by Jim Harrison
“My God you ate a lot of tuna casserole. Are you okay? You ate pounds of it!” She examined the remains on the table. “You hardly have any leftovers.”
“I’m a little drowsy. My body is struggling to handle it. It’s hard making love on a full stomach at age sixty-six.”
“You should have said no.”
“I couldn’t. The view was beautiful.” Despite all, he found that this evening he was a little worried about the relationship of ninety billion galaxies and religion. Was there a connection? The cosmos was too much for an ordinary man to handle. He got a clear case of vertigo when he had seen the first multicolored photos from the Hubble telescope. Right now they went out in the warm evening to see the burgeoning stars. Marquette didn’t have enough ambient light to totally ruin it though if you really wanted to see the Milky Way it was best to be camped way out in the backcountry where there was none. The same was true of the northern lights if you wanted to see them in their full glory. He didn’t want to but he had to tell her about the shooting of her uncle Sprague and the incarceration of Bert and John.
Sunderson told her the full story of the shooting and midway she grabbed his hand and held it. He left out the number of times Sprague was shot thinking it too brutal to repeat. And the flickering eyes stopped flickering.
Mona stopped by while he was still talking. She sat down next to Monica. What a pair.
“I saw on the Internet that there was a shooting.”
“It was my uncle Sprague. He’s dead. When I was young he was the only one who would take me sledding. We’d drive a couple miles to a good hill on a country side road. He was like a kid. He loved to sled.”
“I’m sorry,” Mona said.
“Don’t be. He was going to shoot my old lover here,” Monica continued.
Sunderson felt smugly serene being described as her “old lover.” He certainly wasn’t a young lover and needed to be something definite.
Next morning a judge released Bert and John. They were told they would be jailed again if they came close to Sunderson’s house. A week later the body still wasn’t claimed so was buried locally. The autopsy revealed that Sprague indeed had nine bullet holes, six potentially fatal. Sunderson thought it a grim way for a life to end but what can you do? He was confident that Sprague would have shot him for not revealing Monica’s location. You can’t lose a good cook.
Chapter 11
Early next morning Sunderson packed for the cabin. Now that it was safe, Monica would stay behind to work. To his delight she had stayed up late to put a pork shoulder on slow heat that he could warm up for his dinner. She had rubbed it with garlic and ground chiles. He loved this cheapest cut of pork because it was one of the few things his mother cooked well. She had also packed a box of groceries with explicit instructions for cooking. He packed his revolver in a shoulder holster unsure of his welcome in the neighborhood. He knew the trip was a bit foolhardy but craved to go fishing. Since the shooting, when he dozed he’d wake up quivery to the sound of gunshots. He wondered how his underused brain could imitate the sound so convincingly.
Astonishingly enough Monica had said that she was occasionally homesick. When questioned she said she missed her room with its double locks and all her books about Mexico. It was her dream to visit someday. It was the first time she had mentioned Mexico to him. A couple of books had come from Lemuel who had gone to Mexico trying to recover from prison in Jackson where he was denied enough sunlight. Sunderson vowed to take Monica there someday.
When he got to the cabin it felt empty without Monica and he had an attack of melancholy. He felt doomed that it was either one female or another that dominated his interest. On the way he had stopped to fish two likely looking creeks and caught half a dozen brook trout for lunch. He let the largest go because it was too beautiful to eat. It was deeply colored from living in dark water in the swamp. Fish were the one thing Sunderson could cook with total competency. There was a fine line between cooking it too much and too little but he was very familiar with this fine line even when roasting large lake trout or whitefish. He was eating the last of several brook trout with bread and butter when he noticed out the window Lemuel headed his way across the pasture with a sheaf of paper. It irritated him to be interrupted while eating but he judged he would finish before Lemuel reached the cabin. He was a dawdling walker and a birder so often slowed to lift his battered binoculars to his eyes. He thought unpleasantly that when he told Monica that he would take her to Mexico she had burst into tears. It reminded him of the meager lives most people lived while others could vacation in Mexico on a week’s salary. There was the errant thought that maybe Lemuel was killing members of this family to have something to write about. On the way into town he had stopped for gasoline and heard one of the wives had died, John’s wife, when he had been away in Marquette, but she wasn’t tested for poison because she had midstage ovarian cancer. This sloppy police work irritated Sunderson. Of course, given the family context, she should have been tested.
Sunderson had judged correctly. Lemuel hit the cabin’s doorstep just as he finished his last bite. He again strewed some papers on the table so he would look busy and yelled “come in” to Lemuel’s knock.
Lemuel was distracted and out of sorts.
“Are you busy?”
“Not terribly. No more than usual. I think I’ve been sort of busy since birth.” What a lie I just told, thought Sunderson. The piece of manuscript was called “Thoughts of a Writer” and Sunderson inwardly groaned.
“I always wondered what Raymond Chandler actually thought,” said Lemuel naively.
“What he thinks is the whole of the novel,” Sunderson said with ire. “A novel is a different form of thinking.”
“Well, read it or don’t. It’s idiosyncratic and I think you might find some parts interesting.”
