The Great Leader

Chapter 14

He awoke just before daylight feeling rather good and vowing to turn his life around. He had the firm idea that the loop he had been thrown for by Diane leaving him had been waiting for him a long time and he had been too densely wrapped up in his habits to see it coming. There was an urge to list these habits many of which were involved in his wrongheaded perceptions of the nature of life but he was eager to bundle up and walk down to the beach. Ever since childhood he had been addicted to the beauty of severe storms and had been raised in and lived in the right place to appreciate them. He had heard the storm and despite being frightened by Lake Superior gathering in strength when he woke to pee at five a.m. he hurried through a bowl of tasteless oatmeal without milk and reheated coffee without cream in eagerness to see the mounting seas. He hadn’t been to the grocer’s since arriving home because he was an absentminded dipshit, or so he thought. He listened carefully to the weather on the local NPR station disappointed that it wouldn’t be a full gale though by evening the wind would gust to sixty knots, enough to raise the seas high indeed.

He headed out into the teeth of the northwest wind, his eyes tearing and his wool watch cap pulled over his ears, consoling himself that the wind would be at his back on the way home. Well before he finished the seven-block walk he regretted not putting on long underwear. His dick was turning into an ice cube. He tried very hard to remember the dream that had made him feel so good on waking but failed other than to see in his head the middle branch of the Escanaba River south of Gwinn, normally a fearful place because he had once stumbled in his waders and gone under in a swift stretch of the river. Anyone who didn’t think waterboarding was torture had never come close to the ultimate horror of nearly drowning wherein you’re wallowing, sucking water rather than air.

Turning from the beach and the loose sand and snow blasting into his face with the thunder of the waves in his ears he resented the frailty of his age. He felt that the cold was his heritage and now it was betraying him, a bit dramatic for the simple fact that he had forgotten to put on his wool long underwear.

It was nearly pleasant walking back toward home with the north wind helping to push him up the long hill. He stopped at the grocer’s on Fourth, amused at a woman getting out of her car and standing in the full force of the blizzard talking on her cell phone. Nothing will stop the addiction to this instrument he thought. The spring before while searching for a perp on the campus of the local university he figured that of the hundreds of students crisscrossing the campus between classes a full 90 percent were on their cell phones.

His breath shortened a bit when the woman on the phone followed him into the grocer’s. He held the door and she walked right past him jabbering away without recognizing him. “Fred’s been quite a disappointment,” she said.

It was Debbie Anne, his girlfriend when they were both sophomores at Munising High School. Age had not been kind to her and it was her voice rather than her appearance that immediately gave her away. They used to drive into the country and get in the back of his ’47 Dodge to make out. She was sexually precocious and popular with the school athletes. She would help his trembling hands pull on a Trojan-Enz condom and then say, “You can park your car in my garage and throw the key in the grass,” a line from a dirty joke. She would hoot and chirrup when they screwed. He quickly dodged through the aisles foreshortening his shopping for fear she would recognize him. She was still talking while she sorted through the big family packs of pork chops when he escaped.

Back home he hastily took out a notebook before the heat of the house could make him drowsy. He turned to a fresh page avoiding any notes he had made about Melissa and Xavier in Nogales. He wrote:

My job as a janitor trying to sweep up the detritus of society is over. My grand finale will be to get the Great Leader in prison but this might not be possible.

My divorce has blown a three-year-long bomb crater in my life. I have to get over this before it destroys me at which it is presently doing a good job.

I have to control my habits. In the glory days of marriage I’d have two drinks after work, then a glass of wine with Diane at dinner, and then a nightcap while reading in the late evening. Any more than this has come to depress me. I want to feel good like I did when I camped for a week in Aravaipa Canyon. I have to drive over to Shingleton and buy a new pair of snowshoes. It occurs to me that no matter that he’s a lunatic the Great Leader is a pretty smart guy with a lot of resources and if I’m going to catch him with blood on his hands I better go into training.

Lunch with Carla at the Landmark Inn was confusing. She had come into the restaurant with Queenie who was seated across the room with two elegantly dressed men who, Sunderson decided, couldn’t possibly come from the state of Michigan. Carla told him blithely that the two men were friends of Queenie’s from Los Angeles. After Brown University Queenie had gone to film school at UCLA and the men were producers, a mysterious term to Sunderson. The men struck him as a new kind of tooth decay in the mouth of the room. He was impatient to get on with the denouement but couldn’t repress his curiosity about these interlopers.

“So they came to Marquette for the blizzard?”

“Effective people don’t hang around watching the weather channel like locals do. Queenie has the idea that Dwight’s life would make a great movie. These guys are also interested in the idea that if you create a viable new religion you got a real moneymaker on your hands.”

“No shit?” Sunderson’s mind whirled with the idea.

“We stayed up most of the night partying and talking about both the movie and religion-for-profit idea. Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson took in billions.”

“But they were ostensibly Christian,” Sunderson countered.

“It doesn’t matter. We’re starting from scratch like the Mormons. They’re a worldwide powerhouse. We’re also using the recruitment techniques of the Scientologists. They’re a bright bunch.”

Sunderson sat there looking around the familiar room to make sure he hadn’t been transported to an asylum. He had ordered a bowl of chili and very much wanted a beer, which was verboten because of his upcoming appointment at the high school. Carla did look like she had been rode hard and put away wet. Her eyes were bleary as she sipped her second glass of sauvignon blanc and played with her Caesar salad (without anchovies).

“It sounds utterly deranged.”

“That’s because you’re trapped in your tiny ex-detective box. You don’t have a clue what the world has become. The real movers and shakers are out there on the peripheries discovering new forms. Think of Bill Gates thirty years ago, damn it. Dwight’s basic tenet is that semen is the most powerful fluid in the world. It’s been totally overlooked. I mean that the Bible said you’re not supposed to spill it on the ground, you know jerk off, but that’s not what he’s doing.”

“Pardon?” Sunderson felt his neck redden because four ladies at the next table had turned hearing the magic world semen.

“Jizz. Cum, for Christ’s sake. It’s the stuff of life,” Carla said loudly.

“Of course.” Sunderson felt this was the moment of truth. He reached into his sport coat and took out the folded e-mail and raised-skirt photo of Mona he had found on the cult site in Arizona.

“Where did you get this?” Carla asked looking overlong at the photo of Mona. She wadded up the material and dropped it into her Caesar salad, looking pale and staring at the ceiling.

“I have twenty copies. Perhaps we should talk in private.” He had, in fact, forgotten to make copies. He reached for the wadded paper and dabbed the salad dressing off with his napkin, glancing at Carla’s face which had hardened and become hateful.

