by Jim Harrison
The evening had gone well until 10:30 when they finished Mona’s gorgeous pizzas and she had left with friends who picked her up for a dance.
He and Marion had been a bit melancholy after Mona’s departure as if a certain life force had left. Sunderson told him about the encounter with Carla and the preposterous ideology of semen. Marion guffawed and said that no religion could explain itself clearly. The need to feel ecstasy, the capacity to get out of ourselves was so great a need that we would buy the most ornately simpleminded beliefs. He said that Sunderson wouldn’t take in the idea until he gave up the concept of evidence that so pervaded his detective profession.
“It’s a hard habit to break,” Sunderson had said. “If only you could track gods in the snow. The Greeks and Romans tended to identify exact locations where the gods were thought to live.”
“Before I quit drinking, saloons were the home of my gods. They were the only place I felt good. Once on a Saturday in Iron Mountain I spent fourteen hours in a bar playing euchre and watching football. At closing time the bar owner told me that I had gone through two fifths of whiskey. That seemed too much even though I was a pretty big boy back then, which was in my midtwenties. I was a road man for a snowmobile company and driving, say, from Superior, Wisconsin, to Escanaba I’d stop at a dozen roadhouses as if they were chapels you’d stop at on a pilgrimage way back when.”
“Some of you skins would drink until just short of death and sometimes you made it all the way. Once on the way back from the Soo I got a call on my radio that a frozen Indian had been found near Rudyard. There was no evidence of foul play but the autopsy revealed blood alcohol of .44 which was a record. Dead Indians were always the toughest part of my job, probably a tinge of guilt like investigating a lynching down south.”
“There are many forms of Emmett Till. And maybe you folks would call Wounded Knee a still-open case a hundred and twenty years later.”
“Murder is never a closed case.”
When Marion left and he hurriedly cleaned up in the kitchen he remembered how much his dog had loved pizza crusts. This memory probably helped precipitate the weeping upstairs. Back at the window with his nightcap he watched Mona arrive home from the dance. If only she was ten years older but then she wasn’t. How fatuous. The fatality of time struck him suitably dumb. He had heard on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac on NPR how the famed German writer Goethe had fallen into a depression when at age seventy-three an eighteen-year-old girl had refused to marry him. There was evidence here that great writers could be the same variety of dickheads as ex-detectives. He slipped into a pleasant thought of a canyon near Aravaipa Creek he hadn’t had time to walk to the end of, only discovering it the last day. He had made his way fearfully down the sides where he had seen cattails at the bottom through his binoculars. There was a small spring with five species of birds he didn’t recognize flitting around. When he looked west where the canyon began in the mountains a few miles distant it was so enticing. Maybe he would go back someday and walk it out. Eureka, he thought, picking up his nightcap from the windowsill. He had never seen Au Sable Falls near Grand Marais in the winter. He would walk for a week. It had worked once, why not again? He had made real progress today on his case of the Great Leader what with getting Carla as a Judas spy. These pleasant thoughts, however temporary, put him into a tearless sleep.
He left at daylight, about 7:30, in a mild sweat from having uprooted so much junk in the rear of the garage to find his Bushwacker cross-country skis, relatively short and wide, to get through the trees in the woods. He only found one ski pole, which would be awkward but then the skis were only a substitute for conditions not suitable for snowshoes. While rummaging around and making a lot of noise he turned to see Mona watching from the open garage door. She was bundled up and when they embraced he smelled the incendiary odor, for him, of lilac from her hair damp from the shower. He was disappointed when his nuts clutched because he wanted his thoughts to be pure as the plenitude of fluffy snow not the product of the tub of guts that is the human body.
“Don’t go so far that you have trouble getting back,” she said, heading off for school at a walking pace that far exceeded his own. Diane’s comfortable pace had also been faster than his own. He recalled one of those PBS nature films that showed a huge shaggy-maned male lion pacing around slowly, almost lazily, protecting the territory while the females stalked and raced through the veldt snagging all of the food. When mating time came he couldn’t begin to catch them but had to wait for them to be ready and willing. Sunderson had always known that he wasn’t built for speed but a plodding steadiness. He was a tugboat not a Yankee Clipper.
On the way east on Route 28 along Lake Superior he turned off NPR in order to avoid the world’s plentiful bad news, and turned away from the state police building near the prison in order to enjoy the huge dark green Lake Superior where the swells from the storm were subsiding. Passing through Munising he had a sudden poignant memory of his mother’s best friend, their neighbor Mrs. Amarone, who had died in her fifties from breast cancer. She had taught his mother how to make a spaghetti sauce out of canned tomatoes and the local Italian sausage called cudighi. They had it every Saturday night and it was the family’s favorite meal. He would make the same sauce for camping trips with Diane, drenching a container of cooked pasta with olive oil so it wouldn’t stick. He and Diane would get out of work on a Friday summer afternoon, head out, and he would heat up the dish in a skillet over the campfire in the twilight. One summer they had camped a half dozen times near a small uninhabited lake, really a pond, near the west edge of the Kingston Plains between Melstrand and Grand Marais. The area wasn’t especially striking but they had counted at least a hundred sandhill cranes in the open field and if you were careful you could approach the young ones closely. On a warm evening they had listened to the raucous crane chorus and bathed nude in the pond. Diane had said, “We are naked apes,” and laughed. They made love without drying off, and drank a bottle of Barolo with dinner. She had always said the sauce with the pasta turned her on having grown up in a WASP family where the condiments tended to be limited to salt and pepper. They had made love again at first light when the cranes wakened them with their primitive yawp.
