The Great Leader (5 page)

“He's a stuffy old prick and would never fool with me,” Mona joked. “I did get some gossip about him this morning, though.”

“It's not true!” Sunderson barked, reddening. He had been thinking about something the great luminaire Sir Francis Bacon said but it had slipped away. He couldn't help but presume that Dwight understood the conflict between religion and sex and had simply decided to meld the two.

“I'd trust him with a whole squad of naked cheerleaders,” Marion said. He was expertly chopping a handful of garlic. Marion tended to be obsessive about recipes and a current favorite of a year's duration was a side dish of pasta, minced garlic, olive oil, parsley, and a type of parmesan that he ordered from Zingerman's way down in Ann Arbor. Sunderson figured that since Marion had quit drinking he had spent as much money on fine food as he himself spent on books.

“I don't care what consenting adults do at retirement parties.” Mona patted him on the head, then slid her apple tart into the oven. She walked into the living room and then through the door into his studio. He imagined her pulling a book from the case above his desk and gazing through the slot into her own bedroom. He tried not to give a shit but was unsuccessful. Roxie had showed him some extraordinary filth on the computer and he had wondered at the time about the possible ill effects of the populace viewing this sexual mayhem. Mona likely had a wider knowledge of weird sex than he did. His wife Diane had said that the computer would be the death of the erotic imagination of our time. He was exempt from the funeral, watching Mona stretch when she came out of his study. Her nubbin belly button suggested to him the fact of human continuity. We begin in one place with sore belly buttons and end in another, in his case about fifty miles east of his birthplace.

Dinner was fine indeed though Sunderson drank too much of his cheapish red wine and since Mona and Marion were abstaining his wavelength differed from theirs. He asked them to define “spiritual” but they both ignored him as if he were proposing an inane parlor game. Mona and Marion were talking about torture, which had been much in the news of late but this was dropped when Marion began exclaiming about the deliciousness of the apple tart.

“You'll find a husband, that's for sure,” Marion said with a mouthful of tart.

“It's more likely that I'll be looking for a wife,” Mona said blithely.

Marion was a little embarrassed but Sunderson didn't catch on completely being sunk in the idea that he might have been able to keep his wife if he had been spiritual.

“Why would you want a wife?” Sunderson asked stupidly.

Mona's voice became cool and level. “When I was twelve and living in Escanaba with my aunt while mother was in beautician school in Lansing my two cousins would make me blow them while they watched porn films. Girls seem nicer.”

Sunderson squeezed his eyes tightly shut at the sheer muddiness of human behavior while Marion became angry.

“You should have told someone!” he almost shouted.

“Who? Hey, you guys, I didn't mean to upset you. These things happen.”

The room fell silent as if each of them were sorting through possible things to say.

“I'm getting over it and everything else through witchcraft. I've cursed both of their lives and it's working. One spit on a cop and lost quite a few teeth.” Now Mona was smiling and got up to clear the table. Marion ran dish water and Sunderson folded his arms on the table, cradled his head, and fell asleep.

Later, he wasn't sure how long, he heard their laughing voices and then felt Marion lift up the kitchen chair he was sleeping on and carry it into the living room where he was helped onto the sofa. Up until the age of thirty when he finished college at night school Marion had been a block mason and was still massively strong with the fifty-inch chest frequently found in Chippewa-Finn mixed bloods. Sunderson again heard Mona laugh.

“Look at the big baby sleeping,” she laughed.

He awoke about six hours later at 3:00 a.m. knowing in his entire body that he must fly the coop, abandon his nest of nearly thirty-five years, at least for the time being. Staying here at this time would mean desuetude, a boneyard existence. He better leave early for Thanksgiving in Arizona. He decided to clarify his head by making notes, which always had a carbonating effect on his brain, or so he thought.

1. Just noticed Jack Beatty's overwhelming
   Age of ­Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865–1900,
   on the coffee table. This book has been an off and on obsession. We have an oligarchy not a democracy. We are ruled by the moneyed class.
   
2. This said, my opinion is not worth a cup of coffee. We are helpless. When asked at lunch Carla said that Dwight was not particularly drawn to money. To him sexuality is the core of existence.
   
3. This makes me wonder how he can make a philosophical system out of sexuality.
   
4. I have to get out of town as I sense the possibility of a prolonged drinking binge, which could kill me. Almost did after divorce. The doc said I stopped barely short of doing myself in, which many do intentionally with booze.
   