“Fuck you!” she screamed with alarming volume. She grabbed for her coat and fled toward the door. He stood, deciding not to look around for reactions, dropped two twenties on the table, and followed. Outside the wind had subsided but thick snow was falling straight down and there was a half foot of fresh snow on the recently plowed parking lot. He tracked her easily to Queenie’s Range Rover, which she had started. He wiped away fluffy snow and got in the passenger side hoping the heater was fast because he had left his coat in the restaurant. She was curled up fetally on the driver’s seat sniffling with her back turned to him and her skirt pulled up the undersides of her thighs. Here we go again, he thought coldly, staring at the marvelous rump he had banged away at against the woodpile.

“What are you going to do?” she asked in a hushed voice.

“I don’t know. Maybe put you away for a few years. Maybe not. Mona’s not excited about testifying.”

“What’s that mean?” She curled up tighter, more fully exposing her butt in pale blue panties.

“For the time being it means it’s your duty to stay in close touch with me via cell and e-mail. Any dereliction of duty on your part and I meet with my friend the prosecutor. You are my slave informant. Agreed?”

“Yes. Get a card out of my wallet.”

When he leaned to retrieve the wallet from her purse he got a better view of her bottom, which all in all was the best in his experience. His feelings were mixed but he was becoming tumescent. His general disgust for her didn’t seem to include his dick, which was an independent compass.

“Marion said you could easily start a religion with the world’s shortest man or the world’s tallest woman. She’s seven foot eight and Chinese.”

“Fuck Marion,” she squawked. “You can play with my ass if you want.”

“I’ll pass for now.”

He was nearly to the high school, shivering and feeling virtuous. His mind, such as it was, had been diverted. He didn’t want to go back into the restaurant and face the stares which, though after the fact, were a consideration.

Mona and the gentleman were already in a small office at a desk when a secretary showed him in.

“Hey Daddy. This is Mr. Schmidt.”

“Your daughter is top-notch!” Mr. Schmidt barked. “I’m sure we can make things easy for you financially.”

“She always was smart as a whip and cute as a button,” Sunderson said stupidly.

“I find her interest in both musicology and botany fascinating. What universities is she looking at?” Mona was sitting too close to Schmidt, which seemed to be making him uncomfortable in front of her putative father.

“I’ve checked out Harvard, Tufts, and Macalester on the Web. Also the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. The trouble is that a wadded Kleenex can look like a white rose and a white rose can look like a wadded Kleenex,” Mona said thoughtfully.

“Really?” Schmidt raised his eyebrows.

Sunderson was wondering about this tangent, feeling crummy possibly because he was crummy. The work at hand was to de-crummy himself.

“Make me an offer I can’t refuse. Ann Arbor is attractive because of all the music in the area. I’d like to meet my heroine Aretha Franklin in person. Music soothes the savage beast inside me.”

“Really?” Schmidt said again.

Afterward Mona took the rest of the afternoon off from school and they drove to the hotel so she could run in and pick up his coat and then they went to the New York Delicatessen down the street so he could order chicken soup and a massive corned beef sandwich. “Don’t trim the fat please.” Real life wasn’t exactly panning out and a very long nap was always a primary solution. He toted up the figure and realized that he had only been retired for thirty-three days.

“My parents are so worthless you wonder why they bothered having me,” Mona said plaintively, then dug into her sandwich with a grin.

“People don’t think far ahead.”

“Diane called me this morning. I’m sure you know they’re moving back up here from Florida because her husband wants to be treated by doctors he can trust.”

“I heard that. I’m not sure I can bear to see her.”

“Of course you can. She’s going to be my surrogate mother. I could use one.”

“Me too,” Sunderson laughed. He was tired of swimming in a cold swamp of ideologies hopelessly connected to money. He had never thought of Mona as a semidaughter like Diane did. When Mona’s mother was absent Diane had been extremely attentive to her, becoming a combination big sister and parent in absentia.

“I never made you your homemade birthday pizza. I’ll do it tonight.”

“Make it later,” he said, already drowsy from the soup and massive sandwich. Marion made his own corned beef in order to get the Jewish flavor he remembered from going to college in Chicago.

“I feel rejected that you don’t peek at me anymore.”

“You’ll have to get used to it. How can I get after King David for his penchant for underage girls if I’m peeking at you?”

“The Great Leader goes real young to catch them at the right formative time with his semen, the mightiest fluid in the world. That’s what Carla told me. I’m not really that young. I easily pass for eighteen.”

“That’s what I heard.” Sunderson ignored her comments wondering where the Great Leader got his semen theories.

Sunderson had a four-hour nap waking at eight, made fresh coffee, and smelled his stack of books. Why smell books? A habit. He waved from his kitchen window to Mona’s kitchen window where she and Marion were rolling dough and getting ready to assemble the pizzas. He was on page 37 of Deloria’s Playing Indian, feeling the usual dread. To Sunderson the Indians were the monstrous skeleton in the American closet. He always imagined stretching a white sheet across the United States and historically seeing all of the hundreds of locations where the Indian blood seeped through. At Michigan State he had felt nauseous when a professor had explained the Sand Creek Massacre. As the Russians said, consciousness can be a disease.

He impulsively called Carla and was surprised that she was in Los Angeles and sounding stoned.

“We left by private jet right after our lovely lunch. You didn’t eat your chili. We picked up Dwight and tomorrow we’re heading for Maui to discuss the movie and the future of our religion. Satisfied?”

“Not quite. I need to know how much he’s bilked out of his followers so far.”

“Don’t say bilked. They’ve freely given contributions. About four million but he spends money fast. I can’t wait to hit the beach.”

Chapter 15

At midnight he was sitting in his dark upstairs bedroom looking out at the snow falling softly and straight down under the streetlight, thinking of winter as a vast dormant god of sorts. He had been in bed a mere fifteen minutes or so when he began to weep. The weeping was unacceptable so he had gotten out of bed and gone downstairs to pour the nightcap he had forgotten which now sat on the windowsill reflecting the streetlight in an odd way as if the light were drowning in amber whiskey. He occasionally had wondered if his pillow was haunted though he readily admitted that the notion was goofy. It was his childhood pillow and Diane had teased him about how ratty and lumpy it was even in a fresh pillowcase. He suspected that he was weeping because his brain was melting into a kind of clarity that unnerved him. Since the divorce he had become quite lucid right down to the burying of his dog Walter which had felt like burying his marriage.

The evening had gone well until 10:30 when they finished Mona’s gorgeous pizzas and she had left with friends who picked her up for a dance.

