by Jim Harrison
Lemuel then went on for several pages on Vietnam with nothing new or original. As a lifelong student of history and noncombatant Sunderson had read too much of wars starting with Alexander the Great and even the Indian Wars which disgusted him. The only ones who came out good were Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Chief Joseph. Nothing was so contemptible in American history as our fatal pursuit of Joseph and his people, except possibly Vietnam.
Anyway what recovery Bert made was down at the tavern, according to Lemuel. “He married the lovely Silvia before he totally maimed himself. It was ugly to watch a good-looking young man become a bloated monster. His wife was a profound Catholic and would not leave him with the children he totally neglected. Bert’s case was the clearest I’ve ever seen of alcoholism as a disease though other family members are close. In sheer quantity it was dumbfounding, never less than a quart a day unless he had flu and was vomiting. It was a shock to me that his lovely wife, of whom I was overfond, took his daily abuse.”
This was not new to Sunderson. He had handled dozens and dozens of spousal abuse cases, and it seemed similar to people who adapt to living with chronic pain. Unless the woman had a considerable network of close friends helping her, the trap continued indefinitely, especially for Catholic women to whom divorce is such a taboo. For women the law could not protect, their suffering became like an act of God. After being tied up in the yard, however, Silvia cracked and finally got away from Bert.
Sunderson was tempted to put the “Bert” chapter off to the side, there being nothing unexpected, including a thirty-day jail term for severely beating three young men at the tavern who were persistently harassing him. One was the mayor’s son, the mayor of fifty people, if that, known for a wool pinstripe suit left over from the fifties he loved to wear on special occasions of which there were next to none. This man’s loutish son and two other boys were taunting Bert on the subject of Vietnam over which he had no sense of humor.
Bert was everything to excess including alcohol. I know that many days he must have come close to consuming a half gallon but then he was the largest of the brothers. Twice I recall he totally collapsed and had to be hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. He dried out during his 30 day jail term but actually camped next to the tavern when he got out of jail. He was always bedding tavern tarts. Locally it was a homely selection but I guessed there was some sort of camaraderie in the woebegone.
I speak with mildly improper authority on alcohol. There’s so much of it to observe in my family at large. I’ve only been truly drunk twice in my life and it was long ago when I was a freshman at University of Montana in Missoula. At the onset of the school year I sat around with my new roommates for hours drinking beer. In the morning I vomited for an hour and warned myself not to drink again it was so unpleasant. About a month later I became the lover of a young woman from Kalispell. I had no experience to speak of and her sexual ardor scared me. Her father had sent her off to school in a new Ford convertible, an unsuitable car for Montana except for a few summer months. She was extremely proud of her car which all the students looked at with envy. One evening we were parked on a country road with a six-pack. It was so cold outside but the car heater was on high. She was humping me face forward with the ceiling light on, a lurid sight. Suddenly I felt ill, pushed her aside, and vomited on the dashboard. That essentially ended the relationship. It was unthinkable that anyone would puke in her new car. As penance I never drank another beer in my life. A few years later when she would talk to me again she said it was awful that year in winter because every time she turned on the radio the dashboard would heat up and the car would stink. I sympathized but there was no way she would make love again.
Monica brought in a pot of ham hocks and baked beans for dinner which didn’t smell as good as possible given Sunderson’s reading. They talked a bit about her planned escape to Marquette. She now wanted to leave as soon as possible. That morning one of the wives had slapped her hard when she set out breakfast. The wives had long abdicated any cooking responsibilities, shoving it off on Monica. They had so many chickens and eggs she would scramble a couple dozen every morning which the men would eat with Tabasco. She used plenty of butter and cream trying to kill them with cholesterol. They all loved her chicken and biscuits which she hated making because she would have to kill and pluck five chickens. She liked the chickens and it was hard to cut off their heads.
