The Big Seven (17 page)

He had missed some of what Diane had said about an “amusing” play about five lesbians trying to live in peace in a tiny apartment. Sunderson wanted to ask if that left an odd girl out of the night games but he feared being vulgar in front of Diane. She had never had any of the rough humor of the north and it couldn’t be learned, not that she wanted to. He had found out in their courtship that they often didn’t think the same things were funny. She had a complete intolerance for anything she considered “off color” unless it was French or seemed to be French. French-Canadian, the roots of many locals, didn’t seem to count though they had virtually founded the U.P. When he had dropped Diane off at her house on the hill he felt he couldn’t imagine how much money she and her husband spent on trips to New York City and Chicago. In the latter they always stayed, Mona had told him, in the same suite at the Drake the husband’s parents had stayed in, some more profit from devouring the forests. And they had built the so-called beautiful
bank back in the 1920s, so ready to skin people during the Great Depression. While waiting for her to finish getting ready for the restaurant he had noticed first-class ticket stubs on the desk. Why sit with the working class? Whoever they were these days, though the paper said they were all going broke and having houses foreclosed. None of this thinking made him less stupid. How had he lost this lovely woman? A bad couple of years of stopping for drinks with cronies and coworkers and not keeping his mouth shut, mentioning a wife beating where the woman’s face had looked like a squashed plum and Diane would say, “Please, not at dinner.” Or talking about the little boy who had both his arms broken by his father for not cleaning his room. The mother called in the complaint and got slugged in the face for her “betrayal.” The father was a well-known problem so Sunderson took Eddy, a huge Finnish patrolman, along. Eddy had accidentally kicked the guy in the nuts real hard when he resisted arrest. The mother rushed off to the hospital with the kid and he and Eddy sat on the steps drinking a nasty orange pop while the father was puking on the lawn from the kick. “We also have to nail him for resisting arrest. How can I understand anyone who breaks their kid’s arms? I’d like to hang him, no shit.” Sunderson could see the level of Eddy’s anger. Cruelty to children is difficult to take. A couple of weeks later he saw the kid at a playground in his bulky arm casts. He felt tears of rage welling in his throat.

About an hour after dropping off Diane from dinner she had called and thanked him saying he had looked good and must be drinking less. This wasn’t true but he said it was. Then Diane said, “Maybe we should have tried harder.” In that last fateful year she had tried to get him to join AA but he wouldn’t do it, unable to imagine no drinks after work. He tried to backtrack when she dropped the divorce bomb but by then she was simply sick and tired of him. Marion had once done an experiment with third graders. He had passed out 3x5 cards to the class and asked them seriously to write down what they were most frightened of. He had expected bears, monsters, and dinosaurs but was very surprised when the majority wrote that they were most frightened of their parents when they were drinking. Sunderson was ashamed to think that might be what Diane felt about him. He began to hate those well-oiled sensations, but when she left it had been far too easy to succumb, ending with Marion finding him passed out on the cold floor—for some reason he had drunkenly turned the thermostat way down. He had to be taken to the hospital to be detoxed. He was deeply ashamed of the whole incident and after that bought his booze in pints rather than fifths in order to stop himself short of disaster. After all those years alcohol was still a bit of a mystery. With their limited income his father had only one drink a week and that on Saturday afternoon. Maybe then he subconsciously resolved that when he grew up he’d have as much as he wanted not understanding that in drinking more is less. Teens in his high school, the males that is, drank as much as they could get their hands on. Alcohol was the culture of glory, happiness, nonsense.

Chapter 18

After a rough night, in the morning he took Monica to the hospital to meet his mother. Not having had a functional mother herself, now in a state mental hospital, she was very nervous, and Sunderson was dreading it himself. Sunderson had hated it when Diane would say that he had “unresolved issues”
and insist on “professional help.” People from his class never spent a hundred dollars an hour to talk to a shrink. Among his acquaintances it was thought to be a scam. Only lawyers got that much.

