Sitting there with his tasteless soup Sunderson felt his confused mind becoming more liquid. The image of Mona in bed with a brother and sister floated toward Melissa and her baby daughter overlooked by Daryl, which Mona wrote was Dwight’s new alias.
There was a knock at the door. It was Alfred who handed Sunderson a map saying that he had marked some places in the area for their interesting walks. Alfred then invited Sunderson to join him and his wife for dinner at their favorite Mexican restaurant. Sunderson wanted to refuse but could think of no reason to do so and accepted. After Alfred left he noted that when he pulled up his trousers the waist had become loose. He had probably lost a dozen pounds in the nearly two weeks since the stoning though part of that was because he had forgotten in his dream confusion to drink any alcohol after never missing a day since he entered college. He called Marion knowing that it was lunch hour at the school.
“I haven’t had a drink in twelve days.”
“Oh bullshit,” Marion laughed.
“Truly. I actually forgot in what they call my post-concussive state.”
“I take it you’ll miss deer cabin this year?” The two of them never really hunted unless a deer approached an illegal salt block in Marion’s cabin clearing.
“I can’t cut and run after getting the shit kicked out of me which is a euphemism.”
“If you shoot Dwight you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison. I heard the food is bad.”
“His name is Daryl now.”
“I know. I had dinner with Mona. She’s having problems with her mother.”
“That’s what she told me. Do you figure she’s a lesbian?” Sunderson had brooded about the question for some time.
“Maybe. Who knows what you are at sixteen? At that age my music teacher was blowing me and I turned out hetero.” Marion laughed hard. “He was real good at it.”
“You’re a man of wide experience. I was thinking you could send me some books. There are twenty-nine I haven’t read on the coffee table. Send seven at random. Seven is my lucky number.”
Sunderson hung up after they talked about the ramifications of Diane moving back to town. There were none except that it would be painful to run across her. He was wobbly when he got up from the table and sat down and finished the lukewarm soup, like it or not. What he really wanted was a nap but it was only a little after midmorning. A walk was in order. He spread out Alfred’s map and felt good when he found his own location. There was a town called Patagonia about fifteen miles down the road, the name of which jogged his memory. The thirty-year Cochise Wars had their inception about three miles southwest of town. A low-rent rancher had claimed that the Apaches had kidnapped his child, which proved to be untrue but the war continued. It was akin to Bush thinking that the Iraq war was God’s will. The utter irrationality of the human species continued to leak into Sunderson’s wounded brain as he drove toward the mountain community of Patagonia.
His walk went poorly. He found a place Alfred had marked, the small road up Red Mountain, but the relatively tame incline was too much for him. He turned away, went through a cattle gate, and walked about four hundred yards, preoccupied with his thoughts, until he was on the verge of stepping into a hole covered sparsely with brush. The hole was a pipe about three feet in diameter and led straight down into the center of the earth or so he thought. As a citizen of the Upper Peninsula he was accustomed to the trashed landscape left behind a century ago by mining companies. It was a fine place to dump the body of Dwight-Daryl if it ever came to that. This thought shocked him into a sweat and when he turned back toward his car he realized that he had failed to acknowledge the depth of his anger over being nearly stoned to death.
He stopped in Patagonia and ate a big bowl of menudo, the tripe stew that Melissa had told him to eat daily to regain his strength. How could he do otherwise? He wasn’t sure he liked the dish never having eaten tripe before, but that was beside the point. The big though lovely waitress told him the bone in the stew was a calf’s foot for extra flavor. He mulled over the idea that he was attracted to Mexican women because of his inexperience with them. You would see a few now and then in Marquette, especially students at Northern Michigan University, but he had never actually known any. A Marquette bartender who had been to Mexico said that the women down there would fuck you until your ears flew off but bartenders were notoriously short on credibility. The base of male fantasy life was silly indeed he thought with the image of ears flying through the air like sparrows.
