The Great Leader

But how about retirement? How about letting the mind rest? How about moving over toward L’Anse or Iron Mountain and escaping the scenes of crimes, his own and others. At least Mona was becoming part of his own extended family and disappearing as a sexual being. She was the only example he could think of that showed self-control. You could think it through all you want and you’re still going to get a hard-on over the wrong person and human peace is blown away. At least a tinge of incest made it taboo. Quitting drinking was out of the question. His cop mind needed a constant supply of adrenaline.

Just before dark he cooked his steak over a small fire of pine, never done in his homeland because the meat would taste like pine resin. His dad used to say, “A Saltine is a feast to a starving man,” but the crackers and cheese were nearly impossible because his mouth couldn’t raise enough spittle to effectively chew them. He coughed over and over and a small group of crows that had been hanging around since his arrival scolded him. The tough steak was better because it had some juice and despite the fact that the pine flavor and lack of salt would normally make it intolerable. After this supper and one of the best cigarettes of his life he took his leftovers thirty yards down the slope, returned to his perch, then watched the crows haggle over the food. They were survivors.

Curiously, rather than thinking through the case of the Great Leader, he could think of nothing, not even Diane or his long life. His mind was full of only the grandeur of where he was as if he was trout fishing in the sky. His muddled brain couldn’t begin to compete with the rising three-quarter moon and the immense thunderstorm far to the south.

He tried to fall asleep too early without success and felt he’d pay a thousand bucks for a few aspirin. He got up and walked in circles and tried to stretch out his lumpy muscles. He kept being revisited by the image of time going out the door but never back in. Where did this come from, this huge wooden door? The image arrived because it was true. It wasn’t an abstraction. The neurons made a painting of his anguish. It was the nursery rhyme where all of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men couldn’t put their marriage back together again. Diane’s face was a dozen miles south near the actual storm and the upcoming storm of her new husband’s death. Twenty years before they were visiting her parents near Ludington and went for dinner and dancing at a restaurant on the shores of Lake Michigan. They danced at least an hour to a rather schmaltzy Glenn Miller orchestra but loved it. Diane wouldn’t make love in her parents’ home so they stopped at a motel when they left the restaurant. It was a sublime night and the memory of it made him think his head would burst with tears. It was he who caused their marriage to stop dancing. Now his only fallback position with Diane and Mona was to become a perfect gentleman. After a single beer crazy Uncle Albert would walk in tight circles moaning and after a bender had to be confined in the VA for the last three years of his moaning life. When he was growing up everyone local remarked on Sunderson’s father’s good manners, now called for in his son’s life.

He struggled to drag his mind away from critical issues by pondering an article Mona had faxed him about these large moths that migrate by the millions from Nebraska to Wyoming and Montana and alight at an altitude of eight thousand feet on scree. Dozens of grizzly bears appear and eat up to ninety pounds of protein-rich moths apiece in a day. Staring at the immense thunderstorm moving from the east to the southwest he wondered how this could be? It was certainly a mystery that more deserved to be solved than the inscrutability of wife beating.

Now he saw Mona convoluted in the storm and recalled that the first time he saw her nude on the bed the lust was like a stomach cramp. What in God’s name did such lust mean? He was happy when there was a grand lightning stroke and the image of Mona was gone, clearly an experience that belonged to demonology as if the most haunted house of all were biology.

At dawn he felt creaky but had never slept so well in his life. He made a slow, perilous descent from the top of Crow Butte.

Chapter 21

Sunderson thought afterward that they were by far the longest three days of his life. Without the suppressed violence of the present they reminded him of the nasty heartache of homesickness in late spring at college turning in papers and taking exams before he could make the long drive north toward home. It was a lump in the throat time.