The Big Seven (5 page)

Chapter 5

That spring Sunderson found himself an inexpensive cabin on a small lake two counties to the west in the area that the Great Leader, a cult leader that Sunderson had investigated, had had his headquarters and longhouse. Marion deeply disapproved saying the area had too much bad blood. Two game wardens had been killed there in the past twenty years, there were many marijuana plantations, and there were quarreling families, all marksmen who were given to shooting at each other, not to kill but the bullet landing close enough to be an effective warning. Marion even told him the middle school had had problems with sixth graders carrying pistols. There had been a nonfatal shoot-out in the school yard between children of opposing families. With all of the mass shootings in the news everyone thought the situation was bound to escalate but there wasn’t anything obvious to cure the situation. The reason the cabin was so cheap was that the owner from Iron Mountain was eager to get away from the unpleasant surroundings. Sunderson was not dissuaded because he wanted very much to fish the area and the price was right, about thirty thousand, which would leave him some to spare from the blackmail money, plus as a local he had always been able to get along with backcountry people. In all his years with the state police he had always been known as a peacemaker. The significant thing to Sunderson was that the bullets always missed because prison was dreaded, the loss of freedom the most fearsome thing in life.

Sunderson had decided to look for a cabin after a week when he had visited Mona in the hospital twice at her request, before she moved to drug rehab. This was nerve-racking to him but seemed not to bother her at all. She was looking much healthier than in France in her little white hospital nightie. She got out of bed for the toilet and purposely gave him a little flash of her bare ass which made him almost nauseous with desire. Diane remarked at a restaurant dinner that Mona would always use her sex as a weapon. Sunderson choked on his food and Diane laughed bitterly. It was time to get out of town.

So Sunderson bought the cabin and felt strong and independent. On his second day there when it was finally warm enough to go he was cleaning up, taking down some stupid beer company decals and joke posters of immense fish, when he noticed a pickup at the end of his drive and a tall man in his thirties standing beside it. There was a rifle in the back window gun rack, technically illegal in Michigan but not much enforced.

Sunderson walked out to greet the man, who was sullen and withdrawn, finally saying, “Wood, two cords, thirty bucks.” Sunderson asked him to unload the pickup near the front door but the man started to pitch the wood right where he was parked. Sunderson said nothing figuring the man might be deaf or retarded. Besides he was getting flabby after his injury and hauling the wood shouldn’t hurt his back. On the way back to the house he stopped when he thought he saw movement to the west of the far corner of the property. A hunter’s penchant is to look long. A deer or a human? He felt a shiver when he thought of the local tendency to shoot. Had he made another sloppy decision? He dropped the thought when he stared at the beauty of the cabin. He would play his cards close to the chest and mind his own business. He was here to fish and relax.

Inside he called the previous owner for the lowdown. The man was voluble about fishing then cooled down a bit on the problematical neighbors. “I didn’t sell because they spooked me. My daughters are living in Montana. My wife wanted to move there to be close to the grandchildren. My great-grandfather built the cabin in the 1890s. Later on members of the Ames family bought several miles of land between the cabin and the village. The family were distant relatives of the Ames who invented and manufactured the shovel in nearly every household. There were many problems including grazing their cows on State Forest land. They split the land into three sections with more than six hundred acres per family. The families never stopped quarreling and their behavior became more cantankerous. There was an early unexplained death, a dog was shot for tailing cows, tearing the tail off. They were all NRA marksmen and took to shooting at each other, not to kill but landing the bullets close, sort of a coup-counting shooting. Got you! Anyway you’re better off avoiding them totally, don’t even talk to them.” Sunderson mentioned the wood. “That’s Ike. He’s been brain damaged and was shell shocked in the Gulf, his legs severely burned. He’s a harmless sneak but he’s got good wood.” Sunderson agreed, relieved that he had made the call. “The main worry is that the families will get totally out of control. They’re near it. Avoid them.”

Sunderson was appalled but pleased to have made the call. He intended to also check it out with several policemen he had known in the area years ago. He could check the names with his old secretary in Marquette. Meanwhile he decided to drive into the village for a drink at the tavern he had seen there. In a nod to sobriety he hadn’t brought any liquor with him but now he felt his body needed a drink.

