Jim Harrison - The Great Leader

Within three weeks he had taken the recruit exam passing with the highest score possible, and at their urging went on to get a master’s in criminology. He didn’t mind being an ordinary trooper but his talents and knowledge of the U.P. were exhaustive and within a few years he was a detective in Marquette with a decided aversion for any administrative job.

His heart warmed when he sat at his desk, as if a heart could smile. The only slightly jarring note was the original Marilyn Monroe calendar, discreet by current standards, and also a photo of the actress Blythe Danner who used to figure large in his limited fantasy life. His friend Marion, a mixed-blood middle-school principal, had loaned him a book on Native American longhouses, which he had misplaced but now turned up under a pile of early logging monographs. At the onset Marion had told him that Chippewa (Anishinabe) didn’t build longhouses but they were the chosen dwelling in the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy-Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk, Tuscarora-and in certain Pacific Northwest coast tribes like the Salish and the Suquamish who built one five hundred feet long. This latter fact jogged his mind and he shuffled through the papers of the Great Leader’s slender file finding the record of a Dwight Yoakam (an alias using a country singer’s name) being charged for disturbing the peace in Port Townsend, Washington, the year before. When Roxie called for the details Dwight had alarmed a group of Japanese tourists by speaking in tongues. When Sunderson had impounded Dwight’s old mint Nash Rambler for the day on the flimsy charge of larceny by conversion he had found nine current license plates in the trunk, one of them from the state of Washington. It was hard to explain to the Bloomfield Hills father that if his twenty-five-year-old daughter Portia, whom the cultists called Queenie, wished to give away thirty thousand dollars, mostly for propane heat for the longhouse and bathhouse, she was free to do so. The father, Sunderson thought of him as Mister Bigshot, got drunk at the Verling House the night he was in Marquette and propositioned a waitress for a grand, or so said an informant. They bathed in the Jacuzzi of the Teddy Roosevelt suite in the hotel on the hill. He fell asleep so she pulled the plug in the drain so he wouldn’t drown, removed the thousand from his wallet, and took her friends out drinking with a little cocaine on the side.

He didn’t have all that much information on the Great Leader but he still refused to ask the FBI for help. They were both nosy and condescending and as the disaster of 9/11 indicated they didn’t like to share the information they themselves ignored. Roxie had done the best she could in helping him build a file but in four days he would no longer be able to use her services. Despite his apparent intelligence he had never learned the computer mostly because of a lifelong aversion to electricity. When he was seven a cousin had been electrocuted having climbed the fence of the power station behind the pulp mill.

The ideal substitute for Roxie was the sixteen-year-old girl next door named Mona. She was an ace hacker and a detective friend of his who specialized in computer crimes told him that he kept her under surveillance. She mostly dressed in black explaining to him that she was a goth, which Roxie had explained to him but he kept forgetting the details. They talked a great deal partly because they were neighbors living solo. Her single mother was a traveling cosmetic salesperson so Mona was mostly alone though she said that she was never lonely. When they were both raking maple leaves a few weeks before Mona had teased him about blocking off his remaining dining room window with yet another bookcase. His Lutheran childhood still carried a miniscule weight but enough to make him ashamed of his motive. He could stand in front of the case and at eye level pull out Slotkin’s treatise on violence in America and look across thirty feet of yard directly into her bedroom. Strictly speaking it wasn’t illegal but what was it? A bare butt crack was mere negative space but then it could make the temples of a man very nearly sixty-five years old pound unpleasantly. The biological imperative was a distracting nuisance. Checking his watch he knew she would be getting up for school in fifty minutes and the question was did he have enough self-control not to take a peek, which often devolved into a fifteen-minute trance? Part of his mind ached with guilt over this dubious matter even though since he was in his own home peeking wasn’t criminal. Sexuality could be like carrying around a backpack full of cow manure, especially for a senior frantically holding on to waning impulses.

He read the Great Leader’s file backward in lame hope for new perspective. His quarry Dwight had started religions in four locations in the United States, and had attempted three more in other countries including Canada, France, and Mexico. He had only lasted three days each in Hattiesburg and Oxford, Mississippi, when the police advised him to leave in a hurry. In both Montreal and Arles, France, he had lasted a scant three weeks before he drew too much attention and with an alien passport it was easy to get rid of him. It had occurred to Sunderson that for the populace in general religious belief can have nearly the attraction of money. Dwight lacked the apparent greed of the raft of southern evangelists who had built empires but he had certainly managed to live well enough. As far as he could determine Dwight was still short of forty years old. The second time he visited the longhouse people were otherwise diverted and he had a quick peek through the curtains of Dwight’s bailiwick, which could be called primitive regal, say the tent of Kublai Khan with a wealth of deerskins on the wall, bear skins on the floor, and a beaver skin duvet on the bed trimmed with mink pelts.

Sunderson wasn’t well traveled enough to know if foreigners were in general as gullible as Americans. In America you didn’t need credentials or if they were called for they could swiftly be created. A number of the Great Leader’s current devotees were college graduates though Sunderson had come to the conclusion that most colleges were a mere continuum of the utter slovenliness of high school. In the seventh grade our students are competitive with Western Europe but by the twelfth grade we’re in twenty-seventh place. When Sunderson had read this it made him happy as it helped explain why the United States Congress was so obviously ignorant of American history, not to speak of those sullen louts that had been in the executive branch. Bush would say, “History tells us,” and then come up with something history doesn’t tell us as pointed out by one of Sunderson’s heroes, the journalist David Halberstam. When Halberstam died in an auto accident Sunderson had a private evening of mourning with the writer’s books spread across his desk.

To peek or not to peek, that was the question. It was eleven minutes to zero hour when Mona’s lights would come on. Was he so fatigued by a bad night that he lacked moral resolve? Probably. This was a wan attempt to recapture the melancholic, philosophical mood he used to feel reading Kierkegaard in college. Of course even then he would have dropped Either/Or like a hot skillet if a nude girl had appeared before a window. Biology defeats philosophy in the first round. What was this stomach-souring anguish of sex? Even wise Socrates tripped over his pecker.

He tried to divert himself with history. The Congress of Vienna in 1814 was the occasion of a speech by someone -he needed to look it up-that warned against the dire consequences of raising a mediocre man to power. Quite suddenly he had to go to the toilet, threatening that there would be no dawn Mona, but he accomplished the humbling task in a trice. He was back within twenty seconds of zero hour having synchronized his clock with her alarm as closely as possible indicated by her turning on her bed lamp. His neurons raced. A prof had said that the Enlightenment wasn’t very enlightened. He pulled the Slotkin volume and her light came on. She flopped out of bed and stood. She leaned over to scratch her tummy. Her butt was aimed at me, thought Sunderson, either the gates of heaven or hell. She stood and turned to the window, instantly quizzical. Oh my god I forgot to turn out the light and she doubtless sees the crack of light in my window. He ducked, then crouched with his chest against the desk figuring that if he turned out the light now she’d know he had been watching. What a fool to forget the light! He felt the sweat on his forehead, the navy blue shame of the geezer or near geezer possibly caught at his ignominious vice. He had more than a touch of acid reflux, which didn’t help. When clothed Mona, usually in goth black, looked too slender but in the nude her breasts and bottom were ample. His old dick, sometimes a friend but now a foe, was pointlessly hard and deserved, he thought, to be slammed in the desk drawer for its implicit stupidity. How do we account for the theory and practice of our guilt?