The Great Leader (12 page)

The Tucson gun store was a mud bath, festooned with patriotic and anti-Obama signs, including the usual live free or die. The clerk was plump, florid, and middle-aged smug.

“I need a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver,” Sunderson said.

“You look like you need a pistol,” the clerk chortled.

“Thanks.” Sunderson was impatient to get out of the place and pointed at the pistol he wanted under the glass.

It turned out that despite his expired detective license and still current Michigan concealed weapons permit he couldn't buy a pistol because he was a nonresident. He was pissed off enough to feel his temples pounding. The clerk waited for the bad news to sink in, chortled again, and gave Sunderson directions to a public library.

“You get a library card and that's proper Arizona ID and then I sell you the pistol.”

Sunderson was jangled at the insanity of it all but calmed down sweetly at the library because the desk clerk girl, though homely, smelled like lilac, a fatally sexy scent for him. He felt like a daffy old fuck as he proudly showed his library card from back home but she frowned at the Nogales address he gave.

“I love the next town, Patagonia,” she said.

“I do too. I eat menudo there every morning.”

“I can't eat tripe.”

“It restores your strength.”

When he walked out after the second pass at the gun store he felt the unpleasant heft of the .38 in a shoulder holster thinking that the .38 had been following him around for nearly forty years like the longest-term tumor possible. Back in the car and heading to Miss Saigon for a
pho
fix he pulled over near the University of Arizona to make a cell call. Grungy young men and beautiful young women were passing on the sidewalk in such profusion that he thought about the failure of birth control in the world at large. He called a colleague back in Marquette.

“Sunderson! Gett'n much?”

“More ass than a toilet seat. I need information on an Arizona detective by the name of Roberto Kowalski.”

“Hold on, I'll do it as we speak.”

The colleague, divorced twice, always gave the staff the impression that he was a prime pussy chaser but this was unlikely.

“No one by that name in Arizona law enforcement,” was the answer.

“Thanks for the favor.”

“You're missing deer hunting.”

Sunderson couldn't think of a thing to say so he pushed the end
button. He sat outside again at Miss Saigon smoking two cigarettes in a row and realizing that he had been a little suspicious of Kowalski, not at the first bruised meeting in the hospital, but the second time, at his apartment. The guy lacked a certain tinge of the genuine because he didn't speak the shorthand that detectives use with each other. His cell rang just as the waitress was bringing a variety
pho
that included tripe, also pork meatballs. It was Lucy.

“I'm not crying anymore darling but I've been thinking of our questionable night.”

“I was worried about your Kleenex budget. Look, I'm in a meeting. I'll call you back.” He quickly turned the phone off before she could respond, wondering about the faulty aspects of memory. Why didn't she say that the night had been rotten rather than the euphemism of “questionable”? If you're lonely any contact is better than none.

Two hours later he had found another small temporary apartment on a hillside in Patagonia. It was a room and half, a bit tight, but there were chickens in the backyard and a couple of rabbit hutches. His parents had supplemented their protein budget with a lot of fried rabbit. On the way to Nogales to pick up his meager belongings he reluctantly passed the Wagon Wheel Saloon. It would have to wait for later.

Alfred was in the yard and told Sunderson that soon after he had left Mr. Kowalski had stopped by to fetch his precious cigarette lighter.

“Did you ID him?” Sunderson asked, alarmed.

“Well, no. I mean you guys were together an hour last night. I admit I glanced in the window and he was on the phone at the kitchen table.”

Sunderson didn't bother telling Alfred that Kowalski was a phony. Alfred was upset that he was leaving but pleased when Sunderson told him to keep the rest of the month's rent.

“Where are you going?”

“It would be unsafe for you to know.”

“I get it. You're undercover?”

“Obviously not far enough.”

He packed his suitcase and papers from Mona. Nothing in the apartment looked
tossed
though the papers appeared in less disarray than he had left them. The Great Leader must have been poor reading for Kowalski but now he had Mona's e-mail. He rang her up.

