The Big Seven

by Jim Harrison

“I can’t seem to express what I intend in my mind,” he said petulantly.

  “Of course you can’t. It takes a lifetime of work to write well and even that’s not enough. There are hundreds of thousands of writers in the world and only a few can write well.”

  “Then what am I doing? I quit.”

  “You can’t quit when you haven’t even started.”

  “A man who beats his wife is slapping God in the face.”

  “That’s pretty good if you believe it.”

  “I do. I have a secret religion.”

  “You’ve managed to keep it totally a secret. You could be a spy,” she laughed.

  He brooded for moments that it seemed ridiculous to her that he had a secret religion. He recalled that in an undergraduate philosophy course at Michigan State, the sage Santayana was said to have claimed that we all had secret religions to accompany our ordinary one. It made sense to him as he had often felt the implicit secrecy of life, especially since he had lost Diane and now a truly intimate conversation was impossible. Now there was a lump in his throat and his heart was beating too fast while sitting next to her before the fire.

  “I’m sure you have secrets too. Why make fun of my secret religion?”

  “I’m just an ordinary Presbyterian, not a very imaginative group. I can’t even imagine going to church. Of course I had secrets. Every girl does. When I was thirteen my cousin Tom showed me his erect penis. He was angry when I wouldn’t touch it. I thought, why would anyone want to have anything to do with something like that.”

  “You finally did touch one.”

  “It took some getting used to,” she said and laughed.

  “That’s not much of a secret.”

  “Tom was a peacock. He still is. He was married three times and blew through his inheritance. Now he deals in scrap metal.”

  “Tell me a secret that will make my heart beat fast.”

  “Well, when we got divorced I still loved you but I couldn’t bear the idea of living with you anymore. I was sick to death of you. I wanted to live in a nice little house down by the water all alone. So I did.”

  This wasn’t the kind of secret Sunderson had had in mind. “Then you married a rich guy,” he interrupted.

  “I guess it may have looked like that to others. He was the biggest catch in town before he got sick. A very nice rich man with a beautiful house.”

  “I’ve deduced that you could afford a beautiful house on your own.”

  “Too much of a bother. Who needs it? His only daughter is coming next week. We’re going to list it and split the take. She’s worthless and lives in Aspen. You could call her a playgirl.”

  “I still think of you too much. I haven’t found anyone to love.”

  “What about you and Monica?”

  “She’s barely more than a kid. I like her but she’s going back to Lemuel. A home for the kid. That kind of thing.”

  “I had fantasies about you but you’re too much of a kid for an affair.”

  “I truly resent that.” He felt his body swell in anger.

  “I mean an affair calls for grace and secrecy not emotional explosions.”

  “I won’t drink a single drop.”

  “That’s charming. You must like me more than I thought.”

  “You’re the biggest, darkest failure in my life.”

  “Let me think about it until you get back from Europe. Maybe we could give it a trial run. We could start in that motel on the hill in Grand Marais.”

  “What about the motel down by the car? I’m up for anything. I’ll even drive to Detroit.”

  “Have you forgotten you’re going to Europe next week?”

  “Not really, but right now with you here I can’t think about Europe.”

  “Well, you need to open the window and let some oxygen into your life. Lately you’ve been acting like a classic depressive. You wanted early retirement and now you seem not to know what to do with yourself. I was thinking that if you went to Barcelona first while l have my ex-husband’s daughter I could meet you the following week in Paris. Remember, I was always trying to get us to Paris together?”

  “I don’t know why not. I just hope I won’t die in Barcelona and miss you in Paris,” he laughed.

  “That’s not funny. You simply have to get out of the U.P., darling,” she said softly.

  That brought him to a stop. It had been years since she had called him darling as if she meant it. He felt a tremor he controlled with effort.

  “I’ll fix it at the travel agent tomorrow.”

  “We’ll leave after you write a full page.”

  “Fine by me.” His voice was drowned by a crash of thunder. They looked up to see that the lower third of the stars had been abolished by the coming storm. The big moon was behind them casting an eerie light on the forest to the west. The storm looked like a big line squall, a real bruiser. “I’ll sleep in your sleeping bag on the rug. You can have the bed.”

  “I want to hear the rain on the tent first.”

  “Suit yourself. I’ll bring in more wood.”

  Then a very large gust of wind ripped out her tent stakes and blew the tent against the cabin door and Diane gave in. He was quick to drag the tent in and toss her sleeping bag onto the bed. Wind was driving some smoke down the chimney so he took a poker and parted the logs so that they would burn less intensely and the smoke cleared. Now it began to rain hard and hail at the same time and the lights went out. He was prepared and lit three large candles from the closet so that Diane could read the Lemuel chapter. The hail rattled noisily against the tin roof of the cabin. He was pretending to write about violence in his notebook but the candlelight flickering against Diane’s face was diverting. He copied what he had written before to appear busy.

