On the third day they picked up Lemuel’s ashes down in Escanaba and that evening they strewed the ashes in his favorite bird-watching areas. Lemuel had said concluding his suicide note, “It looks like I will go to prison forever. There are no birds there. I can’t live without my birds every morning.” Sunderson’s stomach with this note plummeted. Lemuel’s dependence on birds made no sense until it occurred to Sunderson that Lemuel was the much-abused runt of the litter and birds were likely his only true companions as a child. Curiously Lemuel was a murderer who meant well. It was sad that he couldn’t simply have a nice life but then like so many he allowed the idea of vengeance to overwhelm it.
Sunderson recognized that he was in very bad shape when Lemuel’s purple face immediately entered his dream life. Diane perceived how bad it was from his phone calls and drove out to the cabin, where he’d stayed after scattering the ashes. When she arrived he was weeping and couldn’t stop. Earlier he had tripped into a deep hole in the river with strong current and nearly drowned. He crawled along the bottom getting handholds on the rock with his breath nearly gone. His dying breath was water until he reached the riverbank and puked up a gallon of it. The bank was steep clay and he barely made it to the top flushing a family of Canada geese. He watched the little ones run away shielded by their mother. He realized his mind hadn’t cared if he died. Everything had been his body’s innate struggle for survival. The steep clay bank might as well have been Everest. He gouged handfuls of dirt on the way to the sought-after top. He told all of this to Diane who listened with a worried frown. They were sitting outside looking at the river, he with a drink and a box of Kleenex to subdue his weeping. She told him over and over that he was taking too much blame. He had the idea that if he had minded his own business and kept remote from the Ameses everyone would still be alive.
“But Lemuel was already writing his book with that ghastly last chapter,” she insisted.
He was buried in it: stealing Monica and then Sprague was shot. His cop’s mind couldn’t let anything go. You had to drive deeper and deeper into the wilderness until the road simply ended. You passed the corpses virtually without notice. Kate told everything and ended up with a bullet in her head. Perhaps Monica would be okay in the long run.
Over dinner Diane reminded him that his mother’s funeral was the next morning in Munising. In his state he’d forgotten. Monica said if he wanted to drive with Diane she could drive Sunderson’s car and drop it off at Diane’s house. She had an old boyfriend from her job who would drive her back home and to the Jeep she had inherited from Lemuel. Sunderson was amused that Monica had managed to have a boyfriend behind his back. The sheer guts and ingenuity of women amazed him.
“You said you didn’t care if you died in the river. Did you forget our lifelong affair and trip to Paris?”
“Only momentarily. You are keeping me alive.”
“Don’t say that.”
He tried to explain to her that in the months since he had the idea of writing about violence he had been wallowing in violent death. He had to wonder if his own snooping had urged Lemuel on in his dark project. He had been an interloper.
Chapter 26
At his mother’s funeral they sat in the family pew except for Berenice who chose to sit alone in the front row. Diane and Roberta held hands which he found charming. He hadn’t been in the church since his father’s funeral a decade ago when they all held hands and comforted Roberta who was particularly fragile. His skin prickled because he was in the exact place that he had heard his death sentence over fifty years before in the Seven Deadly Sins sermon. Luckily Diane was with him. She protected him from the fear that had constricted his heart way back then. He remembered dropping his pencil, a Dixon Ticonderoga no. 3, to look under the table for the telltale dark shadow at the top of his teacher’s thighs. Most often she somehow caught on and quickly crossed her legs and gave him a stony look. She knew her boys. And then he was left with a glance of thigh, not his visual ambition. There was a rather homely girl who would go out in the woodlot behind the school and raise her skirt. The price was a dime apiece for each of the boys who chose to join the expedition. If you didn’t have a dime you could hide behind a big fir tree and try to catch a glimpse. When he accidentally saw his sisters naked upstairs he felt nothing but this big-thighed girl in the woodlot set his stomach buzzing. In college in a philosophy class he thought about the mystery of sex way too much but then it wasn’t on the academic agenda. It was certainly more interesting than Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. But here he was with his ass on a pew brooding about that fatal sermon over fifty years later. He remembered his mother’s sternness with him when he first discovered sex, and again after his retirement party. Sin obviously had great energy and it was a surprise that it hadn’t killed him. It was all the trauma of fear he supposed. Maybe by trying to write about the eighth deadly sin he was trying to compensate for his failure at all the others. They, the preachers, talked about people going to hell for eternity but he wondered how hell can hurt if you don’t have a body?
