by Jim Harrison
His confused mind couldn’t quite focus on what had happened to him, especially his shoulder and back. He had always been a strong man and the total immobilization of a back injury seemed inconceivable to him. He remembered a deer hit by a car he saw limping along the road at the fence, one leg swinging free broken in half. It was early December and the deer would never make it through winter. He stopped and put it out of its misery with his service revolver, throwing the carcass in the trunk for the delicious meat. He had taken it to Marion, his friend, to butcher and had given half the meat to him. The incident finished deer hunting for Sunderson. He could not accept a deer’s inability to deal with cars. Sunderson thought a world without cars would be lovely. Back to horses seemed like a good idea. He was a hopeless Luddite with Quixote dreams of a world he would never see.
He hated the mental blur of narcotics and took as few as he could get away with but sometimes the acuity of the pain would level him up into a world of pure wrenching agony. His breath would shorten until he was gulping the nasty air of the hospital. This drove Diane crazy though she understood the impulse. She had worked in hospitals nearly all her life and had seen how people craved narcotics to reach a pain-free state just short of death, a fog of unknowing. They would do anything to get more. As a nurse before becoming an administrator she recalled giving a man with a bad kidney stone too much morphine. She couldn’t bear his pain that made his body contract and turn rigid. Her sympathy nearly killed him but a doctor friend helped her revive him. Next day the patient told her it was as if his penis were trying to give birth to a cement block.
Diane went home after he moved from the hospital to a rehab unit in the East Twenties. One day after weeks there he told Sonia he loved her which caused a big upset. She broke into tears and said, “You don’t love me. Besides, I’m not beautiful.” It was true she wasn’t particularly attractive but certainly not homely. She was a country girl from out by Elmira where her dad had been an extension agent in land and water conservation for the government. She had been raised on a small farm and despite city life that was her basic orientation. She wouldn’t say anything substantial about her work which he respected though once when they were drinking wine it had turned out what she knew about him was substantial. She finally admitted she worked for a government intelligence agency and could say nothing about it, but she knew the street he lived on, his sisters, his divorce. It made him wonder why anyone collected such tidbits.
He disliked the rehab place immensely. It was mostly full of decrepit sick people. He wondered what Diane was paying but she wouldn’t talk about it. He would pay her back but he had no idea how. He was shocked when he learned half the rehab sum was being paid by the drummer’s mother with whom he had breakfasted. She had told Diane that she felt culpable. He heard the bartender was still in the hospital with several cracked vertebrae in his neck.
Sonia had her grand jury hearing and was exonerated. Sunderson’s inability to testify because of his severe injury was a good point in her defense. The charges against him had been dropped.
Nevertheless, Sonia was depressed to have taken a life. Sunderson told her the man would have killed her in a snap for biting his hand. This didn’t console her. The idea was causing a death and she could not be dissuaded. She visited him daily at the rehab center, about the only person under fifty seen there. He had been totally dead sexually, he guessed due to the pain. One afternoon he playfully got her to raise her skirt a little to show off her legs, but she wouldn’t make love in the rehab center despite the locked door. He was mindful that he couldn’t really move anyway with his still painful back. His thoughts for the post-rehab future had been monopolized by fishing but now he had the image of her legs to entertain him.
Sunderson was looking forward to a wonderful break when he learned his friend Marion would be visiting for a few days. Marion explained that Diane had stopped by with a plane ticket and some worrisome words. He had been to New York once but it still stiffened his posture. He was worried about what he called “vertical living.” He had Sunderson tell the complete story, and the result was not good for Sunderson. Marion wagged his head in anguish and said, “Your messiness since the divorce is going to kill you. In the old days if you had seen the black guy out the window behind a tree, you would have walked over, shoved a gun in his snout, and asked, ‘What the fuck you got in mind?’ Now look at you—you’re paying with your life. Maybe it had something to do with your drinking?”