“Don't respond to anyone in this area except me.”

“Okay darling but why?”

“I'm being tailed and he'll try to find me through your e-mail.”

“That's impossible but it sounds exciting. I have to write a paper on Emily Dickinson and she sucks.”

“No she doesn't. She's wonderful.” Sunderson had been fond of Emily Dickinson ever since he was a sophomore in an American literature class at Michigan State.

“That joke really worked with Marion. I did a little nude dance then I called him. I heard his cell phone hit the floor.”

“Good job.”

“Your fucking friend Carla wants me to come over for dinner. My therapist will be there. Just us three girls. Maybe they'll try to gang bang me.”

“Don't go. But if you do, snoop around. Keep your clothes on.”

“Of course Daddy.”

He hung up and called Melissa. She had been going to pick him up for fishing in the morning but as a precaution he didn't want her to have his new address and told her he would meet her at Patagonia Lake. She was flirtatious on the phone, which made him suspicious though he cautioned himself about letting his paranoia ruin the fishing trip and its remote sexual possibilities. He was on the way out of the apartment and bidding good-bye to Alfred's wife Molly who was dusting her roses for aphids when a FedEx truck pulled up. He had nearly missed the books Marion was sending.

“My second cycle of chemo isn't working,” Molly said. “So this is good-bye.”

“I'm sorry,” Sunderson said, feeling paralyzed.

“Do you believe in the afterlife?”

“I haven't figured it out. I guess I'm not very religious.”

“I don't think anyone has. Someone said, I forgot who, that if nothing happens we won't know it. I'll miss flowers, birds, and lemonade.”

He gave her a hug and got in the car itching for a double whiskey and thinking that there wasn't much left of her. She was made up of Tinkertoys, fragile sticks out of which you could make little buildings and bridges but not human bodies. He recalled that he and his brother Robert had found a recently dead fawn, it didn't stink yet, and they had given it what they had thought to be a proper burial. Molly couldn't weigh much more than the fawn that Sunderson had dropped in the shallow hole he had dug. There wasn't much of a thunk when the fawn hit the bottom of its grave.

The consolation, however slight, was the heft of the package of books Marion had sent. He opened the package in the parking lot and selected
Playing Indian
by Philip Deloria, which Marion had loaned him a couple of years before, rather than one of the new ones like Jeffrey Johnson's
They Are All Red Out Here: Socialist Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1895-1925
, or Kyle Wilkison's
Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914
, and certainly not the new edition of Reinhold Niebuhr's
The Irony of American History,
which he had skimmed through years before and which had precipitated a deep funk.

Over his first double and beer chaser at the bar he read Marion's letter, the first half of which advised him to read the Deloria, which would help him understand the Great Leader's use of faux Indian “rigmarole.” Marion said that many non–Indian Americans had used their fantasies about Indians to acquire a “hokum” spirituality. The second half of the letter was a comic recounting of Marion pulling the Deloria book out from above Sunderson's desk and seeing the nude Mona at her morning rituals. “Don't even try it, friend. It's very upsetting and she caught me red-handed. I drove off to work shamefaced and with a hard-on like a toothache. I thought of a scholarly article by a psychoanalyst named Sullivan that said that at their best poetry and religion push back the boundaries of the ineffable. Well, so can a woman's body.”

The barmaid Amanda brought him his second double. He had caught a nice breast view when she had bent over to get ice for a margarita.

“What are you staring at, asshole?”

“I'm staring into my mind. I can't see it very well,” he said.

“That's cute but a little evasive,” she laughed.

Sunderson felt a trace of fear. Two doubles were enough when bad people might very well be tracking you. It was five in the afternoon and he knew he should eat an early dinner, do some reading, and embrace sobriety. From want of good sense he went to the Mexican restaurant and ate yet another bowl of menudo, sprinkling it liberally with the blistering hot and flavorful chiltepins. He was proud of becoming acclimated though it was easiest when he was in Italy with Diane and liked everything he ate.