He and Marion had been a bit melancholy after Mona’s departure as if a certain life force had left. Sunderson told him about the encounter with Carla and the preposterous ideology of semen. Marion guffawed and said that no religion could explain itself clearly. The need to feel ecstasy, the capacity to get out of ourselves was so great a need that we would buy the most ornately simpleminded beliefs. He said that Sunderson wouldn’t take in the idea until he gave up the concept of evidence that so pervaded his detective profession.

“It’s a hard habit to break,” Sunderson had said. “If only you could track gods in the snow. The Greeks and Romans tended to identify exact locations where the gods were thought to live.”

“Before I quit drinking, saloons were the home of my gods. They were the only place I felt good. Once on a Saturday in Iron Mountain I spent fourteen hours in a bar playing euchre and watching football. At closing time the bar owner told me that I had gone through two fifths of whiskey. That seemed too much even though I was a pretty big boy back then, which was in my midtwenties. I was a road man for a snowmobile company and driving, say, from Superior, Wisconsin, to Escanaba I’d stop at a dozen roadhouses as if they were chapels you’d stop at on a pilgrimage way back when.”

“Some of you skins would drink until just short of death and sometimes you made it all the way. Once on the way back from the Soo I got a call on my radio that a frozen Indian had been found near Rudyard. There was no evidence of foul play but the autopsy revealed blood alcohol of.44 which was a record. Dead Indians were always the toughest part of my job, probably a tinge of guilt like investigating a lynching down south.”

“There are many forms of Emmett Till. And maybe you folks would call Wounded Knee a still-open case a hundred and twenty years later.”

“Murder is never a closed case.”

When Marion left and he hurriedly cleaned up in the kitchen he remembered how much his dog had loved pizza crusts. This memory probably helped precipitate the weeping upstairs. Back at the window with his nightcap he watched Mona arrive home from the dance. If only she was ten years older but then she wasn’t. How fatuous. The fatality of time struck him suitably dumb. He had heard on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac on NPR how the famed German writer Goethe had fallen into a depression when at age seventy-three an eighteen-year-old girl had refused to marry him. There was evidence here that great writers could be the same variety of dickheads as ex-detectives. He slipped into a pleasant thought of a canyon near Aravaipa Creek he hadn’t had time to walk to the end of, only discovering it the last day. He had made his way fearfully down the sides where he had seen cattails at the bottom through his binoculars. There was a small spring with five species of birds he didn’t recognize flitting around. When he looked west where the canyon began in the mountains a few miles distant it was so enticing. Maybe he would go back someday and walk it out. Eureka, he thought, picking up his nightcap from the windowsill. He had never seen Au Sable Falls near Grand Marais in the winter. He would walk for a week. It had worked once, why not again? He had made real progress today on his case of the Great Leader what with getting Carla as a Judas spy. These pleasant thoughts, however temporary, put him into a tearless sleep.

He left at daylight, about 7:30, in a mild sweat from having uprooted so much junk in the rear of the garage to find his Bushwacker cross-country skis, relatively short and wide, to get through the trees in the woods. He only found one ski pole, which would be awkward but then the skis were only a substitute for conditions not suitable for snowshoes. While rummaging around and making a lot of noise he turned to see Mona watching from the open garage door. She was bundled up and when they embraced he smelled the incendiary odor, for him, of lilac from her hair damp from the shower. He was disappointed when his nuts clutched because he wanted his thoughts to be pure as the plenitude of fluffy snow not the product of the tub of guts that is the human body.

“Don’t go so far that you have trouble getting back,” she said, heading off for school at a walking pace that far exceeded his own. Diane’s comfortable pace had also been faster than his own. He recalled one of those PBS nature films that showed a huge shaggy-maned male lion pacing around slowly, almost lazily, protecting the territory while the females stalked and raced through the veldt snagging all of the food. When mating time came he couldn’t begin to catch them but had to wait for them to be ready and willing. Sunderson had always known that he wasn’t built for speed but a plodding steadiness. He was a tugboat not a Yankee Clipper.

On the way east on Route 28 along Lake Superior he turned off NPR in order to avoid the world’s plentiful bad news, and turned away from the state police building near the prison in order to enjoy the huge dark green Lake Superior where the swells from the storm were subsiding. Passing through Munising he had a sudden poignant memory of his mother’s best friend, their neighbor Mrs. Amarone, who had died in her fifties from breast cancer. She had taught his mother how to make a spaghetti sauce out of canned tomatoes and the local Italian sausage called cudighi. They had it every Saturday night and it was the family’s favorite meal. He would make the same sauce for camping trips with Diane, drenching a container of cooked pasta with olive oil so it wouldn’t stick. He and Diane would get out of work on a Friday summer afternoon, head out, and he would heat up the dish in a skillet over the campfire in the twilight. One summer they had camped a half dozen times near a small uninhabited lake, really a pond, near the west edge of the Kingston Plains between Melstrand and Grand Marais. The area wasn’t especially striking but they had counted at least a hundred sandhill cranes in the open field and if you were careful you could approach the young ones closely. On a warm evening they had listened to the raucous crane chorus and bathed nude in the pond. Diane had said, “We are naked apes,” and laughed. They made love without drying off, and drank a bottle of Barolo with dinner. She had always said the sauce with the pasta turned her on having grown up in a WASP family where the condiments tended to be limited to salt and pepper. They had made love again at first light when the cranes wakened them with their primitive yawp.

He pulled into the Township Park in Grand Marais and set off on his new snowshoes west down the shores of Lake Superior on the fairly hard-packed snow, stopping to stare at the latticed ice on the rocks at the water’s edge and the thirty-story precipitously high dunes in their light caramel color. He felt strangely blessed because the air was still and the mist was lifting off the lake, revealing blue water which had been greenish in Marquette and which he immediately gave up trying to figure out. He reached the mouth of the creek in a little more than an hour and headed up the trail along the creek floundering in the deep soft snow. Now the world was all blackish trees and white snow and it was much cooler in the shade of the deep gulley. He was sweating hard when he reached the waterfall and was amazed at the delight the thunderous falling water brought to his mind. He had always been aware how brutish his aesthetic sense was compared to his wife’s but at times rose to the occasion. He had admitted to her that when she played a certain Villa-Lobos composition on the stereo his skin invariably prickled.

