The Great Leader

Chapter 10

Sunderson was dumbfounded by his fragility. He walked. And walked and walked, the only thing he could think of to do to leave what he had become behind him. He wrote a single entry in his journal, cryptic but on the money. “I am a very short man in tall grass.”

After leaving Melissa’s he had stopped at the Wagon Wheel for seven double whiskeys, his favorite number. The whiskey had none of the desired effect. The barmaid Amanda wasn’t there and her replacement was clearly frightened of him as if he were one of the spate of vampires who had descended on the land compliments of television. A soused tourist lady had approached.

“Are you Robert Duvall?”

“No, I’m not,” he had responded gruffly.

“Prove it. I know you’re Robert Duvall.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

She had shrieked and he left the bar. This Robert Duvall misidentification happened a couple of times a year. This used to amuse Diane who thought he should learn how to tango because Robert Duvall tangoed.

Reaching the apartment he vomited in the backyard, the whiskey vomit stinging his nasal passages. This was clearly one of those rare times that alcohol was unable to do its job. His brain was fluttery rather than dulled. He spent a wretched night within a recurring dream of when at age twelve he had cut pulp during winter vacation to earn money for Christmas. His dad had dropped him off at daylight but it was ten below zero and he had skipped breakfast. He couldn’t get warm except for his hands which he pressed against the cowl of his Stihl chain saw, his proudest possession along with his green Schwinn bicycle. At midmorning he was still shaking and carried the saw out to the section road where after half an hour he had been picked up by a county snowplow driver who was a friend of his dad’s. The man said, “You got to eat breakfast if you’re going to work in the woods.” They stopped at a diner and Sunderson ate a hot roast beef sandwich with potatoes and gravy and then fell asleep in his chair. In the dream he had never gotten out of the woods but had grasped a beech tree to avoid shaking into pieces of frozen meat.

He got up at 4:00 a.m. and drank coffee for an hour until he could call Marion at five, which was seven Michigan time.

“You sound pretty rough.”

“That’s a fair thing to say.”

“Maybe it’s because you had the necessary habit of work for forty years and now you don’t.”

“That must be part of it. I’m going to take a powder for a week or so. If Berenice or Mona call tell them I’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure? I could come down for Thanksgiving and we could talk it through.”

“No. I’m just going to walk and knock off the sauce and then maybe come home.”

“Sounds wise. Here’s a thought re: our Great Leader. I read a piece by this historian named Carter who claims religion is biological.”

“Jesus Christ. Why not? Give my love to Mona.”

“That’s not hard. She and this brother and sister have started wearing identical clothes. It’s upsetting the school authorities.” Marion laughed.

Despite repeated rinsing the whiskey puke odor was still in his nose. He turned off his cell phone and put it in the refrigerator for no particular reason. He strapped on his shoulder holster and revolver thinking that it would be fun to shoot Daryl-Dwight in the head but then the problem wasn’t the Great Leader’s but the world’s and the only real solution was to shoot himself.

He drove to the Tucson airport and exchanged his compact for an SUV. He remembered to have breakfast because he was going to the woods of sorts. A burly brown waitress in Birkenstocks saw his copy of Alfred’s map spread on the table and gave suggestions for camping places. She was the typical eco-ninny but pleasant. Her green shorts and brown legs indicated that she was an experienced hiker.

“I don’t want to see anyone for a week including myself.”

“You’re in a bad way,” she laughed. “Try the east end of Aravaipa Creek up near Klondyke. It’s north of Bonita between the Pinaleños and the Galiuros. Take the fork up Turkey Creek so the Conservancy assholes don’t hassle you.”

“Thank you and God bless.” Sunderson had never said “God Bless” before but Roxie used to after he screwed her on the clothes dryer.

“Drop by and let me know how it works,” she said going off to wait on other customers. She smelled wonderful like a hay field and Sunderson felt a touch of life. He went into a huge sporting goods store and bought a cheap sleeping bag, a tarpaulin, a primus stove, a bunch of trail mix and freeze-dried food, coffee packets and a pot, and a canteen. On the way out he looked at a display of bowling balls, which reminded him of Xavier saying that religion, sex, and money aren’t separable. He was likely right. A human is as indivisible as a bowling ball, a biological knot like any other creature, a distressing notion but then so was much of life.

Three hours later he was camped on a flat up Turkey Creek a half mile from his car. The beauty of the mountain landscape made him feel insignificant, which was the feeling he was after. The heavy weight of his personality needed to disappear for a while. Properly and openly perceiving the landscape made his currently dismal self vanish. He had been confused since leaving home in Marquette to a degree that daily seemed impossible at his age when he should have had things figured out.

He walked and walked. Turkey and Aravaipa Creeks were obviously without brook trout but he realized that was missing the point. The truly important idea is where creeks were, often in the most ignored and neglected parts of the landscapes including marshes, swamps, and deep gulleys, landscapes from which the human race couldn’t extract money and therefore they were mostly left to simply be themselves. Marion had said that we have eaten the world and puked it up and except in isolated locations what we have left is mostly puke. This idea was an unpleasant reminder of the tinge of whiskey odor still in his nose so he knelt and snorted some creek water then rubbed some juniper on his upper lip.

The first late afternoon and evening were hard without his habitual alcohol. He simply never missed drinking every day except when he had the flu and then he felt virtuous about not drinking. He had walked so far his legs trembled so whiskey would have been nice and sitting near his campfire he was fearful over how long the nights were in late November, close to fourteen hours at least at this latitude, and worse far north in Marquette. He and Marion always celebrated on winter solstice, December 21, when it turned around and the light began to increase in increments of a minute or so per day.

He slept well from his walking fatigue from eight in the evening until midnight. The dinner of freeze-dried beef stroganoff had been wretched and his irritation over forgetting a bottle of Tabasco or a jar of dill pickles was outsized without the calming influence of a little whiskey. It was a feeling similar to losing all of your favorite marbles in a schoolyard contest. This was miniscule compared to the haunting feeling at midnight when he awoke and fed the fire. Alcohol had always worked fairly well in ameliorating or subduing his hair-shirt memories but now without a trace of it in his body he was struck dumb by the little movie his mind made of the morning after Thanksgiving when the Mayflower van had come and moved out Diane’s collection of fine antique furniture and her many boxes of art books. She was in Naples, Florida, with her parents and her stuff was being moved to a bungalow near the hospital from where she could walk to work. He had opened a bottle of cheap Early Times when the movers had left and it was gone by dinnertime when rather than dinner he had opened another bottle of whiskey. This had gone on a couple of days and when he didn’t show up for work Monday morning or answer the phone a colleague had checked up and found him facedown and comatose on the floor of the unheated enclosed back porch after a ten-degree night. There was a trip to the ER in an ambulance and two days in the hospital where Marion had visited.

