The Great Leader (18 page)

“Where in Nebraska?” Sunderson asked.

“How should I know? Nebraska is Nebraska. Anyway, he got real friendly when I let on that I was rich and the fifty grand wasn't out of the question. He said that it appeared I was already on level twenty-three of the hundred levels of spirituality. Then he shocked me and suggested that I give him a blow job. He wouldn't come in my mouth because he had to save his fluids for younger women who needed them more. He said that sperm is the most powerful fluid in the world. I thought fast because I can't blow a man unless I actually like him so I told him I couldn't because I had a tooth pulled yesterday. So that's that.”

“Thanks. You did a fine job.”

“A little bad news. Xavier is coming home tonight and he's real pissed that we met at the Wagon Wheel so be careful.”

Sunderson's heart dropped in temperature and he pushed the off button. Jesus Christ. He called Mona and asked her to book him a flight home via Minneapolis or Chicago, whichever was soonest. She said that he sounded scared and that he had to pony up fourteen hundred bucks for her new Apple. Within a minute she had him on the dawn plane for Minneapolis with a two-hour wait for Marquette. He said fine and she said she'd call Marion and make them a nice dinner.

He wasn't thinking clearly and stopped at the Wagon Wheel for a pick-me-up. He couldn't help himself and asked Amanda how Xavier could have known that Melissa met him at the bar. She was evasive.

“She needs a lot of looking after. He's a good stockbroker and a good brother though he's up to no good in Mexico. She just lost her volunteer job at the hospital for stealing drugs. Last summer she got busted twice for leaving her kid in the hot car. In July she ran off with some motorcyclists from the Aryan Brotherhood in Idaho and Xavier retrieved her in bad shape. Last winter she tried to board a plane for Hermosillo with a pistol in her purse and had to be restrained. She had to go to a clinic for a month to stay out of jail. There's more. I was thinking of warning you but I figured that you were just another horny old fool.”

“Thanks.” He bought a travel pint and sped home to pack. Kowalski had tossed his apartment again, which bored him, leaving a note saying “Where's my cell?” Sunderson had dropped it out of the car at the Nogales interchange hoping that some kid would find it and call China. He had wondered idly how Melissa was acceptable to the Aryan Brotherhood but then an attractive woman has a passport to anywhere.

He was packed in fifteen minutes and on his way to the Tucson airport where he intended to sleep in the car in a parking lot. Mona had shocked him with the price of a first-class ticket, the only seating available. He was sorely overspending his retirement income but then it would be cheap again when he got home. The mountain road between Sonoita and Interstate 10 that led to Tucson spooked him in the moonlight. All of his life he had been drawn reverentially to the moon but down here it could look malevolent. This was of course part of the United States but it was considerably more alien in some respects than the northern Italy he had traveled through with Diane. Descending Sonoita pass he saw a group of illegal migrants huddled in a ditch and they reminded him of drawings of the starving Irish during the potato famine who were not considered human by their English landlords.

The parking lot as a sleeping place didn't pan out. It was a cool night in Tucson, around freezing, and he had to keep cranking up the car heater for warmth. It reminded him of parking on a country road with a girl in the winter when he was in high school. He had paid a hard-earned hundred bucks for his '47 Dodge but the interior was large and airy and the heater worked poorly. He recalled his cold hands on hot thighs, which was a pleasanter image than his head in a bloody toilet. He had no real idea of what to think about the relationship between Melissa and her brother. She had said that Xavier loved Mozart but then so did Goering and Goebbels. Anything was possible. A priest had doubtless said mass minutes after buggering a ten-year-old boy. He had also noted that Melissa didn't seem upset that Xavier had beat her husband to death.

At midnight he bit the bullet and checked into one of the dozens of motels surrounding the airport, eighty-eight bucks for a single with the usual print of a sad-eyed donkey wearing a garland of flowers, plus another of a pretty senorita drawing water from a well in old Mexico. Marion and his wife had traveled to Mexico a number of times during Christmas vacations to avoid questionable family gatherings, and loved Michoacán and Oaxaca which were obviously without border problems. Marion had seen sad-eyed donkeys but none wearing flowers.

