After she hung up he walked down to the New York Deli and had a corned beef and sauerkraut sandwich on rye (with hot mustard), then stopped at Snowbound Books and bought a new text on the life of Crazy Horse by an Englishman and also, at the suggestion of the proprietor, a book of essays by the poet Gary Snyder called The Practice of the Wild. Poetry was very low on his list of interests but he liked the title and felt that he needed a break from history which after all tended to be a record of national bad habits.
On the walk home he was further irked by a thaw that made the snow soft and slushy. He had felt the warmer air from the south through the window in the middle of the night and left for Big Bay well before dawn. He had hoped to reach one of his brook trout spots back on the Yellow Dog Plains but the melting snow clung to his snowshoes and the going was hard. He returned to his vehicle and tried the Bushwhacker skis but had forgotten to buy a pole to replace the one that was missing. He got stuck in a melting drift and fell over sideways yelling “Goddamnit” to the natural world.
His habitual postlunch nap failed due to a recurrent problem with acid reflux and he didn’t need to taste the sandwich again. He had found some old vinyl records of Diane’s and thought that listening to Berlioz’s Requiem might elevate him but the old record player wasn’t quite up to speed and besides the music only elevated his melancholy over Diane. He decided on a midafternoon jolt of whiskey though he knew it was a mistake. He had seen the unpleasant television ad warning seniors about overdrinking. In the ad an old man had a beer while fishing in his rowboat but then gradually moved up to a six-pack, not a threatening amount to Sunderson. He lay down on the sofa with the obnoxious afternoon sun pouring down on him through the living room window, half dozing and praying to a god unknown for a December blizzard. His thoughts were errant. To wit, if there are ninety billion galaxies how many religions are in the universe? Could he make a beef stew like Diane did without fresh sage? Soon after their divorce he had neglected the heating element in her small greenhouse next to the garage and the herbs had all frozen. Mona had retrieved a science blog for him a few days earlier that claimed religion had a biological inception similar to our aesthetic perceptions. Even other mammals like cows and killer whales enjoyed Mozart. When they were in Florence and Diane had insisted on a three-hour walk through the Uffizi he had wondered about going that long without cigarettes but then had had goose bumps a half dozen times and had quite forgotten the existence of cigarettes. He came away convinced that art books were a hoax compared to the reverence of standing before the actual painting, a reverence ordinarily only elicited by the natural world. Was this religion? Probably.
Something like that since he had read the piece hastily. Unfortunately he slept for a few minutes and reclaimed the past by dreaming of Diane screaming close to his face, “I can’t live any longer with a man who sees the world through shit-stained glasses.” This happened the day before she left. She never swore so it truly got his attention, albeit tardily.
He was sweating and not from the sun through the window, which had disappeared. He pretended that the briefest of sobs was a hiccup and poured a very large whiskey, swallowing it in a couple of gulps. As an investigator he didn’t generally believe in suppressed memory but had not previously admitted this scream to himself.