He squeezed Diane’s free hand and she squeezed back which immediately changed the nature of his mind. Why the hell was he going to Spain tomorrow without her? But she had a houseguest, her stepdaughter from Aspen who smoked dope constantly in the backyard rose garden. Diane had used the term “exhausted” to describe her. When they were introduced the Aspenite stared at him with no effort to conceal her boredom over his existence. Diane had said that she hung out with movie stars but then Sunderson rarely went to a movie. He watched a few on television but the commercials derailed his interest. His favorite he had gone to once with Diane had been an actor named Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He loved the main character and had felt better for days afterward. The idea was that you could find personal freedom even when confined. Diane disagreed saying that he had missed the point that the ax always falls on free men. This distressed him so he stuck to his own interpretation. He would have voted for McMurphy for president, anything to escape the ghastly boredom and habitual lying of politicians. Any ex-cop could tell when he watched them on television that it was all lies. They all had an ex-con’s self-assurance.
He was all packed at home in a single modest suitcase with wheels. In truth it contained everything he owned that was wearable in public. He also had some emergency one hundred dollar bills and a couple of credit cards in a fat wallet zippered in his pocket to stop the many pickpockets he was sure littered the streets of Europe. As a matter of fact he was never approached on the street because he looked much rougher than he was. His head and shoulders were overlarge and his legs a little short. It was the build of a tugboat.
Sitting in the pew listening to the preacher spew inanities about his dead mother being “in a better place” his mind segued to the great mystery in his life, moving water. Lakes were okay but nothing compared to creeks and rivers. As a child he would drive his father quite batty asking him where the water came from when he was looking up a creek or the Laughing Whitefish River. Even now he never understood Faulkner’s line “A drowned man’s shadow was watching for him in the water all the time.” He liked reading Faulkner though he frequently hadn’t understood him. But what was the point, he thought, in reading Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” when he had fished that river himself dozens of times? He was overfamiliar with the material. He assented to the fact that the river must have been a thrill after having a hard time in World War I.
His thoughts were severely interrupted when the preacher said that his mother was kind or kindly, he wasn’t listening closely. This wasn’t really true. Especially after his father died who was the only one capable of moderating her behavior. They had always been Democrats but since she moved to Arizona she blamed everything on Mexicans. Up north she was sometimes the same toward American Indians. Mexicans frightened her like they did many older white people. Anyway, she decidedly wasn’t a nice person. She was a cranky old lady
who went out of her way to be difficult. He himself hoped not to become crankier than he already was. He remembered his mother cooking the endless Italian meals with lots of garlic that delighted him even though she didn’t really care for it. Maybe this was love too.
In view of his early departure he had a light goodbye supper with Diane at the hotel café. He doubted that he would have another fried whitefish sandwich until he got home. He told Diane that he would pick her up at de Gaulle when she arrived. She told him not to be stupid, that Paris morning traffic was horrendous. She would take a cab. Meanwhile their supper was uninspired, and he regretted not getting his favorite. He had found the funeral emotionally exhausting. After the service there had been the usual slovenly potluck lunch in the church basement. He hated these as a child because he wasn’t allowed near the dessert table until he’d eaten some of the casseroles, for instance, hamburger and noodles bound together by various canned soups. Afterward they waited for Berenice to finish talking to old friends then drove down to the dock for Grand Island and dumped Mother’s ashes in the water. It had been her decision because so many of her relatives who had been commercial fishermen had drowned in this water. She normally spoke of these men with contempt because they hadn’t saved their money and gone to college. Of course she hadn’t done either of those things either. She hadn’t been capable along with his father of coming to his graduation at Michigan State because the speaker was Richard Nixon. His father when he could find listeners loved to fulminate against Nixon who he thought was a crook. It was a big day for him when Nixon had to resign. He bought a whole case of cheap beer.