He set up the desk pot for morning coffee and allowed himself a single nightcap from his whiskey pint desperately not wanting to miss his dawn departure. He put his revolver in his suitcase to be checked but his niggling paranoia about Xavier delayed unloading it until morning. When he was lying in Nogales hospital as a big lump of bruises Melissa had been a vision of delight. In the bookcase in her house in Nogales he had noted a number of well-thumbed volumes of Marquis de Sade, which had seemed quirkish. He surfed through the TV channels watching ads for both Scientology and a new, revolutionary pill that would extend your dick. He thought that there was a will to power in both religion and sex that seemed transparently biological, and then money had always been the sole ticket to the future in the culture, with education trailing off far behind. Xavier had belittled the smallness of his pension but then the richer people of Marquette, and more so wealthy tourists, had never excited envy in him. The woods and creeks were free and cheap whiskey and plonk, Diane's word, were sufficient. The closest he came to the delight of dancing was when he was walking along a creek looking for brook trout pools. For the first time he felt deeply that life might be good after retirement. He might even return to the Southwest for winter walking and camping though far out of range of Xavier and Melissa, say on the east side of the Chiricahuas where the Apaches once rode like the wind. Camping was cheap. Just before the divorce when Diane had received her inheritance he had been embarrassed by the large amount. Given his background it seemed unnatural.

Chapter 12

He only fully exhaled when the plane was in the air. He was beside the window and as the plane curved he could see Nogales, Lake Patagonia, and the road to Patagonia. There was no apparent reason for taking southern Arizona from the Apaches except to raise skinny cows and mine unproductive mines but then much the same could be said for the Upper Peninsula where all the virgin timber had been cut and the earth hoovered of its wealth. Both Apaches and Ojibway had lost out to invading armies and the postwar economy had razed the landscape.

There was a certain indecipherable smugness in first class that he was trying to ignore. He had heard that drinks were free but then 7:00 a.m. was a tad early. He relented and had a Bloody Mary out of relief, he supposed, from escaping Xavier and his murderous thugs not to speak of his daffy sister. The expensively dressed matron next to him was tittering over the new
Vogue
with its ornately dressed stick girls. Diane had been a subscriber.

“I'm not going to get a boner from this,” he had said to Diane leafing through the pages. Occasionally he liked irritating her with vulgarity.

“That's scarcely the purpose of the magazine,” she had said.

When his seatmate seemed to frown at his dawn drink he wished he could fart but he was not a fart-on-demand kind of guy. Breakfast was an omelet of aerated faux eggs with two tiny sausages that had no pork flavor. He noted that his neighbor was wisely eating Cheerios with kiwi, a fruit he considered fraudulent.

“We winter in Tucson but I have to go back to Minneapolis to see my ill sister. Have you been vacationing?”

“Yes. In Nogales and Patagonia. Lovely places.”

“Really? I've heard they're quite dangerous.”

“That's nonsense. They're both safer than Minneapolis. The violence is in the drug cartel wars across the border. Americans are always afraid of being mugged even after being scammed out of trillions by the financial community.”

“My husband is a banker,” she said in a mild huff abandoning her Cheerios for an article on two-thousand-dollar handbags.

That ended the conversation. He fell into a deep sleep in which he dreamed music, mostly a Scriabin piano piece that Diane loved that was played only with the left hand. He had studied the Russian Revolution so deeply in college and after that he sometimes dreamt of Russia though the idea of actually visiting the country seemed to be too large an undertaking.

Though groggy with sleep he felt at home in the Minneapolis airport, which was filled with the thickish, whey-faced citizens of the Great North, so many of whom he thought must be Scandinavian, or Germans from farm country. They all seemed to have a pork-and-potatoes businesslike sadness about them. Doubtless they chuckled now and then rather than laughing. His spirits rose further when he had a pot roast sandwich, the food of his childhood, along with a Bloody Mary and a beer. He managed to sleep again between Minneapolis and Marquette despite a bad-weather advisory that normally would have worried him. Dying in a plane crash had always seemed inappropriately modern to him whereas drowning in Lake Superior, like so many relatives who were commercial fishermen, was a logical conclusion to their profession.

Marquette was admirably bleak with a few feet of snow and a pleasant early-winter temperature of ten degrees and it began to get dark at four in the afternoon. He felt the hopeless sentimentality of the familiar driving up the snowy alley to the back porch of his house. He stood looking straight up at the snowflakes heading downward at his face. There was a sense of belonging, of being where he was supposed to be, that had been absurdly absent in the Southwest. He inhaled the cold air deeply and coughed waving at Mona who was waving from his brightly lit kitchen window. When he opened the door from the porch to the kitchen the smell of the roast pork shoulder and mashed rutabaga was wonderfully strong. They embraced and she slid his hand down onto her bottom and he quickly removed it. They kissed and he backed his tongue away from her emerging tongue.

