He was at the Patagonia Lake marina a half hour before Melissa was due. By Michigan standards the lake was dinky indeed but made up for it by its beautiful mountain setting. He had to half drag his aching foot but was eager to row while Melissa fished. He reached the dock from the parking lot with difficulty, his big toe and to a lesser extent the whole front part of his foot feeling like the pulse of a toothache at the root of a loose tooth, certainly better than the grueling pain at the beginning of an attack. At least gout didn’t entail an emotional hangover. Gout was something you did to yourself usually by willful inattention. The list of prohibited foods was taped in clear sight above his desk. The problem was that pain is abstract until it arrives and couldn’t compete with a skillet of quick-fried doe liver that had been sliced thin. His father had told him that liver was the healthiest of meats for building strong bodies but then liver was also the cheapest meat a relatively poor family could afford. He had so wanted to be strong like his father who could easily lift one of cousin Charlie’s boxes of whitefish that weighed three hundred pounds.
Sunderson sat there on the dock near rowboat number seven that the marina clerk advised was the best of the dozen or so. It was clearly a piece of shit in the long line of rowboats in his life. The mythology of liver and rowboats faded when he thought of the pungency of Deloria’s Playing Indian, which he had leafed through in the midst of his pain. Most academic history books he read were real prose clunkers and sometimes Diane would read aloud a sentence or two from them and laugh. Diane liked to listen to Leonard Cohen while reading her favorite author Loren Eiseley. He liked both but not at the same time. He began to doze from his drug combo of colchicine and Oxycontin to which he had added Imodium. Colchicine could be a violent purge. When Melissa had called earlier in the morning to ask what kind of juice he wanted with lunch he had said, “A pint of vodka,” another questionable ingredient.
She finally pulled up in a newish Toyota 4Runner Sport, a vehicle he had yearned for but could scarcely afford on his pension, and definitely not affordable on her nurse’s aide salary. Likely it came from her faux stockbroker brother.
They quickly loaded her small tackle box, two spinning rods, and the picnic hamper. She was so effervescent that it verged on playacting and he cautioned himself in his haze against looking for something wrong rather than right. She wore a light-blue jacket and jeans rather than the skimpy clothes of his fantasies. He rowed the gunk boat, sipped vodka, and hummed, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” He had always preferred the edgy Rolling Stones to the frivolous white canticles of the Beatles. She finally caught a decent smallmouth bass on a Rapala she was casting but released it saying that she preferred to eat saltwater fish. It had become warm enough for her to take off her jacket and her braless breasts in the light sleeveless pullover jiggled pleasantly when she cast the lure. The sight penetrated his drug haze and he felt a specific nut twitch. She was trolling a worm and heavy sinker with her other rod and hooked a little catfish, which he detached because it was too ugly for her to touch. He had brought Alfred’s map and was rowing toward an estuary area where Sonoita Creek, which he had walked along in the Nature Conservancy land, emptied into the lake. He had skipped breakfast and was hungry for the picnic.
The creek was braided near the lake but he found an inlet deep enough to pull in the boat. He watched as she laid out the picnic on her hands and knees, a fetching sight. He took a solid gulp of vodka to ease a foot tinge. There was a fruit salad and a dozen huge shrimp that she said she got through Hector who owned Las Vigas. He knew shrimp was on his proscribed gout list but said fuck it to himself, dipping a shrimp in a blistering hot salsa verde. She laughed at his tears.
“What are you really doing down here?”
This caught him off guard and he knew the question was meant to, but after a near lifetime of interrogating perps, more recently designated “persons of interest,” he was an expert at cat and mouse.
“I’m checking out a cult leader. Seeing my iron mother. Anything more I’m not at liberty to say.” He immediately realized that he should have put the subject to rest but he wanted to tease her. He put on a cool, impassive face when what he was really thinking about is that he should have brought along an Oxycontin.
“You don’t trust me!” She took his coolness as truth, and got up and walked away wandering in the bushes nearly out of sight.
