Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

She turned around and marched up the street.

Sunderson felt sweat oozing from every pore though the air was cool. He went inside and refreshed his drink yet again. He was tempted to cut and run for his trout cabin, but it was only two days from deer season when the orange army would invade the north. He called Marion anyway. They usually opened the season without much interest at his cabin. But as the phone rang with no answer he remembered that Marion was in Hawaii with his wife for a big indigenous conference. Everyone in the Midwest except Sunderson wanted to go to Hawaii, though it interested him slightly more thinking about it having its own native population. There was the idea that he should move to a remote place out of harm’s way. Early in his detective career he would have been happy indeed to bust someone for his current behavior. It would likely bring a ten-year sentence.

Now his sweat turned cold and even more ample. He went in, poured yet another drink, and then pushed it aside and gathered his gear for a cold trip to the cabin. There were snow flurries already up there though the weather report hadn’t predicted anything dire. Winter was coming on so quickly. He packed his rifle and shells in order to at least pretend he was deer hunting. He had long ago lost his taste for it so cherished when he was a teenager and they got the first few days of deer season off school. He prized the memory of shooting a big buck near town when he was sixteen. It dressed out at two hundred pounds and those were hard times. His dad had shot a little spikehorn but Sunderson proudly delivered a real hunk of meat for the family. Like many northern folks they all loved venison and his mother regularly made a stew out of the lesser bits with a big lard crust on top he adored that soaked up the gravy. There was also a nice corn relish a cousin sent up from Indiana. It was virtually impossible to grow sweet corn in Munising or Grand Marais.

He went to bed early very drunk and woke up for the trip very hungover. He couldn’t make it past a single piece of toast. On the way out of town he would pick up a few steaks and a dozen pasties. While he was packing the car Barbara rode past on her bicycle on the way to school, the tenth grade he reminded himself with self-loathing.

“I got time for a quickie if you like,” she said, getting off her bike and revealing her winsome crotch.

“I’m too hungover,” he said feeling his bilge rising. She ignored this, walked into his house, and leaned over the kitchen table lifting her skirt and dropping her panties to the ankles. He couldn’t resist and then off she went whistling her way to school. He was suddenly exhausted and sat on the sofa reading the morning Detroit Free Press that had been delivered by the mouthy paperboy.

He was pleased to read in a longish article that the former football hero Ziegler was being charged with both assault and illegal entry. He paid fines to get out of the rest but his daughter Margaret, the legal tenant, had refused to open the door, or so she testified, saying that Ziegler and her brother saw Sky Blast standing behind her and broke down the front door. Ziegler threw the first punches, a critical matter in charging him, and Michael grazed him in the head with a bat, but Sky Blast was in fine shape with some martial arts training. Margaret knocked her brother over the head with a rolling pin which turned the tide as he had Sky Blast in a sometimes fatal choke hold from behind. Margaret had called the police and when they arrived Sky Blast was busy throwing both father and son off the front porch. All were arrested. Ziegler was a bloody mess from face punches and Michael had a minor skull fracture for which he would never forgive his sister. Sky Blast was put in a cast for a broken arm and knuckles but had clearly defended himself well against the two big bullies.

The real news was that a small town cop in the Bay Area of San Francisco had been surfing the Net and recognized Sky Blast’s photo as that of a man known locally as Roshi Simmons who had an open arrest warrant for embezzling a large amount of money from a Bay Area Buddhist organization. Extradition orders were being filed. So Sky Blast had feet of clay, Sunderson thought, a little embarrassed by his amusement. Ziegler would be happy about that no matter how badly he and his pride were injured.

Sunderson felt mildly suicidal, a new emotion for him as the least self-judgmental person imaginable. He had not been able to resist Barbara once, even looking at ten in the hoosegow. He decided to put off his departure one more day, wondering at the absurd mystery of love and lust and his own questionable behavior in the face of them. Helpless in the world, he thought. None of the pretty girls were available to him in high school so maybe he was living the unlived life. He knew even as he thought it that it was a lie. He’d never unlived life. Without Diane divorcing him none of this could have happened, starting with Mona. But his dad used to say, “No excuses” and there really weren’t any in this case. You walk away from something wrong in an ideal world. He hadn’t done so.

He was sure he had loved Diane during their more than twenty-five years of marriage. He had fucked up the whole thing with drinking and talking ad nauseam about the grim aspects of his work as a detective for the state police, the many wife and child beatings and sexually abused children. She simply couldn’t bear that dose of reality and it was sadistic of him to unburden himself because he couldn’t bear it either. The culture said it was very wrong to make love to his fifteen-year-old gardener. Making love to the married neighbor lady was not recommended either but was at least legal.

He awoke at 7:00 a.m. to an unpleasant call from Ziegler who demanded he drive to Ann Arbor and pick up Margaret.

“Have you forgotten you fired me?” Sunderson replied.

“You’re hired again. Go get her pronto.”

“Fuck you big shot.” Sunderson hung up on him.

The second call, to his cell, was far worse. It was his quasi-friend the prosecutor. He explained in painful detail that Barbara’s parents had taken her to a female shrink, new in town, and she had told her everything about her affair with Sunderson.

“She’s lying,” Sunderson said impulsively.

“Doesn’t sound like it,” the prosecutor said. “You got your ass in a sling. Come in to see me this morning.” He knew the prosecutor was bending the rules in that he hadn’t yet been arrested.

“I can’t. I’m at my cabin deer hunting.”

“I’ll give you until Friday. That’s four days. Be here. I don’t want to have to get a warrant and have you picked up.”

“Thank you,” Sunderson said. He hung up, then went into the toilet and puked up breakfast. Except for drinking, he hadn’t vomited since a bad case of Asian flu twenty years before. This was a special occasion.

He drove off for the cabin feeling as if he weighed nothing in the front seat of the car. He pulled off in an empty restaurant parking lot on the way west of town and called the bartender near the cabin, who looked after the place for him, to warn of his arrival. His mind was naturally jumbled and totally out of focus. He thought of Brazil but was not sure he was ready for such a foreign lifestyle. His other option was Nogales, Mexico, right across the border which he knew only required a driver’s license though they were becoming stricter. But then again there was no real fishing around Nogales except pond catfish. Brazil would be the safest place as they wouldn’t extradite him but whoever heard of jungle trout. The poignant fear was that if he went to prison at sixty-six years of age he likely wouldn’t get out until age seventy-six and by then he’d probably be too weak to fish and wade swift rivers. This put both stomach and brain in an ugly turmoil. What did he have in mind whazzing mere girls? Simple dumb lust whatever that was. He couldn’t pin it down. It was like a stomachache you never get rid of from age twelve to seventy-plus possibly.