The Great Leader

Chapter 6

He tried to run back toward the car while covering his face and squinting out between his fingers but two large rocks hit his fingers in succession, breaking one, and then one hit the back of his head, which felled him like the trees he used to cut, with blood immediately flowing down on his shirt collar. While falling he twisted to try to see his assailants but the blood from his hand smeared his vision. He tried to grab at the bush that had been full of birds but the branches were too brittle and slight to slow his fall and he hit the ground hard facedown, which fractured his nose and knocked out his wind. He scrambled toward his blurred car on his hands and knees with the copper smell of blood gushing from his nose. Rocks continued to thud painfully against his back and the backs of his legs and another large one to the back of his head made him collapse to his stomach again. He became fairly sure he was going to die but rose again crawling slowly toward the gate and through the bottom-most opening and then the rocks stopped coming. He heard a voice that he was sure was Dwight’s shouting, “Go away. Stay away.” He was on his knees beside the compact car and opened the door and felt on the floor for his water bottle, the contents of which he poured on his upturned face. He turned and with limited vision could see Dwight standing there between the canyon walls with a dozen or so young people none of whose height reached his shoulders. All of them were girls wearing skirts. They all turned and walked back toward the ranch.

Sunderson’s hands were too slippery with blood and water to hold the car keys but he managed to open his suitcase and dry his hands on a pair of boxer shorts. He was sure he had a concussion and wondered if he’d be able to drive. He made it the seven miles out to the main road and had barely pulled over when he passed out. He had noted that it was 10:30 a.m. on the car clock and when he awoke it was high noon with sleet beating against the windows and now the peaks of the Chiricahuas were almost invisible. He had the sense that the part of his brain toward the back of his head was short-circuited. It flashed and swirled and there were moments of intense pain. He took out his cell phone but there was no signal so he drove south twenty miles until he neared a dumpy ranching village named Elfrida where he pulled off the road’s shoulder and passed out again. He awoke in fifteen minutes and now his cell phone worked and he called his sister Berenice who was in a beauty parlor. You always had to say things twice to Berenice and it was hard to talk through two bloody tooth stumps and swollen lips. He said he had fallen on his face down a canyon and needed help ASAP. He said it twice and she said she’d come over with Bob who could drive Sunderson’s car. She and Bob had lived for years in Rio Rico, which was near Nogales, and she knew both a nurse and a doctor at the Nogales hospital. She said they’d reach him in two hours or less.

The lights in his brain began to dim again as he sat there with the sleet ticking off the windshield. He kept thinking, “I have no evidence,” but didn’t quite know what his brain meant by this sentence. He had never felt further away from his life as he had known it. He smelled the burned smell of the desert earth but that was the grit in his nose from pitching forward on his face. He figured his mind meant that there was no hard evidence for anything of value. He thought that this wouldn’t help anything and was close to mumbling his childhood prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” He couldn’t bring himself to pray but was surprised he remembered the words. He looked east at the foothills of the Chiricahuas which were disappearing with his vision. His brain could see a map in an historical text because it was just over the mountains to the east that Geronimo had surrendered in Skeleton Canyon. The Apaches were the hardest people imaginable but so were those who had stoned him.

A grizzled old man picking up roadside trash found him and was soon followed by a deputy. He was half awake when the trash man opened the compact door and yelled with breath worse than a skunk’s asshole, “You look like a horse throwed you off and lit on your goddamned face.” The deputy was remote and cool, apparently fresh on the job, trying to do it by the book but the book wasn’t handy so he seemed unsure and frightened by Sunderson’s appearance.

“I took a header down a steep canyon,” he hissed through his broken teeth and swollen lips. He offered his identification including his Michigan State Police badge. He was upset that it was 2:00 p.m. Where had he been?

“Sir, we have to get you to a hospital.”

At that moment Berenice and Bob showed up in their Escalade. Like her mother Berenice was a fair-sized and formidable woman. She took over.

Chapter 7

It was only in the evening of his fifth day at the Nogales hospital that Sunderson felt he had a real inkling of who he was though he was unsure it mattered. He had received a subdural hematoma from the large rock that had struck him in the back of the head, also a minimally depressed fracture that likely wouldn’t require surgery. The hardest symptoms of his post-concussive state were more vague: the anxiety and depression, the inability to concentrate, and the disequilibrium when he toddled out a back door to have a cigarette. Another smoker, a Mexican orderly, pointed to the south of the hospital and told Sunderson that he was real close to the border. This was the best part of his disaster so far as nearly all of the various employees of the hospital spoke Spanish with each other, which meant he didn’t have to struggle with comprehension, which was beyond him anyway. He also liked the pure music of the language. One of the only memories he could recapture was of his Mexican friend in Frankfurt saying “hola,” so Sunderson muttered “hola” to anyone who entered his hospital room. A slight problem was that neither the ER doctor nor the regular doctor Berenice had secured him believed that his injuries came from a fall. They didn’t say why and Sunderson didn’t really give a shit. What could they do, throw more rocks at him? When an attendant, a roly-poly female, had helped him take a shower she kept whispering “muy malo” as he looked at himself in a full-length mirror and discovered that his predominant body color was blue.

Another slight problem was the visit of a plainclothes officer on the third day. There was buzzing in Sunderson’s ear so he hadn’t heard the details when the man introduced himself. The man was short and squat, of Mexican descent, and looked powerful and feral like some of those Detroit detectives who daily brushed against death. The man asked to see his ID, which Sunderson said was locked in the drawer of the nightstand beside his bed. When Sunderson struggled with the key the man said “never mind” and that he had read the report filed by the Cochise County deputy.

“What are you doing here?”

“Visiting my mom in Green Valley.”

“What were you doing near Elfrida? No one goes to Elfrida except for a purpose.”

“I was looking the country over. I like history. I wanted to see where Geronimo surrendered.”

“Oh bullshit. The Michigan State Police said that you retired last week. A lot of people who retire from our line of work have someone they want to get even with. That’s not you?”

“No.”

“Nothing to do with the drug or illegal migrant problems?”

“No.”

“The doctor said you didn’t fall down a canyon. Your palms are fine. If you had fallen they would have been torn up trying to stop your fall.”

“Who gives a shit?” Sunderson watched a fine-looking vulture fly by the window.

“I do. You’re in my homeland. It’s easy for me to run you out of here.”

“I’m looking into a religious cult. A friend’s daughter lost some money to them.”

“Oh fuck me!” The man laughed explosively. “Those daffy fucks are all over Arizona. They’ve probably blown the money on vegetables.”

“I suppose so.” Sunderson was relieved at the man’s reaction.

“Well, take care,” the man said getting up to leave. “It’s obvious your cult doesn’t have a sense of humor. If you shoot anyone you won’t be treated like an officer. Even the cults down here are armed to the teeth. At least most of them don’t do drugs. I guess religion is their drug, you know, the Marxian opiate of the people.”

When he left Sunderson regretted having to explain himself even minimally but then it was a courtesy between detectives. He already felt he was too old to play for keeps and would likely back away from the Great Leader.

His biggest problem was Berenice who visited twice a day. When he told her every other day was enough she began to cry. Bob was loitering out in the hall and Sunderson added that she shouldn’t bring her asshole husband. “Everything gives me a headache in my condition.”

“I’m so sorry about you and now we think Mom had a little stroke. She’s slurring her words.”

“She’s eighty-five and she drinks too much.”

“That doesn’t make it easier.”

He dictated an e-mail to Mona saying, “I’ve been injured. I’ll be okay. I’ll be in touch in a few days. Don’t send anything to Berenice.” He didn’t want Berenice to read anything Mona might send. When he got out he’d find a Kinko’s store for that.

Chapter 8

In seven days and seven nights in the hospital he certainly hadn’t re-created himself. Most of all he felt his age, a sensation that had previously been creeping up on him but had now fallen from the heavens like the “ton of bricks” people used to talk about. He had been warned by the doctor of certain post-concussive symptoms but had only caught the words “depression” and “forgetfulness.” He had been concentrating on a nurse’s aide who had just taken his temperature and blood pressure prefatory to his checking out. Her name was Melissa and he had looked forward to her visits several times a day. When she hadn’t appeared the day before he had been a little teary because she was definitely his only viable contact with life. She spoke English with a heavy accent and had showed him a photo of her three-year-old daughter who wore tiny earrings, evidently a local custom or so he thought. All the staff knew he was a detective and she told him that her husband had been a narcotico who had been murdered the year before. Each day when she would leave the room he was immediately despondent. He was too timid to ask her for her last name or phone number. She was friendly but he doubted she would want anything to do with a black-and-blue geezer. They had mostly talked about fishing and eating fish. Her father had been a schoolteacher in Hermosillo and had taken she and her brother fishing near Guaymas a number of times. She said she would like to cook him some sea bass with lime, oil, and garlic but now here he was discharged with no way to get in touch with her. What had happened to the easy resourcefulness that had informed his career as a detective? There didn’t seem to be an ounce of detective left in him. With great physical or mental suffering or both simultaneously in his case comes humility, and not virtuous humility but that of a dog who, hit by a car, drags itself off the road into a ditch trying to be out of more harm’s way.

Berenice had found him a small garage apartment on the northeast side of Nogales just off the road to Patagonia for his further rehabilitation. The house was owned by an elderly couple from Minnesota whom he readily expected to bother him but they turned out to be bird-watchers and nature photographers and were gone from dawn to dark except on Sundays. His little apartment’s walls were covered with too many of their photos so that the total effect was a bit lurid and capped off with a photo of a large wild rattlesnake with an acorn woodpecker in its mouth, the bird staring at the camera as if to ask for an explanation, an easy metaphor for his own situation, or so Sunderson thought. Not very deep in his mind he knew he had no clear objective except that he couldn’t simply cut and run. There was the prominent mystery of what retired people were supposed to do all day. Read and drink? Join AA? Learn to cook? Divorce had brought about the absence of Diane’s good cooking which he sorely missed. He had thought about taking cooking lessons but then both Marion and Mona were good cooks and had offered to help him learn. Meanwhile he felt he should at least stay in Arizona for Thanksgiving with his mother and until his bruised mind cleared. In the miniscule part of his head he referred to as his snake brain there was a fantasy of shooting Dwight in the head from five hundred yards with a Sako target rifle. He had it coming.

Berenice took him to the dentist to have his two tooth stumps removed and in the pain-free immediate aftermath he listened to his cell phone messages. Lucy called, weeping of course and fairly drunk saying that she missed his company, which seemed unlikely. His ex-wife Diane had left a message saying that she and her ill husband were moving back to Marquette. He had a life expectancy short of a year and wanted to be in his hometown where he could be treated by doctors he knew and trusted. Marion asked if he wanted books sent from the stack of new ones and to please call. Mona’s message was garbled saying that she had had a “disaster” and had sent an explanation via Kinko’s with a lot of cult material. She had also prayed to Odin for his recovery. This latter fact had him stumped but then he recalled she had a lot of little statues of deities on her bedroom dresser. Many were Far Eastern and he wondered about the attraction of India and Tibet for the young.

