The Great Leader (7 page)

“I can't believe it.” She suddenly burst into laughter.

“Believe what?” he asked timidly, already sensing that she had read his thoughts about her similarity to Diane.

“It's outrageous. And funny. Maybe flattering.” She paused, and then added with mock seriousness, “You better go now.”

He took her seriously and headed for the door. She followed and put an arm around his neck.

“I'm so sorry,” he said.

“Just teasing. I have a bottle of wine that's perfect for a Sunday night.”

He slumped down in a chair by the door, looked at his scuffed shoes, and then watched her expertly opening the wine. Since Diane had left he had been strictly screw top. He made his way back to the table. The wine was a soft burgundy called Clos de la Roche and she said it was hard to get but her family knew the family that owned the vineyard. It was gradually occurring to him that she was rich, which had a dampening effect since he was an old-line left-winger and laborite, his sympathies deeply enmeshed in the fortunes of the union movement. He was honest enough, however, to admit that he had never really known a rich woman and the few he had met in Marquette were civil enough.

“How much would a bottle of this set you back?” It was certainly the most delicious liquid he had ever drunk.

“Oh God I could only estimate. My dad has it sent to me. Several hundred dollars a bottle I suspect. My dad's from an old New England family though he's a democrat. He says his family made a lot of money in the spice and slave trade and whaling so it's his duty to try to correct certain ancient injustices. He's always loathed my husband Harold who started as a broker and is now an investment banker. My dad refers to him as Swindler Harold. My dad was pleased when Harold's firm went bankrupt. Harold has been in a depression for a couple of months. I support the family with my money but I could never leave Harold because the kids love their hopeless dad. Harold wants me to invest in a company he wants to start to recondition sailboats but dad has control of my money and won't allow it.” She paused, almost frantic. “This must all sound strange to you.”

“It does sound remote. When my dad was dying of cancer at age sixty he was worried because he was three thousand bucks in debt. I paid it off with a loan from my wife. He didn't know the money came from Diane but was proud that I had a good job.” He was pleased that they were talking nonchalantly about their families. “I never thought much about money because I had enough to buy books and live fine and now I'll get by on my state pension okay.”

They were silent and drowsy drinking the wine and he suspected that his sexual feelings for her came out of the usual loneliness and that the wine had the curious effect of making her look even more like Diane. When you're sixty-five, he thought, a fifty-five-year-old woman looks young.

She asked him if he'd like to go look at petrogylphs with her father early the next morning and at first he said no, that he was moving out to more reasonable quarters, would see his mother a few more times, then head out to find the Great Leader Dwight. She looked quite disappointed like Diane looked when he refused to go along with what she wanted to do so he changed his mind by saying “one more day won't hurt” and then she smiled.

“Why do we seem to like each other?” she asked at the door.

“I have no idea,” he lied. He certainly wasn't going to say, “You bear a resemblance to a woman I loved and lost.”

“Once, on a plane, I developed a crush on an anthropologist I was seated next to. I was
turned on
as the young people say. I told my daughter who thought it was hysterical. She asked, ‘Why didn't you go for it mom?'”

Sunderson thought of this on his way back to his room, quite lost until he was helped by a night watchman. It was a troublesome night indeed as if he had just been on a fifteen-hour drive and couldn't stop moving when he got into bed. Once he woke up weeping but twice it was laughter, and belly laughter. The tears were caused by a reality-based dream of when he had returned from a three-day meeting at state police headquarters and found her gone on a late Friday afternoon. He was in immediate tears as he had skillfully, he thought, remembered that it was their seventeenth anniversary and he had bought fifty bucks worth of cut flowers, a pointless gesture as it was late June and she had better flowers in her perennial garden. Some of their camping equipment was gone from the porch and it seemed odd that a woman fleeing from marriage would take this sort of gear. As a detective he might have figured out he was dulled from the four-hundred-plus-mile drive up from Lansing and a hangover from sitting in a disco rock bar watching college girls wiggle their toothsome asses. Fetching a beer from the refrigerator he saw the note. “Hoped you'd call last night but you must have been busy. Also hoping you remembered I'm camping this weekend at our spot near Big Bay. Your dinner in the blue Creuset is a
blanquette de veau
, a veal stew. I also made a salad dressing, etc. See you Sunday. Love, D.”

He played a little game that was usually successful in countering insomnia. He constructed a series of mental notes that wouldn't be that hard to remember in the morning. At the university he had always memorized potent quotes from historical texts to use in blue book essay exams, so his memory had never been a problem. The only issue in using notes to battle insomnia was that the brain without benefit of light tended to be errant and freely waffled into the irrelevant.

