The Big Seven

by Jim Harrison

  As he drove to the hotel his mind drifted off to long ago when an old-time Detroit homicide detective addressed a room full of state police recruits of which he was a member. The geezer was impressive and slangy saying that the only safe place for any of them was a casket and that a bullet felt like a bad bee sting but you had to immediately check how much you were bleeding. It sounded grim and fearful and he was glad that he seemed destined for the Upper Peninsula or so he had been promised where he would carry his fishing equipment in his squad car. Of course at the cabin his immediate neighbors now competed with Detroit for horrors. Once he had read in the Free Press how police had raided a drug apartment and found eight heads and no bodies. It would have been easier to stomach the other way around.

  There didn’t seem to be a firm theological basis for adding violence to the list of Seven Deadly Sins. All religions at times seem to officially revel in violence and the Middle East appears never to have recovered from the Crusades. The Borgia pope, Alexander VI, hadn’t evidently minded assassinating enemies. Al-Qaeda used belief to oil the skids of murder. A talented historian could total up comparative body counts for Muslims and Christians. You wondered how Muhammad and Jesus thought about the conflagration that was history. Certainly the Gospels didn’t defend violence and the pope himself had always been there to excuse Catholic behavior. The only resource one had was private beliefs that weren’t worth bringing up in public but how much does silence count for? He meant this coming winter to survey theological opinion on violence. It was so easy to become overwhelmingly discouraged when thinking about religion. When reading Elaine Pagels he had decided he would have been better off living in the time of the Apocryphal Gospels before the hammer of the Church came down.

  He was a full hour into a delicious snooze when Roberta called from the desk. The afternoon heat had broken. Monica quickly covered her delightful nakedness and they had a drink with Bertie, as the family called her, on the patio attached to the room. Sunderson became instantly encouraged about life when he saw two quail and a little rabbit. If they could persist in the middle of Tucson life would go on, for a while at least.

  A friend had told Bertie about a Spanish restaurant and they had a fine time, Sunderson drinking a gallon of fine Spanish wine. There was an extraordinary young guitarist that the owner had sent to their table and the Spanish music gave Sunderson shivers and Monica tears. Bertie said the music from Spain was called flamenco which Sunderson remembered slightly from college. He felt he should take some money left over from the blackmail and cabin and get himself to Spain before he dropped dead. He mentioned this to Bertie who suggested a week in Paris and another week or so in Seville and Barcelona. He was naturally worried about the expense but Bertie said both cities were less expensive than New York and Chicago.

  He was at least momentarily enthused. The music had changed and the dance floor at the restaurant was crowded with people doing the samba, a difficult dance. A young man asked her to dance and Monica did very well. When she sat down again she said that she and Lily had spent thousands of hours back home in the evening practicing dance steps after which they would read good books until midnight. It was important to keep your life structured and active or the hellhole they lived in would drive you batty.

  The wine woke Sunderson in the middle of the night. Despite being a retired man he had pretty much given up thinking about death. Death hadn’t seemed too bad when his father died in the hospital of heart failure and he had been there holding his hand, but when Sunderson had said, “He’s dead,” Berenice and his mother sitting there ruined it by starting up wailing. Death exhausts the options for an old fool, he thought. He had noticed the gradual thinning out around town and when he asked after someone he would get “Didn’t you know he died?” He never did because he avoided reading the obits in the Marquette paper. What he couldn’t bear was the bright smiling faces of people Monica’s age and younger who had died in traffic accidents. It was simply unacceptable. He often carried a speed gun in his car before he made detective and once on the Seney Stretch, a straight portion of road where people tended to speed dangerously, a car full of young people passed his anonymous sedan doing a flat hundred miles per hour. Rather than chase them he stopped next to their car at the Seney Bar and nailed them. The three young men were smart-asses and the three girls were drunk and began crying. The ticket cost them over three hundred bucks because he had added reckless driving. He couldn’t test them for alcohol because he didn’t carry a Breathalyzer, but he showed them photos of a 100 mph accident over near Iron Mountain including one of the four young people who died with a head torn off. One of the drunk young girls puked in her lap. Sunderson with his broad experience on drunk driving reflected that it was hard enough driving 50 mph while drunk and at 100 mph the margin of error didn’t exist. Suddenly you were airborne, then dead. He had checked their IDs and they were all below drinking age. He let them off with a warning and drove them all home, and then drove up to Grand Marais and took a walk on the beach to soothe his nerves and bought a big lake trout to fillet for dinner. When in doubt fry some fish, one of the few things his mother could cook well. Their freezer was always crammed with fish and venison both of which the family liked.

  He remembered having dinner with Diane before her husband died, at a restaurant well out of town toward Munising so they wouldn’t have to meet and greet people. The table had a splendid view of Lake Superior on a blustery day, the waves huge and roiling, the kind of day his commercial fishing relatives used to die on. He sat there thinking what a relief it must have been to make it to the harbor on such a day, the relief of getting behind the long lee of Grand Island if the wind was westerly. He still had a secret dread of the lake deep in his system.

