By lucky coincidence an older, Mexican woman came into the bar selling fresh tamales for a buck apiece. Sunderson bought six, eating three immediately with a cold Pacifico beer. They beat any bar food he had ever had in the Great North. They were so good he didn’t feel up to another drink. He looked forward to eating the other three tamales for breakfast. On the walk home he idly thought of becoming a Mexican knowing a lot of Americans retired far to the south of the border where life was less dicey. Just before he reached his place down a dark alley he saw two men loading something in a pickup. They glanced his way and he pretended he hadn’t noticed them with his eyes straight ahead.
“You’re looking for someone?” Amanda had asked when he left the bar.
“I better not say,” he replied with an urge for mystery.
Dawn, which is late in November, found him carving his first mango, sexual to the touch, but he didn’t care for it so maybe he wouldn’t become a Mexican after all. With his coffee he had read a chapter in Deloria titled, “Hobby Indians, Authenticity, and Race in Cold War America” and recalled a number of powwows he had been to in the U.P. while looking for perps, persons of interest. Once at the big winter powwow in Escanaba he had seen the renowned fancy dancer Jonathan Windy Boy and had gotten unwilling goose bumps at the man’s inconceivable grace. There were a few white dancers, usually awkward.
Pushing the book aside he decided to start logging what he was doing in order to bring focus. He had logged notes in journals his entire career to prepare for the obnoxious reports he was obligated to write for the official record. Sunderson recognized good prose despite being unable to write it. Reading so many clunkers in the field of history didn’t help. Like scholars he tended to multiple qualifiers in order to be right without ambiguity. “Are we to believe, unlikely as it seems, that the perp only recently, perhaps in the month since his return from Milwaukee, came into possession of illegal ammunition, usable, mostly in illegal full-automatic weaponry,” that sort of thing. By contrast, Diane had written beautifully, publishing a memoir with Michigan State University of her father’s family adventures in the logging business. She wrote daily in a diary and only read fine nonfiction and literary fiction. He enjoyed Hemingway’s fishing pieces but failed to finish The Sun Also Rises, which was about a bunch of layabouts getting drunk and going to bullfights in Spain.
He sat staring at an empty page of his journal, ballpoint poised, but couldn’t move a mental sentence. The most singular entry since his arrival in Arizona was, “I hurt all over,” written on the last full day in the hospital. It was true. A large rock had hit the crack of his ass while he was in a crouched position so that even around his asshole there was a big bruise.
He took an hour’s walk up Harshaw nodding to an altruistic group of young vegan cult women. Marion had said that vegetarian women tasted better but Sunderson had never had an experience with a vegetarian woman.
He left early for Green Valley wanting to get his grocery shopping out of the way before lunch at his mother’s. Afterward he knew he would want a drink and a long nap before going to Melissa’s. The highway went right past Alfred’s house and Alfred was in the yard so he stopped to say hello, a bad choice because Alfred was pissed off. Someone had broken into Sunderson’s apartment when he and Molly were out for dinner. No damage had been done except to the door’s lock. Sunderson offered him fifty bucks, which he pocketed.
“A cop came but he didn’t take prints like on TV. Anyway, I saw a painted redstart this morning.”
“Lucky you,” Sunderson said, knowing that the redstart was a bird.
The Green Valley supermarket was a melancholy experience. Everyone in there was his age or older. Admittedly they looked better than retirees in the U.P. whose only exercise tended to be pressing the clicker for the television set. The women especially were tanned and sprightly while the men obviously spent too much time on their golf carts. There was a magnificent display of vegetables compared to back home where the piece de resistance was always the pasty. To Sunderson vegetables were an obligation rather than a pleasure since Diane with her cooking skills had left. The coup was finding a package of frozen rabbit pieces, to make one of his favorite meals.
His mother, Roberta, and Berenice were sitting on the front porch luckily without Berenice’s dipshit husband. The Escalade was gone but there was a gray Prius with an Obama sticker, obviously Roberta’s car.
“Nice car. A little pricey,” Sunderson said accepting a glass of nasty California rose that Berenice poured.
“She’s a real success not an alcoholic sex fiend,” his mother said, her voice slurred.
“All I wanted to be was a Podunk gumshoe,” Sunderson said with an edge to his laugh.
“And you lost the world’s finest woman,” his mother continued.
