The Great Leader (22 page)

He fell asleep a full two hours with his head on his arms on the table and then woke up and reheated some brackish coffee. He began reading D. H. Lawrence quoting Crèvecœur, “I must tell you that there is something in the proximity of the woods which is very singular.” And then hunters, “The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable; a hunter wants no neighbors, he rather hates them, because he dreads the competition . . . Eating of wild meat, whatever you may think, tends to alter their tempers . . .”

With a bellyful of venison Sunderson was unsure of the complete truth of what he read though it was more true than not true. He went on to read about Fenimore Cooper and Lawrence's strange speculations on Native Americans which were totally unpleasant and nearly deranged. Not wanting to be kept awake by this lunatic Englishman he pushed the book aside and washed the dishes after which he turned on the television for the eleven o'clock news, pleased to see the forecast for a foot of fresh snow. When the news segued to Afghan car bombs he flipped through satellite channels until he arrived at
Co-ed Confidential
. The young ladies didn't look like coeds but certainly had nifty bodies. He was embarrassed when Mona walked in the unlocked front door and caught him at his movie. She looked distraught.

“So what's wrong?” he asked.

“I don't think Diane's going to want you back when her husband dies.”

“It never occurred to me she would.”

“She doesn't want to take care of another man. She wants to travel a lot.”

“She always did. I was the slowpoke.”

“It's just that I was hoping you two would get back together. With Mom being such a ditz you were nearly my real parents.” Mona had tears in her eyes and slumped down on the sofa beside him suddenly grinning at the television. “Why watch these piggies when you can see me through the window?”

“No comment.”

“We're in luck. I looked it up and they're playing
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
in ten minutes!”

She was sitting too close to him on the sofa but he decided to ignore it. He had a couple of nightcaps but each time he sat back down she drew closer again. She boldly lit a joint and offered him a hit which he declined. He also ignored the illegality of the joint though he was slightly troubled when he glanced over and saw a condom in the purse from which she drew the joint. The movie
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
was magnificently loathsome and trashy with three bathing-suit models punishing men for their lechery far out in the desert. They ran over men with cars or bashed them in the head with big rocks, an unpleasant reminder of his Arizona misadventure. Mona fooled with the clicker and on an adjoining channel was
The Diary of Anne Frank
. That's entertainment, he thought. He fell asleep and awoke at 4:00 a.m. covered with an afghan. Mona had kindly turned off the television. The star of the
Pussycat
movie had been an actress named Tura Satana, likely not her real name.

The morning's mail brought a postcard from Albuquerque and a letter from Roberta which he pushed aside with consternation. He could count on one hand the letters received from Roberta. One about ten years before had been so abrasive it took him days to recover, the key sentence being, “Bobby only found true happiness in his life when he discovered heroin.” He had a bowl of nasty raisin bran to steady himself before opening the letter.

Dear Big Brother,

I must say that I thought you looked totally awful when we saw each other but Berenice said you were in much better shape than you had been the previous week before you went camping. The question is why an old man should unnecessarily put himself in harm's way and get himself nearly stoned to death? Who do you think you are? You should spend a lot of time pondering this question. You should spend all of your time fishing and camping, your childhood passions, when you're not reading. I remember a couple times when you took us camping a few miles south of town. Once you went off fishing and I stayed in the tent reading Nancy Drew. I think I was eight and you were fourteen. Meanwhile Bobby roasted a whole bag of marshmallows and puked and we had to drag him down to a creek and wash off the sticky marshmallow stuff that was even in his hair. Bobby and me were frightened that night when you crawled out of the tent saying that you heard a bear trying to get our food. You came back into the tent saying you had driven the bear away with a burning torch. I had peeked out and saw that it was a small raccoon but didn't say anything because a bear made a better story. How I admired you back then. You were such a kind brother to Bobby.

Now is a different matter. I have witnessed divorces in long-term marriages and one of the partners always falls in a hole like a well pit and it takes them about three years to crawl out, if ever. Diane didn't make her profession her whole life like you did. Your moderate alcoholism makes you emotionally inelastic and you can't seem to crawl out of the hole of your inevitable divorce. It makes me mournful to think you should have been a history teacher. You are a kind man not a tough guy. I would like to retire early, come back, and take care of you but I couldn't bear to live in the area of my childhood.