His mother was calm and delightful to Monica and so was Berenice to his relief. No one brought up the pregnancy. When they left the hospital in the late morning he didn’t even need a drink. He should have stayed with his mother longer but he craved to get out of the hospital which he viewed as the place of death.

After the visit they took a plane via Houston to Veracruz where they rented a car and took off for a drive. They stopped in a village where they saw activity in a stadium. Rather than a corny ball game they watched a marvelous dance contest for an hour or so. Sunderson had a couple of cold beers in the hot sun and was mystified by the grace of the dancers. They couldn’t all be professionals, just local people dancing with the crowd cheering the favorites. Monica was totally swept away and stood at the sidelines keeping time with the music. When they left she was gibbering with the excitement of Mexico. Some of the lovely women caught Sunderson off guard. He had noted that his waning sexual fantasy life seemed to have died nearly for good ever since his severe stoning the year before by young people defending the Great Leader’s compound where they lived. Maybe there was a medical reason centered in the idea that the mind is much less playful after a severe trauma like the one that kept him in the Nogales hospital for a week. He had been a mass of purple swollen bruises from this custom still in use in the Middle East. He only saw the kids in passing searching for more rocks to throw. He had passed through a small canyon, perfect for ambush. Toward the end when he was prone he saw a close-up of their feet throwing bigger rocks from close range perhaps trying to kill him. Much later on when he had visited the cult he recognized a pair of red tennis shoes being worn by a pretty young girl who had murder in mind. With a cult anything is possible. The only good that came out of it was the surprisingly good food at the hospital, plus the view out the window and his crazy nurse.

Their lovely old hotel fronted the water in Veracruz. He took an old man’s short snooze and then sat on the balcony having a big glass of very old tequila. He had forgotten in his reading that Veracruz was Mexico’s leading seaport and he enjoyed watching the big freighters docked to the north. Evidently there was a big plate in the hold that rotated on an axis so that the trucks offloading cargo need not turn around within the ship. He had thought of the water as romantic but as he watched he felt like a big kid. The location of the first cattle shipped to America, Veracruz also saw the creation of cowboys, many of whom in their wild stage worked their way north to what was now the southwest United States, which was the birth of the American West. The cattle were unloaded in a lagoon just north of town and he meant to drive up there and think it over in a historical sense. He had also noticed a large aquarium near the hotel which excited him. He was clearly undertraveled and overopinionated, or so he thought.

They were hungry and ate early. He had an excellent roasted fish called snook in English and
róbalo
in Spanish. The skin was brown and crisp with lemon and garlic and the inside soft and white. It was an important game fish in Florida and when he asked where it was caught the waiter pointed south and said, “Fifty miles.” This gave Sunderson an itch to fish so far from home.

An immaculate Mexican gentleman in an elegant suit sitting at the next table said they must drive over the mountains on a back road to Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz state, where they had, he said proudly, a medical school and also a big Edward Durell Stone anthropology museum in the public park. Sunderson readily agreed to go. They talked until twilight, maybe an hour or so until Sunderson heard music in the distance. The man said it was Tuesday night and they played music so the “old people” could dance. Monica was itching to go.

On a short walk to the
zócalo
downtown Sunderson stuffed the map the man had made in his pocket. Sunderson saw some attractive
putas
near the doorway of a café where they stopped for coffee plus a flan for Monica. He was amused at the critical way they stared at the nonpro Monica. He was also amused that his retirement and his trip to Mexico were further making him forget his profession when he might very well be strolling toward the
zócalo
in Veracruz with a murderer. He had done a lot of thinking about Monica and her long-term lover Lemuel. Was her attachment to him to throw him off the scent? Maybe. No one in the three homesteads except Monica and Lemuel seemed smart or stable enough to pull off the crime wave, starting with her nursing of the fatally ill Simon who might have been hurried to the great beyond. But the main
person of interest
had to be Lemuel as he couldn’t imagine her being the origin of the plot. You had to follow your suspicions even if you liked the people involved. He had shared very little with Detective Smolens even back when it began to jell. He could see it all coming but wanted to keep control of the situation. He also didn’t want Monica to have her baby in prison.

