by Jim Harrison
“I have an unpleasant question before Marion arrives.” He took Carla’s e-mail and the photo from a jacket pocket and passed it to her. “Here Carla says she went down on you and you told me nothing happened. Who’s telling the truth?”
“Who cares?” She was blushing ever so slightly.
“I care. If you’ll testify we can send Carla to prison for years.”
“No chance. Maybe a night in jail but not prison. You said yourself when you and Marion were talking about the Catholic priest sex scandal that a priest giving a sixteen-year-old hundred-seventy-pound young man a blow job wasn’t worth ten million bucks. Why didn’t he run for it?”
“Boys are different,” he said, pausing to glance into his studio den with relief. He intended to put a no sign up on his peek hole. Enough was enough. It seemed that his thinking was becoming less muddy. “Boys can be polymorphously perverse into their teens. Of course I’m unsure about girls. In the last three decades or so the culture has been prolonging childhood so it’s altogether natural that the age of consent be moved up to eighteen. Apparently the young are more sexually active than ever but the law is there to appropriately protect them from older predators of which there are many, like Dwight-Daryl.”
“Carla told me that as of this morning he’s changed his name to King David,” she laughed.
“Jesus Christ! What next?” He finished his whiskey but stopped himself from pouring another.
“I’m different. I’m old for my age. I cooperated so it would be unjust to send Carla to prison. We’re the world record holder for sending people to prison. Skip Carla, concentrate on the Great Leader.”
“For the time being maybe.” He was remembering that he had been expected to be a man at fourteen. And his sisters were hard cases at that age. He certainly had no clear idea why the societal change had occurred. His own family had been matriarchal with his mother holding the iron hand and his dad mostly bringing home the bacon. Mona’s mother was a mostly absent ditz.
“Can I sit on your lap for a minute?”
“If you behave.”
His knee felt the heat of her butt. What would happen to this waif? Did he have guidance to offer?
“You’re under arrest,” Marion said, standing at the open door in an orange coat and orange overalls. There was snow on the front porch which had muffled his approach. Sunderson was busy diverting his thoughts away from Mona’s warm ass with errant thoughts of the history of the Panama Canal, his dislike of college communities and their mental tourism, and the obvious fact that the human body should have been designed so that you only needed to pee once a day. He was sure his knee was beginning to sweat. How many BTUs does a vulva generate?
“I’m wearing my hunting clothes because I’m tired of my school principal clothes. Tomorrow’s the last day of deer season. We should give it a try.”
“You look truly ugly,” Mona said, getting up and reheating the mashed rutabaga and adding more cream and butter.
“It’s defensive, dear, the most visible color, which will save me from getting shot. Most hunting accidents are alcohol related.”
“I’ll tag along. I’m not saying I’ll fire a shot.” Sunderson felt dullish from his dawn plane ride though part of the fatigue might have come from being away from Xavier’s gun sights.
“Just before dark I saw a doe dragging a leg. She’d never make it through winter. You’d love doe liver.”
“I’ll count my gout pills.”
By nine the next morning, a clear glittery day of ten degrees with the snow glistening, Sunderson was frying the doe liver in too much butter, salivating and watching Marion carry in a load of split beech. The evening before, despite having had only two whiskeys, he began to nod off after two servings of the pork roast and mashed rutabaga and a bare nibble of salad. Mona and Marion had scarcely left when the phone rang and it was Queenie’s father, the big-shot Bloomfield Hills businessman who had earlier tried to get Sunderson to retrieve his daughter’s money from the Leader. Queenie had come up missing in Tucson and the man wanted him to look for her, an easy request to decline rather rudely. He gave the man Kowalski’s Nogales number. They deserved each other. Mona had winked at him when she left and he wandered into his den studio for the soft-core porn peep show but found himself unable to remove the book that would give him the view. He went directly to bed not wanting a case of what Satchel Paige had called the “agitations.” He poured a nightcap but didn’t drink it thinking that since touching Mona was unthinkable he had to transcend the remote lecher in himself. Before Marion left he had repeated his advice to Sunderson to closely read Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian for an insight into the behavior of the Great Leader, currently called King David, a hard to swallow name change, but then Sunderson had already begun the book.
At 6:00 a.m. he was up drinking coffee, looking for the shells for his .30-30 deer rifle, making a hash of leftover pork and potatoes, and trying to find where he had put the Deloria book and, not incidentally, D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, the latter impulse coming from the shred of a dream. As a college sophomore in a basic literature course the teacher had been a youngish hotshot directly out of Princeton, already an author of a book about Cotton Mather. Sunderson found them both suffocatingly dreary. This young professor loathed D. H. Lawrence which served to make Sunderson curious and he had had a brief Lawrence period that spring before coming to his senses and returning to history for relief. The dream had only included the professor’s feet, which were far too large in his English brogans for his body. It was time to run a tighter ship, which included not taking a dawn peek.
