though he caught a couple of good browns in deep pools. The ancient ancestor of the owner he’d bought from had picked the best water but then he was first by five decades. Sunderson was just getting out of the water to walk back home when something unbelievable caught his eye. Lodged in a small jam faceup was the body of one of Bert’s twins, a big vigorous boy in his teens, so freshly drowned that he looked like he could be alive. Sunderson did a quick furtive examination rolling the boy over because his eyes were open. As a longtime detective Sunderson knew it was his responsibility to report the death but he wasn’t up to it. Suddenly he was cold and walked the two miles home shivering ignoring a playful rifle shot that hit near his feet. When he got home Monica was there with a batch of good chili. He was paying extra for meals but loved the lack of bother. When tired from fishing you didn’t want to spend an hour at the stove. He didn’t want to but told Monica about the body of her younger brother. She winced but didn’t seem to care. “Half brother. He was a horrible person. Dad made him that way,” she said, “and that crazy woman he took up with after Mom. I’ll tell the others.” Sunderson gave her exact directions and let her use his phone. He was relieved to have it in another’s hands but nonetheless feeling a little shabby as an ex–police officer. He hadn’t seen any marks on the body but if it was poison again there wouldn’t be external marks. He jumped the gun on dinner and had a small bowl of chili, then made love to Monica who was already on the bed. It seemed as ordinary as going to the grocery store though she held him more strongly than usual. The question was how do you make love to a girl after you announce you have found her dead brother in the river? But after she slipped off her jeans and sweater would it have been more hurtful to refuse? He walked a couple of miles with her on the way home. A rifle bullet hit a tree they passed. She s
aid, “That’s Teddy. He doesn’t understand his brother is dead. They were nearly inseparable.”
In the twilight Sunderson saw in the distance a cop car driving across the field followed by the coroner’s car. Not a good job on a summer evening. There would have to be two cops to haul the body up the riverbank as the coroner would have a struggle just to lift his fat off a sofa. Monica called at midnight with the news that a dead coyote had been found nearby with the remains of the boy’s lunch, a clue that it was poison again. Sunderson immediately thought it was sad that a coyote had to die in this creepshow. He couldn’t recall having exchanged a word with the boy but had noted that he was tremendously surly like the rest of the Ames males. He also evidently started drinking vodka as a child under his father’s care.
Sunderson woke abruptly before dawn thinking about writers. He had learned to read at age four. His curiosity was about the adult world not children’s stories. Luckily when he was in sixth grade a school friend would steal his older brother’s Playboy and Esquire both of which transfixed him. During his long marriage to Diane he had been to dozens of arts and letters events at the local college, Northern Michigan University. They were always early in the evening and it was a struggle to keep awake after a long day of work but Diane loved these visits from novelists and poets so Sunderson pretended to, too. When he learned the full résumés of the visitors he thought it odd that they had full tenured positions at universities on the basis of a slender book of poems or a critically admired first novel. The poets read in strangely affected voices poems about their largely bourgeois daily lives. The novelists were worse, if anything. They would read a chapter from an upcoming work, never about crime or anything interesting, often about a boy who was too sensitive for words always with parents who misunderstood him. It was a little like having your mom read to you as a child. The peculiar thing about visiting novelists was their absolute self-obsession. There was one world and it was limited to their curious point of view. It was a real yawner and Sunderson wondered why they hadn’t spent more of their lives out in the world doing something interesting like running guns to Mexico or Mali. There was frequently a small party afterward to which he and Diane were always invited, and the novelists always flirted with her thinking there was a possible score and always looked hangdog when they left. The best he could say about the novelists was that they were better company than he expected, professionally curious about everything.
Lemuel was another matter. Was he doing the killing to add verve to his crime novel about the family? It was certainly logical if a little far-fetched. Sunderson searched his mind for any hidden clues. Monica had told him that Lemuel had had an affair, discreet, with her mother Silvia. The wife of a severe alcoholic is evidently fair game and when Silvia was attentive to herself she was quite attractive.
At first light Sunderson went out to pee in the yard but it was chilly, not quite forty, so there was no hurry to fish. He spent a half hour making himself a pan of fried potatoes. His eye caught movement far out in the pasture which told him that Lemuel was headed his way. He had been thinking that as a boy the nude photos in Playboy had been quite a shock. They were too monstrous to be desirable. The huge breasts troubled him reminding him of his mother and sister Berenice through whom he learned to dislike huge breasts. He liked Monica’s modest breasts which were nearly identical to Diane’s. He was reminded again of the Seven Deadly Sins. And when he saw a woman’s hairy pubic patch in those same magazines he got quite a jolt. He was slowly developing his own pubic hair but it hadn’t occurred to him that women would have it. It seemed vulgar.