Berenice was out in his yard looking at plants so he asked her to fetch Mona’s material without snooping. Naturally tears formed and her face reddened with anger but it was all for show between a brother and sister who in their childhood had readily gotten in each other’s stuff. There were three bedrooms in the second story of the house with his parents up front, then Berenice and Roberta, and then he and little Bobby in the back. Berenice and Roberta had a skeleton key and kept their door locked but Bobby had found a key in their dad’s desk that worked, thus by reading Berenice’s diary they had discovered she had lost her cherry the night that, as a junior, she had been crowned homecoming queen. Sunderson had been a sophomore at the time and Bobby five years younger in the fifth grade. He had questioned, “What’s a cherry,” but Sunderson couldn’t bring himself to answer. The kids had come along in two tiers with Roberta then a year later Bobby coming along after Dad left pulp cutting and driving a log skidder for the comparative prosperity of a job at the mill. When Sunderson had teased Berenice about her lost cherry she had countered by stealing his packet of stolen Trojan condoms and putting them on their mother’s plate at Sunday breakfast and an insufferable scene had followed.

Sunderson thought about his family while waiting for Berenice. A lump arose in his throat with the image of Roberta pulling Bobby up the steep hill in her red wagon in the time between when he lost his leg and when his prosthesis could be fitted.

Sunderson was sitting in a lawn chair and feigned sleep when Berenice returned with the manila envelope. He was relieved when she drove away. The packet remained unopened for five days because of a double obsession, the first one being why he should stay so far from his native ground and in a state of severe physical and mental wreckage. He didn’t have an answer least of all revenge, which was far too large and fancy a word. In the Upper Peninsula people only said “getting even.” The other obsession was Melissa but then he couldn’t proceed beyond her physical image and the slight lisp in her voice. She was only minimally attractive, handsome maybe, a little full-figured like so many of the local Chicano women. He tried to imagine being a father to her daughter but failed. Back at the office Roxie had told him that he should get married again in order to pass on his retirement benefits when he died. That was U.P. thinking. It was not a prosperous area and perhaps half the population had no health insurance. A fishing acquaintance with Lou Gehrig’s disease had shot himself to save money for his wife.

Sunderson was growing a beard to hide the face he no longer understood with its yellowish-blue chin bruises. On the fifth morning of Mona’s unopened package he had hung a hand towel over the bathroom cabinet mirror so he wouldn’t see himself. He took his coffee out to the lawn chair in the yard surprised to find that his landlord was out weeding flowers rather than being on a nature expedition. The man explained that his wife was ill from her chemo, which she had to take for the cancer, as he called it, rather than for simply cancer, a usage Sunderson had noted in the upper Midwest as if cancer were a singular scourge and monster rather than its own multifoliate cellular nightmare.

“Despite what someone did to you, you should walk every day or you’ll turn to shit,” Alfred said.

“That’s probably true.” Sunderson was mildly pleased that he didn’t feel pissed off as he usually did with advice of a personal nature.

“Out here we live up in the sky compared to the Midwest. You have to work to get your lungs acclimated. If you’re in the backcountry you might think of carrying a pistol.”

Sunderson nodded in agreement and Alfred walked away. If you have to carry a pistol for nearly forty years you’re not enthused about continuing to do so. Maybe Marion could send his pistol with the books but it could be illegal. He couldn’t remember. Sunderson had never been interested in gun control except to favor the banning of automatic weapons and having the conviction that the United States would be better off if like Canada we banned handguns. Ultimately he didn’t give a shit though it was likely if he had fired a warning shot they would have stopped throwing rocks. Again he thought that there was no real conclusive evidence for much of anything.

Except hunger. He was wobbly from lack of food and went inside to heat up some lentil soup Berenice had made him. He put it on the stove and then sat down at the kitchenette table and finally opened Mona’s material. On top of the stack was a brief e-mail from Lucy whom he had given Mona’s e-mail to keep in touch. “Your idea was to try to screw me and forget me. You’re a bad person. Love, Lucy.” This message confused him because the severity of his concussion had caused memory lapses the doctor said would probably be temporary. Mona’s letter about her “disaster,” however, fully penetrated his bruised brain. Mona had fallen in love with a brother and sister, and her mother had made a surprise visit back home and caught the three of them making out in bed together. She had beat on them with a broom. The upshot was that her mother insisted she have counseling for her perversion. Sunderson made an effort to be shocked but instead was stimulated for the first time in two weeks. He hadn’t dared think sexually about Melissa in an attempt to stay high-minded to withstand the disappointment if she turned him down for a date.

He sipped at Berenice’s soup, which was without seasoning, while leafing through a pile of cult material that Mona had found on the Internet. It was bizarre indeed but didn’t quite catch his interest. He impulsively called a friendly hospital orderly named Giacomo, not a Mexican name but when the orderly was babbling in the hospital room he had said that he was named after a Tucson landlord who had been kind to his parents when they came north in the 1980s. Giacomo said that he didn’t have Melissa’s cell phone or land line numbers, the latter unlisted because Melissa’s brother was a big-time narcotico in one of the warring cartels and gossip had it that her brother killed her husband because of a deal gone wrong. She and her daughter were always in jeopardy of being kidnapped and the name Melissa was an alias and he had no idea what her real name was. She hadn’t appeared for work today.

Sitting there with his tasteless soup Sunderson felt his confused mind becoming more liquid. The image of Mona in bed with a brother and sister floated toward Melissa and her baby daughter overlooked by Daryl, which Mona wrote was Dwight’s new alias.

There was a knock at the door. It was Alfred who handed Sunderson a map saying that he had marked some places in the area for their interesting walks. Alfred then invited Sunderson to join him and his wife for dinner at their favorite Mexican restaurant. Sunderson wanted to refuse but could think of no reason to do so and accepted. After Alfred left he noted that when he pulled up his trousers the waist had become loose. He had probably lost a dozen pounds in the nearly two weeks since the stoning though part of that was because he had forgotten in his dream confusion to drink any alcohol after never missing a day since he entered college. He called Marion knowing that it was lunch hour at the school.

“I haven’t had a drink in twelve days.”

“Oh bullshit,” Marion laughed.

“Truly. I actually forgot in what they call my post-concussive state.”

“I take it you’ll miss deer cabin this year?” The two of them never really hunted unless a deer approached an illegal salt block in Marion’s cabin clearing.

“I can’t cut and run after getting the shit kicked out of me which is a euphemism.”

“If you shoot Dwight you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison. I heard the food is bad.”

“His name is Daryl now.”

“I know. I had dinner with Mona. She’s having problems with her mother.”

“That’s what she told me. Do you figure she’s a lesbian?” Sunderson had brooded about the question for some time.

“Maybe. Who knows what you are at sixteen? At that age my music teacher was blowing me and I turned out hetero.” Marion laughed hard. “He was real good at it.”

“You’re a man of wide experience. I was thinking you could send me some books. There are twenty-nine I haven’t read on the coffee table. Send seven at random. Seven is my lucky number.”

Sunderson hung up after they talked about the ramifications of Diane moving back to town. There were none except that it would be painful to run across her. He was wobbly when he got up from the table and sat down and finished the lukewarm soup, like it or not. What he really wanted was a nap but it was only a little after midmorning. A walk was in order. He spread out Alfred’s map and felt good when he found his own location. There was a town called Patagonia about fifteen miles down the road, the name of which jogged his memory. The thirty-year Cochise Wars had their inception about three miles southwest of town. A low-rent rancher had claimed that the Apaches had kidnapped his child, which proved to be untrue but the war continued. It was akin to Bush thinking that the Iraq war was God’s will. The utter irrationality of the human species continued to leak into Sunderson’s wounded brain as he drove toward the mountain community of Patagonia.

His walk went poorly. He found a place Alfred had marked, the small road up Red Mountain, but the relatively tame incline was too much for him. He turned away, went through a cattle gate, and walked about four hundred yards, preoccupied with his thoughts, until he was on the verge of stepping into a hole covered sparsely with brush. The hole was a pipe about three feet in diameter and led straight down into the center of the earth or so he thought. As a citizen of the Upper Peninsula he was accustomed to the trashed landscape left behind a century ago by mining companies. It was a fine place to dump the body of Dwight-Daryl if it ever came to that. This thought shocked him into a sweat and when he turned back toward his car he realized that he had failed to acknowledge the depth of his anger over being nearly stoned to death.

He stopped in Patagonia and ate a big bowl of menudo, the tripe stew that Melissa had told him to eat daily to regain his strength. How could he do otherwise? He wasn’t sure he liked the dish never having eaten tripe before, but that was beside the point. The big though lovely waitress told him the bone in the stew was a calf’s foot for extra flavor. He mulled over the idea that he was attracted to Mexican women because of his inexperience with them. You would see a few now and then in Marquette, especially students at Northern Michigan University, but he had never actually known any. A Marquette bartender who had been to Mexico said that the women down there would fuck you until your ears flew off but bartenders were notoriously short on credibility. The base of male fantasy life was silly indeed he thought with the image of ears flying through the air like sparrows.

Out on the street he decided he liked this village. He rechecked Alfred’s map and decided to take a back way, first stopping at a tavern called the Wagon Wheel Saloon. It seemed important not to delay his reintroduction to alcohol. There was an older man behind the bar, likely the owner, who seemed to immediately make him as a cop, a beat-up one at that. Sunderson downed his double shot of Canadian whiskey and took his beer out to the backyard smoking area. Arizona had been unable to slow down any of its public bad behavior except smoking according to Berenice who had told him not to smoke in her house. He had gone outside and his mother had bummed one. It was wonderful watching an eighty-five-year-old woman smoke a cigarette. His mother had been quitting all of her life and Berenice had said that Mom was down to a few a week.

There was a table full of construction workers, gringo and Mexican, drinking their lunch, who fell silent when Sunderson came into the yard. Was he that obvious in his ratty khaki sport coat that Diane had bought him from Orvis and he had worn until it was only a single step up from a rag? Fuck ’em he thought, taking the plastic table farthest away from them in the yard. He was busy brooding about the realities of Mexican women. He had noticed that right down to his young neighbor Mona that females had a sense of reality that no matter how widely varied was at odds with his own. Diane had bought the Sunday New York Times at the newsstand where it arrived on Monday. She also subscribed to the New Yorker and neither of these publications held any interest for him, lacking as they did the solidarity of books. The last thing he wanted in life was to be current. Despite Diane’s urging he had never gone to New York City and she settled for traveling there with friends every couple of years. He could be such a stodgy prick that it amazed him. No wonder Diane had flown the coop.

The double shot of whiskey and single bottle of Mexican beer were more than enough and he walked a bit dizzily out of the Wagon Wheel. He took a back gravel road marked on Alfred’s map past a mile-long Nature Conservancy property, slowing to watch a balding young man get on a tractor, put on a slouch cowboy hat, and begin mowing a big field of weeds. Sunderson continued on enchanted by the road. There were fairly dense woods surrounding a creek on the left, and on the right a series of small canyons leading to the mountains. He loved gravel roads, which were a trademark of his youth when there were far more of them. Gravel roads were easier in the winter because of the traction offered through the snow. He turned left to get back to the highway but then stopped in a large pool of water when the road forded the creek, wondering if his compact rental could handle it. Off to the right less than fifty yards away a man was throwing food to a group of ravens from the patio of a small house mostly hidden in a thicket of bamboo and trees. Sunderson was instantly homesick because he and Marion would collect roadkill if it wasn’t too rank and hoist it up on a platform at the edge of the woods near Marion’s cabin. The ravens kept an eye out and would quickly appear.

“Just keep to the right and you can make it,” the man yelled.

“Thanks. What are you feeding them?”

“Tripe. They love it.”