“You should have called,” Marion had said.

“I didn’t have anything to say.”

That had been the longest winter of his life though from force of will he slowed down his drinking to a point short of passing out. Toward the end of April and the beginning of trout season he found that his fingers trembled so that he couldn’t tie a fly to his leader at which point he was able to cut back to his traditional two drinks after work and two in the evening. This would not have been possible had he not fished a hundred evenings and weekend days in a row. Moving water was the only workable tranquilizer for the central error of his life, the divorce.

The fire flared nicely after he added a large piece of juniper stump. He wondered at how the totally sober mind’s tongue reached the rawest spots. He should have known that Melissa was spying for her brother and not truly drawn to him, the Lone Geezer from the north. He still had the lovely memory of her crouched all nude and moist in the small clearing of the thicket in the estuarine area of the lake’s end. Part of him had known she was a spy but the stronger part chose to ignore it, led by vanity and the biological ring through his nose until the inevitable falling smack on his foolish face. A fool for love and lust or something like that. How absurd. As he drifted off he heard the howling of coyotes up the canyon break into yips, which meant they were closing in on the kill. He thought that the sex game must be about over for him but then it had never been much of a game, more like a mortal intrusion.

At dawn he shivered from the cold, the dew on his sleeping bag crisply frozen. Why hadn’t he set up the tent, where a single candle or two would have kept him warmish? He could just barely reach his pile of wood from the bag and flipped a few pieces on the coals. Ever the detective he had awakened thinking that if the Great Leader could be caught with the raised-skirt photo that his girlfriend Carla had taken of Mona he could be charged with possession of child pornography. That would put the sucker away for a while even though it was definitely pushing the envelope to think of Mona as a child except in the eyes of the law. He lay there brooding over the matter until the sun peeked through the Pinaleño Mountains to the east. Of course it had been okay for him to peek at Mona through his bookcase. It was easy in stray moments to forgive yourself.

He arose, his muscles creaking painfully, and made coffee and then scrambled eggs by adding water to the egg powder in the pan. How nasty and poorly planned. Why hadn’t he brought along a stack of the fine local tortillas? Why hadn’t he brought along a cooler full of steaks, chicken, pork chops, bacon, eggs, and cheese? This dried shit was for hikers who needed to travel light. He could easily have walked the half a mile back to the car once a day to pick up supplies. He had clearly lost his wits in this alien place called Arizona. He had to figure out how to pick up his new life from the ground where he had merely been walking on it and reshape it into a tolerable form.

Lucky for him he gave up thinking when he walked. His recent thinking always arrived at a pile of the same old compromised shit wherein the mistakes of the past readily suffocated the present. When he walked his level of attention was spread thinly but intensely over the entire landscape as it likely had been for walkers a million years before. His thoughts were idle little slips such as trees stay in one place and that even the smallest creeks or trickles follow declining altitude. His mistakes were those of a relative flatlander. If you climb a steep hill it doesn’t mean that like Michigan you can get down the other side. It took him a couple of days to figure out that there was no way to reach the top of the butte that capped the steep cliffs along Aravaipa Creek. He resented this then concluded that no one had ever been up there except birds.

As the days passed his sack of dried food diminished. On the fourth day he ate only two granola bars and he felt how far his trousers were loosening. He had worn holes in his only pair of heavy socks and instead put on two pairs of his cheap thin office socks. His feet became so sore he soaked them an hour each day in a pool of the cold creek. He snuck around a small Nature Conservancy cabin at dawn because you needed a permit to enter their land and he didn’t want to wake anyone up. He proceeded west increasingly intimidated by the steep canyon walls and wondering how the conifers, oaks, and mesquite seemed able to grow out of rock. There was certainly nothing comfortable about the heraldic land of the Apaches who in many ways seemed the tribe least like the white intruders. We made much of their savagery though indeed we cut off the head of their leader Mangas Coloradas and shipped it east to the Smithsonian in the name of science, a fact that made the Apaches improbably difficult to subdue. They wanted to enter the spirit world with their dead bodies intact. The West wasn’t settled by nice people.

He was fatigued by midmorning and forced himself to eat one of the two pathetic so-called energy bars he had carried along. He thought that just because you’re older doesn’t mean that death is imminent every day. There’s generally a tip-off when it’s coming. He sat by the creek chewing his food thinking that we’ll never understand anything. Here he was unable to name the hundreds of varied plants and birds he was seeing that had the solace of taking him away from the miserable world of men, his life in fact. He abruptly felt that even his habitual study of history was parasitic. Like the small leech his was a perfect parasite because he didn’t kill his host, merely attached himself and fed.

He had fed on history and sometimes the food nauseated him. For instance, several months studying the Indian Wars were disastrous. It reminded him of how Diane loved Mahler but Mahler severely jangled him. Composers attached clusters of musical notes to their large emotions but Sunderson didn’t want big emotions so he had truncated his study of the Indian Wars. He often wondered if this emotional timidity was part of the male ethic of the far north, that is, aim low and you won’t be disappointed. In retrospect his being the first college graduate on either side of his family seemed puny. He was amazed after sitting by the creek for fifteen minutes to finally notice the tracks of a big feline in the damp sand near his own feet, obviously a mountain lion. His skin prickled thinking that the beast might be watching him from any of a hundred hiding places along the canyon walls or from the verdant thickets. He didn’t carry his pistol on his walks but then decided he was likely too large to be easy prey. The many small hoof prints also in the damp sand were those of the small pig-like creature the javelina that he had read were the central food of the lion in the Southwest. His ex-landlord Alfred had said that a small number of jaguars, a much more ominous creature, had been migrating north from Mexico.

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.

“Tomorrow is Thanksgiving,” he said idly.

“I grew up without your pilgrims,” she laughed.

He bought a pint of whiskey from the bar and they took a ride down past the Conservancy and up Salero Canyon Road, pulling off on a two-track, behind a mesquite thicket. He was mortally disappointed when she said she had the monthlies and couldn’t screw. He felt like a teenager sucking her breasts in the car. She began to blow him and then stopped.

“Do you want my back door?” She was laughing.

“Of course.” He had paused not quite comprehending. Other than feverish incidents late in high school and in college he hadn’t had wide experience, what with his faithfulness in forty years of marriage to Diane. He felt tremulous and daring as they got out of the car and she leaned over the front seat, turning out the dome light and handing him a bottle of lotion from her purse. There was enough moon that her trim buttocks fairly glowed.

