by Jim Harrison
Sleep was fitful at best. To Sunderson the only reliable drugs were alcohol and tobacco and even ibuprofen and aspirin were suspicious, varying as they did the dream life that amused and fascinated him. His main worry was whether he’d be able to screw Melissa on the long shot of an opportunity. Toe anguish isn’t sexy and a rowboat isn’t a hospitable place for intercourse. Early in their marriage when camping he and Diane had tried it on Lake Gogebic but they had given up, laughing at the awkwardness. If he were religious, he thought, he could at least pray for warm weather so he could see a little skin. He finally slept because luckily for once he was old and with aging you gave up trying to account for everything that might happen, the hopeless attempt to balance the hundreds of variables with your brain’s billion-roomed house between which there are not nearly enough doors. Once again he realized that life had too many moving parts.
He was at the Patagonia Lake marina a half hour before Melissa was due. By Michigan standards the lake was dinky indeed but made up for it by its beautiful mountain setting. He had to half drag his aching foot but was eager to row while Melissa fished. He reached the dock from the parking lot with difficulty, his big toe and to a lesser extent the whole front part of his foot feeling like the pulse of a toothache at the root of a loose tooth, certainly better than the grueling pain at the beginning of an attack. At least gout didn’t entail an emotional hangover. Gout was something you did to yourself usually by willful inattention. The list of prohibited foods was taped in clear sight above his desk. The problem was that pain is abstract until it arrives and couldn’t compete with a skillet of quick-fried doe liver that had been sliced thin. His father had told him that liver was the healthiest of meats for building strong bodies but then liver was also the cheapest meat a relatively poor family could afford. He had so wanted to be strong like his father who could easily lift one of cousin Charlie’s boxes of whitefish that weighed three hundred pounds.
Sunderson sat there on the dock near rowboat number seven that the marina clerk advised was the best of the dozen or so. It was clearly a piece of shit in the long line of rowboats in his life. The mythology of liver and rowboats faded when he thought of the pungency of Deloria’s Playing Indian, which he had leafed through in the midst of his pain. Most academic history books he read were real prose clunkers and sometimes Diane would read aloud a sentence or two from them and laugh. Diane liked to listen to Leonard Cohen while reading her favorite author Loren Eiseley. He liked both but not at the same time. He began to doze from his drug combo of colchicine and Oxycontin to which he had added Imodium. Colchicine could be a violent purge. When Melissa had called earlier in the morning to ask what kind of juice he wanted with lunch he had said, “A pint of vodka,” another questionable ingredient.
She finally pulled up in a newish Toyota 4Runner Sport, a vehicle he had yearned for but could scarcely afford on his pension, and definitely not affordable on her nurse’s aide salary. Likely it came from her faux stockbroker brother.
They quickly loaded her small tackle box, two spinning rods, and the picnic hamper. She was so effervescent that it verged on playacting and he cautioned himself in his haze against looking for something wrong rather than right. She wore a light-blue jacket and jeans rather than the skimpy clothes of his fantasies. He rowed the gunk boat, sipped vodka, and hummed, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” He had always preferred the edgy Rolling Stones to the frivolous white canticles of the Beatles. She finally caught a decent smallmouth bass on a Rapala she was casting but released it saying that she preferred to eat saltwater fish. It had become warm enough for her to take off her jacket and her braless breasts in the light sleeveless pullover jiggled pleasantly when she cast the lure. The sight penetrated his drug haze and he felt a specific nut twitch. She was trolling a worm and heavy sinker with her other rod and hooked a little catfish, which he detached because it was too ugly for her to touch. He had brought Alfred’s map and was rowing toward an estuary area where Sonoita Creek, which he had walked along in the Nature Conservancy land, emptied into the lake. He had skipped breakfast and was hungry for the picnic.