5. Beatty's book can drive me batshit like the NPR morning news. All the issues become dumbfounding. I have to change to the Ishpeming country station and become the white-trash nitwit I occasionally am. Once a peasant, always a peasant.
   

The airline answered in a mere twenty-three rings. Yes, there were plenty of seats available in these troubled times. There were a few minutes of economic commiseration with a sleepy man at the other end of the line while Sunderson sipped his syrupy coffee feeling insincere because he had a more than adequate pension and a fair amount of savings. He could never sell the house because his faithful books needed a dwelling. The books were an immediate problem because he intended to travel light with one suitcase and had decided to carry only two. Mona could send more when needed. At the instant of thinking her name tears arose at her abuse by her cousins mixed with an ample dose of guilt at his window peeking. Jesus Christ what a nightmare. Luckily his sleep had been dreamless except for a brief vision of trying to keep up with Diane on the sandy shores of a lake up near Big Bay. With a longer inseam and in better condition she could walk faster than he could. On this occasion she was chasing a male grebe that was buzzing along ahead of them on the water, keeping itself aloft in the manner of a dolphin skidding along the sea's surface by tail power.

The book choices were obvious: Charles Mackay's
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
and Richard White's “
It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own
”:
A New History of the American West
. The American West was the major lacunae in Sunderson's knowledge for arcane reasons. As a boy their neighbors three doors down were the Mouton family who had four large sons. The Mouton boys were big, strong bullies and when all the kids in the neighborhood gathered for play at the main game of that period, cowboys and Indians, the Mouton boys were cowboys and everyone else had to be an Indian, hence a pummeled victim, and thus Sunderson carried into adulthood a marked dislike for cowboys and their culture. Of course he knew this distaste was childish and was aware of the West through reading Bernard De Voto but he could not overcome his early prejudices. When he explained himself on this issue Marion as a mixed-blood thought it quite funny as he felt the cowboys were the western
proletariat
and nearly as woebegone as the Indians.

He went into the study to fetch the two books and on impulse decided on a last good-bye look next door. It was 4:00 a.m. and to his surprise she was awake and nude on her tummy with her laptop open and beaming in front of her. She turned, looked in his direction, and waved. Of course the lights in the studio were on. He dialed her number and watched as she rose to her hands and knees to pick up the desk phone.

“Hi. I knew you'd be up early because you fell asleep drunk at eight.”

“I apologize.” He was having difficulty breathing.

“It's just a game. No harm done.”

“I shouldn't be peeking.”

“Well, you have been and are right now. Men like to see nude girls. You're nice to me so what's the problem? I don't think you're a pervert.”

“I was half awake part of the time. Why were you and Marion laughing?” He was desperate to change the subject.

“I told Marion that my story was bullshit. I don't have any cousins in Escanaba. It took a while but he thought my lie was funny.”

“Why in God's name would you do that?”

“I like to explore men's emotions. I actually did have a bad time with my stepfather.”

“I don't want to hear about it. I mean, Jesus Christ, you're like my daughter. Don't tease me please. Meanwhile, I'm taking an early plane. You have the key. Keep an eye on my house and I'm leaving the whole Dwight file on the desk. Hack away and keep track of your hours. I'll leave a couple hundred bucks.”

“I'll come over and say good-bye.”

“No. Please don't. I'm not too stable. I'll call every few days.”

“Okay, but I'm not going to bite you. You're the best friend I have.”

“Good-bye. I'll miss you.” He hung up the phone but continued to look another minute wondering what it would be like to feel full of firm moral resolve. He was a little amused to remember the Bible story about King David seeing Bathsheba bathing and then sending her husband off to war so he could get his hands on her. Sunderson was sure he would cut off his own hands before he would touch Mona but then he wondered how one would go about cutting off his own hands? There was also the unpleasant thought of how Mona actually saw him. A college roommate liked to play a wretched blues song about a motherless child. What about a fatherless daughter? He had stopped short of explicitly fantasizing about making love to her knowing that it was morally wrong not to speak of being illegal. There was a specific cruelty to unattainable beauty that he felt now in his spine. Time to flee, he thought. A waffling geezer can talk himself into anything.