“Mona, for Christ's sake.”

“My analyst says it's all obvious. I mean my crush on you. My dad cuts and runs when I'm seven and I think it's at least partly my fault. You're sort of my stepdad. I'm trying to hold on to you so I act sexy. I almost didn't wear undies so I could give you a peek when I sat on the sofa.”

“It's unhealthy.” He knew this was weak as he poured himself a strong whiskey.

“Don't be such a silly fuck. What's
unhealthy
mean? It's harmless and I know you're not going to touch me so what's the problem with flirting and a little touch? I'd already be an old lady in India and Africa.”

“Well, civil authorities have established a law that you're underage . . .” His mind ground to a halt. He may as well have been saying blah, blah, blah, blah. She was wearing a short-sleeved black sweater and a short black skirt. When she leaned way over to check the pork roast he looked out the window at the gathering dark. Her legs were smoothly muscled from running the eight hundred meters for the track team.

“Spare me the legal shit, darling.” She sat down and took a sip of his whiskey.

“I have an unpleasant question before Marion arrives.” He took Carla's e-mail and the photo from a jacket pocket and passed it to her. “Here Carla says she went down on you and you told me nothing happened. Who's telling the truth?”

“Who cares?” She was blushing ever so slightly.

“I care. If you'll testify we can send Carla to prison for years.”

“No chance. Maybe a night in jail but not prison. You said yourself when you and Marion were talking about the Catholic priest sex scandal that a priest giving a sixteen-year-old hundred-seventy-pound young man a blow job wasn't worth ten million bucks. Why didn't he run for it?”

“Boys are different,” he said, pausing to glance into his studio den with relief. He intended to put a no sign up on his peek hole. Enough was enough. It seemed that his thinking was becoming less muddy. “Boys can be polymorphously perverse into their teens. Of course I'm unsure about girls. In the last three decades or so the culture has been prolonging childhood so it's altogether natural that the age of consent be moved up to eighteen. Apparently the young are more sexually active than ever but the law is there to appropriately protect them from older predators of which there are many, like Dwight-Daryl.”

“Carla told me that as of this morning he's changed his name to King David,” she laughed.

“Jesus Christ! What next?” He finished his whiskey but stopped himself from pouring another.

“I'm different. I'm old for my age. I cooperated so it would be unjust to send Carla to prison. We're the world record holder for sending people to prison. Skip Carla, concentrate on the Great Leader.”

“For the time being maybe.” He was remembering that he had been expected to be a man at fourteen. And his sisters were hard cases at that age. He certainly had no clear idea why the societal change had occurred. His own family had been matriarchal with his mother holding the iron hand and his dad mostly bringing home the bacon. Mona's mother was a mostly absent ditz.

“Can I sit on your lap for a minute?”

“If you behave.”

His knee felt the heat of her butt. What would happen to this waif? Did he have guidance to offer?

“You're under arrest,” Marion said, standing at the open door in an orange coat and orange overalls. There was snow on the front porch which had muffled his approach. Sunderson was busy diverting his thoughts away from Mona's warm ass with errant thoughts of the history of the Panama Canal, his dislike of college communities and their mental tourism, and the obvious fact that the human body should have been designed so that you only needed to pee once a day. He was sure his knee was beginning to sweat. How many BTUs does a vulva generate?

“I'm wearing my hunting clothes because I'm tired of my school principal clothes. Tomorrow's the last day of deer season. We should give it a try.”

“You look truly ugly,” Mona said, getting up and reheating the mashed rutabaga and adding more cream and butter.

“It's defensive, dear, the most visible color, which will save me from getting shot. Most hunting accidents are alcohol related.”

“I'll tag along. I'm not saying I'll fire a shot.” Sunderson felt dullish from his dawn plane ride though part of the fatigue might have come from being away from Xavier's gun sights.

“Just before dark I saw a doe dragging a leg. She'd never make it through winter. You'd love doe liver.”

“I'll count my gout pills.”