“Take it easy, kiddo.”

“I don’t think I’m going to last long.” And he didn’t mostly because a dog growled loudly behind them. He pulled out instantly and she shrieked and crawled across the seat. He scrambled in after her. Now she was laughing and he turned to see through the car window a big black dog not a dozen feet away. The dog jumped up against the car and started snarling in at Sunderson. Still laughing Melissa started the car and backed around throwing gravel as she drove out the two-track. Now the dog was chasing the car and roaring.

“It’s the ghost of my father,” she hissed. “When I was twelve he caught Xavier doing that to me and beat him nearly to death. Do you think that’s why Xavier became gay?”

“I have no idea.” Sunderson didn’t want to digest what he was hearing. There was the discordant mental image of pilgrims fucking in their funny pilgrim hats. He unscrewed the pint and took a long, choking drink.

“You shouldn’t drink so much,” she said. “I worry about your drinking.”

“I worry about your brother having me killed.”

“He won’t do that. I asked him not to. He likes to say such things. Though of course he killed my husband with his plastic hand then complained about the expense of getting a new hand.”

Sunderson had looked forward to a real bed but later when trying to sleep found he missed the sweet outdoor night air, the sounds of nocturnal creatures, and even the lumpy pad under his cheap sleeping bag. And at dawn never had bad instant coffee tasted as good, as he planned his walking. He had opened the windows wide but there was still the slight smell of cleaning fluid in the room. All in all he was glad to not be dead and that the big black dog hadn’t bitten him in the ass.

For twenty years he had been trying to dismiss a haunting night image. Back in March 1989 he had investigated a wife beating a few miles from Sault Ste. Marie. A diminutive woman who weighed less than a hundred pounds had been slugged by her husband with such massive force that it had driven her nose bone into her brain and she had died instantly. On the gurney her face looked like a plum from the subcutaneous bleeding. Her husband kept saying, “I only hit her once.” When Sunderson finally got home to Marquette that night he had wept over a glass of whiskey in the kitchen and Diane had gotten out of bed and comforted him. For twenty years he had to face this nightly plum image and after trying to dismiss it for a long time he’d finally given up. But now the little woman’s face appeared normal and she was smiling. He was so startled he turned on the bed lamp. Had he gone daft? Nothing was amiss except that the nightcap he had poured sat untouched on the kitchen table. He wanted to feel good in the morning.

A rooster awoke him before daylight and he was pleased to be in a village that allowed chickens. Roosters were the sound of his childhood when he would awake early for his miserable paper route from which he made five bucks a week. He made coffee and quickly fried half a strip steak and two eggs that he put on toast. It was all uncommonly delicious. He was feeling positive for the first time in the month since his retirement and attributed it to the week far from the world of men. He had no expectations that it would last long but it fueled his walk nearly to the top of Red Mountain from which he could see over the top of a range to the south and far into Mexico. The landscape was too vast for a flatlander and seeing seventy miles or so unnerved him. He descended so hastily his shins ached. He had become quite abruptly homesick. He would go home as soon as possible and do something reasonable like shovel snow off his sidewalk and out of the driveway.

Back in his temporary apartment he noted that a fly had drowned in the glass of whiskey and that there was a message on his cell phone from his ex-wife. He felt light-headed when he called her back.

“Your mother is worried you won’t show up for Thanksgiving. Please do so.”

“I’m heading over in a half hour for her special oven-dried turkey. How have you been?”

“I’ve mostly been a nurse. My husband is on hyperaggressive chemo. How about you?”

“I went camping alone for a week. You would have loved the place.”

“I can’t believe this,” she laughed.

“It’s true. I was recovering. At this late date I’m becoming a boy again by camping.”

“Did it work?”

“Somewhat, except that getting away makes you want more getting away. I’m going to come home and spend some time at Marion’s cabin to think over my pursuit of the Great Leader.”

“It’s not a cabin, it’s barely a shack. You’ll spend your time cutting wood.”

“All the better.”

“Have you found companionship?”

“Of sorts. There’s this young Mexican woman but she’s a tad daffy. It seems nearly all women are daffy except you.”

After he concluded their chat he found he had a lump of grief in his throat. Life moment by moment is so unforgiving and I’m a slow study, he thought. It’s hard to repair a boat after it’s sunk. As he prepared to leave wishing he had some good wine to take along he was amused at his dread of the upcoming meal before which his mother, Hulda, would say a lengthy grace. Her annual Thanksgiving grace was traditionally a summing up of her spiritual fiscal year, more similar to driving nails than the polite “Thank you, Big Guy.”

Sunderson’s peripheral consciousness had expanded and on the way out of town he guessed that a man sitting at the head of an alley in a white sedan reading a newspaper was Kowalski. In the rearview mirror he saw the white sedan pick up his tail as he crested the first hill out of town. He stepped on it and was well ahead by the Salero Road turnoff and then the serpentine turns through the canyon before Circle Z Ranch slowed him down. His compact was a slow dog indeed compared to his old Crown Victoria with which he got up to 150 miles per hour chasing down a car thief in the Seney stretch. For no reason except impulse and the fact that the gate was open which it never was he turned left at Three R, a narrow gravel road leading south into the mountains. Kowalski followed a quarter mile behind and Sunderson took out his pistola as it was known locally. He parked off to the side and Kowalski pulled up behind him and got out grinning. When Kowalski reached him and leaned against the compact Sunderson pointed the pistol.

“Your cell phone, please.”

Sunderson opened his car door violently, catching Kowalski’s shins with the bottom of the door and dropping him like a tub of shit.

“You’re annoying me,” Sunderson said. He turned the compact around and on the way past shot out both of Kowalski’s front tires. Kowalski was sitting in the road with his eyes closed hugging his shins.

On the way to the freeway to Green Valley he stopped at the Safeway on Mariposa to buy a couple bottles of the cheapish champagne his mother favored on special occasions. He was surprised the store was open but then Melissa had said that Latinos didn’t grow up with pilgrims and they could scarcely celebrate the conquistadors who were butchers at best. He didn’t worry about her infiltrating the Leader’s compound. She was a tough cookie.

Bob’s glistening Escalade was parked out front and Sunderson wondered if he washed and polished it every morning, certainly a possibility. Expensive cars had always seemed loathsome. Those from the U.P., often called Yoopers, who had gone downstate and made good money would return in the summer and expect the locals to admire their new cars. They were largely out of luck.

Mom, Berenice, and Bob were sitting on the front porch and Hulda’s lap was covered by the hideous family album. She had been extraordinarily handsome as a young woman and a lifetime later she had become a cranky crone.