In his new digs he laid out his books including White's “
It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own
”
: A New History of the American West
and Mackay's
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
from his suitcase. History books were his central solace in life along with brook trout fishing but on this night history had abruptly fled. He figured the problem was that the sense of his own peril forced him to consider only life in the present tense. He tried the television news but his mistrust of the instant history of the media was jangling. He couldn't find a movie suited to his mood and had to settle on a cop film only because it featured Robert Duvall, his doppelganger, who was uniformly credible in movies. Sunderson almost never watched cop movies because they lacked the visceral aspects of actuality. Once while in training in Detroit he had visited a downriver dope house with two cops and they had found two severed heads on a kitchen table, both with bulging purple tongues and lots of flies because the heads had been there a couple of days.

He was thirsty but stupidly didn't drink water because he didn't want to get up to pee with his geezer's overactive kidneys. The gout struck at midnight, an easy self-diagnosis because it felt like a rat was chewing on his right big toe. He hobbled to the bathroom and took two colchicine pills plus an Oxycontin for the pain. His daily allopurinol had lost the battle with gout and now the crystallized purines in his toe were grating against the nerve endings. It had obviously been the tripe because he remembered tripe had been on the gout list his doctor had given him. It was usually doe liver during deer season. Like his father before him Sunderson simply couldn't resist deer liver.

Sleep was fitful at best. To Sunderson the only reliable drugs were alcohol and tobacco and even ibuprofen and aspirin were suspicious, varying as they did the dream life that amused and fascinated him. His main worry was whether he'd be able to screw Melissa on the long shot of an opportunity. Toe anguish isn't sexy and a rowboat isn't a hospitable place for intercourse. Early in their marriage when camping he and Diane had tried it on Lake Gogebic but they had given up, laughing at the awkwardness. If he were religious, he thought, he could at least pray for warm weather so he could see a little skin. He finally slept because luckily for once he was old and with aging you gave up trying to account for everything that might happen, the hopeless attempt to balance the hundreds of variables with your brain's billion-roomed house between which there are not nearly enough doors. Once again he realized that life had too many moving parts.

He was at the Patagonia Lake marina a half hour before Melissa was due. By Michigan standards the lake was dinky indeed but made up for it by its beautiful mountain setting. He had to half drag his aching foot but was eager to row while Melissa fished. He reached the dock from the parking lot with difficulty, his big toe and to a lesser extent the whole front part of his foot feeling like the pulse of a toothache at the root of a loose tooth, certainly better than the grueling pain at the beginning of an attack. At least gout didn't entail an emotional hangover. Gout was something you did to yourself usually by willful inattention. The list of prohibited foods was taped in clear sight above his desk. The problem was that pain is abstract until it arrives and couldn't compete with a skillet of quick-fried doe liver that had been sliced thin. His father had told him that liver was the healthiest of meats for building strong bodies but then liver was also the cheapest meat a relatively poor family could afford. He had so wanted to be strong like his father who could easily lift one of cousin Charlie's boxes of whitefish that weighed three hundred pounds.

Sunderson sat there on the dock near rowboat number seven that the marina clerk advised was the best of the dozen or so. It was clearly a piece of shit in the long line of rowboats in his life. The mythology of liver and rowboats faded when he thought of the pungency of Deloria's
Playing Indian,
which he had leafed through in the midst of his pain. Most academic history books he read were real prose clunkers and sometimes Diane would read aloud a sentence or two from them and laugh. Diane liked to listen to Leonard Cohen while reading her favorite author Loren Eiseley. He liked both but not at the same time. He began to doze from his drug combo of colchicine and Oxycontin to which he had added Imodium. Colchicine could be a violent purge. When Melissa had called earlier in the morning to ask what kind of juice he wanted with lunch he had said, “A pint of vodka,” another questionable ingredient.