The Great Leader

His heart warmed when he sat at his desk, as if a heart could smile. The only slightly jarring note was the original Marilyn Monroe calendar, discreet by current standards, and also a photo of the actress Blythe Danner who used to figure large in his limited fantasy life. His friend Marion, a mixed-blood middle-school principal, had loaned him a book on Native American longhouses, which he had misplaced but now turned up under a pile of early logging monographs. At the onset Marion had told him that Chippewa (Anishinabe) didn’t build longhouses but they were the chosen dwelling in the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy-Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk, Tuscarora-and in certain Pacific Northwest coast tribes like the Salish and the Suquamish who built one five hundred feet long. This latter fact jogged his mind and he shuffled through the papers of the Great Leader’s slender file finding the record of a Dwight Yoakam (an alias using a country singer’s name) being charged for disturbing the peace in Port Townsend, Washington, the year before. When Roxie called for the details Dwight had alarmed a group of Japanese tourists by speaking in tongues. When Sunderson had impounded Dwight’s old mint Nash Rambler for the day on the flimsy charge of larceny by conversion he had found nine current license plates in the trunk, one of them from the state of Washington. It was hard to explain to the Bloomfield Hills father that if his twenty-five-year-old daughter Portia, whom the cultists called Queenie, wished to give away thirty thousand dollars, mostly for propane heat for the longhouse and bathhouse, she was free to do so. The father, Sunderson thought of him as Mister Bigshot, got drunk at the Verling House the night he was in Marquette and propositioned a waitress for a grand, or so said an informant. They bathed in the Jacuzzi of the Teddy Roosevelt suite in the hotel on the hill. He fell asleep so she pulled the plug in the drain so he wouldn’t drown, removed the thousand from his wallet, and took her friends out drinking with a little cocaine on the side.

He didn’t have all that much information on the Great Leader but he still refused to ask the FBI for help. They were both nosy and condescending and as the disaster of 9/11 indicated they didn’t like to share the information they themselves ignored. Roxie had done the best she could in helping him build a file but in four days he would no longer be able to use her services. Despite his apparent intelligence he had never learned the computer mostly because of a lifelong aversion to electricity. When he was seven a cousin had been electrocuted having climbed the fence of the power station behind the pulp mill.

The ideal substitute for Roxie was the sixteen-year-old girl next door named Mona. She was an ace hacker and a detective friend of his who specialized in computer crimes told him that he kept her under surveillance. She mostly dressed in black explaining to him that she was a goth, which Roxie had explained to him but he kept forgetting the details. They talked a great deal partly because they were neighbors living solo. Her single mother was a traveling cosmetic salesperson so Mona was mostly alone though she said that she was never lonely. When they were both raking maple leaves a few weeks before Mona had teased him about blocking off his remaining dining room window with yet another bookcase. His Lutheran childhood still carried a miniscule weight but enough to make him ashamed of his motive. He could stand in front of the case and at eye level pull out Slotkin’s treatise on violence in America and look across thirty feet of yard directly into her bedroom. Strictly speaking it wasn’t illegal but what was it? A bare butt crack was mere negative space but then it could make the temples of a man very nearly sixty-five years old pound unpleasantly. The biological imperative was a distracting nuisance. Checking his watch he knew she would be getting up for school in fifty minutes and the question was did he have enough self-control not to take a peek, which often devolved into a fifteen-minute trance? Part of his mind ached with guilt over this dubious matter even though since he was in his own home peeking wasn’t criminal. Sexuality could be like carrying around a backpack full of cow manure, especially for a senior frantically holding on to waning impulses.