The Great Leader (16 page)

On the long walk back to the campsite he passed openly on the trail through the Conservancy property and was accosted by a young man and a woman who were hanging up clothes in the yard of the cabin. To avoid any problem he blithered out pidgin Italian he remembered from the trip he and Diane had taken to Italy. The young man was embarrassed and merely pointed the way east off the property. The young woman grinned as if catching on to his ploy. Her brown legs emerging from her blue shorts gave him a nut buzz. When you don't see a female in five days a plain Jane can be striking. As he walked on down a two-track she nagged on him in unison with his need for a cigarette. He only had seven cigarettes left and wanted to stay for a full week, which meant two more days in his somewhat helpless addictive purgatory.

On the sixth day his feet were so sore he mostly sat at the campsite staring at the creek and pondering his next move. He checked the small calendar card in his wallet and noted it was two days until Thanksgiving when he would force himself to grace his mom's dining table. His mind kept raising the image of Melissa's bare butt wagging near the lake. He wanted to see her again but he also wanted not to be dead.

The day had become warmish and he had a disturbing nap with a brief dream wherein the natural world became too vivid to become tolerated. This mood continued on waking. The untitled birds around him had the eyes of snakes, their ancient relatives, and the surrounding foliage became livid. He smoked several of his remaining small cache of cigarettes and decided his mental distortions were due to hunger and loneliness. He cooked up an insipid freeze-dried concoction called Spanish rice but only managed to eat half before his gag reflex began to tickle. He saw a slight movement among the rocks about fifteen feet across the creek. It was a small rattlesnake, perhaps a foot and a half long. He aimed his revolver but couldn't pull the trigger because he didn't want to hear the noise. He would zip up his floor tent partway tonight. For the first time in nearly six days he felt an urge to read a book. When darkness fell he made a plan, a map of war, before a roaring fire. He had been offered at least temporarily the clarity of breaking a habit.

Chapter 11

Before dawn he sat waiting impatiently for enough light to reach his car. He was packed up and studying the single cigarette he had left, which he held in the palm of his hand. He felt pretty clearheaded about his intentions and was amused wondering what level of enlightenment the Great Leader might consider him. He thought that in some otherwise intelligent people there must be an improbable religious yearning that would make them give up their savings and livelihood to the Great Leader. Again, did he actually believe in what he was preaching? Maybe on alternate days. Sunderson recalled that when he was thirteen and his father had a minimal heart attack he had prayed in the Lutheran church with his mother. His prayers were diverted in their intensity by the sight of a girl named Daisy across the aisle. A friend had heard that she had given a blow job to a guy from Shingleton for two beers and a joint. Meanwhile his family cut back on their comparatively meager expenses so that Dad didn't have to work twelve hours a day six days a week. There it was, Sunderson thought while dousing his campfire, sex and religion and money.

It took an hour to reach Willcox. He bought cigarettes and gas, and had a bowl of red chili and beef at the truck stop, then headed south to see the Great Leader, his revolver unbuckled in the shoulder holster.

To his surprise the gate was open and there was a pile of sleeping bags, packs, pads, and several garbage bags full of trash and belongings. He sorted through the pile that they probably planned to come back for as some of the sleeping bags were expensive models. He was tempted to swipe a smallish day pack that was full of papers and magazines but decided it would be wise to wait until his way out. He was pleased to note that a batch of magazines were issues of a soft-core porn rag called
Barely Eighteen
that he had seen in convenience stores and truck stops in the Upper Peninsula. He had watched hunters and fishermen buy this magazine along with the old standards
Hustler
and
Penthouse
on the way out to their camps.

He was alarmed to hear a vehicle coming down the canyon toward him and felt for his unbuckled revolver but it was a green-suited Forest Service ranger at the wheel, swerving to a halt.

“May I help you?” He was clearly pissed.

“Looking for a possible felon.” Sunderson flipped his expired badge from a half dozen feet away.

“Those jerks flew the coop for Tucson. They leased forty acres here from a rancher but didn't comprehend their boundaries and built a permanent structure on federal land. They're cleaning up the site to avoid charges.”

“We're contemplating serious charges in Michigan,” Sunderson said, diffidently looking around and wishing the guy would go away. “How many are in there?”

“Just two. What charges?”

“I'm not at liberty to say.”

