For twenty years he had been trying to dismiss a haunting night image. Back in March 1989 he had investigated a wife beating a few miles from Sault Ste. Marie. A diminutive woman who weighed less than a hundred pounds had been slugged by her husband with such massive force that it had driven her nose bone into her brain and she had died instantly. On the gurney her face looked like a plum from the subcutaneous bleeding. Her husband kept saying, “I only hit her once.” When Sunderson finally got home to Marquette that night he had wept over a glass of whiskey in the kitchen and Diane had gotten out of bed and comforted him. For twenty years he had to face this nightly plum image and after trying to dismiss it for a long time he’d finally given up. But now the little woman’s face appeared normal and she was smiling. He was so startled he turned on the bed lamp. Had he gone daft? Nothing was amiss except that the nightcap he had poured sat untouched on the kitchen table. He wanted to feel good in the morning.
A rooster awoke him before daylight and he was pleased to be in a village that allowed chickens. Roosters were the sound of his childhood when he would awake early for his miserable paper route from which he made five bucks a week. He made coffee and quickly fried half a strip steak and two eggs that he put on toast. It was all uncommonly delicious. He was feeling positive for the first time in the month since his retirement and attributed it to the week far from the world of men. He had no expectations that it would last long but it fueled his walk nearly to the top of Red Mountain from which he could see over the top of a range to the south and far into Mexico. The landscape was too vast for a flatlander and seeing seventy miles or so unnerved him. He descended so hastily his shins ached. He had become quite abruptly homesick. He would go home as soon as possible and do something reasonable like shovel snow off his sidewalk and out of the driveway.
Back in his temporary apartment he noted that a fly had drowned in the glass of whiskey and that there was a message on his cell phone from his ex-wife. He felt light-headed when he called her back.
“Your mother is worried you won’t show up for Thanksgiving. Please do so.”
“I’m heading over in a half hour for her special oven-dried turkey. How have you been?”
“I’ve mostly been a nurse. My husband is on hyperaggressive chemo. How about you?”
“I went camping alone for a week. You would have loved the place.”
“I can’t believe this,” she laughed.
“It’s true. I was recovering. At this late date I’m becoming a boy again by camping.”
“Did it work?”
“Somewhat, except that getting away makes you want more getting away. I’m going to come home and spend some time at Marion’s cabin to think over my pursuit of the Great Leader.”
“It’s not a cabin, it’s barely a shack. You’ll spend your time cutting wood.”
“All the better.”
“Have you found companionship?”
“Of sorts. There’s this young Mexican woman but she’s a tad daffy. It seems nearly all women are daffy except you.”
After he concluded their chat he found he had a lump of grief in his throat. Life moment by moment is so unforgiving and I’m a slow study, he thought. It’s hard to repair a boat after it’s sunk. As he prepared to leave wishing he had some good wine to take along he was amused at his dread of the upcoming meal before which his mother, Hulda, would say a lengthy grace. Her annual Thanksgiving grace was traditionally a summing up of her spiritual fiscal year, more similar to driving nails than the polite “Thank you, Big Guy.”
Sunderson’s peripheral consciousness had expanded and on the way out of town he guessed that a man sitting at the head of an alley in a white sedan reading a newspaper was Kowalski. In the rearview mirror he saw the white sedan pick up his tail as he crested the first hill out of town. He stepped on it and was well ahead by the Salero Road turnoff and then the serpentine turns through the canyon before Circle Z Ranch slowed him down. His compact was a slow dog indeed compared to his old Crown Victoria with which he got up to 150 miles per hour chasing down a car thief in the Seney stretch. For no reason except impulse and the fact that the gate was open which it never was he turned left at Three R, a narrow gravel road leading south into the mountains. Kowalski followed a quarter mile behind and Sunderson took out his pistola as it was known locally. He parked off to the side and Kowalski pulled up behind him and got out grinning. When Kowalski reached him and leaned against the compact Sunderson pointed the pistol.
“Your cell phone, please.”
Sunderson opened his car door violently, catching Kowalski’s shins with the bottom of the door and dropping him like a tub of shit.
“You’re annoying me,” Sunderson said. He turned the compact around and on the way past shot out both of Kowalski’s front tires. Kowalski was sitting in the road with his eyes closed hugging his shins.
