The Great Leader (2 page)

He tried to sleep but it was hopeless. The grimaces on the faces of the naked dancing women were utterly unlike any he had seen in his waking life except on a fourteen-year-old girl over in the Keweenaw who had shot an uncle who had been abusing her. She had a crazed glare and could not stop laughing. She used a 12-gauge shotgun with No. 8s in his lower abdomen, turning into red putty his offending organ and the surrounding area. There was no real effort at prosecution except for formalities because her rectum had to be surgically repaired. At the time he wondered what chance she had for a normal life if such a thing existed though now, six years later, she was playing basketball at a small college downstate and was a premed major. This said nothing about the state of her mind but Sunderson remembered so clearly looking up “maenad,” the mythological women given to tearing men into pieces. Oddly, the most awkward thing about the abused murderer was her utter beauty.

He made coffee at 4:00 a.m. and went to the study, a literal cave of books that used to be in the basement but had been moved up to the former dining room after the divorce. His ex-wife, Diane, had joked that his book buying each month exceeded their mortgage payment which was only two hundred and fifty dollars. She had worked as an administrator at the large regional hospital and they had lived well on their combined salaries, no longer true for him alone but he didn't care because he had his books, nearly all historical in nature. He had been a brilliant student of history at Michigan State in East Lansing. He had been strongly encouraged by his professors to go to graduate school but he was mortally homesick for the Upper Peninsula, especially in May when the homesickness would become a palpable ache in the throat. He applied as a courtesy and received a graduate assistantship but one day on his way to visit a professor in faculty housing he had passed the Michigan State Police headquarters and stopped on impulse. In his Munising youth everyone thought the state police were zippy and along with being a UPS driver it was one of the best jobs in the U.P. He adamantly rejected the idea of teaching because he didn't want to be trapped indoors during his favorite brook trout month which was May. Other than history, brook trout proved to be his only other lifelong obsession. It was mostly their lovely remote habitats, some of the smallest and unobtrusive creeks and springs, and beaver ponds.

Within three weeks he had taken the recruit exam passing with the highest score possible, and at their urging went on to get a master's in criminology. He didn't mind being an ordinary trooper but his talents and knowledge of the U.P. were exhaustive and within a few years he was a detective in Marquette with a decided aversion for any administrative job.

His heart warmed when he sat at his desk, as if a heart could smile. The only slightly jarring note was the original Marilyn Monroe calendar, discreet by current standards, and also a photo of the actress Blythe Danner who used to figure large in his limited fantasy life. His friend Marion, a mixed-blood middle-school principal, had loaned him a book on Native American longhouses, which he had misplaced but now turned up under a pile of early logging monographs. At the onset Marion had told him that Chippewa (Anishinabe) didn't build longhouses but they were the chosen dwelling in the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy—Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk, Tuscarora—and in certain Pacific Northwest coast tribes like the Salish and the Suquamish who built one five hundred feet long. This latter fact jogged his mind and he shuffled through the papers of the Great Leader's slender file finding the record of a Dwight Yoakam (an alias using a country singer's name) being charged for disturbing the peace in Port Townsend, Washington, the year before. When Roxie called for the details Dwight had alarmed a group of Japanese tourists by speaking in tongues. When Sunderson had impounded Dwight's old mint Nash Rambler for the day on the flimsy charge of larceny by conversion he had found nine current license plates in the trunk, one of them from the state of Washington. It was hard to explain to the Bloomfield Hills father that if his twenty-five-year-old daughter Portia, whom the cultists called Queenie, wished to give away thirty thousand dollars, mostly for propane heat for the longhouse and bathhouse, she was free to do so. The father, Sunderson thought of him as Mister Bigshot, got drunk at the Verling House the night he was in Marquette and propositioned a waitress for a grand, or so said an informant. They bathed in the Jacuzzi of the Teddy Roosevelt suite in the hotel on the hill. He fell asleep so she pulled the plug in the drain so he wouldn't drown, removed the thousand from his wallet, and took her friends out drinking with a little cocaine on the side.

He didn't have all that much information on the Great Leader but he still refused to ask the FBI for help. They were both nosy and condescending and as the disaster of 9/11 indicated they didn't like to share the information they themselves ignored. Roxie had done the best she could in helping him build a file but in four days he would no longer be able to use her services. Despite his apparent intelligence he had never learned the computer mostly because of a lifelong aversion to electricity. When he was seven a cousin had been electrocuted having climbed the fence of the power station behind the pulp mill.

