PART IV
Chapter 14
He awoke just before daylight feeling rather good and vowing to turn his life around. He had the firm idea that the loop he had been thrown for by Diane leaving him had been waiting for him a long time and he had been too densely wrapped up in his habits to see it coming. There was an urge to list these habits many of which were involved in his wrongheaded perceptions of the nature of life but he was eager to bundle up and walk down to the beach. Ever since childhood he had been addicted to the beauty of severe storms and had been raised in and lived in the right place to appreciate them. He had heard the storm and despite being frightened by Lake Superior gathering in strength when he woke to pee at five a.m. he hurried through a bowl of tasteless oatmeal without milk and reheated coffee without cream in eagerness to see the mounting seas. He hadn’t been to the grocer’s since arriving home because he was an absentminded dipshit, or so he thought. He listened carefully to the weather on the local NPR station disappointed that it wouldn’t be a full gale though by evening the wind would gust to sixty knots, enough to raise the seas high indeed.
He headed out into the teeth of the northwest wind, his eyes tearing and his wool watch cap pulled over his ears, consoling himself that the wind would be at his back on the way home. Well before he finished the seven-block walk he regretted not putting on long underwear. His dick was turning into an ice cube. He tried very hard to remember the dream that had made him feel so good on waking but failed other than to see in his head the middle branch of the Escanaba River south of Gwinn, normally a fearful place because he had once stumbled in his waders and gone under in a swift stretch of the river. Anyone who didn’t think waterboarding was torture had never come close to the ultimate horror of nearly drowning wherein you’re wallowing, sucking water rather than air.
Turning from the beach and the loose sand and snow blasting into his face with the thunder of the waves in his ears he resented the frailty of his age. He felt that the cold was his heritage and now it was betraying him, a bit dramatic for the simple fact that he had forgotten to put on his wool long underwear.
It was nearly pleasant walking back toward home with the north wind helping to push him up the long hill. He stopped at the grocer’s on Fourth, amused at a woman getting out of her car and standing in the full force of the blizzard talking on her cell phone. Nothing will stop the addiction to this instrument he thought. The spring before while searching for a perp on the campus of the local university he figured that of the hundreds of students crisscrossing the campus between classes a full 90 percent were on their cell phones.
His breath shortened a bit when the woman on the phone followed him into the grocer’s. He held the door and she walked right past him jabbering away without recognizing him. “Fred’s been quite a disappointment,” she said.
It was Debbie Anne, his girlfriend when they were both sophomores at Munising High School. Age had not been kind to her and it was her voice rather than her appearance that immediately gave her away. They used to drive into the country and get in the back of his ’47 Dodge to make out. She was sexually precocious and popular with the school athletes. She would help his trembling hands pull on a Trojan-Enz condom and then say, “You can park your car in my garage and throw the key in the grass,” a line from a dirty joke. She would hoot and chirrup when they screwed. He quickly dodged through the aisles foreshortening his shopping for fear she would recognize him. She was still talking while she sorted through the big family packs of pork chops when he escaped.
Back home he hastily took out a notebook before the heat of the house could make him drowsy. He turned to a fresh page avoiding any notes he had made about Melissa and Xavier in Nogales. He wrote:
My job as a janitor trying to sweep up the detritus of society is over. My grand finale will be to get the Great Leader in prison but this might not be possible.
My divorce has blown a three-year-long bomb crater in my life. I have to get over this before it destroys me at which it is presently doing a good job.
I have to control my habits. In the glory days of marriage I’d have two drinks after work, then a glass of wine with Diane at dinner, and then a nightcap while reading in the late evening. Any more than this has come to depress me. I want to feel good like I did when I camped for a week in Aravaipa Canyon. I have to drive over to Shingleton and buy a new pair of snowshoes. It occurs to me that no matter that he’s a lunatic the Great Leader is a pretty smart guy with a lot of resources and if I’m going to catch him with blood on his hands I better go into training.
Lunch with Carla at the Landmark Inn was confusing. She had come into the restaurant with Queenie who was seated across the room with two elegantly dressed men who, Sunderson decided, couldn’t possibly come from the state of Michigan. Carla told him blithely that the two men were friends of Queenie’s from Los Angeles. After Brown University Queenie had gone to film school at UCLA and the men were producers, a mysterious term to Sunderson. The men struck him as a new kind of tooth decay in the mouth of the room. He was impatient to get on with the denouement but couldn’t repress his curiosity about these interlopers.
“So they came to Marquette for the blizzard?”
“Effective people don’t hang around watching the weather channel like locals do. Queenie has the idea that Dwight’s life would make a great movie. These guys are also interested in the idea that if you create a viable new religion you got a real moneymaker on your hands.”
“No shit?” Sunderson’s mind whirled with the idea.
“We stayed up most of the night partying and talking about both the movie and religion-for-profit idea. Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson took in billions.”
“But they were ostensibly Christian,” Sunderson countered.
“It doesn’t matter. We’re starting from scratch like the Mormons. They’re a worldwide powerhouse. We’re also using the recruitment techniques of the Scientologists. They’re a bright bunch.”
Sunderson sat there looking around the familiar room to make sure he hadn’t been transported to an asylum. He had ordered a bowl of chili and very much wanted a beer, which was verboten because of his upcoming appointment at the high school. Carla did look like she had been rode hard and put away wet. Her eyes were bleary as she sipped her second glass of sauvignon blanc and played with her Caesar salad (without anchovies).
“It sounds utterly deranged.”
“That’s because you’re trapped in your tiny ex-detective box. You don’t have a clue what the world has become. The real movers and shakers are out there on the peripheries discovering new forms. Think of Bill Gates thirty years ago, damn it. Dwight’s basic tenet is that semen is the most powerful fluid in the world. It’s been totally overlooked. I mean that the Bible said you’re not supposed to spill it on the ground, you know jerk off, but that’s not what he’s doing.”
“Pardon?” Sunderson felt his neck redden because four ladies at the next table had turned hearing the magic world semen.