by Jim Harrison
He struggled to drag his mind away from critical issues by pondering an article Mona had faxed him about these large moths that migrate by the millions from Nebraska to Wyoming and Montana and alight at an altitude of eight thousand feet on scree. Dozens of grizzly bears appear and eat up to ninety pounds of protein-rich moths apiece in a day. Staring at the immense thunderstorm moving from the east to the southwest he wondered how this could be? It was certainly a mystery that more deserved to be solved than the inscrutability of wife beating.
Now he saw Mona convoluted in the storm and recalled that the first time he saw her nude on the bed the lust was like a stomach cramp. What in God’s name did such lust mean? He was happy when there was a grand lightning stroke and the image of Mona was gone, clearly an experience that belonged to demonology as if the most haunted house of all were biology.
At dawn he felt creaky but had never slept so well in his life. He made a slow, perilous descent from the top of Crow Butte.
Chapter 21
Sunderson thought afterward that they were by far the longest three days of his life. Without the suppressed violence of the present they reminded him of the nasty heartache of homesickness in late spring at college turning in papers and taking exams before he could make the long drive north toward home. It was a lump in the throat time.
The first day the whole idea of using a horse as camouflage for his pretense was most unfortunate. Nearly two hours into his ride while skirting a mudhole the horse became slightly mired and frantically bucked Sunderson off. He watched despondently as the horse ran off in the direction they had come and then he walked toward the cult site perhaps three miles away. It was raining, which at least washed off the mud stuck to his clothes. As he neared the site he was pleased to see a big bonfire behind the house. The workers were burning trash and all the members kept to their distant tipis in the rain. He dried off before the hot fire.
Adam wasn’t disturbed about the horse saying that it knew the direct way home better than any human. Most fortunate for Sunderson was that Queenie and Carla had flown off that morning with the guy in the suit on the charter for Denver with a big list of supplies to buy for the new location. Sunderson was put to work by the foreman for ten bucks an hour chipping dried mud off the half dozen new all-terrain vehicles, the noisy four-wheelers that haunt mere walkers in the wild with their insufferable racket. He kept an eye on Dwight’s distant tipi thinking that Dwight was the only one with an off chance of recognizing him, remote because of the costume and the idea of being out of context. His outfit made him as invisible as a man in a green janitor suit in urban areas. No one notices janitors. It was, however, comical to Sunderson that he was cleaning up the machine he hated most other than snowmobiles. That night he was totally the exhausted geezer, ate a burger at the bar, and slept twelve hours.
The next morning, Saturday, life warmed up in every way. It was bright, clear, and sunny and by ten warm enough to be without a coat. Sunderson was put to work with a hammer, nails, and a crow bar repairing the collapsed portion of the corral. Dwight had decided that in harmony with the countryside the cult should have horses and commissioned Adam to secure a dozen rideable quarter horses and give lessons to those without experience. From the corral he watched Adam and Petunia perhaps a hundred yards away, teaching most of the young people horsemanship. He noted the great majority of girls over boys and wondered how this was organized. Dwight was an onlooker in a mauve robe and Sunderson noticed that he was standing fairly close to Morning Star.
At noon there was a picnic to which the workers were invited but Sunderson hung back at the corral and Adam brought him a sandwich.
“He seems like a pretty nice guy,” Adam said.
“I was a state police detective for nearly forty years. You’ll have to trust me.”
“True. I’ve been suckered by a lot of white folks.”
Sunderson sat in the pickup eating the sandwich and glassing the scene. When Adam was off leading a horse and rider at a brisk walk he saw Dwight hold Morning Star’s hand and his blood pressure rose precipitously, but then she got in a car with a friend and they were driven off to a Girl Scout meeting.
He had dinner with Adam and Morning Star in the trailer. She was enthusiastic because the cult was hiring her at good wages to teach riding with her father on weekends. Dwight had told her that his nickname was King David which she thought was funny.
“He’s such a wonderful man,” she said.
Sunday was bright and sunny but with a brisk wind from the south. The workers had taken the day off and Sunderson ensconced himself near a window upstairs in the old house having packed two wretched bologna sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. Petunia was teaching three girls about twelve how to saddle a horse and he was amazed at the ease at which she pitched the saddle onto the horse. She was a strong girl indeed. He was relieved for her that King David hadn’t made a move but also pissed off that it hadn’t come to a head like he knew it would.
