The Great Leader

by Jim Harrison

  His luck held when they turned off on a no-exit two-track near Seney where Sunderson had fished the Driggs River. He and the game warden reconnoitered and after an hour they heard hounds baying and a rifle shot and they called in reinforcements. Within a half hour another game warden and two state police arrived. Bingo, Sunderson thought. When the pickup approached it tried to turn around and Sunderson shot out the back tires with his .38. In a cooler full of ice in a hidden compartment of the pickup there were sixteen gallbladders, one of them still warm, and sixty-four paws. The bust was big in the news but Sunderson declined all credit passing it on to the game wardens. The last thing he wanted was to become too visible. He did, however, relish the pleasure of an ultraclean bust. The perps got five years.

  Outside of Patagonia his cell phone rang with the William Tell Overture, music that he hated but he didn’t know how to change. He answered because he saw it was Mona on the caller ID.

  “Good morning dear.”

  “You can’t believe what’s happening as we speak. You know how dark it is here in November at seven a.m.? Well Marion pulls up in his car on the way to work. He goes in your house and then he pulls a book in your study and I can see the crack of light. He’s been peeking at me for about ten minutes. I thought it was our special secret. It pisses me off that you told him, darling.”

  “I didn’t tell him,” Sunderson laughed. “He’s picking up some books to FedEx me. It was his own discovery.”

  “I did some nude yoga so he wouldn’t be disappointed. I think I believe you. I mean it’s a silly thing but I like the idea that it’s just between us.”

  “Well, he’s not going to pick up books to send me every day. Here’s a nifty thing to do. When you hang up with me call his cell and say, Caught you, you shitheel pervert.”

  “I want to write my own lines,” she laughed. “Maybe I’ll say, Come on over, big boy.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “Are you jealous, darling?”

  Sunderson hung up on her and when he ate his menudo the labial texture made him horny. The freedom of retirement was distressing. Normally at this time back home he would be driving to work and mentally rehearsing the cases at hand. Why was the little old widow whose husband left her a nice pension embezzling from the dry goods store where she worked twenty hours a week? A tiny video camera caught her. She wept. She was helping a niece with cancer but it turned out she didn’t have a niece. She was addicted to hitting the slots at the Indian casino east of town. A month after the judge gave her probation she was caught on video stealing change from other players’ coin cups and stealing tips from tables in the lunchroom. Sunderson disliked interrogating her because despite his innovative questioning he couldn’t make a dent. She said she was aiming at winning the hundred-thousand-dollar jackpot and giving it to her church because the pastor’s wife had cancer. A phone call revealed that the pastor’s wife didn’t have cancer. Dealing with this senior citizen ditz gave Sunderson heartburn and a deep need for more alcohol. In his last week of work she had been caught at midnight rifling parking meters using a technique she refused to describe. When Sunderson met with the prosecutor they went to the bar at the Ramada Inn where he received a cell call from Snowbound Books. The owner had caught the woman jamming three copies of the new Danielle Steel in her underpants in the back room. “Shoot her,” Sunderson had said then closed the phone. This was clearly not a life.

  When he finished his last piece of tripe which raised the image of Mona he thought that a serious man can’t be pussy struck at breakfast. What a fool he had become in his loneliness, a fungoid teenage boy. He pondered the idea that he should be over this nonsense at age sixty-five but he wasn’t. He couldn’t very well ask Melissa to wear a miniskirt while fishing. Now that he was recovering, however slowly, it was time to up the ante on the Great Leader. His dad used to say that idle hands are the devil’s work tools. He didn’t want to be idle but the true mystery was how to proceed so far from home ground. He needed to somehow daily carbonate his brain to become less sodden and more attentive.

  He walked a route in the Nature Conservancy property for an hour without his usual attentiveness in natural surroundings because he remembered what an abrasive Detroit detective had told him forty years before, “Paranoia is healthy for a cop.” Maybe Roberto Kowalski wasn’t straight and suspected Sunderson of being a fed, maybe a DEA guy from out of state snooping into crooked locals? Maybe two weeks before Melissa had told her brother Xavier about a beat-up detective in the Nogales hospital and Xavier had told her to check him out? The question was whether or not this paranoia was healthy or delusional.

