The Big Seven by Jim Harrison Read Free Book Online

a sucker, letting a sick girl twist you this way and that.” She handed him a tissue to wipe his tears then walked out without looking back.
    Sunderson felt better as he ate his dinner, the questionable relief of confession. This is not to say that he didn’t also feel stupid but there was a sense that he could also breathe freely again. He reminded himself errantly that he intended to read the New Testament again to see if he still believed any of the stuff from his childhood churchgoing. There had been an unpleasant reminder early that morning when he had pulled the book in his library to watch his neighbor’s wife doing some yoga in her nightie and got a clear view of her nude butt reared up in posture. He gasped from the strength of his lust. She seemed to look at him and he wondered if she had caught on. He thought of masturbation but look what his peeking had got him.
    Almost comically he began with his last bite of dinner to think of spiritual life. He certainly wasn’t sure what it was except in a literary sense. It was the one thing Marion wouldn’t talk about. He claimed that the spiritual life gained power by being kept secret. Once they were having a roaring political argument while having lunch at Marion’s cabin when Marion had suddenly stopped and laughed. He wouldn’t continue to Sunderson’s disappointment who was enjoying himself. Marion said, “Nothing but child abuse is more disgusting than the U.S. Congress. Just now I remembered I was having a nice lunch in the middle of a galaxy. Each night before bed I step out and look at the stars. It’s good for humility. If it’s cloudy I have a childish faith that they are still there so it doesn’t matter that it’s cloudy.” That was as close as Marion had ever come to saying something spiritual. That afternoon while hiking Sunderson remembered what Marion had said about being in the middle of a galaxy. He was an earthbound man and if he had any spiritual life it came from close observation of the natural world. The stars were beyond him. Diane had a nice telescope but he almost never looked through it. Once he had looked at the full moon and it frankly scared him. How can this be, he wondered. The mystery in his life came from water. In school they had clumsily just said H 2 O, but from early on Sunderson had been hypnotized by creeks, rivers, lakes, though it was mostly moving water that mystified him. He was openly frightened by Lake Superior which had killed men in his family who had been commercial fishermen. Even on a placid summer day Lake Superior seemed endlessly ominous. Maybe it was the moving water being frozen that made him so restless over Mona.

Chapter 5
    That spring Sunderson found himself an inexpensive cabin on a small lake two counties to the west in the area that the Great Leader, a cult leader that Sunderson had investigated, had had his headquarters and longhouse. Marion deeply disapproved saying the area had too much bad blood. Two game wardens had been killed there in the past twenty years, there were many marijuana plantations, and there were quarreling families, all marksmen who were given to shooting at each other, not to kill but the bullet landing close enough to be an effective warning. Marion even told him the middle school had had problems with sixth graders carrying pistols. There had been a nonfatal shoot-out in the school yard between children of opposing families. With all of the mass shootings in the news everyone thought the situation was bound to escalate but there wasn’t anything obvious to cure the situation. The reason the cabin was so cheap was that the owner from Iron Mountain was eager to get away from the unpleasant surroundings. Sunderson was not dissuaded because he wanted very much to fish the area and the price was right, about thirty thousand, which would leave him some to spare from the blackmail money, plus as a local he had always been able to get along with backcountry people. In all his