1. As Mom used to say when I was slow to do chores, “Stop fiddle-faddling,” an expression no longer in use. Dad was more direct, saying, “Get your head out of your ass and get to work,” a difficult physical maneuver. Fifty years later I'm still my parents' child. Fiddle-faddle. If I'm going to nail Dwight to the wall I better get started with full energy. Carla is possibly the key due to her volatility as in all witnesses who struggle to explain themselves to themselves. Despite everything Dwight teaches she wants him for herself.
   
2. A dim memory of Berenice giving her allowance to the Lutheran pastor for the African Mission effort. Mom was angry when Dad said that the clergy were “God's pickpockets.” Back to money and religion. The central business of Lucy's life seems to be inheritance. A portion of her emotional content died with her infant daughter.
   
3. A clear memory of ten years ago when Diane gave me Judy Crichton's
   America 1900
   for my birthday and also made a fine stewed rabbit she said was a French recipe. At first the book seemed insufficiently scholarly but then this was a relief. I recall a passage from a 1900
   New York Times
   unsigned editorial insisting that we hadn't moved an inch forward from the Dark Ages. Ten years before in reaction to the Ghost Dance movement the
   Chicago Tribune
   stated that it might be wise to kill all of the Lakota. I had this sobering feeling that I was spending my life running around the Upper Peninsula applying tiny bandages to mostly superficial wounds.
   
4. The idea that history gives perspective is partly a hoax because it only functionally gives you perspective on history! Imagine if Congress were actually knowledgeable of American history.
   

It didn't work. Here he was in a hotel room in Tucson drying his tears after he mistakenly thought Diane had left him, still feeling the fool. He turned on the light to change the pattern of consciousness. With Diane he had always felt a little vulgar and brutish and now Lucy was doing the same thing to him. Curiously his colleagues and many people thought him to be too refined and bookish to be a detective but they were victims of television and crime novels. He'd never wanted to be a tough-guy cop partly because the first two years of his state police career he had been stationed near Detroit where there were a phenomenal number of tough cops, real bruisers, first among them the “Big Four” who were called in for particularly violent situations. He was off duty after a Detroit Lions–Green Bay Packer game, always a volatile item, and had seen the Big Four cruise up in their black Chrysler sedan to settle a brawl between fans, locals, and a group of big krauts that had come over from Milwaukee. Sunderson stood well back watching with amazement as the lead man of the Big Four, an immense Polack named Thaddeus chewing a ten-cent rum-soaked Crooks cigar, waded into the brawlers and began throwing them left and right fairly high in the air, grinning as he worked. Later on a gory case Sunderson had had dinner with Thaddeus in Hamtramck, duck blood soup and fried muskrat, and the table next to them had been noisy and Thaddeus had said to them, “Shut up we're talking about the fucking United Nations.” And the men fell silent. Thaddeus was melancholy that evening because a pimp had cut a nipple off of an Amazonian black hooker he loved. It was a famous pimp who was named Mink because he wore a mink coat even in July. Thaddeus had said, “That fuck is gonna go off a bridge. He don't know it yet but he's a floater,” meaning a dead body in the Detroit River. When Sunderson was transferred and he and Diane drove north there were tears of relief when they reached the Straits of Mackinac. The least fun possible was picking up a severed head in a drug slaying down near the Flat Rock drag strip.

In semisleep he could see Diane and Lucy standing next to each other and there was a drift of thoughts about his own unworthiness. He should have married a Munising girl from a mill family though by the time he was in the tenth grade he had aspired to a better world and had lived a life caught in between.

As he reentered sleep he laughed remembering when their little group of outcasts including two local mixed- bloods had fired some stolen bottle rockets at the Mouton brothers' fake cowboy camp in a woodlot up the steep hill behind town. The attack came at dawn while the Moutons were asleep. When the rockets hit Sunderson and his group jumped up screaming and charged up the hill. Sunderson's terrier-Lab mix upended the biggest brother by ripping at a pant leg. Sunderson's gang got the shit beat out of them but it was worth it. Unfortunately the rocket had started a fire in the woods that spread to a few acres and his dad had to accompany him to the police station where he was threatened with reform school way down in Lansing. His laughter dampened when he recalled Diane's first visit north when they were seniors at Michigan State. He had seen her glance at the raw board floors of the dining room and the oval braided rug his mother had made. The whole family had immediately loved Diane and were quick to tell Sunderson he wasn't good enough for her. His dad had taken him aside and told him that Diane had too much “class” and was sure to ditch him.

