The Great Leader by Jim Harrison
“But you have an appointment in the morning.”
“I’ll e-mail them.” She suitably placed her laptop on her lap. “I won’t be able to meet with you tomorrow because my father has died. How’s that?”
“Wonderful dear.”
They proceeded to Ann Arbor arriving in the confusing dark at the Campus Inn with Mona playing expert navigator with MapQuest on her computer screen. He was utterly fatigued from ten hours of driving so they had a dismal room-service dinner including a bottle of white wine in his quarters of their connecting rooms. He had a whiskey from the pint in his suitcase and glanced only once through the connecting door as she changed into jeans to take a walk. He felt a jolt in his nuts, then stared down at his half-eaten club sandwich. Will this pointless lust never end he thought?
Three hours later at midnight she still hadn’t returned and he was near tears of frustration. She hadn’t responded to his calls on her cell but then he discovered she had left it behind on the coffee table in her room. He must have paced a solid mile unaware that he was merely another father waiting up for a wayward daughter. His black mood had begun right after Mona left when Diane had called to say that his old friend Otto had died of a heart attack. He had difficulty accepting this as fact. He and Otto had fished for brook trout together a half dozen times a summer ever since they were ten years old in Munising. Otto owned a small construction company that specialized in building summer cabins for downstaters and the recent economic downturn had nearly bankrupted him. Otto could drink a case of beer in a long evening and was addicted to sausage in all its various forms. In a day of fishing he would eat a whole package of raw hot dogs. He would use a pound of ham in a sandwich and was locally famous for his expertise at roasting whole pigs and would devour the bronzed skin in portions of a square foot. Diane and her friends would euphemistically refer to Otto’s problem as an “eating disorder.”
The news of Otto had brought with it a momentary fear of death which Sunderson dismissed in favor of worrying about Mona wandering the nighttime streets of Ann Arbor. When she got home he intended on locking his side of the connecting doors to prevent the possibility of sexual mishap whether peeking or something more serious. When he was a senior in high school and full of confusion and near depression his dad had counseled him by saying, “You’ve got to boil down your life and figure out what you want.” Remembering this made him feel oddly hopeful and he took his notebook out of his briefcase.
On the map of Ann Arbor I note a park along the river where I can walk in the morning. Television weather says it will be unseasonably warm.
In e-mails with Carla, Mona has discovered that within Dwight’s followers there are seventeen couples with daughters of eleven, twelve, or thirteen in age. Of course historically cults are often involved in illegal sexual license. This was possibly true in the Waco affair and the recent activity of the Mormon apostasy group on the Arizona-Utah border.
Boiling it down what truly angers me is Dwight using fake Indian material to fuck young girls. Given my knowledge of the suffering of American Indians for five hundred years this is doubly monstrous. It’s been a decade since I could bear to read about this suffering which only talking to Marion puts into perspective.
Carla said that all the women in the cult dance naked around the bonfire while the men beat on drums after which Dwight selects one or two of the young ones for his “blessing.” This happens every evening.
How could the parents allow this except through the delusion of religion? Carla said that in Arizona Dwight threatened one mother with his pet rattlesnake. She was trying to hide her daughter who had been made “uncomfortable” by Dwight’s big dick.
This all sounds like a bad dream but it’s reality. I have to put a stop to this. The irony is that I wouldn’t have all of this information without the criminal Carla-Mona connection and Carla’s belief that I could get her sent to prison.
I just now leafed through Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild and read, “Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility.” I am unsure of what he means except that in a walk of a couple of hours the first half hour is full of the usual mental junk but then you just zone out into the landscape and are simply a humanoid biped walking through the snowy hills and forests or along Lake Superior’s frozen beaches. You don’t bother trying to comprehend this immense body of water because you’re not meant to.
Mona still not back and it’s eleven. It helps to write it down. Why? It makes it concrete. D. H. Lawrence on the subject of Indians is very irritating but I have to remember that this stuff was published in 1923, nearly ninety years ago. He thought the demon in our continent was caused by the unappeased ghost of the “Red Indian,” the inner malaise that brings us to madness. What am I to make of this?
I have to do a little reading to figure out again what Christianity is. It certainly cooperated in the destruction of approximately five hundred tribes.
Back to Dwight: he is using Indianness to enact his pathological sexual desires. This is unforgivable and deserves death, but his is unlikely.
He shuffled from the small desk to an easy chair where Mona woke him up at midnight. He had gotten pretty cranked up over Keith Olbermann but not enough to keep him awake. He had spilled his drink on his crotch which made it look like he pissed his pants. His Uncle Bertie, a commercial fisherman, used to say that any day you don’t puke or shit your pants is a good day so Sunderson was ahead of the game.
“I was worried about you,” he muttered.
“I just walked around town and had a couple glasses of wine with some students. I love it here.”
Sunderson decided to let sleeping dogs lie rather than begin an interrogation. She was standing in front of him and his eyes focused on her visible, protuberant belly button between her sweater and jeans. There was an urge to lick this mystery. She pulled him out of the chair and led him to bed, helping him disrobe down to his boxer shorts.
“Get outta here,” he said, following her to the door and locking it.
