He played a little game that was usually successful in countering insomnia. He constructed a series of mental notes that wouldn’t be that hard to remember in the morning. At the university he had always memorized potent quotes from historical texts to use in blue book essay exams, so his memory had never been a problem. The only issue in using notes to battle insomnia was that the brain without benefit of light tended to be errant and freely waffled into the irrelevant.
1. As Mom used to say when I was slow to do chores, “Stop fiddle-faddling,” an expression no longer in use. Dad was more direct, saying, “Get your head out of your ass and get to work,” a difficult physical maneuver. Fifty years later I’m still my parents’ child. Fiddle-faddle. If I’m going to nail Dwight to the wall I better get started with full energy. Carla is possibly the key due to her volatility as in all witnesses who struggle to explain themselves to themselves. Despite everything Dwight teaches she wants him for herself. 2. A dim memory of Berenice giving her allowance to the Lutheran pastor for the African Mission effort. Mom was angry when Dad said that the clergy were “God’s pickpockets.” Back to money and religion. The central business of Lucy’s life seems to be inheritance. A portion of her emotional content died with her infant daughter. 3. A clear memory of ten years ago when Diane gave me Judy Crichton’s America 1900 for my birthday and also made a fine stewed rabbit she said was a French recipe. At first the book seemed insufficiently scholarly but then this was a relief. I recall a passage from a 1900 New York Times unsigned editorial insisting that we hadn’t moved an inch forward from the Dark Ages. Ten years before in reaction to the Ghost Dance movement the Chicago Tribune stated that it might be wise to kill all of the Lakota. I had this sobering feeling that I was spending my life running around the Upper Peninsula applying tiny bandages to mostly superficial wounds. 4. The idea that history gives perspective is partly a hoax because it only functionally gives you perspective on history! Imagine if Congress were actually knowledgeable of American history.
It didn’t work. Here he was in a hotel room in Tucson drying his tears after he mistakenly thought Diane had left him, still feeling the fool. He turned on the light to change the pattern of consciousness. With Diane he had always felt a little vulgar and brutish and now Lucy was doing the same thing to him. Curiously his colleagues and many people thought him to be too refined and bookish to be a detective but they were victims of television and crime novels. He’d never wanted to be a tough-guy cop partly because the first two years of his state police career he had been stationed near Detroit where there were a phenomenal number of tough cops, real bruisers, first among them the “Big Four” who were called in for particularly violent situations. He was off duty after a Detroit Lions-Green Bay Packer game, always a volatile item, and had seen the Big Four cruise up in their black Chrysler sedan to settle a brawl between fans, locals, and a group of big krauts that had come over from Milwaukee. Sunderson stood well back watching with amazement as the lead man of the Big Four, an immense Polack named Thaddeus chewing a ten-cent rum-soaked Crooks cigar, waded into the brawlers and began throwing them left and right fairly high in the air, grinning as he worked. Later on a gory case Sunderson had had dinner with Thaddeus in Hamtramck, duck blood soup and fried muskrat, and the table next to them had been noisy and Thaddeus had said to them, “Shut up we’re talking about the fucking United Nations.” And the men fell silent. Thaddeus was melancholy that evening because a pimp had cut a nipple off of an Amazonian black hooker he loved. It was a famous pimp who was named Mink because he wore a mink coat even in July. Thaddeus had said, “That fuck is gonna go off a bridge. He don’t know it yet but he’s a floater,” meaning a dead body in the Detroit River. When Sunderson was transferred and he and Diane drove north there were tears of relief when they reached the Straits of Mackinac. The least fun possible was picking up a severed head in a drug slaying down near the Flat Rock drag strip.
In semisleep he could see Diane and Lucy standing next to each other and there was a drift of thoughts about his own unworthiness. He should have married a Munising girl from a mill family though by the time he was in the tenth grade he had aspired to a better world and had lived a life caught in between.
