The Great Leader

  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 the
mselves 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.

  Sunderson sat under a pergola on the hotel lawn, the official smoking area, and read the faxes with growing anger. He had no idea how many cult members had taken out home equity loans before the current financial plummet and turned the money over to Dwight. Mona had also discovered that Dwight had taken a Rent-a-Jet from Choteau to Albuquerque and then to Tucson for the exorbitant total of twenty thousand dollars. Mona had also written that Dwight had purchased five hundred peyote buttons in New Mexico. She found this out by prying into Queenie’s checking account, which used a simpleminded code for peyote. Sunderson thought idly that he might turn over this information to the DEA but then they were too busy tracking shipments of heroin and cocaine from Mexico to be interested in this peripheral drug mostly used by the Native American church, a widespread religious organization among Indians, and besides the DEA would be interested in where he got the information. He suspected that law enforcement agencies would be wise to hire world-class hackers like Mona and probably some of them had already done so.

  Mona had sent him MapQuest directions to his mother’s house but he was inattentive when he reached Green Valley which, all in all, was rather brownish. On the drive down on 19 through Papago property he had been mystified and captivated by the weird flora, the saguaro, cholla, paloverde, and the spiny ocotillo. Sunderson wasn’t a traveler, another sore point in his marriage. Other than a long flight to Frankfurt for army hospital work he had only been west of the Mississippi once and then only briefly to Denver to retrieve an extradited prisoner. He was somehow pleased to note that the Rocky Mountains looked fake. Southern Arizona was another matter mostly because Marion had loaned him a book about the Apaches called Once They Moved Like the Wind, which left him with the obvious conclusion that the Apaches were the hardest hombres in the history of mankind. Dwight and his followers were unlikely to ape such a recalcitrant tribe, preferring “nicer” Indians.

  His mother’s house was a small stucco bungalow right next to a large home owned by his sister Berenice and her husband Bob whom Sunderson considered a nitwit, albeit a wealthy nitwit, having managed to acquire a dozen RV parks. Bob’s Cadillac Escalade was parked out front, sixty grand worth of nothing and Sunderson had the irrational urge to ram it with his Avis compact but then giggled at the impulse like a child.

  He was barely in the front door before his mother hissed, “Shame on you, son.” She was seated on the sofa wrapped in her wildly colored macramé throw, the air conditioner on so high on this warm day that she needed the blanket’s warmth. Berenice had given her a home permanent and her hair was such tightly wrapped white nubs that her pinkish knobby skull was revealed. “You have disgraced our family, son.”

  “Mom, you have no idea of the tensile strength of some women there. They go to the gym every day. She had me in a bear hug.”

  “From what I heard in e-mail and on the phone you were behind her in plain view.” His mom was smug with self-righteousness.

  “The night was black and cold and snowing. No one could see a thing. I was carried away with passion.” Sunderson had decided that a strong offensive was best and could see that his mother had become doubtful in her attack posture.

  “We’re having your favorite chicken and biscuits,” Berenice interrupted.

  “Darrell Waltrip is kicking ass,” Bob said, turning from his NASCAR event on the television, then noticing Sunde
rson. “There’s room for you in the company,” he added.

  Sunderson sat down beside his mother and took her stiff hand. She turned away, still unwilling to let him off the hook.

  “I e-mailed Diane and you can tell she’s upset about your behavior.”

  Sunderson tried to imagine the language his mother had used to describe his behavior to Diane, and then Diane’s trilling laughter when she read the e-mail. Berenice brought him a stiff whiskey on the rocks for which he was grateful. He spilled a little when Bob bellowed, “Waltrip won!”

  Sunderson ate too much of the stewed chicken and biscuits but then so did everyone else. His mother dozed off at the table after her last bite of lemon meringue pie. Looking at her he dwelt on the mystery of her giving birth to him sixty-five years before.