“Just had some myself.” Sunderson waved and got back in the compact, fording the creek slowly so the water wouldn’t surge upward and drown his engine.

Back at the apartment he took a deeply wonderful hour’s nap truncated by a call from his mother who was very angry.

“That little bitch Berenice took my cigarettes,” his mother practically yelled, her voice a little slurred by her stroke. “She also took my goddamn car keys.” His mother only swore when she was very angry.

“Calm down. I’ll drop some off in the morning.” It was time to make a few notes in his journal.

There is the sudden troubling thought that my pursuit of Dwight-Daryl has a religious motive, however slight. I’d rather think that it’s strictly a law enforcement matter but that is no longer my job. I’m morally pissed off, which makes it quasi-religious. This is mildly embarrassing.

Post-concussive state causing some new memories as if clusters of neurons were reactivated. Mother was in hospital having just given birth to Bobby. Dad went with his friend Big Frank down to Trenary to pick up a sow’s head to make what they called souse or head cheese. I remember I was sitting in the backseat with Berenice in the old Dodge. It was a cold November day and they had just butchered at the farmer’s and I stomped on a frozen pool of pig blood until the ice broke. Back at Frank’s house they boiled up the huge sow’s head in a scalding pot over a fire. I remember I cried because I wasn’t strong enough to pick up the sow’s head at the farmer’s. They boiled it all afternoon then chopped it up and put it in the pan with liquid and next day it was like pig-meat Jell-O and tasted good.

Sunderson showered, heated coffee, and dressed in fresh clothes for his upcoming dinner with Alfred and his wife. He intended to drive to Tucson in the morning to try to buy a pistol and would drop off cigarettes for his mother. Why deny an eighty-five-year-old woman her pleasure? Everyone on the continent is pestering each other not to speak of the children and animals.

Were it not for the fact that he had looked into the bathroom’s full-length mirror the good feeling of his nap would have continued. Jesus. What did I do to be so black and blue? Got truly stoned. He certainly didn’t turn around for a back view to see more smears of dark blue and sickly yellow. To distract himself he leafed through Mona’s big packet on cults in the United States feeling a tremor of humility at the job of figuring out the mess. Mona had added another note he had missed on his first go-through of the material. She had communicated with a disaffected member of Daryl’s (the former Dwight) new Arizona commune called Yahweh Kwa. The woman loved “spiritual adventures” but felt that Daryl’s membership fee of twenty thousand bucks was too stiff. The money was for a huge kiva and the stone Basque-Apache sheepherder’s huts the members would live in. Only two hundred people would be allowed in this spiritual village. Construction had already started and the woman objected that all toilet and shower facilities were open-air as there was no shame in being a spiritual mammal. The woman objected to the idea of “pooping” in public and living in a tent until her stone hut was finished. She said that Arizona winter nights at five thousand feet could be below freezing despite the immense mesquite log fire the tents surrounded. The winter diet would be “natural Apache,” which meant sheep and cattle and the woman was a vegan, which would be the summer diet. Another objection was Daryl’s hundred levels of spiritual accomplishment. These hundred stages would remain in Daryl’s care and would be unwritten. Daryl had spent years at the library of the University of California in Berkeley researching the great third-world religions to come up with the hundred levels. Each week there would be a ritual dance around an immense fire and Daryl would present that week’s spiritual challenge. The Yahweh Kwa would be safe from government intervention because it was on the property of the illegal Gadsden Purchase, which Daryl was challenging in federal court.

It went on and on in this fantastic arena of cockamamie bullshit including the fact that over half the members were college graduates. Sunderson laughed aloud, his first full laugh in the two weeks since his “accident” forgetting for the moment just who had caused his nearly fatal injury. The Nogales doctor had been concerned with a specific heart fluttering called tachycardia which, after a few days, subsided on its own. The doctor had mentioned the possibility of a pacemaker, which even in his brutalized condition made him cringe further. It wasn’t something to worry about in retrospect, an ugly habit of his this worrying about events that had already been resolved. He missed the calming influence of his friend Marion and wondered for the thousandth time if he would be a calmer man if he didn’t drink so much, a habit that had increased in volume after Diane left. To even think about quitting made him feel that life was on the verge of cheating him.

He drew his chair up to a window that faced the southeast trying to dismiss the niggling idea that he should simply shoot Dwight-Daryl and then go back home. How tempting. His still very sore body had brought on a sense of his age like a thunderstorm. Dwight-Daryl reminded him of something he had heard about on NPR. Somewhere in South America there was a type of malevolent foot-long centipede that hung from the ceilings of bat caves and snagged innocent little bats for dinner.

Out the window a few miles to the southeast a small jet was landing at the Nogales International Airport. Why build the airport next to a mountain Sunderson wondered, but there was very little in the way of flatland in the area. Everywhere the substance of earth was rising up in the form of rocky hills and mountains, which gave Sunderson vertigo. Why did white people settle here? Why hadn’t it simply been left to the indigenous Apaches? It might have been easier to digest this landscape if every plant and bush and tree weren’t alien to him excepting the cottonwoods, which were obvious relatives of the popple in the U.P. Why were their so-called oaks a fake-looking green in November? He had touched a simple plant in the yard and the contact had drawn blood from a finger. Certainly he was ingenious enough as a detective of long experience to kill Dwight-Daryl and get back home scot-free. There was no hurry because it was nearly six months until the opening of brook trout season. He suddenly recalled one morning in the hospital when Melissa had pushed in a portable heart monitor on wheels. She had stooped to get something out of a cabinet and while dazed with Oxycontin he had received a clear view up her white nurse’s uniform to her pubis. She sensed his gaze, blushed, and swiveled her hips so he could no longer catch the view. Now at the window this memory made him tumescent, a clear rush of life. His mind segued helplessly to the image of a nude Mona through the peek hole in his library. His hard-on twinged with pain. He was homesick. He dialed the phone.

“Hello, you big old darling. I miss you.” She sounded high.

“I miss you, too. Are you high? It’s illegal,” he joked.

“Just an after-therapy toke. I’m told I may be bisexual.”

“I’d rather not think about it.” He was regretting the call.

“Don’t be squeamish. Genitalia are simply genitalia. It all starts in the mind.”

“Sorry. I lost my confidence when I left home.” He was surprised to admit this.

“I can’t imagine you without total confidence.”

“Well it’s true. My first trip to a foreign country has been a disaster. I mean it’s technically part of the United States but I don’t believe it. You wouldn’t want to look at me.”

“I know it. Marion said that he talked to your sister Berenice a couple of times and she said that every time she left your hospital room she sobbed.”

“Thanks for all that material you sent.” Sunderson was trying to get the subject away from himself.

“I’ve done some more poking around. Our Dwight-Daryl had an underage-sex charge in Choteau, Montana. I think he bought off the parents like big shots do. He made another mild threat to me so now I’m doing anything touchy through a cousin in Pittsburgh who’s an ace hacker.”

“That’s a good idea.” Sunderson had no real idea of the technology involved but other suspicions suddenly niggled at him. “Have you ever met anyone named Carla?” He wondered if Carla or Queenie were acting as Marquette spies for Dwight-Daryl.

“You mean Carla the dyke?” Mona laughed. “She made a pass at me at the tennis barn. She’s a buddy of my so-called therapist who says my root problem is my disappearing father.”

“Just avoid her at all costs.” There was a knock at the door. “Looks like I have to go to dinner. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Sunderson ate like a fool at a restaurant called Las Vigas in downtown Nogales. At first he thought the restaurant sign was misspelled but Alfred told him that vigas in Spanish meant beams as in roof beams. Alfred walked him through the menu and they both had chicherones, fried chunks of beef intestine, a side of guacamole, and then machaca, which was dry, fried jerked beef with chile and onions. Alfred’s wife Molly was just finishing her second session of chemo and had to limit herself to soup. Her wig kept slipping and she would merrily push it back into place. She spoke Spanish fluently with a waiter named Alphonse. They were telling jokes about the Border Patrol and a ton of cocaine found on a vegetable import truck the day before. When Molly translated for him Sunderson was boggled having never busted more than a kilo in his career and that was a cumulative amount.

“Someone is waving at you,” Alfred said, nudging him away from his food.

Sunderson looked up and about three tables away there was Melissa and her little daughter and a man. He felt his blood heating in his face and he swallowed a bite of machaca with difficulty. He got up slowly fearing the effects of a large margarita.

“It’s so good to see you,” Melissa said. “This is my brother Xavier and my daughter Josefina.”

Xavier stood and Sunderson shook his left hand because his right was withdrawn. Sunderson restrained his startled reaction to Xavier’s appearance. The man was dressed in a fine dark suit and red tie. His appearance was more than vaguely effeminate but his face had the pale specific edge of the ominous, the feral as if all of his schooling, his life in fact, had taken place at night.

“Are you liking our area?” Xavier asked with a cool smile.

“Yes, despite a certain unfriendliness.” Sunderson wondered why he was admitting this but then Xavier was obviously no man’s fool.

“Yes, Melissa said that you tripped on a vicious rock and fell off a fifty-thousand-foot cliff.” He winked and clunked his gloved right hand on the table. “I tripped once myself and lost a hand.” He laughed a metallic laugh. “Please sit down.”

“Accidents happen,” Sunderson said. Josefina was crawling on his lap and feeling the beginning of his beard with a smile the moment he was seated.

“She thinks all older men are nice grandfathers,” Melissa said.

“It is a rare pleasure to sit with a detective.” Xavier glanced toward the front door where two very large men were standing.

“I’m recently retired,” Sunderson said with a clench in his gut.

“Someone didn’t know you were retired,” Xavier said, standing and dropping a hundred-dollar bill on the table. He leaned and kissed both his sister and niece. “Be kind to my sister. She likes to fish and have picnics. Call if you need help.”

Sunderson watched as Xavier walked through the crowded restaurant with everyone averting their eyes including a big table of Border Patrol agents. Through the front window he saw Xavier and the two big men who had stood near the door get in the back of a black Suburban with tinted windows.

“He took a degree in the history of Spanish drama at the University of Arizona. Now he thinks of himself as a stockbroker.” Melissa sighed and held her daughter close. “Let’s go fishing on Patagonia Lake when you wish.” She handed Sunderson a card with her cell phone number, kissed his cheek, and left.

“I know her from the hospital. Isn’t she lovely,” Molly said when he returned to the table.

“You’re already in over your head,” Alfred said gruffly. “I’d expect a visitor.”

“I’m only an old man with a crush on a nurse,” Sunderson said grabbing the check and noting that now the waiter Alphonse wouldn’t look at him directly.

After saying good night to Alfred and Molly he wasn’t in a mood that included a semblance of equilibrium. Why did fate make him infatuated with a young woman who had a brother like Xavier? He got a pint of Canadian whiskey out of his suitcase in order to calm his nerves. The only time he had run into anyone similar to Xavier was in Detroit in the early seventies when as a rookie state policeman he had been ordered to keep an eye on a cabin on the Huron River near Ann Arbor. This was back when Detroit was a vibrant, angry town with high wages in the auto industry and a residual unrest from the violent riots of 1967. All Sunderson was supposed to do was park his squad car near the driveway of the cabin to make its inhabitant, a murder-for-hire assassin from Chicago, nervous enough to go home. Sunderson had been told the man had been seen talking to a primary figure of the Detroit mafia at a Grosse Pointe horse show of all places. He only saw the man once in two days and when he drove toward him in his rental car Sunderson felt a tremor of nausea simply looking at the man’s smiling face. As opposed to what is seen on television cops can become very frightened. In Detroit he had been out of his league like a cub scout with a pistol in drag.