Diane and Sunderson went out to Presque Isle in Marquette Park and walked a couple of hours, an old habit for when they were having a marital argument. It always worked for lowering the cabin pressure as it were. It was such a lovely place with deep woods and stormy cliffs and quite full of bird life. He once dozed off out there and woke up with a deer staring into his face from a few feet away attracted by the sonority of his snores.
As they walked and chatted it occurred to him that she increased his love of life while he had decreased hers. Did he have no natural talent for marriage? Marriage required the etiquette of an hour-by-hour getting along, something that dawned on him too late. In short, real work. He dropped back to tie his shoe and watched how gracefully she walked. He wondered again why stumbling and grabbing her calf while struggling up the hill near the Ontonagon had caused instant sexual arousal.
He had to sit down on a park bench. His stomach churned and he felt a bit faint. It was a delayed reaction to the church and the memory of the nausea of fear after the Seven Deadly Sins sermon that was virtually shouted at him. For weeks he had expected to die at any moment for his sins. He didn’t of course, but the damage was done and he never again was able to think of Christianity as a peaceful religion, and he always felt like someone was watching him even though it’s ridiculous to think that God cares about our genitals. He thought God was probably habituated to saying “no thank you” to the millions of requests he gets every single day. Sunderson could imagine the prayers blubbering skyward, so few of them worthy. His biggest ally on earth, his father, had told him to take the sermon with a grain of salt, but it had already marked him. He could tell that his father disapproved of his choice of a career but never said so. His father was a redoubtable leftist and stood strongly against authority. He had been beaten by the police during a demonstration in Chicago in his youth. The much later misbehavior of the Chicago police during the Democratic convention was thoroughly foreseeable, according to his father.
Right now, there on their pleasant hike around Presque Isle, Sunderson was convinced that the early curiosity about evil that eventually led him to become a detective likely began with that execrable Seven Deadly Sins sermon. It depressed him that he could be so predictable. It had been a great mistake not to become a high school teacher as Diane had wanted. She was sure that his problems with alcohol began and ended with the relentless daily unpleasantness of his job. As usual she was right though she seemed not to comprehend the drop in income going from detective to neophyte teacher. She was simply trying to save their life together. But still, here they were on a nature walk together, even after the ineradicable mistake that had chopped their marriage in half.
He had simply been raised in a culture of hard drinking. As if he didn’t know, his sociology professor at Michigan State had given him a monograph on the Upper Peninsula being a hard-drinking place ever since it was populated mostly by miners and loggers. Sunderson’s father had been a light drinker simply because the family budget couldn’t handle it. For a brief period his father had been a local school board member, the only proletarian on the board, he claimed. At Christmastime a bus company had distributed gift baskets to board members that included several bottles of expensive whiskey. His father invited over several poor friends, retired injured railroaders and miners. The group of them sat at the kitchen table until they had drunk everything and were exhausted and drunk with that much alcohol. There were also fancy cheese and crackers in the basket but no one in the family liked them compared to the ordinary sharp cheddar made ninety miles southwest in Rapid City. In the following days his dad would say that he was glad they got rid of the liquor. Sunderson had never had his father’s ability to deny himself. Maybe he was a glutton after all.
Diane and Sunderson sat at the last bench on the point of the island staring out at the immensity of Lake Superior, the largest body of fresh water in the world. Michigan residents were sure that other states wanted to steal the water of the Great Lakes and were combatively protective.