  There was a slight rustle and movement of leaves and he jumped back as far as a man his age could jump back. He had a preconception that the area was chock-full of rattlers though in truth it would take an expert and hard looking to find one and the morning was far too cold at fifty degrees for a rattler to be active. He knelt down feeling the pain of his bruised legs and examined a large black beetle making its way slowly through the leaf detritus. Such large beetles were unknown in the north and he wondered how it made its way through life, where it ate and slept, and how it mated.

  The beetle took him out of his head and into the world and he backtracked a few hundred yards to the path along the creek. He had barely noticed the creek when he was pondering the subject of paranoia but now he sat down on a cottonwood log and stared at the moving water. It would have been a good brook trout creek had there been any brook trout this far south though he had read that there were rainbow trout in the mountains farther north in Arizona. He spotted some minnows swirling in unison in a deeper hole and then watched a blue heron fly over above him looking smaller than the great blues of the north.

  He studied the thicket of mesquite trees across the creek. There was also a number of large green bushes that looked like the elderberry back home, and a number of vast cottonwoods. He heard only bird sounds and the sound of moving water, his two favorites beginning in his childhood. He noticed that he was more relaxed and breathing more deeply than he had since he left home. He smiled remembering a slightly religious experience on a small river down near Steuben south of Shingleton the summer before. It was a hot August morning and he had been trying to catch brookies under logjams with a short line and his preferred fly, a small olive woolly bugger. The fly had snagged under the logjam and he was in despair because it was his last one and he had forgotten to tie up anymore. He was also hungover, which he had noted dozens of times made him a little inattentive. He threw in the towel as it were, pulled himself up on the riverbank, and stripped off his waders and clothes down to his undies. He carelessly plunged under the logjam with a hand, following the fly line until he could detach the fly hooked on the slippery log, not quite a victory as he had to struggle violently to back himself out against the current thinking how odd it would be to drown while saving an olive woolly bugger. He emerged breathing hard and grabbing a branch to hold himself in the current, tossing the fly up near his rod on the bank. For no reason he let go of the branch and floated downstream rolling over and over in the water, then simply floating on his back looking up at the hot blue sky and the trees that bordered the stream. About a hundred yards downstream he crawled up on a sandbar and lay there, happier than he had been in the three years since Diane left.

  The Tucson gun store was a mud bath, festooned with patriotic and anti-Obama signs, including the usual live free or die. The clerk was plump, florid, and middle-aged smug.

  “I need a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver,” Sunderson said.

  “You look like you need a pistol,” the clerk chortled.

  “Thanks.” Sunderson was impatient to get out of the place and pointed at the pistol he wanted under the glass.

  It turned out that despite his expired detective license and still current Michigan concealed weapons permit he couldn’t buy a pistol because he was a nonresident. He was pissed off enough to feel his temples pounding. The clerk waited for the bad news
to sink in, chortled again, and gave Sunderson directions to a public library.

  “You get a library card and that’s proper Arizona ID and then I sell you the pistol.”

  Sunderson was jangled at the insanity of it all but calmed down sweetly at the library because the desk clerk girl, though homely, smelled like lilac, a fatally sexy scent for him. He felt like a daffy old fuck as he proudly showed his library card from back home but she frowned at the Nogales address he gave.

  “I love the next town, Patagonia,” she said.

  “I do too. I eat menudo there every morning.”

  “I can’t eat tripe.”

  “It restores your strength.”

  When he walked out after the second pass at the gun store he felt the unpleasant heft of the .38 in a shoulder holster thinking that the .38 had been following him around for nearly forty years like the longest-term tumor possible. Back in the car and heading to Miss Saigon for a pho fix he pulled over near the University of Arizona to make a cell call. Grungy young men and beautiful young women were passing on the sidewalk in such profusion that he thought about the failure of birth control in the world at large. He called a colleague back in Marquette.