Monica said that they would have to use stealth to escape to Marquette because everyone would try to stop her. She said that twilight would be best because by then usually everyone would be too drunk to act. He agreed. They made love hastily with Monica bent over the table, her favorite way to avoid undressing and dressing.
It was too cool and windy to fish well and coincidentally, when Monica left, he discovered he had aborted his Seven Deadly Sins project with lechery, perhaps a subconscious act, wanting to avoid an item over which he felt guilt.
Lechery. Perhaps one of my downfalls and I don’t know why. Most men, I think, talk more about sex than they actually feel. I never talk about sex except in humorous terms with Marion. On our honeymoon I made love to Diane ten times one day and she talked as if something was wrong with me. Maybe. My prostate acted up so when fishing I had to keep a hold on a tree to pee. Admittedly I did a very wrong thing with Mona in Paris. And should Monica seem in question at age nineteen? I told her there was no obligation and she said, “I thought we were lovers, like in books I’ve read.” What do you say to that? Still it nags at me. Her butt is beautiful but is that an excuse? I should look for a girl at least in her twenties or thirties of course. I consider Mona a sexual disease that started years ago with my peeking out the window at her next door doing nude yoga before school. I was so vigilant in my lust checking the window nearly around the clock by pulling a book from the bookcase that covered the window. After a while I knew that she knew I was looking, and sometimes I mistakenly left a back light on but that seemed to encourage her. I think of the sexual urge deeply coded within us, ingrained, and predisposed to make us fools. I think Mona was curious, charmed by my stupidity, pleased with her power over an older man. Obviously the world has to be populated thus nature has given us these barely controllable impulses that begin early and continue into advanced age. This is copping a plea a bit. But then I can’t very well withdraw my offer to help Monica just to avoid making love to her. Perhaps I’m not being entirely honest. My generosity to myself knows no bounds! The very idea of sex on occasion fills me with unrest and torpor as if I want it to end.
Gluttony. I am absolved of this sin though when I finally get something good I’ll eat it to near exhaustion. I am a poor cook. Good ones like Diane and Marion always have a mixture of patience and imagination. Even when I do something as ordinary as chopping garlic I could be droning the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.” In a dozen tries I’ve never made a chicken pot pie where the crust didn’t collapse into the stew. Actual tears fell. Trying to bone a lamb shoulder also brought tears. I did research and drew the bone structure on a piece of paper with no luck. What I am insinuating is that poor cooks are poor eaters. One night during deer season I missed a decent dinner while drinking and talking about the hunt with other nitwits. I ate a big pile of bar food, pickled turkey gizzards and a wretched frozen pizza which was asking for trouble. Shortly before noon on the next day’s hunt I was eating my favorite baked bean and onion sandwich and the diarrhea struck with breathless intensity in the middle of a blizzard. I crawled into a small pine plantation swearing off pickled turkey gizzards. Luckily every hunter carries toilet paper, a great invention if ever there was one.
The other day Marion made me a venison carbonade, a Belgian dish that seemed the best single thing I’d ever eaten, a stew made with lots of onions, garlic, and dark beer. I have had a fantasy of simply going to France (without Mona) and Italy for a couple of months and eating well. Diane thinks this is a great idea and even did some restaurant research for me and sent me a little boo
k, The Best Bistros of Paris. She said I was temperamentally ill suited for starred restaurants or what she calls haute cuisine. They would “put me off,” she said. My mother was an ordinary to poor cook so I didn’t develop sophisticated tastes like many do. She regularly made pot roasts but not good ones like Diane. My mother would put the pot in the oven and cook the hell out of it so the meat was dry and tough and the onions and potatoes denatured. The only thing that survived with taste was the rutabaga of which she used a great deal because my father loved it. So do I. Naturally she didn’t use the essential cup of red wine. I don’t recall ever seeing wine in the house. We were poor and doomed in a culinary sense. Even the Thanksgiving turkey or any roast chicken was dry and tough. She was killing everything twice. Now I imagine that there was an American Housewives School of Dry Cooking to which she adhered. Quite naturally my own tendency is to never cook things long enough. I’ve had altogether too many pink-jointed roast chickens, too many underdone pot roasts wherein the secret seems to be long low heat. In any event I’m innocent of the sin of gluttony.
