Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

More than forty-five years later his temples still burned at the memory of lifting her prom dress. Lust didn’t seem to go away. According to Marion, the curdled lust for Missy was still haunting him. You could feel practically sick with it. He had with Barbara wearing the T-shirt and sliding it up so that the prime rump was on display. That was as tough on his system as the time he’d made love with Mona in Paris. It was right after the rock ’n’ roller left her for the young girls and Sunderson had been overwhelmed by her advances, he told himself. Diane had been angry but had eventually forgiven him because she knew Mona had used every hook and crook to seduce him and when it came to sex nearly all men were fools, him especially, which she’d learned from his slavish sexuality in their marriage. Now sexually sated with Barbara he, of course, could think of giving up sex with her.

He did however feel a remote tickle over the idea of anal sex, which he’d read about but done only once in college. According to his reading Brazilian girls considered it a birth control measure. But what if he were careless with Barbara and they ended up at the ER with a Beethoven chorus singing shame before a squad of police showed up?

He shivered and turned Barbara over on her belly. “Don’t even think about it,” he said to himself. He put the tip of his cock there.

“Don’t even think about it,” she said. “This coach over in Duluth did it there to a girl. She ended up going to a hospital that night. Think of explaining that to my parents. The coach had five kids and went to the same Catholic church as the girl’s family. My aunt goes there and told me.”

The story hit uncomfortably close to home. He asked what happened. “Nothing,” she said. “They prayed a lot over her sore butt with the priest.”

“What would your dad do?”

“Get out his deer rifle. He’s real religious. He would shoot you square in the head, that’s for sure. I might try it tomorrow with lots of lotion.”

Sunderson was back to thinking of the seven deadly sins with the help of her dad’s rifle. He wasn’t coming close to her tomorrow. He’d be on a long hike in the woods if he could pick up a true friend from the dog pound.

It was noon and they were famished when they go out of bed, him with an aching prostate gland. He made them hamburgers from frozen patties, not a preference but all he had on hand.

“Fucking makes you real hungry,” she said nonchalantly. They dozed on the sofa for fifteen minutes and then she went out and attacked her weeding. She despised the man Sunderson was working for and referred to his daughters as “rich bitches” and their brother as a “nerd” and a “dweeb,” slang he wasn’t familiar with. Later she took a shower and had a quarrelsome call with her mother concluding, “No I am not dressed properly. I’m showing Mr. Sunderson my bare ass. Old men like to look at bare asses.” She slammed the phone down. “With Mother everything is propriety. Though my wicked aunt told me bawdy stories about her when she was in high school. Evidently she fucked the football coach on a junior camping trip.”

Later that afternoon Sunderson made a trip to the grocery for some Stouffer’s mac and cheese of which he always ate two packages, and then at the bar he ran into an old friend and his family sitting in the corner with a menu for the Italian place down the street trying to figure out if they could afford dinner. This embarrassed Sunderson with his ample pension and secret money from blackmailing the rock ’n’ roller’s rich mother. He supposedly saved the kid from a sex abuse charge for which he had received fifty grand. Little did she know that the charge she paid to protect him from was just a mixture of rumors a college friend at the LAPD had told him. They had been watching the rock musician hard but didn’t have anything that would stick. And here Sunderson was chasing his tail about sex while millions were unemployed including his friend. His educated wife worked checkout at the supermarket while he was one of a legion of out of work computer programmers and a fine angler. Their son Billy had Down syndrome but their daughter Wendy was a straight-A student headed in the fall to Kalamazoo College on a big scholarship. When Billy saw Sunderson he brayed and aimed his finger around the room shouting bang-bang in honor of Sunderson’s former profession. His sister calmed him down. Sunderson lied and said he had just won two hundred bucks in the lottery and wanted some greaseball lasagna so let’s all go to dinner. He could tell that the mother didn’t believe him but everyone was suddenly happy. He had a quick double and off they went. It was a chilly evening and he had a sense of winter approaching although the day had been pleasant.

Later that evening with considerable prostate discomfort he called another fishing friend who was a doctor. He told Sunderson to stop fucking so much. Sunderson lamely replied that he didn’t know you could fuck too much. At dinner he had sat next to the attractive, flirtatious daughter and managed to get excited and sighed in despair. She was the daughter of a friend, he reminded himself. He slept poorly that night waking again and again to Barbara’s delightful odor on the bedclothes. He thought over and over of his teen desire to become a Maori warrior in New Zealand where there was also a great supply of brown trout. By morning he had decided to control his obsessions by traveling more, even to New York City again to spend a week at the Museum of Natural History with several trips to Katz’s delicatessen. When he was growing up his father would occasionally make him Jewish-style pickled tongue in a stone crock which he loved.

He decided to fly to Ann Arbor and rent a car, rather than make the laborious drive, and soak his wealthy client with the expense. He didn’t want to face the airport twice so he bought a one-way ticket and thought he’d go fishing on the way back. He arranged to meet Mona at Zingerman’s where he always had a brisket sandwich with extra hot horseradish, an inevitable gut bomb but sacrifices must be made. Mona proudly announced she had bought him a pile of used janitorial supplies at a yard sale. A man must have a professional mop. That morning Barbara had dropped by for what she called a “quickie” which his prostate scarcely needed. He suspected that her athletic abilities promoted her sexual energy. He would need a long trip to simply recover.

He checked into a small suite at the Campus Inn where he slept twenty minutes to handle his sandwich, then drove over to the church basement to unload the supplies of his new craft. There were long neat rows of zafus and zabutons, Zen sitting cushions that Sunderson thought very uncomfortable. He had sat on the one Diane owned that she kept stored in a closet and had fallen crudely off to the side which meant to him that he wasn’t built for meditation. They packed the janitor stuff in a coat closet. Sky Blast and the Ziegler girl came in the basement door with her carrying a heavy load of groceries. He wasn’t the grocery-carrying type and wore a look of seedy reverence in his black robe, the slack look of “Isn’t life wonderful” that one sees in nickel orientalists to whom the universe is a spiritual playground. Mona introduced them.

“We can afford to pay you very little.”

“I’m volunteering because of my curiosity about Zen. My ex-wife was a practioner and it seemed to do her a lot of good.”

Sky Blast looked at him with a trace of cynicism then let out with a shattering howler monkey screech that startled Sunderson witless. He was answered by Margaret in the kitchen who was equally loud.

“We are cleansing the dead air,” Sky Blast announced with pretension. Sunderson went into the kitchen to help Margaret unpack the groceries. She was a big girl with a reasonably shaped fanny. It was strictly vegetarian stuff with lots of fruit, vegetables, juice, and not a trace of the pork sausage he valued so highly. There were also big bags of a Tibetan cereal called tsampa. He would have to make his own breakfast before he came to work. Michael Ziegler the lout was making eyes at Mona, who regarded him as one does a dog turd.