The Great Leader

When he pulled into his drive just before dark Marion was finishing raking the yard and Mona was picking up windfall apples near his Jonathan tree, which yielded only every few years due to late frosts. Sunderson remembered that Marion’s wife was in Milwaukee on tribal business and Marion was going to grill his signature Hawaiian pork chops. Mona put her hand on his shoulder and said she was going to make an apple tart. There was a new twinkle in her eye and he wondered again if she was wise to his window peeking. There was certainly no way to correct his stupidity in not turning out the lights. Of course this is what the Great Leader Dwight was talking about: to make the present and future a far better place to live you must change your past, which is to say, before window peeking make sure there’s no backlight.

He poured himself a drink and watched Marion and Mona out the kitchen window. There was no dealing with Marion’s peculiarities. Fifteen years before when Marion had quit drinking after a single AA meeting he felt he had to keep himself busy and so did such things as mow and rake Sunderson’s yard, replace the garage roof, build new steps to the basement because the old ones had become rickety-though as a middle-school principal Marion had always made more money than Sunderson who still resented mowing or raking lawns for a quarter in his childhood.

Sunderson also resented biology when Mona came in and began peeling and coring the apples at the kitchen table. He sat down across from her and made his employment proposition. He would construct an exhaustive list of questions about Dwight and turn her loose on her computer. She was happy because her mother’s on-the-road cosmetic business wasn’t doing well during the financial collapse, and then she said blankly that her mother was conducting an affair with a rich old businessman in Charlevoix. She had read some of her mother’s filthy e-mails and she then did a mocking imitation of her mother’s chirpy voice, “Oh Bob, I love the way you lick my pussy for a whole hour.” Mona added that she had found out via her computer that Bob had been making their mortgage payments for the last three months.

Sunderson felt his face redden as he stared down into his whiskey. The frankness of young women these days always caught him off guard and made him feel like a middle-aged antique, or like a diminutive football player without a face guard on his helmet.

Now Mona took off her sweater and she was wearing a beige T-shirt with no bra underneath. Not wanting to confuse himself further he inspected Marion’s extra thick pork chops on the kitchen counter and out the window could see him cranking up the Weber grill with his usual mixture of charcoal with split oak for extra heat. It was then that Sunderson had the peculiarly unpleasant notion that he knew nothing about religion much less the spirituality that carried the outward form of religion. How then could he understand Dwight and his erstwhile followers when he had no real conception of their spiritual impulses? He then realized that if at gunpoint it was demanded of him he likely couldn’t define the word “spirituality.” The idea was simply enough not something that held his interest.

“Daddy, are you depressed about retirement?” Mona embraced him from behind and he stared down at the tiny gargoyle tattooed on her arm. At times she jokingly, or so he thought, called him “daddy.” She smelled sweetly of the windfall apples and he felt her breasts against his back. His embarrassment about lust was clearly a Lutheran hangover from childhood when a Sunday school teacher, an obviously gay young man, had told the roomful of little boys that they must treat girls as if they were their sisters. In other words Sunderson knew religion as a systematic description of right and wrong behavior. Historical religion was mostly another power to be reckoned with. This diverted him to a book he had read about the criminal uselessness of the Catholic Church in saving Jews during World War II. All of those bleeding Jesuses on the cross he had seen with his wife in Italy had left him cold as an ice cube while the emerging Venus at the Uffizi had given him half a hard-on.

He turned but Mona didn’t let go. She put her face in his neck and said, “You didn’t answer me.”

“I’ve never been happier in my life,” he lied.

“Oh bullshit,” she answered as Marion walked in through the porch door to the kitchen.

“Sixteen will get you twenty,” Marion laughed, meaning that if Sunderson and Mona continued on to the biological conclusion he could go to prison.

“He’s a stuffy old prick and would never fool with me,” Mona joked. “I did get some gossip about him this morning, though.”

“It’s not true!” Sunderson barked, reddening. He had been thinking about something the great luminaire Sir Francis Bacon said but it had slipped away. He couldn’t help but presume that Dwight understood the conflict between religion and sex and had simply decided to meld the two.