  Cain rose up and slew Abel, an astounding way for God to begin human history, perhaps showing that He’s not in full control and doesn’t want to be. It’s up to us. The first two brothers on earth and one killed the other. God knows why or maybe not. Mental freedom is mostly invigorating but sometimes not. There were no girls to chase in the Garden of Eden, often a diversion from violence. The Old Testament, mock history, is indeed a murderous book. The Greek Senate prevented an intended war by proclaiming that each senator had to commit a family member to the battle. That stopped the war. As an aside it is interesting to note that young men from Ivy League schools hardly ever died in Vietnam. Violence is apparently part of what used to be called the class struggle. The lower the class the more likely you are to suffer from violence.

  “I love this storm,” Diane said. “I’m overprotected in my big house. I’m going to try to buy my little one back where I could hear the rain and wind and snow.”

  “You can hear snow?”

  “Of course. Meanwhile you have to read this chapter. He confesses everything.”

  “I doubt that you could introduce fiction into a court of law.”

  “Maybe not but it tells you how he did it. He evidently convinced the women that he was only trying to make the victims sick, so they would become nicer, more pleasant creatures.”

  “I’m tired.” Sunderson nestled into her sleeping bag on the braided rug. The bag had the odor of lilac, his favorite scent.

  “I assumed you might want to fool around,” Diane said. “Fool around” was her euphemism for making love.

  Sunderson got out of the bag and onto the bed feeling quite strange as if his skin were pricking and his heart beating fast. They embraced and he felt nothing from this act long sought, only despair. In fact, he couldn’t move.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “I feel paralyzed. Too much anticipation.”

  “Maybe you should have a little drink, relax.”

  “I think I will.” He got up and poured a stiff one. Just imagine her suggesting he have a drink.

>   He drank quickly and got back in bed but the drink did no good. They were in an embrace but his body was dead. He imagined that he was a cold pork shoulder in the butcher’s case. Soon enough he heard her slight, vague snores, somehow charming, but he wasn’t aware of sleeping himself except briefly at dawn when he smelled cooking sausage.

  Diane woke him. He grabbed her but once again felt a sexless paralysis overwhelm him. She finished cooking breakfast while he pretended, at her insistence, to write about the deadly sin of violence. He was cheating again and asked silently, “Why am I a cheat?” He found himself writing willy-nilly about a terrible accident he’d witnessed as a child. Mack was a friend of his brother Bobby, a daredevil. He was small for his age and had run at a very slow moving freight train to pull one of his favorite tricks which was to run at the space between the moving railroad cars, jump up on the coupling and jump down on the other side. He had done this a dozen times including once for cops in chase who had to wait for the passing train at which time Mack was home in the basement in his old hideout, the root cellar. This time he stumbled on the coupling which was rain wet and fell on the tracks, scrambling out of the way of the vastly heavy wheels except for his right arm which was severed. Sunderson could still hear in bad moments the crunch sound. Jake, a friend whom they called “Boy Scout,” made a tourniquet out of his T-shirt, pulled off Mack’s shirt, and shook out the arm with a quizzical look. Jake applied the tourniquet and ran over to the train station for help. Mack was pale white and Sunderson had watched as Bobby knelt beside his friend and looked over at the severed arm which seemed very isolated in the ragweed. And that was the end of Mack’s normal life. Sunderson had thought, the fastest boy in the Munising school system became the slowest.

  Sunderson wondered idly how many lives had been taken by trains and then he switched to cars and traffic for which he had attended a series of lectures in preparation for police work. Car accident calls were the only thing that competed with wife beating in terms of the loathsome. Helping paramedics get the wounded bodies out of a wrecked car could spoil lunch to say the least. Hard to wash the blood from your hands and impossible on the clothes. He always packed a pair of bib overalls. The deaths of young people in particular squeezed his heart. Once he was giving a young girl mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It looked bad because the back of her head was soft from fractures. She coughed up blood, filling his mouth, and then she died. On the way home he bought a pint of whiskey and drove into the country and drank the whole thing. Diane chided him for being semidrunk but forgave him when he told her the story, including the fact that the girl’s blood had a copper taste.

  Now Diane was making sandwiches for the trip home. She looked nice at the kitchen counter in a pale green summer skirt. He was pleased she had brought along ham and cheese because he usually stuffed himself at a pasty place and felt ill the rest of the day. He said he was done and she wanted to see what he had written. He said no as it needed some work and largely didn’t exist. He was transfixed by his dead pecker and the amount of mechanical violence in the world. He had left out Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in his thinking in favor of the symbol of Cain and Abel. The Germans mechanized violence at Buchenwald and the sheer horror made one forget the Warsaw Ghetto. We liked planes because we could kill at a safe distance and now we don’t even need to be in the drone. This was the worst part of being history adept, knowing the history of violence which was the history of man.

  When they left the cabin they saw Lemuel back at the edge of the woods with his binoculars. Lemuel called out, “Three orioles!”

  They waved and Sunderson pondered.

  “He watches birds every morning.”

  “How nice.”

  “For a murderer?”

  “Birds are more likable than people,” she said.

  “Remember when you were trying to plant peas and blackbirds were in the row behind you eating the seeds? You were so pissed.”

  “Let me repeat, you have to read Lemuel’s chapter. The whole technique of embedding poison in a sausage patty is there. The women believed he was just trying to make the victims sick because such a small amount is needed. Toward the end with victims dying he did it all himself.”