The ideal substitute for Roxie was the sixteen-year-old girl next door named Mona. She was an ace hacker and a detective friend of his who specialized in computer crimes told him that he kept her under surveillance. She mostly dressed in black explaining to him that she was a goth, which Roxie had explained to him but he kept forgetting the details. They talked a great deal partly because they were neighbors living solo. Her single mother was a traveling cosmetic salesperson so Mona was mostly alone though she said that she was never lonely. When they were both raking maple leaves a few weeks before Mona had teased him about blocking off his remaining dining room window with yet another bookcase. His Lutheran childhood still carried a miniscule weight but enough to make him ashamed of his motive. He could stand in front of the case and at eye level pull out Slotkin's treatise on violence in America and look across thirty feet of yard directly into her bedroom. Strictly speaking it wasn't illegal but what was it? A bare butt crack was mere negative space but then it could make the temples of a man very nearly sixty-five years old pound unpleasantly. The biological imperative was a distracting nuisance. Checking his watch he knew she would be getting up for school in fifty minutes and the question was did he have enough self-control not to take a peek, which often devolved into a fifteen-minute trance? Part of his mind ached with guilt over this dubious matter even though since he was in his own home peeking wasn't criminal. Sexuality could be like carrying around a backpack full of cow manure, especially for a senior frantically holding on to waning impulses.

He read the Great Leader's file backward in lame hope for new perspective. His quarry Dwight had started religions in four locations in the United States, and had attempted three more in other countries including Canada, France, and Mexico. He had only lasted three days each in Hattiesburg and Oxford, Mississippi, when the police advised him to leave in a hurry. In both Montreal and Arles, France, he had lasted a scant three weeks before he drew too much attention and with an alien passport it was easy to get rid of him. It had occurred to Sunderson that for the populace in general religious belief can have nearly the attraction of money. Dwight lacked the apparent greed of the raft of southern evangelists who had built empires but he had certainly managed to live well enough. As far as he could determine Dwight was still short of forty years old. The second time he visited the longhouse people were otherwise diverted and he had a quick peek through the curtains of Dwight's bailiwick, which could be called primitive regal, say the tent of Kublai Khan with a wealth of deerskins on the wall, bear skins on the floor, and a beaver skin duvet on the bed trimmed with mink pelts.

Sunderson wasn't well traveled enough to know if foreigners were in general as gullible as Americans. In America you didn't need credentials or if they were called for they could swiftly be created. A number of the Great Leader's current devotees were college graduates though Sunderson had come to the conclusion that most colleges were a mere continuum of the utter slovenliness of high school. In the seventh grade our students are competitive with Western Europe but by the twelfth grade we're in twenty-seventh place. When Sunderson had read this it made him happy as it helped explain why the United States Congress was so obviously ignorant of American history, not to speak of those sullen louts that had been in the executive branch. Bush would say, “History tells us,” and then come up with something history doesn't tell us as pointed out by one of Sunderson's heroes, the journalist David Halberstam. When Halberstam died in an auto accident Sunderson had a private evening of mourning with the writer's books spread across his desk.

To peek or not to peek, that was the question. It was eleven minutes to zero hour when Mona's lights would come on. Was he so fatigued by a bad night that he lacked moral resolve? Probably. This was a wan attempt to recapture the melancholic, philosophical mood he used to feel reading Kierkegaard in college. Of course even then he would have dropped
Either/Or
like a hot skillet if a nude girl had appeared before a window. Biology defeats philosophy in the first round. What was this stomach-souring anguish of sex? Even wise Socrates tripped over his pecker.

