Outside of Patagonia his cell phone rang with the William Tell Overture, music that he hated but he didn’t know how to change. He answered because he saw it was Mona on the caller ID.
“Good morning dear.”
“You can’t believe what’s happening as we speak. You know how dark it is here in November at seven a.m.? Well Marion pulls up in his car on the way to work. He goes in your house and then he pulls a book in your study and I can see the crack of light. He’s been peeking at me for about ten minutes. I thought it was our special secret. It pisses me off that you told him, darling.”
“I didn’t tell him,” Sunderson laughed. “He’s picking up some books to FedEx me. It was his own discovery.”
“I did some nude yoga so he wouldn’t be disappointed. I think I believe you. I mean it’s a silly thing but I like the idea that it’s just between us.”
“Well, he’s not going to pick up books to send me every day. Here’s a nifty thing to do. When you hang up with me call his cell and say, Caught you, you shitheel pervert.”
“I want to write my own lines,” she laughed. “Maybe I’ll say, Come on over, big boy.”
“Please don’t.”
“Are you jealous, darling?”
Sunderson hung up on her and when he ate his menudo the labial texture made him horny. The freedom of retirement was distressing. Normally at this time back home he would be driving to work and mentally rehearsing the cases at hand. Why was the little old widow whose husband left her a nice pension embezzling from the dry goods store where she worked twenty hours a week? A tiny video camera caught her. She wept. She was helping a niece with cancer but it turned out she didn’t have a niece. She was addicted to hitting the slots at the Indian casino east of town. A month after the judge gave her probation she was caught on video stealing change from other players’ coin cups and stealing tips from tables in the lunchroom. Sunderson disliked interrogating her because despite his innovative questioning he couldn’t make a dent. She said she was aiming at winning the hundred-thousand-dollar jackpot and giving it to her church because the pastor’s wife had cancer. A phone call revealed that the pastor’s wife didn’t have cancer. Dealing with this senior citizen ditz gave Sunderson heartburn and a deep need for more alcohol. In his last week of work she had been caught at midnight rifling parking meters using a technique she refused to describe. When Sunderson met with the prosecutor they went to the bar at the Ramada Inn where he received a cell call from Snowbound Books. The owner had caught the woman jamming three copies of the new Danielle Steel in her underpants in the back room. “Shoot her,” Sunderson had said then closed the phone. This was clearly not a life.
When he finished his last piece of tripe which raised the image of Mona he thought that a serious man can’t be pussy struck at breakfast. What a fool he had become in his loneliness, a fungoid teenage boy. He pondered the idea that he should be over this nonsense at age sixty-five but he wasn’t. He couldn’t very well ask Melissa to wear a miniskirt while fishing. Now that he was recovering, however slowly, it was time to up the ante on the Great Leader. His dad used to say that idle hands are the devil’s work tools. He didn’t want to be idle but the true mystery was how to proceed so far from home ground. He needed to somehow daily carbonate his brain to become less sodden and more attentive.
He walked a route in the Nature Conservancy property for an hour without his usual attentiveness in natural surroundings because he remembered what an abrasive Detroit detective had told him forty years before, “Paranoia is healthy for a cop.” Maybe Roberto Kowalski wasn’t straight and suspected Sunderson of being a fed, maybe a DEA guy from out of state snooping into crooked locals? Maybe two weeks before Melissa had told her brother Xavier about a beat-up detective in the Nogales hospital and Xavier had told her to check him out? The question was whether or not this paranoia was healthy or delusional.
There was a slight rustle and movement of leaves and he jumped back as far as a man his age could jump back. He had a preconception that the area was chock-full of rattlers though in truth it would take an expert and hard looking to find one and the morning was far too cold at fifty degrees for a rattler to be active. He knelt down feeling the pain of his bruised legs and examined a large black beetle making its way slowly through the leaf detritus. Such large beetles were unknown in the north and he wondered how it made its way through life, where it ate and slept, and how it mated.
