The Great Leader (19 page)

“He's certainly an effective predator. I'm a bit mystified by his interest in females that are too young.” Sunderson took Carla's e-mail and the photo of Mona from his jacket and slid it across the table to Marion who was startled.

“This is hot stuff. I'd make copies. The young girl stuff is at least partly biological, you know, like Warren Jeffs and those apostate Mormons. Without knowing it men want to continue their own genetic line so they try to get there first by even getting rid of the young men. With mammals as varied as antelope and mountain lions the alpha male chases off the competition. It's quite a battle in the so-called natural world. Male bears kill the cubs fathered by other male bears to further their own line. With humans some stepfathers are notably unkind to children sired by previous husbands.”

“What a fucking mess.”

“Not at all. It's just us. Certain scientists are now positing the biological origins of religion. We're perfect parasites when we maintain order in society and maintain the host that feeds us, and religion is an essential way of maintaining order.”

“The Lutheran church is a biological organism?” Sunderson laughed.

“At least partly. Bring it all home. Look at yourself. Consider what either of us do to conduct our lives in terms of sex, finance, and religion. We've been friends for more than twenty years. We talk about everything. You've said that after your divorce you felt sexually deprived scurrying around looking for a good piece of ass. You've said that money has always made you nervous and you try to ignore it because you've made five times as much as your poor father did without even trying hard. You've never said much about your religion, though you've inquired about mine a lot.”

“I thought it over quite a bit in the Nogales hospital when I was trying to organize an interest in continuing my life. Of course the drugs helped but they're mostly a lid over the pain like a manhole cover and you remain aware of the surge of pain underneath. Anyway I'd keep making a list of my favorite brook trout creeks, nine of them in fact. Also my favorite landscapes, maybe a half dozen, two of them from boyhood on Grand Island, and also that long gully you showed me west of here. I'd go over these places in my memory for hours and was surprised how well I remembered them right down to the minutest detail. The day I left the hospital it occurred to me that these places were the location of whatever religion I had. This started when I was a boy. In these places I never think of anything except where I am, sometimes for hours. I remembered that Mother said that when you pray you're not supposed to think about anything else, which was a trick I never could manage but can in these places. I found another one when I camped out for a week in Arizona.”

They walked for two hours on this rare windless day, normally a period when northwest winds off Lake Superior pound the locals senseless with their fury. It was a little odd not to find any wolf prints in the fresh snow but Marion said that here on the eastern edge of the Huron Mountains the wolves retreated far into roadless areas at the first shot of deer season.

Back at the cabin Sunderson fried up the sliced doe heart for a snack and then they dozed in their chairs after a few exhausting sentences about Mona's future.

Chapter 13

After their nap Marion and Sunderson took Mona to the Verling for supper. Sunderson was frantic for a mess of fried whitefish. A “mess of fish” was a localism. People would say that they “fried up a mess of brook trout” they had caught. Sunderson was in a peculiar mental state not having totally awakened from his nap and a dream in which he was a god in the sky but hadn't done anything with his godhead except wander around the heavens. He had returned to earth in his mortal body and was relieved.

Mona was stunning in a black pantsuit she said a “friend” had given her. She was pouty because her father had called from Cleveland for the first time in months and had said he was buying her a car. She had told him “I don't want your fucking car” and had hung up. She changed the mood by taking out a page she had ripped from
Vanity Fair
to which her mother subscribed. She read aloud to them an item that said that at an auction of the belongings of the deceased fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, a single chair had gone for twenty-four million dollars. Marion had laughed so explosively that he alarmed the adjoining tables while Sunderson was merely puzzled to the point of melancholy and also irked that his whitefish and glass of beer had arrived and he had forgotten to order his habitual double whiskey. He thought he was losing his grip and corrected his error. Meanwhile Mona was thrilled at Marion's laughter and asked him why he thought the chair's price was so funny.

“Money would be great if we didn't die but since we do it's an absurd obsession.”

Sunderson was struck by Marion's answer to the point of hypnosis. He couldn't seem to move the forkful of fish halfway to his mouth. Mona tapped his arm and nodded toward the door. Carla and Queenie were self-consciously flouncing in wearing twin sheepskin coats. They took off their coats and shook out their short hair that didn't move all that much and headed toward the table to say hello as if everyone were lifelong friends. Sunderson was startled to see Queenie and puzzled by her native dress and the pounds of turquoise jewelry hanging from her neck.

“Your dad is having you looked for in Tucson.”

