Jim Harrison - The Great Leader

He sat at the desk in the hotel room pondering this matter, which made him sleepy. Above the desk was a Frederic Remington print of a bunch of cowboys rounding up cattle in a mountain valley. He had never been on a horse and had no intentions in that direction. It looked desperately uncomfortable. He remembered his embarrassment as a boy during the Saturday matinee at the movie theater when Gene Autry pulled up his horse during a roundup and began singing, more like braying, “When It’s Springtime in the Rockies.” Even worse was Roy Rogers with guitar in hand and a foot up on a straw bale singing to a group of appreciative wildly painted Indians in ceremonial headdresses. Why was he letting a hotel painting lead him off into the void?

Mona had managed to get Dwight’s cell phone number but Sunderson wanted to collect his scattered thoughts before he called and then he decided it would be better to simply arrive out of context, which might unnerve the wily Dwight. He could also accuse Dwight of impregnating the twelve-year-old girl but then that might spook him into running forever. Marion had been helpful when Sunderson had questioned the Native American motif in the Great Leader’s projects, strongly evident from the slim files that also touched on Choteau, Montana, and Arizona. Roxie had said, “What’s all this Injun shit?” Marion doubted if more than 10 percent of the populace as a whole had deep religious feelings but Indians were a fresher source for the sucker shot. People were still genetically primitive and responded to drum beats. Religion is fueled by the general sense of incomprehension about life, and ceremonies that were equally incomprehensible had been discovered by charlatans. Marion gave him the work of the scholar Philip Deloria that dealt with the way whites would ape Indians culturally. Sunderson and Marion had been friends for over twenty years but Marion refused to talk about his own nativist religion, which he claimed shouldn’t be subject to a white man’s idle curiosity even if it was a close friend.

Near Marion’s retreat shack back in the woods a half mile from any other dwelling there was a fine, if small, brook trout creek that began a mile upstream in a large spring and beaver pond. He and Marion had shoved a twenty-foot tamarack pole in the spring and hadn’t reached bottom. Marion said that this was what was sacred about the particulars of the natural world. Sunderson said that some ancient Greeks believed that the gods lived in springs and Marion said, “Why not?” Marion’s intelligence was peculiar. One evening the month before they had been surfing through the satellite channels after watching the Detroit Lions lose their thirteenth in a row and happened onto a program called Celebrity Medical Nightmares. Further on there was a soft-core porn channel playing Super Ninja Bikini Babes, and Marion remarked that in our culture both men and women were working toward enormous breasts, men by bench-pressing and women by surgery. He wondered what this meant and Sunderson was at a loss.

He was beginning to feel irritable about having to go to his mother’s for dinner down in Green Valley about forty miles to the south. The phone rang and it was the desk to say Mona’s faxes had arrived. He left the room in a hurry then slowed down when he saw a woman examining the extensive flower beds. He put a hand to his chest because his heart abruptly fluttered. With her back turned he was sure the woman was Diane but then of course not. Her hair was a lighter brunette and she was slightly shorter than Diane’s five foot nine. He passed close enough to catch her scent, an unknown quality. She turned and smiled and he said, “Gorgeous flowers.” She nodded then knelt beside a bed to examine the flowers more closely. She was faultlessly neat like Diane who had even folded her undies like one would handkerchiefs. Diane had always arrived at breakfast impeccably dressed for her job, then toasted her English muffin applying a scant amount of cream cheese and Scottish marmalade she got by mail order. She was always fresh as a daisy while he struggled to make passable sausage gravy at the stove. She even peeled fruit precisely while he had difficulties with something as simple as starting a roll of toilet paper. He had to abandon their king-size bed because his snoring kept her awake and he had refused to wear the antisnoring mask contraption his doctor had recommended. His doctor, who had moved up from Kalamazoo, was shocked at the number of men in the Upper Peninsula who thought of themselves in fine physical and mental shape when by any outside standards they were walking wrecks. Sunderson smoked and drank heavily and his cholesterol always hovered around three hundred. He was very strong for his age but this had nothing to do with his diminishing life expectancy.

Sunderson sat under a pergola on the hotel lawn, the official smoking area, and read the faxes with growing anger. He had no idea how many cult members had taken out home equity loans before the current financial plummet and turned the money over to Dwight. Mona had also discovered that Dwight had taken a Rent-a-Jet from Choteau to Albuquerque and then to Tucson for the exorbitant total of twenty thousand dollars. Mona had also written that Dwight had purchased five hundred peyote buttons in New Mexico. She found this out by prying into Queenie’s checking account, which used a simpleminded code for peyote. Sunderson thought idly that he might turn over this information to the DEA but then they were too busy tracking shipments of heroin and cocaine from Mexico to be interested in this peripheral drug mostly used by the Native American church, a widespread religious organization among Indians, and besides the DEA would be interested in where he got the information. He suspected that law enforcement agencies would be wise to hire world-class hackers like Mona and probably some of them had already done so.

Mona had sent him MapQuest directions to his mother’s house but he was inattentive when he reached Green Valley which, all in all, was rather brownish. On the drive down on 19 through Papago property he had been mystified and captivated by the weird flora, the saguaro, cholla, paloverde, and the spiny ocotillo. Sunderson wasn’t a traveler, another sore point in his marriage. Other than a long flight to Frankfurt for army hospital work he had only been west of the Mississippi once and then only briefly to Denver to retrieve an extradited prisoner. He was somehow pleased to note that the Rocky Mountains looked fake. Southern Arizona was another matter mostly because Marion had loaned him a book about the Apaches called Once They Moved Like the Wind, which left him with the obvious conclusion that the Apaches were the hardest hombres in the history of mankind. Dwight and his followers were unlikely to ape such a recalcitrant tribe, preferring “nicer” Indians.

His mother’s house was a small stucco bungalow right next to a large home owned by his sister Berenice and her husband Bob whom Sunderson considered a nitwit, albeit a wealthy nitwit, having managed to acquire a dozen RV parks. Bob’s Cadillac Escalade was parked out front, sixty grand worth of nothing and Sunderson had the irrational urge to ram it with his Avis compact but then giggled at the impulse like a child.

He was barely in the front door before his mother hissed, “Shame on you, son.” She was seated on the sofa wrapped in her wildly colored macrame throw, the air conditioner on so high on this warm day that she needed the blanket’s warmth. Berenice had given her a home permanent and her hair was such tightly wrapped white nubs that her pinkish knobby skull was revealed. “You have disgraced our family, son.”

“Mom, you have no idea of the tensile strength of some women there. They go to the gym every day. She had me in a bear hug.”