Anger. I’m up in the air about the sin of anger. I’ve always believed in “righteous anger” but I’m in doubt about what direction it’s in. Obviously when I was still working I would get very angry at wife and child beaters but this can rapidly descend in other areas. The expression “I blew my top” is quite lame or “I was real pissed off.” Maybe rage at inanimate objects is excusable —fury over the flat tire, a furnace that quits on a cold night, a car that won’t start, the meat that you burned—but I find so much of this questionable. Anger gobbles up so much of the energy that could have been used correcting the situation. I except wife beating or child abuse. I’d answer a call and the wife was a mess with the shit beat out of her face, the husband sitting at the kitchen table crying into his hands. Why is he crying? He did it. Sometimes the husband would still be angry as if your answering the call was the cause of everything. Sometimes they had to be restrained. The same with the beating of children. The man would cry as if he were to be pitied.
More than anything as a detective I learned that human behavior was an endless puzzle, especially bad behavior. Good behavior is obvious. It also saves oceans of time. You always feel the fool when you’re mad at your car. I rarely ever got angry with Diane except occasionally when she would adopt her father’s right-wing opinions. “The poor don’t work hard enough.” I’ve never known anyone as desperate for work as the poor. Welfare Diane was mixed about. Apparently there is welfare fraud but not nearly as much as many people think. I saw a few cases of it but the majority of welfare recipients were hopeless people who simply couldn’t take care of themselves, often for reasons of low intelligence or mental illness. I think that often a stupid man would marry a stupid woman and breed a family that would never be able to take care of itself. Food stamps are wonderful because we can’t let them starve. So I would get mad at her limited views.
Laziness. Is up and down. Too often in a bad situation I just sit there instead of getting out of it. My father wouldn’t just mow the lawn he would attack it with our old-fashioned mower. When I grew older I was expected to do the same but didn’t have his strength, partly because some of the lawn was uphill. But he said he went to work at manual labor at age twelve so was very strong right into old age which he refused to recognize.
Monica called saying she had to get out of there ASAP because Sprague had punched her hard in the face that morning when his eggs were cold. Bert threw him against the wall but then Sprague, a champion fistfighter, punched Bert several times until Bert got him in a choke hold on the floor. Bert had to be restrained because it looked like Sprague was being strangled to death. A family breakfast, Sunderson thought. They agreed to meet at 8:30 p.m. in the twilight this close to the solstice at the foot of the road. Monica thought she could get away after serving dinner because this was the time of day the men were the drunkest. It was agreed though Sunderson was upset. These warm, muggy days were supposed to be the best for trout fishing and he had ruined his vacation by getting involved. He fished the rest of the day through dinner hour, Spanish rice Monica delivered that he never liked due to its heavy presence on the school’s hot lunch program. Monica’s, however, was good with lots of chicken thighs in it not the chintzy school variety, and lots of garlic which he loved. He dozed, woke up and made coffee, then fished for a while.
It was time to fetch Monica. As a precaution he wore his pistol and shoulder holster under a light sport coat. He was bathed in the mist of having caught his largest brown trout, probably four pounds, and had been so transfixed remembering the beauty of its coloring that he burned his lips on the coffee and dropped the cup, jumping back to avoid splattering. He wasn’t angry, he just felt inept. He cautiously poured another cup and thought about what he hoped to do. He thought of buying her a hotel room at the Landmark Inn, the best hotel in town, then thought it would be more awkward than staying at his house which had the advantage of being more private. He imagined someone trying to stop him getting Monica out of there and made himself pointlessly angry.
