The Great Leader

He had dinner with Diane and Mona once a week after taking Diane’s declining husband for a ride out in the summery landscape. Mona had moved in with Diane and now acted a bit more girlish rather than prematurely womanly. Her ditzy mother hadn’t protested the change in her daughter’s parentage and had immediately sold the house to a young academic couple with a little money on the side. Sunderson couldn’t help but pull out the Slotkin book for a little peek at the attractive wife. One stellar morning he had caught her doing yoga in a skimpy leotard and his blood pressure ascended. What was this yoga thing? Wasn’t it also a religion? He had been pleased on Memorial Day when it was an untypically hot day and Mona had bathed nude in a spring hole in the creek that he hadn’t watched but fled back into the woods. A girl needed a father figure not a lecher. He bet that Adam would keep a close eye on Morning Star.

Soon after he had returned home he had bought a pedometer and now on an unpleasantly warm Labor Day weekend he checked his mileage, startled that he had walked seven hundred miles in four months, an average of five miles a day. This was neither here nor there except to remember that such diverse figures as Thoreau, Kierkegaard, and George Bernard Shaw had said that you could walk yourself into serenity. He doubted that but walking and fishing filled his life in a way that his work had long ceased to. He knew he wouldn’t become as well mannered as his father but kept a fairly tight lid on his irascibility. He was charged with assaulting two college students but the charges were dismissed when it was determined they were setting off cherry bombs near Sunderson’s garage. That made the Marquette Mining Journal with “Retired Detective Subdues Athletes with Clothesline Rope.”

He didn’t drink less on purpose he just drank less by switching to wine, the quantity of which could be more easily controlled. With the help of a surveyor he blocked out an even square mile of state land near Marion’s cabin having decided to do a flora and fauna identification and species count. His stack of nature guidebooks was becoming well thumbed and he liked the idea of investigating the nature of nature excluding the human species and its charnel-house history. Enough is enough.

On a Sunday morning before Labor Day he stopped by Diane’s house to check out dinner plans just as a hospice worker and an RN arrived. Diane was making arrangements for a full day off and Sunderson and Mona took a short walk down to the beach near the Coast Guard station. Mona waded in and said it was the warmest she had ever felt Lake Superior. She was distracted with butterflies because she was leaving for Ann Arbor and the university midweek. When they got back to Diane’s house a pile of camping gear was stacked on the porch and the temperature was already in the eighties. Diane’s face was tight and distraught. She told them her husband had suggested an overnight camping trip while he came as close to euthanizing himself as possible without the final step.