“So I heard. I'm going back tomorrow. He wants to borrow money from my trust. He and some friends want to buy the Lions to save Detroit from further shame. I'm not loaning the asshole a single cent.”

Sunderson nodded thinking about girls and their daddies. He was relieved when his whiskey arrived because Carla was causing him discomfort. How could this nasty twerp be so ferally sexual dressed nearly as a boy?

“Lunch tomorrow at noon at the Landmark Inn?” Carla asked.

“Of course, darling.” They left for their table and Sunderson downed his whiskey as if it were water.

“Why is she wearing that absurd Indian costume?” Mona laughed.

“I've met a number of American women who think they were Pocahontas or Sacajawea in their past lives. They're never a miserable squaw shot in a tent by advancing United States Cavalry.” Marion loved this sort of irony. He was a speed eater and signaled the waitress for more fish.

Sunderson was so pleased to reach home and sit at his desk with a stack of books, relatively sober because it was quite a struggle for the single double whiskey to work its way through his belly full of food. Intending to stay up late he made a small pot of coffee and surveyed the glory of his home though in truth the carpet needed to be replaced. After Diane had left he had stopped wiping his feet properly and there was a lot of scuzz on the wall around the stove and sink in the kitchen. Also, all of the windows in the house needed washing. He and a friend had set up a window washing business for fifty cents an hour when they were fourteen and it had been horribly boring work. He reduced the stack of books to three: Deloria's
Playing Indian,
D. H. Lawrence's
Studies in Classic American Literature,
and the Bible, King James version. He needed to go through the New Testament to remind himself of the gist of Christianity, which had garnered countless billions of dollars over the years. When on their trip to Italy he had stood with Diane in Saint Peter's Square, he had been mightily impressed but had also wondered about the top-dollar cost of the project and how the construction workers had wended their weary ways home for a simple bowl of spaghetti. He took out his journal.

1. I read that in the 1940s we made fifty phone calls a year. Now we make five thousand. Reminds me of the cacophony of blackbirds in spring or wild geese who will honk for hours at a time. Actually I think I heard this on NPR.
   
2. All of the
   lachryma Christi
   in Italy. Why is Jesus always weeping?
   
3. At Marion's shack I had this feeling of just how ordinary I was. I simply have to nail the Great Leader but the group is so intact I must somehow catch him red-handed. I talked to Roxie briefly and she said the cult father who filed the early complaint and then went off to Flint had now withdrawn the complaint. Possibly paid off.
   
4. The bitterness of history. At the Sand Creek Massacre our cavalry shot low into the tents at dawn but the warriors were off hunting so we only killed women and children.
   
5. The childish attempt to tie oneself to history. I used to say while drinking in bars that I was born during the Blitzkrieg in World War II but only three old men even knew what I was talking about.
   

The phone rang and the caller ID said it was Mona. It was unthinkable not to answer.

“I just danced naked to ‘Wild Thing' and you weren't even watching. The dance was in thanks for dinner. Is your peeking period over?”

“Yes, it's over. I intend to become a white Christian gentleman.”

“Aren't you worrying about losing your manhood?”

“I hope so.”

“A couple of items. My friend Freddy was looking into universities. He's a senior. Anyway, at Tufts in the Boston area they have a course called ‘Sex, Religion, and Money.' Maybe you should fly out there and enroll. I could go along and sleep on the sofa.”

“Thank you but no. I've proven myself ill-suited to leave Marquette.”

“I forgot to tell you at dinner but I talked on the phone to Carla when she was stoned and this spring the Great Leader aka King David is going to move his followers to Choteau, Montana, or Chadron, Nebraska, or Channing in Michigan. He insists that there's mystical power in the letters ‘ch.' Myself, I have doubts.”

“Good night, darling. I'm doing my homework. I have to read the New Testament.” He was thinking that the G.L. would know that the Hebrew “chai” held mystical powers.

It turned out that the New Testament was hard going. Reading Matthew brought on a specific memory of being wedged between his mother and Berenice in the Lutheran church so that he couldn't escape. He had been a rawboned troublesome boy with difficulties trying to connect religion to his own life in a small town surrounded by forest and Lake Superior. Struggling with Matthew he began to think of Marion's insistence that it is easily forgotten that character also emerges from the landscape of our early years. If your antennae are educated by following your dog through the woods all day and your major preoccupations are hunting and fishing you don't lose this molding of your character by merely going to college, falling in love and getting married, or becoming a detective in an area with very little viable crime. No wonder he couldn't deal with Nogales.