Diane spoke briefly of Lemuel’s suicide and admitted that one day he had stopped by for a chat, something Sunderson didn’t know. It made him retrospectively angry. She said she hadn’t expected a serial murderer to be so charming. She thought that it was only fair that Lemuel commit suicide after he had shot Kate. Sunderson didn’t know what to say. What is fair in double deaths? But he knew what she meant. Lovely little Kate’s death needed to be answered and the answer in the cosmos is always no.
He held Diane’s hand. Hers was dry while his was sweaty. She seemed on the verge of saying something that could upset him.
“Marriage was lovely compared to the glories of courtship,” she sighed. “But remember that fine week after we bought the house?”
She was referring to the second year of their marriage when they moved out of a depressing apartment near downtown and into his present house which had been owned by an old alcoholic couple. Diane had researched them to satisfy her own curiosity. She couldn’t believe a drunk couple could live well into their seventies. Her parents had been steadfast members of AA. By her teens she often thought that their only accomplishment in life was to quit drinking. Her parents had visited the house when Sunderson and Diane were scrubbing, mopping, sanding, and painting. Sunderson came off his high horse and allowed them to pay for a new kitchen for the young couple. The kitchen had been so embedded with filth as to be hopeless anyway. The previous owners had taught literature at the university then retired and moved to Arizona. The rehabilitation had taken his entire vacation and Sunderson sorely missed his trout fishing. For a change he was truly his father’s son and often worked a dozen hours a day on the house. They were young enough to still make love a couple of times a day, once on the floor where they had rolled into still wet varnish. When they finished they camped the entirety of each weekend near a river so he could recapture some of his lost fishing. She spent her time applying insect repellent to her body, feeding their campfire and reading. They took at least two long walks every day which rejuvenated them. With these long days he slept harder than ever in his life. It didn’t matter if it rained because Diane had bought them a first-rate, expensive tent, the first in Sunderson’s life that didn’t leak. With his modest youthful savings he was always buying war surplus crap, thinking if it was good enough for soldiers it was good enough for him. He tho
ught of them in far off New Guinea encamped in this very equipment or in France breaking off the necks of bottles so they could drink the wine they found in bombarded French basements. Despite these romantic dreams everything he bought either leaked or malfunctioned and the store wouldn’t take anything back. This was what Diane called a false economy. A canteen smelled like a skunk had pissed in it though years later he realized a soldier had put tequila in the canteen. So if it rained they were quite happy in their big waterproof tent. He brought in wood and stored it inside the front of the tent so they would have dry firewood after the rain stopped.
They chatted for a long time out on the bench at the tip of Presque Isle. She urged him to continue his nonexistent writing in Europe. She wanted to see what he had done but he said it would intimidate him and temporarily ruin his productivity. She backed away and he felt a strong shame over his fibbing. They walked back to his house which was closer because she had said she could use some sex, a bold statement for her. They made love on the sofa. He went down on her because she used to love it. Her butt moved to the rhythm of his tongue. She made modest screeching noises with her eyes wide open as if she could see straight through the back of the sofa. When they were done she sat up and her face tightened.
“I hate this fucking house.” She had never used the F word to his knowledge. “Remember how we loved it when we spent three weeks fixing it up? It was downhill after that. I never told you the previous owners died in an auto accident in Arizona. They were drunk of course. Maybe their ghosts came back here. You would come home from work after a few drinks somewhere. You would wolf down your dinner, then flop on the sofa and, more horribly, I would take a walk to get away from you. You always treated alcohol as if it were your life’s performance-enhancing drug. I’d go on long walks in spring and summer way down to near the campus and watch the college boys practicing soccer. I had a crush on one and he finally figured it out. He came over to the sidelines to say hello and said that we ought to visit each other. I agreed that it would be nice but I told him I was a married woman with children and if any of them found out my life would be ruined. He smiled, gave me a hug and a kiss which impossibly turned me on. He went back to the game and I immediately started regretting it. I used to imagine I had children all the time. When Mona came along I was so happy. I’ll never really forgive you for what you did, but I had to try to forget it because I loved Mona and you, and you less so perhaps.”