The consolation, however slight, was the heft of the package of books Marion had sent. He opened the package in the parking lot and selected Playing Indian by Philip Deloria, which Marion had loaned him a couple of years before, rather than one of the new ones like Jeffrey Johnson’s They Are All Red Out Here: Socialist Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1895-1925, or Kyle Wilkison’s Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914, and certainly not the new edition of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, which he had skimmed through years before and which had precipitated a deep funk.
Over his first double and beer chaser at the bar he read Marion’s letter, the first half of which advised him to read the Deloria, which would help him understand the Great Leader’s use of faux Indian “rigmarole.” Marion said that many non-Indian Americans had used their fantasies about Indians to acquire a “hokum” spirituality. The second half of the letter was a comic recounting of Marion pulling the Deloria book out from above Sunderson’s desk and seeing the nude Mona at her morning rituals. “Don’t even try it, friend. It’s very upsetting and she caught me red-handed. I drove off to work shamefaced and with a hard-on like a toothache. I thought of a scholarly article by a psychoanalyst named Sullivan that said that at their best poetry and religion push back the boundaries of the ineffable. Well, so can a woman’s body.”
The barmaid Amanda brought him his second double. He had caught a nice breast view when she had bent over to get ice for a margarita.
“What are you staring at, asshole?”
“I’m staring into my mind. I can’t see it very well,” he said.
“That’s cute but a little evasive,” she laughed.
Sunderson felt a trace of fear. Two doubles were enough when bad people might very well be tracking you. It was five in the afternoon and he knew he should eat an early dinner, do some reading, and embrace sobriety. From want of good sense he went to the Mexican restaurant and ate yet another bowl of menudo, sprinkling it liberally with the blistering hot and flavorful chiltepins. He was proud of becoming acclimated though it was easiest when he was in Italy with Diane and liked everything he ate.
In his new digs he laid out his books including White’s “ It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own ”: A New History of the American West and Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds from his suitcase. History books were his central solace in life along with brook trout fishing but on this night history had abruptly fled. He figured the problem was that the sense of his own peril forced him to consider only life in the present tense. He tried the television news but his mistrust of the instant history of the media was jangling. He couldn’t find a movie suited to his mood and had to settle on a cop film only because it featured Robert Duvall, his doppelganger, who was uniformly credible in movies. Sunderson almost never watched cop movies because they lacked the visceral aspects of actuality. Once while in training in Detroit he had visited a downriver dope house with two cops and they had found two severed heads on a kitchen table, both with bulging purple tongues and lots of flies because the heads had been there a couple of days.
He was thirsty but stupidly didn’t drink water because he didn’t want to get up to pee with his geezer’s overactive kidneys. The gout struck at midnight, an easy self-diagnosis because it felt like a rat was chewing on his right big toe. He hobbled to the bathroom and took two colchicine pills plus an Oxycontin for the pain. His daily allopurinol had lost the battle with gout and now the crystallized purines in his toe were grating against the nerve endings. It had obviously been the tripe because he remembered tripe had been on the gout list his doctor had given him. It was usually doe liver during deer season. Like his father before him Sunderson simply couldn’t resist deer liver.
Sleep was fitful at best. To Sunderson the only reliable drugs were alcohol and tobacco and even ibuprofen and aspirin were suspicious, varying as they did the dream life that amused and fascinated him. His main worry was whether he’d be able to screw Melissa on the long shot of an opportunity. Toe anguish isn’t sexy and a rowboat isn’t a hospitable place for intercourse. Early in their marriage when camping he and Diane had tried it on Lake Gogebic but they had given up, laughing at the awkwardness. If he were religious, he thought, he could at least pray for warm weather so he could see a little skin. He finally slept because luckily for once he was old and with aging you gave up trying to account for everything that might happen, the hopeless attempt to balance the hundreds of variables with your brain’s billion-roomed house between which there are not nearly enough doors. Once again he realized that life had too many moving parts.