He pushed the Bible aside and fetched the proper volume of a 1920s edition of the Britannica, back when the writing was better and without the cruelty of the Warsaw Pact and atomic power, a fine place to check out the essence of Christianity. His eyelids immediately began to droop but then he was saved by the phone, this time a call from ­Mona's mother in Lansing. A representative from University of Michigan would be in Marquette on Monday to talk to talented students and their parents. Would he mind showing up at 2:00 p.m. at Marquette High School and acting as a guardian? He'd be glad to. Unfortunately Mona's mother was named Gidget, a product of her own mother's fascination with the 1961 film
Gidget Goes Hawaiian
. Sunderson felt there was something to be said for biblical names.

He was suddenly fatigued with his feeble attempts at reading, poured a nightcap, and watched the 11:00 p.m. news in which he noted again that car bombs were much smarter than smart bombs. The weather forecast was pleasantly awful with an Alberta clipper
,
a vast storm coming down from the northwest across Lake Superior to bury them in an early blizzard. Splendid, he thought. Well back in his brain, a naughty place, he thought his noon lunch might lead to a sexual encounter. Their woodpile fusion had been electric indeed. Now the possible encounter was sullied by the fact that he had to be at the high school at two. He brooded about this as he poured a second nightcap to cure the coffee jangles, took the clicker, and segued to a satellite channel playing a non–Oscar winning movie called
Ninja Cheerleaders
. Marion had said that a central fact of our time was the triumph of process over content. In the movie these nubile but powerful girls would leap high in the air and viciously kick bad guys in the face in an explosion of blood and lost teeth. Despite some marvelous butt shots he dozed, waking in a couple of hours to one of those save the whales movies where a crew in a rubber boat cruised through bumpy waters pestering the marine mammals. Back at camp a geek in a black turtleneck said that male whales of different generations keep in touch with their moms. On the way to bed Sunderson imagined a mother whale introducing her newborn daughter to a forty-year-old brother, “Sarah, this is your brother Leviathan.”

PART IV

Chapter 14

He awoke just before daylight feeling rather good and vowing to turn his life around. He had the firm idea that the loop he had been thrown for by Diane leaving him had been waiting for him a long time and he had been too densely wrapped up in his habits to see it coming. There was an urge to list these habits many of which were involved in his wrongheaded perceptions of the nature of life but he was eager to bundle up and walk down to the beach. Ever since childhood he had been addicted to the beauty of severe storms and had been raised in and lived in the right place to appreciate them. He had heard the storm and despite being frightened by Lake Superior gathering in strength when he woke to pee at five a.m. he hurried through a bowl of tasteless oatmeal without milk and reheated coffee without cream in eagerness to see the mounting seas. He hadn't been to the grocer's since arriving home because he was an absentminded dipshit, or so he thought. He listened carefully to the weather on the local NPR station disappointed that it wouldn't be a full gale though by evening the wind would gust to sixty knots, enough to raise the seas high indeed.

He headed out into the teeth of the northwest wind, his eyes tearing and his wool watch cap pulled over his ears, consoling himself that the wind would be at his back on the way home. Well before he finished the seven-block walk he regretted not putting on long underwear. His dick was turning into an ice cube. He tried very hard to remember the dream that had made him feel so good on waking but failed other than to see in his head the middle branch of the Escanaba River south of Gwinn, normally a fearful place because he had once stumbled in his waders and gone under in a swift stretch of the river. Anyone who didn't think waterboarding was torture had never come close to the ultimate horror of nearly drowning wherein you're wallowing, sucking water rather than air.

Turning from the beach and the loose sand and snow blasting into his face with the thunder of the waves in his ears he resented the frailty of his age. He felt that the cold was his heritage and now it was betraying him, a bit dramatic for the simple fact that he had forgotten to put on his wool long underwear.

It was nearly pleasant walking back toward home with the north wind helping to push him up the long hill. He stopped at the grocer's on Fourth, amused at a woman getting out of her car and standing in the full force of the blizzard talking on her cell phone. Nothing will stop the addiction to this instrument he thought. The spring before while searching for a perp on the campus of the local university he figured that of the hundreds of students crisscrossing the campus between classes a full 90 percent were on their cell phones.

His breath shortened a bit when the woman on the phone followed him into the grocer's. He held the door and she walked right past him jabbering away without recognizing him. “Fred's been quite a disappointment,” she said.