On the way home a day and half later he was happy because Mona was happy, perhaps the happiest he had ever seen her. For the seven-hour drive home he had packed a cooler with the three hundred bucks worth of stuff he had bought at Zingerman’s Delicatessen, a place where Diane had gotten FedEx food for special occasions. A thaw had caused the spending binge. Fifty-five degrees in December! And after shopping he had ordered what was to be the best sandwich of his long life, a real pile of brisket on rye slathered with the hottest horseradish possible so that tears of pain and pleasure came freely. The moon was to be nearly full and when they reached Marquette he intended to take a couple-hour moonlit walk out to Presque Isle.
On the way home he described to Mona a freakishly difficult case that he had finally solved the year before. In a small school system in the eastern U.P. twelve thousand dollars had been embezzled. The only possible guilty parties had been the school superintendent and his secretary, a minister’s wife in her midfifties, a graceful and intelligent woman, albeit rather dumpy. After a number of questionings about computer and accounting accesses he determined both of them to be clean. On what he decided was his final visit he talked to the school janitor who seemed somewhat retarded and had a speech impediment from a cleft palate. They smoked a cigarette in the parking lot and chatted. No one notices janitors in their green suits. To Sunderson the janitor had tried to present himself as stupider than he was and had let the word “ubiquitous” slip through while talking about students and the meth epidemic. It occurred to Sunderson that the janitor had ready access to the office computer after everyone left for the day. Back in the school he checked old yearbooks and noted that the janitor and the school secretary, the minister’s wife, were classmates. He took a big chance and suddenly asked her over coffee, “Why are you fucking Bob the janitor?” Bingo. She fell apart, confessing that she and Bob were going to run away with the money held in a bank account in the Soo. They were headed to Milwaukee where Bob had a job lined up at t
Mona laughed hysterically. “The sweetest most religious girl in my class is a blow-job artist. She told me it was like conducting an orchestra.”
Sunderson was puzzled by this but let it pass. When they reached Marquette Mona made them mortadella and provolone sandwiches and then he headed out on his walk. The moonrise was stupendous forming a glissade of light on quiet Lake Superior and making the freshly fallen soft snow on the beach a nearly daytime white. He walked fast and raised a sweat, pausing only to talk to Professor Eathorne whom he had met in various taverns. Eathorne was throwing a ball for his yellow Lab who was able to find the ball hidden in the soft snow. Their language is in their nose, Sunderson thought. Where is mine? Maybe he should get a yellow Lab, he thought, to counter loneliness. Dogs need a lot of petting, which might have been a better way to conduct his marriage. Eathorne taught human geography, which among other things dealt with why people were where they were, a germane question in human history. Running into Eathorne gave Sunderson a dose of oxygen. There were all these areas of human inquiry that were intriguing. He thought he might begin auditing some courses at the university and stretch his mind beyond the confines of history.
Christmas dinner made him jealous of Diane’s dying husband. How can you be jealous of a dying man? It takes work. They lived high on the edge of a steep slope that overlooked the harbor. He was a gentle and obviously melancholy soul and when he and Sunderson went into his den it took a while to permit their chat to go fluidly. His son had sadly enough dropped out of medical school to enter the movie business in L.A. while his daughter happily enough was a marine biologist at Scripps south of San Francisco. Neither had married so there were no grandchildren. Sunderson sipped rather than gulped his whiskey, always a temptation, and stared at a half dozen bird and animal prints that were splendid including a javelina. The man said that they were first folio Audubons. Sunderson said he had seen a number of javelinas down on the border.
“Diane said that you were down their chasing an evil cult leader who preys on young girls,” he said with a hard edge in his voice.
“I haven’t been at it long, a couple of months, and I doubt I’ll be successful. The problem is getting one of his followers, a parent, to testify against him.”
“When my daughter was growing up a banker down the street had a discreet but unhealthy interest in her. I warned him and he broke into tears. He thought he was in love with a twelve-year-old. Then a friend of mine, an old classmate, who practiced in Omaha was caught and prosecuted for the same Lolita syndrome. It often comes from a man who lacked social contact with girls his own age between, say, age eleven and fourteen. The pathology is in the inability to control the urges.”
“The problem is of course the permanent scar tissue left behind.” Sunderson was unable to admit that he hadn’t read Lolita though Marion had advised him to do so. He grew nervous watching Diane’s husband wince a number of times.
At dinner Diane was perfect as usual. Sunderson overate, mystified by the deliciousness of the roast beef, which Diane had ordered from Chicago. The Burgundy wine was the best he had ever put in his mouth, and the good doctor asked Diane to open a second bottle for which Sunderson was grateful. He was also grateful for the way Mona amused and cheered the man. She was sitting on his right and had him laughing until quite suddenly during dessert he fell asleep. Diane’s eyes flowed with tears.