  At dinner Diane was perky from a recent “lovely” trip to New York City while Sunderson tried to hide his perpetual melancholy about their divorce. He’d heard the doctor she was married to had been born rich. They lived in a beautiful home on the high hill overlooking the harbor. The father and ancestors had been in the timber business which Sunderson felt was the equivalent of being in the slave trade in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. All timber had been razed to the ground for money except for a few pitifully small patches. Occasionally but rarely while fishing Sunderson would see an out of reach virgin white pine in a river gorge and the tree was breathtaking. And sometimes he would see a great log half buried in the sand where the water lacked enough volume to float it downstream to the mill. They were returning in size but then he had seen in old lumberjack photos puny men next to gloriously immense trees. It seemed to him that these immense trees were like the buffalo we wiped out in our western movement when we had killed some seventy million buffalo, many shot from passing trains for fun with the meat never collected. Sunderson had cooked buffalo tongue, a favored part, mail ordered from the O’Brien herd in South Dakota. It was utterly delicious, much better than the fatty beef tongue offered by supermarkets. He often reflected that people whether individually or in groups think they are smarter than they are. Why would a country decimate its best forests and kill all the buffalo? Because they are collectively dumb bastards, he thought. And so am I, he added.

  He had missed some of what Diane had said about an “amusing” play about five lesbians trying to live in peace in a tiny apartment. Sunderson wanted to ask if that left an odd girl out of the night games but he feared being vulgar in front of Diane. She had never had any of the rough humor of the north and it couldn’t be learned, not that she wanted to. He had found out in their courtship that they often didn’t think the same things were funny. She had a complete intolerance for anything she considered “off color” unless it was French or seemed to be French. French-Canadian, the roots of many locals, didn’t seem to count though they had virtually founded the U.P. When he had dropped Diane off at her house on the hill he felt he couldn’t imagine how much money she and her husband spent on trips to New York City and Chicago. In the latter they
always stayed, Mona had told him, in the same suite at the Drake the husband’s parents had stayed in, some more profit from devouring the forests. And they had built the so-called beautiful bank back in the 1920s, so ready to skin people during the Great Depression. While waiting for her to finish getting ready for the restaurant he had noticed first-class ticket stubs on the desk. Why sit with the working class? Whoever they were these days, though the paper said they were all going broke and having houses foreclosed. None of this thinking made him less stupid. How had he lost this lovely woman? A bad couple of years of stopping for drinks with cronies and coworkers and not keeping his mouth shut, mentioning a wife beating where the woman’s face had looked like a squashed plum and Diane would say, “Please, not at dinner.” Or talking about the little boy who had both his arms broken by his father for not cleaning his room. The mother called in the complaint and got slugged in the face for her “betrayal.” The father was a well-known problem so Sunderson took Eddy, a huge Finnish patrolman, along. Eddy had accidentally kicked the guy in the nuts real hard when he resisted arrest. The mother rushed off to the hospital with the kid and he and Eddy sat on the steps drinking a nasty orange pop while the father was puking on the lawn from the kick. “We also have to nail him for resisting arrest. How can I understand anyone who breaks their kid’s arms? I’d like to hang him, no shit.” Sunderson could see the level of Eddy’s anger. Cruelty to children is difficult to take. A couple of weeks later he saw the kid at a playground in his bulky arm casts. He felt tears of rage welling in his throat.

  About an hour after dropping off Diane from dinner she had called and thanked him saying he had looked good and must be drinking less. This wasn’t true but he said it was. Then Diane said, “Maybe we should have tried harder.” In that last fateful year she had tried to get him to join AA but he wouldn’t do it, unable to imagine no drinks after work. He tried to backtrack when she dropped the divorce bomb but by then she was simply sick and tired of him. Marion had once done an experiment with third graders. He had passed out 3x5 cards to the class and asked them seriously to write down what they were most frightened of. He had expected bears, monsters, and dinosaurs but was very surprised when the majority wrote that they were most frightened of their parents when they were drinking. Sunderson was ashamed to think that might be what Diane felt about him. He began to hate those well-oiled sensations, but when she left it had been far too easy to succumb, ending with Marion finding him passed out on the cold floor—for some reason he had drunkenly turned the thermostat way down. He had to be taken to the hospital to be detoxed. He was deeply ashamed of the whole incident and after that bought his booze in pints rather than fifths in order to stop himself short of disaster. After all those years alcohol was still a bit of a mystery. With their limited income his father had only one drink a week and that on Saturday afternoon. Maybe then he subconsciously resolved that when he grew up he’d have as much as he wanted not understanding that in drinking more is less. Teens in his high school, the males that is, drank as much as they could get their hands on. Alcohol was the culture of glory, happiness, nonsense.

  Chapter 18

  After a rough night, in the morning he took Monica to the hospital to meet his mother. Not having had a functional mother herself, now in a state mental hospital, she was very nervous, and Sunderson was dreading it himself. Sunderson had hated it when Diane would say that he had “unresolved issues” and insist on “professional help.” People from his class never spent a hundred dollars an hour to talk to a shrink. Among his acquaintances it was thought to be a scam. Only lawyers got that much.

