Sunderson showered, heated coffee, and dressed in fresh clothes for his upcoming dinner with Alfred and his wife. He intended to drive to Tucson in the morning to try to buy a pistol and would drop off cigarettes for his mother. Why deny an eighty-five-year-old woman her pleasure? Everyone on the continent is pestering each other not to speak of the children and animals.
Were it not for the fact that he had looked into the bathroom’s full-length mirror the good feeling of his nap would have continued. Jesus. What did I do to be so black and blue? Got truly stoned. He certainly didn’t turn around for a back view to see more smears of dark blue and sickly yellow. To distract himself he leafed through Mona’s big packet on cults in the United States feeling a tremor of humility at the job of figuring out the mess. Mona had added another note he had missed on his first go-through of the material. She had communicated with a disaffected member of Daryl’s (the former Dwight) new Arizona commune called Yahweh Kwa. The woman loved “spiritual adventures” but felt that Daryl’s membership fee of twenty thousand bucks was too stiff. The money was for a huge kiva and the stone Basque-Apache sheepherder’s huts the members would live in. Only two hundred people would be allowed in this spiritual village. Construction had already started and the woman objected that all toilet and shower facilities were open-air as there was no shame in being a spiritual mammal. The woman objected to the idea of “pooping” in public and living in a tent until her stone hut was finished. She said that Arizona winter nights at five thousand feet could be below freezing despite the immense mesquite log fire the tents surrounded. The winter diet would be “natural Apache,” which meant sheep and cattle and the woman was a vegan, which would be the summer diet. Another objection was Daryl’s hundred levels of spiritual accomplishment. These hundred stages would remain in Daryl’s care and would be unwritten. Daryl had spent years at the library of the University of California in Berkeley researching the great third-world religions to come up with the hundred levels. Each week there would be a ritual dance around an immense fire and Daryl would present that week’s spiritual challenge. The Yahweh Kwa would be safe from government intervention because it was on the property of the illegal Gadsden Purchase, which Daryl was challenging in federal court.
It went on and on in this fantastic arena of cockamamie bullshit including the fact that over half the members were college graduates. Sunderson laughed aloud, his first full laugh in the two weeks since his “accident” forgetting for the moment just who had caused his nearly fatal injury. The Nogales doctor had been concerned with a specific heart fluttering called tachycardia which, after a few days, subsided on its own. The doctor had mentioned the possibility of a pacemaker, which even in his brutalized condition made him cringe further. It wasn’t something to worry about in retrospect, an ugly habit of his this worrying about events that had already been resolved. He missed the calming influence of his friend Marion and wondered for the thousandth time if he would be a calmer man if he didn’t drink so much, a habit that had increased in volume after Diane left. To even think about quitting made him feel that life was on the verge of cheating him.
He drew his chair up to a window that faced the southeast trying to dismiss the niggling idea that he should simply shoot Dwight-Daryl and then go back home. How tempting. His still very sore body had brought on a sense of his age like a thunderstorm. Dwight-Daryl reminded him of something he had heard about on NPR. Somewhere in South America there was a type of malevolent foot-long centipede that hung from the ceilings of bat caves and snagged innocent little bats for dinner.
