The Big Seven (12 page)

Chapter 12

The bleakness of Lemuel’s manuscript had given Sunderson the urge to see how he lived at present. Before he could change his mind he put on a coat, his pistol in his shoulder holster, and headed off to the houses he had seen only from the road and never visited. They looked absurdly large and spread out from the road but maybe they wanted to keep distant from each other after a lifetime of fistfighting. He walked fairly fast downriver at the beginning but then his legs seemed to weaken with his courage and he slowed down. The first house seemed to be moving toward him in the manner of a ghost. It was a huge box on prairieland. It hadn’t been painted since it had been built and on the south side where the weather was the weakest you could still see a little raw lumber out of the sun. A little boy about ten popped out from behind a bush holding a real life pistol.

“You’re trespassing,” he shrieked.

“I’m looking for Lemuel,” Sunderson said holding up his hand in peace.

“You’re not from the government?” the boy said, calming down.

“No, I’m your neighbor from upriver.” Sunderson pointed.

“You’re the sonofabitch that stole our cousin Monica. Now we only have shit to eat. I ought to shoot you.” He was genuinely irritated.

“Why shoot me and spend your life in prison, far from this beautiful place?”

The boy looked crestfallen and turned away.

If anything the second house was junkier than the first. It was a mile down the trail as each house sat on a section of land more than six hundred acres. The screen on the back porch was torn in several places and the porch itself tilted severely to the south. A log pole was holding it up none too well. A little girl who couldn’t be more than seven came around the corner of a shed aiming a big .44 pistol at him. It was so heavy she had to hold it with both hands.

“You’re trespassing,” she said in a wee voice. “Uncle Lemuel is writing today. Don’t disturb him unless you have to.”

It occurred to Sunderson that if she fired the pistol the recoil would knock her down. She pointed the pistol at the third house in the distance. “He lives there,” she said with a sudden smile which startled him. The smile made him forget the trashy background and the gun. Two big coon hounds were investigating tipped-over plastic garbage barrels. A pit bull was snarling at the end of a long chain tether but couldn’t reach him which was lucky as he didn’t want to shoot it. It was preposterously muscular.

Lemuel’s house looked very trim compared to the others with a recent coat of gray paint and a nice back porch, screened to get away from the mosquitoes. Lemuel was watering ornamental bushes with a hose which he dropped in shock after noticing Sunderson.

“What a surprise,” he said.

“At least you don’t have a pistol on me like the other places.”

“The kids are trained as guards because if they shoot someone they’re too young to go to prison.”

“That’s convenient,” Sunderson said.

They went inside and had coffee in a big spotless kitchen.

“This was Simon Jr.’s house. He bought part of the land when Big Simon bought the rest. Monica did her cooking here. I received the house in his will that I forged. The other two houses are pigstys.”

They toured the house including an ample library with a bed. “I like to sleep with my books. The only adult I let into the house is Levi’s wife. We still make love but never more than once a week.” Upstairs there were four bedrooms, one with a huge rococo bed. “This was Big Simon’s bed. He brought it up from Kentucky, doubtless stolen.”

Sunderson was amazed at the house. So clean and rather feminine.

“Simon was ill a long time so I finished him off with a tincture I devised.”

He said this with the airiness of someone announcing good weather. Sunderson wasn’t surprised. In this family killing your father didn’t seem terribly serious. Back down in the library Lemuel pulled out a volume on violence in America. Sunderson told him he already had the book. Perhaps after spending most of a lifetime as a detective it wasn’t strange he was obsessed with violence and a family that had spent so much time beating the shit out of each other and others. Bert had done a year’s time for beating up an IRS man who had shown up on the steps. Sprague had shot out the tires of the census taker’s car. Political canvassers before elections were simply thrown off the porch.

“Violence is a rich tradition in America,” Lemuel said. “History books in schools don’t teach us about the thousands of lynchings or this tradition of shooting low into teepees to kill Indian women and children while they slept. Many newspapers argued that all Indians should be exterminated like the Nazi press in the 1930s with the Jews.”