The last bit of laughter came at dawn when Sunderson dreamed the smell of fire and he remembered a remote cabin that served as a meth lab over near Crystal Falls that had burned one April. There had been a late snow and he rode in with a new local deputy on a snowmobile. The fire was still smoldering and right away Sunderson smelled burned flesh but didn't mention it to the deputy, waiting for him to make his own discovery. It was a bright blue day and Sunderson enjoyed the growing warmth that meant it was over freezing temperature. He watched the deputy poking in the ruins until he heard him yell, “Jesus Christ, a fucking burned-up body!” The deputy puked then fainted. Sunderson rubbed snow on his face and the deputy looked up and said, “It's my wife's birthday. I was going to grill steaks and now I'm not.”

Mona called just as Sunderson was leaving the room short of 7:00 a.m. “I missed your peeking. It was like a vacuum.”

“Never mind. What's up?”

“I found out Dwight's origins. His mom was in the Peace Corps in Uganda. She got knocked up by a French civil engineer working on a dam project. She died from various tropical diseases when Dwight was a year old. He was raised by his grandparents. They died then it was foster parents.”

“I'm running late. Fax it along. Also go in my study and check page 300 of Judy Crichton's
America 1900
. Something about the Middle Ages from the
New York Times
. I forgot a quote I used to know by heart.” It must be age he thought.

“Okay, right away. Darling, I miss your old eyes burning a hole in my butt from your peek hole.”

Sunderson said thank you and rushed out.

Chapter 4

His mind flip-flopped seeing Lucy with her father. She acted like a ditzy teenager. It wasn't a chink in her armor but a whole gully. His name was Bushrod, a name Sunderson had only encountered in certain New England historical texts. He was Scots-English, a bantam sun-wizened bully with tiny tufts of gray hair coming out of his ears and eyebrows that needed a haircut.

“Ten minutes late Mister Crime Buster. I can't eat breakfast in public at this place. All those desperate old widows trying to replace the husbands they killed. I can't say I've shaken hands with a detective. You ought to look into Lucy's swindler husband,” Bushrod said, offering his hand without getting up from the breakfast table in Lucy's room. The
Wall Street Journal
and
New York Times
were folded beside his plate of scrambled eggs and link sausage, which he had covered with Tabasco, also a habit of Sunderson's.

Lucy fluttered around, her face pink from embarrassment, stowing water and box lunches into a pretty canvas satchel. “Daddy, please.” She glanced furtively at Sunderson who ate hastily because Bushrod was now up and pacing near the door, muttering at the front page of the
Journal
.

“They ought to guillotine fifty thousand brokers in Battery Park. Can't you law people arrange it?”

“This is the first workday of my retirement,” Sunderson said, amused at this antique nutcase, obviously the source of Lucy's lifestyle. Lucy had called him a “desert rat,” someone who found the deserts of the Southwest obsessively interesting.

“Find something to do full time or you'll die on the vine,” Bushrod pronounced as if he were Moses.

“I'm investigating the evil connection between religion, money, and sex,” Sunderson joked, relieved that his own father had been a mild, kind man.

“Excellent. Send me the results.”

With Bushrod at the wheel of a battered Range Rover they drove out toward Ina and through Saguaro National Park, with Lucy seemingly frozen in place in the center of the backseat, leafing through a bird book without seeing it. Bushrod explained the nature of the flora they passed, the dozens of species of cacti while Sunderson was glum about the relationship of adult children to their old parents. It was a different person in the backseat and Sunderson was inattentive to Bushrod, meditating on all the forms of bullying in the world. He had faulted his own parents for not letting his dog Ralph in the house. At bedtime he and his brother Robert would lower a basket on a rope from their second-story bedroom window. Ralph would jump in and they would pull him up to where he belonged. His dad finally caught on but it was his mother who was the prime mover of the no dogs rule. His father never mentioned their secret to her.

They reached a desert two-track and drove several miles onto the Tohono O'odham reservation with Sunderson reflecting that the scrawny cattle would have elicited calls to the Humane Society in Michigan. Bushrod pulled up near a grove of shady paloverde and when Sunderson got out his bare arm brushed painfully against a cholla cactus and he yelped.

“Nearly all the flora around here will poke a hole in you.” Bushrod pulled a hemostat out of a Dopp kit and pulled a dozen slender spines from Sunderson's arm. “Keep an eye out for crotalids,” he said, heading up what looked like a hundred-foot-high pile of basaltic rock.

