Jim Harrison - The Great Leader

His eye caught a few words from a piece of paper that belonged in the Dwight folder but had been carelessly stored. It was the testimony of a Carla G., the only person he could find who had become somewhat disaffected with the Great Leader’s cult and returned to Marquette. She insisted that Dwight had moved headquarters from Marquette to Ontonagon for greater control but Sunderson knew it was the cheaper land over to the west. Carla G. was a shopper and claimed that was the reason for her departure but on further probing she began to cry and it nearly ruined his whitefish sandwich. They were lunching in the bar of the elegant old hotel, the Landmark Inn, and several women of the feminist persuasion glared at Sunderson as if Carla’s weeping was his fault. She finally admitted she had quit the cult because Dwight had maintained that she was his true love but she soon discovered he was screwing the other members, sometimes even a few of the men, and possibly underaged girls. Sunderson practically gasped at this new detail and then her mind wandered off into details about the Great Leader’s various masks and costumes. He had a half dozen or so tree costumes made of the bark of different trees in order to be invisible. He had a round mask with his face on all sides, with eye holes, and his features bleeding into each other so it looked like he could see like an owl. The last bite of the whitefish sandwich was hard to swallow. Out in the parking lot at her car Carla had embraced him in her thin summer dress putting her hips and pelvis into it. She started crying again and said that her father had abandoned the family when she was only seven and all she could remember was all the spankings he gave to her on her bare bottom. With a glint of something in her eye she suggested that he come to her apartment. He said that it would be improper for him to do so until late October when he retired, and she said, “What do you mean?” as if he were the naughty instigator. At that moment her cell phone rang. She answered with an air of importance and a loud voice squawked, “Carla, I want your ass on my face right now!” She reddened and struggled with her car door. “That young man likes you,” Sunderson chuckled and walked away, absolutely convinced that Carla was a fabulous liar about everything and was in all likelihood a frontwoman and spy for Dwight in addition to being nuts.

In truth Sunderson was fair looking. Many thought that though he was verging on sixty-five he could pass for fifty-five. He was without vanity so this meant nothing to him. “Sixty-five is sixty-five,” he would reply. Roxie had said many times that he looked “ratty” but that was because he had bought no new clothes in the three years since his divorce. When he had lunch with his ex-wife Diane a few weeks before to settle a business matter she was appalled because both the cuffs of his sleeves and his sports coat were frayed. She had insisted on signing the house over to him because when her parents from Battle Creek had died she had become “overloaded,” plus she was now married to a retired surgeon who shared her passions for art and nature. He had only met Bill a few times, mostly because doctors don’t normally hang out with detectives and because often during their marriage when invited out he had the slightly paranoid feeling that people would have preferred if only his wife had shown up. Near the end of it all he had asked just how she demonstrated her love for the arts and nature. They were having dinner and she broke into tears at the question and left the table for her small private room where she listened to classical music and looked at her art books. He didn’t explain that his cold crankiness was caused by a child-beating incident that afternoon. A boy of ten had been unmercifully beaten by his drunken father. The boy lost several teeth and his nose was crushed flat. His mouth was too swollen to talk so he wrote, “I don’t want dad to get in no trouble.” It was out near Champion and when Sunderson and a trooper led the handcuffed man out the door Sunderson tripped him so that he pitched off the steps onto the sidewalk on his face. He never shared this sort of information with his wife who found so much unbearable. A hatchling robin fallen to the ground out in the yard brought her to tears.

On the way to work he was drowsy so he drove down to the harbor and stood out in the cold north wind that was pushing waves over to the top of the break wall. He felt forlornly on the wrong track with the Great Leader. His colleagues and captain in the state police teased him with, “Where’s the evidence of a crime?” Everyone knew there wasn’t a provable one and it was certainly an ironic way to end a fine career. His uncle John Shannon who was a commercial fisherman liked to say, “Every boat is looking for a place to sink.” There were far more rumors of sexual abuse these days than day-old bread and in this case the mother and daughter were unwilling to testify.

He turned and looked at the huge Catholic church on the hill and received a modest jolt in his frontal lobe, not really a clue. The year before the divorce they had taken a vacation in northern Italy and his wife had been in a serene trance over religious art and architecture while he as an historian mostly saw the parasitical nature of the Catholic Church. This was what truly goaded him about Dwight who had managed to get seventy people to give up their lives and money. By living in primitive conditions in the “past before the past” as Dwight called it they would have a wonderful future. Was this any more cockamamie than the Mormons, or the Catholics for that matter? The idea that something so obviously stupid worked with people irked him. They beat on their drums, chanted in tongues, danced, and hunted and fished. As the members spiritually matured their pasts would reshape themselves. Dwight seemed to utterly believe in what he was doing and then one day he didn’t and would move on. The little information Roxie had gathered on the Great Leader’s activities seemed to center on the Mayan calendar, the nature of which Sunderson didn’t yet understand. He suspected that it was true Dwight had had sexual relations with the twelve-year-old daughter of a cult member but there was nowhere to go with this. Sunderson was concerned that when you looked into the history of religion those in power generally devised a way to get at the young stuff, which seemed also to be a biological premise in other mammals. This was scarcely a new idea as Marion had noted. Just as Sunderson’s hobby was history Marion, as a mixed blood, was obsessive about anthropology.

It was Saturday morning and the miracle was upon him through the open window of his upstairs bedroom. There was a balmy though brisk wind from the south and it was sixty degrees, much warmer than it had been in two weeks. Marion had told him about the incoming weather when they drove to the party at a big log cabin on a lake near Au Train but Sunderson barely took notice so great was his anxiety and irritation over attending his own retirement party. He had a fantasy temptation about jumping on the afternoon plane to Chicago, staying at the Drake, and spending a leisurely Saturday at the Newberry Library. He certainly wasn’t a party animal and shouldn’t his feelings have been regarded? Of course not. Diane was paying for the cook who normally only handled occasions for Marquette’s upper crust and certainly no one at the party had ever tasted her cooking. His ex-wife had also sent two cases of fine wine and a half case of top-shelf liquor to Marion who as a recovering alcoholic could be trusted with the bounty, he was so steadfast. This was a lot for fifteen men to drink but then the Upper Peninsula was a region of heavy drinkers and most of the men who were involved in law enforcement had arranged to be picked up by designated drivers. The entertainment was arranged by a younger officer whom Sunderson had originally disliked but then sympathized with over his rejection by the FBI because of a college prank. The FBI had altogether too many stiffs who couldn’t think, in that pathetic euphemism, out of the box. A little old lady FBI agent had seen 9/11 coming and had she worn a necktie thousands of lives might have been saved not to speak of the grotesque governmental aftermath wherein the constitution was sadly bruised and the fraternity boys realized their ambitions about torturing brown people. There were thousands of bright career tracks for sadists who knew no more about the Middle East than a Lubbock insurance adjustor.