The whiskey tasted very good and Sunderson was thinking that if the day was warm enough Melissa might wear a bathing suit when they went fishing. He very much needed a dose of life that didn’t scare him. He had a dimmish recollection of an evening years before when Diane had cooked Marion’s favorite pot roast dish and Marion had brought over an old movie that he said was America’s best, Touch of Evil by Orson Welles. Sunderson had his usual too many drinks but before he fell asleep on the sofa halfway through he thought the movie was the scariest he had ever seen. And now here he was in the center of the same sort of mise-en-scène, the same ambience of dread you couldn’t quite locate.

There was a sharp knock on the door and Sunderson wished he had the pistol he would buy the following day. It was the Arizona detective who had visited him in the hospital. This time he caught the man’s name, Roberto Kowalski.

“Kowalski?” Sunderson smiled.

“My mom married a soldier over in Sierra Vista. He was from up in your country. Flint, Michigan, to be exact. I been there. It sucks. I’m here to ask you what the fuck you were doing having dinner with Xavier Martinez.”

“I wasn’t. I stopped by to say hello to his sister. I developed a crush on her in the hospital.”

Roberto paused for a full minute. “I thought it had to be something else. No one is allowed to talk to Xavier. He beat her husband to death with his artificial hand. He’s got a couple of heavier ones than the plastic he wears in public.”

“It must have been about money,” Sunderson joked.

“Of course. If I were you I’d take my affections elsewhere. If she develops a hangnail in your presence you’re dead. She’s a nice kid and you’re a fucking geezer.”

“She’s twenty-five. She’s a woman. Maybe a little young. You ever attracted to younger women?” Sunderson felt irritable.

“Never mind. I’ve tried but they can’t talk. The words are the same but now they mean something different. Meanwhile I stopped at your commune. I saw a lot of blood on the rocks. Why didn’t you press charges?”

“The perps, the rock throwers, were kids, girls. Maybe around twelve years old plus or minus. Charges wouldn’t work.”

“Yeah. They’ve started a school for troubled girls. Real teachers, however Daryl had a charge for underage sex.”

“Yes, in Choteau, Montana. Settled out of court. How come a guy like Xavier can cross the border?”

“His parents are Mexican but Xavier was born in Tucson when his dad was in college so he’s an American citizen. He’s always clean here. He’s in the yellow pages as a stockbroker.”

“That’s funny in this economy,” Sunderson suggested.

“Nothing about him is funny. Ironical maybe. We got Melissa work papers so she wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire down south.”

“She’s safe here?” Sunderson was surprised.

“Pretty much so. It’s considered bad etiquette for cartels to kill anyone north of the border.”

“I’m thinking of going home. This place spooks me but then so did Detroit.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Maybe you could do me a favor and run Daryl out of here so he’ll go back north where I feel more comfortable.”

“Well, we’ve thought about pushing him out of Arizona. I know a local puta who’s nineteen but looks fourteen. The charge wouldn’t stick but we could scare him enough so he might run.”

Roberto stood up looking very tired. Sunderson offered him a drink and poured big.

“Delicious,” he said, downing it in two gulps. “I’ve lost two wives to this job.”

“I lost one. Every day you come home with shit on your shoes.” Sunderson paused trying to recapture his thoughts. “You know up in Marquette Daryl was named Dwight and was known as the Great Leader. What I’ve been thinking about is that it couldn’t simply be a con for money. He has to believe somewhat in what he’s doing.”

“Maybe every other day.” He pushed his glass across the table and Sunderson split the rest of the pint. Roberto’s face was slack with puzzlement. “I only talked to him for a few minutes but he reminded me of a schoolteacher, you know, the hottest teacher at a local school. His followers were staring at him as if he glowed.”

Sunderson was exhausted when Roberto left at midnight but was pleased at the ordinary aspects of the conversation. They were just a couple of law and order stiffs though Roberto had hunted for larger game in a far more violent area.

“I hope you feel better than you look,” Roberto had said when he left.

“I’ll get there,” Sunderson responded without conviction.

He fell asleep in his clothes on the sofa and awoke at nearly 3:00 a.m. thinking in his haze that he heard birds. The sound was coming from the area of the concussion in the back of his head. The birds continued when he turned on the lamp then slowly subsided. He considered this a message from a decade before when he had fished in the evening on the west branch of the Fox and when it became dark started a small fire, ate a sandwich Diane had made for him, and curled up in a sleeping bag in the open air after a single sip from his flask. It was near the summer solstice and he awoke a little after 4 a.m. to the first faint light that far north. There was a dense profusion of birdsong on the liquid dawn air and he had the illusion that he could understand what the birds were talking about in their songs. The lyrics were of ordinary content about food, home, trees, water, watching out for ravens and hawks. It didn’t seem extraordinary and the ability to understand the birds lasted right up until he stirred the coals and made his coffee. A day later when he told Marion after failing to figure it out Marion told him that he was lucky to have this religious experience.

Now in Nogales a decade later his homesickness was lessened by the fact that it was deer season in Michigan and a full five months from trout season. He got into bed naked and when he turned out the lights the birds resumed in the concussion sector of his head. He hoped he wouldn’t wake up as a baby. He certainly didn’t want to reenact his life. Where could such an idea come from? Anything that would purge the copness out of his brain would be welcome. There was a man at Northern Michigan University that taught a course in Middle Eastern history that would be good to audit, and another prof who taught human geography wherein one might learn why people lived in this particular hellhole of the world. Marion had said that he would qualify as a substitute teacher and it might be pleasant to correct widespread misapprehensions about American history. Anything to escape the copness that had driven his wife away.

Chapter 9

He awoke so cold that momentarily he couldn’t imagine being in Arizona but there through the window wide open to the north wind was Alfred and Molly’s cactus garden. The effort it took to close the window made him a little dizzy but his most negative thought was that if he went fishing with Melissa the next day she certainly wouldn’t be wearing a skimpy bathing suit. His bedroom couldn’t be more than fifty degrees and the blanket he was rolled up in was insufficient. He began to laugh, which was definitely not one of his morning habits. The fantasy of Melissa sitting in the backseat of the rowboat in a skimpy bathing suit in this weather pattern became comic, if a bit self-lacerating. There was a mere forty years’ age difference between them, the kind of thing that normally only worked if the man was wealthy. Why would a lovely Mexican girl have anything to do with a black-and-blue geezer whose bruises were turning yellow here and there?

Thinking about Roxie on his throbbing clothes dryer didn’t work. It was Carla against the woodpile at his retirement party that set him off. It was parodic like an old retired plumber he knew who bought a convertible and lime-green jump suit thinking that with these accoutrements he would become attractive to young women. That and five hundred bucks as a starter might get you a taste, Sunderson had advised. So what in God’s name am I doing chasing this girl he thought, making his coffee and taking a glug of cranberry juice that was supposed to help his gout and kidney stones. American boys have this absurd carryover when they get older, as exemplified by three old men he had overheard at the Ford garage waiting for their cars to be repaired told sex jokes as if they were still in the game. Or retirees watching porn films at their deer cabin when they couldn’t get it up for a waitress at gunpoint. It was likely that Carla had allowed him to back scuttle her because she was spying for Daryl-Dwight or perhaps she’d had a moment of sheer wantonness like many humans experience.

He cautioned himself against self-ridicule. It was part of the comedy of trying to maintain his Upper Peninsula sensibilities in this alien place that had him continually off-balance. Part of it might be the post-concussive instability the doctors had warned him about.

He leafed through the Tucson Yellow Pages that Alfred had loaned him, trying to match a gun store location with a city map. He felt untraveled because, simply enough, he was. He knew an approximately 300-by-100-mile area of the Upper Peninsula but nowhere else. The spring before he had picked up a prisoner in Grand Rapids and managed to get a little lost. He had volunteered for this early joyride saying to his colleagues that he knew Grand Rapids but he hadn’t been there in thirty years. The prisoner had said, “Hey man, you’re fucked up. You’re supposed to be on 131 North and you’re headed for Muskegon.” The prisoner was pissed off in the heavily screened backseat because no smoking was allowed in state police squad cars.

Sunderson took the long way to Tucson so as not to miss his health regimen of a bowl of menudo and a morning walk in Patagonia. Despite the cold north wind the mountainous landscape had a resplendent clarity. He had read that human mules carried fifty-pound bales of marijuana across this rugged landscape and thought that these mules must be in good shape. What a way to lose weight. He caught himself thinking of what was wrong in this beautiful area. It was really why Diane had left him. She had said, “Your profession is to find out what is wrong and you’ve done it so long you can no longer see what is right about life.” This was what the media called a crying indictment and it was right on the money. He had no argument to counter it.

He pulled off the road near a picnic table thinking that he had to stop this unprofitable way of thinking if he was ever going to lock up Dwight-Daryl. He was softening when he should have been hardening. He immediately thought that part of the problem came with being a bachelor and no longer having to monitor his moods, which you had to do in marriage to maintain civility, the day-to-day etiquette that makes marriages last. He had become too easily diverted by rather inane moods, which were fueled by overdrinking and the general sloppiness of his household. Life without a woman to temper your stupidities was difficult indeed. Even something so banal as grocery shopping could throw him into a skewed loop of anger. During his marriage Diane would always shop for dinner impulsively on her walk home from the hospital and then cook with pleasure, actually singing silly show tunes. By contrast he could blow fifty bucks in the supermarket during a quick shop and come home to discover that he didn’t really have anything for dinner. He had quarreled with the store manager over prices because he hadn’t yet caught up with the idea that prices hadn’t actually gone up that much but packaged quantities had been reduced from sixteen ounces to twelve. The manager had patiently explained that he was a vendor of the food not the manufacturer.

Sitting there on the roadside viewing the vast mountainous landscape and the cloak of snow far up Mount Wrightson he vowed the cold clarity of a simpler chase. A few years before the divorce he had met with the game wardens of a half dozen Upper Peninsula counties to help map strategies to catch two poachers up from Tennessee who were involved in the not so uncommon crime of killing numerous bears for their paws and gallbladders, which were precious and extremely valuable items in Chinese pharmacopeia. These bear body parts were dropped off in Chicago and made their way to Beijing on a Northwest flight. Customs in Chicago had picked up on it in the post-9/11 X-raying of random luggage and backtracked through United States Fish and Wildlife Service to a Chinese restaurant owner in Evanston and thence to the two hunters in Tennessee who needed to be caught red-handed hunting and in possession of bear parts in the U.P. of Michigan. It was two weeks of wonderful October pursuit with Sunderson masquerading as an alcoholic bow hunter, not a far reach in sailing terms.

He used his dozens of informants and snitches in taverns across the U.P. and after two weeks or so of fruitless searching it was an informant at a country bar in Wolf Junction north of Newberry in Luce County that panned out. He had called around midnight and was mildly drunk but then so was Sunderson.

“They were headed north toward Superior so they’re likely going over to Crisp Point or Grand Marais. I would have followed to see if they turned left or right south of Deer Park but they was a bit scary and mean looking. One chews a big gob of bubble gum and they’re driving a crew-cab black Ford and they got hounds.”