Could Lemuel, in fact, have organized this whole thing for his mystery novel? It was certainly possible from what he had learned about writers. One professor used to like to quote Faulkner as saying “Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of broken-hearted old ladies.” Hemingway was ruthless with his children but would head to bed with a case of sniffles. Sunderson always thought Hemingway wrote very well but if you peeked under the covers you saw one of the worst pricks in the history of literature. Faulkner stayed home and drank and wasn’t into serial marriages. To Sunderson’s limited knowledge Hemingway’s personal downfall came from wanting very much to be a big shot all of the time. Back to Lemuel who was by far the brightest of the Ameses and whom Sunderson liked very much. There was the ethical question of whether he felt compelled to blow the whistle on Lemuel and Monica. Probably not. He was retired. If Smolens figured it out which was unlikely he could do as he wished. Currently his attitude toward all the murders was
good riddance to bad rubbish.

They wandered around town until they found the
zócalo
. There was a bandstand set up which they approached from the backside. A rather ratty-looking American next to them said that it was called
El Danzón
and every Tuesday evening the city as a public service set up an orchestra so that the older people could dance old-style. Sunderson and Monica watched amazed at the elegant dancers, and shuffled a bit to the music on the sidelines. Some of the women were using antique fans against their faces to brush away the heat of the evening. One of the passing older women smiled at him and he felt a small jolt at her handsomeness.

He had made two mistakes during the layover at the Houston Airport neither of which he shared with Monica. He had called Lemuel with his cell and found out that after the second fire a crippled child, Levi’s son, had been found suffocated on the second floor. The mother had been having a couple of habitual morning drinks on the porch and her first thought was of saving herself. The fire was instantaneous and spread quickly due to the planted pans of gasoline. Once out the mother remembered her child and ran back inside in her robe. The stairwell was blazing and her robe caught fire. She ran back out and was helped to roll in the dirt but was severely burned. Lemuel had heard the casual comment that the child would have had an unhappy life as a cripple. Lemuel had once pushed the little boy along the edge of the woods in a wheelbarrow to see birds. He had taught him bird watching which had delighted him. Sunderson had an instant lump in his throat. He wanted to murder the arsonist with a blow torch.

His second mistake was to errantly read the second item in the Houston newspaper. A fourteen-year-old boy in a Houston suburb had shot a seven-year-old neighbor girl five times in the stomach with a pistol for borrowing his bicycle without permission. She died in the ambulance. He felt his soul wither with the little news item which was actually vast when truly penetrated with the mind. His thoughts drifted back to theology that had nothing to say on the matter. Lemuel had been with the little Ames boy when he saw his first oriole and had told Sunderson he began hooting like an uninvented animal. What about the eighth deadly sin? It should have occurred to someone long ago. He had never believed in capital punishment because too many mistakes were regularly made in conviction but what could you do about a fourteen-year-old boy who would commit cold-blooded murder? The paper failed to mention whether he was a Boy Scout or a junior member of the NRA. There were no clues other than the implicit one that he was a member of a culture dying of dry rot. Who was the father of the boy that gave him ready access to a pistol? Sunderson knew he could drive himself senseless pondering cause and effect in such a case. The girl dead with five bullets in the gut and he had the likely vain hope that the crippled Ames boy would be quickly reincarnated as an oriole. Back in the fifth grade each student had received a packet of Audubon cards resembling baseball cards but with photos of birds rather than players, and they were let out into the woods to match them to what they saw. An oriole was a prize sighting. Some boys cheated and sat around in the woods smoking cigarettes. He told his dad about this and his dad had said, “Once a cheat, always a cheat.” He had pondered what this meant and came up with not much because he had noticed that cheaters seemed to do well at everything and being one might well prepare you for a career in business.

On the way back from the
Danzón
at the
zócalo
Monica was crying softly and he thought she was happy.