His mind was muddy that morning and irked at Lemuel for dropping in. He could always clarify it by an hour of fishing but he had long since abandoned fishing when it was 40 degrees or under. His brain mud which started in a fit of insomnia the night before was comprised of the idea of taking Monica to Marquette to get her away from her awful life but what would it look like with him living with a nineteen-year-old girl. It wasn’t illegal and she was unlikely to walk around saying, “Yes, he’s fucking me.” But what would Diane think? Though they were no longer married, and perhaps it wasn’t her business except in his mind. The second intrusive thought that stopped him from falling back into the sweet sleep that is the last hour of every morning was about the Seven Deadly Sins. He wished he had ten bucks for every time they arose in his mind and then he could buy a new car. After that youthful exposure they could be labeled post-traumatic stress disorder for all of the mental damage they had done. He had only gotten back to sleep by planning to write them down and see how he fared in an honest assessment, and was awoken again with thoughts of writers and Lemuel. Now as Lemuel approached the back door he strewed some papers on the table to make it look like he was busy.
He poured Lemuel a cup of coffee and he glanced at the table.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“I was doing my monthly books.” This was an outright lie as Sunderson never did books. Diane had kept track of his finances except for his checkbook which was always such a mess she didn’t want to touch it. For some reason a check stub was beyond his filling out. The bank always called when he was overdrawn. Diane pointed out that his yearly overdraft penalties were enormous. That didn’t help. He hated to be in a grocery line when someone ahead of him was laboriously filling out a check stub at the counter.
“This is a chapter on Bert I thought might interest you.” He handed Sunderson a sheaf held together by a big paper clip.
Before his long decline after Vietnam Bert was a key worker. We were very friendly when young, hanging out together fishing and hunting. He told me when he got home he had killed some wrong people by mistake. That’s why he couldn’t hunt anymore. He couldn’t even eat venison because it reminded him of dead bodies. Bert started each day with a big glass of vodka before breakfast.
Lemuel got up hastily to leave glancing again at Sunderson’s strewn papers.
“I’ve always hated paperwork,” he said.
“Me too.” Sunderson in fact had very little of it since retirement and generally ignored it.
With Lemuel gone Sunderson pushed the Bert material aside for the time being. With minimal exposure he disliked the man intensely. He had heard that once on a hot day Bert had tethered his daffy wife to a post in the yard and left her there until a kid came along and cut her loose with a jackknife. He had chased the kid down and beat him. Meanwhile Lily had driven her mother to the ER with heatstroke.
He carefully made out a list of the Seven Deadly Sins on a long, yellow legal tablet: Pride, Greed, Envy, Lechery, Gluttony, Anger, Laziness. He resolved to be honest and as brief as possible in his self-evaluation.
Pride. Most men are prideful for no particular reason. They carry themselves as if they were directing the United Nations when they are real estate agents or bookkeepers. Real estate developers are particularly prideful as if they were the economic key. Early on when I was the only ace detective in the U.P. I would put on a clean shirt and beam in the mirror. The thought of it now embarrasses me. By and large I flunk on pride. No matter how bad my behavior I am still full of pride even after my wretched but justified divorce.
Greed. I can give myself a fairly high mark on this one having been raised the way I was. My father made enough for the basic support of the family, no extras, and that was that. I made my own small amounts of money by mowing lawns, washing cars, shoveling walks in winter. My father made me continue shoveling the walk for an old lady who would only give me a dime. She couldn’t do her own, he pointed out. I never washed a car as an adult because I did too many for a quarter as a kid and it generally took two hours which meant about twelve cents per hour of work. The only exception was a real estate developer who would give me a buck to do his Buick, the cost of a car wash over in Marquette in those days. The developer was from downstate and I figured that was what they paid down there. Such youthful labor teaches economic realities, but I w
as simply never oriented to money. We lived fine on my detective salary and Diane saved her hospital paycheck for travel and our retirement which as it turns out will not be together. She has mentioned the unfairness of this and told me to tell her if I need money. I nearly asked her for a Toyota 4Runner, Sport model, which would be fine for the rough country I encounter fishing and hunting but stopped short. She would go to France and Italy every couple of years usually with a friend. I didn’t go except once because I doubted an airplane’s ability to fly across the ocean and I’d rather go fishing. It will cost me money to move Monica to Marquette but I don’t care. Call it compassion.
Envy. I don’t get this one very clearly. I mean I am unsure what it covers. Envy for Diane’s husband, maybe—which means I envy a dead man. I once read an article about American women traveling solo to Europe to get fucked by French and Italian men who I envied. I brought it up with Diane once when I was drinking. She laughed very hard and said, “Why would I do that when all I would have to do is go to downtown Marquette in the evening? They must be desperate. You already do it more than I like which I tolerate because I love you.”
Writing this down had upset Sunderson so he decided to take a break and read a little of “Bert.” The upshot was that well into his teens Bert was a fair-haired boy. He was a fine high school athlete and would neither drink nor smoke. He did one year at the state college in Bozeman, Montana, didn’t like it, got drunk and joined the marines with no idea of the horror he was entering. He spent the last two years of Vietnam, the waning years of the war, as an NCO in the north. “When I picked him up in Marquette from his flight home we had to stop at several bars. He said, ‘Lem, none of it was worth it. None of the war was worth a single American life. Our country betrayed us.’” The girl Bert had married before he shipped out promptly called an end to it.