Sunderson couldn’t sleep so left for Grand Marais about three a.m. in a snowstorm that he knew wouldn’t last because the wind was turning south. He felt silly with his camo archer’s outfit and his compound bow in the backseat because he couldn’t hit a barn at gunpoint. On a hunch, at daylight he decided on the Barfield Lakes area. He had alerted by phone the two game wardens in contiguous counties but the trouble in the U.P. is that poaching was low on the totem pole of seriousness and taking a deer out of season was fairly popular after the bars closed, and after July Fourth when the deer would lose the cedar taste after yarding up in swamps during the winter.

It was barely daylight and he was driving south on a small county road up Pull Up Hill when the three-quarter-ton pickup passed him going the other way. His cell phone worked on the hill and he called a game warden who had positioned himself in Seney. He waited a few minutes before turning around on the off chance that they would “make” his pickup if he was close on their trail.

His luck held when they turned off on a no-exit two-track near Seney where Sunderson had fished the Driggs River. He and the game warden reconnoitered and after an hour they heard hounds baying and a rifle shot and they called in reinforcements. Within a half hour another game warden and two state police arrived. Bingo, Sunderson thought. When the pickup approached it tried to turn around and Sunderson shot out the back tires with his.38. In a cooler full of ice in a hidden compartment of the pickup there were sixteen gallbladders, one of them still warm, and sixty-four paws. The bust was big in the news but Sunderson declined all credit passing it on to the game wardens. The last thing he wanted was to become too visible. He did, however, relish the pleasure of an ultraclean bust. The perps got five years.

Outside of Patagonia his cell phone rang with the William Tell Overture, music that he hated but he didn’t know how to change. He answered because he saw it was Mona on the caller ID.

“Good morning dear.”

“You can’t believe what’s happening as we speak. You know how dark it is here in November at seven a.m.? Well Marion pulls up in his car on the way to work. He goes in your house and then he pulls a book in your study and I can see the crack of light. He’s been peeking at me for about ten minutes. I thought it was our special secret. It pisses me off that you told him, darling.”

“I didn’t tell him,” Sunderson laughed. “He’s picking up some books to FedEx me. It was his own discovery.”

“I did some nude yoga so he wouldn’t be disappointed. I think I believe you. I mean it’s a silly thing but I like the idea that it’s just between us.”

“Well, he’s not going to pick up books to send me every day. Here’s a nifty thing to do. When you hang up with me call his cell and say, Caught you, you shitheel pervert.”

“I want to write my own lines,” she laughed. “Maybe I’ll say, Come on over, big boy.”

“Please don’t.”

“Are you jealous, darling?”

Sunderson hung up on her and when he ate his menudo the labial texture made him horny. The freedom of retirement was distressing. Normally at this time back home he would be driving to work and mentally rehearsing the cases at hand. Why was the little old widow whose husband left her a nice pension embezzling from the dry goods store where she worked twenty hours a week? A tiny video camera caught her. She wept. She was helping a niece with cancer but it turned out she didn’t have a niece. She was addicted to hitting the slots at the Indian casino east of town. A month after the judge gave her probation she was caught on video stealing change from other players’ coin cups and stealing tips from tables in the lunchroom. Sunderson disliked interrogating her because despite his innovative questioning he couldn’t make a dent. She said she was aiming at winning the hundred-thousand-dollar jackpot and giving it to her church because the pastor’s wife had cancer. A phone call revealed that the pastor’s wife didn’t have cancer. Dealing with this senior citizen ditz gave Sunderson heartburn and a deep need for more alcohol. In his last week of work she had been caught at midnight rifling parking meters using a technique she refused to describe. When Sunderson met with the prosecutor they went to the bar at the Ramada Inn where he received a cell call from Snowbound Books. The owner had caught the woman jamming three copies of the new Danielle Steel in her underpants in the back room. “Shoot her,” Sunderson had said then closed the phone. This was clearly not a life.

When he finished his last piece of tripe which raised the image of Mona he thought that a serious man can’t be pussy struck at breakfast. What a fool he had become in his loneliness, a fungoid teenage boy. He pondered the idea that he should be over this nonsense at age sixty-five but he wasn’t. He couldn’t very well ask Melissa to wear a miniskirt while fishing. Now that he was recovering, however slowly, it was time to up the ante on the Great Leader. His dad used to say that idle hands are the devil’s work tools. He didn’t want to be idle but the true mystery was how to proceed so far from home ground. He needed to somehow daily carbonate his brain to become less sodden and more attentive.

He walked a route in the Nature Conservancy property for an hour without his usual attentiveness in natural surroundings because he remembered what an abrasive Detroit detective had told him forty years before, “Paranoia is healthy for a cop.” Maybe Roberto Kowalski wasn’t straight and suspected Sunderson of being a fed, maybe a DEA guy from out of state snooping into crooked locals? Maybe two weeks before Melissa had told her brother Xavier about a beat-up detective in the Nogales hospital and Xavier had told her to check him out? The question was whether or not this paranoia was healthy or delusional.

There was a slight rustle and movement of leaves and he jumped back as far as a man his age could jump back. He had a preconception that the area was chock-full of rattlers though in truth it would take an expert and hard looking to find one and the morning was far too cold at fifty degrees for a rattler to be active. He knelt down feeling the pain of his bruised legs and examined a large black beetle making its way slowly through the leaf detritus. Such large beetles were unknown in the north and he wondered how it made its way through life, where it ate and slept, and how it mated.

The beetle took him out of his head and into the world and he backtracked a few hundred yards to the path along the creek. He had barely noticed the creek when he was pondering the subject of paranoia but now he sat down on a cottonwood log and stared at the moving water. It would have been a good brook trout creek had there been any brook trout this far south though he had read that there were rainbow trout in the mountains farther north in Arizona. He spotted some minnows swirling in unison in a deeper hole and then watched a blue heron fly over above him looking smaller than the great blues of the north.

He studied the thicket of mesquite trees across the creek. There was also a number of large green bushes that looked like the elderberry back home, and a number of vast cottonwoods. He heard only bird sounds and the sound of moving water, his two favorites beginning in his childhood. He noticed that he was more relaxed and breathing more deeply than he had since he left home. He smiled remembering a slightly religious experience on a small river down near Steuben south of Shingleton the summer before. It was a hot August morning and he had been trying to catch brookies under logjams with a short line and his preferred fly, a small olive woolly bugger. The fly had snagged under the logjam and he was in despair because it was his last one and he had forgotten to tie up anymore. He was also hungover, which he had noted dozens of times made him a little inattentive. He threw in the towel as it were, pulled himself up on the riverbank, and stripped off his waders and clothes down to his undies. He carelessly plunged under the logjam with a hand, following the fly line until he could detach the fly hooked on the slippery log, not quite a victory as he had to struggle violently to back himself out against the current thinking how odd it would be to drown while saving an olive woolly bugger. He emerged breathing hard and grabbing a branch to hold himself in the current, tossing the fly up near his rod on the bank. For no reason he let go of the branch and floated downstream rolling over and over in the water, then simply floating on his back looking up at the hot blue sky and the trees that bordered the stream. About a hundred yards downstream he crawled up on a sandbar and lay there, happier than he had been in the three years since Diane left.

The Tucson gun store was a mud bath, festooned with patriotic and anti-Obama signs, including the usual live free or die. The clerk was plump, florid, and middle-aged smug.

“I need a.38 Smith and Wesson revolver,” Sunderson said.

“You look like you need a pistol,” the clerk chortled.

“Thanks.” Sunderson was impatient to get out of the place and pointed at the pistol he wanted under the glass.

It turned out that despite his expired detective license and still current Michigan concealed weapons permit he couldn’t buy a pistol because he was a nonresident. He was pissed off enough to feel his temples pounding. The clerk waited for the bad news to sink in, chortled again, and gave Sunderson directions to a public library.

“You get a library card and that’s proper Arizona ID and then I sell you the pistol.”

Sunderson was jangled at the insanity of it all but calmed down sweetly at the library because the desk clerk girl, though homely, smelled like lilac, a fatally sexy scent for him. He felt like a daffy old fuck as he proudly showed his library card from back home but she frowned at the Nogales address he gave.

“I love the next town, Patagonia,” she said.

“I do too. I eat menudo there every morning.”

“I can’t eat tripe.”

“It restores your strength.”

When he walked out after the second pass at the gun store he felt the unpleasant heft of the.38 in a shoulder holster thinking that the.38 had been following him around for nearly forty years like the longest-term tumor possible. Back in the car and heading to Miss Saigon for a pho fix he pulled over near the University of Arizona to make a cell call. Grungy young men and beautiful young women were passing on the sidewalk in such profusion that he thought about the failure of birth control in the world at large. He called a colleague back in Marquette.

“Sunderson! Gett’n much?”

“More ass than a toilet seat. I need information on an Arizona detective by the name of Roberto Kowalski.”

“Hold on, I’ll do it as we speak.”

The colleague, divorced twice, always gave the staff the impression that he was a prime pussy chaser but this was unlikely.

“No one by that name in Arizona law enforcement,” was the answer.

“Thanks for the favor.”

“You’re missing deer hunting.”

Sunderson couldn’t think of a thing to say so he pushed the end button. He sat outside again at Miss Saigon smoking two cigarettes in a row and realizing that he had been a little suspicious of Kowalski, not at the first bruised meeting in the hospital, but the second time, at his apartment. The guy lacked a certain tinge of the genuine because he didn’t speak the shorthand that detectives use with each other. His cell rang just as the waitress was bringing a variety pho that included tripe, also pork meatballs. It was Lucy.

“I’m not crying anymore darling but I’ve been thinking of our questionable night.”

“I was worried about your Kleenex budget. Look, I’m in a meeting. I’ll call you back.” He quickly turned the phone off before she could respond, wondering about the faulty aspects of memory. Why didn’t she say that the night had been rotten rather than the euphemism of “questionable”? If you’re lonely any contact is better than none.

Two hours later he had found another small temporary apartment on a hillside in Patagonia. It was a room and half, a bit tight, but there were chickens in the backyard and a couple of rabbit hutches. His parents had supplemented their protein budget with a lot of fried rabbit. On the way to Nogales to pick up his meager belongings he reluctantly passed the Wagon Wheel Saloon. It would have to wait for later.

Alfred was in the yard and told Sunderson that soon after he had left Mr. Kowalski had stopped by to fetch his precious cigarette lighter.

“Did you ID him?” Sunderson asked, alarmed.

“Well, no. I mean you guys were together an hour last night. I admit I glanced in the window and he was on the phone at the kitchen table.”

Sunderson didn’t bother telling Alfred that Kowalski was a phony. Alfred was upset that he was leaving but pleased when Sunderson told him to keep the rest of the month’s rent.

“Where are you going?”

“It would be unsafe for you to know.”

“I get it. You’re undercover?”

“Obviously not far enough.”

He packed his suitcase and papers from Mona. Nothing in the apartment looked tossed though the papers appeared in less disarray than he had left them. The Great Leader must have been poor reading for Kowalski but now he had Mona’s e-mail. He rang her up.

“Don’t respond to anyone in this area except me.”

“Okay darling but why?”

“I’m being tailed and he’ll try to find me through your e-mail.”

“That’s impossible but it sounds exciting. I have to write a paper on Emily Dickinson and she sucks.”

“No she doesn’t. She’s wonderful.” Sunderson had been fond of Emily Dickinson ever since he was a sophomore in an American literature class at Michigan State.

