The Great Leader

  Sunderson finished his lunch and had his last cup of lukewarm coffee. He glassed a distant hill with his binoculars. There was a mob of northern ravens circling and the hill was reachable from an overgrown two-track near the gate. This was doubtless the location of the cult’s gut pile and boneyard for the game they shot. He decided not to visit primarily because of the queasiness engendered by his hangover. Along with the modest ill feelings, he did not want to see a pile of desiccated deer carcasses, probably a few beaver, raccoon, even porcupine thrown in. Marion had once made a porcupine stew that was quite good if a little fatty. He doubted that there would be any bear skeletons as the more traditional Chippewa (Anishinabe) were hesitant about killing bear for religious reasons. It had to be done just so.

  The vagaries of a hangover included gratuitous guilt and he speculated at the speed the news of his misbehavior the night before would spread. As he hit the uncomfortable muddy potholes on the way out he could imagine that everyone at the party except Marion would be busy sending out the news of his coupling with Carla over the woodpile. Men in general were far worse gossips than women. There were a dozen or so Munising–Au Train area retirees out in Tucson and it was not unlikely that his iron mother would hear the story. She thought of herself as very religious but she loved bawdy gossip as long as it wasn’t connected with a member of her own family. He didn’t want to imagine his arrival in Tucson for Thanksgiving if she knew the story, which he suspected she would. The comic aspects of a sixty-five-year-old man being intimidated by his eighty-seven-year-old mother were not lost on him.

  On the drive home he pondered his confusion about whether or not to learn how to operate a computer. Roxie had been badgering him on the issue because she would no longer be at his service. She figured she could teach him the essentials in a couple of weeks during the evenings but he was resisting on the basis of not wanting any more obligations. The phone was bad enough and he had noted the general slavery of e-mail in people he knew. His neighbor Mona, the goth hacker, had told him he could just do research and avoid e-mail. She needed pocket money and had offered to help him for ten bucks an hour. There had been a confidentiality issue but now that he was retired it was no longer relevant.

  When he pulled into his drive just before dark Marion was finishing raking the yard and Mona was picking up windfall apples near his Jonathan tree, which yielded only every few years due to late frosts. Sunderson remembered that Marion’s wife was in Milwaukee on tribal business and Marion was going to grill his signature Hawaiian pork chops. Mona put her hand on his shoulder and said she was going to make an apple tart. There was a new twinkle in her eye and he wondered again if she was wise to his window peeking. There was certainly no way to correct his stupidity in not turning out the lights. Of course this is what the Great Leader Dwight was talking about: to make the present and future a far better place to live you must change your past, which is to say, before window peeking make sure there’s no backlight.

  He poured himself a drink and watched Marion and Mona out the kitchen window. There was no dealing with Marion’s peculiarities. Fifteen years before when Marion had quit drinking after a single AA meeting he felt he had to keep himself busy and so did such things as mow and rake Sunderson’s yard, replace the garage roof, build new steps to the basement because the old ones had become rickety—though as a middle-school principal Marion had always made more money than Sunderson who still resented mowing or raking lawns for a quarter in his childhood.

  Sunderson also resented biology when Mona came in and began peeling and coring the apples at the kitchen table. He sat down across from her and made his employment proposition. He would construct an exhaustive list of questions about Dwight and turn her loose on her computer. She was happy because her mother’s on-the-road cosmetic business wasn’t doing well during the financial collapse, and then she said blankly that her mother was conducting an affair with a rich old businessman in Charlevoix. She had read some of her mother’s filthy e-mails and she then did a mocking imitation of her mother’s chirpy voice, “Oh Bob, I love the way you lick my pussy for a whole hour.” Mona added that she had found out via her computer that Bob had been making their mortgage payments for the last three months.

  Sunderson felt his face redden as he stared down into his whiskey. The frankness of young women these days always caught him off guard and made him feel like a middle-aged antique, or like a diminutive football player without a face guard on his helmet.

  Now Mona took off her sweater and she was wearing a beige T-shirt with no bra underneath. Not wanting to confuse himself further he inspected Marion’s extra thick pork chops on the kitchen counter and out the window could see him cranking up the Weber grill with his usual mixture of charcoal with split oak for extra heat. It was then that Sunderson had the peculiarly unpleasant notion that he knew nothing about religion much less the spirituality that carried the outward form of religion. How then could he understand Dwight and his erstwhile followers when he had no real conception of their spiritual impulses? He then realized that if at gunpoint it was demanded of him he likely couldn’t define the word “spirituality.” The idea was simply enough not something that held his interest.

  “Daddy, are you depressed about retirement?” Mona embraced him from behind and he stared down at the tiny gargoyle tattooed on her arm. At times she jokingly, or so he thought, called him “daddy.” She smelled sweetly of the windfall apples and he felt her breasts against his back. His embarrassment about lust was clearly a Lutheran hangover from childhood when a Sunday school teacher, an obviously gay young man, had told the roomful of little boys that they must treat girls as if they were their sisters. In other words Sunderson knew religion as a systematic description of right and wrong behavior. Historical religion was mostly another power to be reckoned with. This diverted him to a book he had read about the criminal uselessness of the Catholic Church in saving Jews during World War II. All of those bleeding Jesuses on the cross he had seen with his wife in Italy had left him cold as an ice cube while the emerging Venus at the Uffizi had given him half a hard-on.

  He turned but Mona didn’t let go. She put her face in his neck and said, “You didn’t answer me.”

  “I’ve never been happier in my life,” he lied.

  “Oh bullshit,” she answered as Marion walked in through the porch door to the kitchen.

  “Sixteen will get you twenty,” Marion laughed, meaning that if Sunderson and Mona continued on to the biological conclusion he could go to prison.

  “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.

  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.

  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.

  This makes me wonder how he can make a philosophical system out of sexuality.

  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.

  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?