The day was too bright and clear for fishing until late in the afternoon. Meanwhile he’d spend his time getting the cabin in shape and heat up the pasty he had bought when leaving Marquette early that morning amid disturbing religious thoughts. Marion had been talking about the evolutionary nature of religion according to a social scientist that such items as the Ten Commandments and Seven Deadly Sins in the Judeo-Christian tradition had evolved to keep the human race in check, to ensure good behavior and prevent self-destruction. The Muslims had proscribed alcohol and pork which historically were a notorious cause of disease in hot climates. Politicians even learned from religions. For instance the Gin Tax in England was necessary because gin was too cheap and people were drinking too much to go to work. Raise the price and people drank less. Adultery is generally destructive in a society so forbid it. Anyone with a dull eye for the financial markets could see the horror of greed. Sunderson in a somewhat Marxian drift took the thinking into the economic arena: people must be good boys and girls for economic balance.

The three Ames places were virtual triplets about a mile from one another: two-story fair-sized farmhouses the color of weathered wood from lack of paint, ramshackle outbuildings and decrepit porches, the edges of the weedy yards covered with rusty farm machinery and autos. Country people keep old cars believing they’ll use them for spare parts though in fact that is a remote possibility. On the second of the three farms the main beam of the barn had collapsed sinking the roof. It wouldn’t last long. He understood that five brothers inhabited the three houses along with their families. The youngest brother was childless, but the other four had something like nine kids, some of whom had kids of their own.

The village wasn’t much: a small grocery that doubled as a post office, a rickety house, a couple of occupied trailers, a small closed elementary school. The tavern was a big well-built cement block building with burned timbers in the vacant lot from which Sunderson deduced that the previous tavern had burned. Such taverns are the social center of small communities with kids playing in the corner and told not to bother anyone, a small pool table, several pinball machines, and a jukebox. There were three pickups parked in front for those who needed a noon beer or two. Sunderson’s first irritating thought was he would have to ship food from home. As a detective he had been in dozens of such bars throughout the U.P. The info about the families came from a newspaper article he recalled that talked in terms of Hatfields and McCoys, though in this case it was Ames and Ames and a long history of mayhem over the years.

In the tavern half the stools at the bar were taken. Sunderson sat down nearest the door, a reasonable precaution if the cabin’s previous owner wasn’t exaggerating. The floor was filthy and there was a heavy fetor of sweat and manure. In short, a farmer bar. A young man a few seats down stared at him. “You buy the Sims place?” The young man turned out to be a girl in Carhartt farm clothing.

Sunderson merely nodded yes not wanting to start a conversation.

“You going to keep it posted?” she persisted.

“Haven’t made up my mind. I don’t like the signs.”

All of the men nodded in agreement. He guessed they were Ameses.

“A lot of deer on your south end,” she said.

“I hunt over east near Michagamee,” he said, not wanting them to picture him as a competitor.

“You can fish our water if we can hunt your land,” she said.

“I’ll think that over,” Sunderson hastily finished his shot and beer and left with a nod.

When he reached his car he felt he had done okay. Keep noncommittal he reminded himself. He had sensed a general hostility. If he had been in Alabama he would have run for it before getting shot, or so went the superstitions of those in the North about the Deep South. He had often wondered in his detective work if there was a genetic quality in psychopathology. Criminal behavior often ran in families and you came to the conclusion that it must be in the genes. You can’t separate nature from nurture but in this family it seemed obviously both. The shallow genetic pool must have worn out and there was a Brownian movement to berserk behavior. His police work had taught him that poverty was always of consequence but less so in areas where everyone seemed poor. In the area of his cabin there was no mining, just poor farmers on bad land and pulp cutters, loggers who cut small inferior trees for the paper mills. This was terribly hard work at poor pay and tended to produce bad tempers. These were strong men and their fights tended to be long and gruesome. Some he had been able to stop only by firing a pistol in the air.