The man drove off with a conspiratorial wave. Sunderson headed down the road on foot hoping for undetected surveillance. He took his cheap binoculars along, pausing at the place he had been stoned and noting the dark markings of his blood on the rocks here and there. He felt a newfound energy from having had something real to eat. He peeked around a boulder and saw two men disassembling a small stone hut, their newish blue Ford pickup nearby blasting loud rock music. Through the binoculars he could see one was a sallow young man who wasn't working very hard but then there was also Clayton, a mixed-blood Chippewa he had met at the longhouse in Ontonagon County. He had checked Clayton out: he had had a few minor scrapes with the law and was evidently on the payroll, not being a religious type. Clayton was a renowned brawler with a thick chest and big arms so Sunderson approached with his revolver drawn. The young man saw him first and took off running up a hill toward a thicket. Clayton grinned leaning on the pickax he was using to dislodge the stones of the hut walls.

“Hey, boss. Good to see someone from home. I didn't throw stones at you.”

“What's up?” Sunderson put the revolver back in his holster and looked toward the hill where the young man had run. “Who was that?”

“He's the Leader's main pussy scout. It's a legally sensitive job.” Clayton laughed. “The Leader's name is Daryl now. He's into shape changing, you know, playing Indian.”

“I figured that. You get paid in cash?”

“Why?” Clayton was nervous.

“You don't want the IRS after you. Give me Daryl's address.”

“Of course.” Clayton was relieved that so little was being asked of him. There was more than a trace of despair in his face. “The money is the best of my life but I'm getting the fuck out of here. I'm going home. This area is too fucking weird and violent. When I was at a lumberyard in Douglas getting supplies this Apache told me he was going to cut off my big nose. And then these big Mexican guys come along and tell us to move on. This is a drug route, you know. I've seen groups of guys carrying bales of pot and whatever over that way.” He pointed in the direction the young man had run.

“I know.” Sunderson sniffed the air smelling something painfully familiar. He walked around the stone hut and in the back there was a Dutch oven iron pot on a small bed of coals. It was a venison stew.

“The deer meat down here ain't as good as back home. Want some?”

It became absurdly like old home week with the two men sitting on boulders and eating bowls of venison stew, reminiscing about the U.P., mostly fishing and hunting and eating fried whitefish and lake trout.

“This is a foreign country down here,” Sunderson said, helping himself to another tortilla wrapped in aluminum foil and another portion of stew.

“No shit. That's why I can't wait to get home. I went into a grocery store and they'd never heard of rutabagas.”

Sunderson headed for Tucson, stopping at the airport to exchange the SUV for a less expensive compact. He stopped at the diner hoping to see the girl who had directed him to the fire camping site. She wasn't there and he felt a specific pang of disappointment. He left her a thank-you note that included his cell number. Back in his car he suddenly realized that the address Clayton had given him for the Great Leader was a street near the Arizona Inn. It wouldn't do to let his immediate presence be known but he gambled on a drive past. Dwight-Daryl was in the side yard of an expensive house playing doubles badminton with three girls well under eighteen. On the way out of the cult site he had grabbed the day pack he'd eyed and was eager to look at the contents. He mulled over the whole, deep mud bath of human sexuality admitting to himself that you surely didn't see the best as a cop. Returning to Tucson his thinking had been confused by the sheer number of attractive women walking around, especially near the university, after a week in the wilds in which he had only seen the one female at the Conservancy cabin. The fresh look reminded him of the nondirectional yearning he had felt toward females in high school when the excitement of simply hugging a girl had made him dizzy. In the expensive market he stopped in before leaving the city he lamely pushed his cart around behind a knockout in her thirties but then she caught on, turned, and frowned and he reddened. He bought steak, shrimp, and a pile of fruit and vegetables. Everything looked delicious after his week of stupid privation. At the checkout register the woman he had stalked pulled her cart in behind his and he raised his hands in a mime of apology. She smiled shyly which relieved him of his immediate sense of being a fool.

Back in Patagonia it wasn't quite drink time so he made a cup of instant coffee and thought over some plans he had made. He was thinking about calling Lucy in New York and trying to get her to come to Tucson and infiltrate the cult in the guise of a wealthy woman. The drawback was that she was a tad unstable. He tried to dismiss the question of how long his ex-wife would follow him like a ghost and whether there were other Diane doppelgangers like Lucy? Probably.

He slowly unpacked the contents of the cult bag. There were a half dozen issues of
Barely Eighteen,
which he leafed through with no particular interest, not being turned on by photos. A spiral notebook with Dwight-Daryl's handwriting was a severe disappointment. The first page was titled,
I Am Many,
but the following pages were in code which he would have to FedEx to Mona, or maybe just take back home as he was thinking of hightailing it after Thanksgiving. Comically there were a number of small bottles of Viagra, Levitra, and Cialis to keep the Leader's pecker up. It added up to not much but then he shook the magazines to make sure and eureka the third contained a printed-out e-mail and digital photo in between the pages featuring Candy the High School Dropout. The photo was an electrifying one of Mona on a sofa with her skirt raised and no undies. Sunderson blushed and turned the photo over on the table. The e-mail was from Carla and read, “Dearest, here's a photo of the creep, which might turn you on though she's a bit old for your taste. I went down on her for an hour which you would have liked watching. Love, Carla”