“That joke really worked with Marion. I did a little nude dance then I called him. I heard his cell phone hit the floor.”

“Good job.”

“Your fucking friend Carla wants me to come over for dinner. My therapist will be there. Just us three girls. Maybe they’ll try to gang bang me.”

“Don’t go. But if you do, snoop around. Keep your clothes on.”

“Of course Daddy.”

He hung up and called Melissa. She had been going to pick him up for fishing in the morning but as a precaution he didn’t want her to have his new address and told her he would meet her at Patagonia Lake. She was flirtatious on the phone, which made him suspicious though he cautioned himself about letting his paranoia ruin the fishing trip and its remote sexual possibilities. He was on the way out of the apartment and bidding good-bye to Alfred’s wife Molly who was dusting her roses for aphids when a FedEx truck pulled up. He had nearly missed the books Marion was sending.

“My second cycle of chemo isn’t working,” Molly said. “So this is good-bye.”

“I’m sorry,” Sunderson said, feeling paralyzed.

“Do you believe in the afterlife?”

“I haven’t figured it out. I guess I’m not very religious.”

“I don’t think anyone has. Someone said, I forgot who, that if nothing happens we won’t know it. I’ll miss flowers, birds, and lemonade.”

He gave her a hug and got in the car itching for a double whiskey and thinking that there wasn’t much left of her. She was made up of Tinkertoys, fragile sticks out of which you could make little buildings and bridges but not human bodies. He recalled that he and his brother Robert had found a recently dead fawn, it didn’t stink yet, and they had given it what they had thought to be a proper burial. Molly couldn’t weigh much more than the fawn that Sunderson had dropped in the shallow hole he had dug. There wasn’t much of a thunk when the fawn hit the bottom of its grave.

The consolation, however slight, was the heft of the package of books Marion had sent. He opened the package in the parking lot and selected Playing Indian by Philip Deloria, which Marion had loaned him a couple of years before, rather than one of the new ones like Jeffrey Johnson’s They Are All Red Out Here: Socialist Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1895-1925, or Kyle Wilkison’s Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914, and certainly not the new edition of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, which he had skimmed through years before and which had precipitated a deep funk.

Over his first double and beer chaser at the bar he read Marion’s letter, the first half of which advised him to read the Deloria, which would help him understand the Great Leader’s use of faux Indian “rigmarole.” Marion said that many non-Indian Americans had used their fantasies about Indians to acquire a “hokum” spirituality. The second half of the letter was a comic recounting of Marion pulling the Deloria book out from above Sunderson’s desk and seeing the nude Mona at her morning rituals. “Don’t even try it, friend. It’s very upsetting and she caught me red-handed. I drove off to work shamefaced and with a hard-on like a toothache. I thought of a scholarly article by a psychoanalyst named Sullivan that said that at their best poetry and religion push back the boundaries of the ineffable. Well, so can a woman’s body.”

The barmaid Amanda brought him his second double. He had caught a nice breast view when she had bent over to get ice for a margarita.

“What are you staring at, asshole?”

“I’m staring into my mind. I can’t see it very well,” he said.

“That’s cute but a little evasive,” she laughed.

Sunderson felt a trace of fear. Two doubles were enough when bad people might very well be tracking you. It was five in the afternoon and he knew he should eat an early dinner, do some reading, and embrace sobriety. From want of good sense he went to the Mexican restaurant and ate yet another bowl of menudo, sprinkling it liberally with the blistering hot and flavorful chiltepins. He was proud of becoming acclimated though it was easiest when he was in Italy with Diane and liked everything he ate.

In his new digs he laid out his books including White’s “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West and Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds from his suitcase. History books were his central solace in life along with brook trout fishing but on this night history had abruptly fled. He figured the problem was that the sense of his own peril forced him to consider only life in the present tense. He tried the television news but his mistrust of the instant history of the media was jangling. He couldn’t find a movie suited to his mood and had to settle on a cop film only because it featured Robert Duvall, his doppelganger, who was uniformly credible in movies. Sunderson almost never watched cop movies because they lacked the visceral aspects of actuality. Once while in training in Detroit he had visited a downriver dope house with two cops and they had found two severed heads on a kitchen table, both with bulging purple tongues and lots of flies because the heads had been there a couple of days.

He was thirsty but stupidly didn’t drink water because he didn’t want to get up to pee with his geezer’s overactive kidneys. The gout struck at midnight, an easy self-diagnosis because it felt like a rat was chewing on his right big toe. He hobbled to the bathroom and took two colchicine pills plus an Oxycontin for the pain. His daily allopurinol had lost the battle with gout and now the crystallized purines in his toe were grating against the nerve endings. It had obviously been the tripe because he remembered tripe had been on the gout list his doctor had given him. It was usually doe liver during deer season. Like his father before him Sunderson simply couldn’t resist deer liver.

Sleep was fitful at best. To Sunderson the only reliable drugs were alcohol and tobacco and even ibuprofen and aspirin were suspicious, varying as they did the dream life that amused and fascinated him. His main worry was whether he’d be able to screw Melissa on the long shot of an opportunity. Toe anguish isn’t sexy and a rowboat isn’t a hospitable place for intercourse. Early in their marriage when camping he and Diane had tried it on Lake Gogebic but they had given up, laughing at the awkwardness. If he were religious, he thought, he could at least pray for warm weather so he could see a little skin. He finally slept because luckily for once he was old and with aging you gave up trying to account for everything that might happen, the hopeless attempt to balance the hundreds of variables with your brain’s billion-roomed house between which there are not nearly enough doors. Once again he realized that life had too many moving parts.

He was at the Patagonia Lake marina a half hour before Melissa was due. By Michigan standards the lake was dinky indeed but made up for it by its beautiful mountain setting. He had to half drag his aching foot but was eager to row while Melissa fished. He reached the dock from the parking lot with difficulty, his big toe and to a lesser extent the whole front part of his foot feeling like the pulse of a toothache at the root of a loose tooth, certainly better than the grueling pain at the beginning of an attack. At least gout didn’t entail an emotional hangover. Gout was something you did to yourself usually by willful inattention. The list of prohibited foods was taped in clear sight above his desk. The problem was that pain is abstract until it arrives and couldn’t compete with a skillet of quick-fried doe liver that had been sliced thin. His father had told him that liver was the healthiest of meats for building strong bodies but then liver was also the cheapest meat a relatively poor family could afford. He had so wanted to be strong like his father who could easily lift one of cousin Charlie’s boxes of whitefish that weighed three hundred pounds.

Sunderson sat there on the dock near rowboat number seven that the marina clerk advised was the best of the dozen or so. It was clearly a piece of shit in the long line of rowboats in his life. The mythology of liver and rowboats faded when he thought of the pungency of Deloria’s Playing Indian, which he had leafed through in the midst of his pain. Most academic history books he read were real prose clunkers and sometimes Diane would read aloud a sentence or two from them and laugh. Diane liked to listen to Leonard Cohen while reading her favorite author Loren Eiseley. He liked both but not at the same time. He began to doze from his drug combo of colchicine and Oxycontin to which he had added Imodium. Colchicine could be a violent purge. When Melissa had called earlier in the morning to ask what kind of juice he wanted with lunch he had said, “A pint of vodka,” another questionable ingredient.

She finally pulled up in a newish Toyota 4Runner Sport, a vehicle he had yearned for but could scarcely afford on his pension, and definitely not affordable on her nurse’s aide salary. Likely it came from her faux stockbroker brother.

They quickly loaded her small tackle box, two spinning rods, and the picnic hamper. She was so effervescent that it verged on playacting and he cautioned himself in his haze against looking for something wrong rather than right. She wore a light-blue jacket and jeans rather than the skimpy clothes of his fantasies. He rowed the gunk boat, sipped vodka, and hummed, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” He had always preferred the edgy Rolling Stones to the frivolous white canticles of the Beatles. She finally caught a decent smallmouth bass on a Rapala she was casting but released it saying that she preferred to eat saltwater fish. It had become warm enough for her to take off her jacket and her braless breasts in the light sleeveless pullover jiggled pleasantly when she cast the lure. The sight penetrated his drug haze and he felt a specific nut twitch. She was trolling a worm and heavy sinker with her other rod and hooked a little catfish, which he detached because it was too ugly for her to touch. He had brought Alfred’s map and was rowing toward an estuary area where Sonoita Creek, which he had walked along in the Nature Conservancy land, emptied into the lake. He had skipped breakfast and was hungry for the picnic.

The creek was braided near the lake but he found an inlet deep enough to pull in the boat. He watched as she laid out the picnic on her hands and knees, a fetching sight. He took a solid gulp of vodka to ease a foot tinge. There was a fruit salad and a dozen huge shrimp that she said she got through Hector who owned Las Vigas. He knew shrimp was on his proscribed gout list but said fuck it to himself, dipping a shrimp in a blistering hot salsa verde. She laughed at his tears.

“What are you really doing down here?”

This caught him off guard and he knew the question was meant to, but after a near lifetime of interrogating perps, more recently designated “persons of interest,” he was an expert at cat and mouse.

“I’m checking out a cult leader. Seeing my iron mother. Anything more I’m not at liberty to say.” He immediately realized that he should have put the subject to rest but he wanted to tease her. He put on a cool, impassive face when what he was really thinking about is that he should have brought along an Oxycontin.

“You don’t trust me!” She took his coolness as truth, and got up and walked away wandering in the bushes nearly out of sight.

He was sitting back against a small tree he wished he could identify. He intended to call Alfred and take a walk with him so he could learn some of the mysterious flora. Meanwhile he was watching her through barely open lids and wondering at her next move now that it had become clear to him that she was spying for her brother. He was pleased she was upset that he was cooling toward her, thus failing in her mission. It was then that he saw her in the gap between the bushes give a fake little shriek and intentionally plop herself down in a boggy hole. He begrudgingly got up from his resting place then sat back down when he saw she was walking toward him with muddy jeans and tears in her eyes. He had always been puzzled by the emotional volatility that allowed women to cry on demand.

“I’m a mess. I have to clean up. Shut your eyes.”

With eyes wide open he watched as she stripped off her jeans with her back turned. She sat and pulled the jeans off her feet and then knelt on her hands and knees rinsing the jeans in the clear water of the inlet near the boat. She wore white thong undies and had the prettiest, most perfect ass he had ever seen and it was easy to crawl over, pull down the thong, and start lapping, errantly thinking, I am a dog who accepts food from strangers.

“Oh you pig, you fucking pig,” she said laughing.

He didn’t have much more than a half-master because of his numbed condition but he managed to get it in where it properly grew in the wet heat. The drug numbness also helped him last longer as did the oddly melodramatic mountain landscape. His hard strokes had pushed them down the grassy bank so that she was grabbing the gunnel of the rowboat to keep them from sliding in the water.

“You are a fucking pig,” she said turning back to look at him.

“No, I’m a dog wondering if I’m going to have a heart attack.”

They struggled back to the blue tablecloth she had spread for the picnic. She slipped into the thong and clumsily tried to wring out her jeans but he stopped her from putting them on.

“I need to study your beautiful ass.”

“You don’t get my ass unless you cook me a fine meal.”

If this was meant to lead him by eyes, nose, and pecker further into the void it worked. While rowing back to the marina she asked him to come to dinner at her place the following evening. He accepted, ignoring the idea that Xavier might be there. She said that now she had to go home, make Josefina some flan she’d promised, take a shower to wash off the “pigginess,” and then work the 4:00 p.m. to midnight shift at the hospital.