Easter was late this year and he had dinner with Diane and Mona who was home from rehab. Easter had been his favorite holiday as a child. It was without the acquisition and confusion of Christmas in a relatively poor family. Rich kids in his class would get new bicycles or sleds or toboggans and he might receive only a pair of bedroom slippers. On Easter they had a big breakfast with caramel rolls his mother made that he loved. They would go to church, festive on Easter, and then have a big ham dinner which he also loved. At church they’d sing, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” which he believed. He still believed in the Resurrection but figured that was because he never got around to not believing in it. If there wasn’t too much spring snow they’d drive up to the cemetery as they did on Memorial Day. He would drift by the grave of the little girl from the hospital then find the graves of his grandpa and grandmother plus all of the many Sundersons who had died in Lake Superior in commercial fishing. The young are often ready-made martyrs. Death is a mystery not yet real and graves are perhaps temporary traps. It horrified young Sunderson to learn that the bodies of sailors most often didn’t float to the surface because Lake Superior water was so cold that the natural gases from decomposition didn’t form to cause them to float. The graves of many drowned commercial fishermen were in fact empty. They lay on the bottom of the deep lake forever. At the shipwreck museum near Whitefish Point he had seen a photo of a cook in the galley of a freighter that went down in the 1880s. A hundred years later a diver took the photo and the cook was still perfectly preserved except that his eyes were missing, likely eaten by minnows. The sea was cruel indeed.

During Easter dinner he had made the mistake of describing the Ames family to Diane who was horrified and became worried that Sunderson would get himself shot. He should have kept his mouth shut rather than giving Diane an additional worry. Her smile when she greeted him was tight and she talked to him without her usual warmth. She had talked to University of Michigan and they were willing to let Mona back into school for the spring and summer terms. Mona disliked the idea of missing summer in Marquette but agreed. Diane offered to fly her up for weekends, an expensive proposition, which led Sunderson to wonder just how much money Diane’s parents had left her. They had always kept separate books and his salary had covered their expenses and what she saved from salary and inheritance was intended for retirement. She had offered to pay for his cabin before she knew about Mona but he had said no. He had never told her about the blackmail cash which would only be another worry. He had never asked how much money she had and she never mentioned it. Inheritance had certainly never existed in his family and when his father died and his mother moved to Arizona even their house was considered fundamentally worthless. His sister Roberta had rented the house to some poor people who never paid the rent but she was too softhearted to evict them because the husband had Parkinson’s. Sunderson had been frugal since childhood. Thus his horror that a martini in New York could be up to twenty dollars when the same drink was three dollars or less in the U.P. Local bartenders told him not to order a martini which was more expensive than a double top shelf vodka on the rocks. Why pay an extra buck for the vermouth that they rarely had.

On the way home he drove slowly to study the landscape and three Ames cars passed him at blinding speed, speed being a habit of many backcountry people. He had been thinking of the long ride home from France. Mona was withdrawing from heroin and was intensely restless but luckily he had some strong narcotic pills, oxycodone, left over from his back pain, which calmed her. She slept six hours and then he gave her some more. He knew it wasn’t strictly legal but she was in such pain. She still delighted fuzzily in the fact that her ex-boyfriend had been arrested.

When he got back to the cabin he was startled that the roughly dressed girl from the bar was sitting at the kitchen table. She told him her name was Lily and explained she had a key because she had cleaned the cabin for the Sims family twice a week. He thought “why not?” and hired her on the spot since he was a slob. He took her phone number to tell her when he was coming so the cabin would be spick-and-span. She reminded him that cell phones didn’t work five miles south. He offered her a ride home but she took off by foot cross-country. He took a nap which was a bit eerie because of new surroundings, waking up unsure of where he was. He suited up for fishing, slowly trying to regain his balance. He tied on a clumsy muddler minnow fly and immediately caught a brown trout of about fourteen inches in a deep pool on the bend of the river. This thrilled him to an ineffable degree and his skin tingled. This was what it was all about, to own your own cabin and catch a nice fish practically in the front yard. He would tell Marion about it because there weren’t many brown trout near his cabin and Marion loved the speckled beauty of brown trout. He released the fish and heard Lily who had snuck up behind him say, “I would have eaten it for breakfast.” He said, “Be patient,” and quickly caught two brook trout of ten inches, fine eating size, went ashore and gave them to Lily to fry. Back in the cabin she looked nice with her coat off in a worn green blouse. Sunderson felt a slight pinch in his groin. He didn’t want to but her butt looked nice in Levi’s.