The Great Leader

by Jim Harrison

  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?

  When Marion pulled the car up to the cabin for the party he handed Sunderson an envelope from his ex-wife and turned on the interior lights. There was an intensely risqué photo of Diane he had taken the first year of their marriage with a Polaroid camera her parents had given them for Christmas. One evening, after they had drunk a good deal and smoked a whopper joint he had taken the photo as she lay naked and laughing on the sofa of their married student apartment. The photo excited him so much that they had made love twice and cooked midnight hamburgers for their poststoned hunger. In the morning he had furtively looked for the photo, which was gone, and she pretended she had no idea where it was. He had been furious and now more than forty years later he was looking at the photo. He handed it to Marion who said, “Jesus Christ but you were a lucky dog.” Sunderson read the note that began with “Dear Big Boy,” his nickname, but it only said, “Thought you might like this memento of our marriage.” She had always had a remarkably tricky sense of humor and now he felt a hopeless sense of desire for her. He knew he lacked the courage to throw the photo away. It was a totem for his life, simply enough.

  In just short of three hours he reached the turnoff from the county road on to the lumpy five-mile two-track leading to the longhouse, disappointed that there was a single set of tracks in the moist soil leading in but not returning. He did not want to see anyone and had hoped for a day of solitude, quite understandable in the aftermath of his retirement party. He had a cup of coffee and half a sandwich leaning against the hood of the ancient Subaru that he used for his excursions into the immense outback of the Upper Peninsula. A nearby elderberry held a noisy group of cedar waxwings eating their berry fuel for the trip south. The sandwich meat was so delicious he wondered what kind of cattle gave up such flavor. He felt a bit stupid that he hadn’t brought along his fishing gear. The season was closed but he could have caught a few brookies for pleasure and released them and the thought of a brook trout’s cool slippery skin reminded him of the young woman the night before. The dancing girls who provided the entertainment turned out to be Carla, the young woman he had interviewed at lunch, whose dad spanked her bare butt, and Queenie, Dwight’s primary girlfriend from Bloomfield Hills who had provided the thirty grand toward the purchase of the cult property and other expenses. In Sunderson’s experience such young women generally turned out to be less than they appeared, pretty but no content. This also confirmed his suspicion that Carla was likely still in the cult. He had been startled by their immense physical presence in the not very large room. They began by sitting facing the banquet table on a sofa before the roaring fireplace. They were wearing the demure attire of the sorority girls of his distant past: pleated plaid skirts and white blouses. Carla turned on their boom box to the Grateful Dead and they danced with frantic but somehow graceful energy. The music segued into “Born to be Wild” and they began laughing and wrestling on the sofa, tearing at their clothes until they wore only tiny half-slips with no panties and began to neck passionately. Then on cue the cook turned out the lights though the girls were still visible on the sofa in the firelight dry humping with vigor. Suddenly they jumped up and ran out the door. Someone bellowed, “Jesus Christ, I can’t take it.” Sunderson whispered to Marion, “I’m going out for a pee,” and Marion said, “I’ll bet.”

  Outside in the dim porch light Carla was standing near the woodpile staring at him and Queenie was dressing in the interior light of her Yukon. He felt a little faint as he walked slowly toward Carla who was hugging her chest in her slip and waiting patiently. They embraced and her back was slippery with cooling sweat. He wanted to go down on her but she turned her back and leaned against the woodpile. In a moment he was in like Flynn as they used to say and she whispered, “Slap my ass,” which he did with gusto. It was a brief mating and then she ran off to her car. He stumbled and then sat down heavily on a pile of wood to light a cigarette. A number of men waved from the cabin windows but he didn’t wave back now feeling a rush of embarrassment. Oh well, he thought, and when he managed to make his way back into the cabin the men absurdly sang, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Sunderson poured a tumbler full of whiskey and drank it with another bowl of caramel ice cream after which he chewed on a bloody beef bone. In technical terms he was not fully conscious. Marion said, “You’re entitled,” thinking him morose rather than dumbstruck. Normally he was no more spontaneous than barbed wire.

  His temples tingled in embarrassment as he finished the first half of his sandwich. Once a Lutheran, forever a Lutheran, his family’s nominal faith, which mostly meant the women and children went to church and the men stayed home Sunday morning, went fishing or did yard work or shoveled the snow. Religion was merely there like cod liver oil, taxes, the beginning of school.

