The Great Leader (11 page)

“It's so good to see you,” Melissa said. “This is my brother Xavier and my daughter Josefina.”

Xavier stood and Sunderson shook his left hand because his right was withdrawn. Sunderson restrained his startled reaction to Xavier's appearance. The man was dressed in a fine dark suit and red tie. His appearance was more than vaguely effeminate but his face had the pale specific edge of the ominous, the feral as if all of his schooling, his life in fact, had taken place at night.

“Are you liking our area?” Xavier asked with a cool smile.

“Yes, despite a certain unfriendliness.” Sunderson wondered why he was admitting this but then Xavier was obviously no man's fool.

“Yes, Melissa said that you tripped on a vicious rock and fell off a fifty-thousand-foot cliff.” He winked and clunked his gloved right hand on the table. “I tripped once myself and lost a hand.” He laughed a metallic laugh. “Please sit down.”

“Accidents happen,” Sunderson said. Josefina was crawling on his lap and feeling the beginning of his beard with a smile the moment he was seated.

“She thinks all older men are nice grandfathers,” Melissa said.

“It is a rare pleasure to sit with a detective.” Xavier glanced toward the front door where two very large men were standing.

“I'm recently retired,” Sunderson said with a clench in his gut.

“Someone didn't know you were retired,” Xavier said, standing and dropping a hundred-dollar bill on the table. He leaned and kissed both his sister and niece. “Be kind to my sister. She likes to fish and have picnics. Call if you need help.”

Sunderson watched as Xavier walked through the crowded restaurant with everyone averting their eyes including a big table of Border Patrol agents. Through the front window he saw Xavier and the two big men who had stood near the door get in the back of a black Suburban with tinted windows.

“He took a degree in the history of Spanish drama at the University of Arizona. Now he thinks of himself as a stockbroker.” Melissa sighed and held her daughter close. “Let's go fishing on Patagonia Lake when you wish.” She handed Sunderson a card with her cell phone number, kissed his cheek, and left.

“I know her from the hospital. Isn't she lovely,” Molly said when he returned to the table.

“You're already in over your head,” Alfred said gruffly. “I'd expect a visitor.”

“I'm only an old man with a crush on a nurse,” Sunderson said grabbing the check and noting that now the waiter Alphonse wouldn't look at him directly.

After saying good night to Alfred and Molly he wasn't in a mood that included a semblance of equilibrium. Why did fate make him infatuated with a young woman who had a brother like Xavier? He got a pint of Canadian whiskey out of his suitcase in order to calm his nerves. The only time he had run into anyone similar to Xavier was in Detroit in the early seventies when as a rookie state policeman he had been ordered to keep an eye on a cabin on the Huron River near Ann Arbor. This was back when Detroit was a vibrant, angry town with high wages in the auto industry and a residual unrest from the violent riots of 1967. All Sunderson was supposed to do was park his squad car near the driveway of the cabin to make its inhabitant, a murder-for-hire assassin from Chicago, nervous enough to go home. Sunderson had been told the man had been seen talking to a primary figure of the Detroit mafia at a Grosse Pointe horse show of all places. He only saw the man once in two days and when he drove toward him in his rental car Sunderson felt a tremor of nausea simply looking at the man's smiling face. As opposed to what is seen on television cops can become very frightened. In Detroit he had been out of his league like a cub scout with a pistol in drag.

The whiskey tasted very good and Sunderson was thinking that if the day was warm enough Melissa might wear a bathing suit when they went fishing. He very much needed a dose of life that didn't scare him. He had a dimmish recollection of an evening years before when Diane had cooked Marion's favorite pot roast dish and Marion had brought over an old movie that he said was America's best,
Touch of Evil
by Orson Welles. Sunderson had his usual too many drinks but before he fell asleep on the sofa halfway through he thought the movie was the scariest he had ever seen. And now here he was in the center of the same sort of mise-en-scène, the same ambience of dread you couldn't quite locate.

There was a sharp knock on the door and Sunderson wished he had the pistol he would buy the following day. It was the Arizona detective who had visited him in the hospital. This time he caught the man's name, Roberto Kowalski.

“Kowalski?” Sunderson smiled.

“My mom married a soldier over in Sierra Vista. He was from up in your country. Flint, Michigan, to be exact. I been there. It sucks. I'm here to ask you what the fuck you were doing having dinner with Xavier Martinez.”

