The Great Leader (10 page)

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.

1. 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.
   
2. 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.