The Great Leader (8 page)

Meanwhile Sunderson felt a palpable prickling of the skin on his neck, a sign that they were being watched. When he had noted many human tracks at the base of the canyon Bushrod had said the tracks were made by illegal Mexican migrants who had crossed the border. He raised his eyes up the canyon wall and there not thirty yards away was a petroglyph of a half-man, half-lizard looking down at them. Sunderson knew that no matter what he read, no matter what was explained to him, he would never truly understand what he was looking at. The language that might do so was permanently lost. But this alone did not add up to his neck tingle. Farther up the canyon, easily a hundred yards, there was a small man, or perhaps a boy, looking at them partially concealed by a boulder and a bush. The mental jump between lizard-man and the boy was unavailable to him.

“I was wondering when you'd notice it, crime buster,” Bushrod said with the self-assured voice of a bully politician.

“Quite something,” Sunderson said, pleased to have diverted him from the wrong mustard.

“I have theorized it was made by the local shaman warning others away from his canyon.”

Sunderson ignored him, got up with half his sandwich, a bottle of water, and an apple, and walked diagonally away from the boy up the canyon, putting the food on a solitary boulder beneath a mesquite. “Hola,” he yelled,
hola
being the sum total of the Spanish he remembered from a Mexican American bunkmate in Frankfurt. He returned to quizzical glances.

“There's a boy up the canyon.”

They both looked but lacked Sunderson's tough hunter vision in which you always look
through
a landscape, looking for a shape that doesn't belong.

“I don't see him,” Lucy admitted.

“I think I do.” Of course Bushrod was lying. “You shouldn't encourage them.”

By the time they started back to Tucson Sunderson would have given an incalculable amount of money to be away from Bushrod not to speak of Lucy in her present incarnation as a dutiful daughter, which meant a piece of raw emotional roadkill. After the lizard-man the remaining singular event was a large rattlesnake crossing a two-track. They got out to look at it and Bushrod teased the viper to exhaustion with a long stick.

“I won that round,” Bushrod said.

“The snake didn't have a stick,” Sunderson parried.

“What's that supposed to mean, young man?”

“Try it without a stick.” Sunderson loathed those television nature programs featuring people pestering frantic animals in the name of knowledge.

“You are impudent!” Bushrod yelled.

“I hope so.”

“Please,” said Lucy, a frantic animal.

They drove back in silence and when they reached the Arizona Inn Sunderson bolted from the vehicle without a word. Safely in his room he uncapped a cheap travel pint of Four Roses knowing it would have taken a gallon to purge the day. There was an envelope with a fax on the coffee table. The voice mail light on his phone was on and he listened grimly to his mother. “Son, Berenice said the restaurant at your hotel is wonderful. We want to come in for dinner.” He called back from his cell phone in case she had caller ID that would read Arizona Inn.

“Mom, I'm on my way to Willcox.”

“The hotel said you hadn't checked out.”

“I just did.”

“How sad. I had high hopes for a nice dinner.”

“I'll see you in a couple of days.” He called the hotel operator and asked that all calls be blocked, then read the fax from Mona. “This guy's a wiz. He got on to me and said, ‘You'll be in real trouble if you keep tracking me.' Love, your darling Mona who aches for her stepdaddy. P.S. the quote you wanted from Crichton is from the
Washington Post
not the
NY Times
.”

All our progress of luxury and knowledge . . . we have not been lifted by as much as an inch above the level of the darkest ages . . . The last hundred years have wrought no change in the passions, the cruelties, and the barbarous impulses of mankind. There is no change from the savagery of the Middle Ages. We enter a new century equipped with every wonderful device of science and art but the pirate, the savage, and the tyrant still survives.

