Mona’s father had left them when she was ten. He was the usual young realtor slicker trying to create a big development out of air. Despite the overwhelming beauty of the area it was impossible because Michigan’s main population centers were at least a seven-hour drive away. Sunderson’s motive in the early morning call was to get Mona off her direct hacking with Dwight which was conceivably dangerous. He diverted her by asking for specific information on contemporary cults. Sunderson had felt his focus was too narrow. After all, so much of his work had been with the minor laws made by the state legislature, the county supervisors, and the city council to pester people, not to speak of the U.S. Congress, the members of which have been so deranged by lobbyist pressure that many forget which state they come from.
“That sounds fun,” she replied to the request for cult info. “Too bad you’re not here. Two of my friends stayed over for a pajama party and we drank the rest of your beer. They’re still here and they’re naked, aren’t you girls?” He heard shrieks of “naked nude.”
“Please behave, Mona. I checked out of the Arizona Inn so hold any research faxes until you hear from me.” He quickly hung up to the sound of more shrieks and laughter. In his own danceless life he couldn’t imagine anyone laughing on a November dawn but here it was. He tried to dismiss the image of three nude girls in the same bed but it was like trying not to think of a white horse. Now there was suddenly a white horse in Mona’s bedroom. It occurred to him while driving through Benson, a town that his brother-in-law Bob had bragged held thirty thousand Airstream trailers in the winter, that he hadn’t seen any boys visiting Mona for a couple of years, just her goth female cabal, the nature of which was beyond him. He did not want to wander into the territory of his average male ignorance of lesbianism.
When he took the Willcox exit he began to feel presumptuous, which meant he was losing his nerve. There was a sign saying that Willcox was the hometown of Rex Allen, the singing cowboy, and he was way back when in the world of the Saturday matinee when he and a hundred other kids would watch big Rex and a dozen other cowboys who were on horseback and would warble, “Get Along Little Doggie,” and then minutes later would be firing their six-shooters at a group of woebegone Indians. From the research Mona had faxed he knew there had been a scandal years ago about the Willcox cops using stray dogs for target practice at the town dump, which was not a good advertisement for law enforcement integrity. Another local problem, this one of a financial nature, was an oversupply of ostriches. Many people had bought breeding pairs for fifty thousand bucks hoping to raise broods of young ostriches for their hides, feathers, and meat to make their inevitable fortunes. This struck Sunderson as a mini-Wall Street scheme but too small-time to attract the likes of Bernard Madoff, just the usual millions of suckers who wanted to be sitting pretty.
To build his nerve back to a functional level he stopped at a diner for the habitual heart-stopper breakfast of sausage, eggs, and crispy hash browns his doctor had warned about. While working at a bag of delicious local pistachios he noted the loose wattles of all the retirees eating big breakfasts and muttering with full mouths about the dangers presented by Obama. It had always mystified him why so many of the poor were right-wingers when with the Republicans the poor went totally unacknowledged. The poor are always betrayed by history he thought feeling both sympathy and empathy as his own interest in history seemed to be betraying him. On his coffee table he had counted nineteen volumes of an historical nature that he had bought but not yet touched. He had used reading to escape his job but as his job had withered toward his retirement party he had become less enthused. On the last day of brook trout fishing in September he had been thinking about the Etruscans while he waded a good stretch of the Chocolay River. He smelled marijuana before he rounded a bend and caught two young couples drinking beer and smoking pot on the riverbank. He flipped his badge and the girls began crying while the boys’ faces turned pale. He stared at them coldly while his mind wandered to a small Etruscan museum he and Diane had visited in Italy.
“Fuck it,” he said.
“Fuck what,” one of the boys croaked hugging his girlfriend.
“I don’t have time to take you in. I have to go fishing.” Sunderson was staring at a trout rising and feeding at the edge of the eddy. How happy he and Diane had been in the Guarnacci Etruscan Museum in Volterra.