It was nearly noon when Queenie and Carla drove in with a Suburban jam-packed with supplies from the plane. Only one male member volunteered so Adam was made busy unpacking the supplies and carrying them to the cook tent and various tipis. Sunderson’s heart jumped when he saw King David lead Morning Star into his tipi while Adam was coming out of the most distant tipi. Within a few minutes he heard a scream and Morning Star ran out of the tipi in her panties with Dwight stopping at the open tent flap. He looked dazed until he saw Adam running toward him with a drawn knife. Dwight jumped on an ATV and sped off at top speed. Adam swiftly mounted his horse and gave chase but fell behind because the ATV could do fifty on the road but then Dwight made a fatal mistake and turned off the road heading cross-country toward Crow Butte.
“Jesus Christ,” Sunderson yelled, moving to a back window watching the figures become distant. He ran downstairs and luckily one of the ATVs he had cleaned was still parked near the corral. He took a few frantic minutes to figure out how to operate the machine but then he was off and moving. He could see that Dwight was still well ahead but Adam was gaining, while he was a full mile behind. The only reason that he didn’t want Adam to cut Dwight’s throat is he’d go to prison and leave Morning Star fatherless.
Now Dwight slowed moving up the initial slope of Crow Butte, slowing even more as the slope grew steeper. Sunderson could see him look back at the quickly gaining Adam then gun the powerful ATV, shooting up the steep slope until it became almost vertical whereupon the machine flipped backward in a big arc with Dwight clutching the handlebars until it hit earth landing on Dwight and both man and machine rolled down the hill so that Adam had to dodge on his horse. Adam dismounted taking out his knife.
Sunderson was yelling “no” over the roar of his machine as he came up the beginning of the hill. He feared flipping and jumped off still yelling “no.” Adam turned to him as he crawled and scrambled up the slope to Dwight’s side. Dwight was on his back with the left side of his chest clearly stoven in and a leg twisted under him. His head was also cocked at an impossible angle and was the only thing about him that moved. He yawped a primitive sound like a heron then gurgled up puke and blood.
Sunderson and Adam only looked at each other shaking their heads then turned away from the now bleating body.
Epilogue
Sunderson had only taken a few careful steps down the steep hill when he heard a howl that froze his soul. He turned in panic and saw that Adam had lifted Dwight high with his big rough hands around his neck and was shaking him like a terrier does a rat, not a fond memory for Sunderson, or Dwight for that matter.
Of course King David lived. No one has ever been able to kill the Devil. He is everywhere with us. The State of Nebraska and Sioux County were puzzled about a possible prosecution for attempted sodomy and rape. Should millions of dollars be spent incarcerating an acute quadriplegic with no operable parts except a head that talked in a language no one could understand? Morning Star had given frank testimony. Indian girls are generally tough wha
t with living in two worlds. Sunderson skillfully minimized his own part in nailing Dwight. He presented himself as merely a retired Michigan state police detective looking for a missing person. He certainly didn’t mention the rag doll shaking incident. It wasn’t that the crime was swept under the rug, only that law enforcement and justice are as messy as life herself and why spend millions trying to punish an eggplant?
The Devil was medevaced to the big regional hospital in Rapid City where his condition was stabilized, the lowest common denominator, for a month or so whereupon he was flown to Santa Monica, California, where Queenie and Carla decided to live. Dwight was kept in a small guesthouse that was converted into a colorful hospital room. Young women can’t be expected to spend their lives on dead meat so there were around-the-clock attendants, three of them in eight-hour shifts, who played alternatively the kind of music Dwight loathed, heavy metal, rap, and country.
Sunderson drove home to Michigan by a circuitous route at a leisurely pace attempting to allow himself to decompress. He tried to avoid thinking about the big issues like love, death, freedom, or religion, much less money. He drove north to experience the emptiness of North Dakota knowing that an underpopulated landscape can draw off the poison. In a good if eccentric restaurant in Fargo he ate a big plate of barbecued beef ribs betting in his mind that the cult would dissolve as they usually do with the loss of the charismatic leader who could put a number on a member’s state of development. Some cult leaders have predicted Armageddon and are at a loss when the world fails to end and just keeps plugging along through the indifferent cosmos. There had always been a trace of a dog barking in Dwight’s voice and now he would bark no more.
He reached home in time for the opening of trout season on April 23, but it was largely a joke because half a foot of fresh snow fell. He fished anyway at a beaver pond near Marion’s cabin sensing the weight of the snow gathering on his hat. He caught two modest brook trout and fried them with bacon fat for lunch with bread and salt. He spent most of May at Marion’s cabin not quite ready for a steady diet of people.