On the drive back toward his humble digs in the village of Patagonia he pondered his postcoital slump. In a more distinctly natural world he was the male spider who flops over after ejaculation to provide a meal for the female. He was mildly resentful that sex could still wield this sort of power over him, that a geezer could be so strongly hooked by the biological imperative. His little male dog, now in heaven, used to jump up hopelessly at the high rear end of the female collie down the street. His mother used to say, “God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform,” but that was when a local hockey team had beaten the thugs from Iron Mountain.

He forced himself to drive past the Wagon Wheel. The two shrimp he had managed to eat before rutting weren’t enough cushion for a couple of double whiskeys. A nap and something to eat would help prepare him for the usual cocktail hour. He avoided the pathetic temptation to stop at the restaurant and have yet another bowl of menudo, opting for the grocery store and a few frozen dinners, which normally repelled him but he lacked the verve to cook a real meal. He also treated himself to a fifth of Absolut vodka although he normally only drank the cheapest brands.

He sat down at the kitchen table because memory was prodding him and he needed to make a journal entry.

Melissa reminds me of Sonia when I was nineteen and an unconfident sophomore at Michigan State. It’s more than their mutual raspberry scent or their fine butts. Sonia was a hippie graduate student in history and we met at the bookstore when we started talking about the failure of the White Russian Army. We had coffee and then agreed to meet now and then and talk about Russian history about which she was obsessed far beyond me. She was a genuine kook and wore orange and black clothing because she believed in evil and her favorite holiday was Halloween. Sad to say I only met her in May a few weeks before the end of the school year after which she was going to Leningrad for the summer on a travel scholarship. She spoke fluent Russian because her parents were refugees from World War II when they lived in Kiev. They were Jews but not religious so it was easy to understand why her belief in evil was so firm.

When I was six my mother slapped me real hard. I haven’t remembered this for years as if it were a small visual splotch. (This was a time when schoolteachers were still allowed corporal punishment.) I was in the first grade and having trouble learning to read. I was sitting with Mom in an easy chair while she read aloud to me from a story called The Water Babies from the Book House and I was attempting to follow the text with a forefinger. I was upset because I thought the story was a big lie. I had fished brook trout with my dad and there was no way that a group of human babies could live underwater in a river swimming around through water weeds without coming up for air. Meanwhile Berenice was prancing back and forth through the room yelling “dumby” at me. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon and Mom smelled like the rhubarb wine a neighbor made every year. Berenice came too close and I grabbed her by a pigtail and called her a “bitch.” Mom reared back and slapped me very hard. I had no idea what the word “bitch” meant.

This area reminds me of the collection of DVDs called The Blue Planet Diane gave me for a birthday. Much of the underwater life was alien with no possible human reference point. Some of it was troublesome and repellent. There were clusters of two-inch-wide, six-foot-long worms living a mile deep in perfect darkness. I certainly didn’t want to go there.

An image of Melissa’s ass in the broad daylight of the estuary. There should be a legion of pollsters asking all the men in the world what an ass means to them.

I keep thinking of a photo in an old Life magazine of monkeys bathing in a hot spring in northern Japan. It’s snowing but they’re quite warm though wet. How do they get out and dry off without freezing their asses off? That’s the question.

He undressed totally for his nap trying to dismiss the power of his negative thinking. After forty years as a janitor trying to clean up the culture’s dirt, here he was in a decidedly alien locale trying to chase down someone who had committed no readily provable crime. He had been stoned by mostly female preteens or so he thought from the few glances before trying to shield his eyes. This seemed to be causing a murderous edge back there in his mind. He perforce had an edge he had developed in order to function at his job but then the edge had become an organic part of his character. A goodly number of people, some unconsciously, sensed this edge and avoided any more than nominal contact with him. It reminded him of the way people in social contact with a doctor would wedge in a medical question, usually ineptly. With Sunderson the brave ones would ask a peripheral question about law enforcement because it was the rare male who hadn’t committed a felony, unwittingly or consciously. In bars and on social occasions Sunderson tended to be reassuring saying that strictly speaking the entire population of the United States should be imprisoned but then who would take care of the innocent children? Law enforcement was merely the manhole cover on the human sewer. People within earshot would laugh a bit nervously.

He napped solidly for three hours by grace of an Oxycontin and a gulp of vodka, dreaming of church bells on wintry Sunday mornings in Munising. The bells turned out to be his cell phone with Mona on the other end.

“I’ve called five times. Where the fuck were you?”

“Taking a health nap. I’ve had a gout attack.”

“You’re always having gout attacks, darling.”

“I can’t seem to learn from experience. What’s up?”

“I had dinner with Carla and my therapist and found out some nifty stuff. First of all they fed me this cheap California chardonnay that tasted like rancid butter. Then they wanted to rub my body with Apache lotion, can you believe it?”

“I wasn’t aware that Apaches were into cosmetics.”

“Carla gave me the bottle. It was made in Boulder, Colorado. Well, we smoked a joint and I got a little drunk and dozed off on the sofa and the next thing you know when I opened my eyes Carla was taking a raised skirt photo of me.”

“Pardon?”

“She was on her knees before me and taking a raised skirt photo with a flash. I said ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ and she said that her boyfriend likes raised skirt photos of young girls. Guess who her boyfriend is?”

“That’s easy. It’s the Great Leader. I’m sure she’s one of many.”

“Carla says if you don’t lay off she’s going to accuse you of sodomy, you know, at your retirement party. She’s got Queenie as a witness.”

“How interesting.” Sunderson’s mind whirled with the permutations, which were easy to dismiss. “It would be embarrassing but it wouldn’t work. There were a number of cops there plus friends from the prosecutor’s office. There are also photos of her going sixty-nine with Queenie. I’ve got more and better witnesses.”

“Should I tell her that?”

“No. Of course not. We don’t want a pissing contest. Just don’t go to her place.”

“I miss you, darling.”

“I miss you, too.”

He was only able to eat one of the wretched frozen chicken dinners before he felt gaggy. It was time to drive to a supermarket and set up a proper kitchen. He had planned to spend a quiet evening reading Deloria’s Playing Indian and making some written notes on his situation. He knew he felt a certain misplaced pride, a questionable hubris that he could deal with this new territory when there was no evidence so far that he was actually capable of doing so. He had let down his guard after being freed from forty years of work habits and the results of this slippage had been poor indeed. Before answering Mona’s call he had had a confused dream that had his favorite brook trout creek becoming round, a perfect circle in the meadow, woods, and marsh that was its path. Toward the end it had become coiled and serpentine, which reminded him of some of Marion’s favorite ideas. The aging process was linear with the inevitability of gravity but our thinking and behavior tended to occur in clusters, knots that wound and unwound themselves. His current central problem was comparable to the poorly remembered Gospel parable: when you clean out the room of your life via retirement you have to be careful what you let back in. Since it was five months until brook trout season he had only his obsession with the Great Leader, which was not something to pleasantly fill a life. He had an image of a lovely old basilica he had walked in to on a side street in Florence while Diane napped at their room at the Brunelleschi. He had sat on a bench in the basilica calmed by the utter loveliness of the place, the wonderful simple lines compared to the rococo monstrosity of the Duomo. An old lady and a pretty girl of about twelve entered, lit candles, and knelt and prayed. The question was why not destroy the Great Leader who so grotesquely diminished what everyone must sense, however remotely, as the divinity of existence. To be sure, Sunderson only felt this in the natural world distant from the collective human puke that drowned so much of what was good in life.

Berenice called and he answered out of guilt. She wanted him to come to dinner the following evening because their sister Roberta was passing through town. He said he was booked and they settled for lunch. He was chain smoking and noted with irritation that he was down to five cigarettes, not nearly enough for an evening’s reading. Was he capable of walking to the Wagon Wheel for cigarettes without getting stewed? Time would tell. Another more irritating thought occurred. What would his mother think if he was charged with sodomy? Not good.

He poured a modest drink not bothering with ice and called a former colleague in Marquette explaining Carla’s supposed intentions. The friend explained that the prosecutor would never bring such a pathetic case but to make sure they would bring Carla to complete “attention.” An informant had told him that Carla sold not only the occasional lid of pot but also totally untaxed cartons of cigarettes a Chippewa member of Daryl-Dwight’s cult brought in from the smugglers in the Sault Ste. Marie area. The latter would be a federal charge and the threat would “bunch her undies,” or so the man said. The little cigarette sideline gave Carla a profit of twenty bucks a carton.

Sunderson was nearly cheery walking the few blocks to the bar. The thought of pissing off his iron mother had been a powerful corrective ever since his youth. Near the motel he saw a young man wearing a turban above his bliss ninny face and asked Amanda at the Wagon Wheel about it. She said he was from the vegan cult up Harshaw Creek Road. Sunderson pondered the possible spiritual content of raw vegetables remembering the rubbery carrot and celery sticks on the grade school hot lunch program.

“Maybe the raw vegetables release their secret powers,” he suggested polishing off his first double in a single long gulp.

“Got me by the ass. I do know that when they get too pure the medevac chopper from Tucson has to pick them up,” Amanda laughed.

By lucky coincidence an older, Mexican woman came into the bar selling fresh tamales for a buck apiece. Sunderson bought six, eating three immediately with a cold Pacifico beer. They beat any bar food he had ever had in the Great North. They were so good he didn’t feel up to another drink. He looked forward to eating the other three tamales for breakfast. On the walk home he idly thought of becoming a Mexican knowing a lot of Americans retired far to the south of the border where life was less dicey. Just before he reached his place down a dark alley he saw two men loading something in a pickup. They glanced his way and he pretended he hadn’t noticed them with his eyes straight ahead.

“You’re looking for someone?” Amanda had asked when he left the bar.

“I better not say,” he replied with an urge for mystery.

Dawn, which is late in November, found him carving his first mango, sexual to the touch, but he didn’t care for it so maybe he wouldn’t become a Mexican after all. With his coffee he had read a chapter in Deloria titled, “Hobby Indians, Authenticity, and Race in Cold War America” and recalled a number of powwows he had been to in the U.P. while looking for perps, persons of interest. Once at the big winter powwow in Escanaba he had seen the renowned fancy dancer Jonathan Windy Boy and had gotten unwilling goose bumps at the man’s inconceivable grace. There were a few white dancers, usually awkward.

Pushing the book aside he decided to start logging what he was doing in order to bring focus. He had logged notes in journals his entire career to prepare for the obnoxious reports he was obligated to write for the official record. Sunderson recognized good prose despite being unable to write it. Reading so many clunkers in the field of history didn’t help. Like scholars he tended to multiple qualifiers in order to be right without ambiguity. “Are we to believe, unlikely as it seems, that the perp only recently, perhaps in the month since his return from Milwaukee, came into possession of illegal ammunition, usable, mostly in illegal full-automatic weaponry,” that sort of thing. By contrast, Diane had written beautifully, publishing a memoir with Michigan State University of her father’s family adventures in the logging business. She wrote daily in a diary and only read fine nonfiction and literary fiction. He enjoyed Hemingway’s fishing pieces but failed to finish The Sun Also Rises, which was about a bunch of layabouts getting drunk and going to bullfights in Spain.