“He means rattlesnakes,” Lucy said dully, her eyes moist. Her father was already up the steep incline out of earshot. “He's driven me crazy since I could walk.”

“That's not a good way to live.” Sunderson supposed he was meant to follow Bushrod. Those from the upper Midwest are not born climbers except maybe when they're younger and then only conifers with lots of branches. The landscape unnerved him and having seen rattlers on television and in the movies he was not thrilled at the idea of an encounter with a snake that could possibly kill him. He calmed himself thinking that though he was intensely perceptive on his home ground because of his job, when he traveled he was a bit of a goof. Once with Diane in Chicago he had taken a solo walk and had gotten a bit lost, remembering with difficulty their hotel for which she had made the arrangements.

“Come along dear,” Lucy said scrambling up the rocks.

His fears were leavened by her fine bottom in the khaki shorts though there remained a bit of the “What am I doing here?” By the time he reached the top he was breathing heavily while Bushrod and daughter had caught their breath. He had been troubled by the many snake drawings and carvings on the rocks. There were others but snakes were dominant. He seated himself beneath Lucy not failing to notice the nice underthighs beneath her loose-legged shorts.

“A lot of speculation here, possibly about the roots of religion before sex and money came into play,” Bushrod joked. “Or maybe they all happen at once, an amusing idea. This place is called Cocoraque Butte, not really a butte is it? It's a little close to town for the university boys to get interested in. They'd rather go north for the Navajo and Hopi or maybe down to Casas Grandes. In fact I've never seen anyone here in a dozen trips.”

“Why all the renderings of snakes?” Sunderson was uncomfortably leery that a rattler might ooze between the boulders they were sitting on.

“Well, this kind of rockpile is habitat for rodentia and consequently for the snakes that eat them. You have to think that maybe primitive people were encamped here six thousand years ago and there were a prolific number of rattlers. Say that someone from the tribe or group, probably a child, had been killed by a rattler, which is comparatively small but immense in the power of their venom. You naturally would ascribe godlike powers to them. You propitiate the snake gods by drawing or carving them, a sort of prayer. You pray to God so that he won't kill you and in hopes he'll give good luck to your family or group. Of course this is a crude and speculative simplification.”

“Where did the priests come in exactly? I mean I took an anthropology course but I don't recall.” Sunderson tilted a bit for a better look at Lucy's thighs. She perceived his intent and smiled at him, her first of the day.

“Well, these early people were nomadic and usually had a medicine man, a shaman that stayed off to the side but priesthoods came to people that were established as farmers or, on the northwest coast, as farmers and fishermen. Farmers need rain and are suckers for religious leaders.”

“They also offer consolation and advice,” Lucy added timidly.

“Yours should have told you long ago to get rid of your nitwit husband.”

“Please, Dad.”

“Please, bullshit.” He turned to Sunderson. “You ever meet any of these people in their three-thousand-dollar suits? They're the priests of money and pretend they have mystical knowledge about how to increase yours, which as you've seen recently gives them a chance to swindle everyone. Me, I'm strictly into land. You can read a realtor like a stop sign.”

Sunderson immediately recognized that historically Bushrod was from the moneyed class, which bought all the land out of which a dime could be squeezed and even felt virtuous about their land rape.

Lucy was in tears and began her slow descent, which Sunderson figured was more difficult because you had your gravity behind you. He looked off across the massive landscape to the west and southwest and then down at Lucy who had stumbled near the bottom.

“She was a champ when young but then she became a brood mare to a fool. Early on I had him looked into. Word had it that he cheated his way through Choate and Yale.”

“From this vantage point the Gadsden Purchase doesn't seem very wise.” Sunderson was trying to avoid the subject of Lucy, upset by the cruelty of the father toward the daughter. He wondered at the number of parents he had known who bludgeon their children with their own ideals for them.

“I read that the part of the Mexican government that sold it to us were crooks. There's a fuss about it locally in the newspapers.” Bushrod stood up and stretched with crackling bones.

“Yes, a man I'm looking for is involved.” Mona's fax had said that Dwight was helping fuel this pointless controversy.

“You said you were retired.”

“It's a hobby.”

“For thirty years my hobby has been the desert. I don't have time to wear it out.”

Bushrod descended nimbly as if in a hurry while Sunderson backed himself down, bursting into a profuse sweat when he thought he heard a rattling down in a crevasse beneath him. If you looked northeast toward Tucson the sky was discolored by the smudge pot of civilization, while to the west there were the
purple mountains majesty
in a haze of heat. He peeked down the deep crevasse praying to the snake gods to have mercy.

