“She was on her knees before me and taking a raised skirt photo with a flash. I said ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ and she said that her boyfriend likes raised skirt photos of young girls. Guess who her boyfriend is?”
“That’s easy. It’s the Great Leader. I’m sure she’s one of many.”
“Carla says if you don’t lay off she’s going to accuse you of sodomy, you know, at your retirement party. She’s got Queenie as a witness.”
“How interesting.” Sunderson’s mind whirled with the permutations, which were easy to dismiss. “It would be embarrassing but it wouldn’t work. There were a number of cops there plus friends from the prosecutor’s office. There are also photos of her going sixty-nine with Queenie. I’ve got more and better witnesses.”
“Should I tell her that?”
“No. Of course not. We don’t want a pissing contest. Just don’t go to her place.”
“I miss you, darling.”
“I miss you, too.”
He was only able to eat one of the wretched frozen chicken dinners before he felt gaggy. It was time to drive to a supermarket and set up a proper kitchen. He had planned to spend a quiet evening reading Deloria’s Playing Indian and making some written notes on his situation. He knew he felt a certain misplaced pride, a questionable hubris that he could deal with this new territory when there was no evidence so far that he was actually capable of doing so. He had let down his guard after being freed from forty years of work habits and the results of this slippage had been poor indeed. Before answering Mona’s call he had had a confused dream that had his favorite brook trout creek becoming round, a perfect circle in the meadow, woods, and marsh that was its path. Toward the end it had become coiled and serpentine, which reminded him of some of Marion’s favorite ideas. The aging process was linear with the inevitability of gravity but our thinking and behavior tended to occur in clusters, knots that wound and unwound themselves. His current central problem was comparable to the poorly remembered Gospel parable: when you clean out the room of your life via retirement you have to be careful what you let back in. Since it was five months until brook trout season he had only his obsession with the Great Leader, which was not something to pleasantly fill a life. He had an image of a lovely old basilica he had walked in to on a side street in Florence while Diane napped at their room at the Brunelleschi. He had sat on a bench in the basilica calmed by the utter loveliness of the place, the wonderful simple lines compared to the rococo monstrosity of the Duomo. An old lady and a pretty girl of about twelve entered, lit candles, and knelt and prayed. The question was why not destroy the Great Leader who so grotesquely diminished what everyone must sense, however remotely, as the divinity of existence. To be sure, Sunderson only felt this in the natural world distant from the collective human puke that drowned so much of what was good in life.
Berenice called and he answered out of guilt. She wanted him to come to dinner the following evening because their sister Roberta was passing through town. He said he was booked and they settled for lunch. He was chain smoking and noted with irritation that he was down to five cigarettes, not nearly enough for an evening’s reading. Was he capable of walking to the Wagon Wheel for cigarettes without getting stewed? Time would tell. Another more irritating thought occurred. What would his mother think if he was charged with sodomy? Not good.
He poured a modest drink not bothering with ice and called a former colleague in Marquette explaining Carla’s supposed intentions. The friend explained that the prosecutor would never bring such a pathetic case but to make sure they would bring Carla to complete “attention.” An informant had told him that Carla sold not only the occasional lid of pot but also totally untaxed cartons of cigarettes a Chippewa member of Daryl-Dwight’s cult brought in from the smugglers in the Sault Ste. Marie area. The latter would be a federal charge and the threat would “bunch her undies,” or so the man said. The little cigarette sideline gave Carla a profit of twenty bucks a carton.
Sunderson was nearly cheery walking the few blocks to the bar. The thought of pissing off his iron mother had been a powerful corrective ever since his youth. Near the motel he saw a young man wearing a turban above his bliss ninny face and asked Amanda at the Wagon Wheel about it. She said he was from the vegan cult up Harshaw Creek Road. Sunderson pondered the possible spiritual content of raw vegetables remembering the rubbery carrot and celery sticks on the grade school hot lunch program.
“Maybe the raw vegetables release their secret powers,” he suggested polishing off his first double in a single long gulp.
“Got me by the ass. I do know that when they get too pure the medevac chopper from Tucson has to pick them up,” Amanda laughed.