He sat on a stump for a half hour watching the water until his sweat dried and he was chilled wondering idly how the Ojibway, or Anishinabe as they called themselves, the first citizens here, the aboriginals, the true natives, regarded the falls and decided it had to be a sacred place to them, an idea fairly alien to our own culture. He was startled when he arose from the stump to see that a group of a dozen or so northern ravens had gathered soundlessly high in the trees behind him. One of them squawked and he squawked back. The squawking back and forth continued on his way back down the creek gulley to the lake. His dad had taught him early on to talk to ravens because they enjoyed it and would keep him company on walks. Perhaps these avian creatures besides being themselves contained the ghost of his ancient predecessors. He shivered at the idea on his way back partly because the notion was untypical and partly because he had neglected to eat breakfast in Shingleton. Marion had insisted that religion tends to emerge from the landscape and given the austere nature of Anishinabe beliefs this appeared as a sound concept. Christianity could spruce up its message by including bears, ravens, and other animals, or so he thought, but then the desert country out of which Christianity emerged was without these glorious creatures. Maybe he should look up what religions came out of jungles.

By the time he reached his car his limbs were leaden and his breath short and gasping. This aging thing was a real pain in the ass, he thought, resolving to continue hiking every day of the week. Why not? He could read afternoons and evenings within the deep puzzlement of retirement. He stopped at the Dunes Saloon for a burger and a cup of chili and talked to a big man named Mike who once owned the bar and whom Sunderson had to bust twice for throwing men out through the window of the bar and also the hardware store. The judge liked Mike and the sentence had been a course in “anger management,” which Mike had said “pissed me off.” They talked about their mutual passion for brook trout fishing and grouse hunting.

“I quit grouse hunting when my dog died,” Sunderson said.

“What the hell do you do in September when trout season ends?”

A good question Sunderson thought. His dog would trot through the woods well ahead and bark when it flushed and treed a grouse. He’d make the easy shot out of the tree, the bird would fall and the dog prance with joy. Diane, who was not much taken by wild game, loved roasted wild grouse. This wasn’t close to the classic version of grouse hunting but a successful peasant version of man and dog teaming up to get dinner.

The sun beat in the car windshield and he stopped at the rest stop on Route 28 near the Driggs River, the upper reaches of which were good brook trout fishing. Down the highway there was a small road leading into a five-mile-long pond on the Seney Wildlife Preserve, a good destination for the following day. He put his seat back and was immediately asleep for an hour, finally awakening to a rapping on the window. There was the state police cruiser parked next to his own car and Corporal Berks was staring in the window.

“Just making sure you’re alive, sir.”

“I think I am. I took a long hike. How are you Berks?”

“Fine. We miss you at the Post. The new guy’s from Mount Pleasant and doesn’t catch on to the U.P. How are you doing?”

“Just fucking, dancing, and fighting. Tell the new guy to give me a call if he gets especially puzzled.”

Berks drove off and Sunderson was amused by having said “fucking, dancing, fighting.” It was one of the things Diane liked least about the U.P., the male braggadocio she called “macho.” Marion, a frequent visitor to Mexico, corrected her on this saying macho meant a man who was gratuitously vicious. U.P. men were often intelligent louts, strutting and growling like their logging and mining grandfathers. It wasn’t really about manliness, a word not much in use until the recent decade and one that in former times would have been embarrassing. He couldn’t recall men ever talking about manhood when he was growing up. It was a more recent, absurd development.

Back home Sunderson was pleased by a note from Marion saying that he had put about twenty pounds of venison from the doe in the fridge, then Mona burst in the porch door glowing with excitement.

“Carla tried to call you from Hawaii. Where’s your cell?”

“I have no idea.” He fixed himself a whiskey.

“You’re not going to fucking believe this. It looks like King David might do ninety days in jail. You know those two fancy L.A. guys that were with Queenie you told me about? Well in this high-class lounge in the hotel in Maui, Dwight, I mean King David, wiped up the floor with them. I mean Carla said he beat the shit out of them. He exploded because they were trying to defile his religion. Carla said he went totally apeshit and trashed the place after he beat them to a pulp.”

“Will wonders never cease?” Sunderson smiled. He had observed when he met Dwight that he was in fine shape and in fact put his followers through an hour of rigorous exercise a day plus their manual work load. This was part of the warrior nonsense, the faux Indian part of the cult.

“I guess you’re going to have to take a break,” Mona said.

Chapter 16

And that’s what he did. He planned on walking in the mornings and reading a book a day in the afternoons and evenings. Of course it didn’t work out that way with human willpower more than occasionally a weak item. He was making a New Year’s resolution a few weeks short of the actual new year and there was a traditional problem with retirees in the Great North that they tend to come close to hibernation in the deep winter months of December, January, and February. A week after Mona had made her startling announcement about King David Sunderson was sitting at his desk sleepily reading about the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in the 1790s when Carla called.

“Dwight got ninety days,” she sobbed.

“I’m not surprised.”

“What the fuck do you know about Hawaii?” Her voice was shrill with anger.

“Everywhere public mayhem is punished.” It was a relief to get away from the historical text wherein farmers dressed up like redskins to protest a tax on their homemade whiskey. So what, he thought.

“Well, Queenie left for L.A. to nurse her friends leaving me high and dry with no money. I visit Dwight in the mornings and then I waitress.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I don’t know. I needed to talk to someone. Queenie’s not answering my calls and you and I have a relationship of some sort.”

“I suppose so.” He wondered what it was though every time he thought of their woodpile coupling he was hopelessly stimulated.

“I thought I should tell you that the Chadron land sale went through. Actually it’s a hundred and twenty acres north of Crawford, which is near Chadron and Fort Robinson where Dwight’s hero Crazy Horse was murdered.”

“How convenient.”

“Fuck you.”

After she hung up he walked down to the New York Deli and had a corned beef and sauerkraut sandwich on rye (with hot mustard), then stopped at Snowbound Books and bought a new text on the life of Crazy Horse by an Englishman and also, at the suggestion of the proprietor, a book of essays by the poet Gary Snyder called The Practice of the Wild. Poetry was very low on his list of interests but he liked the title and felt that he needed a break from history which after all tended to be a record of national bad habits.

On the walk home he was further irked by a thaw that made the snow soft and slushy. He had felt the warmer air from the south through the window in the middle of the night and left for Big Bay well before dawn. He had hoped to reach one of his brook trout spots back on the Yellow Dog Plains but the melting snow clung to his snowshoes and the going was hard. He returned to his vehicle and tried the Bushwhacker skis but had forgotten to buy a pole to replace the one that was missing. He got stuck in a melting drift and fell over sideways yelling “Goddamnit” to the natural world.