Sunderson began to sweat and reached for the absent whiskey bottle. How could he have forgotten to buy whiskey or wine? Mona had said nothing had
happened
that evening. One of them was lying and he hoped it was Carla. In any event he had a fine piece of evidence, perhaps not enough to convict but plenty to cause a heap of trouble. He brooded as he made a salad not wanting to fry a rib steak without having a bottle of wine to go with it. The loaf of French bread was fair and he was inclined to feel virtuous even though he had simply forgotten the whiskey. He finally stored his groceries and was amused to see his cell phone in the refrigerator. He had assumed it wouldn't work in there but he was of course wrong. What the fuck, he thought, being electronically ignorant. He took out his notebook and jotted down messages from Berenice for the Thanksgiving dinner, one from his mother telling him that he was, as always, a disappointment, a cheery one from Marion, and three from Mona saying that someone had broken into her house and stolen her computer. To his surprise there were five messages from Melissa, which frightened him because of Xavier's threat at dinner. He called anyway feeling a memory-driven nut itch.

“I want to see you,” she said.

“I don't want to die.”

“Xavier is at his apartment in New York City because there's a war between everyone. His people are hiding out down in Obregon. Anyway it causes too many problems to kill an American.”

“How nice. Why do you want to see me?”

“Companionship. Everyone else is afraid of me.”

“The Wagon Wheel bar ASAP,” he said, pressing the off button then calling Mona.

“I'm sorry about your computer. I'll buy you a new one.”

“Everything's in there. I feel like I lost my past.”

“I can't do anything about that.”

“No shit. Can you still turn a doorknob? Where the hell were you?”

“Camping in the wilderness without my cell. Cooling off. I found that raised-skirt photo of you in the Leader's day pack. He can be nailed for possession of child pornography.”

“I'm a child? I better tell the guy that fucked me an hour ago.” She laughed.

“That's not funny,” he said lamely.

“It was fun. Why should I be faithful to you? You won't touch me no matter how much I tease you. I don't really like to do yoga at dawn. Everything was for you, darling.”

He hung up. Now he really needed a drink. He called Berenice and said he'd be there for Thanksgiving dinner and turned off the phone before she could get started on his week's disappearance.

The first double shot and Pacifico at the bar made him glow. Alcohol beat the shit out of the Shroud of Turin as a miracle though the fair-sized crowd of drinkers didn't look merry.

“Where you been, cutie?” Amanda asked.

“Camping.”

“Oh bullshit. A pretty Latino named Melissa is looking for you. Also a guy named Kowalski although he didn't look like a Kowalski. He wondered if you had left town. He doesn't know that I know his name but he's a low-rent P.D. from Rio Rico. Mostly divorce cases.”

“Thanks.” Hearing Kowalski's name made him glad he had the photo and Carla's e-mail in his sport coat pocket. It occurred to him that Kowalski must have been retained by Dwight-Daryl. He decided to kick his ass if he saw him again.

All of the men in the bar had turned to the door while Sunderson was rehearsing violence and refusing to recognize the abrupt limitations of his age, the way the years drew closer daily, and the fact that Kowalski, being much younger, might very well kick his ass. Where is the considerable strength of yesteryear? Mostly gone.

He finally turned and saw Melissa at the door, impatient to be acknowledged, wearing a blonde wig and a waist-length fur jacket. The outfit didn't work but he still felt a tingle. What's with blonde hair and black eyebrows? It looked silly and vulgar. He beckoned her toward the side table farthest from the jukebox, which was playing a Latino lament. He had been avoiding gringo stations on the car radio in favor of the Latino, finding it remarkable how often the word
corazon
was used. Amanda brought him another double and a beer and Melissa a predictable white wine.

“What's a
corazon
?” he asked.

“It's the heart, stupid. I'm taking you to Spain on Xavier's dime.”

“I couldn't accept that.”

“Of course you could. We'd meet in Barcelona. I lived there a year when I was nineteen. Xavier keeps saying that he's lost a lot of hard-earned money on the market. Isn't that funny?”

“I suppose so. I need you to do me a favor.”

“Then let's go to your place.”

“I don't want you to know where it is. I don't want my severed head found in the toilet bowl.”

He went on to ask her to stop at the Leader's address and pretend she was interested in the cult. She was fascinated and agreed saying that she would try it tomorrow if he'd keep his cell on. She said she and Josefina had to move to Tucson anyway because Xavier felt that Nogales was too vulnerable a place for his sister while the drug wars raged.