“My remaining son,” she announced. She had been calling him this for thirty years because the death of his brother was still current news to her.

“Surprise!” Sunderson said, holding up the two bottles of faux-champagne that had cost ten bucks apiece.

“Cool it off Mister Bigshot. And make the brown stuff.” She was referring to a roux that Diane used to make to give the turkey gravy an appealing color. Diane had taught him and he found the process tedious.

“The Detroit Lions are playing the Chicago Bears in eighteen minutes,” Bob said.

“I’m a Packers fan,” Sunderson said.

“That’s not patriotic. You should root for your home state.” Bob was in a huff. “I like my gravy dark brown. I always was a gravy man. Valerie will help you. She’s my niece.”

“I’m cooking a twenty-two pounder. I put it on at daylight. We’ll be eatin’ on that sucker for a week. Put some juice on ice for me, son,” Mom cackled.

Sunderson dutifully kissed Hulda and Berenice on the forehead and shook Bob’s clammy hand. He went inside and was pleased to see that a fairly chubby young woman had already started the roux and was setting the table. She looked good bending over the table in her short skirt. She introduced herself and said she was going to cooking school in Santa Monica.

“This fucking turkey’s going to be dead as a doornail. And what’s this?” She opened the refrigerator and pointed at a tomato aspic dotted with ripe olives and tiny marshmallows.

“That’s Hulda’s secret recipe from the Great North,” Sunderson laughed. He noted that the roux was a darker brown than he had ever achieved. “Nice roux,” he said wanting to pat her on her plump ass but thinking better of it.

“I’m here interviewing for jobs in Tucson restaurants but the economy is tits up. Uncle Bob said I could be an assistant manager at his trailer park in Benson. I drove over there and it’s a suckhole. He says you’re on the track of top-rung criminals.”

“He’s on the money. I’m daily imperiled.” This was sort of true. He opened his sport coat flap so she could see the shoulder holster hoping to improve her questionable dank mood which was everywhere present in America.

“Oh bullshit, everyone’s carrying in this state,” she said raising her eyebrows as he poured his mom a full glass of champagne on the rocks.

“It’s the message not the delivery,” he said.

They finally arranged themselves at the table. He had meant to tell Valerie not to carve until after grace as the food would lose its heat. He knew that his mother got her ornate prayer language via the King James version of the Bible plus her bug-eyed little minister back home.

“Let us bow our heads and close our eyes in prayer. Our heavenly father we thank thee for our ample foodstuffs on this gladsome day. Whilst thou art in heaven with my husband and son sitting on your right hand we thank thee that we are still alive and kicking. As thou knowest it was a tough year with my stroke putting me on the fritz for a while. We thank thee for curing Berenice’s sprained ankle which she got tripping over the hose Bob left on the front steps after he washed her car. We thank thee for Bob’s prosperity which keeps our hides and hair together in these troubled times. We thank thee for getting Simon back on his feet after he got beat up by a Mexican gang. Lord, protect the borders of our country. We pray that niece Valerie finds a job and keeps her body pure for the hubby in her future…”

Sunderson opened his eyes a squint and saw the startled look on Valerie’s face. Next to him Bob was text messaging on his cell in his lap. Berenice was staring up at a fly on the ceiling. The torpor was in full flood. Hulda paused to take a gulp of her iced champagne. He was bored enough to childishly drop his fork on the floor in order to catch a view up Valerie’s legs. He leaned over and the view was dizzying what with Valerie abruptly giving her legs an extra spread. There was the fabled little muffin contained in blue undies. When he popped back up he blushed when she gave him a silly grin. Why was he such a fool? “To thine own self be true,” said Polonius but then his Shakespeare professor at Michigan State forty-five years before had said that Polonius was a parodic character blathering the street wisdom of the day.

“And Lord, we are in thine hands for better or worse,” Hulda continued with a champagne burp, “and of late it’s been worse for my little retirement fund which as you know is handled by the Lutheran Brotherhood. It sure would be nice if you could see fit to let the market fly high like a balloon.”

And so on. Luckily Valerie reheated the turkey gravy in the microwave. Sunderson left as soon as it was vaguely polite to do so after Berenice’s medley of pies, which apparently came from a bakery as they were without her vaunted lard crust. He was barely in the car when he got a cell call from Melissa.

“It was unpleasant,” she began, then paused. “He was wearing a red robe and we were alone in a den.”

“Yes. Go ahead.”

“He was like, you know, a slick fraternity guy at U of A. He wanted to see my butt and I said no. That put a stop to things so for you I quickly showed him my butt which because of you is sore today. So then he got friendlier. The ticket for me to enter the group would be fifty grand which would get me complete spiritual satisfaction and a transcendent mind whatever that is. I asked him why he needed so much money and he said he and his people were moving to Nebraska in the spring.”

“Where in Nebraska?” Sunderson asked.

“How should I know? Nebraska is Nebraska. Anyway, he got real friendly when I let on that I was rich and the fifty grand wasn’t out of the question. He said that it appeared I was already on level twenty-three of the hundred levels of spirituality. Then he shocked me and suggested that I give him a blow job. He wouldn’t come in my mouth because he had to save his fluids for younger women who needed them more. He said that sperm is the most powerful fluid in the world. I thought fast because I can’t blow a man unless I actually like him so I told him I couldn’t because I had a tooth pulled yesterday. So that’s that.”

“Thanks. You did a fine job.”

“A little bad news. Xavier is coming home tonight and he’s real pissed that we met at the Wagon Wheel so be careful.”

Sunderson’s heart dropped in temperature and he pushed the off button. Jesus Christ. He called Mona and asked her to book him a flight home via Minneapolis or Chicago, whichever was soonest. She said that he sounded scared and that he had to pony up fourteen hundred bucks for her new Apple. Within a minute she had him on the dawn plane for Minneapolis with a two-hour wait for Marquette. He said fine and she said she’d call Marion and make them a nice dinner.

He wasn’t thinking clearly and stopped at the Wagon Wheel for a pick-me-up. He couldn’t help himself and asked Amanda how Xavier could have known that Melissa met him at the bar. She was evasive.

“She needs a lot of looking after. He’s a good stockbroker and a good brother though he’s up to no good in Mexico. She just lost her volunteer job at the hospital for stealing drugs. Last summer she got busted twice for leaving her kid in the hot car. In July she ran off with some motorcyclists from the Aryan Brotherhood in Idaho and Xavier retrieved her in bad shape. Last winter she tried to board a plane for Hermosillo with a pistol in her purse and had to be restrained. She had to go to a clinic for a month to stay out of jail. There’s more. I was thinking of warning you but I figured that you were just another horny old fool.”