“I love Mexico. It’s the opposite of how I grew up where no one ever danced.”

This embarrassed him because Diane had to force him to let her teach him to dance. Now he liked the illusion that he was moving well to the music.

Back in the hotel room they made love briefly. He was suffering from an emotional overload and began to lose interest partway through. Afterward he went out to the balcony and sat with a very old bottle of Herradura, a treat he bought himself for being a nifty fellow. It was delicious. Far out at sea at the entry to the wide harbor there was an enormous freighter headed for port. It looked like a small, well-lit city in the dark, somewhat melancholy as if it were laden with sadness in shipping containers from China. Despite resisting, his thoughts returned to the crippled boy and the girl with bullets in her stomach. It seemed horrible to die in an ambulance. Was it your soul wailing or the ambulance? He chided himself for not having started his essay. This tiny self-criticism propelled him into taking a large gulp of tequila. Maybe he hadn’t read enough about violence but had certainly lived it. He had read a brief smattering of Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr at the public library in preparation but they made him want to go to the bar. It seemed he had read nothing appropriate to the job. Elmore Leonard couldn’t help and he had read nothing else of note of late. One evening Diane had been reading Nabokov’s very complicated
Ada
and when he asked her she as a practical joke told him that he’d love it. To her surprise he did like it saying the book reminded him of a beautiful and senseless dream. At the time he had been particularly bored with academic prose, the 1, 2, 3 aspect of historical studies—“Therefore Europe fell with a resounding splat that quivered the civilized world like currant jelly,” and so on—whereas Nabokov was splendidly whimsical.

He couldn’t remember much of
Ada
now except Lucette’s wool bathing suit. From what he could figure there was a lot of well-veiled sex in it but not the kind that gave the reader a boner or had a woman panting. Nothing was as simple and appetizing as spaghetti and meatballs, one of his favorite dishes.

Anyway, he couldn’t have spent more than a half hour in the library looking at Tillich and Niebuhr but unlike the Michigan State library in college there weren’t any hordes of lovely women hanging out. He had checked out the Tillich to please the woman at the desk who was like a car salesman making a sale. Who would read theology (except him) if it was as dry as cremains?

What did you know after you had read that there were eight hundred thousand casualties at Verdun? His relentless reading of history proved disappointing in retrospect, perhaps why he wanted to write about violence as a sin. Eight hundred thousand was just a number in the most fatality-racked battle in human history. He used to idly wonder if a single transvestite had been involved, a young woman who desperately wanted to be a man at war.

In college he had become absurdly fascinated in a class with a girl who seemed to be the most depressed person he had ever met. They had a couple of perfunctory dates going to foreign films at the State Theatre, Bergman films, which seemed to push her deeper into her slump. She didn’t drink because it made her depressed so they had coffee at Kewpee’s, wretched coffee but a pleasant place after watching
The Virgin Spring
which broke a little ice within her. He tried without success to penetrate her mind but she would only say that “there’s nothing in my life worth talking about.” He had drawn a blank but a few days later on a fine spring day they had taken a long walk on the Red Cedar River and she became voluble. Her parents had died in an auto accident when she was twelve. The three kids were farmed out to aunts and uncles. Her uncle had raped her “a lot.” She told a teacher and he was prosecuted which made her whole larger family angry with her rather than at the uncle. This was mystifying to a young girl. After that she lived with the teacher, an older woman, and she studied hard and won a scholarship to Michigan State. That evening they ate a Chinese dinner and she loaned him several of her favorite books: Dostoyevsky’s
Notes from the Underground
, Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights,
and Djuna Barnes’s
Nightwood
. As a junior detective he quickly read all three looking for a clue to depression other than death and rape. He admired the books but they certainly put him in a slump. How could anyone imagine the minds of any of them? Heathcliff for instance, or “I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man,” or Barnes spinning her tale of darkness. Of the three Barnes was the best stylistically for him to imitate in writing about his eighth deadly sin.