His habitual postlunch nap failed due to a recurrent problem with acid reflux and he didn’t need to taste the sandwich again. He had found some old vinyl records of Diane’s and thought that listening to Berlioz’s Requiem might elevate him but the old record player wasn’t quite up to speed and besides the music only elevated his melancholy over Diane. He decided on a midafternoon jolt of whiskey though he knew it was a mistake. He had seen the unpleasant television ad warning seniors about overdrinking. In the ad an old man had a beer while fishing in his rowboat but then gradually moved up to a six-pack, not a threatening amount to Sunderson. He lay down on the sofa with the obnoxious afternoon sun pouring down on him through the living room window, half dozing and praying to a god unknown for a December blizzard. His thoughts were errant. To wit, if there are ninety billion galaxies how many religions are in the universe? Could he make a beef stew like Diane did without fresh sage? Soon after their divorce he had neglected the heating element in her small greenhouse next to the garage and the herbs had all frozen. Mona had retrieved a science blog for him a few days earlier that claimed religion had a biological inception similar to our aesthetic perceptions. Even other mammals like cows and killer whales enjoyed Mozart. When they were in Florence and Diane had insisted on a three-hour walk through the Uffizi he had wondered about going that long without cigarettes but then had had goose bumps a half dozen times and had quite forgotten the existence of cigarettes. He came away convinced that art books were a hoax compared to the reverence of standing before the actual painting, a reverence ordinarily only elicited by the natural world. Was this religion? Probably.

Something like that since he had read the piece hastily. Unfortunately he slept for a few minutes and reclaimed the past by dreaming of Diane screaming close to his face, “I can’t live any longer with a man who sees the world through shit-stained glasses.” This happened the day before she left. She never swore so it truly got his attention, albeit tardily.

He was sweating and not from the sun through the window, which had disappeared. He pretended that the briefest of sobs was a hiccup and poured a very large whiskey, swallowing it in a couple of gulps. As an investigator he didn’t generally believe in suppressed memory but had not previously admitted this scream to himself.

He threw on a jacket and bolted the house not wanting to make his way through the bottle of whiskey. He was wearing street shoes which were wet within a few blocks and he stumbled on a curb and nearly fell when the power of the big drink hit full force then he walked more slowly. He made it out to the city park, Presque Isle, for a gorgeous sunset which somewhat subdued his panic but not completely. He was brooding over a case that had preceded their separation and over which Diane had become very angry. In a small town far to the west three upstanding young men had seemingly kept a girl just over eighteen hostage in their deer cabin for three days. They had stowed her clothes outside and she was nude and hysterical when a visiting hunter came to the cabin. The perpetrators were out hunting and the girl had refused to run for it without her clothes. She was from a “trailer trash” family and when the local prosecutor talked to her father he said that she had always been “haywire.” It was a dicey case indeed and when he had described it to Diane she demanded a prosecution full-speed ahead. Sunderson was less sure. When he talked to the perps who were all married with young children they were remorseful and used the excuse that they had all been drinking too much, an excuse all too often honored by some judges with a “boys will be boys” attitude. The prosecutor and Sunderson had agonized over the matter and decided against going on with the case, which would permanently injure the young men with felony convictions. The girl was trying to withdraw the charges under the pressure of her parents. They could have gone ahead anyway with the initial charges but the prosecutor felt too vulnerable in the community and chickened out. Diane was enraged when Sunderson had stupidly said, “She’ll get over it,” then went on to explain he couldn’t continue without the prosecutor which was less than true. Oddly, in a follow-up inquiry the young woman seemed to be doing well having moved off to Duluth with a friend.

He was utterly fatigued and wobbly when he completed the nearly two-hour walk home, much longer than necessary because he had made a wrong turn and had walked toward a small rented bungalow they had lived in during their happier times early in their marriage. He could barely acknowledge his mistake but then blamed it on his age rather than on a questionable mood.

When he reached the house there was an unfamiliar car parked in front and the kitchen light was on in the late afternoon winter darkness. He walked across the yard then peeked around a maple tree and could see Diane and Mona chatting at the kitchen table. He stood there not wanting to go in his house and face the music but then realized there was no music to face. He slicked back his hair and entered through the porch door with a thoroughly fake smile. Get a grip on yourself, he thought.

“My goodness but you look good. Mona said you’ve become a fitness buff.” Diane was grinning with no backspin.

“Retirement is more complicated than I thought it would be so I’ve been walking a few hours a day.” He wished the open whiskey bottle wasn’t on the table. To his surprise Diane poured herself a shot.

“I was wondering if you could drive Mona to Ann Arbor and then over to Kalamazoo to look into colleges? My husband is too ill for me to leave.”

“Of course. I’d be glad to.” This was a lie. He had a peculiar fear of heavy traffic.

They left to go out for dinner without inviting him. He wouldn’t have gone but was still slightly miffed in the manner of a girl who didn’t get invited to the prom. Before they left Diane said that she and her husband wanted he and Mona to come for Christmas. He accepted when he noted Mona’s eagerness though in truth he’d rather stay home and suck a dozen raw eggs. He sighed wanting a whiskey but decided to delay it for after he had done a little reading and cooked supper. Diane, always prim and proper, looked ten years younger than her age of sixty-five. Marion had observed that in the past decade women were staying younger much better than men. He wanted to talk to Marion but he was off in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife for a meeting on Indian affairs after which they were traveling to Guadalajara in Mexico for Christmas vacation. He opened D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature but something not clearly definable was nagging at him. He called Carla.

“What are you wearing?” he asked impulsively.

“A blue cotton skirt for work. White cotton short-sleeved blouse. It’s warm here. Robin’s egg blue bikini panties. You want to try some phone sex?”

“Yes and no but not really.”

“I want your thick fat cock in my mouth,” she laughed.

“Never mind, please. We’ve tried very hard and Mona’s a computer whiz but we can find little information on King David’s past except some French stuff, and almost nothing on his childhood.”

“You’re out of luck. I’ve known him the longest, three years to be exact, and he’s said very little except he was brought up in a bunch of foster families in California. He went to college a couple of years somewhere in Oregon to study acting and anthropology. He knows a lot about Indians. That’s about all I know. He’s certainly unfaithful to his lovers but you get used to it. I worry that he’s burning himself out with Viagra and Cialis. I know he has prostate problems. No wonder.”

“Why does he go for the young stuff?”

“Are you taping this?”

“No. That would be illegal.” He was amused by this.

“The young girl thing is theological. He sees himself as a god with a small g. It’s important a girl’s first sexual contact be with him if she is to live a powerful life. They are actually not of illegal age in most countries.”

“I see,” he said, but he didn’t. He knew all of this in bits and pieces but it certainly didn’t make a cogent whole.

“He thinks modern times suck and for health we must return to old-timey pagan life. We do a lot of drum dancing and free sex. He says that he is many persons.”

“Do you believe this?” He was trying to ignore the mental image of Carla’s butt glistening under the porch light near the woodpile.

“Some days I do and some days I don’t. I’m mostly in love with him which is hard work.”