He tried to divert himself with history. The Congress of Vienna in 1814 was the occasion of a speech by ­someone —he needed to look it up—that warned against the dire consequences of raising a mediocre man to power. Quite suddenly he had to go to the toilet, threatening that there would be no dawn Mona, but he accomplished the humbling task in a trice. He was back within twenty seconds of zero hour having synchronized his clock with her alarm as closely as possible indicated by her turning on her bed lamp. His neurons raced. A prof had said that the Enlightenment wasn't very enlightened. He pulled the Slotkin volume and her light came on. She flopped out of bed and stood. She leaned over to scratch her tummy. Her butt was aimed at me, thought Sunderson, either the gates of heaven or hell. She stood and turned to the window, instantly quizzical. Oh my god I forgot to turn out the light and she doubtless sees the crack of light in my window. He ducked, then crouched with his chest against the desk figuring that if he turned out the light now she'd know he had been watching. What a fool to forget the light! He felt the sweat on his forehead, the navy blue shame of the geezer or near geezer possibly caught at his ignominious vice. He had more than a touch of acid reflux, which didn't help. When clothed Mona, ­usually in goth black, looked too slender but in the nude her breasts and bottom were ample. His old dick, sometimes a friend but now a foe, was pointlessly hard and deserved, he thought, to be slammed in the desk drawer for its implicit stupidity. How do we account for the theory and practice of our guilt?

His eye caught a few words from a piece of paper that belonged in the Dwight folder but had been carelessly stored. It was the testimony of a Carla G., the only person he could find who had become somewhat disaffected with the Great Leader's cult and returned to Marquette. She insisted that Dwight had moved headquarters from Marquette to Ontonagon for greater control but Sunderson knew it was the cheaper land over to the west. Carla G. was a shopper and claimed that was the reason for her departure but on further probing she began to cry and it nearly ruined his whitefish sandwich. They were lunching in the bar of the elegant old hotel, the Landmark Inn, and several women of the feminist persuasion glared at Sunderson as if Carla's weeping was his fault. She finally admitted she had quit the cult because Dwight had maintained that she was his true love but she soon discovered he was screwing the other members, sometimes even a few of the men, and possibly underaged girls. Sunderson practically gasped at this new detail and then her mind wandered off into details about the Great Leader's various masks and costumes. He had a half dozen or so tree costumes made of the bark of different trees in order to be invisible. He had a round mask with his face on all sides, with eye holes, and his features bleeding into each other so it looked like he could see like an owl. The last bite of the whitefish sandwich was hard to swallow. Out in the parking lot at her car Carla had embraced him in her thin summer dress putting her hips and pelvis into it. She started crying again and said that her father had abandoned the family when she was only seven and all she could remember was all the spankings he gave to her on her bare bottom. With a glint of something in her eye she suggested that he come to her apartment. He said that it would be improper for him to do so until late October when he retired, and she said, “What do you mean?” as if he were the naughty instigator. At that moment her cell phone rang. She answered with an air of importance and a loud voice squawked, “Carla, I want your ass on my face right now!” She reddened and struggled with her car door. “That young man likes you,” Sunderson chuckled and walked away, absolutely convinced that Carla was a fabulous liar about everything and was in all likelihood a frontwoman
and spy for Dwight in addition to being nuts.

In truth Sunderson was fair looking. Many thought that though he was verging on sixty-five he could pass for fifty-five. He was without vanity so this meant nothing to him. “Sixty-five is sixty-five,” he would reply. Roxie had said many times that he looked “ratty” but that was because he had bought no new clothes in the three years since his divorce. When he had lunch with his ex-wife Diane a few weeks before to settle a business matter she was appalled because both the cuffs of his sleeves and his sports coat were frayed. She had insisted on signing the house over to him because when her parents from Battle Creek had died she had become “overloaded,” plus she was now married to a retired surgeon who shared her passions for art and nature. He had only met Bill a few times, mostly because doctors don't normally hang out with detectives and because often during their marriage when invited out he had the slightly paranoid feeling that people would have preferred if only his wife had shown up. Near the end of it all he had asked just how she demonstrated her love for the arts and nature. They were having dinner and she broke into tears at the question and left the table for her small private room where she listened to classical music and looked at her art books. He didn't explain that his cold crankiness was caused by a child-beating incident that afternoon. A boy of ten had been unmercifully beaten by his drunken father. The boy lost several teeth and his nose was crushed flat. His mouth was too swollen to talk so he wrote, “I don't want dad to get in no trouble.” It was out near Champion and when Sunderson and a trooper led the handcuffed man out the door Sunderson tripped him so that he pitched off the steps onto the sidewalk on his face. He never shared this sort of information with his wife who found so much unbearable. A hatchling robin fallen to the ground out in the yard brought her to tears.