It was Debbie Anne, his girlfriend when they were both sophomores at Munising High School. Age had not been kind to her and it was her voice rather than her appearance that immediately gave her away. They used to drive into the country and get in the back of his '47 Dodge to make out. She was sexually precocious and popular with the school athletes. She would help his trembling hands pull on a Trojan-Enz condom and then say, “You can park your car in my garage and throw the key in the grass,” a line from a dirty joke. She would hoot and chirrup when they screwed. He quickly dodged through the aisles foreshortening his shopping for fear she would recognize him. She was still talking while she sorted through the big family packs of pork chops when he escaped.

Back home he hastily took out a notebook before the heat of the house could make him drowsy. He turned to a fresh page avoiding any notes he had made about Melissa and Xavier in Nogales. He wrote:

1. My job as a janitor trying to sweep up the detritus of society is over. My grand finale will be to get the Great Leader in prison but this might not be possible.
   
2. My divorce has blown a three-year-long bomb crater in my life. I have to get over this before it destroys me at which it is presently doing a good job.
   
3. I have to control my habits. In the glory days of marriage I'd have two drinks after work, then a glass of wine with Diane at dinner, and then a nightcap while reading in the late evening. Any more than this has come to depress me. I want to feel good like I did when I camped for a week in Aravaipa Canyon. I have to drive over to Shingleton and buy a new pair of snowshoes. It occurs to me that no matter that he's a lunatic the Great Leader is a pretty smart guy with a lot of resources and if I'm going to catch him with blood on his hands I better go into training.
   

Lunch with Carla at the Landmark Inn was confusing. She had come into the restaurant with Queenie who was seated across the room with two elegantly dressed men who, Sunderson decided, couldn't possibly come from the state of Michigan. Carla told him blithely that the two men were friends of Queenie's from Los Angeles. After Brown University Queenie had gone to film school at UCLA and the men were
producers,
a mysterious term to Sunderson. The men struck him as a new kind of tooth decay in the mouth of the room. He was impatient to get on with the denouement but couldn't repress his curiosity about these interlopers.

“So they came to Marquette for the blizzard?”

“Effective people don't hang around watching the weather channel like locals do. Queenie has the idea that Dwight's life would make a great movie. These guys are also interested in the idea that if you create a viable new religion you got a real moneymaker on your hands.”

“No shit?” Sunderson's mind whirled with the idea.

“We stayed up most of the night partying and talking about both the movie and religion-for-profit idea. Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson took in billions.”

“But they were ostensibly Christian,” Sunderson countered.

“It doesn't matter. We're starting from scratch like the Mormons. They're a worldwide powerhouse. We're also using the recruitment techniques of the Scientologists. They're a bright bunch.”

Sunderson sat there looking around the familiar room to make sure he hadn't been transported to an asylum. He had ordered a bowl of chili and very much wanted a beer, which was verboten because of his upcoming appointment at the high school. Carla did look like she had been rode hard and put away wet. Her eyes were bleary as she sipped her second glass of sauvignon blanc and played with her Caesar salad (without anchovies).

“It sounds utterly deranged.”

“That's because you're trapped in your tiny ex-detective box. You don't have a clue what the world has become. The real movers and shakers are out there on the peripheries discovering new forms. Think of Bill Gates thirty years ago, damn it. Dwight's basic tenet is that semen is the most powerful fluid in the world. It's been totally overlooked. I mean that the Bible said you're not supposed to spill it on the ground, you know jerk off, but that's not what he's doing.”

“Pardon?” Sunderson felt his neck redden because four ladies at the next table had turned hearing the magic world
semen
.

“Jizz. Cum, for Christ's sake. It's the stuff of life,” Carla said loudly.

“Of course.” Sunderson felt this was the moment of truth. He reached into his sport coat and took out the folded e-mail and raised-skirt photo of Mona he had found on the cult site in Arizona.

“Where did you get this?” Carla asked looking overlong at the photo of Mona. She wadded up the material and dropped it into her Caesar salad, looking pale and staring at the ceiling.

“I have twenty copies. Perhaps we should talk in private.” He had, in fact, forgotten to make copies. He reached for the wadded paper and dabbed the salad dressing off with his napkin, glancing at Carla's face which had hardened and become hateful.

“Fuck you!” she screamed with alarming volume. She grabbed for her coat and fled toward the door. He stood, deciding not to look around for reactions, dropped two twenties on the table, and followed. Outside the wind had subsided but thick snow was falling straight down and there was a half foot of fresh snow on the recently plowed parking lot. He tracked her easily to Queenie's Range Rover, which she had started. He wiped away fluffy snow and got in the passenger side hoping the heater was fast because he had left his coat in the restaurant. She was curled up fetally on the driver's seat sniffling with her back turned to him and her skirt pulled up the undersides of her thighs. Here we go again, he thought coldly, staring at the marvelous rump he had banged away at against the woodpile.

