by Jim Harrison
The women all talked softly and Sunderson followed Diane into the kitchen where she and Mona made up a cheese platter. Sunderson shyly offered her a platonic camping trip wherever she liked. She shook her head and said maybe someday, smiling sadly.
Now Sunderson reminded Diane of their conversation and she admitted that she would like to see his cabin. It gave him hope. He sometimes thought perhaps he was a widower himself with the actual spouse alive seven blocks away. Human loneliness is a huge item and Monica couldn’t begin to compensate for his love for Diane. A hopeless love at that.
He thought of the number of times he had been rained out when fishing. When he was a junior in high school he had sat in a cheapish pup tent two full days in the rain until he and all his bedding were soaked. He persisted, catching trout for his family’s dinner. When wet you can only get a little wetter. Now he reflected that the odor of sex was as powerful as that of a butcher shop. At the cabin it was cut only by the blossoming of a chokecherry outside the window, an odor he had always loved. In the spring he liked to travel to an area to fish where there were hundreds of acres of blooming chokecherries and be overwhelmed by them.
Now, suddenly, in his car approaching Marquette he thought of copying passages from Nightwood and Ada under the idea he would thusly learn to write. Why not? He had the paper and pens. What was stopping him? He doubted this was a surefire answer but was worth trying. He didn’t think it constituted cheating. He certainly needed not to die before he wrote about the eighth deadly sin. For a very big change he felt necessary to the world. He knew if he could get it right the essay would change everything.
Back in college there was a year after the rage of existentialism that it was commonly held we are all guilty of everything. Sunderson, however, was drawn in very little on this one for common pragmatic reasons. He tended to see the entirety of the United States as an Indian graveyard but could not see how any of it was his own fault. Maybe his ancestors were at fault and he didn’t have any descendants.
He nearly ran a stop sign when he had the absurd idea that perhaps Sara, Monica, and Kate were all guilty. Lemuel was a junior Svengali. Sunderson couldn’t admit Monica might have known what she was doing and stopped at the IGA, buying a very large package of pig hocks. Back in the parking lot he called Diane’s cell phone to see how to cook them. He was disappointed to find out that the pig hocks took three hours at a slow simmer. Maybe he should nuke them first. “Absolutely not,” she said. Naturally he wanted more immediate results. He walked across the street and stocked up at the liquor store seeing a beautiful girl ride past with the seat of the bicycle stuck in her butt, or so it seemed. Boys used to tell girls they wanted to be their first bicycle seat and he wondered if they still did. What was there about a shapely fanny? The taste must be deeply embedded in the brain.
He put the pig hocks on the stove in the big Le Creuset, had a drink, got on the sofa for a snooze. He intended to spend the evening copying parts of Barnes and Nabokov. He awoke in three hours to smell pork fat. He leaped up and saw the water had boiled away and his beloved hocks were frying in their copious fat. He refilled the pot with water deciding that the hocks weren’t fatally injured. He got out his books by Barnes and Nabokov with the religious sense that he was in touch with greatness. Mona walked in without knocking because she saw him in the kitchen. She asked after the “dreadful” smell and he said, “Fucked-up pig hocks that I’m restoring.” He averted his eyes because she looked particularly lovely. Her boyfriend the cellist had parents with a house in Naples and they had gone there on August break. Mona’s long bare legs were tan as were her arms and face.
“Did you sunbathe nude?” he teased.
“Of course not.” She turned then raised her skirt and pulled down her panties revealing a lovely pale butt. She pranced around wagging it.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “It reminds me of our unforgivable sin in Paris.”
“Oh bullshit! You’ll live.” She flopped down on the sofa with her skirt on her chest. He bolted out the back door. After five minutes she came out with a beer and sat beside him. “I’m sorry I’m wicked. My current boyfriend can’t make love unless he’s wearing his bedroom slippers. I suddenly wanted to do something old-fashioned nasty.”
“I’m in a murder mess in my retirement. I can’t afford mentally to fuck up now.”
“Diane told me you were thinking of going to Spain. You should go tomorrow.”