  His mother was calm and delightful to Monica and so was Berenice to his relief. No one brought up the pregnancy. When they left the hospital in the late morning he didn’t even need a drink. He should have stayed with his mother longer but he craved to get out of the hospital which he viewed as the place of death.

  After the visit they took a plane via Houston to Veracruz where they rented a car and took off for a drive. They stopped in a village where they saw activity in a stadium. Rather than a corny ball game they watched a marvelous dance contest for an hour or so. Sunderson had a couple of cold beers in the hot sun and was mystified by the grace of the dancers. They couldn’t all be professionals, just local people dancing with the crowd cheering the favorites. Monica was totally swept away and stood at the sidelines keeping time with the music. When they left she was gibbering with the excitement of Mexico. Some of the lovely women caught Sunderson off guard. He had noted that his waning sexual fantasy life seemed to have died nearly for good ever since his severe stoning the year before by young people defending the Great Leader’s compound where they lived. Maybe there was a medical reason centered in the idea that the mind is much less playful after a severe trauma like the one that kept him in the Nogales hospital for a week. He had been a mass of purple swollen bruises from this custom still in use in the Middle East. He only saw the kids in passing searching for more rocks to throw. He had passed through a small canyon, perfect for ambush. Toward the end when he was prone he saw a close-up of their feet throwing bigger rocks from close range perhaps trying to kill him. Much later on when he had visited the cult he recognized a pair of red tennis shoes being worn by a pretty young girl who had murder in mind. With a cult anything is possible. The only good that came out of it was the surprisingly good food at the hospital, plus the view out the window and his crazy nurse.

  Their lovely old hotel fronted the water in Veracruz. He took an old man’s short snooze and then sat on the balcony having a big glass of very old tequila. He had forgotten in his reading that Veracruz was Mexico’s leading seaport and he enjoyed watching the big freighters docked to the north. Evidently there was a big plate in the hold that rotated on an axis so that the trucks offloading cargo need not turn around within the ship. He had thought of the water as romantic but as he watched he felt like a big kid. The location of the first cattle shipped to America, Veracruz also saw the creation of cowboys, many of whom in their wild stage worked their way north to what was now the southwest United States, which was the birth of the American West. The cattle were unloaded in a lagoon just north of town and he meant to drive up there and think it over in a historical sense. He had also noticed a large aquarium near the hotel which excited him. He was clearly undertraveled and overopinionated, or so he thought.

  They were hungry and ate early. He had an excellent roasted fish called snook in English and róbalo in Spanish. The skin was brown and crisp with lemon and garlic and the inside soft and white. It was an important game fish in Florida and when he asked where it was caught the waiter pointed south and said, “Fifty miles.” This gave Sunderson an itch to fish so far from home.

  An immaculate Mexican gentleman in an elegant suit sitting at the next table said they must drive over the mountains on a back road to Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz state, where they had, he said proudly, a medical school and also a big Edward Durell Stone anthropology museum in the public park. Sunderson readily agreed to go. They talked until twilight, maybe an hour or so until Sunderson heard music in the distance. The man said it was Tuesday night and they played music so the “old people” could dance. Monica was itching to go.

  On a short walk to the zócalo downtown Sunderson stuffed the map the man had made in his pocket. Sunderson saw some attractive putas near the doorway of a café where they stopped for coffee plus a flan for Monica. He was amused at the critical way they stared at the nonpro Monica. He was also amused that his retirement and his trip to Mexico were further making him forget his profession when he might very well be strolling toward the zócalo in Veracruz with a murderer. He had done a lot of thinking about Monica and her long-term lover Lemuel. Was her attachment to him to throw him off the scent? Maybe. No one in the three homesteads except Monica and Lemuel seemed smart or stable enough to pull off the crime wave, starting with her nursing of the fatally ill Simon who might have been hurried to the great beyond. But the ma
in person of interest had to be Lemuel as he couldn’t imagine her being the origin of the plot. You had to follow your suspicions even if you liked the people involved. He had shared very little with Detective Smolens even back when it began to jell. He could see it all coming but wanted to keep control of the situation. He also didn’t want Monica to have her baby in prison.

  Could Lemuel, in fact, have organized this whole thing for his mystery novel? It was certainly possible from what he had learned about writers. One professor used to like to quote Faulkner as saying “Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of broken-hearted old ladies.” Hemingway was ruthless with his children but would head to bed with a case of sniffles. Sunderson always thought Hemingway wrote very well but if you peeked under the covers you saw one of the worst pricks in the history of literature. Faulkner stayed home and drank and wasn’t into serial marriages. To Sunderson’s limited knowledge Hemingway’s personal downfall came from wanting very much to be a big shot all of the time. Back to Lemuel who was by far the brightest of the Ameses and whom Sunderson liked very much. There was the ethical question of whether he felt compelled to blow the whistle on Lemuel and Monica. Probably not. He was retired. If Smolens figured it out which was unlikely he could do as he wished. Currently his attitude toward all the murders was good riddance to bad rubbish.