When he hung up Sunderson was mostly amazed at his own sloppiness. In his long experience his habit was to locate the problem criminals, “the person of interest,” as they are currently referred to, and then bear down hard. While unwrapping a piece of thawed venison and pouring a small drink it occurred to him that when he got interested in this case he was nearly retired and he likely subconsciously wanted to prolong it to give himself something intriguing to do. How could cult members willingly sacrifice their underage daughters? How could Abraham be willing to sacrifice his son Isaac? How did religion derange the human mind? Would the Shiites and Sunnis ever stop killing each other? Why did the Catholic Church want to ignore pederasty?

He fried some spuds and then his slab of venison medium rare, still troubled that King David hadn’t committed a provable crime though he knew from cultural history that some of the grandest crimes aren’t technically against the law. They were simply the way people in power behaved.

The venison and fried potatoes with an amber glass of whiskey would have been even better if it weren’t for his errant thinking. The year before his computer crime colleague had told him that there were four million child porn sites. This was hard to believe but there was no reason for the man to lie. About a week later as a favor to Marion he had appeared at a middle school “career carnival” and talked to an assembly about jobs in law enforcement. He had been amazed at how widely varied the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders were. Some looked like mature high school students but many were just kids. In the question and answer period a diminutive girl with thick glasses and braces had squeaked, “I don’t think you guys should shoot people. It’s not Christian.”

“We don’t unless they’re trying to shoot us,” he had answered. “In forty years of law enforcement I’ve never shot anyone.” He did not mention a drunk man on his front porch aiming a shotgun at him. He was betting that the shotgun wasn’t loaded when the man’s very large wife jumped him from behind crushing him to the porch floor. Afterward Sunderson discovered the shotgun was loaded.

Now at the table forking in the last of the nearly bloody venison he recalled talking to the little girl after the assembly was over. She said she was twelve and read a lot of mysteries because she wanted to be a detective when she grew up. The obvious point was that a girl that age was King David’s favorite prey and an adult male who tampered with such a girl should be permanently imprisoned as hopeless scum. There was a fairly specific theory and practice of law enforcement that gave an appearance of sane equilibrium until you put a particular human face in place and then your stomach would begin churning.

He fell asleep a full two hours with his head on his arms on the table and then woke up and reheated some brackish coffee. He began reading D. H. Lawrence quoting Crèvecœur, “I must tell you that there is something in the proximity of the woods which is very singular.” And then hunters, “The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable; a hunter wants no neighbors, he rather hates them, because he dreads the competition… Eating of wild meat, whatever you may think, tends to alter their tempers…”

With a bellyful of venison Sunderson was unsure of the complete truth of what he read though it was more true than not true. He went on to read about Fenimore Cooper and Lawrence’s strange speculations on Native Americans which were totally unpleasant and nearly deranged. Not wanting to be kept awake by this lunatic Englishman he pushed the book aside and washed the dishes after which he turned on the television for the eleven o’clock news, pleased to see the forecast for a foot of fresh snow. When the news segued to Afghan car bombs he flipped through satellite channels until he arrived at Co-ed Confidential. The young ladies didn’t look like coeds but certainly had nifty bodies. He was embarrassed when Mona walked in the unlocked front door and caught him at his movie. She looked distraught.

“So what’s wrong?” he asked.

“I don’t think Diane’s going to want you back when her husband dies.”

“It never occurred to me she would.”

“She doesn’t want to take care of another man. She wants to travel a lot.”

“She always did. I was the slowpoke.”

“It’s just that I was hoping you two would get back together. With Mom being such a ditz you were nearly my real parents.” Mona had tears in her eyes and slumped down on the sofa beside him suddenly grinning at the television. “Why watch these piggies when you can see me through the window?”

“No comment.”

“We’re in luck. I looked it up and they’re playing Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! in ten minutes!”

She was sitting too close to him on the sofa but he decided to ignore it. He had a couple of nightcaps but each time he sat back down she drew closer again. She boldly lit a joint and offered him a hit which he declined. He also ignored the illegality of the joint though he was slightly troubled when he glanced over and saw a condom in the purse from which she drew the joint. The movie Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was magnificently loathsome and trashy with three bathing-suit models punishing men for their lechery far out in the desert. They ran over men with cars or bashed them in the head with big rocks, an unpleasant reminder of his Arizona misadventure. Mona fooled with the clicker and on an adjoining channel was The Diary of Anne Frank. That’s entertainment, he thought. He fell asleep and awoke at 4:00 a.m. covered with an afghan. Mona had kindly turned off the television. The star of the Pussycat movie had been an actress named Tura Satana, likely not her real name.

The morning’s mail brought a postcard from Albuquerque and a letter from Roberta which he pushed aside with consternation. He could count on one hand the letters received from Roberta. One about ten years before had been so abrasive it took him days to recover, the key sentence being, “Bobby only found true happiness in his life when he discovered heroin.” He had a bowl of nasty raisin bran to steady himself before opening the letter.

Dear Big Brother,

I must say that I thought you looked totally awful when we saw each other but Berenice said you were in much better shape than you had been the previous week before you went camping. The question is why an old man should unnecessarily put himself in harm’s way and get himself nearly stoned to death? Who do you think you are? You should spend a lot of time pondering this question. You should spend all of your time fishing and camping, your childhood passions, when you’re not reading. I remember a couple times when you took us camping a few miles south of town. Once you went off fishing and I stayed in the tent reading Nancy Drew. I think I was eight and you were fourteen. Meanwhile Bobby roasted a whole bag of marshmallows and puked and we had to drag him down to a creek and wash off the sticky marshmallow stuff that was even in his hair. Bobby and me were frightened that night when you crawled out of the tent saying that you heard a bear trying to get our food. You came back into the tent saying you had driven the bear away with a burning torch. I had peeked out and saw that it was a small raccoon but didn’t say anything because a bear made a better story. How I admired you back then. You were such a kind brother to Bobby.

Now is a different matter. I have witnessed divorces in long-term marriages and one of the partners always falls in a hole like a well pit and it takes them about three years to crawl out, if ever. Diane didn’t make her profession her whole life like you did. Your moderate alcoholism makes you emotionally inelastic and you can’t seem to crawl out of the hole of your inevitable divorce. It makes me mournful to think you should have been a history teacher. You are a kind man not a tough guy. I would like to retire early, come back, and take care of you but I couldn’t bear to live in the area of my childhood.

Love, Roberta

Of course the letter made him angry. He dressed warmly in near tears and set off for a walk in the falling snow and was gone for four hours. By the time he reached Presque Isle in about forty-five minutes the anger had passed because he was able to admit to himself that she was right on every count. The idle idea of throwing himself off a cliff into Lake Superior amused rather than alarmed him. He had work to do.