He pulled into the Township Park in Grand Marais and set off on his new snowshoes west down the shores of Lake Superior on the fairly hard-packed snow, stopping to stare at the latticed ice on the rocks at the water’s edge and the thirty-story precipitously high dunes in their light caramel color. He felt strangely blessed because the air was still and the mist was lifting off the lake, revealing blue water which had been greenish in Marquette and which he immediately gave up trying to figure out. He reached the mouth of the creek in a little more than an hour and headed up the trail along the creek floundering in the deep soft snow. Now the world was all blackish trees and white snow and it was much cooler in the shade of the deep gulley. He was sweating hard when he reached the waterfall and was amazed at the delight the thunderous falling water brought to his mind. He had always been aware how brutish his aesthetic sense was compared to his wife’s but at times rose to the occasion. He had admitted to her that when she played a certain Villa-Lobos composition on the stereo his skin invariably prickled.
He sat on a stump for a half hour watching the water until his sweat dried and he was chilled wondering idly how the Ojibway, or Anishinabe as they called themselves, the first citizens here, the aboriginals, the true natives, regarded the falls and decided it had to be a sacred place to them, an idea fairly alien to our own culture. He was startled when he arose from the stump to see that a group of a dozen or so northern ravens had gathered soundlessly high in the trees behind him. One of them squawked and he squawked back. The squawking back and forth continued on his way back down the creek gulley to the lake. His dad had taught him early on to talk to ravens because they enjoyed it and would keep him company on walks. Perhaps these avian creatures besides being themselves contained the ghost of his anci
ent predecessors. He shivered at the idea on his way back partly because the notion was untypical and partly because he had neglected to eat breakfast in Shingleton. Marion had insisted that religion tends to emerge from the landscape and given the austere nature of Anishinabe beliefs this appeared as a sound concept. Christianity could spruce up its message by including bears, ravens, and other animals, or so he thought, but then the desert country out of which Christianity emerged was without these glorious creatures. Maybe he should look up what religions came out of jungles.
By the time he reached his car his limbs were leaden and his breath short and gasping. This aging thing was a real pain in the ass, he thought, resolving to continue hiking every day of the week. Why not? He could read afternoons and evenings within the deep puzzlement of retirement. He stopped at the Dunes Saloon for a burger and a cup of chili and talked to a big man named Mike who once owned the bar and whom Sunderson had to bust twice for throwing men out through the window of the bar and also the hardware store. The judge liked Mike and the sentence had been a course in “anger management,” which Mike had said “pissed me off.” They talked about their mutual passion for brook trout fishing and grouse hunting.
“I quit grouse hunting when my dog died,” Sunderson said.
“What the hell do you do in September when trout season ends?”
A good question Sunderson thought. His dog would trot through the woods well ahead and bark when it flushed and treed a grouse. He’d make the easy shot out of the tree, the bird would fall and the dog prance with joy. Diane, who was not much taken by wild game, loved roasted wild grouse. This wasn’t close to the classic version of grouse hunting but a successful peasant version of man and dog teaming up to get dinner.
The sun beat in the car windshield and he stopped at the rest stop on Route 28 near the Driggs River, the upper reaches of which were good brook trout fishing. Down the highway there was a small road leading into a five-mile-long pond on the Seney Wildlife Preserve, a good destination for the following day. He put his seat back and was immediately asleep for an hour, finally awakening to a rapping on the window. There was the state police cruiser parked next to his own car and Corporal Berks was staring in the window.
“Just making sure you’re alive, sir.”
“I think I am. I took a long hike. How are you Berks?”
“Fine. We miss you at the Post. The new guy’s from Mount Pleasant and doesn’t catch on to the U.P. How are you doing?”
“Just fucking, dancing, and fighting. Tell the new guy to give me a call if he gets especially puzzled.”
Berks drove off and Sunderson was amused by having said “fucking, dancing, fighting.” It was one of the things Diane liked least about the U.P., the male braggadocio she called “macho.” Marion, a frequent visitor to Mexico, corrected her on this saying macho meant a man who was gratuitously vicious. U.P. men were often intelligent louts, strutting and growling like their logging and mining grandfathers. It wasn’t really about manliness, a word not much in use until the recent decade and one that in former times would have been embarrassing. He couldn’t recall men ever talking about manhood when he was growing up. It was a more recent, absurd development.
Back home Sunderson was pleased by a note from Marion saying that he had put about twenty pounds of venison from the doe in the fridge, then Mona burst in the porch door glowing with excitement.
“Carla tried to call you from Hawaii. Where’s your cell?”
