“Boys are different,” he said, pausing to glance into his studio den with relief. He intended to put a no sign up on his peek hole. Enough was enough. It seemed that his thinking was becoming less muddy. “Boys can be polymorphously perverse into their teens. Of course I’m unsure about girls. In the last three decades or so the culture has been prolonging childhood so it’s altogether natural that the age of consent be moved up to eighteen. Apparently the young are more sexually active than ever but the law is there to appropriately protect them from older predators of which there are many, like Dwight-Daryl.”
“Carla told me that as of this morning he’s changed his name to King David,” she laughed.
“Jesus Christ! What next?” He finished his whiskey but stopped himself from pouring another.
“I’m different. I’m old for my age. I cooperated so it would be unjust to send Carla to prison. We’re the world record holder for sending people to prison. Skip Carla, concentrate on the Great Leader.”
“For the time being maybe.” He was remembering that he had been expected to be a man at fourteen. And his sisters were hard cases at that age. He certainly had no clear idea why the societal change had occurred. His own family had been matriarchal with his mother holding the iron hand and his dad mostly bringing home the bacon. Mona’s mother was a mostly absent ditz.
“Can I sit on your lap for a minute?”
“If you behave.”
His knee felt the heat of her butt. What would happen to this waif? Did he have guidance to offer?
“You’re under arrest,” Marion said, standing at the open door in an orange coat and orange overalls. There was snow on the front porch which had muffled his approach. Sunderson was busy diverting his thoughts away from Mona’s warm ass with errant thoughts of the history of the Panama Canal, his dislike of college communities and their mental tourism, and the obvious fact that the human body should have been designed so that you only needed to pee once a day. He was sure his knee was beginning to sweat. How many BTUs does a vulva generate?
“I’m wearing my hunting clothes because I’m tired of my school principal clothes. Tomorrow’s the last day of deer season. We should give it a try.”
“You look truly ugly,” Mona said, getting up and reheating the mashed rutabaga and adding more cream and butter.
“It’s defensive, dear, the most visible color, which will save me from getting shot. Most hunting accidents are alcohol related.”
“I’ll tag along. I’m not saying I’ll fire a shot.” Sunderson felt dullish from his dawn plane ride though part of the fatigue might have come from being away from Xavier’s gun sights.
“Just before dark I saw a doe dragging a leg. She’d never make it through winter. You’d love doe liver.”
“I’ll count my gout pills.”
By nine the next morning, a clear glittery day of ten degrees with the snow glistening, Sunderson was frying the doe liver in too much butter, salivating and watching Marion carry in a load of split beech. The evening before, despite having had only two whiskeys, he began to nod off after two servings of the pork roast and mashed rutabaga and a bare nibble of salad. Mona and Marion had scarcely left when the phone rang and it was Queenie’s father, the big-shot Bloomfield Hills businessman who had earlier tried to get Sunderson to retrieve his daughter’s money from the Leader. Queenie had come up missing in Tucson and the man wanted him to look for her, an easy request to decline rather rudely. He gave the man Kowalski’s Nogales number. They deserved each other. Mona had winked at him when she left and he wandered into his den studio for the soft-core porn peep show but found himself unable to remove the book that would give him the view. He went directly to bed not wanting a case of what Satchel Paige had called the “agitations.” He poured a nightcap but didn’t drink it thinking that since touching Mona was unthinkable he had to transcend the remote lecher in himself. Before Marion left he had repeated his advice to Sunderson to closely read Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian for an insight into the behavior of the Great Leader, currently called King David, a hard to swallow name change, but then Sunderson had already begun the book.