The creek was braided near the lake but he found an inlet deep enough to pull in the boat. He watched as she laid out the picnic on her hands and knees, a fetching sight. He took a solid gulp of vodka to ease a foot tinge. There was a fruit salad and a dozen huge shrimp that she said she got through Hector who owned Las Vigas. He knew shrimp was on his proscribed gout list but said fuck it to himself, dipping a shrimp in a blistering hot salsa verde. She laughed at his tears.
“What are you really doing down here?”
This caught him off guard and he knew the question was meant to, but after a near lifetime of interrogating perps, more recently designated “persons of interest,” he was an expert at cat and mouse.
“I’m checking out a cult leader. Seeing my iron mother. Anything more I’m not at liberty to say.” He immediately realized that he should have put the subject to rest but he wanted to tease her. He put on a cool, impassive face when what he was really thinking about is that he should have brought along an Oxycontin.
“You don’t trust me!” She took his coolness as truth, and got up and walked away wandering in the bushes nearly out of sight.
He was sitting back against a small tree he wished he could identify. He intended to call Alfred and take a walk with him so he could learn some of the mysterious flora. Meanwhile he was watching her through barely open lids and wondering at her next move now that it had become clear to him that she was spying for her brother. He was pleased she was upset that he was cooling toward her, thus failing in her mission. It was then that he saw her in the gap between the bushes give a fake little shriek and intentionally plop herself down in a boggy hole. He begrudgingly got up from his resting place then sat back down when he saw she was walking toward him with muddy jeans and tears in her eyes. He had always been puzzled by the emotional volatility that allowed women to cry on demand.
“I’m a mess. I have to clean up. Shut your eyes.”
With eyes wide open he watched as she stripped off her jeans with her back turned. She sat and pulled the jeans off her feet and then knelt on her hands and knees rinsing the jeans in the clear water of the inlet near the boat. She wore white thong undies and had the prettiest, most perfect ass he had ever seen and it was easy to crawl over, pull down the thong, and start lapping, errantly thinking, I am a dog who accepts food from strangers.
“Oh you pig, you fucking pig,” she said laughing.
He didn’t have much more than a half-master because of his numbed condition but he managed to get it in where it properly grew in the wet heat. The drug numbness also helped him last longer as did the oddly melodramatic mountain landscape. His hard strokes had pushed them down the grassy bank so that she was grabbing the gunnel of the rowboat to keep them from sliding in the water.
“You are a fucking pig,” she said turning back to look at him.
“No, I’m a dog wondering if I’m going to have a heart attack.”
They struggled back to the blue tablecloth she had spread for the picnic. She slipped into the thong and clumsily tried to wring out her jeans but he stopped her from putting them on.
“I need to study your beautiful ass.”
“You don’t get my ass unless you cook me a fine meal.”
If this was meant to lead him by eyes, nose, and pecker further into the void it worked. While rowing back to the marina she asked him to come to dinner at her place the following evening. He accepted, ignoring the idea that Xavier might be there. She said that now she had to go home, make Josefina some flan she’d promised, take a shower to wash off the “pigginess,” and then work the 4:00 p.m. to midnight shift at the hospital.
On the drive back toward his humble digs in the village of Patagonia he pondered his postcoital slump. In a more distinctly natural world he was the male spider who flops over after ejaculation to provide a meal for the female. He was mildly resentful that sex could s
till wield this sort of power over him, that a geezer could be so strongly hooked by the biological imperative. His little male dog, now in heaven, used to jump up hopelessly at the high rear end of the female collie down the street. His mother used to say, “God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform,” but that was when a local hockey team had beaten the thugs from Iron Mountain.
He forced himself to drive past the Wagon Wheel. The two shrimp he had managed to eat before rutting weren’t enough cushion for a couple of double whiskeys. A nap and something to eat would help prepare him for the usual cocktail hour. He avoided the pathetic temptation to stop at the restaurant and have yet another bowl of menudo, opting for the grocery store and a few frozen dinners, which normally repelled him but he lacked the verve to cook a real meal. He also treated himself to a fifth of Absolut vodka although he normally only drank the cheapest brands.