“Thanks.” He bought a travel pint and sped home to pack. Kowalski had tossed his apartment again, which bored him, leaving a note saying “Where’s my cell?” Sunderson had dropped it out of the car at the Nogales interchange hoping that some kid would find it and call China. He had wondered idly how Melissa was acceptable to the Aryan Brotherhood but then an attractive woman has a passport to anywhere.

He was packed in fifteen minutes and on his way to the Tucson airport where he intended to sleep in the car in a parking lot. Mona had shocked him with the price of a first-class ticket, the only seating available. He was sorely overspending his retirement income but then it would be cheap again when he got home. The mountain road between Sonoita and Interstate 10 that led to Tucson spooked him in the moonlight. All of his life he had been drawn reverentially to the moon but down here it could look malevolent. This was of course part of the United States but it was considerably more alien in some respects than the northern Italy he had traveled through with Diane. Descending Sonoita pass he saw a group of illegal migrants huddled in a ditch and they reminded him of drawings of the starving Irish during the potato famine who were not considered human by their English landlords.

The parking lot as a sleeping place didn’t pan out. It was a cool night in Tucson, around freezing, and he had to keep cranking up the car heater for warmth. It reminded him of parking on a country road with a girl in the winter when he was in high school. He had paid a hard-earned hundred bucks for his ’47 Dodge but the interior was large and airy and the heater worked poorly. He recalled his cold hands on hot thighs, which was a pleasanter image than his head in a bloody toilet. He had no real idea of what to think about the relationship between Melissa and her brother. She had said that Xavier loved Mozart but then so did Goering and Goebbels. Anything was possible. A priest had doubtless said mass minutes after buggering a ten-year-old boy. He had also noted that Melissa didn’t seem upset that Xavier had beat her husband to death.

At midnight he bit the bullet and checked into one of the dozens of motels surrounding the airport, eighty-eight bucks for a single with the usual print of a sad-eyed donkey wearing a garland of flowers, plus another of a pretty senorita drawing water from a well in old Mexico. Marion and his wife had traveled to Mexico a number of times during Christmas vacations to avoid questionable family gatherings, and loved Michoacán and Oaxaca which were obviously without border problems. Marion had seen sad-eyed donkeys but none wearing flowers.

He set up the desk pot for morning coffee and allowed himself a single nightcap from his whiskey pint desperately not wanting to miss his dawn departure. He put his revolver in his suitcase to be checked but his niggling paranoia about Xavier delayed unloading it until morning. When he was lying in Nogales hospital as a big lump of bruises Melissa had been a vision of delight. In the bookcase in her house in Nogales he had noted a number of well-thumbed volumes of Marquis de Sade, which had seemed quirkish. He surfed through the TV channels watching ads for both Scientology and a new, revolutionary pill that would extend your dick. He thought that there was a will to power in both religion and sex that seemed transparently biological, and then money had always been the sole ticket to the future in the culture, with education trailing off far behind. Xavier had belittled the smallness of his pension but then the richer people of Marquette, and more so wealthy tourists, had never excited envy in him. The woods and creeks were free and cheap whiskey and plonk, Diane’s word, were sufficient. The closest he came to the delight of dancing was when he was walking along a creek looking for brook trout pools. For the first time he felt deeply that life might be good after retirement. He might even return to the Southwest for winter walking and camping though far out of range of Xavier and Melissa, say on the east side of the Chiricahuas where the Apaches once rode like the wind. Camping was cheap. Just before the divorce when Diane had received her inheritance he had been embarrassed by the large amount. Given his background it seemed unnatural.

Chapter 12

He only fully exhaled when the plane was in the air. He was beside the window and as the plane curved he could see Nogales, Lake Patagonia, and the road to Patagonia. There was no apparent reason for taking southern Arizona from the Apaches except to raise skinny cows and mine unproductive mines but then much the same could be said for the Upper Peninsula where all the virgin timber had been cut and the earth hoovered of its wealth. Both Apaches and Ojibway had lost out to invading armies and the postwar economy had razed the landscape.

There was a certain indecipherable smugness in first class that he was trying to ignore. He had heard that drinks were free but then 7:00 a.m. was a tad early. He relented and had a Bloody Mary out of relief, he supposed, from escaping Xavier and his murderous thugs not to speak of his daffy sister. The expensively dressed matron next to him was tittering over the new Vogue with its ornately dressed stick girls. Diane had been a subscriber.

“I’m not going to get a boner from this,” he had said to Diane leafing through the pages. Occasionally he liked irritating her with vulgarity.

“That’s scarcely the purpose of the magazine,” she had said.

When his seatmate seemed to frown at his dawn drink he wished he could fart but he was not a fart-on-demand kind of guy. Breakfast was an omelet of aerated faux eggs with two tiny sausages that had no pork flavor. He noted that his neighbor was wisely eating Cheerios with kiwi, a fruit he considered fraudulent.

“We winter in Tucson but I have to go back to Minneapolis to see my ill sister. Have you been vacationing?”

“Yes. In Nogales and Patagonia. Lovely places.”

“Really? I’ve heard they’re quite dangerous.”

“That’s nonsense. They’re both safer than Minneapolis. The violence is in the drug cartel wars across the border. Americans are always afraid of being mugged even after being scammed out of trillions by the financial community.”

“My husband is a banker,” she said in a mild huff abandoning her Cheerios for an article on two-thousand-dollar handbags.

That ended the conversation. He fell into a deep sleep in which he dreamed music, mostly a Scriabin piano piece that Diane loved that was played only with the left hand. He had studied the Russian Revolution so deeply in college and after that he sometimes dreamt of Russia though the idea of actually visiting the country seemed to be too large an undertaking.

Though groggy with sleep he felt at home in the Minneapolis airport, which was filled with the thickish, whey-faced citizens of the Great North, so many of whom he thought must be Scandinavian, or Germans from farm country. They all seemed to have a pork-and-potatoes businesslike sadness about them. Doubtless they chuckled now and then rather than laughing. His spirits rose further when he had a pot roast sandwich, the food of his childhood, along with a Bloody Mary and a beer. He managed to sleep again between Minneapolis and Marquette despite a bad-weather advisory that normally would have worried him. Dying in a plane crash had always seemed inappropriately modern to him whereas drowning in Lake Superior, like so many relatives who were commercial fishermen, was a logical conclusion to their profession.