“I’m sure it takes a lot of planning,” he said lamely.
“Don’t be silly. I’ll go in and call the travel agent.”
He followed her inside as she booked him to Paris for five days then Seville. If he didn’t like Seville he could take a train or plane to Barcelona, and his flight home was from there. She also booked him the same hotel near the Odéon he had stayed in when he came to retrieve her. May as well give him some memories. To irritate him she got him the most expensive hotel in Seville. She helped him pack and reminded him to pick up cash and the tickets in the morning. He kissed her goodbye and gave himself the treat of letting his hand brush across her tight ass. She had always amazed him with the immediacy with which she lived. Compared to her he existed totally on a diet of reverie and fishing. He was also proud of actually running out when she tempted him though there remained a nugget of regret. When she left she said that she wished she was going with him and his mind constructed an absurd headline, “Man Fucks Stepdaughter Across Europe.”
Monica stopped by to take a shower before work. She had been sailing on the bay with friends from the hotel. She was running late but he nagged her into some quick sex. Mona had built up a head of steam within him. After she went to work he had another drink and hastily made some hot mustard out of the dried. He sat down and ate with the prompt conclusion that they weren’t as tender as Diane’s but much better than no pig hocks.
Of course he was brooding about his possible trip. He could see that he was damned if he did—could he get the considerable sum back for the tickets?—but even more so damned if he didn’t. He couldn’t come up with a single other reason not to go. The TV had said that a week of coolish weather was due which meant there wouldn’t be bug hatches for fly fishing. Other than fishing and his little adventure tracking the Great Leader, his life in retirement had been quite aimless except, of course, for taking Monica to Mexico. Right now he wished he were in Veracruz or Mérida, then he wouldn’t have to fly to Paris, where the ghost of Mona waited. His last trip had been frantic on the way with worry about Mona’s musician and on the way back there was the regret and immense guilt. What they had done was clearly a strident violation of one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Mona made his mouth dry and his heart pound.
He had waited until Monica came home late to tell her about his trip. He gratuitously lied to her, saying an old friend from college was getting married and asked him to stand up for him. The friend was paying for the ticket. He began to believe the lie himself. He was already irritated because Smolens had called earlier to say that the prosecutor was still unwilling to proceed despite the new evidence. His point was obvious: Kate was in the kitchen all the time so of course her prints would be on the spice bottles and even more damning was that the two bottles that supposedly held poison contained small amounts of comparatively harmless cocaine, one cut with the popular Italian baby laxative Manitol, the other with a teaspoon of ordinary talc. The prosecutor was pleased with the coke and wanted to pin it on someone because it was the drug that put him on the warpath and strong action against it was popular with voters who were ignorant that the real threat was speed. Sunderson had always been amazed how drug dealers as businessmen cheated their customers and still stayed in business. A recent big bust in Detroit flopped because the three kilos of cocaine that had been seized had been devoid of any actual cocaine.
Meanwhile he tried to console Smolens who was heartsick and threatened to quit the case. “No one gives a shit about these people,�
�� he said. Sunderson replied, “You can’t let a murderer go free,” and Smolens said, “Yes I can, just watch.” When Sunderson said “a murderer” the image of Lemuel flashed in his mind. There could be no other engineer of the whole matter. In the mail Lemuel had sent him another chapter, called “Doom,” of his wretched crime novel. Maybe he should actually be reading it for clues but the punishment was truly bad prose. Lemuel’s prose was absolutely devoid of any charm, one of the main reasons you read. If he found a clue would he recognize it while half asleep and bored? Lemuel would never be a good crime writer. He wanted to inform the world not describe it.
In the morning he cleared his credit cards in preparation for the trip. He stopped at the bar across the street from the travel agent. Suddenly worry hit like a sledgehammer. What if Diane wanted to go camping while he was wandering aimlessly in Paris, Seville, or Barcelona? What a disaster. He’d wait a day and call her tomorrow.