“I wasn't. I stopped by to say hello to his sister. I developed a crush on her in the hospital.”

Roberto paused for a full minute. “I thought it had to be something else. No one is allowed to talk to Xavier. He beat her husband to death with his artificial hand. He's got a couple of heavier ones than the plastic he wears in public.”

“It must have been about money,” Sunderson joked.

“Of course. If I were you I'd take my affections elsewhere. If she develops a hangnail in your presence you're dead. She's a nice kid and you're a fucking geezer.”

“She's twenty-five. She's a woman. Maybe a little young. You ever attracted to younger women?” Sunderson felt irritable.

“Never mind. I've tried but they can't talk. The words are the same but now they mean something different. Meanwhile I stopped at your commune. I saw a lot of blood on the rocks. Why didn't you press charges?”

“The perps, the rock throwers, were kids, girls. Maybe around twelve years old plus or minus. Charges wouldn't work.”

“Yeah. They've started a school for troubled girls. Real teachers, however Daryl had a charge for underage sex.”

“Yes, in Choteau, Montana. Settled out of court. How come a guy like Xavier can cross the border?”

“His parents are Mexican but Xavier was born in Tucson when his dad was in college so he's an American citizen. He's always clean here. He's in the yellow pages as a stockbroker.”

“That's funny in this economy,” Sunderson suggested.

“Nothing about him is funny. Ironical maybe. We got Melissa work papers so she wouldn't get caught in the crossfire down south.”

“She's safe here?” Sunderson was surprised.

“Pretty much so. It's considered bad etiquette for cartels to kill anyone north of the border.”

“I'm thinking of going home. This place spooks me but then so did Detroit.”

“That's a good idea.”

“Maybe you could do me a favor and run Daryl out of here so he'll go back north where I feel more comfortable.”

“Well, we've thought about pushing him out of Arizona. I know a local
puta
who's nineteen but looks fourteen. The charge wouldn't stick but we could scare him enough so he might run.”

Roberto stood up looking very tired. Sunderson offered him a drink and poured big.

“Delicious,” he said, downing it in two gulps. “I've lost two wives to this job.”

“I lost one. Every day you come home with shit on your shoes.” Sunderson paused trying to recapture his thoughts. “You know up in Marquette Daryl was named Dwight and was known as the Great Leader. What I've been thinking about is that it couldn't simply be a con for money. He has to believe somewhat in what he's doing.”

“Maybe every other day.” He pushed his glass across the table and Sunderson split the rest of the pint. Roberto's face was slack with puzzlement. “I only talked to him for a few minutes but he reminded me of a schoolteacher, you know, the hottest teacher at a local school. His followers were staring at him as if he glowed.”

Sunderson was exhausted when Roberto left at midnight but was pleased at the ordinary aspects of the conversation. They were just a couple of law and order stiffs though Roberto had hunted for larger game in a far more violent area.

“I hope you feel better than you look,” Roberto had said when he left.

“I'll get there,” Sunderson responded without conviction.

He fell asleep in his clothes on the sofa and awoke at nearly 3:00 a.m. thinking in his haze that he heard birds. The sound was coming from the area of the concussion in the back of his head. The birds continued when he turned on the lamp then slowly subsided. He considered this a message from a decade before when he had fished in the evening on the west branch of the Fox and when it became dark started a small fire, ate a sandwich Diane had made for him, and curled up in a sleeping bag in the open air after a single sip from his flask. It was near the summer solstice and he awoke a little after 4 a.m. to the first faint light that far north. There was a dense profusion of birdsong on the liquid dawn air and he had the illusion that he could understand what the birds were talking about in their songs. The lyrics were of ordinary content about food, home, trees, water, watching out for ravens and hawks. It didn't seem extraordinary and the ability to understand the birds lasted right up until he stirred the coals and made his coffee. A day later when he told Marion after failing to figure it out Marion told him that he was lucky to have this religious experience.

Now in Nogales a decade later his homesickness was lessened by the fact that it was deer season in Michigan and a full five months from trout season. He got into bed naked and when he turned out the lights the birds resumed in the concussion sector of his head. He hoped he wouldn't wake up as a baby. He certainly didn't want to reenact his life. Where could such an idea come from? Anything that would purge the
copness
out of his brain would be welcome. There was a man at Northern Michigan University that taught a course in Middle Eastern history that would be good to audit, and another prof who taught human geography wherein one might learn why people lived in this particular hellhole of the world. Marion had said that he would qualify as a substitute teacher and it might be pleasant to correct widespread misapprehensions about American history. Anything to escape the copness that had driven his wife away.