Sunderson walked Lemuel back across half the pasture with two stops for birds, a shrike and a kestrel. Lemuel agreed that John’s wife should have been tested though he said she was on her way anyway. He also said that there aren’t any survivors to ovarian cancer. As he walked back to the cabin, Sunderson reminded himself to check this with Diane. He often zoned out on cancer talk because he hated the use of military metaphors (“I’m battling cancer” or “I fought cancer to a draw”) but also because Diane’s hospital stories gave him chills. One day you’re okay and the next you’re dying.
Sunderson felt like an oaf for becoming so fond of Monica and missing her so much at the cabin. He wondered if his compassionate desire to “get this girl off the farm to where she belongs” was in fact social engineering of the kind he had always dreaded, sort of “let’s get the poorest into high-rises. Life on the ground floor is dangerous and dirty.” Sunderson was singularly ignorant in all aspects of love. Monica certainly didn’t raise the all-encompassing feelings he had had for Diane but here he was at the cabin with the sharp pang of missing her. Something had changed when he moved her to Marquette. It embarrassed him when she treated him as if he were her savior. When he protested she would simply say, “How else was I going to get away? I couldn’t do it all by myself.” She had only been to Marquette once on a school trip as a senior. Now she bounced along as if it was a natural stepping-stone to New York. Once in bed she had said at some point she would like to have a baby. His whole body shivered with dread and he asked, “What about New York? How are you going to take a baby to New York?” She was charmingly naive. One evening she had asked him to describe the Empire State Building in his own words. In truth he hadn’t noticed it. “It’s a huge ass building. If it fell over it would destroy the city,” he had said. She was thrilled. The Empire State Building had figured large in her imagination as a child. Once in the car she had sung “Give My Regards to Broadway,” which she had learned early in school without any idea what Broadway was.
Did he love Monica? The whole culture claimed to be in love with someone or something, maybe a foot
ball or baseball team, a girl, a woman, a man. It seemed a form of hysteria. Maybe with Monica he was absorbed in that slipstream. It was not what he intended but what did that matter? Or maybe these peculiar niggling feelings we generate toward one another are called love. They enter our minds willy-nilly like bees around a sweet pop can. He had once been bit in the mouth by a yellow jacket that was hanging around the perforation in his beer can—was there a lesson here?
Sunderson sat at the table glancing with dread at Lemuel’s manuscript, “Thoughts of a Writer.” He was sick to death of the whole Ames clan. Why couldn’t they behave? Lemuel had told Sunderson he was confident that Sprague had killed a game warden who had been found dead by a hunter way back three miles into the woods. The game warden had been shot once in the back of the head with a pistol. The authorities had questioned whether someone had snuck up on him or had walked around behind him when he was examining a license. It occurred to Sunderson to call the station to recommend Smolens compare the ballistics of the game warden’s death to the few shots Sprague managed to get off in his house before he was blown away into eternity. He could dig out bullets with his jackknife but it was best to leave it to the forensics guy in the department. A ballistics match wouldn’t surprise him one bit. Knowing that delay was impossible he called Detective Smolens immediately. Smolens thanked him profusely and promised a call back on his suspicions.
The day was bright and sunny, bad for fishing unless he used weighted streamers but he preferred the grace of dry flies floating down from the sky to be sipped or gulped by a rising fish. It was a matter of aesthetics. He was abruptly nauseated with the Ameses when he reread the first paragraph of Lemuel’s manuscript wherein he described his childhood and how his friends in school were never allowed to come to his place. People in town heard all too much gunfire coming from the three Ames places. Even the men who visited the saloon like birds to a feeder kept a safe distance from the Ameses. The question, Sunderson thought, was why the dad never learned to behave.
Sunderson decided he himself had behaved rather well though he wasn’t setting the bar very high and it was obvious that the seeds of his destruction were in alcohol and lechery. Diane, of course, had perfect behavior and so did Marion though his was learned after early alcoholism and fistfighting. Right now he was at a conference of middle school principals at Michigan State in East Lansing. That made Sunderson want to pull up stakes and fish out of Marion’s peaceful cabin rather than endure the implicit threat of the Ameses which was in the air everywhere like mosquitoes. So the urge to cut and run was actually there but so was the uncontrollable ego that resisted it.
Anyone sensible would take the next plane to Chicago and simply walk around and eat in restaurants or to Montana and fish around Bozeman near rich stockbrokers. He imagined the three Ames homes suppurating with mayhem and possibly planning his own murder. If he went to Marion’s cabin Monica could go out with him in the day and it was close enough to Marquette, thirty miles, that he could still get her to work on time. But letting fear drive him away from his beloved cabin seemed worse than the threat of nuclear attack. Ego again, or one of the Big Seven, pride. He reminded himself that the cabin had been free, bought with highly illegal blackmail money from New York City. He was ever so slightly ashamed of the blackmail matter after a lifetime of legal purity, his first time on “the wrong side of the law,” but he was glad again that Mona’s misbegotten rock ’n’ roll boyfriend was doing ten years in a French prison for fooling with girls in their early teens and preteens. He had no idea about French prisons but hoped they were nasty.