Lemuel had hit on some of the history that most disturbed Sunderson. He could think of nothing to say except that the tradition of gunfights made police work difficult. And mass shootings were a mentality his mind had never grasped and nothing he’d read offered a firm clue either. Hate was as common as fingernails among the human race, and though Lemuel seemed civilized his brothers were far from it. He felt very tired thinking about it and how weak the law was as a consideration. He didn’t want to walk home thinking about it and accepted an offer of a ride from Lemuel.

On the way home they detoured to the tavern to get a drink. John and Bert were sitting in the corner drinking the unvarying vodka. John came slowly over with no signal in his face of what he had on his mind. He suddenly kicked their Formica and metal table over splaying out their shots and beer. He aimed another kick at Sunderson’s chest but Sunderson had the wit to catch his foot and lift it high. John went over backward with his head hitting the floor with a resounding crack. He was still. Now Bert rushed over but Lemuel stood and met him with an astounding array of punches. Bert shuffled away, his face bloody and shamefaced that the smallest brother had kicked the shit out of him.

“My black cellmate in prison taught me how to box,” Lemuel said.

On the way out Sunderson remembered he needed to replace the pint he had exhausted at home. First things first.

“No fighting in here,” the bartender said as they left. “You Ameses never learned how to behave.”

“Very sorry,” Lemuel said. “We were under attack.”

After the liquor store Sunderson couldn’t talk. He took a swig of his pint. He was thinking that violence should be the eighth deadly sin, and then unpleasantly it occurred to him that he was almost fifty years older than Monica. If they did have a baby he would be eighty when it graduated from high school. Not good, he thought. This was all a mortal blow about which he had to do something.

He packed up and left the cabin that afternoon after having a cup of coffee and another drink with Lemuel who startled him by showing no aftereffects of the violence except some bloody knuckles. Maybe that was partly it. Sunderson was shaken and had the urge to flee, but these Ameses simply didn’t react to the evil of violence or any other kind of evil. It was mysterious. They were born and lived that way from the start.

Chapter 13

On the long drive home he impulsively called Diane on the phone. He lamely wanted some advice on Monica.

“Of course it’s absurd but it’s not the dumbest thing you’ve ever done. Maybe it’s okay in South America and you should move there,” she laughed. Her voice sounded relaxed talking to him for the first time in a long time.

“You know I hate that word
absurd
,” he said.

“What else is it? Forty-five or fifty years’ age difference is absurd. Even the French say that seventeen years is the max. My husband was ten years older than me and that was quite a gap.”

“You mean sex?” he asked.

“I’m not answering that, you old fool.”

Now they had truly irritated each other. She never called him a fool unless she was pissed off. And she knew he had long hated her use of the word
absurd
. This had begun decades before when he had gone ice fishing with friends on a terribly cold January day. They had a few whiskeys and fished after dark. That evening at home at bedtime Diane discovered that his entire body was cold and said, “What an absurd sport. Your body is still freezing cold. This must be bad for your health.” He took umbrage. Ice fishing was a way of life. At bars in early winter before the ice was safe men were anxious to get out on the “big ice.” Out near the oar dock and power plant men would fish off the edge of ice in the open water. Sunderson pretended otherwise but he had never felt comfortable doing this. When a friend insisted he said he didn’t feel well. The few times he had done it he was semiparalyzed with fright.

The wrangle with Diane had spread far and wide. “Why not just buy fish and avoid suffering from the cold?” she said. He could not convincingly explain the pleasure of the sport to her, the beauty of frozen lakes, or the endless vista of frozen Lake Superior. You spudded a hole with effort and dropped down your bait and would occasionally catch a nice lake trout or whitefish. They were delicious drawn from extremely cold waters. She had segued to his health and nagged him insufferably about his physical condition saying that he was an early heart attack “waiting to happen.” Well, it hadn’t happened though he was a little worried when an orgasm with Monica over the table made him so dizzy he fell down. He had better settle for the bed, he thought after crashing to the floor.

The evening brought a call from Lemuel saying that big John had died from a heart attack that may have been precipitated, according to the doctor, by the concussion from falling backward in the tavern that afternoon. Sunderson felt as if he had killed someone but what was he to do about the kick that might have reached his face? Still he was nudged by guilt. It was the eighth deadly sin of violence, impossible to avoid when you’re attacked. He mentioned all of this to Lemuel.