  “Sunderson! Gett’n much?”

  “More ass than a toilet seat. I need information on an Arizona detective by the name of Roberto Kowalski.”

  “Hold on, I’ll do it as we speak.”

  The colleague, divorced twice, always gave the staff the impression that he was a prime pussy chaser but this was unlikely.

  “No one by that name in Arizona law enforcement,” was the answer.

  “Thanks for the favor.”

  “You’re missing deer hunting.”

  Sunderson couldn’t think of a thing to say so he pushed the end button. He sat outside again at Miss Saigon smoking two cigarettes in a row and realizing that he had been a little suspicious of Kowalski, not at the first bruised meeting in the hospital, but the second time, at his apartment. The guy lacked a certain tinge of the genuine because he didn’t speak the shorthand that detectives use with each other. His cell rang just as the waitress was bringing a variety pho that included tripe, also pork meatballs. It was Lucy.

  “I’m not crying anymore darling but I’ve been thinking of our questionable night.”

  “I was worried about your Kleenex budget. Look, I’m in a meeting. I’ll call you back.” He quickly turned the phone off before she could respond, wondering about the faulty aspects of memory. Why didn’t she say that the night had been rotten rather than the euphemism of “questionable”? If you’re lonely any contact is better than none.

  Two hours later he had found another small temporary apartment on a hillside in Patagonia. It was a room and half, a bit tight, but there were chickens in the backyard and a couple of rabbit hutches. His parents had supplemented their protein budget with a lot of fried rabbit. On the way to Nogales to pick up his meager belongings he reluctantly passed the Wagon Wheel Saloon. It would have to wait for later.

  Alfred was in the yard and told Sunderson that soon after he had left Mr. Kowalski had stopped by to fetch his precious cigarette lighter.

  “Did you ID him?” Sunderson asked, alarmed.

  “Well, no. I mean you guys were together an hour last night. I admit I glanced in the window and he was on the phone at the kitchen table.”

  Sunderson didn’t bother telling Alfred that Kowalski was a phony. Alfred was upset that he was leaving but pleased when Sunderson told him to keep the rest of the month’s rent.

  “Where are you going?”

  “It would be unsafe for you to know.”

  “I get it. You’re undercover?”

  “Obviously not far enough.”

  He packed his suitcase and papers from Mona. Nothing in the apartment looked tossed though the papers appeared in less disarray than he had left them. The Great Leader must have been poor reading for Kowalski but now he had Mona’s e-mail. He rang her up.

  “Don’t respond to anyone in this area except me.”

  “Okay darling but why?”

  “I’m being tailed and he’ll try to find me through your e-mail.”

  “That’s impossible but it sounds exciting. I have to write a paper on Emily Dickinson and she sucks.”

  “No she doesn’t. She’s wonderful.” Sunderson had been fond of Emily Dickinson ever since he was a sophomore in an American literature class at Michigan State.

  “That joke really worked with Marion. I did a little nude dance then I called him. I heard his cell phone hit the floor.”

  “Good job.”

  “Your fucking friend Carla wants me to come over for dinner. My therapist will be there. Just us three girls. Maybe they’ll try to gang bang me.”

  “Don’t go. But if you do, snoop around. Keep your clothes on.”

  “Of course Daddy.”

  He hung up and called Melissa. She had been going to pick him up for fishing in the morning but as a precaution he didn’t want her to have his new address and told her he would meet her at Patagonia Lake. She was flirtatious on the phone, which made him suspicious though he cautioned himself about letting his paranoia ruin the fishing trip and its remote sexual possibilities. He was on the way out of the apartment and bidding good-bye to Alfred’s wife Molly who was dusting her roses for aphids when a FedEx truck pulled up. He had nearly missed the books Marion was sending.