He still had some blackmail money left for his French-Italian eating trip or taking Monica to Mexico, maybe both. He had once dreamed of something truly adventuresome like going into the jungle and capturing an enormous reticulated python or anaconda by himself, but these were the fantasies of childhood and had nothing to do with a retired careworn cop. Why would he want to catch a huge snake? He had seen photos of these monsters and there was the question of why God made them. A question not to be answered in a lifetime, similar to why did God make Hitler.
Some things in creation were altogether too messy, including the cosmos. What on a side street in Marquette was he to do with ninety billion galaxies when he couldn’t comprehend nearby Lake Superior? Diane had explained to him all about the melting glaciers. It was appropriate that humans felt insignificant contemplating the cosmos when our own historical record was so appalling. You needed only to read about the inception of World War I to feel navy blue shame for humankind. The thought of millions upon millions of the dead would send one running to the woods to stare at a simple creek. Dead Sprague on his floor was just one. Meanwhile what were all of us minuscule orphans supposed to do on earth after we endured the so-called miracle of birth? He had read an endless amount of history, his den was full of it, simply to see what had happened. He had heard that hundreds of historians had committed suicide. Our universities should be charnel houses.
Little items like literature suffocated in the sweep of history. He did recall that the summer after graduating from college before he joined the state police he had read Shakespeare. It was the pure language that stupefied him. He would be in a diner reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream and his acquaintances were confident he was studying for some test. The test turned out to be the nature of his mind. Shakespeare seemed even truer than history. Literature was against the abyss while history wallowed in it. Now, forty years later, he remembered the pleasure of going fishing while thinking of Hamlet. The mental music while fishing was always the cello. It still was.
He had to come up for air. Despair over the Ameses was driving him crazy and he had to put an end to it. Diane could always decompress him but she was off on her own and he preferred not to think of what she was doing. Did curiosity about the Ameses drive him? Or was it the fundamental question of evil on earth? Who in this wretched world had any answers to anything? He had never seen or heard of a family that lived in such disarray, legal or otherwise, the grotesque way they treated each other and their wives. He was thinking of paying them a neighborly visit which he had never done.
He was diverted by a line in Lemuel’s manuscript on the table: “My father used to beat all of us with a simple willow stick for misbehavior, real and imagined but he stopped beating me when he discovered I was learning about science and could talk about it with him. He never paid attention to anything else I had to say. The grade school science teacher, Mrs. Sedgwick, taught us slowly, carefully and gently. That way it stuck and aroused our curiosity, for some of us permanently. I was never smart about science like Levi but where it came to life for me was birding. Simon and I would take short walks to teach him bird watching. He knew physics well but knew he was weak in the natural sciences, so it made him irritable but was something we could talk about. He believed in Darwin but questioned why evolution had created so many different species of birds which was messy indeed. The habit helped his old age because after the obligatory and somewhat cruel early morning meetings with his sons he would be off in decent weather to the pastures and woods to see birds. This seemed contradictory to his essential mean mindedness but he never spoke of it except to me.”
Lemuel seemed the very definition of an unlived life. What would it be like to spend your twenties in prison? He continued, “I missed my talks with Simon when I was in prison for my bank robberies. Simon would write me short notes about any new birds he saw, the only mail I got in prison. I wrote letters to an imaginary girlfriend. The only sex in my life at the time was with one of Bert’s girlfriends who took my virginity after I got out of the bathtub with a hard-on. This did not urge me toward other women because I could only think of one at once.”
Chapter 12
The bleakness of Lemuel’s manuscript had given Sunderson the urge to see how he lived at present. Before he could change his mind he put on a coat, his pistol in his shoulder holster, and headed off to the houses he had seen only f
rom the road and never visited. They looked absurdly large and spread out from the road but maybe they wanted to keep distant from each other after a lifetime of fistfighting. He walked fairly fast downriver at the beginning but then his legs seemed to weaken with his courage and he slowed down. The first house seemed to be moving toward him in the manner of a ghost. It was a huge box on prairieland. It hadn’t been painted since it had been built and on the south side where the weather was the weakest you could still see a little raw lumber out of the sun. A little boy about ten popped out from behind a bush holding a real life pistol.
“You’re trespassing,” he shrieked.
“I’m looking for Lemuel,” Sunderson said holding up his hand in peace.
“You’re not from the government?” the boy said, calming down.
“No, I’m your neighbor from upriver.” Sunderson pointed.
“You’re the sonofabitch that stole our cousin Monica. Now we only have shit to eat. I ought to shoot you.” He was genuinely irritated.
“Why shoot me and spend your life in prison, far from this beautiful place?”
The boy looked crestfallen and turned away.
If anything the second house was junkier than the first. It was a mile down the trail as each house sat on a section of land more than six hundred acres. The screen on the back porch was torn in several places and the porch itself tilted severely to the south. A log pole was holding it up none too well. A little girl who couldn’t be more than seven came around the corner of a shed aiming a big .44 pistol at him. It was so heavy she had to hold it with both hands.
“You’re trespassing,” she said in a wee voice. “Uncle Lemuel is writing today. Don’t disturb him unless you have to.”