Sunderson took off his clothes and got under the sheets after mixing a hefty second drink. Life at present called for a professional-size nap but his mind was a whirling jangle despite the alcohol which had failed its soporific mission. It was 5:00 p.m. back in Marquette thus his first full workday of retirement was finished, not that a detective was ever truly off duty. Leisure was overrated he thought in a second euphemism. His mind wandered among its flotsam and jetsam looking for a pleasant factoid that might ease him into unconsciousness. In the 1600s thousands of Tuscan girls starved themselves in order to get closer to Jesus according to a forensic pathologist. No, this was too jarring. Because of his brook trout fishing he had known for two years that the little leopard frogs were disappearing from the landscape before Diane had discovered the fact in an eco magazine. She was angry he hadn't told her. So what. He had prayed at age eight that his little brother Robert would grow a new lower leg but when he told his dad his dad had said, “That won't happen.” Now, fifty-five years later there was a suggestion of tears. Lucy was a Diane from hell. There was a split-second image of dropping Bushrod down a manhole and sliding back the heavy cover. Down there with the shit he is. This didn't work because violence causes a surge of blood. Marion said that there were no truths only stories and how would my story end in the desuetude of retirement? Marion said that the computer allows people to waste endless hours on the novelty of their weaker interests. Just how is flax grown and why are there so many Russian prostitutes in Madrid? Diane's new husband is ill and is there a chance for us to hitch up again? Doubtful. He was still the same man she left, a man whose horizons were far lower than her own. Early on he busted a college girl for five lids of pot and it ruined her life. That's what her mother wrote him. Can the brain be swollen with loneliness? Of course. The Evangelicals largely favor enhanced torture. The years have swallowed themselves and disappeared. Through the slit of Slotkin's book Mona was crossways on the bed, her bare butt aimed at him, a poignantly illegal butt if you weren't in Mississippi or Costa Rica. His dick rose but his body relaxed. He slept.

It was more dark than twilight with a bird fooling at the window and sharp raps at the door. “It's me, Lucy,” the door voice said. He turned over looking for a clue to where he might be. The rapping continued and he yelled, “Yes.” He grabbed the wrong one of the two robes hanging from a bathrobe hook, a woman's robe that didn't quite close off his middle. Opening the door he glanced immediately away from Lucy's face which was swollen with weeping as if her entire family had been wiped out in a house fire only minutes ago. In contrast she was dressed sexily in a shortish blue skirt and a white sleeveless blouse. His sleep-slowed brain computed
seduction
. She threw herself facedown on his bed muffling her voice.

“You had your phone turned off when I needed you.”

“It was a tough day out on the range with your dad. I needed a nap.” She looked attractive indeed but he couldn't quite make the wires of sex and tears connect.

“I have to leave early in the morning. I had this feeling you wanted me. Sadly I also had this intuition that I reminded you of your ex-wife. So it's not me you want, is it?”

“What am I supposed to say?” He was buying time what with being half tumescent.

“Never mind. I know the answer. I can't make love to you if I remind you of someone else.” She began crying hard.

“I'm sorry.” His brain had become a knot.

“At least hold me,” she pleaded. Her voice was that of a girl, another explicit turnoff for him. Girls, unlike women, were only a turn-on at a distance, say the thirty feet between his peek hole and Mona's bedroom window.

So he did with her face against his neck which was soon wet and slippery. He questioned whether there were a limit to tears and if her ducts might eventually dry up making love possible but that was unlikely.

“Too bad you don't know how to lie,” she wept.

“Jesus Christ, Lucy!” He flung himself out of bed and went to the desk, flipping through the room service menu. He had given half of his sandwich to the Mexican kid. It was 9:00 p.m. in Michigan, well past dinnertime, and he was ravenous. There was a salad with jicama whatever the hell that was. He called in an order for two cheeseburgers, a bottle of Beaujolais that he remembered Diane liked to drink in the summer, and a full bottle of Canadian whiskey for sixty bucks, the cheapest full bottle on the menu. Maybe he could drown her tears.

“We've failed each other,” she wailed.

In answer he turned on the TV to Anderson Cooper who at the moment reminded him of a chipmunk. He segued to a film with a boatload of naturalists chasing a pod of killer whales off the coast of Alaska and hoped that the beasts would turn back on the boat and have a naturalist meal. He split the last of his travel pint into two drinks and she poked her head out from under a pillow at the rattle of ice.