Chapter 9

He awoke so cold that momentarily he couldn't imagine being in Arizona but there through the window wide open to the north wind was Alfred and Molly's cactus garden. The effort it took to close the window made him a little dizzy but his most negative thought was that if he went fishing with Melissa the next day she certainly wouldn't be wearing a skimpy bathing suit. His bedroom couldn't be more than fifty degrees and the blanket he was rolled up in was insufficient. He began to laugh, which was definitely not one of his morning habits. The fantasy of Melissa sitting in the backseat of the rowboat in a skimpy bathing suit in this weather pattern became comic, if a bit self-lacerating. There was a mere forty years' age difference between them, the kind of thing that normally only worked if the man was wealthy. Why would a lovely Mexican girl have anything to do with a black-and-blue geezer whose bruises were turning yellow here and there?

Thinking about Roxie on his throbbing clothes dryer didn't work. It was Carla against the woodpile at his retirement party that set him off. It was parodic like an old retired plumber he knew who bought a convertible and lime-green jump suit thinking that with these accoutrements he would become attractive to young women. That and five hundred bucks as a starter might get you a taste, Sunderson had advised. So what in God's name am I doing chasing this girl he thought, making his coffee and taking a glug of cranberry juice that was supposed to help his gout and kidney stones. American boys have this absurd carryover when they get older, as exemplified by three old men he had overheard at the Ford garage waiting for their cars to be repaired told sex jokes as if they were still in the game. Or retirees watching porn films at their deer cabin when they couldn't get it up for a waitress at gunpoint. It was likely that Carla had allowed him to back scuttle her because she was spying for Daryl-Dwight or perhaps she'd had a moment of sheer wantonness like many humans experience.

He cautioned himself against self-ridicule. It was part of the comedy of trying to maintain his Upper Peninsula sensibilities in this alien place that had him continually off-balance. Part of it might be the
post-concussive instability
the doctors had warned him about.

He leafed through the Tucson Yellow Pages that Alfred had loaned him, trying to match a gun store location with a city map. He felt untraveled because, simply enough, he was. He knew an approximately 300-by-100-mile area of the Upper Peninsula but nowhere else. The spring before he had picked up a prisoner in Grand Rapids and managed to get a little lost. He had volunteered for this early joyride saying to his colleagues that he knew Grand Rapids but he hadn't been there in thirty years. The prisoner had said, “Hey man, you're fucked up. You're supposed to be on 131 North and you're headed for Muskegon.” The prisoner was pissed off in the heavily screened backseat because no smoking was allowed in state police squad cars.

Sunderson took the long way to Tucson so as not to miss his health regimen of a bowl of menudo and a morning walk in Patagonia. Despite the cold north wind the mountainous landscape had a resplendent clarity. He had read that human mules carried fifty-pound bales of marijuana across this rugged landscape and thought that these mules must be in good shape. What a way to lose weight. He caught himself thinking of what was wrong in this beautiful area. It was really why Diane had left him. She had said, “Your profession is to find out what is wrong and you've done it so long you can no longer see what is right about life.” This was what the media called a
crying indictment
and it was right on the money. He had no argument to counter it.

He pulled off the road near a picnic table thinking that he had to stop this unprofitable way of thinking if he was ever going to lock up Dwight-Daryl. He was softening when he should have been hardening. He immediately thought that part of the problem came with being a bachelor and no longer having to monitor his moods, which you had to do in marriage to maintain civility, the day-to-day etiquette that makes marriages last. He had become too easily diverted by rather inane moods, which were fueled by overdrinking and the general sloppiness of his household. Life without a woman to temper your stupidities was difficult indeed. Even something so banal as grocery shopping could throw him into a skewed loop of anger. During his marriage Diane would always shop for dinner impulsively on her walk home from the hospital and then cook with pleasure, actually singing silly show tunes. By contrast he could blow fifty bucks in the supermarket during a quick shop and come home to discover that he didn't really have anything for dinner. He had quarreled with the store manager over prices because he hadn't yet caught up with the idea that prices hadn't actually gone up that much but packaged quantities had been reduced from sixteen ounces to twelve. The manager had patiently explained that he was a vendor of the food not the manufacturer.

