Jim Harrison - The Great Leader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Never mind. What’s up?”

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

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

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

Sunderson said thank you and rushed out.

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

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