Sunderson went to great lengths to defend himself but his voice was weakening. He knew in his heart that he never should have come to New York. The fancy people and fifteen-dollar drinks—everything in this unfamiliar place depressed him and his wariness died rather than became enlivened. The blackmail had seemed smart but look what it got him. He was a dried pea in a huge machine, rattling around at random. Marion continued, saying that Sunderson had never recovered from his divorce and what was the point in pursuing Mona when she plainly wanted to follow her lover? What was the urgency about getting her back into University of Michigan where she obviously didn’t want to go? He and Diane were comparatively old and what did they know about the power of younger love? Mona doubtless at present thought she was leading an exciting life compared to being a student as her parents wished for her.
Sunderson continued to listen to Marion with a lump in his throat for an hour. It was dawning on him that it was all brutally true. With his divorce he had lost the edge he had in life. He didn’t know where it went, only that it had gone. When Diane had caught a cab for the airport from the rehab center he had wept. It wasn’t Diane anymore but someone else in her body, a second mother perhaps, checking on an unruly child. The love was totally gone for her, not for him. He had driven it out of her with his behavior over the years.
Though the rest of Marion’s visit was more pleasant, Sunderson was glad when Marion left a few days later because the truth in what he said made Sunderson’s whole being ache. Look where his sloppiness had brought him. The evening after his lecture was the first he didn’t bribe an attendant to bring him a pint of whiskey. It was very hard to go to sleep without the whiskey and he had tortured dreams of Sonia’s bare legs and the visiting pastor braying about the Seven Deadly Sins. In the sixth grade all the boys sat in front and marveled at the teacher’s legs carelessly covered by loose skirts. He knew according to the Bible that could kill him and when he awoke before dawn he tried to sort out what he believed in a religious sense. Not certainly that Sonia’s bare legs were sinful. Everything was assumptions held over from his youth. He meant to read the New Testament again when he got home to see if he actually believed it.
He and Marion had planned an extensive fishing and camping trip for his recovery. On the fifth week of rehab he was shuffling in the gym. It seemed like a miracle but ultimately all he could feel was disappointment. Diane flew him home in a medical jet. God knows what that cost. A big Finnish girl stayed with him as a full-time attendant to buy groceries, cook, clean, and help him dress in the morning. He had lost all flexibility and despaired of going fishing. The girl walked with him in case he fell. Each day they walked farther. He fell once on a curb but luckily landed on grass. He feared breaking bones again but was okay when he got up with difficulty. The girl screamed when he fell and people came running so it was embarrassing. He knew everybody and explained lamely that he had broken his back in New York. He saw the Finnish girl naked after a shower but was only slightly aroused. As men say it was too much meat on the hoof with an ass an ax-handle wide.
One morning he walked much more vigorously and was encouraged. He spent hours at the dining room table sorting out his fishing equipment with a fishing song in his heart. He needed an extra pain pill for his exertion. He hated the pills—after all, his problems came from mental fuzziness. But he had to decide that he was lucky not to be dead. He was puzzled by how in the sweep of life we end up where we do. Both our good and bad decisions appear to us in peculiar knots t
hat lack the clarity of our original intentions. He had gone to New York to retrieve Mona which now seemed preposterous. Could he walk around the corner without tripping on a toad? He thought humility could be debilitating but now it was apparent that it wasn’t. It was wisdom if anything.
Given his condition one day on his walk two months after his return he and Marion reduced their plan for the trip to going to Marion’s cabin for a week to do a little fishing and just hang out. It seemed sensible to reduce their ambitions until he was conclusively okay. Marion was much bigger than he so he could carry most of the gear. When Sunderson gathered his gear for the trip he was upset at its shabbiness, another area of his life he had neglected.
Diane stopped by. She heard daily from the Finnish girl who had told her that he was going camping. She disagreed strongly but backed down seeing he was adamant. She had tears of worry in her eyes as he stumbled around. The Finnish girl had reported that every morning he sat in his studio, pulling a book from the shelf so he could watch the neighbor woman doing yoga in her leotard. Diane didn’t care. He had been doing this for years. It used to be nude Mona he watched.