Sitting there on the roadside viewing the vast mountainous landscape and the cloak of snow far up Mount Wrightson he vowed the cold clarity of a simpler chase. A few years before the divorce he had met with the game wardens of a half dozen Upper Peninsula counties to help map strategies to catch two poachers up from Tennessee who were involved in the not so uncommon crime of killing numerous bears for their paws and gallbladders, which were precious and extremely valuable items in Chinese pharmacopeia. These bear body parts were dropped off in Chicago and made their way to Beijing on a Northwest flight. Customs in Chicago had picked up on it in the post-9/11 X-raying of random luggage and backtracked through United States Fish and Wildlife Service to a Chinese restaurant owner in Evanston and thence to the two hunters in Tennessee who needed to be caught red-handed hunting and in possession of bear parts in the U.P. of Michigan. It was two weeks of wonderful October pursuit with Sunderson masquerading as an alcoholic bow hunter, not a far reach in sailing terms.

He used his dozens of informants and snitches in taverns across the U.P. and after two weeks or so of fruitless searching it was an informant at a country bar in Wolf Junction north of Newberry in Luce County that panned out. He had called around midnight and was mildly drunk but then so was Sunderson.

“They were headed north toward Superior so they're likely going over to Crisp Point or Grand Marais. I would have followed to see if they turned left or right south of Deer Park but they was a bit scary and mean looking. One chews a big gob of bubble gum and they're driving a crew-cab black Ford and they got hounds.”

Sunderson couldn't sleep so left for Grand Marais about three a.m. in a snowstorm that he knew wouldn't last because the wind was turning south. He felt silly with his camo archer's outfit and his compound bow in the backseat because he couldn't hit a barn at gunpoint. On a hunch, at daylight he decided on the Barfield Lakes area. He had alerted by phone the two game wardens in contiguous counties but the trouble in the U.P. is that poaching was low on the totem pole of seriousness and taking a deer out of season was fairly popular after the bars closed, and after July Fourth when the deer would lose the cedar taste after yarding up in swamps during the winter.

It was barely daylight and he was driving south on a small county road up Pull Up Hill when the three-quarter-ton pickup passed him going the other way. His cell phone worked on the hill and he called a game warden who had positioned himself in Seney. He waited a few minutes before turning around on the off chance that they would “make” his pickup if he was close on their trail.

His luck held when they turned off on a no-exit two-track near Seney where Sunderson had fished the Driggs River. He and the game warden reconnoitered and after an hour they heard hounds baying and a rifle shot and they called in reinforcements. Within a half hour another game warden and two state police arrived. Bingo, Sunderson thought. When the pickup approached it tried to turn around and Sunderson shot out the back tires with his .38. In a cooler full of ice in a hidden compartment of the pickup there were sixteen gallbladders, one of them still warm, and sixty-four paws. The bust was big in the news but Sunderson declined all credit passing it on to the game wardens. The last thing he wanted was to become too visible. He did, however, relish the pleasure of an ultraclean bust. The perps got five years.

Outside of Patagonia his cell phone rang with the
William Tell Overture,
music that he hated but he didn't know how to change. He answered because he saw it was Mona on the caller ID.

“Good morning dear.”

“You can't believe what's happening as we speak. You know how dark it is here in November at seven a.m.? Well Marion pulls up in his car on the way to work. He goes in your house and then he pulls a book in your study and I can see the crack of light. He's been peeking at me for about ten minutes. I thought it was our special secret. It pisses me off that you told him, darling.”

“I didn't tell him,” Sunderson laughed. “He's picking up some books to FedEx me. It was his own discovery.”

“I did some nude yoga so he wouldn't be disappointed. I think I believe you. I mean it's a silly thing but I like the idea that it's just between us.”

“Well, he's not going to pick up books to send me every day. Here's a nifty thing to do. When you hang up with me call his cell and say, Caught you, you shitheel pervert.”

“I want to write my own lines,” she laughed. “Maybe I'll say, Come on over, big boy.”

“Please don't.”

“Are you jealous, darling?”

