The Great Leader

And the novel Lolita was nearly unreadable what with the hero Humbert Humbert being a perverted nitwit bapping a thirteen-year-old girl and covering up his crime with layers of intricate thought and language. Marion counseled him on this problem.

“Fucking is fucking but what adds a good measure is the aesthetic backdrop. There are a dozen reasons for his criminal lust but they are inseparably intertwined. Remember what you said after talking to that drug cartel guy in Nogales, about sex, religion, and money being knotted together and impenetrable like the structure of a bowling ball? Desire is like that and the cues are subtle and infinite.”

Sunderson mentally backpedaled when he recalled making love to a slumming sorority girl he had met in a boring but required sociology class. He had bought sandwiches and a six-pack and they took a long car ride. It was early June and they had made love in a foot-high wheat field near a creek out near Fowlerville. It was her idea and they had never made love again but this one occasion was lunar. When they had finally risen it looked as if deer had bedded in the wheat.

He had become obsessed with Deloria’s Playing Indian until he had to put it away for a while. And Mona required time. Her mother had made a horrid three-day visit and her father had the dealership deliver a compact Honda which Mona had left in the drive until it was covered with four feet of snow. She had also begun dating a freshman from Northern Michigan University, a diminutive but bright physics major from Newberry. Sunderson was embarrassed over his vague jealousy when he detected they were sleeping together. During a brief thaw he had grilled steaks for himself and Mona and described to her a peculiar case near Detroit where a boy barely over eighteen had made love to a girl barely under eighteen and had been prosecuted for statutory rape.

“Hey, fuck you fucking hypocrites. You’d love to lock up Romeo and Juliet,” she exploded.

It took a full half hour to calm her down decisively. She ate with her hands and chewed at her rib steak angrily. He reflected how intolerant the young are of adult ironies and that a compendium of our sexual laws might exceed the size of the Chicago phone book. The effort to keep us from maiming each other often goes awry. The mating schedule of dogs and cattle seemed more reasonable and depended on a biological alarm that only rang once or twice a year. Humans were cursed with the sexual persistence of mice.

Chapter 19

Sunderson kept a terse journal of the season, a “winter count” in native terms, biding his time until he could drive to Arizona in April and track the departure of the cult from Tucson to Nebraska.

He had a close call near Grand Marais while heading the few miles down the beach to revisit the dunes and Au Sable Falls. He should have known better on the bright sunny afternoon that he might not beat the massive black front coming from the northwest toward town. He didn’t and the fifty-knot winds and driving snow made him fearful. Luckily he could hear the harbor foghorn above the wind and there was a jumble of ice near the shore so when his way was blocked by ice piles he bore to the right. There were frozen tears of pleasure when he reached the township park and could see the lights of the tavern. Driving home was plainly impossible so he checked into a motel and headed to the bar questioning what he loved about his bedraggled landscape aside from its carpet of forest and clearings, the rivers, creeks, swamps, countless beaver ponds, and the terrain, occasionally rolling and hilly but mostly flattish in western terms. It had been entirely cut over by the timber barons except for a few minimal shreds of land, and after that pulped relentlessly of its second, third, and fourth growth for the paper mills, and mined to exhaustion of its iron and copper. Maybe it was the hundreds of miles of Lake Superior shoreline, much of it undisturbed, that saved the area, or even the Lake Michigan coast to the south, more pleasant, much less ominous than Superior so that even the people a hundred miles to the south were gentler and less cranky. He also thought his love for the area rose from the indefatigable creature life, his beloved trout and the thousands of bear, deer, otter, wolves, beaver, and other creatures, even loving the ugly and slow porcupine, the millions of birds and wildflowers. It was so good to live in a place largely ignored by the rest of the world.

Chapter 20