PART V
Chapter 17
In January the cold winnowed him. It stayed near zero during the day and twenty below at night for a week. In order to walk he had to wear an irritating face mask and he went less far in the woods out of timidity. He carried a compass and wood matches in a small aluminum tube, also candles in his vehicle in case it broke down. It did on a country road south of Trenary with a metallic, hacking cough. Two candles plus the afternoon sun kept the interior well above freezing. He dozed, content that he would live through this and remembering his cell phone was on the coffee table in the living room. He had turned on the warning lights and overcame the irksome clicking sound by turning on the NPR station to a rather dreary Haydn piece and mulling recent developments in the case. Mona had shown him an e-mail from King David sent through Carla. “Carla tells me that you’re extorting information from her. You better be careful, kiddo. You’re no longer a law officer.” Sunderson replied, “It is unwise to threaten someone from jail. I need only to send your message to Maui officials to get your sentence extended. However, I want you out of jail so I can get at you.” To Carla he said, “You should behave yourself. I need only to call the prosecutor to begin extradition on you for sexual abuse of a minor.” He wanted Mona to add, “Mona is now willing to testify,” but she refused. She was stirring a short-rib-and-lentil soup at his stove and said, “Carla got me drunk and stoned and ate me out. I can’t say that. I’m a big girl not one of those kids King David is fucking with.”
A logger towed Sunderson to a tavern in Trenary and pointed out the hole in his engine drooling oil. “You’ve thrown a rod,” the logger said. “Your Blazer is shit-canned, buddy.”
He signed the title over to the logger who could use a vehicle for spare parts for the price of a hamburger and a beer. Marion picked him up in an hour. Sunderson got his gear out of the woebegone junker.
“Aren’t you going to say something sentimental?”
“Good-bye, darling,” he said, patting the hood. The hard part was when he found his dead dog’s teddy bear under the backseat.
When they got back to his house Mona was frying a chicken and had also made succotash, one of his favorites.
“I’m being nice so you won’t run away like my dad did.”
He and Marion looked at each other feeling uncomfortable at her frankness. She was wearing a pair of turquoise earrings Marion had bought her on a trip to Albuquerque.
“Carla e-mailed to say that Queenie’s grandma died and she’s going to inherit a lot more money. The cult is definitely moving to Nebraska in April.”
Sunderson exhaled over a whiskey thinking that he would have time to get all of his ducks in a row whatever that meant. He would walk, read, and intermittently hibernate for three months and then, by God, he would somehow close the case.
In the morning he bought a used, gray Subaru with only sixty thousand miles on it, then stopped at Snowbound Books for a copy of Lolita. He had a painful lunch with Diane which she had requested. She talked a lot about her husband’s white corpuscle count and other medical details and barely touched her food which he, typically, finished. He was down fifteen pounds in the nearly three months since retirement, which made him ponder on the scales whether or not he had a fatal disease but then figured it must be the addictive walking. By the end of lunch she was in tears and he was near tears. Outside she hugged him good-bye and he shuddered at their first real physical contact in over three years. Life could be so merciless.
He fled out to the Skandia area for a hike. The temperature had risen to a balmy ten degrees above zero and he made a three-hour circle on a packed snowmobile track, which made walking without snowshoes easy. When the car came in sight after the lovely mindless exhaustion he wasn’t ready to go home yet and stopped and built a small fire out of dead pine branches to keep himself company. He was thinking about back after 9/11 when he had attended two law enforcement conferences in Canada on the cooperative efforts to prevent terrorism. The problem seemed unlikely indeed in the Upper Peninsula but the U.S. government was paying the tab and the chief ordered him to go. The first was in Toronto and the meetings were mostly pathetic nonsense but the city was wonderful. He met a now retired Toronto detective named Bob Kolb and they talked for hours in taverns and restaurants about trout fishing and grouse and woodcock hunting. There was another meeting a few months later in Calgary wherein much the same material was repeated so that one day he and Kolb skipped a couple of sessions to see the zoo. Strange to say Sunderson had never be
There were repercussions that continued onward to the present time. A trout wasn’t just a trout any more than a crow was simply a crow. This spirit of attention wasn’t with him often but often enough. Marion was better practiced in this spirit of attention and when Sunderson visited Marion’s remote cabin he learned a great deal from him. Once they had found a dead yellow-rumped warbler which Sunderson had kept and put in a plastic bag in the freezer to remind him of the ineffable. A creek or river would also change the texture of his spirit so that staring into the moving water would make his brain tingle as it had in his childhood when wonder is nothing special but an everyday event.
Stooping before the fire his back and butt were chilled with drying sweat. When his job confused him he often reread from a letter Kolb had sent years before now kept in a tiny plastic envelope in his wallet. Kolb was responding to Sunderson’s note on how simple it must be to work in the U.P. compared to an immense city like Toronto. “No surprise but the TV networks, the news media, and I imagine most writers, have got it wrong. Crime is not interesting, it’s pathetically predictable. Nothing has changed since Cain slew Abel. Greed, jealousy, mental instability, and economic deprivation remain the prime ingredients. Religion has a place as well. Today substance abuse and moral lassitude thicken the gravy. The interest is in the circumstances, not the act, and not necessarily the people directly involved. Witnesses seldom tell the same story. For any detective, geography notwithstanding, police investigation involves hours of grinding boredom interspersed with moments of shit-your-pants excitement. The latter keeps the adrenaline junkies in the game.”