Two days later they were off for Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor. Diane and Mona had organized a precise itinerary including hotels and appointments. Diane had irritated Sunderson by renting them a nice Hertz car for the trip feeling that his twelve-year-old Blazer with a hundred and seventy thousand miles on the odometer was vulnerable. She had rented the car without telling him saying that it was a “treat.” As a civil servant from a relatively poor family he had chosen the path of ignoring their finances and when Diane had tried to involve his interest in her inherited money he had refused to cooperate. Any amount over a thousand dollars set off a red light in his noggin and that was what the rental car would cost for the four-day trip. Sunderson felt like one of the limo drivers he used to talk to at the Detroit airport early in his career when he was on surveillance for a mob hit man supposedly coming in from New York City. The drivers were there waiting for “bigwigs,” a name referring back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when a man’s importance could be determined by the amplitude of his wig.

They left an hour before dawn with Mona not excited about colleges but about a computer discovery: to wit, she had started over from ground zero in the investigative process. Instead of using the Peace Corps dead mother’s name, Atkins, she had tried the French father’s name, Peyraud, while surveying Carla’s clue of Dwight attending an Oregon college twenty-five years before. Bingo. Dwight had attended Reed College for two years in 1983 and 1984. Mona then managed to communicate with a retired anthropology professor who recalled Dwight with amusement and distaste. Dwight had been arrogant and overbearing though a brilliant student. He had had a Mohawk haircut, a thin strip of hair down the center of his skull, wore martial arts clothing, and had a cadre of male and female students following him around. Mona’s ingenuity depressed Sunderson. He and Roxie at the cop shop had clearly begun with the wrong name, the wrong presumptions. The sixteen-year-old neighbor girl was a better detective.

Mona typed on her laptop and listened to CDs of John Cage (which drove him batty), Pink Floyd, and Los Lobos, the latter with traces of rhythm that made him stupidly sentimental about his time on the border. His mistake in not searching Dwight’s father’s name kept reminding him of the term “unforced errors” in tennis. He had Mona reread the professor’s e-mail pondering the last sentence about Dwight’s disappearance during a summer visit to the Haida Indians on the Queen Charlotte Islands off British Columbia for a research paper. Sunderson recalled a few things about the Haida from talking to Marion. They believed that wolves and killer whales were the same creatures, taking up separate forms on land and water. Sunderson felt he should research native shape-changing since that seemed to be a continuing motif.

Five hours into the trip at a gas station near Cadillac he abruptly demanded that Mona change from her short skirt to slacks. An hour before she had curled up and dozed and he could see her blue undies and a bit of pubic furze and had come up on a semi too fast. What was this thing about blue panties? Diane had always worn white.

Mona returned from the service station laughing and waving the new Rolling Stone at him. She read a quote from the cover girl, an antic starlet named Megan Fox: “Men are scared of powerful, confident vaginas.” What in God’s name could this mean, Sunderson wondered. Had the starlet’s parents read this and been embarrassed for their daughter? He was unsure of parental emotions but then here was Mona, nearly a stepdaughter, who of course was capable of saying something this preposterous.

“Imagine having a vagina as powerful as Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime,” Mona laughed. “You could chew up unsuspecting men.”

The city of Kalamazoo, their first stop, didn’t last long. He said the college looked homely but she said that he was looking at western Michigan. They drove to the top of a hill to Kalamazoo College but then Mona said, “Too small,” and demanded that they proceed to Ann Arbor.

“But you have an appointment in the morning.”

“I’ll e-mail them.” She suitably placed her laptop on her lap. “I won’t be able to meet with you tomorrow because my father has died. How’s that?”

“Wonderful dear.”

They proceeded to Ann Arbor arriving in the confusing dark at the Campus Inn with Mona playing expert navigator with MapQuest on her computer screen. He was utterly fatigued from ten hours of driving so they had a dismal room-service dinner including a bottle of white wine in his quarters of their connecting rooms. He had a whiskey from the pint in his suitcase and glanced only once through the connecting door as she changed into jeans to take a walk. He felt a jolt in his nuts, then stared down at his half-eaten club sandwich. Will this pointless lust never end he thought?

Three hours later at midnight she still hadn’t returned and he was near tears of frustration. She hadn’t responded to his calls on her cell but then he discovered she had left it behind on the coffee table in her room. He must have paced a solid mile unaware that he was merely another father waiting up for a wayward daughter. His black mood had begun right after Mona left when Diane had called to say that his old friend Otto had died of a heart attack. He had difficulty accepting this as fact. He and Otto had fished for brook trout together a half dozen times a summer ever since they were ten years old in Munising. Otto owned a small construction company that specialized in building summer cabins for downstaters and the recent economic downturn had nearly bankrupted him. Otto could drink a case of beer in a long evening and was addicted to sausage in all its various forms. In a day of fishing he would eat a whole package of raw hot dogs. He would use a pound of ham in a sandwich and was locally famous for his expertise at roasting whole pigs and would devour the bronzed skin in portions of a square foot. Diane and her friends would euphemistically refer to Otto’s problem as an “eating disorder.”

The news of Otto had brought with it a momentary fear of death which Sunderson dismissed in favor of worrying about Mona wandering the nighttime streets of Ann Arbor. When she got home he intended on locking his side of the connecting doors to prevent the possibility of sexual mishap whether peeking or something more serious. When he was a senior in high school and full of confusion and near depression his dad had counseled him by saying, “You’ve got to boil down your life and figure out what you want.” Remembering this made him feel oddly hopeful and he took his notebook out of his briefcase.

On the map of Ann Arbor I note a park along the river where I can walk in the morning. Television weather says it will be unseasonably warm.

In e-mails with Carla, Mona has discovered that within Dwight’s followers there are seventeen couples with daughters of eleven, twelve, or thirteen in age. Of course historically cults are often involved in illegal sexual license. This was possibly true in the Waco affair and the recent activity of the Mormon apostasy group on the Arizona-Utah border.

Boiling it down what truly angers me is Dwight using fake Indian material to fuck young girls. Given my knowledge of the suffering of American Indians for five hundred years this is doubly monstrous. It’s been a decade since I could bear to read about this suffering which only talking to Marion puts into perspective.

Carla said that all the women in the cult dance naked around the bonfire while the men beat on drums after which Dwight selects one or two of the young ones for his “blessing.” This happens every evening.

How could the parents allow this except through the delusion of religion? Carla said that in Arizona Dwight threatened one mother with his pet rattlesnake. She was trying to hide her daughter who had been made “uncomfortable” by Dwight’s big dick.

This all sounds like a bad dream but it’s reality. I have to put a stop to this. The irony is that I wouldn’t have all of this information without the criminal Carla-Mona connection and Carla’s belief that I could get her sent to prison.