“Marion’s big and strong. He can carry me himself if I fall,” he said.
Suddenly she hugged him and he shivered.
“I still love you,” he choked out. Years after the divorce, she was still never out of his thoughts.
“You have to stop and find a life,” she said. “You’re a mess.”
“I know it. Marion gave me a lecture in New York and I could see my downfall clearly. I even quit drinking.”
In truth he had been drinking but very little, just to get him over the hump of sleeplessness. He had however bought a fifth of whiskey for the coming trip as he loved to sip whiskey before the fireplace in Marion’s cabin. He had mixed feelings about this. Complete sobriety seemed like nothing. There were no mood swings either bad or delirious, and his fantasy life had dwindled to nothing. A fantasy life is a big item for a man. When you have nothing and your mind can make love to the most beautiful woman in the world it can be grand. Or catch a big fish, make a bunch of money.
Sunderson had hidden the money from his Peanuts bag in different books in his library, making a list of their titles. He was careful as he dreaded losing the list and having to sort through a couple thousand books to get his hard-earned, considering the injury, cash. He very much wanted to buy a small, remote cabin in the wilderness for his coming old age. He had read Thoreau but that wasn’t the whole impetus. Besides he wouldn’t be within walking distance of town like Thoreau. He wanted to be really out there and there were many areas in the Upper Peninsula that qualified. Maybe someone’s old deer shack he could fix up? It was the life of the wild that compelled him; a peopleless universe far away would console him from terrifying failures like losing Diane with his hundreds of mistakes. They say you can’t die from love but he almost had immediately after the divorce ending up facedown on the floor and then into the hospital with acute alcohol poisoning.
Fishing repaired him somewhat but a peopleless sport is ill suited to a peopled world. Isolated people can become like the babbling prospectors in old Western movies. They come to town and everything is amiss except the taverns. Many of Sunderson’s old drinking buddies had died or generally disappeared and he drank mostly at home alone now which compounded his isolation. He couldn’t very well split up his life between a five-month fishing season and the rest of life. New York was the exception and he had certainly been dense and unprepared. Marion was right. He should have gone after the guy behind the tree in the park.
Marion came over for the night before their departure and cooked his celebrated Hawaiian pork chops basted with soy, butter, ginger, and garlic. Sunderson thought that his own hastily prepared meals depressed him, another item on a large list of things he had to change. He looked at the ragged and tattered fishing vest he had been wearing since he was a teenager. Why not get a new one? Why be sentimental over an article of clothing? Marion kept his gear neat as a pin. When Sunderson had opened his fly box the other day all of the trout flies were in total disarray. He disgusted himself. Marion told Sunderson that back in his own messy alcoholic days he had left his best fly rod at streamside but when he went back to fetch it he drove over it in the grass, breaking it. He was heartbroken but he couldn’t afford an expensive replacement. Sunderson reflected on what made men so messy. It wasn’t just drinking but the corrupt spirit behind getting drunk, a general malaise of letting go of good sense and order in life. It was the deadly sin of greed that kept him swallowing. He couldn’t blame divorce because it had started way before and was part of the reason behind the divorce. Sunderson decided it was a faulty worldview that he would have to change. How to do so was a daunting challenge. Diane meditated a half hour early every morning before work. She didn’t make a big deal about it. She just described it as a half hour of total quiet so she would be ready for the maelstrom of life. Sunderson didn’t quite get that part. Life was just life, rolling on in inevitable disorder. Now, however, he was aware that he had to work his way up through the sludge that had accumulated in his life. It seemed compacted in his soul. He wanted the clear cool feeling of a ten-year-old getting up at dawn for a hike around a lake. It was a purity of intent that he wanted rather than sliding from one confused day into another. He found himself envying true believers, those who believed in the Gospels and the Seven Deadly Sins that he found so murky.