At the travel agent’s he delayed his trip for two weeks, not easy as it was a busy season and planes and hotels were getting booked. He was forced to book business-class tickets to Paris for a fortune but then he viewed the remaining blackmail cash as “funny money” like winning big at a poker game. The prospect of taking Diane camping was emotionally too large to miss. He had waited over sixty years to go so a couple more weeks wouldn’t hurt him.
Smolens stopped by for a chat and a drink. He was frazzled and generally bereft.
“What do you generally think happened not considering our lack of evidence?” Smolens grimaced with the size of the drink he had poured for himself.
“Well, it’s pointless to speculate but I see Lemuel spearheading the whole thing possibly using all three of the women not incidentally because he was a lover of all three. Lemuel was on the offense of course and besides he’s likely smarter than us. With the right preparation a perfect murder is easy and Lemuel possibly did a lot of research. He’s not going to break and I don’t see any of the women breaking. Too much is at stake. And I don’t see anyone suffering from conscience. The victims were too ghastly as humans.”
“I can’t believe that a hayseed outsmarted us college guys who wear guns.” Smolens smirked.
“Well, he’s very well self-educated. Don’t forget that he had fifteen years of reading time in prison. They have a pretty good library.”
“I simply don’t understand the power he had over the women. He’s an ugly little twerp.” Smolens was in a state of umbrage.
“He was the only one in the compound who listened to them. He’s not even having the two burned-out hulks of the houses removed. He told me he likes to look at them. The remnants of the family are living on the east side of Escanaba on welfare though I know he helps them out. He’s sort of rich.”
“I wish I was,” Smolens said begrudgingly. “I’d buy a small farm and dawdle on it. I’d quit this shit job like you did but I’m five years from possible retirement. My wife wants to live in Hawaii. I don’t.”
“Why Hawaii?” Sunderson was curious.
“A childhood dream, I think. She always wanted to grow coconuts near the ocean.” Smolens was obviously in despair.
“How do you grow coconuts?”
“I have no idea. I think you have to grow a tree first. It might take a hundred years. Luckily that leaves me out of the marketing.”
“Maybe we could look into Lemuel’s taxes.”
“Very hard to do. Even for a Mafia don or a political candidate.”
Their lack of ideas evaporated their withered spirits. They poured another drink and went out in the backyard and watched Delphine next door weeding a flower bed wearing knee pads. Smolens stared with curiosity. “On a certain level women can be quite basic. Of course so can we. Like lonely stray dogs who are still horny.”
That did it for Sunderson. He choked on his drink and had to spit up a precious mouthful.
When Smolens left Sunderson had a headache and poured yet another drink. He remembered a professor saying in a criminology course that some crimes are meant never to be solved. He thought, it’s always darkest before it gets even darker.
Monica had left him a small T-bone bought with her own money as he had forgotten to set out the grocery money. He errantly cooked it too long while fiddling with the TV to get the Bulls-Heat game. He was irked with himself and also the world. Only a fool didn’t know how to cook a steak. He had lectured junior officers countless times about their level of attention. The steak was pretty good anyway. He drank too much whiskey and after the ball game which LeBron won in the last minutes he treated himself to a quick peek at his neighbor’s evening yoga. From here, her ass looked a bit large but smooth and in good shape.
He almost overslept the next morning but was luckily awakened by an early call from Smolens who had had a bright idea that woke him in the middle of the night. He had had breakfast at the diner and run into the prosecutor who ate oatmeal and raisins, a repulsive combination. He took the opportunity to broach his idea to the prosecutor: offer Sara, who was refusing to testify, immunity from a prison sentence if she turned state’s evidence against the others. The prosecutor agreed. Smolens admitted to Sunderson that he had told Sara he would divorce his wife and marry her.
“That won’t get you a promotion after a criminal case with her,” Sunderson pointed out and Smolens said he didn’t give a shit. If he went up any further he’d have to transfer to Lansing which he wouldn’t do at gunpoint. Smolens said he had been to the hospital early to broach the idea with Sara who so far was noncommittal. She had said, “But Lemuel was the only one who was nice to me.” And Smolens had answered, “Well right now he’s fucking your kid niece Kate.” Sara didn’t know this and got quite angry. She was Kate’s godmother and had dressed her for school.