Marquette was admirably bleak with a few feet of snow and a pleasant early-winter temperature of ten degrees and it began to get dark at four in the afternoon. He felt the hopeless sentimentality of the familiar driving up the snowy alley to the back porch of his house. He stood looking straight up at the snowflakes heading downward at his face. There was a sense of belonging, of being where he was supposed to be, that had been absurdly absent in the Southwest. He inhaled the cold air deeply and coughed waving at Mona who was waving from his brightly lit kitchen window. When he opened the door from the porch to the kitchen the smell of the roast pork shoulder and mashed rutabaga was wonderfully strong. They embraced and she slid his hand down onto her bottom and he quickly removed it. They kissed and he backed his tongue away from her emerging tongue.

“Mona, for Christ’s sake.”

“My analyst says it’s all obvious. I mean my crush on you. My dad cuts and runs when I’m seven and I think it’s at least partly my fault. You’re sort of my stepdad. I’m trying to hold on to you so I act sexy. I almost didn’t wear undies so I could give you a peek when I sat on the sofa.”

“It’s unhealthy.” He knew this was weak as he poured himself a strong whiskey.

“Don’t be such a silly fuck. What’s unhealthy mean? It’s harmless and I know you’re not going to touch me so what’s the problem with flirting and a little touch? I’d already be an old lady in India and Africa.”

“Well, civil authorities have established a law that you’re underage…” His mind ground to a halt. He may as well have been saying blah, blah, blah, blah. She was wearing a short-sleeved black sweater and a short black skirt. When she leaned way over to check the pork roast he looked out the window at the gathering dark. Her legs were smoothly muscled from running the eight hundred meters for the track team.

“Spare me the legal shit, darling.” She sat down and took a sip of his whiskey.

“I have an unpleasant question before Marion arrives.” He took Carla’s e-mail and the photo from a jacket pocket and passed it to her. “Here Carla says she went down on you and you told me nothing happened. Who’s telling the truth?”

“Who cares?” She was blushing ever so slightly.

“I care. If you’ll testify we can send Carla to prison for years.”

“No chance. Maybe a night in jail but not prison. You said yourself when you and Marion were talking about the Catholic priest sex scandal that a priest giving a sixteen-year-old hundred-seventy-pound young man a blow job wasn’t worth ten million bucks. Why didn’t he run for it?”

“Boys are different,” he said, pausing to glance into his studio den with relief. He intended to put a no sign up on his peek hole. Enough was enough. It seemed that his thinking was becoming less muddy. “Boys can be polymorphously perverse into their teens. Of course I’m unsure about girls. In the last three decades or so the culture has been prolonging childhood so it’s altogether natural that the age of consent be moved up to eighteen. Apparently the young are more sexually active than ever but the law is there to appropriately protect them from older predators of which there are many, like Dwight-Daryl.”

“Carla told me that as of this morning he’s changed his name to King David,” she laughed.

“Jesus Christ! What next?” He finished his whiskey but stopped himself from pouring another.

“I’m different. I’m old for my age. I cooperated so it would be unjust to send Carla to prison. We’re the world record holder for sending people to prison. Skip Carla, concentrate on the Great Leader.”

“For the time being maybe.” He was remembering that he had been expected to be a man at fourteen. And his sisters were hard cases at that age. He certainly had no clear idea why the societal change had occurred. His own family had been matriarchal with his mother holding the iron hand and his dad mostly bringing home the bacon. Mona’s mother was a mostly absent ditz.

“Can I sit on your lap for a minute?”

“If you behave.”

His knee felt the heat of her butt. What would happen to this waif? Did he have guidance to offer?

“You’re under arrest,” Marion said, standing at the open door in an orange coat and orange overalls. There was snow on the front porch which had muffled his approach. Sunderson was busy diverting his thoughts away from Mona’s warm ass with errant thoughts of the history of the Panama Canal, his dislike of college communities and their mental tourism, and the obvious fact that the human body should have been designed so that you only needed to pee once a day. He was sure his knee was beginning to sweat. How many BTUs does a vulva generate?

“I’m wearing my hunting clothes because I’m tired of my school principal clothes. Tomorrow’s the last day of deer season. We should give it a try.”

“You look truly ugly,” Mona said, getting up and reheating the mashed rutabaga and adding more cream and butter.

“It’s defensive, dear, the most visible color, which will save me from getting shot. Most hunting accidents are alcohol related.”

“I’ll tag along. I’m not saying I’ll fire a shot.” Sunderson felt dullish from his dawn plane ride though part of the fatigue might have come from being away from Xavier’s gun sights.

“Just before dark I saw a doe dragging a leg. She’d never make it through winter. You’d love doe liver.”

“I’ll count my gout pills.”

By nine the next morning, a clear glittery day of ten degrees with the snow glistening, Sunderson was frying the doe liver in too much butter, salivating and watching Marion carry in a load of split beech. The evening before, despite having had only two whiskeys, he began to nod off after two servings of the pork roast and mashed rutabaga and a bare nibble of salad. Mona and Marion had scarcely left when the phone rang and it was Queenie’s father, the big-shot Bloomfield Hills businessman who had earlier tried to get Sunderson to retrieve his daughter’s money from the Leader. Queenie had come up missing in Tucson and the man wanted him to look for her, an easy request to decline rather rudely. He gave the man Kowalski’s Nogales number. They deserved each other. Mona had winked at him when she left and he wandered into his den studio for the soft-core porn peep show but found himself unable to remove the book that would give him the view. He went directly to bed not wanting a case of what Satchel Paige had called the “agitations.” He poured a nightcap but didn’t drink it thinking that since touching Mona was unthinkable he had to transcend the remote lecher in himself. Before Marion left he had repeated his advice to Sunderson to closely read Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian for an insight into the behavior of the Great Leader, currently called King David, a hard to swallow name change, but then Sunderson had already begun the book.

At 6:00 a.m. he was up drinking coffee, looking for the shells for his.30-30 deer rifle, making a hash of leftover pork and potatoes, and trying to find where he had put the Deloria book and, not incidentally, D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, the latter impulse coming from the shred of a dream. As a college sophomore in a basic literature course the teacher had been a youngish hotshot directly out of Princeton, already an author of a book about Cotton Mather. Sunderson found them both suffocatingly dreary. This young professor loathed D. H. Lawrence which served to make Sunderson curious and he had had a brief Lawrence period that spring before coming to his senses and returning to history for relief. The dream had only included the professor’s feet, which were far too large in his English brogans for his body. It was time to run a tighter ship, which included not taking a dawn peek.