He sat down at the kitchen table because memory was prodding him and he needed to make a journal entry.
Melissa reminds me of Sonia when I was nineteen and an unconfident sophomore at Michigan State. It’s more than their mutual raspberry scent or their fine butts. Sonia was a hippie graduate student in history and we met at the bookstore when we started talking about the failure of the White Russian Army. We had coffee and then agreed to meet now and then and talk about Russian history about which she was obsessed far beyond me. She was a genuine kook and wore orange and black clothing because she believed in evil and her favorite holiday was Halloween. Sad to say I only met her in May a few weeks before the end of the school year after which she was going to Leningrad for the summer on a travel scholarship. She spoke fluent Russian because her parents were refugees from World War II when they lived in Kiev. They were Jews but not religious so it was easy to understand why her belief in evil was so firm.
When I was six my mother slapped me real hard. I haven’t remembered this for years as if it were a small visual splotch. (This was a time when schoolteachers were still allowed corporal punishment.) I was in the first grade and having trouble learning to read. I was sitting with Mom in an easy chair while she read aloud to me from a story called The Water Babies from the Book House and I was attempting to follow the text with a forefinger. I was upset because I thought the story was a big lie. I had fished brook trout with my dad and there was no way that a group of human babies could live underwater in a river swimming around through water weeds without coming up for air. Meanwhile Berenice was prancing back and forth through the room yelling “dumby” at me. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon and Mom smelled like the rhubarb wine a neighbor made every year. Berenice came too close and I grabbed her by a pigtail and called her a “bitch.” Mom reared back and slapped me very hard. I had no idea what the word “bitch” meant.
This area reminds me of the collection of DVDs called The Blue Planet Diane gave me for a birthday. Much of the underwater life was alien with no possible human reference point. Some of it was troublesome and repellent. There were clusters of two-inch-wide, six-foot-long worms living a mile deep in perfect darkness. I certainly didn’t want to go there.
An image of Melissa’s ass in the broad daylight of the estuary. There should be a legion of pollsters asking all the men in the world what an ass means to them.
I keep thinking of a photo in an old Life magazine of monkeys bathing in a hot spring in northern Japan. It’s snowing but they’re quite warm though wet. How do they get out and dry off without freezing their asses off? That’s the question.
He undressed totally for his nap trying to dismiss the power of his negative thinking. After forty years as a janitor trying to clean up the culture’s dirt, here he was in a decidedly alien locale trying to chase down someone who had committed no readily provable crime. He had been stoned by mostly female preteens or so he thought from the few glances before trying to shield his eyes. This seemed to be causing a murderous edge back there in his mind. He perforce had an edge he had developed in order to function at his job but then the edge had become an organic part of his character. A goodly number of people, some unconsciously, sensed this edge and avoided any more than nominal contact with him. It reminded him of the way people in social contact with a doctor would wedge in a medical question, usually ineptly. With Sunderson the brave ones would ask a peripheral question about law enforcement because it was the rare male who hadn’t committed a felony, unwittingly or consciously. In bars and on social occasions Sunderson tended to be reassuring saying that strictly speaking the entire population of the United States should be imprisoned but then who would take care of the innocent children? Law enforcement was merely the manhole cover on the human sewer. People within earshot would laugh a bit nervously.
He napped solidly for three hours by grace of an Oxycontin and a gulp of vodka, dreaming of church bells on wintry Sunday mornings in Munising. The bells turned out to be his cell phone with Mona on the other end.
“I’ve called five times. Where the fuck were you?”
“Taking a health nap. I’ve had a gout attack.”
“You’re always having gout attacks, darling.”
“I can’t seem to learn from experience. What’s up?”
