The Big Seven (16 page)

Chapter 17

Monica naturally was in a dither having dreamed of Mexico so long and spent a restless evening packing and repacking. He had told her that experienced travelers travel light, besides he didn’t want to haul multiple bags around in the sure to be hot weather, or so Mona advised him after laughing that he hadn’t even checked the Internet for Mexican weather. He had booked the long way around so that after visiting his mother they would fly to Veracruz only because he had always liked the name and had read that Veracruz was the place where cattle were first unloaded in North America, an act of enormous consequences for the future. Sunderson was also enough of a romantic to appreciate that it was on the water.

Lemuel called very late to say that Bert’s house had burned to the ground. It was the house closest to Sunderson’s cabin. The bank authorities had been there all day to take possession of the house. Lemuel was sure that the burning was on Bert’s instructions, and he had doubtless moved his gunnysack of pistols and other arms including the illegal fully automatic M15 with a banana clip. Someone had left strategic pans of gasoline in each room and the big boxy wooden house burned into an inferno. Lemuel had read Bert’s mail for him before he was incarcerated and pointed out that an estate intended to repossess their property as assets that had been lost in Simon’s swindle. “If I can’t have it, burn it,” was Bert’s attitude. Lemuel had said that all of the land was also being seized except the plot his own house sat on. “That land is mine,” Bert said. “Not according to the judgment,” Lemuel responded.

In the morning Lemuel called again while Sunderson and Monica were having breakfast before the airport. He said the second house burned in the night from obvious arson. The estate was now furious as they had an investor on the string who wanted to form a trout fishing club using one of the houses as a lodge. This prospect frightened Sunderson for a moment as he had been around rich fishermen from the city several times. They tended to be piggish about what they thought were “their” stretches of river and also absurdly overequipped somewhat like golfers who bought the most expensive clubs thinking they were guaranteed success. Selfishly Sunderson was a little bit grateful to Bert.

When they boarded the plane Monica seemed frightened and he found out she had never flown on a jet before. Sunderson soothed her by assuring her that no one wanted to live more than the pilots which made them quite careful. She slept against his shoulder all the way to Chicago and then most of the way between Chicago and Tucson. When she finally awoke about a half hour from landing she said, “Jesus Christ, we’re up too high and we’re starting to fall.” “We’re getting ready to land,” he said.

When the cab took them to the Arizona Inn she was shy and remote but became wildly enthused about the green grass and profusion of flower beds. Sunderson was diverted when checking in by the idea that evil people don’t seem to mind doing evil to themselves. It must be a matter of pure anger, he thought, and damn the consequences. Bert must have known he’d get in serious trouble by standing behind the oak and firing away at Sunderson’s car. Still, he did it. Sunderson’s insurance wouldn’t pay for bullet holes which had set Sunderson back more than a thousand dollars so he had a small hopeless lien on Bert for the money. But Bert would be going directly to prison from the hospital where doctors were trying to mend his shattered hip from Sunderson’s passing pistol shot. Lucky he hadn’t missed or Bert would have had a shot at the vulnerable back window. Monica knew about the first house going up in flames but he hadn’t told her about the second. Spite figured large in all of it. Also a big shot detective in Detroit had once told him, “We catch most criminals because they’re stupid.” He reflected again about children growing up and the old cognitive problem. A lot of people don’t get it because they never learned better. Like his neighbors. He imagined growing up in that rabbit warren of fear and horror. “Your mom is tied to a stake out by the doghouse.” What did that do to the mind of a child?

He followed the bellhop out into the big flowered yard and didn’t see Monica at first, but there she was in the distance stooped by a large flower bed. When he reached her she practically began to babble saying she had tried to grow flowers “back home” but the dogs or the other kids destroyed the beds. In their room which she thought was “fancy” he called room service and they split a club sandwich with a Coca-Cola for her and red wine for him. He regretted telling Berenice that they would come straight from the airport just to get her off the phone when he wanted a snooze and to see Monica nude on the fancy sheets. He read the map while Monica drove them to the Tucson Heart Hospital. She stayed in the waiting room downstairs reading magazines while he went up to the room. Mother was on oxygen and had IV tubes coming out of her arm. Berenice said she couldn’t talk but could write notes on a tablet. Berenice looked old and gray and tired and for the first time it occurred to Sunderson that she was closer to seventy than sixty.