At the bottom Sunderson took the vehicle's medicine kit away from Lucy who was ineptly trying to patch a skinned knee.

“I've even doctored bullet wounds,” Sunderson said kneeling before her and cleaning the grit from her knee. Her skin was smooth and moist with sweat. The nut twinge was not called for but was there.

“Nice legs, indeed. The only thing of value she got from her tosspot mother, whom I call Miss Absolut, were nice features to moderate my ugly ones. Did you ever shoot anyone? I bet that's not an original question.”

“Just over their heads to slow them down. A couple were shot by partners. It's quite ugly.” He was thinking that if Lucy's mother drank too much it was obvious who drove her there. It would be nice to slow the old fool down. “Once I entered a house south of Detroit with a partner. I knelt down to inspect a guy wheezing with a meat cleaver in his chest. He was blowing a pink bubble like a lung-shot deer. Another guy comes running out of a room with a butcher knife and my partner shot half his ass off with a .357.”

“My God what an ugly story,” Bushrod said.

They drove on another thirty miles to the southwest, and then on a two-track as bad as Sunderson had experienced reaching the Great Leader's longhouse. They parked at the foot of a canyon that was shaded from the early winter sun. Sunderson guessed it was nearly eighty degrees and said so.

“It gets to be one-fifteen-plus in June when we head back to Maine.” Bushrod set off at a brisk pace up the canyon. Sunderson tried to help Lucy carry the lunches.

“You go ahead with Dad. I'm the squaw. He likes to lecture.”

“You ever think of shooting him?” Sunderson teased.

“Many times,” she replied archly.

He caught Bushrod who walked up the canyon in silence and Sunderson wondered if it was the cleaver story that battened his gob. They stopped at a place shadowed by paloverde and ironwoods and signs of a fire ring.

“I've camped here alone and been satisfied with the company. Before you showed up this morning Lucy said you were divorced?”

“Yes, for three years.”

“Willingly?”

“No. It was my fault. She fled.”

“You must not have much money.”

“None to speak of. A pension. It's enough.”

“If you're worth a lot you can't drive them away unless they can get a big cut.”

“That's what I heard.”

It was only beginning to occur to Sunderson that he was in the company of high rollers, hard to perceive as they weren't the least bit demonstrative like the midwestern rich. Having grown up so modestly, if not in poverty, he had done fairly well as a college graduate or so he thought. He had seen nothing enviable in the lives of richer people like Diane's parents whose peripheries seemed blinded by their possessions. His lifelong obsession with fishing for brook trout was largely free.

“She said you were from the Upper Peninsula. Way back when my family had a lot of timberland up that way and in Wisconsin and Maine of course. We were noble predators, to be sure,” he chuckled unattractively. “Later we were mostly into paper mills. I bailed out totally in the late eighties sensing that computers will make a lot of the paper supply obsolete. I'd wager the
Boston Globe
will go under. My land will always be land.”

He was thinking that his suspicions were confirmed. Now Bushrod reminded him of a big-shot banker in Marquette who yelled over to him a few weeks before when he walked out of the Verling where he had had a fine whitefish dinner. The banker had been parked in front of the disco and someone had keyed his new Lexus leaving a deep five-foot scratch along the door panels. The man was in tears of rage and wanted immediate action. Sunderson had said that it was out of his territory and that the banker must call the Marquette city police, after which the man actually gasped in rage. Sunderson had suddenly decided to be nice and called the city police. The dispatcher had said, “That guy's an asshole. We'll let him wait a half hour.” Sunderson had said that the city cops would arrive momentarily and had walked off with a smile.

Deeper, though, was a rawer place, which was the habitat of his thoughts about his father who had worked for comparative peanuts at the paper mill in Munising for over thirty years. His father, however, felt the job was a big upward step from cutting pulp logs in the woods when winter days could be thirty below zero or in June when the blackflies were insufferably thick. Sunderson had done it himself starting at age twelve on weekends when he had saved enough for a used chain saw but it was brutally hard to make fifteen bucks in a ten-hour day. Bushrod was the dictator in the faraway office who owned the timberland, the pulp mill, and tens of thousands of slaves and acres.

Lucy had laid out lunch on a sky-blue tablecloth and they sat on big rocks that someone who was very strong had dragged near the fire ring. There was an immediate wrangle because there was the wrong kind of mustard on Bushrod's roast beef sandwich.

“Dad, it's not my fault.”

“Then whose fault is it?”

“You can have my chicken sandwich.”

“My dear, are you crazy? You know I don't eat chicken sandwiches.”