Sunderson hung up on her and when he ate his menudo the labial texture made him horny. The freedom of retirement was distressing. Normally at this time back home he would be driving to work and mentally rehearsing the cases at hand. Why was the little old widow whose husband left her a nice pension embezzling from the dry goods store where she worked twenty hours a week? A tiny video camera caught her. She wept. She was helping a niece with cancer but it turned out she didn't have a niece. She was addicted to hitting the slots at the Indian casino east of town. A month after the judge gave her probation she was caught on video stealing change from other players' coin cups and stealing tips from tables in the lunchroom. Sunderson disliked interrogating her because despite his innovative questioning he couldn't make a dent. She said she was aiming at winning the hundred-thousand-dollar jackpot and giving it to her church because the pastor's wife had cancer. A phone call revealed that the pastor's wife didn't have cancer. Dealing with this senior citizen ditz gave Sunderson heartburn and a deep need for more alcohol. In his last week of work she had been caught at midnight rifling parking meters using a technique she refused to describe. When Sunderson met with the prosecutor they went to the bar at the Ramada Inn where he received a cell call from Snowbound Books. The owner had caught the woman jamming three copies of the new Danielle Steel in her underpants in the back room. “Shoot her,” Sunderson had said then closed the phone. This was clearly not a life.

When he finished his last piece of tripe which raised the image of Mona he thought that a serious man can't be pussy struck at breakfast. What a fool he had become in his loneliness, a fungoid teenage boy. He pondered the idea that he should be over this nonsense at age sixty-five but he wasn't. He couldn't very well ask Melissa to wear a miniskirt while fishing. Now that he was recovering, however slowly, it was time to up the ante on the Great Leader. His dad used to say that idle hands are the devil's work tools. He didn't want to be idle but the true mystery was how to proceed so far from home ground. He needed to somehow daily carbonate his brain to become less sodden and more attentive.

He walked a route in the Nature Conservancy property for an hour without his usual attentiveness in natural surroundings because he remembered what an abrasive Detroit detective had told him forty years before, “Paranoia is healthy for a cop.” Maybe Roberto Kowalski wasn't straight and suspected Sunderson of being a fed, maybe a DEA guy from out of state snooping into crooked locals? Maybe two weeks before Melissa had told her brother Xavier about a beat-up detective in the Nogales hospital and Xavier had told her to check him out? The question was whether or not this paranoia was healthy or delusional.

There was a slight rustle and movement of leaves and he jumped back as far as a man his age could jump back. He had a preconception that the area was chock-full of rattlers though in truth it would take an expert and hard looking to find one and the morning was far too cold at fifty degrees for a rattler to be active. He knelt down feeling the pain of his bruised legs and examined a large black beetle making its way slowly through the leaf detritus. Such large beetles were unknown in the north and he wondered how it made its way through life, where it ate and slept, and how it mated.

The beetle took him out of his head and into the world and he backtracked a few hundred yards to the path along the creek. He had barely noticed the creek when he was pondering the subject of paranoia but now he sat down on a cottonwood log and stared at the moving water. It would have been a good brook trout creek had there been any brook trout this far south though he had read that there were rainbow trout in the mountains farther north in Arizona. He spotted some minnows swirling in unison in a deeper hole and then watched a blue heron fly over above him looking smaller than the great blues of the north.

He studied the thicket of mesquite trees across the creek. There was also a number of large green bushes that looked like the elderberry back home, and a number of vast cottonwoods. He heard only bird sounds and the sound of moving water, his two favorites beginning in his childhood. He noticed that he was more relaxed and breathing more deeply than he had since he left home. He smiled remembering a slightly religious experience on a small river down near Steuben south of Shingleton the summer before. It was a hot August morning and he had been trying to catch brookies under logjams with a short line and his preferred fly, a small olive woolly bugger. The fly had snagged under the logjam and he was in despair because it was his last one and he had forgotten to tie up anymore. He was also hungover, which he had noted dozens of times made him a little inattentive. He threw in the towel as it were, pulled himself up on the riverbank, and stripped off his waders and clothes down to his undies. He carelessly plunged under the logjam with a hand, following the fly line until he could detach the fly hooked on the slippery log, not quite a victory as he had to struggle violently to back himself out against the current thinking how odd it would be to drown while saving an olive woolly bugger. He emerged breathing hard and grabbing a branch to hold himself in the current, tossing the fly up near his rod on the bank. For no reason he let go of the branch and floated downstream rolling over and over in the water, then simply floating on his back looking up at the hot blue sky and the trees that bordered the stream. About a hundred yards downstream he crawled up on a sandbar and lay there, happier than he had been in the three years since Diane left.