  Now he heard a vehicle coming up the miserable road from the compound, a two-track that only sportsmen with 4WDs would gamble on what with getting stuck being a central facet of the U.P. experience. Sunderson was irritated because he had called and requested that an Ontonagon County deputy secure the crime scene with a piece of yellow tape across the road. He had made the call the day before but his real motive had been that he wanted to wander the full section of cult land, 640 acres, in solitude unbotched by grouse hunters or the bow hunters who had an early deer season or those who drove their junkers around on Saturdays working on a case of beer and pretending they were looking for a big buck for the oncoming gun season in November.

  It turned out to be a realtor and client in a spiffy but now mud-spattered newish Tahoe. He flipped his expired badge in his billfold and they got out of the car, the realtor reddening, and the client, a man in his fifties, yawning in his expensive Orvis-type sporting wear.

  Sunderson was fatigued with protocol and simply said, “What’s up? You violated a crime scene.”

  The upshot was that the deputy had neglected to tape the entrance to the cult compound. The confrontation became civil out of necessity. The realtor said he had received a phone call asking him to show the property.

  “Who was the owner?”

  “A guy named Dwight Janus.”

  “From where?”

  “I don’t know,” the realtor said then began fiddling with his cell phone. “The area code is five-two-zero.
”

  “That’s the Tucson, Arizona, area code,” the client said gazing north down the two-track. “What a frightful road.”

  “What would you do with the longhouse?” Sunderson asked.

  “Sit in it with my English setter and forget the world. You have any idea of grouse and woodcock populations in the locale?”

  “Should be good. The cult shot and ate everything except birds. The Great Leader proclaimed that killing birds was taboo. He called them avian messengers.”

  “How delightful. It will be odd to buy a section of land for less than a pathetic house in Minneapolis.”

  The realtor was beaming. The recent financial collapse had brought his best efforts to a standstill and he had a son and daughter in college.

  They all shook hands. Sunderson gave the realtor his own numbers to pass along under the pathetic idea that Dwight might call him. He was pleased to see them drive away and imagined the effort the client would make putting up NO TRESPASSING signs, which would be ignored by locals. He stood there at high noon with the eerie feeling that only his curiosity was still ambitious. It would be a pleasure to never arrest anyone again or write a report beginning with, “The stolen ’73 Dodge was found abandoned two miles SW of Gwinn. The perp or perps left behind eleven empty beer cans and someone had shit on the backseat.” Crime did pay but usually very little. He began smiling with the thought of his lovely library and then the fact that Dwight’s most recent alias was Janus, a double-faced, fascinating prophetic figure from mythology. It was nearly as good as his claim that his mother was named Nokomis from Longfellow’s doggerel Song of Hiawatha. Behind his pomp the Great Leader had a sense of humor. Historically the mysteries of religion, sex, and money tended to accumulate pontifical phlegm rather than humor. And as a student of history Sunderson had been mystified since college with the particularities of the relationship between money, religion, and sex—in fact, obsessed.

  When he reached the gate of the cult’s property he felt a curious lightness descend upon him. He was properly suspicious of moods but figured this one had a pretty solid base. Since childhood he couldn’t remember ever having been free of multiple obligations and here on an early Saturday afternoon in late October he had no more duties than a cedar waxwing, in their case, to fill their tummies and head south.

  The trees were leafless and he intended to head up the creek to check for beaver ponds for possible future brook trout fishing but first he had to check out the longhouse. Three of the four doors were lockless and open but the fourth door in the back had its lock broken. What was the point? The fresh tracks in the moist earth told him that the realtor and his client had entered by the southward-facing front door. The broken lock was senseless and therefore worthy of investigation. The interior of the longhouse was cooler than the balmy outside air and the floor was covered with the discouraging remnants of domestic life: sneakers, baby shoes, unmatched socks, plastic dishes, cut-rate skillets, cotton gloves. In a food cache there was a case of canned peaches apparently deemed not worthy of hauling out and a few broken sacks of white flour, rice flour, and rice. Three mice looked up at him from deep in the bag of rice. The only thing he could determine that had real value in the long rectangular room were the six big potbellied stoves each with a large wood box beside it. Some local human scavengers were sure to carry off the stoves, which were easily worth a grand apiece. The last stove at the back was the nearest to Dwight’s quarters where the door with the broken lock was opened to the river thirty yards away down a slope. Dwight’s wood box turned out to have a false bottom and he cursed himself for not having searched the abandoned longhouse the week before. Someone had beat him to it, pushed the logs aside, opened the hinged boards, and rifled the contents. All that was left were environmental books and a stack of journal notebooks unused except for one that had a name and address inside the front cover: Philippe Desarmais, 13 rue Arenes. Sunderson recalled that Roxie had found a map of Arles on the computer and that particular street led to a coliseum still in use after two thousand years. With the help of a French teacher at the local Northern Michigan University Sunderson had written a letter of inquiry to the Arles municipal authorities and had received an answer in faultless English saying yes, the American Desarmais had created a modest stir in the area before being “urged” to move on. He had rented halls and gave well-attended speeches (free wine, cheese, and charcuterie) proposing the overthrow of the government of the United States, which, during the first term of Bush Jr., did not seem irrational. Dwight wanted the 512 tribes of Native Americans to be able to reclaim their ancestral land and the capital of the U.S. government to be reestablished in the more central location of Chicago. According to the Arles authorities Dwight had been there in April, out in the Camargue watching migratory birds returning from Africa. During an interview with an operative from French intelligence and representatives of local police Dwight, who seemed to be a bit drunk at the time, would not disavow the possible use of violence. With European financial help he planned on arming Indian tribes. The police, who had noted that Dwight spoke good schoolboy French, had him pack his bags and then put him on the train to Marseilles, which was being indulgent of international riffraff.