“No, it was the sausage,” Lemuel said. “That sucker ate at least a pound for breakfast every day with a half dozen scrambled eggs. Sometimes he repeated it for lunch. Sometimes I’d cook for him because he simply couldn’t. He wanted short ribs and would eat all the fat first. I called the resident doctor who I play chess with to get his cholesterol checked for the sake of curiosity.”

Sunderson felt foolish coming home for no reason other than that the tavern incident the day before had been so unpleasant. He could have been killed by a kick in the face. Instead the other guy died forever. Violence was wretched indeed. He reflected that he had no theological authority to add it as the eighth deadly sin. Who did? Not even the pope.

He called Monica at work thinking probably she wouldn’t know her uncle had died but Lemuel had already called her. Sunderson had an extra drink feeling a little morose. He went out in the backyard to try and shake his cast of thought and there was Delphine on her knees in a flower bed, her ass in blue shorts bobbing in the air like a house cat’s. He guessed her to be in her early forties, more his proper age range. He sat in the lawn chair to watch her. Monica had told him that there was a small chicken pot pie in the freezer he should put on thaw cycle then bake for half an hour at 350 degrees. He loved chicken pot pies as much as women in blue shorts. Marion came quietly up behind him and startled him.

“Haven’t seen you in quite a while. I stopped at the hotel for a fish sandwich and Monica said you came home.”

Sunderson gave him a litany of poor fishing, violence, and death.

“You better get out of there before you get your ass handed to you on a plate,” Marion said, following the line of his vision to the gardener. “Pretty good porn movie. Did you know you’re fifty years older than Monica?”

“I’ve been thinking of that as we speak. Something has to be done.”

“Get her a nice room or small apartment. Stop fucking her. Wean her from your company. Tell her to find a boyfriend not on the lip of an old folks’ home.”

“What if I’m in love with her?” This sorrow was quite sudden. Sunderson felt woebegone.

“You were also in love with your current stepdaughter. You keep on like this and you’ll end up in jail or on one of those registries. Pick on someone your own size.” Marion pointed at the neighbor wagging her tail.

“Monica takes care of me. I can’t quite do the job.” Now Sunderson was a little plaintive. He had never told Marion about his time with Mona in Paris.

“You’re being a fucking brat. If it was someone you knew with such a girl you’d be horrified.”

This was definitely true, even if it wasn’t technically illegal. Many rural girls got married by sixteen or earlier, but to people their own age. He admitted to himself that any other retired man living with a nineteen-year-old would have horrified him. What’s love got to do with it? In terms of the shadier side of life Monica had seen it all. Once more love in America disgusted him. What could it possibly mean? Monica playfully nude on her hands and knees was irresistible. But so was peeking at Mona through the window nudely doing her yoga. Look where that got him. Diane had been a paradise of guiltless affection. The best that marriage offers. Until it ended, a personal Nagasaki for him.

He and Marion went in the house when the neighbor finished her gardening. The movie over, Marion talked about the burdensomeness of sexual attraction. He was faithful to his wife because the alternative made him feel weary. There was a third grade teacher at his school who had attracted his full attention. She wasn’t any great beauty but was quietly attractive and supple. Sunderson hadn’t thought of it before but to Marion the sky to eroticism was intelligence. That was true of Diane, he thought, but didn’t figure in his lust for Monica who was smart enough but was basically unlearned except for her rich knowledge about Mexico. She had been grumpy lately because the head chef at work kept hitting on her. Sunderson wondered if she wasn’t telling him because she actually was interested, and said, “Don’t let me stop you.” It might have been an errant moment but he meant it. It would be good if she got out and around. At her current rate she said she would have saved enough by fall to move to New York City. She had read enough to know she would have to settle for a simple room. An apartment might be forever beyond her reach, especially in Manhattan. Sonia’s apartment sitting there on Washington Square would make her envious, but it would make nearly anyone envious. Sunderson had guessed the property was owned by the FBI in its impulse to “gather facts” about each and all, including Marilyn Monroe and Martin Luther King. Reading a book about either the CIA or FBI was disturbing.