“I had dinner with Carla and my therapist and found out some nifty stuff. First of all they fed me this cheap California chardonnay that tasted like rancid butter. Then they wanted to rub my body with Apache lotion, can you believe it?”
“I wasn’t aware that Apaches were into cosmetics.”
“Carla gave me the bottle. It was made in Boulder, Colorado. Well, we smoked a joint and I got a little drunk and dozed off on the sofa and the next thing you know when I opened my eyes Carla was taking a raised skirt photo of me.”
“Pardon?”
“She was on her knees before me and taking a raised skirt photo with a flash. I said ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ and she said that her boyfriend likes raised skirt photos of young girls. Guess who her boyfriend is?”
“That’s easy. It’s the Great Leader. I’m sure she’s one of many.”
“Carla says if you don’t lay off she’s going to accuse you of sodomy, you know, at your retirement party. She’s got Queenie as a witness.”
“How interesting.” Sunderson’s mind whirled with the permutations, which were easy to dismiss. “It would be embarrassing but it wouldn’t work. There were a number of cops there plus friends from the prosecutor’s office. There are also photos of her going sixty-nine with Queenie. I’ve got more and better witnesses.”
“Should I tell her that?”
“No. Of course not. We don’t want a pissing contest. Just don’t go to her place.”
“I miss you, darling.”
“I miss you, too.”
He was only able to eat one of the wretched frozen chicken dinners before he felt gaggy. It was time to drive to a supermarket and set up a proper kitchen. He had planned to spend a quiet evening reading Deloria’s Playing Indian and making some written notes on his situation. He knew he felt a certain misplaced pride, a questionable hubris that he could deal with this new territory when there was no evidence so far that he was actually capable of doing so. He had let down his guard after being freed from forty years of work habits and the results of this slippage had been poor indeed. Before answering Mona’s call he had had a confused dream that had his favorite brook trout creek becoming round, a perfect circle in the meadow, woods, and marsh that was its path. Toward the end it had become coiled and serpentine, which reminded him of some of Marion’s favorite ideas. The aging process was linear with the inevitability of gravity but our thinking and behavior tended to occur in clusters, knots that wound and unwound themselves. His current central problem was comparable to the poorly remembered Gospel parable: when you clean out the room of your life via retirement you have to be careful what you let back in. Since it was five months until brook trout season he had only his obsession with the Great Leader, which was not something to pleasantly fill a life. He had an image of a lovely old basilica he ha
d walked in to on a side street in Florence while Diane napped at their room at the Brunelleschi. He had sat on a bench in the basilica calmed by the utter loveliness of the place, the wonderful simple lines compared to the rococo monstrosity of the Duomo. An old lady and a pretty girl of about twelve entered, lit candles, and knelt and prayed. The question was why not destroy the Great Leader who so grotesquely diminished what everyone must sense, however remotely, as the divinity of existence. To be sure, Sunderson only felt this in the natural world distant from the collective human puke that drowned so much of what was good in life.
Berenice called and he answered out of guilt. She wanted him to come to dinner the following evening because their sister Roberta was passing through town. He said he was booked and they settled for lunch. He was chain smoking and noted with irritation that he was down to five cigarettes, not nearly enough for an evening’s reading. Was he capable of walking to the Wagon Wheel for cigarettes without getting stewed? Time would tell. Another more irritating thought occurred. What would his mother think if he was charged with sodomy? Not good.
He poured a modest drink not bothering with ice and called a former colleague in Marquette explaining Carla’s supposed intentions. The friend explained that the prosecutor would never bring such a pathetic case but to make sure they would bring Carla to complete “attention.” An informant had told him that Carla sold not only the occasional lid of pot but also totally untaxed cartons of cigarettes a Chippewa member of Daryl-Dwight’s cult brought in from the smugglers in the Sault Ste. Marie area. The latter would be a federal charge and the threat would “bunch her undies,” or so the man said. The little cigarette sideline gave Carla a profit of twenty bucks a carton.