  “My second cycle of chemo isn’t working,” Molly said. “So this is good-bye.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sunderson said, feeling paralyzed.

  “Do you believe in the afterlife?”

  “I haven’t figured it out. I guess I’m not very religious.”

  “I don’t think anyone has. Someone said, I forgot who, that if nothing happens we won’t know it. I’ll miss flowers, birds, and lemonade.”

  He gave her a hug and got in the car itching for a double whiskey and thinking that there wasn’t much left of her. She was made up of Tinkertoys, fragile sticks out of which you could make little buildings and bridges but not human bodies. He recalled that he and his brother Robert had found a recently dead fawn, it didn’t stink yet, and they had given it what they had thought to be a proper burial. Molly couldn’t weigh much more than the fawn that Sunderson had dropped in the shallow hole he had dug. There wasn’t much of a thunk when the fawn hit the bottom of its grave.

  The consolation, however slight, was the heft of the package of books Marion had sent. He opened the package in the parking lot and selected Playing Indian by Philip Deloria, which Marion had loaned him a couple of years before, rather than one of the new ones like Jeffrey Johnson’s They Are All Red Out Here: Socialist Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1895-1925, or Kyle Wilkison’s Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914, and certainly not the new edition of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, which he had skimmed through years before and which had precipitated a deep funk.

  Over his first double and beer chaser at the bar he read Marion’s letter, the first half of which advised him to read the Deloria, which would help him understand the Great Leader’s use of faux Indian “rigmarole.” Marion said that many non–Indian Americans had used their fantasies about Indians to acquire a “hokum” spirituality. The second half of the letter was a comic recounting of Marion pulling the Deloria book out from above Sunderson’s desk and seeing the nude Mona at her morning rituals. “Don’t even try it, friend. It’s very upsetting and she caught me red-handed. I drove off to work shamefaced and with a hard-on like a toothache. I thought of a scholarly article by a psychoanalyst named Sullivan that said that at their best poetry and religion push back the boundaries of the ineffable. Well, so can a woman’s body.”

  The barmaid Amanda brought him his second double. He had caught a nice breast view when she had bent over to get ice for a margarita.

  “What are you staring at, asshole?”

  “I’m staring into my mind. I can’t see it very well,” he
said.

  “That’s cute but a little evasive,” she laughed.

  Sunderson felt a trace of fear. Two doubles were enough when bad people might very well be tracking you. It was five in the afternoon and he knew he should eat an early dinner, do some reading, and embrace sobriety. From want of good sense he went to the Mexican restaurant and ate yet another bowl of menudo, sprinkling it liberally with the blistering hot and flavorful chiltepins. He was proud of becoming acclimated though it was easiest when he was in Italy with Diane and liked everything he ate.

  In his new digs he laid out his books including White’s “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West and Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds from his suitcase. History books were his central solace in life along with brook trout fishing but on this night history had abruptly fled. He figured the problem was that the sense of his own peril forced him to consider only life in the present tense. He tried the television news but his mistrust of the instant history of the media was jangling. He couldn’t find a movie suited to his mood and had to settle on a cop film only because it featured Robert Duvall, his doppelganger, who was uniformly credible in movies. Sunderson almost never watched cop movies because they lacked the visceral aspects of actuality. Once while in training in Detroit he had visited a downriver dope house with two cops and they had found two severed heads on a kitchen table, both with bulging purple tongues and lots of flies because the heads had been there a couple of days.

  He was thirsty but stupidly didn’t drink water because he didn’t want to get up to pee with his geezer’s overactive kidneys. The gout struck at midnight, an easy self-diagnosis because it felt like a rat was chewing on his right big toe. He hobbled to the bathroom and took two colchicine pills plus an Oxycontin for the pain. His daily allopurinol had lost the battle with gout and now the crystallized purines in his toe were grating against the nerve endings. It had obviously been the tripe because he remembered tripe had been on the gout list his doctor had given him. It was usually doe liver during deer season. Like his father before him Sunderson simply couldn’t resist deer liver.