Sunderson’s head was light and hungover but the news was good though how could he separate the pregnant Monica from this? When the evidence was in he was sure Kate and Lemuel would be revealed as the main malefactors.
Sunderson had always thought it was a good idea that justice moved slowly as the potential for mistakes was infinite. He himself had engineered the withdrawal of a case against a young man who had been charged for underage drinking with the naked daughter of an important family along with three other naked boys at the gravel pit swimming hole at night. They all ganged up on the poor boy saying he had supplied the beer and whiskey. However Sunderson had noted that the beer was an expensive import, not the kind kids buy, and the whiskey was a scotch, Haig & Haig Pinch with the wire around it, not available locally. He interviewed the girl in a car after school to avoid bringing her to the station and ruining her life. She was terribly attractive, wild and destined to get wilder. She wore a short dress and put her stocking feet up on the dashboard so that her legs, her trump suit, might get him confused. Sunderson was already in the middle of a patented lecture on poor kids but they were parked near the Coast Guard station and he was really watching the sunlight glitter off the big waves. He explained that though the poor kid was very bright he would likely lose his chance for a college scholarship. She broke and started crying in sympathy. She said, “Mike brought the beer and I filched the whiskey from Dad’s liquor cabinet.” The case was dropped now that it had become complicated with rich kids’ lawyers. Later he heard that the poor kid had gotten her pregnant and her mother had taken her off to Chicago for a medical procedure. Unfortunately she had wanted to keep the baby and after this she got wackier and wackier and didn’t want to come home for several years. He had lately seen her coming out of a lowlife bar looking like a very premature hag. Could she drink the baby back alive? Not likely. Her parents had died and left her a good deal of money all of which she spent in Chicago. Sunderson tried not to care but the arrest and then the abortion had marked her life terribly.
Lemuel called to say he understood that he was to be prosecuted with Sara’s testimony.
“Why would you think that?” Sunderson
was concerned about the leak.
“An old girlfriend of mine works in the prosecutor’s office. Always be nice to ex-girlfriends. They know a lot about you. Anyway you should leave the girls alone. I don’t give a shit about myself.”
“No one will believe you did it all by yourself.”
“I basically did. I admit we had a little club called the Murder Club. I put it together for my novel. If a woman loves you she’ll do anything for you.”
“You’re proof of that,” Sunderson quipped. He thought Lemuel was full of captious shit.
When Sunderson hung up with Lemuel he found himself amazed at how calm Lemuel sounded except when he said, “I’m not going back to prison. There aren’t any birds there.” Was he talking about suicide?
Sunderson was irritated that this had intruded on the day of the solstice which was as close as he got to a religious occasion. He was usually camping and fishing on that day. He was awake and staring at the eastern sky for the first glimmer of light which this far north was shortly before 4:00 a.m. And in the evening he’d find a good place, usually the bank of a river or a comfortable stump, and sit there for an hour for the last of the light to leave the western sky about 11:00 p.m. It made for a nineteen-hour day. When they were quite young his little brother Bobby was obsessed with the idea that everyone got murdered or died in the dark. Obviously this made the summer solstice the best day of the year, the day you were least likely to die.
One year when he was camped he had the spectacular combination of a full moon, huge pale green northern lights, and a big thunderstorm coming from the west. Did this mean he was going to die? He sat on a log actually trembling until the storm hit and he was immediately drenched. He toweled off in the tent and dozed for the mere five hours of the storm with his Glock pistol ready in case this was a sign for any prospective murderers. For years afterward he was prone to think of this as the most sacred night of his life apart from his wedding night with Diane, if only he had had the knowledge to take advantage of it. He dropped that line of thought because what was there to take advantage of, the full moon, the northern lights, and a thunderstorm. It was the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time. He couldn’t remember the name of the philosopher who said, “The miracle is that the world exists.” You had to be in the right mood to believe this but it happened not so infrequently.
