The Great Leader

Sunderson hastily had a cup of coffee and packed two sandwiches made of the party’s prime beef-it had been only the third time in his life he had eaten prime. He rechecked the gear in his day pack and decided to leave his service revolver behind. No more of that he thought though he would continue to possess a concealed-weapons permit in case any of the felons he had gotten convicted bore a grudge. On the way out the back door he had second thoughts and turned back, entered his studio, and pulled the Slotkin volume. It wasn’t a school morning and the odds on seeing a nude Mona were slim but why commit the sin of omission? There she was topless wearing a skimpy pair of panties. He took the monocular out of his jacket pocket and focused on her butt cleft in which the panties were drawn up tightly. Of all things she was reading Audubon Magazine. He focused on her breasts, then her face, utterly startled because she seemed to be looking at him. Of course his studio door was open and the kitchen light shone brightly. He had always been a bit clumsy at surveillance. There was a niggling suspicion that Mona was putting on a show for him. He ducked and smiled, questioning whether this was a proper way for a retiree to begin his first full day of freedom, a towering item in itself, but then he had long since admitted that he wasn’t particularly high-minded as he had proved the night before. A long day’s walk in wild country was clearly in order no matter that the day had begun humbly with an intense but guilty view of Mona’s butt crack. Like so many of us Sunderson wished to be brighter than he was, bright enough but not to the point that he could overcome his very human fickleness. Back in his sophomore year in college an acquaintance had loaned him Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer but Sunderson had finished less than half the book so fearsome was the disorder of the lives of the characters. Sunderson was the first in his greater family to go to college and to finish college and to succeed in life you had to keep the lid screwed on pretty tight, not a frequent modus operandi for a young man hailing from the Upper Peninsula.

Two hours into his journey he stopped in Bruce Crossing for a hasty Bloody Mary having admitted that though his hangover wasn’t in the top one hundred of his life it nevertheless existed and part of unscrewing the tight lid of his life involved the free following of impulses.

In truth his retirement party had fulfilled none of his anxieties. It began at seven with heavy drinks and hundreds of oysters, went on to rib roasts so fine that they were gorged upon, caramel sundaes, then two dancing girls in the overheated cabin, and the party was over at ten.

A modest revelation occurred on the drive to Au Train when Marion told him that as the school principal he knew that the eighth-grade daughter of a cult member was pregnant, at fourteen a different victim than the twelve-year-old. Sunderson pretended to be unconcerned and said that when he had seen the girl she had looked a tad blimpy and then he asked, “Who was the guilty party?” He was disappointed when Marion said that the girl had told the school counselor that it could have been any of four or five men but that her most persistent lover had been an Indian. Naturally Sunderson wanted to hear that her only lover had been the Great Leader himself. A firm charge of statutory rape would have nailed the sucker assuming that he was not dead and could be found. Sunderson was confident that Dwight wasn’t dead and had wondered if the man could fly a plane because an ultralight had been found by a grouse hunter two days before in a field near Bessemer a hundred miles from cult property. However, Roxie said that no pilot’s license had ever been issued in the name of any of Dwight’s aliases. He felt he was losing his incisiveness because he couldn’t remember if the other victim was twelve or thirteen. Did it matter? What was truly boggling was that the mother wouldn’t sign a complaint. What kind of religion condoned child rape?