When she finally walked out the door he looked at the whiskey bottle and was pleased that it was only half gone, which meant he wouldn't have a hangover in his top five hundred. He thought of what his dad would say if he knew his son paid sixty bucks for a bottle of whiskey. Likely nothing. Lucy had eaten only half of her cheeseburger so he took a cold bite to get full value. With the light out and chewing slowly he remembered a professor saying that carefully read history will tell us everything. This seemed not to be true. This was one of those times when he felt the utter exhaustion of not making love as if he were a teenager necking in a car. She had ended up talking so glowingly about her children he once again wished that he and Diane had had a child.

Chapter 5

Driving west at 7:00 a.m. on Interstate 10 toward Willcox into the bright headlights of oncoming commuter traffic Sunderson recalled that as a child he had devoutly wished for summer solstice all year round, when at least minimal light would tip the scales at over eighteen hours a day in the Great North. By early November it was down to about seven hours, clearly not enough to keep the soul together and one treaded the dark water in despair until after December 21, the winter solstice, when a minute or two of additional daylight helped the soul regather. Way back at Michigan State Kaplan's course on the Russian Revolution had enthralled him. One day this great professor of Russian history with his wonderful big bald head had given Sunderson a few minutes after class and Sunderson questioned the morale effect of so much darkness on far northern countries. Kaplan had said
how interesting
as he packed his briefcase and when Sunderson aced the course his skin had tingled with pride.

Not so this morning. He had barely made it out of the lobby and peeked around the corner to see Lucy coming toward the desk with a bellhop, then he had to hide in the bushes of the parking lot across the street as she got into a black sedan limo with a black driver. How much did this cost? What's wrong with a taxi?

He hit the radio off button when someone on NPR used the word turd
iconic
. He used to keep track of these obtuse Orwellian nuggets. A few years ago it was the relentless use of the word
closure
that raised his ire and then with Iraq the silly term
embedded
. In general Sunderson had no use for pundits. It reminded him of a recent article in the Marquette newspaper interviewing a local girl who had tried to
make it
in Hollywood who said, “Just about everyone you meet out there is a producer.” Pundits reflected his idea that everyone in America gets to make themselves up whole cloth, and also the hideously mistaken idea that talking is thinking.

He had gotten up at 6:00 a.m. to call Mona before she was off to school. There had been a juvenile urge to ask her what she was wearing if anything but she beat him to it.

“Without you here I get dressed right away. Mom has the thermostat turned down to save money. Dad sent his annual note saying to keep my chin up. Can you believe that miserable cocksucker?”

Mona's father had left them when she was ten. He was the usual young realtor slicker trying to create a big development out of air. Despite the overwhelming beauty of the area it was impossible because Michigan's main population centers were at least a seven-hour drive away. Sunderson's motive in the early morning call was to get Mona off her direct hacking with Dwight which was conceivably dangerous. He diverted her by asking for specific information on contemporary cults. Sunderson had felt his focus was too narrow. After all, so much of his work had been with the minor laws made by the state legislature, the county supervisors, and the city council to pester people, not to speak of the U.S. Congress, the members of which have been so deranged by lobbyist pressure that many forget which state they come from.

“That sounds fun,” she replied to the request for cult info. “Too bad you're not here. Two of my friends stayed over for a pajama party and we drank the rest of your beer. They're still here and they're naked, aren't you girls?” He heard shrieks of “naked nude.”

“Please behave, Mona. I checked out of the Arizona Inn so hold any research faxes until you hear from me.” He quickly hung up to the sound of more shrieks and laughter. In his own danceless life he couldn't imagine anyone laughing on a November dawn but here it was. He tried to dismiss the image of three nude girls in the same bed but it was like trying not to think of a white horse. Now there was suddenly a white horse in Mona's bedroom. It occurred to him while driving through Benson, a town that his brother-in-law Bob had bragged held thirty thousand Airstream trailers in the winter, that he hadn't seen any boys visiting Mona for a couple of years, just her goth female cabal, the nature of which was beyond him. He did not want to wander into the territory of his average male ignorance of lesbianism.