  Back home in Ontonagon someone had also taken the bearskin and other fur decorations from the longhouse and Sunderson wondered idly about the still enduring human preoccupation with fur. Once he and Diane had made love on a bearskin in a friend’s cabin and the fur seemed to invigorate him.

  Sunderson stood at the open back door leaning against the wall next to the doorjamb and noted a small latch on the wall. He popped the latch and there was a tiny closet containing a stack of bird books and, of all things, a dozen expensive, lacy nightgowns.

  The whole thing was giving Sunderson a headache so he took an hour’s walk up the creek and back. The wind began clocking from the south to the west, which meant it would likely be out of the north by nightfall bringing the normal ghastly weather of the season. Sure enough there were two fine beaver ponds with fine brookies rising to the year’s last insects. He meant to use his spotty introduction to the realtor’s client to gain access during the coming year’s trout season.

  On the way out he noted that he still felt a delicious lightness reminiscent of his childhood when the last day of school brought on a near frenzy of happiness. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old when he and two friends had begun camping out but then that was well before parents monitored their children so carefully. They would pack a few cans of beans, a skillet, salt and pepper, a loaf of bread, and a baby food jar of bacon grease to fry their fish catch. To Sunderson that beat the hell out of softball and besides he was too busy mowing lawns and washing cars for quarters to give him time to be on a team like the kids from better- heeled families.

  He was nearly to his vehicle when he turned to have a last look at the bathhouse. He believed in thoroughness rather than hunches or intuition and it occurred to him that if Dwight’s members survived on wild meat and foraging plus the usual staples of rice and flour there should be some indication of hunting like ammo or shell casings. Dwight was wise enough to limit the hunting to a half dozen Indian employees who had tribal rights in the area. They were doubtless aware of Dwight’s phoniness. Sunderson had talked briefly to a game warden who had done some snooping and had said the cult was circumspect in this matter.

  In the bathhouse were thatches of dried wildflowers hanging from the walls that pretty much absolved the place of the odor of human sweat. He turned on a shower that kicked in a demand generator for the pump. There was no hot-water tank so he presumed that they had settled for cold showers. There was a potbellied stove to keep the pipes from freezing. Even with the reputed free-for-all sex it must have been a dismal place in the winter. He had heard that Dwight made three-hour speeches in the manner of Fidel Castro. Dwight had told him that monotheism was destroying the world and that his people worshipped dozens of gods like many ancient societies. On the verge of leaving the bath
house he lifted the lid on one of the box benches noting that the piles of expensive towels were the name brand favored by his wife. He dug deep under each of the three benches and on the third came up with an M-16 rifle wrapped in oilcloth. On close inspection he noted this one was full automatic, making it a highly illegal weapon. It was easy to shoot a deer with this because you could fire off a banana clip of thirty cartridges in seconds. What to do? Nothing. He was no longer a cop but a curious citizen and gun laws are widely disregarded across America. His friend Marion who had been a marine told him that a good shot could stand at the end of a runway and conceivably bring down an airliner by firing a full clip of an AK-47 into the undercarriage beneath the pilots where the plane’s brain center was located. Sunderson had known many cops who owned illegal, full automatic weapons and it was hard to take the law seriously when owners were overwhelmingly nonfelons.