Chapter 3

Once aboard the plane for Chicago Sunderson had a striking sense of clarity and felt ashamed at how far he had slipped in the past few months. Starting in midsummer he had trapped himself in a male hoax of the far upper Midwest, the Great North, in which the attitude is, “I can handle anything.” For instance, he was aware that the silly coda of his youth had helped doom his marriage: you had to be tough, taciturn, and when injured you said, “It don't hurt none,” even if you were bleeding from your nose and mouth, and at funerals you didn't cry though you might when you were alone at night. Sunderson had noted that the educated women in Marquette tended to favor men who arrived at their remote city carrying a full load of extreme sensitivities. Certainly he had seen retirement and its problems coming but then he wasn't retired yet and had denied the possibility of any real difficulties. He had begun to lose the “grip” people talked about during a minor celebration he and other officers had held in honor of their breaking up what they thought was a major U.P. dope ring. They were in a working man's bar near the coal docks on the east side of Escanaba and Sunderson had untypically drunk too much while on duty and chain-smoked, and flirted with a dowdy, overplump, middle-aged barmaid. He was conscious enough to sense the concern of his colleagues but he still resisted taking a local motel rather than drive back to Marquette. The feeling had been uncomfortable indeed. He had always been able to have a few drinks and make the frequently long drive home. He had awakened in a shabby motel on a cold summer morning with the windows wide open and the door unlocked. For the first time he felt autumnal and after showering he avoided looking in the mirror. He ate his breakfast with slightly trembling hands and drove far over the speed limit back to Marquette in order not to be late for work only to discover it was Saturday. He was so unnerved that he spent the day on his hands and knees weeding his meager vegetable garden and Diane's perennial beds, which had been in decline since her departure. This make-work wasn't helped by Mona and three friends playing doubles badminton in skimpy attire in the adjoining yard. Men would say they were as horny as a toad but who among them knew if a toad was horny? An actual horned toad?

He drank no alcohol and smoked sparingly for six days until the following Friday when he was pitched off a tavern porch by a logger over in Amasa. He had to draw his pistol to arrest the man, something that he had rarely done. He should have called for backup knowing the logger's history of violence but despite his age he still thought of himself as physically tough. The man had beat up three college students the night before and Sunderson booked him in Iron Mountain. On the long drive home he had stopped in Manistique for dinner and his firm resolve had liquefied into a couple of calming whiskeys. At the restaurant he had seen a realtor out on bail on a drug charge for distribution. Rather than just society's edge scum, more and more middle-class men throughout the country were becoming involved in the drug business for the simple motive of money. Most of them were on the rather remote capital end of deals and hard to convict.

He indulged in a Bloody Mary at O'Hare and on the longish flight to Tucson slept for the first two hours waking up with the peculiar sense of having been smeared, a brand-new feeling, not quite like a roadkill but like a man whose peripheries had been squashed, blurred, by the loss of his defining profession. Midway through high school his dad who worked at the paper mill, a step up from his earlier career of cutting pulp logs, had told him, “Like the rest of us you'll never have much but make the most of it.” Unfortunately, now he continued to lose order in his mind while he continued to try to control it to the point that any order was a false order.

Fortunately the feeling of being smeared gave way to the light-headedness of the morning before on the way to the cult property. He had become nothing but he was free. He would no longer break into a dilapidated house trailer and find three ounces of marijuana, three grams of meth, and the usual needleworks. He had once been cited for breaking a perp's arm but the young man was so skinny from meth that when Sunderson grabbed his arm when he was trying to crawl out the back window of a third-story apartment the snap was audible. What was he going to do, fly? Unlike most in his profession Sunderson did not see the dire threat of narcotics as a societal rot that must be expunged or society would be imperiled. When a guy with four DUIs runs over a kid and receives less time than a college kid with a half-pound of pot intent on selling the silly weed to other dipshits you have a justice problem. It was easy in the current economy to have fantasies about being a member of a secret cabal of detectives who travel through the world assassinating the world's most destructive criminals who, obviously, were all members of the financial community next to which a Mexican drug cartel seemed murderous but childishly simple. Drug cartels didn't destroy the world economy, but then what were his conclusions worth? Hadn't he been put out to pasture? His mind had become a Ping-Pong table.