When he took the Willcox exit he began to feel presumptuous, which meant he was losing his nerve. There was a sign saying that Willcox was the hometown of Rex Allen, the singing cowboy, and he was way back when in the world of the Saturday matinee when he and a hundred other kids would watch big Rex and a dozen other cowboys who were on horseback and would warble, “Get Along Little Doggie,” and then minutes later would be firing their six-shooters at a group of woebegone Indians. From the research Mona had faxed he knew there had been a scandal years ago about the Willcox cops using stray dogs for target practice at the town dump, which was not a good advertisement for law enforcement integrity. Another local problem, this one of a financial nature, was an oversupply of ostriches. Many people had bought breeding pairs for fifty thousand bucks hoping to raise broods of young ostriches for their hides, feathers, and meat to make their inevitable fortunes. This struck Sunderson as a mini–Wall Street scheme but too small-time to attract the likes of Bernard Madoff, just the usual millions of suckers who wanted to be sitting pretty.

To build his nerve back to a functional level he stopped at a diner for the habitual heart-stopper breakfast of sausage, eggs, and crispy hash browns his doctor had warned about. While working at a bag of delicious local pistachios he noted the loose wattles of all the retirees eating big breakfasts and muttering with full mouths about the dangers presented by Obama. It had always mystified him why so many of the poor were right-wingers when with the Republicans the poor went totally unacknowledged. The poor are always betrayed by history he thought feeling both sympathy and empathy as his own interest in history seemed to be betraying him. On his coffee table he had counted nineteen volumes of an historical nature that he had bought but not yet touched. He had used reading to escape his job but as his job had withered toward his retirement party he had become less enthused. On the last day of brook trout fishing in September he had been thinking about the Etruscans while he waded a good stretch of the Chocolay River. He smelled marijuana before he rounded a bend and caught two young couples drinking beer and smoking pot on the riverbank. He flipped his badge and the girls began crying while the boys' faces turned pale. He stared at them coldly while his mind wandered to a small Etruscan museum he and Diane had visited in Italy.

“Fuck it,” he said.

“Fuck what,” one of the boys croaked hugging his girlfriend.

“I don't have time to take you in. I have to go fishing.” Sunderson was staring at a trout rising and feeding at the edge of the eddy. How happy he and Diane had been in the Guarnacci Etruscan Museum in Volterra.

He was struggling with shelling pistachios as he drove south from Willcox past the Dos Cabezas Mountains toward the immense and ominous Chiricahuas farther south. Perhaps shelling pistachios while driving was as dangerous as talking on a cell phone in heavy traffic. His mood of unrest and a somewhat cramped tummy from his huge breakfast was matched by the weather, a strong wind from the north and a temperature in the low fifties out in the valley that was twice the altitude of sunny Tucson. He couldn't seem to keep up with the banks of clouds scudding overhead and it seemed to be snowing on the mountaintops of the Chiricahuas. His doubt came from recognizing his own hubris, the jump from busting young people for pot and meth or petty burglary to investigating the evils of religion too sizable to give him a sense of solid footing. His last burglary before retiring was an old man whose two jars of coins were stolen and Sunderson had busted the high school perps when they turned the coins in for cash at the bank the next morning. This was a decidedly nonreligious crime.

After nearly thirty miles he pulled off the blacktop at the intersection of a gravel road leading east toward the Chiricahuas. The MapQuest was fairly clear and the Google aerial showed a rather run-down ranch house with a number of corrals and ramshackle outbuildings but there was the question of whether it was a recent photo. A topographical map would have been handier and so would a 4WD he thought because the seven miles of gravel led into successively rougher country. He made his right turn and drove the mile toward the ranch thinking that the aerial had given no indication of the depth of the canyon on each side of the two-track, which showed signs of traffic in the dirt. He parked off to the side of a locked gate feeling a little naked without his .38, which was in a locked desk drawer back in Marquette, but then the Great Leader Dwight had always been friendly enough if somewhat distant.

He climbed the iron-bar gate with wobbly legs and headed up the road amused at the similarity of the landscape to the cowboy movies where Indians or outlaws would pop up from the uniform and phony-looking boulders and start shooting arrows or bullets at Gene Autry or Roy Rogers.

He stopped to look at a large gathering of varied birds on the bushes around a small spring, really a seep from the canyon wall, and then he was quite literally stoned. Stoned as happened in certain Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia where the woebegone malefactor tries to cover his face while being pelted by fair-sized rocks.