Love, Roberta

Of course the letter made him angry. He dressed warmly in near tears and set off for a walk in the falling snow and was gone for four hours. By the time he reached Presque Isle in about forty-five minutes the anger had passed because he was able to admit to himself that she was right on every count. The idle idea of throwing himself off a cliff into Lake Superior amused rather than alarmed him. He had work to do.

Two days later they were off for Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor. Diane and Mona had organized a precise itinerary including hotels and appointments. Diane had irritated Sunderson by renting them a nice Hertz car for the trip feeling that his twelve-year-old Blazer with a hundred and seventy thousand miles on the odometer was vulnerable. She had rented the car without telling him saying that it was a “treat.” As a civil servant from a relatively poor family he had chosen the path of ignoring their finances and when Diane had tried to involve his interest in her inherited money he had refused to cooperate. Any amount over a thousand dollars set off a red light in his noggin and that was what the rental car would cost for the four-day trip. Sunderson felt like one of the limo drivers he used to talk to at the Detroit airport early in his career when he was on surveillance for a mob hit man supposedly coming in from New York City. The drivers were there waiting for “bigwigs,” a name referring back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when a man's importance could be determined by the amplitude of his wig.

They left an hour before dawn with Mona not excited about colleges but about a computer discovery: to wit, she had started over from ground zero in the investigative process. Instead of using the Peace Corps dead mother's name, Atkins, she had tried the French father's name, Peyraud, while surveying Carla's clue of Dwight attending an Ore­gon college twenty-five years before. Bingo. Dwight had attended Reed College for two years in 1983 and 1984. Mona then managed to communicate with a retired anthropology professor who recalled Dwight with amusement and distaste. Dwight had been arrogant and overbearing though a brilliant student. He had had a Mohawk haircut, a thin strip of hair down the center of his skull, wore martial arts clothing, and had a cadre of male and female students following him around. Mona's ingenuity depressed Sunderson. He and Roxie at the cop shop had clearly begun with the wrong name, the wrong presumptions. The sixteen-year-old neighbor girl was a better detective.

Mona typed on her laptop and listened to CDs of John Cage (which drove him batty), Pink Floyd, and Los Lobos, the latter with traces of rhythm that made him stupidly sentimental about his time on the border. His mistake in not searching Dwight's father's name kept reminding him of the term “unforced errors” in tennis. He had Mona reread the professor's e-mail pondering the last sentence about Dwight's disappearance during a summer visit to the Haida Indians on the Queen Charlotte Islands off British Columbia for a research paper. Sunderson recalled a few things about the Haida from talking to Marion. They believed that wolves and killer whales were the same creatures, taking up separate forms on land and water. Sunderson felt he should research native shape-changing since that seemed to be a continuing motif.

Five hours into the trip at a gas station near Cadillac he abruptly demanded that Mona change from her short skirt to slacks. An hour before she had curled up and dozed and he could see her blue undies and a bit of pubic furze and had come up on a semi too fast. What was this thing about blue panties? Diane had always worn white.

Mona returned from the service station laughing and waving the new
Rolling Stone
at him. She read a quote from the cover girl, an antic starlet named Megan Fox: “Men are scared of powerful, confident vaginas.” What in God's name could this mean, Sunderson wondered. Had the starlet's parents read this and been embarrassed for their daughter? He was unsure of parental emotions but then here was Mona, nearly a stepdaughter, who of course was capable of saying something this preposterous.

“Imagine having a vagina as powerful as Arnold Schwarz­enegger in his prime,” Mona laughed. “You could chew up unsuspecting men.”

The city of Kalamazoo, their first stop, didn't last long. He said the college looked
homely
but she said that he was looking at western Michigan. They drove to the top of a hill to Kalamazoo College but then Mona said, “Too small,” and demanded that they proceed to Ann Arbor.

“But you have an appointment in the morning.”

“I'll e-mail them.” She suitably placed her laptop on her lap. “I won't be able to meet with you tomorrow because my father has died. How's that?”

“Wonderful dear.”