Halfway out to Marion’s shack on the snowy two-track at daylight Marion braked and jumped out of his ancient, boxy Toyota Land Cruiser with his.30-06 and shot the doe, which was down a slope between a grove of small white pines and alders beside a tiny creek. Sunderson could barely see the deer, which dropped in its tracks. Marion said, “Poor girl” while he gutted it with Sunderson holding the hind legs splayed to make it easier for Marion’s knife to avoid the anal sack. She was fairly healthy he thought examining her shattered knee, which he deduced came from a shot earlier in the two-week season. While Marion skinned the doe Sunderson had stoked the woodstove until it reddened. He guessed that he had gotten the cabin up to fifty degrees by the time they ate the liver off warmed tin plates.

“You have totally fucked up my schedule with your pursuit of this nitwit,” Marion laughed.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not. I’ve done a fair load of research while you were in Arizona possibly drinking and chasing pussy not to leave out getting the shit kicked out of you. Yours is the first American case of stoning I can recall.”

Marion had been helping his wife Sonia who, though lily white, had been a crack tribal administrator until she had taken a long leave to aid in the research in the nationwide lawsuit against the Bureau of Indian Affairs to recover billions of lost royalties coming to the tribes. A few years before, after Sunderson dealt with a particularly gory case of spousal abuse, he had been deeply puzzled how Marion had come up with a thick pile of articles on the subject along with a lengthy bibliography. Sunderson was still married to Diane at the time and she had hidden the material fearing another of his March depressions. A good deal of his puzzlement on the matter came from his father teaching him that it was forbidden to ever strike a female even if she hit you first.

“I think I’d have a much better grasp of the Leader, now King David, if I had his hundred stages of spiritual development in writing.” Sunderson swabbed up his butter and liver juices with a piece of mediocre white bread.

“No, that’s the wrong track. They probably don’t exist in writing. Maybe a number of them in his noggin. His power comes from the idea that he’s the only one in the know. He’s the judge. His followers must be kept off balance in their strain to prove their spiritual accomplishment.”

“But then what is he offering for their time and money for Christ’s sake?”

“The ecstasy of belief. That’s what we want from religion. Something we can count on as helpless children in the face of ninety billion galaxies. In a despondent culture he is telling them how to live, how to get out of their very limited bodies into an arena of spiritual confidence.” Marion was grinning as he turned down the damper of the stove which was now putting out too much heat.

“But how do you tie in the sexual thing?”

“That’s an attractive come-on. Remember that guru in Oregon, the Baghwan what’s his name? His followers had absolute sexual freedom for a while then out of fear of disease he promulgated that they had to wrap themselves in plastic for sex. He went downhill after that and lost his thirty-two Rolls-Royces. I think our government shipped him back to India.”

“He’s certainly an effective predator. I’m a bit mystified by his interest in females that are too young.” Sunderson took Carla’s e-mail and the photo of Mona from his jacket and slid it across the table to Marion who was startled.

“This is hot stuff. I’d make copies. The young girl stuff is at least partly biological, you know, like Warren Jeffs and those apostate Mormons. Without knowing it men want to continue their own genetic line so they try to get there first by even getting rid of the young men. With mammals as varied as antelope and mountain lions the alpha male chases off the competition. It’s quite a battle in the so-called natural world. Male bears kill the cubs fathered by other male bears to further their own line. With humans some stepfathers are notably unkind to children sired by previous husbands.”

“What a fucking mess.”

“Not at all. It’s just us. Certain scientists are now positing the biological origins of religion. We’re perfect parasites when we maintain order in society and maintain the host that feeds us, and religion is an essential way of maintaining order.”

“The Lutheran church is a biological organism?” Sunderson laughed.

“At least partly. Bring it all home. Look at yourself. Consider what either of us do to conduct our lives in terms of sex, finance, and religion. We’ve been friends for more than twenty years. We talk about everything. You’ve said that after your divorce you felt sexually deprived scurrying around looking for a good piece of ass. You’ve said that money has always made you nervous and you try to ignore it because you’ve made five times as much as your poor father did without even trying hard. You’ve never said much about your religion, though you’ve inquired about mine a lot.”

“I thought it over quite a bit in the Nogales hospital when I was trying to organize an interest in continuing my life. Of course the drugs helped but they’re mostly a lid over the pain like a manhole cover and you remain aware of the surge of pain underneath. Anyway I’d keep making a list of my favorite brook trout creeks, nine of them in fact. Also my favorite landscapes, maybe a half dozen, two of them from boyhood on Grand Island, and also that long gully you showed me west of here. I’d go over these places in my memory for hours and was surprised how well I remembered them right down to the minutest detail. The day I left the hospital it occurred to me that these places were the location of whatever religion I had. This started when I was a boy. In these places I never think of anything except where I am, sometimes for hours. I remembered that Mother said that when you pray you’re not supposed to think about anything else, which was a trick I never could manage but can in these places. I found another one when I camped out for a week in Arizona.”

They walked for two hours on this rare windless day, normally a period when northwest winds off Lake Superior pound the locals senseless with their fury. It was a little odd not to find any wolf prints in the fresh snow but Marion said that here on the eastern edge of the Huron Mountains the wolves retreated far into roadless areas at the first shot of deer season.

Back at the cabin Sunderson fried up the sliced doe heart for a snack and then they dozed in their chairs after a few exhausting sentences about Mona’s future.

Chapter 13

After their nap Marion and Sunderson took Mona to the Verling for supper. Sunderson was frantic for a mess of fried whitefish. A “mess of fish” was a localism. People would say that they “fried up a mess of brook trout” they had caught. Sunderson was in a peculiar mental state not having totally awakened from his nap and a dream in which he was a god in the sky but hadn’t done anything with his godhead except wander around the heavens. He had returned to earth in his mortal body and was relieved.

Mona was stunning in a black pantsuit she said a “friend” had given her. She was pouty because her father had called from Cleveland for the first time in months and had said he was buying her a car. She had told him “I don’t want your fucking car” and had hung up. She changed the mood by taking out a page she had ripped from Vanity Fair to which her mother subscribed. She read aloud to them an item that said that at an auction of the belongings of the deceased fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, a single chair had gone for twenty-four million dollars. Marion had laughed so explosively that he alarmed the adjoining tables while Sunderson was merely puzzled to the point of melancholy and also irked that his whitefish and glass of beer had arrived and he had forgotten to order his habitual double whiskey. He thought he was losing his grip and corrected his error. Meanwhile Mona was thrilled at Marion’s laughter and asked him why he thought the chair’s price was so funny.

“Money would be great if we didn’t die but since we do it’s an absurd obsession.”

Sunderson was struck by Marion’s answer to the point of hypnosis. He couldn’t seem to move the forkful of fish halfway to his mouth. Mona tapped his arm and nodded toward the door. Carla and Queenie were self-consciously flouncing in wearing twin sheepskin coats. They took off their coats and shook out their short hair that didn’t move all that much and headed toward the table to say hello as if everyone were lifelong friends. Sunderson was startled to see Queenie and puzzled by her native dress and the pounds of turquoise jewelry hanging from her neck.