He sat staring at an empty page of his journal, ballpoint poised, but couldn’t move a mental sentence. The most singular entry since his arrival in Arizona was, “I hurt all over,” written on the last full day in the hospital. It was true. A large rock had hit the crack of his ass while he was in a crouched position so that even around his asshole there was a big bruise.

He took an hour’s walk up Harshaw nodding to an altruistic group of young vegan cult women. Marion had said that vegetarian women tasted better but Sunderson had never had an experience with a vegetarian woman.

He left early for Green Valley wanting to get his grocery shopping out of the way before lunch at his mother’s. Afterward he knew he would want a drink and a long nap before going to Melissa’s. The highway went right past Alfred’s house and Alfred was in the yard so he stopped to say hello, a bad choice because Alfred was pissed off. Someone had broken into Sunderson’s apartment when he and Molly were out for dinner. No damage had been done except to the door’s lock. Sunderson offered him fifty bucks, which he pocketed.

“A cop came but he didn’t take prints like on TV. Anyway, I saw a painted redstart this morning.”

“Lucky you,” Sunderson said, knowing that the redstart was a bird.

The Green Valley supermarket was a melancholy experience. Everyone in there was his age or older. Admittedly they looked better than retirees in the U.P. whose only exercise tended to be pressing the clicker for the television set. The women especially were tanned and sprightly while the men obviously spent too much time on their golf carts. There was a magnificent display of vegetables compared to back home where the pièce de résistance was always the pasty. To Sunderson vegetables were an obligation rather than a pleasure since Diane with her cooking skills had left. The coup was finding a package of frozen rabbit pieces, to make one of his favorite meals.

His mother, Roberta, and Berenice were sitting on the front porch luckily without Berenice’s dipshit husband. The Escalade was gone but there was a gray Prius with an Obama sticker, obviously Roberta’s car.

“Nice car. A little pricey,” Sunderson said accepting a glass of nasty California rosé that Berenice poured.

“She’s a real success not an alcoholic sex fiend,” his mother said, her voice slurred.

“All I wanted to be was a Podunk gumshoe,” Sunderson said with an edge to his laugh.

“And you lost the world’s finest woman,” his mother continued.

“Oh for Christ’s sake Mom, lighten up and stop bullying him.” Roberta had had a hot temper since she was a baby and was the only one of the four children that their mother had never been able to push around. Sunderson was four years older than Roberta with her having arrived a scant year before Bobby in a birth control error. Those two had been a tight little unit and had been good at defending themselves against the rest of the family who were always considered by them to be possible enemies. Sunderson had thought of them as from another generation.

His mother launched into a fresh caterwaul about her lack of grandchildren.

“You have to learn a new song, Mom,” Roberta said, then suggested that she and Sunderson take a walk. They weren’t a half block down the street when they turned melancholy.

“How is it with you?” she asked.

“So-so at best.”

“You got the shit kicked out of you. Nobody told me why.”

“I’m not sure why. I’ll find out pretty soon.”

“You won’t back away, will you? You’re a bit long in the tooth for physical bravery.”

“That’s why God made guns,” he tried to joke but it was lame.

“You know I keep in touch with Diane. You also know her new husband is dying. Any chance of you two getting back together?”

“None whatsoever. What’s wrong with me then is still wrong.”

Roberta suddenly stopped and looked around in puzzlement at the uniform beige stucco homes and absurdly uniform lawns.

“I’d rather retire to the south side of Chicago,” she spit out.

“Me too,” he agreed.

“Think how Bobby would have hated this place. He was always using the word bourgeois. Think of it. The only man I could ever love was my brother.”

Sunderson’s feet became glued to the sidewalk. She walked ahead for a few steps then turned shaking her head with tears in her eyes. Looking at her he felt his own tears well up uncontrollably. He moved toward her and they embraced, his heart thumping with this inconsolable love.

He was too overwrought when he got back to Patagonia for either a drink or a nap. He swerved off a side road, forded Sonoita Creek, and walked out around the Conservancy property again. His mind was swollen by his sister and the evidently vast quantity of love that was beyond sexuality and its simpleminded merging of genitalia. He wondered if religion was partly the love for an imaginary parent and whether any steps to make contact with this parent were justifiable. People sought out an intermediary like Daryl-Dwight or any sort of priest, preacher, swami, or guru in order to shortcut the search. As questionable luck would have it about halfway through the loop path he ran into a rather eerie young woman he guessed to be in her early thirties studying a bird book. Her skin was too translucent for his taste as if there was a danger of seeing her skull underneath the skin. He could see the blood of life pulsing lightly in her temples. She pointed out a bird in a mesquite tree about twenty yards away. It was disconcertingly colorful as if it had been painted by numbers.

“Elegant trogan.”

“Yes it is,” he agreed.

“No, that’s its name. It’s a male and it’s a new life lister for me.”

“Congratulations.” He had an urge to escape but she put a hand on his arm.

“You look like you’re having a hard time,” she said, staring at the bird through her binoculars.

“You’re right on the money.” He was becoming frantic.

“Me, too. That’s why I look at birds instead of inside my head. Good luck.”

She walked off in the opposite direction and for once the idea that this woman had a nice butt was irrelevant. She obviously possessed information that he needed. His brain began to perk with exterior landscape rather than interior.

He was driving down the alley to his quarters when he saw Kowalski, the fake cop, driving hurriedly out of the driveway. Sunderson didn’t give a shit unless the man had left a bomb behind. Kowalski had put a note on top of the folder of Daryl-Dwight research that Mona had sent. The note read, “Why don’t you just go over there and shoot the cocksucker?”

Sunderson couldn’t nap and a drink still seemed inappropriate. He felt that his concerns were levitating him an inch above his bed. The primary result was homesickness. He thought of the bird woman he had met in terms of something that Marion had said about his own obsession with paying attention to the natural world that already was, rather than himself. Marion was totally without self-concern, thinking that as a human he was essentially a comic figure.

When it was time to get ready to go to Melissa’s for dinner he checked his cell phone, which had been turned off, for messages. Mona had called, sounding effervescent, to say that Carla had been busted for a pound of weed in her apartment and a dozen cartons of unstamped cigarettes. Out on bail Carla had screamed at Mona on the phone detecting the trail of her bust. Sunderson grinned. Something had worked. He also felt a trace of rejuvenation in the shower but was less than enthused about the upcoming dinner. Typical of his age he had not yet regenerated from the previous day’s sex. This was a case where the tired fountain does not overflow.

Melissa had a smallish stucco house in a semigated community that wasn’t guarded. There was, however, a very large man sitting on her porch whom Sunderson recognized as being near the front door that evening at Las Vigas. The man’s heavy eyelids made it look as if his eyes were closed.

“Señor Sunderson, of course,” he said not getting up from his chair.

Sunderson sat with Melissa in a wildly flowered backyard drinking a margarita she had made fresh with tiny limes and a tequila that cost fifty bucks he had seen in the liquor store. She seemed scattered and a little cool, glancing at Josefina in the corner of the yard playing on a swing set with a nanny. He was wondering if she regretted making love to him the day before. When she had welcomed him at the door and guided him through the utterly elegant living room with its burnished copper walls and antique furniture he had thought again that nothing down here is what it seems to be.

“What are you going to do?” She wasn’t looking at him.

“I don’t know for sure. I’m thinking about moving over to Willcox or the Dos Cabezas to be closer to my enemy.”

“If you don’t have a pistol I have an extra.” Now she was looking at him as if he were incompetent.

“I have one.”

“But I can tell you’re not wearing it. What good is a pistol if you don’t have it with you?” She kept checking her watch and then led him into the house. They sat down at the dining room table and Sunderson was disappointed to note that the table was set for four. Looking at her in her short green skirt had warmed him up after all. She explained the platter of ceviche, a Mexican fish dish pickled with lime juice and hot chilies. He loved the ceviche because it reminded him of the pickled herring of home.

“You’re very nice but I worry that you will be killed like my husband,” she said furtively as the front door opened and Xavier arrived with an attractive young thing who looked 99 percent female but her Adam’s apple told Sunderson that she was likely a transvestite. Will wonders never cease? Melissa rose to kiss her brother but refused to acknowledge his girlfriend, or boyfriend, or whatever. Xavier was ebullient and placed three cell phones near his plate.

“I keep one for Melissa but I have two new cell phones every day for my business. Sorry we’re late but I must make love after work every day to remind me that I’m human.”

“Please,” Melissa said, blushing.

“I have solved your mystery,” Xavier said, looking at Sunderson and pouring a white wine that Sunderson recognized as Diane’s favorite, Meursault. “My problem was that I said to myself, what are two men from Marquette, Michigan, doing in my area? One has the other nearly killed. They must be quarreling about money. Then I learned a lot of information about you. You are studying this man’s cult. I know you have a pension of thirty-two thousand a year, which is not enough. I know you take Norvasc for high blood pressure and Levoxyl for a deficient thyroid and your wife left you three years ago. And now you have moved to Patagonia. I thought you were snooping about me through my sister but now I think you are just another horny old man. Your enemy is camped on what I think of as my land with a hundred of his followers. Today I had him brought to me in Nogales for a conversation. He wasn’t very happy. I have been forced to tell him that he and his people must leave by Christmas. Why, I must ask you, are you fascinated by this lunatic?”

Sunderson was unnerved by Xavier’s high metallic laughter. Melissa stared at Sunderson harshly as if to say, “You are imperiled. Be honest.”

“My hobby has always been history,” Sunderson began slowly. “I became interested in the relationship between religion, money, and sex.”

“Well, you are a fool or a scholar or both. They are one. They can’t be separated,” Xavier interrupted.

“Perhaps, but this enemy was in my area, as you say. I didn’t like what he was doing to people.” Sunderson was developing a case of ice cubes in the guts.

“I mean you can’t think of sex, religion, and money as individual building blocks. They have bled into each other until they are a huge unruly animal, quite vicious, really.” Xavier was enthused about the conversation as if he were taking part in a college debate.

“My job until a few weeks ago was to protect the citizenry from those with criminal intent,” Sunderson said lamely, biding for time. He remembered reading William Blake way back in college who had said something to the effect of brothels being built with the bricks of religion.

“You people haven’t protected shit. You’ve built little dams here and there. People are natural children of the beast.”

They stopped talking for a few minutes and ate what Melissa called carne adovada, which was little chunks of pork cooked with hot chili. Sunderson was beginning to sweat and felt in his pocket to make sure he had his Gas-X.

“I didn’t realize you were ranching in the area of the man who calls himself the Great Leader,” Sunderson teased, knowing full well that individual cartels control specific routes of import all along the nearly two-thousand-mile border.

“You are becoming impolite,” Xavier said petulantly. “We are speaking as educated gentlemen. You may stay in the area through Christmas Day so you can have Christmas with your mother and sister in Green Valley. After that, go home.”

“And if I don’t?” Sunderson’s heart swelled in anger.

“You will become menudo for the vultures and ravens,” Xavier laughed.

“How inhospitable.” Sunderson’s ice cubes had become a solid block.

“And don’t see my sister again. I can’t have you fucking her like a dog in broad daylight.”

“Xavier!” Melissa screamed, getting up and going as far as the kitchen door.

Xavier smiled and pointed a forefinger at Sunderson as if it were a gun. Sunderson got up slowly and walked to the front door, summoning his courage for a backward glance at Melissa but she was staring down at her feet. Now on the front porch there were three men that Sunderson supposed were there in case he presented a problem. He didn’t intend to.