The first question after he kissed his mother’s forehead was that he had been seen at the Marquette airport by a friend of hers with a girl. Who was she? He reflected that this was the phone tom-tom again. He decided to blow the situation sky high and said that the girl was his pregnant girlfriend. It certainly worked. They were utterly dumbfounded. His mother quickly wrote a note, “I hope to live to see my first grandchild!” and Berenice kept shrieking, “You’re too old!” This dither lasted his entire visit with his mother outraged when she realized that Sunderson hadn’t married her yet. Still she was very happy because her most long-standing complaint was that she had no grandchildren and all her friends had many. Berenice had never told her that her husband was sterile because Mother would have said “Get rid of him.” “Who is going to carry on the Sunderson name?” she would ask, as if a Sunderson were like a Rockefeller or a Kennedy. His mother had looked into the genealogy of both sides of the family but quit when all she could find was “trash and scoundrels.” One grandfather was even half Indian which she rejected because she didn’t want to be part Indian like a great share of the people in the Upper Peninsula. Genealogy seemed to be popular among people making the largely vain effort to find someone noteworthy or noble in their pasts. Sunderson never cared. What was wrong, he had asked his mother, with loggers and commercial fishermen? Even if they ended up in prison for a fatal fight they were hardworking people. Sunderson had been addicted to history long enough to like being a peasant. All of the problems on earth were caused by men who wore suits.

Out in the car in a predictable cold sweat he didn’t remember ever so desperately needing a drink. His younger sister Roberta was coming into town in an hour or so but she was always soothing and had been so since childhood. Unlike Mother and Berenice she had a soft voice and when he had his first hangovers in high school she pretended to be a nurse and would bring him aspirin or Alka-Seltzer which she preferred as it was more dramatic. Meanwhile work had never presented any difficulties that could compete with his mother and drawing a pistol never equaled the anxiety she could cause. Anyway, his mother demanded to meet “the pregnant girl” in the morning. He said it would have to be early as they were flying to Mexico in the early afternoon on a kind of honeymoon. His mother took umbrage at that saying, “Honeymoons are for married people.” And then, “Can’t you do anything normal?” She had liked Diane a great deal despite her childless condition but had thought that Diane was too refined for her son whom she ultimately thought to be a lout.

As he drove to the hotel his mind drifted off to long ago when an old-time Detroit homicide detective addressed a room full of state police recruits of which he was a member. The geezer was impressive and slangy saying that the only safe place for any of them was a casket and that a bullet felt like a bad bee sting but you had to immediately check how much you were bleeding. It sounded grim and fearful and he was glad that he seemed destined for the Upper Peninsula or so he had been promised where he would carry his fishing equipment in his squad car. Of course at the cabin his immediate neighbors now competed with Detroit for horrors. Once he had read in the
Free Press
how police had raided a drug apartment and found eight heads and no bodies. It would have been easier to stomach the other way around.

There didn’t seem to be a firm theological basis for adding violence to the list of Seven Deadly Sins. All religions at times seem to officially revel in violence and the Middle East appears never to have recovered from the Crusades. The Borgia pope, Alexander VI, hadn’t evidently minded assassinating enemies. Al-Qaeda used belief to oil the skids of murder. A talented historian could total up comparative body counts for Muslims and Christians. You wondered how Muhammad and Jesus thought about the conflagration that was history. Certainly the Gospels didn’t defend violence and the pope himself had always been there to excuse Catholic behavior. The only resource one had was private beliefs that weren’t worth bringing up in public but how much does silence count for? He meant this coming winter to survey theological opinion on violence. It was so easy to become overwhelmingly discouraged when thinking about religion. When reading Elaine Pagels he had decided he would have been better off living in the time of the Apocryphal Gospels before the hammer of the Church came down.

He was a full hour into a delicious snooze when Roberta called from the desk. The afternoon heat had broken. Monica quickly covered her delightful nakedness and they had a drink with Bertie, as the family called her, on the patio attached to the room. Sunderson became instantly encouraged about life when he saw two quail and a little rabbit. If they could persist in the middle of Tucson life would go on, for a while at least.