By June and the beginning of the obnoxious bug season that would last at least a month he was back in his home study. There was simply no dealing with the mosquitoes, blackflies, and deerflies unless it was very windy at which point he would launch himself back into the woods.
He had dinner with Diane and Mona once a week after taking Diane’s declining husband for a ride out in the summery landscape. Mona had moved in with Diane and now acted a bit more girlish rather than prematurely womanly. Her ditzy mother hadn’t protested the change in her daughter’s parentage and had immediately sold the house to a young academic couple with a little money on the side. Sunderson couldn’t help but pull out the Slotkin book for a little peek at the attractive wife. One stellar morning he had caught her doing yoga in a skimpy leotard and his blood pressure ascended. What was this yoga thing? Wasn’t it also a religion? He had been pleased on Memorial Day when it was an untypically hot day and Mona had bathed nude in a spring hole in the creek that he hadn’t watched but fled back into the woods. A girl needed a father figure not a lecher. He bet that Adam would keep a close eye on Morning Star.
Soon after he had returned home he had bought a pedometer and now on an unpleasantly warm Labor Day weekend he checked his mileage, startled that he had walked seven hundred miles in four months, an average of five miles a day. This was neither here nor there except to remember that such diverse figures as Thoreau, Kierkegaard, and George Bernard Shaw had said that you could walk yourself into serenity. He doubted that but walking and fishing filled his life in a way that his work had long ceased to. He knew he wouldn’t become as well mannered as his father but kept a fairly tight lid on his irascibility. He was charged with assaulting two college students but the charges were dismissed when it was determined they were setting off cherry bombs near Sunderson’s garage. That made the Marquette Mining Journal with “Retired Detective Subdues Athletes with Clothesline Rope.”
He didn’t drink less on purpose he just drank less by switching to wine, the quantity of which could be more easily controlled. With the help of a surveyor he blocked out an even square mile of state land near Marion’s cabin having decided to do a flora and fauna identification and species count. His stack of nature guidebooks was becoming well thumbed and he liked the idea of investigating the nature of nature excluding the human species and its charnel-house history. Enough is enough.
On a Sunday morning before Labor Day he stopped by Diane’s house to check out dinner plans just as a hospice worker and an RN arrived. Diane was making arrangements for a full day off and Sunderson and Mona took a short walk down to the beach near the Coast Guard station. Mona waded in and said it was the warmest she had ever felt Lake Superior. She was distracted with butterflies because she was leaving for Ann Arbor and the university midweek. When they got back to Diane’s house a pile of camping gear was stacked on the porch and the temperature was already in the eighties. Diane’s face was tight and distraught. She told them her husband had suggested an overnight camping trip while he came as close to euthanizing himself as possible without the final step.
They drove east to Munising and then northeast to the shore road, taking a dip at Twelvemile Beach which was nearly empty, the often tempestuous water sullen and placid. A dozen miles to the south beyond Kingston Lake Sunderson found the two-track with difficulty. He was full of anxiety that the pond he and Diane had loved and so often camped at over twenty years before had somehow been ruined. Not in the least. The two-track was nearly impenetrably overgrown and Sunderson managed to knock loose one of the sideview mirrors on Diane’s newish station wagon, which she ignored. When they arrived at the clearing, about seventy yards by seventy, two coyote pups scooted off and entered a burrow up a hillside. Sunderson grabbed a flashlight, walked up, knelt, and shined the light in the tunnel. The male pup growled as if to protect his sister. The women took the flashlight and knelt down wagging their butts in the air. They were both wearing clingy gray cotton gym shorts. At the first stroke of desire Sunderson looked up at the heavens but failed to feel heavenly. He quickly set up his small tent facing east so he could catch the first of dawn’s light while the girls chose the far side so that they could sleep in. He was told to turn around while they put on their bathing suits but he was already headed west for a walk despite the heat following a tiny creek that provided the pond’s outlet. He looked down at the spring fumaroles burbling upward and the shadows of a small patch of lily pads with yellow knob flowers. Everywhere on the water’s bottom where it was shallow enough there were the footprints of heron and sandhill cranes. At the far end the girls were screeching at the coldness of the water but finally submerged to their necks. He was looking forward to the roast chicken, potato salad, and wine Diane had brought but he first needed a two-hour sweaty walk and a swim. They would never be the kind of family that would live under one roof but they would be close.
About the Author
Jim Harrison is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and has had his work published in twenty-seven languages. He has earned a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association. Harrison divides his time between Michigan, Arizona, and Montana.
About the Publisher
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamso
n, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”