There she was in a skirt and blouse and a small cheap suitcase at the end of the driveway. She had tears in her eyes but still managed a smile. They were barely through the village when he saw in the rearview mirror Sprague’s muddy white pickup truck giving chase. About a mile out of town he pulled up beside them and Monica screamed, “Don’t stop!” Sprague bumped their left front fender fairly hard and Sunderson nearly lost control. He drew his pistol and blew out Sprague’s windshield lowering his tolerance for cool evening wind. Sprague slowed down to get behind them then accelerated up on the inside with a shotgun out the driver’s window. Sunderson yelled “duck” to Monica and quickly shot Sprague, it looked like in the shoulder, and the shotgun dropped to the road. Sprague’s pickup swerved off the bumpy shoulder and into the thicket of young maples where it stopped. Sunderson slowed to a stop, got out, and approached Sprague’s vehicle slowly in case he had another gun. He was sitting in the front seat holding the bloody shoulder with his other hand.
“Where you taking her, fucker?” he muttered in pain.
“I’m sending her to my sister in Tucson tomorrow morning.” Sunderson was pleased with the lie.
“Who is going to cook for us?” Sprague whined.
Sunderson was stunned. Was this all about food?
“You’ll have to take cooking lessons,” Sunderson said lamely. “Meanwhile you want a ride to the hospital?”
“I doubt that it’s that bad. Give me a ride home.”
“Not a chance. You can hoof it.” Sunderson imagined that anything near an Ames house could bring fire from a .30-06 rifle.
“You’re a dead man,” Sprague bellowed.
“I’ll take that chance.” Sunderson shoved his pistol in Sprague’s mouth and cocked it. Sprague’s eyes were wild with fear. Sunderson walked back to his car and consoled the sobbing Monica.
“You should have killed him,” she said.
“It would have been too much of a mess afterward,” he said. “Filling out papers. That sort of thing. Death is very bureaucratic.”
She slumped in the seat and tried to calm down and doze. Her skirt was well up her thighs which didn’t help his driving. He leaned far forward for a craven look upward. God never made better thighs. Or butt. What a lucky old fool I am, he thought.
They reached Marquette before 10:00 p.m. and the kitchen at the bar at the Landmark Inn was still serving food. He talked to the chef extolling Monica’s abilities and he went back to the office and got a blank job application which Monica held as if precious. Sunderson had his favorite fried whitefish tail sandwich and a beer.
At home he put Monica in Diane’s lovely private upstairs room. He had moved a single bed in there and the toilet and shower were next door. She wanted a shower so he went downstairs and poured a modest drink. At first he felt nervous putting her in Diane’s precious room but then she had
abandoned it when she left him. She came downstairs in one of Diane’s huge expensive towels. They had a quick one on the sofa and the immediacy of sexual desire surprised him. A moron friend sophomore year in high school used to say, “If we didn’t fuck the world would get empty.” Everyone doubted that the boy had done the deed but it turned out his neighbor, a great big senior girl, was screwing him often for her own purposes. When she got pregnant she was too embarrassed to admit he was the father but he told everyone who would listen. He was proud. Sunderson was amused remembering this. There is someone for everyone.
It was pointless to get too analytical about sex, and no one had done so satisfactorily that he knew of. They liked to say “it’s in the brain” but where else would it be, down the street? He was ill equipped in the sciences anyway. He was just curious at the electric effect Monica had on him not to speak of Diane in the past. The very thought of Diane filled him with unrest and even the next day he wandered around the yard to check on this and that on his list of tasks to be done. He always disliked yard work having done it so cheaply as a youth. His neighbor was hanging up clothes in a sexy robe. There it was again! They chatted a moment. She was wondering where he spent so much time and he told her about the fishing cabin. She hoped that sometime she could go along. They were from Ohio and quite unused to the natural beauty that she was seeing in the Upper Peninsula. Her name was Delphine, a name he’d never heard before. He couldn’t imagine her husband letting her go off to his cabin while he worked but perhaps they were a “modern couple.” He had heard of such things but not locally. Besides his plate was full with Monica.