The Great Leader

He fled out to the Skandia area for a hike. The temperature had risen to a balmy ten degrees above zero and he made a three-hour circle on a packed snowmobile track, which made walking without snowshoes easy. When the car came in sight after the lovely mindless exhaustion he wasn’t ready to go home yet and stopped and built a small fire out of dead pine branches to keep himself company. He was thinking about back after 9/11 when he had attended two law enforcement conferences in Canada on the cooperative efforts to prevent terrorism. The problem seemed unlikely indeed in the Upper Peninsula but the U.S. government was paying the tab and the chief ordered him to go. The first was in Toronto and the meetings were mostly pathetic nonsense but the city was wonderful. He met a now retired Toronto detective named Bob Kolb and they talked for hours in taverns and restaurants about trout fishing and grouse and woodcock hunting. There was another meeting a few months later in Calgary wherein much the same material was repeated so that one day he and Kolb skipped a couple of sessions to see the zoo. Strange to say Sunderson had never been to a zoo and the event comprised the beginning of what passed for him as a spiritual life. Soon after entering they saw a group of giraffes and Sunderson stared long and hard at a very young giraffe, a weanling, feeling goose bumps sweep up and down his body. Simply enough, the animal seemed impossible. How could it exist? Of course he had seen pictures but they had meant nothing. How could this creature have been invented? He had taken several college science courses and he was a devout evolutionist but he suspected a mind had to be behind this sublime creature, maybe what Indians called the Great Spirit.

There were repercussions that continued onward to the present time. A trout wasn’t just a trout any more than a crow was simply a crow. This spirit of attention wasn’t with him often but often enough. Marion was better practiced in this spirit of attention and when Sunderson visited Marion’s remote cabin he learned a great deal from him. Once they had found a dead yellow-rumped warbler which Sunderson had kept and put in a plastic bag in the freezer to remind him of the ineffable. A creek or river would also change the texture of his spirit so that staring into the moving water would make his brain tingle as it had in his childhood when wonder is nothing special but an everyday event.

Stooping before the fire his back and butt were chilled with drying sweat. When his job confused him he often reread from a letter Kolb had sent years before now kept in a tiny plastic envelope in his wallet. Kolb was responding to Sunderson’s note on how simple it must be to work in the U.P. compared to an immense city like Toronto. “No surprise but the TV networks, the news media, and I imagine most writers, have got it wrong. Crime is not interesting, it’s pathetically predictable. Nothing has changed since Cain slew Abel. Greed, jealousy, mental instability, and economic deprivation remain the prime ingredients. Religion has a place as well. Today substance abuse and moral lassitude thicken the gravy. The interest is in the circumstances, not the act, and not necessarily the people directly involved. Witnesses seldom tell the same story. For any detective, geography notwithstanding, police investigation involves hours of grinding boredom interspersed with moments of shit-your-pants excitement. The latter keeps the adrenaline junkies in the game.”

Sunderson watched the fire die. He shivered and anticipated the soup Mona said she would make out of venison shanks and neck plus barley and his favorite vegetable, rutabaga. Sunderson didn’t realize that he had been a good detective because he was utterly ordinary like a root vegetable. He didn’t separate himself from others like the Romantic hero, writers, painters, famed athletes. He made warm eye contact and spoke slowly in the grungy local accent. “Let’s have a brewsky, hey?” People were disarmed and told him everything. His day job had been total consciousness.

Chapter 18

Winter passed quickly. He hit a long stretch of the best aspect of retirement which was freedom, the texture of which he had never totally experienced since before the age of twelve when he had begun working. He studied maps over breakfast and when he arrived at various destinations the only significant decision was whether to use cross-country skis, snowshoes, or whether there were solid enough snowmobile trails to go on foot. He had an upsetting pratfall with Roxie one evening when he couldn’t get it up, rarely a problem. The throbbing, warm clothes dryer didn’t work and she was chewing and snapping Dentyne the odor of which he never cared for. She wept and lapsed into bad grammar. “I don’t turn you on no more.”