  “Hard to believe the women were that gullible.”

  “Oh bullshit. You like the idea they were suckers.” Diane was coming down hard on him lately.

  “Maybe so,” he laughed. The fact of the matter was that it takes such a small amount of cyanide to kill someone it would be easy to believe it wasn’t a serious threat.

  On the way home he made modest detours to show her some favorite fishing places. She pretended to be interested but how could she be as a nonfishing person? Like Lemuel her neck was always craned for birds. In late May the great arboreal canopy of the U.P. is flooded with warblers and these tiny, unique creatures had always fascinated her.

  He was still distraught over his sexual paralysis but it was as dumb as regretting your suicide. What’s over is over. Sunderson mentioned that Smolens had told him Kate was fourteen and not twelve—she’d been a sickly child and remained skinny so no one figured it out.

  “He’s still her uncle, and she’s still a child. Lemuel should go to prison for sleeping with her.”

  They had reached their lunch place, a lovely park rest stop near the bridge that crossed the middle branch of the Ontonagon River. Before eating their sandwiches he led her on a longish, steep path down to a fine stretch of the river. He stumbled twice but managed to stay afoot. Diane was surefooted. On summer vacations with her parents they always visited vacationing relatives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Diane had learned rock climbing early. Diane was thrilled seeing a heron across the river. Everything was fine until they turned around and Sunderson had difficulty, slipping on the steep path. She did what she could to help his huffing and puffing and efforts to get a solid foothold. She was ahead of him pulling on his left arm and at one point he stumbled and fell grabbing her bare calf. A bright light went off in his head and he was suddenly aroused. The calf had been so palpable. Near the top there was a small tussock of soft grass and he dragged her down. She couldn’t stop laughing hard but he quickly made love to her and she responded energetically. His heart actually soared rather than fluttering. At lunch never had a ham and cheese sandwich tasted so good. She acted natural as if nothing had happened though she kissed him.

  When they got home in two hours they made love long and languorously in their old marriage bed. Afterward she had tears in her eyes. “We really screwed up, didn’t we?” she said. Now he teared up as well and muttered, “Yes.”

  “I could never get married again.”

  “Why?” he asked with an ache behind his voice.

  “I noticed as I get older it’s hard enough to take care of myself let alone adding a man. When I was nursing Bill I was exhausted all the time though it wasn’t much work. We couldn’t find another nurse he could abide. He said the problem was that when you’re dying you can’t stand banality. So when a nurse would say her dishwasher broke or she thought her grandson was smoking dope it would drive him batty. In those last weeks he kept talking about his glorious dream life in which he could see death creeping up on him while he was whirling free through the universe which he loved. He told me how he was able to visit many of the ninety billion galaxies out there. He would say, ‘If this is death it’s not bad.’ That aspect was quite encouraging. I mean he had always been a doctor, a scientist of the body, and quite the cynic about anything religious. Now he was talking about visiting galaxies and hearing the voice of God in the explosion of a black hole that had the power of five million suns.”

  Sunderson’s curiosity but not his comprehension was piqued by any information about black holes. He had read about the one with the power of five million suns but what could he make of it? Was this where God lived? There was also a constellation surrounded by five million stars. How did they count them? It
had to be an estimate, he thought pathetically. He had read a couple of books by the astronomy writer Timothy Ferris that left him chewing the air as if it were food. The man had once appeared at the local university to give a lecture. That helped to humanize it a bit though all the details were still beyond him. In childhood Sunderson and his friends had the usual dream of inventing a time machine. If he had one he would mainly use it to revisit his best days of fishing. So many years later after the divorce he kept wanting to go back to certain times with Diane like one night camped on a deserted beach miles east of Grand Marais when the northern lights were so spectacular that for the first time he had felt at one with the universe. Usually it was at two, three, five, ad infinitum. In truth, like most men he lived his life in pieces and remembered only fragments.

  They stopped at the travel agent in Marquette to synchronize her trip to Paris with his own. He didn’t mind heading to Seville first, then Barcelona and on to Paris when she arrived. She told him she’d picked out a relatively inexpensive hotel with a room overlooking a garden that she and her husband had loved because she could watch birds and there was little street noise. When he looked he realized she’d chosen the hotel where he stayed with Mona. It was now easy to admit that it was the worst thing he’d ever done in his life.

  Sunderson dropped her off at her grand home that she was eager to leave. She kissed him on the lips, an instant thrill.

  “See, we don’t need to get married. We can have a nice affair until we die.”

  Chapter 24

  At home Sunderson was pleased Diane had given him the Le Creuset of leftover cacciatore. He saw Monica’s bags packed near the door and no longer regretted that she was moving away to be with Lemuel. There was a phone message from Berenice in Green Valley that said his mother was dying again but there was no point in his coming out. The doctor thought she would die soon from her stroke and pneumonia. He was relieved that she didn’t seem to be in pain, though he could not imagine his mother absent from earth.

  There was also an angry call from Kate who was furious that Lemuel was kicking her out in favor of Monica. Kate was now willing to tell him anything he wanted to know about the “murderers” as she called them.