“I quit grouse hunting when my dog died,” Sunderson said.
“What the hell do you do in September when trout season ends?”
A good question Sunderson thought. His dog would trot through the woods well ahead and bark when it flushed and treed a grouse. He’d make the easy shot out of the tree, the bird would fall and the dog prance with joy. Diane, who was not much taken by wild game, loved roasted wild grouse. This wasn’t close to the classic version of grouse hunting but a successful peasant version of man and dog teaming up to get dinner.
The sun beat in the car windshield and he stopped at the rest stop on Route 28 near the Driggs River, the upper reaches of which were good brook trout fishing. Down the highway there was a small road leading into a five-mile-long pond on the Seney Wildlife Preserve, a good destination for the following day. He put his seat back and was immediately asleep for an hour, finally awakening to a rapping on the window. There was the state police cruiser parked next to his own car and Corporal Berks was staring in the window.
“Just making sure you’re alive, sir.”
“I think I am. I took a long hike. How are you Berks?”
“Fine. We miss you at the Post. The new guy’s from Mount Pleasant and doesn’t catch on to the U.P. How are you doing?”
“Just fucking, dancing, and fighting. Tell the new guy to give me a call if he gets especially puzzled.”
Berks drove off and Sunderson was amused by having said “fucking, dancing, fighting.” It was one of the things Diane liked least about the U.P., the male braggadocio she called “macho.” Marion, a frequent visitor to Mexico, corrected her on this saying macho meant a man who was gratuitously vicious. U.P. men were often intelligent louts, strutting and growling like their logging and mining grandfathers. It wasn’t really about manliness, a word not much in use until the recent decade and one that in former times would have been embarrassing. He couldn’t recall men ever talking about manhood when he was growing up. It was a more recent, absurd development.
Back home Sunderson was pleased by a note from Marion saying that he had put about twenty pounds of venison from the doe in the fridge, then Mona burst in the porch door glowing with excitement.
“Carla tried to call you from Hawaii. Where’s your cell?”
“I have no idea.” He fixed himself a whiskey.
“You’re not going to fucking believe this. It looks like King David might do ninety days in jail. You know those two fancy L.A. guys that were with Queenie you told me about? Well in this high-class lounge in the hotel in Maui, Dwight, I mean King David, wiped up the floor with them. I mean Carla said he beat the shit out of them. He exploded because they were trying to defile his religion. Carla said he went totally apeshit and trashed the place after he beat them to a pulp.”
“Will wonders never cease?” Sunderson smiled. He had observed when he met Dwight that he was in fine shape and in fact put his followers through an hour of rigorous exercise a day plus their manual work load. This was part of the warrior nonsense, the faux Indian part of the cult.
“I guess you’re going to have to take a break,” Mona said.
And that’s what he did. He planned on walking in the mornings and reading a book a day in the afternoons and evenings. Of course it didn’t work out that way with human willpower more than occasionally a weak item. He was making a New Year’s resolution a few weeks short of the actual new year and there was a traditional problem with retirees in the Great North that they tend to come close to hibernation in the deep winter months of December, January, and February. A week after Mona had made her startling announcement about King David Sunderson was sitting at his desk sleepily reading about the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in the 1790s when Carla called.
“Dwight got ninety days,” she sobbed.
“I’m not surprised.”
“What the fuck do you know about Hawaii?” Her voice was shrill with anger.
“Everywhere public mayhem is punished.” It was a relief to get away from the historical text wherein farmers dressed up like redskins to protest a tax on their homemade whiskey. So what, he thought.
“Well, Queenie left for L.A. to nurse her friends leaving me high and dry with no money. I visit Dwight in the mornings and then I waitress.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I don’t know. I needed to talk to someone. Queenie’s not answering my calls and you and I have a relationship of some sort.”
“I suppose so.” He wondered what it was though every time he thought of their woodpile coupling he was hopelessly stimulated.
“I thought I should tell you that the Chadron land sale went through. Actually it’s a hundred and twenty acres north of Crawford, which is near Chadron and Fort Robinson where Dwight’s hero Crazy Horse was murdered.”
“How convenient.”
“Fuck you.”
