Read Online The Great Leader by Jim Harrison - Free Book Online Page B

something noteworthy.
    He had left his cell phone in the car and noted that Diane had called for “no reason,” or so she said in her message. He called back before he got on the freeway back to Tucson. While they talked he watched an octogenarian shuffling down the street with his walker. Sunderson resolved to shoot himself in the head before he would live in a retirement colony. Diane joked about his “scandalous missteps” with Carla. She had always been amused rather than judgmental about human foibles, but then her voice weakened and she said that two days before her husband had been diagnosed with liver cancer. Since he was a doctor himself he had become immediately depressed about the inevitable prognosis. “I’m so sorry,” Sunderson offered. “Things had been going so well,” she said before hanging up. She had only been married half a year.
    Heading north on the freeway he saw clearly again that like so many his marriage, the central fact of his life, had failed because the marriage and the job didn’t go together, couldn’t coalesce, couldn’t coexist in a comfortable manner. The simple fact was that when you worked all day monitoring the least attractive behavior of the species you’re going to carry the job home. Diane, a very bright woman indeed, couldn’t believe in the fact of evil, which always reminded him of Anne Frank’s deranged statement that people were essentially good. If you’re a cop long enough even songbirds are under suspicion. The daily involvement with minor league mayhem did not predispose one to large thoughts. His brain short-circuited again. His unused first name, Simon, only served to remind him of the Mother Goose verse, “Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair.” He signed his name S. Sunderson and no one he knew had the guts to call him Simon, except his mother. In his childhood any grade school boy that used Simon got his ass kicked while the girls tortured this sore point as did his sisters Berenice and Roberta. The family called Roberta “Bertie” because of the eccentricity of his parents calling the little brother Robert who had been the family’s long-term headache until he died of heroin in Detroit where he was the soundman for a Motown band. When Robert was a boy he’d had a terrible accident at the big saw at the pulp mill and Sunderson and the rest had all stood in a circle looking at Robert’s lower leg on the railroad siding. When the ambulance came the driver put the appendage in a small burlap bag. This item was large in Sunderson’s accretion of emotional mold.
    When he reached the Arizona Inn in the twilight he saw that Diane’s near doppelganger was sitting near the vacant Ping-Pong table under the smoking cupola. He barely had the courage but joined her and was rewarded with a broad smile. This made him happily nervous so he lit a cigarette. To his surprise she lit one of her own.
    â€œI rarely smoke but at dinner I had an argument with my mother. I’m fifty-five and she’s eighty but she tried to make me eat my spinach.” She laughed at the absurdity.
    â€œI had an argument with mine, too,” he admitted.
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œI misbehaved at my retirement party in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the news reached her by phone and e-mail all the way out here.”
    â€œWhat did you do?”
    â€œIt’s too indelicate to admit.” He felt himself blush.
    â€œPlease. I’m an Episcopalian but I’m an adult. I want to hear some naughty talk,” she laughed.
    â€œI sort of made love to a dancing girl out by a woodpile. There were witnesses looking out the window of the cabin.” He was pained to admit this but he liked the fullness of the laughter that ensued.
    â€œYou sort of made love! What did your mother say?”
    â€œShe said shame on you son.”
    More laughter and Sunderson leafed through a