“What are you going to do?” she asked in a hushed voice.

“I don't know. Maybe put you away for a few years. Maybe not. Mona's not excited about testifying.”

“What's that mean?” She curled up tighter, more fully exposing her butt in pale blue panties.

“For the time being it means it's your duty to stay in close touch with me via cell and e-mail. Any dereliction of duty on your part and I meet with my friend the prosecutor. You are my slave informant. Agreed?”

“Yes. Get a card out of my wallet.”

When he leaned to retrieve the wallet from her purse he got a better view of her bottom, which all in all was the best in his experience. His feelings were mixed but he was becoming tumescent. His general disgust for her didn't seem to include his dick, which was an independent compass.

“Marion said you could easily start a religion with the world's shortest man or the world's tallest woman. She's seven foot eight and Chinese.”

“Fuck Marion,” she squawked. “You can play with my ass if you want.”

“I'll pass for now.”

He was nearly to the high school, shivering and feeling virtuous. His mind, such as it was, had been diverted. He didn't want to go back into the restaurant and face the stares which, though after the fact, were a consideration.

Mona and the gentleman were already in a small office at a desk when a secretary showed him in.

“Hey Daddy. This is Mr. Schmidt.”

“Your daughter is top-notch!” Mr. Schmidt barked. “I'm sure we can make things easy for you financially.”

“She always was smart as a whip and cute as a button,” Sunderson said stupidly.

“I find her interest in both musicology and botany fascinating. What universities is she looking at?” Mona was sitting too close to Schmidt, which seemed to be making him uncomfortable in front of her putative father.

“I've checked out Harvard, Tufts, and Macalester on the Web. Also the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. The trouble is that a wadded Kleenex can look like a white rose and a white rose can look like a wadded Kleenex,” Mona said thoughtfully.

“Really?” Schmidt raised his eyebrows.

Sunderson was wondering about this tangent, feeling crummy possibly because he was crummy. The work at hand was to de-crummy himself.

“Make me an offer I can't refuse. Ann Arbor is attractive because of all the music in the area. I'd like to meet my heroine Aretha Franklin in person. Music soothes the savage beast inside me.”

“Really?” Schmidt said again.

Afterward Mona took the rest of the afternoon off from school and they drove to the hotel so she could run in and pick up his coat and then they went to the New York Delicatessen down the street so he could order chicken soup and a massive corned beef sandwich. “Don't trim the fat please.” Real life wasn't exactly panning out and a very long nap was always a primary solution. He toted up the figure and realized that he had only been retired for thirty-three days.

“My parents are so worthless you wonder why they bothered having me,” Mona said plaintively, then dug into her sandwich with a grin.

“People don't think far ahead.”

“Diane called me this morning. I'm sure you know they're moving back up here from Florida because her husband wants to be treated by doctors he can trust.”

“I heard that. I'm not sure I can bear to see her.”

“Of course you can. She's going to be my surrogate mother. I could use one.”

“Me too,” Sunderson laughed. He was tired of swimming in a cold swamp of ideologies hopelessly connected to money. He had never thought of Mona as a semidaughter like Diane did. When Mona's mother was absent Diane had been extremely attentive to her, becoming a combination big sister and parent in absentia.

“I never made you your homemade birthday pizza. I'll do it tonight.”

“Make it later,” he said, already drowsy from the soup and massive sandwich. Marion made his own corned beef in order to get the Jewish flavor he remembered from going to college in Chicago.

“I feel rejected that you don't peek at me anymore.”

“You'll have to get used to it. How can I get after King David for his penchant for underage girls if I'm peeking at you?”

“The Great Leader goes real young to catch them at the right formative time with his semen, the mightiest fluid in the world. That's what Carla told me. I'm not really that young. I easily pass for eighteen.”

“That's what I heard.” Sunderson ignored her comments wondering where the Great Leader got his semen theories.

Sunderson had a four-hour nap waking at eight, made fresh coffee, and smelled his stack of books. Why smell books? A habit. He waved from his kitchen window to ­Mona's kitchen window where she and Marion were rolling dough and getting ready to assemble the pizzas. He was on page 37 of Deloria's
Playing Indian,
feeling the usual dread. To Sunderson the Indians were the monstrous skeleton in the American closet. He always imagined stretching a white sheet across the United States and historically seeing all of the hundreds of locations where the Indian blood seeped through. At Michigan State he had felt nauseous when a professor had explained the Sand Creek Massacre. As the Russians said, consciousness can be a disease.