Halfway out to Marion’s shack on the snowy two-track at daylight Marion braked and jumped out of his ancient, boxy Toyota Land Cruiser with his .30-06 and shot the doe, which was down a slope between a grove of small white pines and alders beside a tiny creek. Sunderson could barely see the deer, which dropped in its tracks. Marion said, “Poor girl” while he gutted it with Sunderson holding the hind legs splayed to make it easier for Marion’s knife to avoid the anal sack. She was fairly healthy he thought examining her shattered knee, which he deduced came from a shot earlier in the two-week season. While Marion skinned the doe Sunderson had stoked the woodstove until it reddened. He guessed that he had gotten the cabin up to fifty degrees by the time they ate the liver off warmed tin plates.
“You have totally fucked up my schedule with your pursuit of this nitwit,” Marion laughed.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not. I’ve done a fair load of research while you were in Arizona possibly drinking and chasing pussy not to leave out getting the shit kicked out of you. Yours is the first American case of stoning I can recall.”
Marion had been helping his wife Sonia who, though lily white, had been a crack tribal administrator until she had taken a long leave to aid in the research in the nationwide lawsuit against the Bureau of Indian Affairs to recover billions of lost royalties coming to the tribes. A few years before, after Sunderson dealt with a particularly gory case of spousal abuse, he had been deeply puzzled how Marion had come up with a thick pile of articles on the subject along with a lengthy bibliography. Sunderson was still married to Diane at the time and she had hidden the material fearing another of his March depressions. A good deal of his puzzlement on the matter came from his father teaching him that it was forbidden to ever strike a female even if she hit you first.
“I think I’d have a much better grasp of the Leader, now King David, if I had his hundred stages of spiritual development in writing.” Sunderson swabbed up his butter and liver juices with a piece of mediocre white bread.
“No, that’s the wrong track. They probably don’t exist in writing. Maybe a number of them in his noggin. His power comes from the idea that he’s the only one in the know. He’s the judge. His followers must be kept off balance in their strain to prove their spiritual accomplishment.”
“But then what is he offering for their time and money fo
r Christ’s sake?”
“The ecstasy of belief. That’s what we want from religion. Something we can count on as helpless children in the face of ninety billion galaxies. In a despondent culture he is telling them how to live, how to get out of their very limited bodies into an arena of spiritual confidence.” Marion was grinning as he turned down the damper of the stove which was now putting out too much heat.
“But how do you tie in the sexual thing?”
“That’s an attractive come-on. Remember that guru in Oregon, the Baghwan what’s his name? His followers had absolute sexual freedom for a while then out of fear of disease he promulgated that they had to wrap themselves in plastic for sex. He went downhill after that and lost his thirty-two Rolls-Royces. I think our government shipped him back to India.”
“He’s certainly an effective predator. I’m a bit mystified by his interest in females that are too young.” Sunderson took Carla’s e-mail and the photo of Mona from his jacket and slid it across the table to Marion who was startled.
“This is hot stuff. I’d make copies. The young girl stuff is at least partly biological, you know, like Warren Jeffs and those apostate Mormons. Without knowing it men want to continue their own genetic line so they try to get there first by even getting rid of the young men. With mammals as varied as antelope and mountain lions the alpha male chases off the competition. It’s quite a battle in the so-called natural world. Male bears kill the cubs fathered by other male bears to further their own line. With humans some stepfathers are notably unkind to children sired by previous husbands.”
“What a fucking mess.”
“Not at all. It’s just us. Certain scientists are now positing the biological origins of religion. We’re perfect parasites when we maintain order in society and maintain the host that feeds us, and religion is an essential way of maintaining order.”
“The Lutheran church is a biological organism?” Sunderson laughed.
“At least partly. Bring it all home. Look at yourself. Consider what either of us do to conduct our lives in terms of sex, finance, and religion. We’ve been friends for more than twenty years. We talk about everything. You’ve said that after your divorce you felt sexually deprived scurrying around looking for a good piece of ass. You’ve said that money has always made you nervous and you try to ignore it because you’ve made five times as much as your poor father did without even trying hard. You’ve never said much about your religion, though you’ve inquired about mine a lot.”
“I thought it over quite a bit in the Nogales hospital when I was trying to organize an interest in continuing my life. Of course the drugs helped but they’re mostly a lid over the pain like a manhole cover and you remain aware of the surge of pain underneath. Anyway I’d keep making a list of my favorite brook trout creeks, nine of them in fact. Also my favorite landscapes, maybe a half dozen, two of them from boyhood on Grand Island, and also that long gully you showed me west of here. I’d go over these places in my memory for hours and was surprised how well I remembered them right down to the minutest detail. The day I left the hospital it occurred to me that these places were the location of whatever religion I had. This started when I was a boy. In these places I never think of anything except where I am, sometimes for hours. I remembered that Mother said that when you pray you’re not supposed to think about anything else, which was a trick I never could manage but can in these places. I found another one when I camped out for a week in Arizona.”
They walked for two hours on this rare windless day, normally a period when northwest winds off Lake Superior pound the locals senseless with their fury. It was a little odd not to find any wolf prints in the fresh snow but Marion said that here on the eastern edge of the Huron Mountains the wolves retreated far into roadless areas at the first shot of deer season.
Back at the cabin Sunderson fried up the sliced doe heart for a snack and then they dozed in their chairs after a few exhausting sentences about Mona’s future.