In the Tucson landing pattern he came near to euphoria over the idea that with his extensive historical preparation he was just the man to study the crime of religion. Sometimes you had to get out of town to see things clearly. Prosecution was as childish as the profession he had left. At least Dwight hadn't swindled widows by giving them a hope of heaven where they might rejoin their mates who had worked themselves to death. As the plane jolted to the ground he felt a momentary loss at not being able to find any of the cult's tree costumes. How grand it would be to stand beside a brook trout stream masquerading as a tree though there was the alarming thought that a bear would rub against your bark. Several years before their divorce Diane had pushed him into attending a reading by a U.P. author who had found a stump, mammoth in size, in a gulley in the back country south of Grand Marais. The man claimed that he often sat within this huge, hollow stump. Sunderson had been envious to the point that he totally ignored the contents of the man's reading of his fiction and poetry. Sunderson had no interest in fiction sensing that his room full of historical texts were fiction enough. The writer had said that the stump was his church.

Because of the time change it was only noon when he found himself in his room at the Arizona Inn, which was an extravagant mistake. Sunderson had remembered the name because Diane used to stay there when visiting her parents in their retirement home in north Tucson. She and her petulant mother didn't get along well enough for Diane to bunk with her parents. His room at the Arizona Inn reminded him uncomfortably of Diane's parents' home near Battle Creek. Everything was immaculate, the furniture old and expensive. The toilets were fluffy and you weren't confident it was a proper place to take a crap.

There was an urge for another nap, which troubled him. He wasn't ordinarily a napper but it was his consciousness that was tired rather than his body. He checked the pricey room service menu then walked a few blocks to a restaurant called Miss Saigon he had noted in the car. He had a splendid bowl of Vietnamese
pho
with tripe, meatballs, pork, hot chopped peppers, lime, and cilantro. The irony about Vietnam is that the war closed down and Sunderson was in a medical detail in Frankfurt helping to take care of the thousands of burn victims. The Frankfurt hospital fed
pho
to the veterans. Sunderson worried for a year about being transferred to a field hospital in an area of action. He was also afraid of snakes and had heard many stories. The grotesque thing was how much burned flesh stunk and how many times he vomited. He returned to MSU with a glad heart and the U.P. with actual joy.

His morale was high on his walk back to the hotel. A good meal would do that. In the room there was a call from Mona on his voice mail and he was startled to hear that she had tracked Dwight from Choteau, Montana, to Albuquerque to a location about thirty miles south of Willcox, Arizona, near a village named Sun City where Dwight was currently looking for the bones of Cochise with a group of six followers all of whom had dark hair. Dwight would no longer accept disciples who looked decidedly Aryan.

“Jesus, how did you get all this info?”

“Three hours of hacking. I got it from credit card records. Your secretary Roxie didn't know shit. Want a MapQuest of where Dwight is staying, also an aerial photo?” Mona had met Roxie only once but thought of her as a
lowlife
.

“Sure. Fax it here.” Sunderson was still unnerved by the information she had garnered through her computer, obviously through illegal means but then what with computers was truly enforceable?

“I miss you, darling.”

“I've asked you not to call me darling.”

“Don't worry. I don't want to fuck you. I just want to be pals.”

“Before I come back I want you to put up venetian blinds in your bedroom. I'll pay for it.”

“Okay, but I'm real surprised that you can't control yourself.”

“I never was very religious.” Sunderson struggled to change the subject. “I'm actually controlling myself,” he said defensively. “I'm just looking at you like you were a painting.” This was lame.

“It's funny but the most sexed up kids at school are the Bible thumpers. The rest of us started early and now it's a yawn.”

“Keep up the good work.” Sunderson hung up abruptly. Sexual issues unnerved him to the point that he would nearly prefer to find a dead body. A few days ago when Roxie had left the office to pick up sandwiches he had fielded a call from the wife of a prominent citizen. She was sobbing having learned that her fourteen-year-old son was sexually active, and his
slut
of a girlfriend, also fourteen, had sent him a nude picture of herself on his cell phone. It took a half hour to calm the woman down by which time his Italian meatball sandwich had lost its heat. As his dad used to say everything was fucked up like a soup sandwich. Why did they all have to have cell phones? Down at the marina park last summer a whole group was busy text messaging rather than playing and there had been several accidents involving kids walking into traffic while listening to iPods or watching TV programs on their cell phones.

