Jim Harrison - The Great Leader

He indulged in a Bloody Mary at O’Hare and on the longish flight to Tucson slept for the first two hours waking up with the peculiar sense of having been smeared, a brand-new feeling, not quite like a roadkill but like a man whose peripheries had been squashed, blurred, by the loss of his defining profession. Midway through high school his dad who worked at the paper mill, a step up from his earlier career of cutting pulp logs, had told him, “Like the rest of us you’ll never have much but make the most of it.” Unfortunately, now he continued to lose order in his mind while he continued to try to control it to the point that any order was a false order.

Fortunately the feeling of being smeared gave way to the light-headedness of the morning before on the way to the cult property. He had become nothing but he was free. He would no longer break into a dilapidated house trailer and find three ounces of marijuana, three grams of meth, and the usual needleworks. He had once been cited for breaking a perp’s arm but the young man was so skinny from meth that when Sunderson grabbed his arm when he was trying to crawl out the back window of a third-story apartment the snap was audible. What was he going to do, fly? Unlike most in his profession Sunderson did not see the dire threat of narcotics as a societal rot that must be expunged or society would be imperiled. When a guy with four DUIs runs over a kid and receives less time than a college kid with a half-pound of pot intent on selling the silly weed to other dipshits you have a justice problem. It was easy in the current economy to have fantasies about being a member of a secret cabal of detectives who travel through the world assassinating the world’s most destructive criminals who, obviously, were all members of the financial community next to which a Mexican drug cartel seemed murderous but childishly simple. Drug cartels didn’t destroy the world economy, but then what were his conclusions worth? Hadn’t he been put out to pasture? His mind had become a Ping-Pong table.

In the Tucson landing pattern he came near to euphoria over the idea that with his extensive historical preparation he was just the man to study the crime of religion. Sometimes you had to get out of town to see things clearly. Prosecution was as childish as the profession he had left. At least Dwight hadn’t swindled widows by giving them a hope of heaven where they might rejoin their mates who had worked themselves to death. As the plane jolted to the ground he felt a momentary loss at not being able to find any of the cult’s tree costumes. How grand it would be to stand beside a brook trout stream masquerading as a tree though there was the alarming thought that a bear would rub against your bark. Several years before their divorce Diane had pushed him into attending a reading by a U.P. author who had found a stump, mammoth in size, in a gulley in the back country south of Grand Marais. The man claimed that he often sat within this huge, hollow stump. Sunderson had been envious to the point that he totally ignored the contents of the man’s reading of his fiction and poetry. Sunderson had no interest in fiction sensing that his room full of historical texts were fiction enough. The writer had said that the stump was his church.

Because of the time change it was only noon when he found himself in his room at the Arizona Inn, which was an extravagant mistake. Sunderson had remembered the name because Diane used to stay there when visiting her parents in their retirement home in north Tucson. She and her petulant mother didn’t get along well enough for Diane to bunk with her parents. His room at the Arizona Inn reminded him uncomfortably of Diane’s parents’ home near Battle Creek. Everything was immaculate, the furniture old and expensive. The toilets were fluffy and you weren’t confident it was a proper place to take a crap.

There was an urge for another nap, which troubled him. He wasn’t ordinarily a napper but it was his consciousness that was tired rather than his body. He checked the pricey room service menu then walked a few blocks to a restaurant called Miss Saigon he had noted in the car. He had a splendid bowl of Vietnamese pho with tripe, meatballs, pork, hot chopped peppers, lime, and cilantro. The irony about Vietnam is that the war closed down and Sunderson was in a medical detail in Frankfurt helping to take care of the thousands of burn victims. The Frankfurt hospital fed pho to the veterans. Sunderson worried for a year about being transferred to a field hospital in an area of action. He was also afraid of snakes and had heard many stories. The grotesque thing was how much burned flesh stunk and how many times he vomited. He returned to MSU with a glad heart and the U.P. with actual joy.

His morale was high on his walk back to the hotel. A good meal would do that. In the room there was a call from Mona on his voice mail and he was startled to hear that she had tracked Dwight from Choteau, Montana, to Albuquerque to a location about thirty miles south of Willcox, Arizona, near a village named Sun City where Dwight was currently looking for the bones of Cochise with a group of six followers all of whom had dark hair. Dwight would no longer accept disciples who looked decidedly Aryan.

“Jesus, how did you get all this info?”

“Three hours of hacking. I got it from credit card records. Your secretary Roxie didn’t know shit. Want a MapQuest of where Dwight is staying, also an aerial photo?” Mona had met Roxie only once but thought of her as a lowlife.

“Sure. Fax it here.” Sunderson was still unnerved by the information she had garnered through her computer, obviously through illegal means but then what with computers was truly enforceable?

“I miss you, darling.”

“I’ve asked you not to call me darling.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t want to fuck you. I just want to be pals.”

“Before I come back I want you to put up venetian blinds in your bedroom. I’ll pay for it.”

“Okay, but I’m real surprised that you can’t control yourself.”

“I never was very religious.” Sunderson struggled to change the subject. “I’m actually controlling myself,” he said defensively. “I’m just looking at you like you were a painting.” This was lame.

“It’s funny but the most sexed up kids at school are the Bible thumpers. The rest of us started early and now it’s a yawn.”

“Keep up the good work.” Sunderson hung up abruptly. Sexual issues unnerved him to the point that he would nearly prefer to find a dead body. A few days ago when Roxie had left the office to pick up sandwiches he had fielded a call from the wife of a prominent citizen. She was sobbing having learned that her fourteen-year-old son was sexually active, and his slut of a girlfriend, also fourteen, had sent him a nude picture of herself on his cell phone. It took a half hour to calm the woman down by which time his Italian meatball sandwich had lost its heat. As his dad used to say everything was fucked up like a soup sandwich. Why did they all have to have cell phones? Down at the marina park last summer a whole group was busy text messaging rather than playing and there had been several accidents involving kids walking into traffic while listening to iPods or watching TV programs on their cell phones.

He tried to stop his brain from nattering against the way things were what with having no more control than he did over his own impulses. His friend Marion, who was as addicted to reading in the field of anthropology as he was in history, had quoted Loren Eiseley to the effect that older men like themselves become antiques in the face of the fantastically accelerated social evolution induced by industrial technology. He had been becoming a fish out of water back home and even more so in Tucson where he was a fish in the desert.