Chapter 13
After their nap Marion and Sunderson took Mona to the Verling for supper. Sunderson was frantic for a mess of fried whitefish. A “mess of fish” was a localism. People would say that they “fried up a mess of brook trout” they had caught. Sunderson was in a peculiar mental state not having totally awakened from his nap and a dream in which he was a god in the sky but hadn’t done anything with his godhead except wander around the heavens. He had returned to earth in his mortal body and was relieved.
Mona was stunning in a black pantsuit she said a “friend” had given her. She was pouty because her father had called from Cleveland for the first time in months and had said he was buying her a car. She had told him “I don’t want your fucking car” and had hung up. She changed the mood by taking out a page she had ripped from Vanity Fair to which her mother subscribed. She read aloud to them an item that said that at an auction of the belongings of the deceased fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, a single chair had gone for twenty-four million dollars. Marion had laughed so explosively that he alarmed the adjoining tables while Sunderson was merely puzzled to the point of melancholy and also irked that his whitefish and glass of beer had arrived and he had forgotten to order his habitual double whiskey. He thought he was losing his grip and corrected his error. Meanwhile Mona was thrilled at Marion’s laughter and asked him why he thought the chair’s price was so funny.
“Money would be great if we didn’t die but since we do it’s an absurd obsession.”
Sunderson was struck by Marion’s answer to the point of hypnosis. He couldn’t seem to move the forkful of fish halfway to his mouth. Mona tapped his arm and nodded toward the door. Carla and Queenie were self-consciously flouncing in wearing twin sheepskin coats. They took off their coats and shook out their short hair that didn’t move all that much and headed toward the table to say hello as if everyone were lifelong friends. Sunderson was startled to see Queenie and puzzled by her native dress and the pounds of turquoise jewelry hanging from her neck.
“Your dad is having you looked for in Tucson.”
“So I heard. I’m going back tomorrow. He wants to borrow money from my trust. He and some friends want to buy the Lions to save Detroit from further shame. I’m not loaning the asshole a single cent.”
Sunderson nodded thinking about girls and their daddies. He was relieved when his whiskey arrived because Carla was causing him discomfort. How could this nasty twerp be so ferally sexual dressed nearly as a boy?
“Lunch tomorrow at noon at the Landmark Inn?” Carla asked.
“Of course, darling.” They left for their table and Sunderson downed his whiskey as if it were water.
“Why is she wearing that absurd Indian costume?” Mona laughed.
“I’ve met a number of American women who think they were Pocahontas or Sacajawea in their past lives. They’re never a miserable squaw shot in a tent by advancing United States Cavalry.” Marion loved this sort of irony. He was a speed eater and signaled the waitress for more fish.
Sunderson was so pleased to reach home and sit at his desk with a stack of books, relatively sober because it was quite a struggle for the single double whiskey to work its way through his belly full of food. Intending to stay up late he made a small pot of coffee and surveyed the glory of his home though in truth the carpet needed to be replaced. After Diane had left he had stopped wiping his feet properly and there was a lot of scuzz on the wall around the stove and sink in the kitchen. Also, all of the windows in the house needed washing. He and a friend had set up a window washing business for fifty cents an hour when they were fourteen and it had been horribly boring work. He reduced the stack of books to three: Deloria’s Playing Indian, D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, and the Bible, King James version. He needed to go through the New Testament to remind himself of the gist of Christianity, which had garnered countless billions of dollars over the years. When on their trip to Italy he had stood with Diane in Saint Peter’s Square, he had been mightily impressed
but had also wondered about the top-dollar cost of the project and how the construction workers had wended their weary ways home for a simple bowl of spaghetti. He took out his journal.
I read that in the 1940s we made fifty phone calls a year. Now we make five thousand. Reminds me of the cacophony of blackbirds in spring or wild geese who will honk for hours at a time. Actually I think I heard this on NPR.
All of the lachryma Christi in Italy. Why is Jesus always weeping?
At Marion’s shack I had this feeling of just how ordinary I was. I simply have to nail the Great Leader but the group is so intact I must somehow catch him red-handed. I talked to Roxie briefly and she said the cult father who filed the early complaint and then went off to Flint had now withdrawn the complaint. Possibly paid off.
The bitterness of history. At the Sand Creek Massacre our cavalry shot low into the tents at dawn but the warriors were off hunting so we only killed women and children.
The childish attempt to tie oneself to history. I used to say while drinking in bars that I was born during the Blitzkrieg in World War II but only three old men even knew what I was talking about.
The phone rang and the caller ID said it was Mona. It was unthinkable not to answer.
“I just danced naked to ‘Wild Thing’ and you weren’t even watching. The dance was in thanks for dinner. Is your peeking period over?”
“Yes, it’s over. I intend to become a white Christian gentleman.”
“Aren’t you worrying about losing your manhood?”
“I hope so.”
“A couple of items. My friend Freddy was looking into universities. He’s a senior. Anyway, at Tufts in the Boston area they have a course called ‘Sex, Religion, and Money.’ Maybe you should fly out there and enroll. I could go along and sleep on the sofa.”
“Thank you but no. I’ve proven myself ill-suited to leave Marquette.”