By nine the next morning, a clear glittery day of ten degrees with the snow glistening, Sunderson was frying the doe liver in too much butter, salivating and watching Marion carry in a load of split beech. The evening before, despite having had only two whiskeys, he began to nod off after two servings of the pork roast and mashed rutabaga and a bare nibble of salad. Mona and Marion had scarcely left when the phone rang and it was Queenie's father, the big-shot Bloomfield Hills businessman who had earlier tried to get Sunderson to retrieve his daughter's money from the Leader. Queenie had come up missing in Tucson and the man wanted him to look for her, an easy request to decline rather rudely. He gave the man Kowalski's Nogales number. They deserved each other. Mona had winked at him when she left and he wandered into his den studio for the soft-core porn peep show but found himself unable to remove the book that would give him the view. He went directly to bed not wanting a case of what Satchel Paige had called the “agitations.” He poured a nightcap but didn't drink it thinking that since touching Mona was unthinkable he had to transcend the remote lecher in himself. Before Marion left he had repeated his advice to Sunderson to closely read Philip Deloria's
Playing Indian
for an insight into the behavior of the Great Leader, currently called King David, a hard to swallow name change, but then Sunderson had already begun the book.

At 6:00 a.m. he was up drinking coffee, looking for the shells for his .30-30 deer rifle, making a hash of leftover pork and potatoes, and trying to find where he had put the Deloria book and, not incidentally, D. H. Lawrence's
Studies in Classic American Literature,
the latter impulse coming from the shred of a dream. As a college sophomore in a basic literature course the teacher had been a youngish hotshot directly out of Princeton, already an author of a book about Cotton Mather. Sunderson found them both suffocatingly dreary. This young professor loathed D. H. Lawrence which served to make Sunderson curious and he had had a brief Lawrence period that spring before coming to his senses and returning to history for relief. The dream had only included the professor's feet, which were far too large in his English brogans for his body. It was time to run a tighter ship, which included not taking a dawn peek.

Halfway out to Marion's shack on the snowy two-track at daylight Marion braked and jumped out of his ancient, boxy Toyota Land Cruiser with his .30-06 and shot the doe, which was down a slope between a grove of small white pines and alders beside a tiny creek. Sunderson could barely see the deer, which dropped in its tracks. Marion said, “Poor girl” while he gutted it with Sunderson holding the hind legs splayed to make it easier for Marion's knife to avoid the anal sack. She was fairly healthy he thought examining her shattered knee, which he deduced came from a shot earlier in the two-week season. While Marion skinned the doe Sunderson had stoked the woodstove until it reddened. He guessed that he had gotten the cabin up to fifty degrees by the time they ate the liver off warmed tin plates.

“You have totally fucked up my schedule with your pursuit of this nitwit,” Marion laughed.

“I'm sorry.”

“No, you're not. I've done a fair load of research while you were in Arizona possibly drinking and chasing pussy not to leave out getting the shit kicked out of you. Yours is the first American case of stoning I can recall.”

Marion had been helping his wife Sonia who, though lily white, had been a crack tribal administrator until she had taken a long leave to aid in the research in the nationwide lawsuit against the Bureau of Indian Affairs to recover billions of lost royalties coming to the tribes. A few years before, after Sunderson dealt with a particularly gory case of spousal abuse, he had been deeply puzzled how Marion had come up with a thick pile of articles on the subject along with a lengthy bibliography. Sunderson was still married to Diane at the time and she had hidden the material fearing another of his March depressions. A good deal of his puzzlement on the matter came from his father teaching him that it was forbidden to ever strike a female even if she hit you first.

“I think I'd have a much better grasp of the Leader, now King David, if I had his hundred stages of spiritual development in writing.” Sunderson swabbed up his butter and liver juices with a piece of mediocre white bread.

“No, that's the wrong track. They probably don't exist in writing. Maybe a number of them in his noggin. His power comes from the idea that he's the only one in the know. He's the judge. His followers must be kept off balance in their strain to prove their spiritual accomplishment.”

“But then what is he offering for their time and money for Christ's sake?”

“The ecstasy of belief. That's what we want from religion. Something we can count on as helpless children in the face of ninety billion galaxies. In a despondent culture he is telling them how to live, how to get out of their very limited bodies into an arena of spiritual confidence.” Marion was grinning as he turned down the damper of the stove which was now putting out too much heat.

“But how do you tie in the sexual thing?”

“That's an attractive come-on. Remember that guru in Oregon, the Baghwan what's his name? His followers had absolute sexual freedom for a while then out of fear of disease he promulgated that they had to wrap themselves in plastic for sex. He went downhill after that and lost his thirty-two Rolls-Royces. I think our government shipped him back to India.”