I just now leafed through Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild and read, “Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility.” I am unsure of what he means except that in a walk of a couple of hours the first half hour is full of the usual mental junk but then you just zone out into the landscape and are simply a humanoid biped walking through the snowy hills and forests or along Lake Superior’s frozen beaches. You don’t bother trying to comprehend this immense body of water because you’re not meant to.

Mona still not back and it’s eleven. It helps to write it down. Why? It makes it concrete. D. H. Lawrence on the subject of Indians is very irritating but I have to remember that this stuff was published in 1923, nearly ninety years ago. He thought the demon in our continent was caused by the unappeased ghost of the “Red Indian,” the inner malaise that brings us to madness. What am I to make of this?

I have to do a little reading to figure out again what Christianity is. It certainly cooperated in the destruction of approximately five hundred tribes.

Back to Dwight: he is using Indianness to enact his pathological sexual desires. This is unforgivable and deserves death, but his is unlikely.

He shuffled from the small desk to an easy chair where Mona woke him up at midnight. He had gotten pretty cranked up over Keith Olbermann but not enough to keep him awake. He had spilled his drink on his crotch which made it look like he pissed his pants. His Uncle Bertie, a commercial fisherman, used to say that any day you don’t puke or shit your pants is a good day so Sunderson was ahead of the game.

“I was worried about you,” he muttered.

“I just walked around town and had a couple glasses of wine with some students. I love it here.”

Sunderson decided to let sleeping dogs lie rather than begin an interrogation. She was standing in front of him and his eyes focused on her visible, protuberant belly button between her sweater and jeans. There was an urge to lick this mystery. She pulled him out of the chair and led him to bed, helping him disrobe down to his boxer shorts.

“Get outta here,” he said, following her to the door and locking it.

On the way home a day and half later he was happy because Mona was happy, perhaps the happiest he had ever seen her. For the seven-hour drive home he had packed a cooler with the three hundred bucks worth of stuff he had bought at Zingerman’s Delicatessen, a place where Diane had gotten FedEx food for special occasions. A thaw had caused the spending binge. Fifty-five degrees in December! And after shopping he had ordered what was to be the best sandwich of his long life, a real pile of brisket on rye slathered with the hottest horseradish possible so that tears of pain and pleasure came freely. The moon was to be nearly full and when they reached Marquette he intended to take a couple-hour moonlit walk out to Presque Isle.

On the way home he described to Mona a freakishly difficult case that he had finally solved the year before. In a small school system in the eastern U.P. twelve thousand dollars had been embezzled. The only possible guilty parties had been the school superintendent and his secretary, a minister’s wife in her midfifties, a graceful and intelligent woman, albeit rather dumpy. After a number of questionings about computer and accounting accesses he determined both of them to be clean. On what he decided was his final visit he talked to the school janitor who seemed somewhat retarded and had a speech impediment from a cleft palate. They smoked a cigarette in the parking lot and chatted. No one notices janitors in their green suits. To Sunderson the janitor had tried to present himself as stupider than he was and had let the word “ubiquitous” slip through while talking about students and the meth epidemic. It occurred to Sunderson that the janitor had ready access to the office computer after everyone left for the day. Back in the school he checked old yearbooks and noted that the janitor and the school secretary, the minister’s wife, were classmates. He took a big chance and suddenly asked her over coffee, “Why are you fucking Bob the janitor?” Bingo. She fell apart, confessing that she and Bob were going to run away with the money held in a bank account in the Soo. They were headed to Milwaukee where Bob had a job lined up at the famous Usinger’s sausage factory. Why did every other man in the U.P. seem to be named Bob?

Mona laughed hysterically. “The sweetest most religious girl in my class is a blow-job artist. She told me it was like conducting an orchestra.”

Sunderson was puzzled by this but let it pass. When they reached Marquette Mona made them mortadella and provolone sandwiches and then he headed out on his walk. The moonrise was stupendous forming a glissade of light on quiet Lake Superior and making the freshly fallen soft snow on the beach a nearly daytime white. He walked fast and raised a sweat, pausing only to talk to Professor Eathorne whom he had met in various taverns. Eathorne was throwing a ball for his yellow Lab who was able to find the ball hidden in the soft snow. Their language is in their nose, Sunderson thought. Where is mine? Maybe he should get a yellow Lab, he thought, to counter loneliness. Dogs need a lot of petting, which might have been a better way to conduct his marriage. Eathorne taught human geography, which among other things dealt with why people were where they were, a germane question in human history. Running into Eathorne gave Sunderson a dose of oxygen. There were all these areas of human inquiry that were intriguing. He thought he might begin auditing some courses at the university and stretch his mind beyond the confines of history.

Christmas dinner made him jealous of Diane’s dying husband. How can you be jealous of a dying man? It takes work. They lived high on the edge of a steep slope that overlooked the harbor. He was a gentle and obviously melancholy soul and when he and Sunderson went into his den it took a while to permit their chat to go fluidly. His son had sadly enough dropped out of medical school to enter the movie business in L.A. while his daughter happily enough was a marine biologist at Scripps south of San Francisco. Neither had married so there were no grandchildren. Sunderson sipped rather than gulped his whiskey, always a temptation, and stared at a half dozen bird and animal prints that were splendid including a javelina. The man said that they were first folio Audubons. Sunderson said he had seen a number of javelinas down on the border.

“Diane said that you were down their chasing an evil cult leader who preys on young girls,” he said with a hard edge in his voice.

“I haven’t been at it long, a couple of months, and I doubt I’ll be successful. The problem is getting one of his followers, a parent, to testify against him.”

“When my daughter was growing up a banker down the street had a discreet but unhealthy interest in her. I warned him and he broke into tears. He thought he was in love with a twelve-year-old. Then a friend of mine, an old classmate, who practiced in Omaha was caught and prosecuted for the same Lolita syndrome. It often comes from a man who lacked social contact with girls his own age between, say, age eleven and fourteen. The pathology is in the inability to control the urges.”

“The problem is of course the permanent scar tissue left behind.” Sunderson was unable to admit that he hadn’t read Lolita though Marion had advised him to do so. He grew nervous watching Diane’s husband wince a number of times.

At dinner Diane was perfect as usual. Sunderson overate, mystified by the deliciousness of the roast beef, which Diane had ordered from Chicago. The Burgundy wine was the best he had ever put in his mouth, and the good doctor asked Diane to open a second bottle for which Sunderson was grateful. He was also grateful for the way Mona amused and cheered the man. She was sitting on his right and had him laughing until quite suddenly during dessert he fell asleep. Diane’s eyes flowed with tears.