They proceeded to Ann Arbor arriving in the confusing dark at the Campus Inn with Mona playing expert navigator with MapQuest on her computer screen. He was utterly fatigued from ten hours of driving so they had a dismal room-service dinner including a bottle of white wine in his quarters of their connecting rooms. He had a whiskey from the pint in his suitcase and glanced only once through the connecting door as she changed into jeans to take a walk. He felt a jolt in his nuts, then stared down at his half-eaten club sandwich. Will this pointless lust never end he thought?

Three hours later at midnight she still hadn't returned and he was near tears of frustration. She hadn't responded to his calls on her cell but then he discovered she had left it behind on the coffee table in her room. He must have paced a solid mile unaware that he was merely another father waiting up for a wayward daughter. His black mood had begun right after Mona left when Diane had called to say that his old friend Otto had died of a heart attack. He had difficulty accepting this as fact. He and Otto had fished for brook trout together a half dozen times a summer ever since they were ten years old in Munising. Otto owned a small construction company that specialized in building summer cabins for downstaters and the recent economic downturn had nearly bankrupted him. Otto could drink a case of beer in a long evening and was addicted to sausage in all its various forms. In a day of fishing he would eat a whole package of raw hot dogs. He would use a pound of ham in a sandwich and was locally famous for his expertise at roasting whole pigs and would devour the bronzed skin in portions of a square foot. Diane and her friends would euphemistically refer to Otto's problem as an “eating disorder.”

The news of Otto had brought with it a momentary fear of death which Sunderson dismissed in favor of worrying about Mona wandering the nighttime streets of Ann Arbor. When she got home he intended on locking his side of the connecting doors to prevent the possibility of sexual mishap whether peeking or something more serious. When he was a senior in high school and full of confusion and near depression his dad had counseled him by saying, “You've got to boil down your life and figure out what you want.” Remembering this made him feel oddly hopeful and he took his notebook out of his briefcase.

1. On the map of Ann Arbor I note a park along the river where I can walk in the morning. Television weather says it will be unseasonably warm.
   
2. In e-mails with Carla, Mona has discovered that within Dwight's followers there are seventeen couples with daughters of eleven, twelve, or thirteen in age. Of course historically cults are often involved in illegal sexual license. This was possibly true in the Waco affair and the recent activity of the Mormon apostasy group on the Arizona-Utah border.
   
3. Boiling it down what truly angers me is Dwight using fake Indian material to fuck young girls. Given my knowledge of the suffering of American Indians for five hundred years this is doubly monstrous. It's been a decade since I could bear to read about this suffering which only talking to Marion puts into perspective.
   
4. Carla said that all the women in the cult dance naked around the bonfire while the men beat on drums after which Dwight selects one or two of the young ones for his “blessing.” This happens every evening.
   
5. How could the parents allow this except through the delusion of religion? Carla said that in Arizona Dwight threatened one mother with his pet rattlesnake. She was trying to hide her daughter who had been made “uncomfortable” by Dwight's big dick.
   
6. This all sounds like a bad dream but it's reality. I have to put a stop to this. The irony is that I wouldn't have all of this information without the criminal Carla-Mona connection and Carla's belief that I could get her sent to prison.
   
7. I just now leafed through Snyder's
   The Practice of the Wild
   and read, “Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility.” I am unsure of what he means except that in a walk of a couple of hours the first half hour is full of the usual mental junk but then you just zone out into the landscape and are simply a humanoid biped walking through the snowy hills and forests or along Lake Superior's frozen beaches. You don't bother trying to comprehend this immense body of water because you're not meant to.
   
8. Mona still not back and it's eleven. It helps to write it down. Why? It makes it concrete. D. H. Lawrence on the subject of Indians is very irritating but I have to remember that this stuff was published in 1923, nearly ninety years ago. He thought the demon in our continent was caused by the unappeased ghost of the “Red Indian,” the inner malaise that brings us to madness. What am I to make of this?
   
9. I have to do a little reading to figure out again what Christianity is. It certainly cooperated in the destruction of approximately five hundred tribes.
   
10. Back to Dwight: he is using
    Indianness
    to enact his pathological sexual desires. This is unforgivable and deserves death, but his is unlikely.