The Great Leader (28 page)

Epilogue

Sunderson had only taken a few careful steps down the steep hill when he heard a howl that froze his soul. He turned in panic and saw that Adam had lifted Dwight high with his big rough hands around his neck and was shaking him like a terrier does a rat, not a fond memory for Sunderson, or Dwight for that matter.

Of course King David lived. No one has ever been able to kill the Devil. He is everywhere with us. The State of Nebraska and Sioux County were puzzled about a possible prosecution for attempted sodomy and rape. Should millions of dollars be spent incarcerating an acute quadriplegic with no operable parts except a head that talked in a language no one could understand? Morning Star had given frank testimony. Indian girls are generally tough what with living in two worlds. Sunderson skillfully minimized his own part in nailing Dwight. He presented himself as merely a retired Michigan state police detective looking for a missing person. He certainly didn't mention the rag doll shaking incident. It wasn't that the crime was swept under the rug, only that law enforcement and justice are as messy as life herself and why spend millions trying to punish an eggplant?

The Devil was medevaced to the big regional hospital in Rapid City where his condition was stabilized, the lowest common denominator, for a month or so whereupon he was flown to Santa Monica, California, where Queenie and Carla decided to live. Dwight was kept in a small guesthouse that was converted into a colorful hospital room. Young women can't be expected to spend their lives on dead meat so there were around-the-clock attendants, three of them in eight-hour shifts, who played alternatively the kind of music Dwight loathed, heavy metal, rap, and country.

Sunderson drove home to Michigan by a circuitous route at a leisurely pace attempting to allow himself to decompress. He tried to avoid thinking about the big issues like love, death, freedom, or religion, much less money. He drove north to experience the emptiness of North Dakota knowing that an underpopulated landscape can draw off the poison. In a good if eccentric restaurant in Fargo he ate a big plate of barbecued beef ribs betting in his mind that the cult would dissolve as they usually do with the loss of the charismatic leader who could put a number on a member's state of development. Some cult leaders have predicted Armageddon and are at a loss when the world fails to end and just keeps plugging along through the indifferent cosmos. There had always been a trace of a dog barking in Dwight's voice and now he would bark no more.

He reached home in time for the opening of trout season on April 23, but it was largely a joke because half a foot of fresh snow fell. He fished anyway at a beaver pond near Marion's cabin sensing the weight of the snow gathering on his hat. He caught two modest brook trout and fried them with bacon fat for lunch with bread and salt. He spent most of May at Marion's cabin not quite ready for a steady diet of people.

By June and the beginning of the obnoxious bug season that would last at least a month he was back in his home study. There was simply no dealing with the mosquitoes, blackflies, and deerflies unless it was very windy at which point he would launch himself back into the woods.

He had dinner with Diane and Mona once a week after taking Diane's declining husband for a ride out in the summery landscape. Mona had moved in with Diane and now acted a bit more girlish rather than prematurely womanly. Her ditzy mother hadn't protested the change in her daughter's parentage and had immediately sold the house to a young academic couple with a little money on the side. Sunderson couldn't help but pull out the Slotkin book for a little peek at the attractive wife. One stellar morning he had caught her doing yoga in a skimpy leotard and his blood pressure ascended. What was this yoga thing? Wasn't it also a religion? He had been pleased on Memorial Day when it was an untypically hot day and Mona had bathed nude in a spring hole in the creek that he hadn't watched but fled back into the woods. A girl needed a father figure not a lecher. He bet that Adam would keep a close eye on Morning Star.

Soon after he had returned home he had bought a pedometer and now on an unpleasantly warm Labor Day weekend he checked his mileage, startled that he had walked seven hundred miles in four months, an average of five miles a day. This was neither here nor there except to remember that such diverse figures as Thoreau, Kierke­gaard, and George Bernard Shaw had said that you could walk yourself into serenity. He doubted that but walking and fishing filled his life in a way that his work had long ceased to. He knew he wouldn't become as well mannered as his father but kept a fairly tight lid on his irascibility. He was charged with assaulting two college students but the charges were dismissed when it was determined they were setting off cherry bombs near Sunderson's garage. That made the
Marquette Mining Journal
with “Retired Detective Subdues Athletes with Clothesline Rope.”

He didn't drink less on purpose he just drank less by switching to wine, the quantity of which could be more easily controlled. With the help of a surveyor he blocked out an even square mile of state land near Marion's cabin having decided to do a flora and fauna identification and species count. His stack of nature guidebooks was becoming well thumbed and he liked the idea of investigating the nature of nature excluding the human species and its charnel-house history. Enough is enough.

On a Sunday morning before Labor Day he stopped by Diane's house to check out dinner plans just as a hospice worker and an RN arrived. Diane was making arrangements for a full day off and Sunderson and Mona took a short walk down to the beach near the Coast Guard station. Mona waded in and said it was the warmest she had ever felt Lake Superior. She was distracted with butterflies because she was leaving for Ann Arbor and the university midweek. When they got back to Diane's house a pile of camping gear was stacked on the porch and the temperature was already in the eighties. Diane's face was tight and distraught. She told them her husband had suggested an overnight camping trip while he came as close to euthanizing himself as possible without the final step.

They drove east to Munising and then northeast to the shore road, taking a dip at Twelvemile Beach which was nearly empty, the often tempestuous water sullen and placid. A dozen miles to the south beyond Kingston Lake Sunderson found the two-track with difficulty. He was full of anxiety that the pond he and Diane had loved and so often camped at over twenty years before had somehow been ruined. Not in the least. The two-track was nearly impenetrably overgrown and Sunderson managed to knock loose one of the sideview mirrors on Diane's newish station wagon, which she ignored. When they arrived at the clearing, about seventy yards by seventy, two coyote pups scooted off and entered a burrow up a hillside. Sunderson grabbed a flashlight, walked up, knelt, and shined the light in the tunnel. The male pup growled as if to protect his sister. The women took the flashlight and knelt down wagging their butts in the air. They were both wearing clingy gray cotton gym shorts. At the first stroke of desire Sunderson looked up at the heavens but failed to feel heavenly. He quickly set up his small tent facing east so he could catch the first of dawn's light while the girls chose the far side so that they could sleep in. He was told to turn around while they put on their bathing suits but he was already headed west for a walk despite the heat following a tiny creek that provided the pond's outlet. He looked down at the spring fumaroles burbling upward and the shadows of a small patch of lily pads with yellow knob flowers. Everywhere on the water's bottom where it was shallow enough there were the footprints of heron and sandhill cranes. At the far end the girls were screeching at the coldness of the water but finally submerged to their necks. He was looking forward to the roast chicken, potato salad, and wine Diane had brought but he first needed a two-hour sweaty walk and a swim. They would never be the kind of family that would live under one roof but they would be close.

About the Author

Jim Harrison is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and has had his work published in twenty-seven languages. He has earned a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association. Harrison divides his time between Michigan, Arizona, and Montana.