“Your dad is having you looked for in Tucson.”

“So I heard. I’m going back tomorrow. He wants to borrow money from my trust. He and some friends want to buy the Lions to save Detroit from further shame. I’m not loaning the asshole a single cent.”

Sunderson nodded thinking about girls and their daddies. He was relieved when his whiskey arrived because Carla was causing him discomfort. How could this nasty twerp be so ferally sexual dressed nearly as a boy?

“Lunch tomorrow at noon at the Landmark Inn?” Carla asked.

“Of course, darling.” They left for their table and Sunderson downed his whiskey as if it were water.

“Why is she wearing that absurd Indian costume?” Mona laughed.

“I’ve met a number of American women who think they were Pocahontas or Sacajawea in their past lives. They’re never a miserable squaw shot in a tent by advancing United States Cavalry.” Marion loved this sort of irony. He was a speed eater and signaled the waitress for more fish.

Sunderson was so pleased to reach home and sit at his desk with a stack of books, relatively sober because it was quite a struggle for the single double whiskey to work its way through his belly full of food. Intending to stay up late he made a small pot of coffee and surveyed the glory of his home though in truth the carpet needed to be replaced. After Diane had left he had stopped wiping his feet properly and there was a lot of scuzz on the wall around the stove and sink in the kitchen. Also, all of the windows in the house needed washing. He and a friend had set up a window washing business for fifty cents an hour when they were fourteen and it had been horribly boring work. He reduced the stack of books to three: Deloria’s Playing Indian, D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, and the Bible, King James version. He needed to go through the New Testament to remind himself of the gist of Christianity, which had garnered countless billions of dollars over the years. When on their trip to Italy he had stood with Diane in Saint Peter’s Square, he had been mightily impressed but had also wondered about the top-dollar cost of the project and how the construction workers had wended their weary ways home for a simple bowl of spaghetti. He took out his journal.

I read that in the 1940s we made fifty phone calls a year. Now we make five thousand. Reminds me of the cacophony of blackbirds in spring or wild geese who will honk for hours at a time. Actually I think I heard this on NPR.

All of the lachryma Christi in Italy. Why is Jesus always weeping?

At Marion’s shack I had this feeling of just how ordinary I was. I simply have to nail the Great Leader but the group is so intact I must somehow catch him red-handed. I talked to Roxie briefly and she said the cult father who filed the early complaint and then went off to Flint had now withdrawn the complaint. Possibly paid off.

The bitterness of history. At the Sand Creek Massacre our cavalry shot low into the tents at dawn but the warriors were off hunting so we only killed women and children.

The childish attempt to tie oneself to history. I used to say while drinking in bars that I was born during the Blitzkrieg in World War II but only three old men even knew what I was talking about.

The phone rang and the caller ID said it was Mona. It was unthinkable not to answer.

“I just danced naked to ‘Wild Thing’ and you weren’t even watching. The dance was in thanks for dinner. Is your peeking period over?”

“Yes, it’s over. I intend to become a white Christian gentleman.”

“Aren’t you worrying about losing your manhood?”

“I hope so.”

“A couple of items. My friend Freddy was looking into universities. He’s a senior. Anyway, at Tufts in the Boston area they have a course called ‘Sex, Religion, and Money.’ Maybe you should fly out there and enroll. I could go along and sleep on the sofa.”

“Thank you but no. I’ve proven myself ill-suited to leave Marquette.”

“I forgot to tell you at dinner but I talked on the phone to Carla when she was stoned and this spring the Great Leader aka King David is going to move his followers to Choteau, Montana, or Chadron, Nebraska, or Channing in Michigan. He insists that there’s mystical power in the letters ‘ch.’ Myself, I have doubts.”

“Good night, darling. I’m doing my homework. I have to read the New Testament.” He was thinking that the G.L. would know that the Hebrew “chai” held mystical powers.

It turned out that the New Testament was hard going. Reading Matthew brought on a specific memory of being wedged between his mother and Berenice in the Lutheran church so that he couldn’t escape. He had been a rawboned troublesome boy with difficulties trying to connect religion to his own life in a small town surrounded by forest and Lake Superior. Struggling with Matthew he began to think of Marion’s insistence that it is easily forgotten that character also emerges from the landscape of our early years. If your antennae are educated by following your dog through the woods all day and your major preoccupations are hunting and fishing you don’t lose this molding of your character by merely going to college, falling in love and getting married, or becoming a detective in an area with very little viable crime. No wonder he couldn’t deal with Nogales.

He pushed the Bible aside and fetched the proper volume of a 1920s edition of the Britannica, back when the writing was better and without the cruelty of the Warsaw Pact and atomic power, a fine place to check out the essence of Christianity. His eyelids immediately began to droop but then he was saved by the phone, this time a call from Mona’s mother in Lansing. A representative from University of Michigan would be in Marquette on Monday to talk to talented students and their parents. Would he mind showing up at 2:00 p.m. at Marquette High School and acting as a guardian? He’d be glad to. Unfortunately Mona’s mother was named Gidget, a product of her own mother’s fascination with the 1961 film Gidget Goes Hawaiian. Sunderson felt there was something to be said for biblical names.

He was suddenly fatigued with his feeble attempts at reading, poured a nightcap, and watched the 11:00 p.m. news in which he noted again that car bombs were much smarter than smart bombs. The weather forecast was pleasantly awful with an Alberta clipper, a vast storm coming down from the northwest across Lake Superior to bury them in an early blizzard. Splendid, he thought. Well back in his brain, a naughty place, he thought his noon lunch might lead to a sexual encounter. Their woodpile fusion had been electric indeed. Now the possible encounter was sullied by the fact that he had to be at the high school at two. He brooded about this as he poured a second nightcap to cure the coffee jangles, took the clicker, and segued to a satellite channel playing a non-Oscar winning movie called Ninja Cheerleaders. Marion had said that a central fact of our time was the triumph of process over content. In the movie these nubile but powerful girls would leap high in the air and viciously kick bad guys in the face in an explosion of blood and lost teeth. Despite some marvelous butt shots he dozed, waking in a couple of hours to one of those save the whales movies where a crew in a rubber boat cruised through bumpy waters pestering the marine mammals. Back at camp a geek in a black turtleneck said that male whales of different generations keep in touch with their moms. On the way to bed Sunderson imagined a mother whale introducing her newborn daughter to a forty-year-old brother, “Sarah, this is your brother Leviathan.”