He had finished breakfast at 6:00 a.m., cooked himself because the Finnish girl was packing up to go home during his camping trip. Marion wasn’t due to pick him up until 8:00 a.m. so he decided to take a little morning walk. He argued with the Finnish girl who thought she should accompany him as per Diane’s instructions. He angrily said “no.” He wanted to be alone.
Chapter 3
A block down the street on a fair late summer morning a runner passed him with a nod. It was a lovely girl in shorts, perhaps in her late teens. It was a warm morning and she was in tight shorts with a butt as lovely as Mona’s. He cautioned himself against thinking about Mona’s body now that he and Diane had adopted her. It had become the ancient taboo of incest which gave him a slight shudder. The running girl in the shorts had given him the first twinge of lust since his back was broken. This both reassured and confused him. What was he going to do with lust, certainly not return to his old girlfriend, his secretary? The thought of her and their absurd couplings repelled him. The fresh-looking girl with the delicious butt suited him though the odds against finding one were preposterous. He tripped on an uneven piece of sidewalk and fell on the lawn in front of Mona’s old house. He couldn’t seem to get up with his faulty back. A dapper man half dressed for work rushed out of his house, the yoga woman’s husband, and helped him to his feet. Sunderson explained his back surgery and they agreed to have a drink as neighbors. His wife came out in a scanty nightie and asked if he was okay. He said “fine” much taken by her body which was much sexier than at the vantage point of the window in her yoga contortions.
He went back in his house thinking of the v shadow in the nightie. He rechecked his gear, had another cup of coffee, and felt lonely for the old days when he drank a lot and didn’t think much. Marion finally came, only minutes late but Sunderson was already irritable from his falling. His mood recovered when he spent a few minutes peeking next door and was delighted that the neighbor woman was doing yoga in her nightie which slipped up so that he saw her whole lower half nude. What good luck he thought with a sexual pang in his stomach as if he were ill.
The twenty-mile trip to the cabin brought him back to earth. The last seven miles through the woods they were stuck briefly in a mud hole which was watery from the last winter runoff. They roared out and were delighted to see a fairly big bear near the cabin. Marion knew the bear and speculated that it had gotten much larger from eating all the deer that had died from cold in the hard winter. The bears normally reached their peak weight in late fall befor
e the long winter but this spring they came out of hibernation to a sort of a waiting deep freeze with plenty of deer meat and had fattened up quickly.
They were anxious to get unpacked and start fishing well before the midday sun and heat. They burned a large branch of cedar in the fireplace to sweeten the cabin air, an old Indian tactic.
Sunderson began fishing where a small creek emerged from a swamp about a mile behind the cabin. Marion plunged into the swamp toward a beaver pond, his favorite place. The rough walking gave Sunderson a painful twinge at the site of his surgery so he sat under a tree to rest and took a painkiller. He hated knowing the pills would make him feel drowsy and goofy but the pain was a poor start to fishing. He felt better in half an hour and made his way, now more slowly, toward the creek.
He caught a few small fish then missed a larger one that sensed his presence fleeing upstream. Maybe later when it calmed down, he thought. It didn’t take fish that long to calm down and then you had to put the sneak on them.
He became prematurely tired and sat down under another tree for a rest, a fir with piles of soft needles beneath it. He reflected that in literature our lives were rivers which seemed inappropriate to him. Rivers were unstoppable, of great power. We were primarily creeks or rivulets that flowed into rivers. You could hope your life to be a smooth, clear, strong creek. You could make it so with care. Or you could muddy it up with carelessness. Sunderson had to put himself in the latter category but then nothing was stopping a change. He drifted away in fantasies of a clean life and fine behavior. He would find a retirement job of some sort to occupy his time properly. His long career as a state police detective had worn him out. He dreaded the many cases of physical abuse of children and wives. His gorge rose in the woods.