He tried to stop his brain from nattering against the way things were what with having no more control than he did over his own impulses. His friend Marion, who was as addicted to reading in the field of anthropology as he was in history, had quoted Loren Eiseley to the effect that older men like themselves become antiques in the face of the fantastically accelerated social evolution induced by industrial technology. He had been becoming a fish out of water back home and even more so in Tucson where he was a fish in the desert.

He sat at the desk in the hotel room pondering this matter, which made him sleepy. Above the desk was a Frederic Remington print of a bunch of cowboys rounding up cattle in a mountain valley. He had never been on a horse and had no intentions in that direction. It looked desperately uncomfortable. He remembered his embarrassment as a boy during the Saturday matinee at the movie theater when Gene Autry pulled up his horse during a roundup and began singing, more like braying, “When It's Springtime in the Rockies.” Even worse was Roy Rogers with guitar in hand and a foot up on a straw bale singing to a group of appreciative wildly painted Indians in ceremonial headdresses. Why was he letting a hotel painting lead him off into the void?

Mona had managed to get Dwight's cell phone number but Sunderson wanted to collect his scattered thoughts before he called and then he decided it would be better to simply arrive out of context, which might unnerve the wily Dwight. He could also accuse Dwight of impregnating the twelve-year-old girl but then that might spook him into running forever. Marion had been helpful when Sunderson had questioned the Native American motif in the Great Leader's projects, strongly evident from the slim files that also touched on Choteau, Montana, and Arizona. Roxie had said, “What's all this Injun shit?” Marion doubted if more than 10 percent of the populace as a whole had deep religious feelings but Indians were a fresher source for the sucker shot. People were still genetically primitive and responded to drum beats. Religion is fueled by the general sense of incomprehension about life, and ceremonies that were equally incomprehensible had been discovered by charlatans. Marion gave him the work of the scholar Philip Deloria that dealt with the way whites would ape Indians culturally. Sunderson and Marion had been friends for over twenty years but Marion refused to talk about his own nativist religion, which he claimed shouldn't be subject to a white man's idle curiosity even if it was a close friend.

Near Marion's retreat shack back in the woods a half mile from any other dwelling there was a fine, if small, brook trout creek that began a mile upstream in a large spring and beaver pond. He and Marion had shoved a twenty-foot tamarack pole in the spring and hadn't reached bottom. Marion said that this was what was sacred about the particulars of the natural world. Sunderson said that some ancient Greeks believed that the gods lived in springs and Marion said, “Why not?” Marion's intelligence was peculiar. One evening the month before they had been surfing through the satellite channels after watching the Detroit Lions lose their thirteenth in a row and happened onto a program called
Celebrity Medical Nightmares
. Further on there was a soft-core porn channel playing
Super Ninja Bikini Babes,
and Marion remarked that in our culture both men and women were working toward enormous breasts, men by bench-pressing and women by surgery. He wondered what this meant and Sunderson was at a loss.

He was beginning to feel irritable about having to go to his mother's for dinner down in Green Valley about forty miles to the south. The phone rang and it was the desk to say Mona's faxes had arrived. He left the room in a hurry then slowed down when he saw a woman examining the extensive flower beds. He put a hand to his chest because his heart abruptly fluttered. With her back turned he was sure the woman was Diane but then of course not. Her hair was a lighter brunette and she was slightly shorter than Diane's five foot nine. He passed close enough to catch her scent, an unknown quality. She turned and smiled and he said, “Gorgeous flowers.” She nodded then knelt beside a bed to examine the flowers more closely. She was faultlessly neat like Diane who had even folded her undies like one would handkerchiefs. Diane had always arrived at breakfast impeccably dressed for her job, then toasted her English muffin applying a scant amount of cream cheese and Scottish marmalade she got by mail order. She was always fresh as a daisy while he struggled to make passable sausage gravy at the stove. She even peeled fruit precisely while he had difficulties with something as simple as starting a roll of toilet paper. He had to abandon their king-size bed because his snoring kept her awake and he had refused to wear the antisnoring mask contraption his doctor had recommended. His doctor, who had moved up from Kalamazoo, was shocked at the number of men in the Upper Peninsula who thought of themselves in fine physical and mental shape when by any outside standards they were walking wrecks. Sunderson smoked and drank heavily and his cholesterol always hovered around three hundred. He was very strong for his age but this had nothing to do with his diminishing life expectancy.