A friend had told Bertie about a Spanish restaurant and they had a fine time, Sunderson drinking a gallon of fine Spanish wine. There was an extraordinary young guitarist that the owner had sent to their table and the Spanish music gave Sunderson shivers and Monica tears. Bertie said the music from Spain was called
flamenco
which Sunderson remembered slightly from college. He felt he should take some money left over from the blackmail and cabin and get himself to Spain before he dropped dead. He mentioned this to Bertie who suggested a week in Paris and another week or so in Seville and Barcelona. He was naturally worried about the expense but Bertie said both cities were less expensive than New York and Chicago.

He was at least momentarily enthused. The music had changed and the dance floor at the restaurant was crowded with people doing the samba, a difficult dance. A young man asked her to dance and Monica did very well. When she sat down again she said that she and Lily had spent thousands of hours back home in the evening practicing dance steps after which they would read good books until midnight. It was important to keep your life structured and active or the hellhole they lived in would drive you batty.

The wine woke Sunderson in the middle of the night. Despite being a retired man he had pretty much given up thinking about death. Death hadn’t seemed too bad when his father died in the hospital of heart failure and he had been there holding his hand, but when Sunderson had said, “He’s dead,” Berenice and his mother sitting there ruined it by starting up wailing. Death exhausts the options for an old fool, he thought. He had noticed the gradual thinning out around town and when he asked after someone he would get “Didn’t you know he died?” He never did because he avoided reading the obits in the Marquette paper. What he couldn’t bear was the bright smiling faces of people Monica’s age and younger who had died in traffic accidents. It was simply unacceptable. He often carried a speed gun in his car before he made detective and once on the Seney Stretch, a straight portion of road where people tended to speed dangerously, a car full of young people passed his anonymous sedan doing a flat hundred miles per hour. Rather than chase them he stopped next to their car at the Seney Bar and nailed them. The three young men were smart-asses and the three girls were drunk and began crying. The ticket cost them over three hundred bucks because he had added reckless driving. He couldn’t test them for alcohol because he didn’t carry a Breathalyzer, but he showed them photos of a 100 mph accident over near Iron Mountain including one of the four young people who died with a head torn off. One of the drunk young girls puked in her lap. Sunderson with his broad experience on drunk driving reflected that it was hard enough driving 50 mph while drunk and at 100 mph the margin of error didn’t exist. Suddenly you were airborne, then dead. He had checked their IDs and they were all below drinking age. He let them off with a warning and drove them all home, and then drove up to Grand Marais and took a walk on the beach to soothe his nerves and bought a big lake trout to fillet for dinner. When in doubt fry some fish, one of the few things his mother could cook well. Their freezer was always crammed with fish and venison both of which the family liked.

He remembered having dinner with Diane before her husband died, at a restaurant well out of town toward Munising so they wouldn’t have to meet and greet people. The table had a splendid view of Lake Superior on a blustery day, the waves huge and roiling, the kind of day his commercial fishing relatives used to die on. He sat there thinking what a relief it must have been to make it to the harbor on such a day, the relief of getting behind the long lee of Grand Island if the wind was westerly. He still had a secret dread of the lake deep in his system.

At dinner Diane was perky from a recent “lovely”
trip to New York City while Sunderson tried to hide his perpetual melancholy about their divorce. He’d heard the doctor she was married to had been born rich. They lived in a beautiful home on the high hill overlooking the harbor. The father and ancestors had been in the timber business which Sunderson felt was the equivalent of being in the slave trade in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. All timber had been razed to the ground for money except for a few pitifully small patches. Occasionally but rarely while fishing Sunderson would see an out of reach virgin white pine in a river gorge and the tree was breathtaking. And sometimes he would see a great log half buried in the sand where the water lacked enough volume to float it downstream to the mill. They were returning in size but then he had seen in old lumberjack photos puny men next to gloriously immense trees. It seemed to him that these immense trees were like the buffalo we wiped out in our western movement when we had killed some seventy million buffalo, many shot from passing trains for fun with the meat never collected. Sunderson had cooked buffalo tongue, a favored part, mail ordered from the O’Brien herd in South Dakota. It was utterly delicious, much better than the fatty beef tongue offered by supermarkets. He often reflected that people whether individually or in groups think they are smarter than they are. Why would a country decimate its best forests and kill all the buffalo? Because they are collectively dumb bastards, he thought. And so am I, he added.