Sunderson had the breath knocked out of him when he stepped into Diane’s old room, now Monica’s, and saw a pamphlet sticking out of her suitcase. With his obsessive curiosity about the printed word he had to check it out. It was called
A Handbook of Poisons
. He reassured himself that she was just reading up on the subject, though his detective’s mind protested weakly. Lemuel’s name was on the cover as if it belonged to him. Was it a conspiracy? He knew her incapable of it.

He slipped the pamphlet back in her luggage and grabbed an art book that Diane had temporarily left behind, one of hundreds in fact, which he loved to flip through. Art was a mystery to him. He knew very little about it. He particularly liked Caravaggio, Goya, and Gauguin. He had never thought about why until now. Maybe Caravaggio for the primacy of colors, Goya for the width and depth of his work, and Gauguin partly for the romantic idea that he ran away to the South Seas. Diane had gone to Chicago for a big Gauguin show but he was too embarrassed to accompany her. Why all that money when he had a book of Gauguin on his lap? In short he was a stupid prick. There was also the slight fear of being overcome since sometimes when he gazed at the Gauguin book a long time in the evening he would get a lump in his throat as if he couldn’t quite handle the work. It was too powerful. He got the same lump for difficult reasons looking at Goya’s
Horrors of War
and its eighth sin of violence but then the pope had killed a boatload of Jews by not interceding so they could land in Italy. Gauguin was a great puzzle, beauty that produced a kind of terror. He threatened my life, Sunderson thought.

His thoughts were disturbed by two calls in rapid succession. Lemuel reported that John’s cholesterol was in the four hundreds, the highest the doctor had ever seen, doubtless due to a lifetime of excessive sausage. And then Smolens called to say the bullet in the game warden’s head had come from Sprague’s pistol. Murder solved. There was however an additional nonfatal .32 in the game warden’s back, perhaps a coup de grâce when he was prone. Who did Sprague usually hunt with? Sunderson knew the answer. It was always Bert. Together they were widely known as the champion violators—Mona’s long rap sheet was covered with their names. They would drive the swamp toward each other and Monica said that one day they shot six deer. But Sunderson had a dilemma: how to test Bert’s .32 for the ballistics to the other bullet? Sunderson could readily imagine Bert shooting the game warden on the ground. He knew that Bert carried the pistol to the tavern and said so to Smolens. He had seen a sag in the coat and one day got a glimpse of the grip. He suggested that Smolens have two of his biggest, strongest cops stop Bert’s pickup when he left the tavern and do a body check, confiscating the pistol as Bert certainly wouldn’t have a rare permit to carry. Smolens thanked him.

He went back to gazing at the Gauguin book while heating his chicken pot pie. The South Seas women and girls were slightly chunky for his taste but he couldn’t deny their allure. Maybe he should go there? He had thought frequently of buying a set of paints but was too timid. It was presumptuous. He had seen the wretched products of Sunday painters in Munising and Marquette. Like writing you have to give your life to it or stay away. He had told Lemuel that his chapter “Thoughts of a Writer” lacked any elements of a story, therefore must be left out of the crime novel. Everything must contribute to the story. “Read Elmore Leonard. He’s the best right now,” Sunderson advised. He felt dishonest suggesting Leonard to Lemuel as he could scarcely aspire to him. Perhaps Lemuel would realize this on his own, although he had told Sunderson he’d read “hundreds” of crime novels so the possibility was remote.

In his mind Sunderson could still hear John’s head cracking against the cement floor, in itself sounding fatal. But there were hours between that and the evening’s heart attack. He hadn’t been able to read crime novels when he was a practicing detective, but on retirement he looked into Diane’s strongest recommendations. First in line was Raymond Chandler who knocked him out of his chair. He also enjoyed Elmore Leonard and John D. MacDonald who were writers of a different sort, albeit wonderful. Chandler could make you want to take a shower and go see
The Sound of
Music
. He was so foreboding at times that you sharply drew in your breath. Leonard in Detroit, MacDonald in Florida, and Chandler in California all made him wish he had been a detective in a more interesting place than Marquette. There wasn’t a single unsolved murder during his career. And now the Ames family arose after his retirement.