“I have no idea.” He fixed himself a whiskey.
“You’re not going to fucking believe this. It looks like King David might do ninety days in jail. You know those two fancy L.A. guys that were with Queenie you told me about? Well in this high-class lounge in the hotel in Maui, Dwight, I mean King David, wiped up the floor with them. I mean Carla said he beat the shit out of them. He exploded because they were trying to defile his religion. Carla said he went totally apeshit and trashed the place after he beat them to a pulp.”
“Will wonders never cease?” Sunderson smiled. He had observed when he met Dwight that he was in fine shape and in fact put his followers through an hour of rigorous exercise a day plus their manual work load. This was part of the warrior nonsense, the faux Indian part of the cult.
“I guess you’re going to have to take a break,” Mona said.
Chapter 16
And that’s what he did. He planned on walking in the mornings and reading a book a day in the afternoons and evenings. Of course it didn’t work out that way with human willpower more than occasionally a weak item. He was making a New Year’s resolution a few weeks short of the actual new year and there was a traditional problem with retirees in the Great North that they tend to come close to hibernation in the deep winter months of December, January, and February. A week after Mona had made her startling announcement about King David Sunderson was sitting at his desk sleepily reading about the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in the 1790s when Carla called.
“Dwight got ninety days,” she sobbed.
“I’m not surprised.”
“What the fuck do you know about Hawaii?” Her voice was shrill with anger.
“Everywhere public mayhem is punished.” It was a relief to get away from the historical text wherein farmers dressed up like redskins to protest a tax on their homemade whiskey. So what, he thought.
“Well, Queenie left for L.A. to nurse her friends leaving me high and dry with no money. I visit Dwight in the mornings and then I waitress.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I don’t know. I needed to talk to someone. Queenie’s not answering my calls and you and I have a relationship of some sort.”
“I suppose so.” He wondered what it was though every time he thought of their woodpile coupling he was hopelessly stimulated.
“I thought I should tell you that the Chadron land sale went through. Actually it’s a hundred and twenty acres north of Crawford, which is near Chadron and Fort Robinson where Dwight’s hero Crazy Horse was murdered.”
“How convenient.”
“Fuck you.”
After she hung up he walked down to the New York Deli and had a corned beef and sauerkraut sandwich on rye (with hot mustard), then stopped at Snowbound Books and bought a new text on the life of Crazy Horse by an Englishman and also, at the suggestion of the proprietor, a book of essays by the poet Gary Snyder called The Practice of the Wild. Poetry was very low on his list of interests but he liked the title and felt that he needed a break from history which after all tended to be a record of national bad habits.
On the walk home he was further irked by a thaw that made the snow soft and slushy. He had felt the warmer air from the south through the window in the middle of the night and left for Big Bay well before dawn. He had hoped to reach one of his brook trout spots back on the Yellow Dog Plains but the melting snow clung to his snowshoes and the going was hard. He returned to his vehicle and tried the Bushwhacker skis but had forgotten to buy a pole to replace the one that was missing. He got stuck in a melting drift and fell over sideways yelling “Goddamnit” to the natural world.
His habitual postlunch nap failed due to a recurrent problem with acid reflux and he didn’t need to taste the sandwich again. He had found some old vinyl records of Diane’s and thought that listening to Berlioz’s Requiem might elevate him but the old record player wasn’t quite up to speed and besides the music only elevated his melancholy over Diane. He decided on a midafternoon jolt of whiskey though he knew it was a mistake. He had seen the unpleasant television ad warning seniors about overdrinking. In the ad an old man had a beer while fishing in his rowboat but then gradually moved up to a six-pack, not a threatening amount to Sunderson. He lay down on the sofa with the obnoxious afternoon sun pouring down on him through the living room window, half dozing and praying to a god unknown for a December blizzard. His thoughts were errant. To wit, if there are ninety billion galaxies how many religions are in the universe? Could he make a beef stew like Diane did w
ithout fresh sage? Soon after their divorce he had neglected the heating element in her small greenhouse next to the garage and the herbs had all frozen. Mona had retrieved a science blog for him a few days earlier that claimed religion had a biological inception similar to our aesthetic perceptions. Even other mammals like cows and killer whales enjoyed Mozart. When they were in Florence and Diane had insisted on a three-hour walk through the Uffizi he had wondered about going that long without cigarettes but then had had goose bumps a half dozen times and had quite forgotten the existence of cigarettes. He came away convinced that art books were a hoax compared to the reverence of standing before the actual painting, a reverence ordinarily only elicited by the natural world. Was this religion? Probably.
Something like that since he had read the piece hastily. Unfortunately he slept for a few minutes and reclaimed the past by dreaming of Diane screaming close to his face, “I can’t live any longer with a man who sees the world through shit-stained glasses.” This happened the day before she left. She never swore so it truly got his attention, albeit tardily.
He was sweating and not from the sun through the window, which had disappeared. He pretended that the briefest of sobs was a hiccup and poured a very large whiskey, swallowing it in a couple of gulps. As an investigator he didn’t generally believe in suppressed memory but had not previously admitted this scream to himself.