Read The Great Leader for Free Online Page A

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.
    Sunderson finished his lunch and had his last cup of lukewarm coffee. He glassed a distant hill with his binoculars. There was a mob of northern ravens circling and the hill was reachable from an overgrown two-track near the gate. This was doubtless the location of the cult’s gut pile and boneyard for the game they shot. He decided not to visit primarily because of the queasiness engendered by his hangover. Along with the modest ill feelings, he did not want to see a pile of desiccated deer carcasses, probably a few beaver, raccoon, even porcupine thrown in. Marion had once made a porcupine stew that was quite good if a little fatty. He doubted that there would be any bear skeletons as the more traditional Chippewa (Anishinabe) were hesitant about killing bear for religious reasons. It had to be done just so.
    The vagaries of a hangover included gratuitous guilt and he speculated at the speed the news of his misbehavior the night before would spread. As he hit the uncomfortable muddy potholes on the way out he could imagine that every­one at the party except Marion would be busy sending out the news of his coupling with Carla over the woodpile. Men in general were far worse gossips than women. There were a dozen or so Munising–Au Train area retirees out in Tucson and it was not unlikely that his iron mother would hear the story. She thought of herself as very religious but she loved bawdy gossip as long as it wasn’t connected with a member of her own family. He didn’t want to imagine his arrival in Tucson for Thanksgiving if she knew the story, which he suspected she would. The comic aspects of a sixty-five-year-old man being intimidated by his eighty-seven-year-old mother were not lost on him.
    On the drive home he pondered his confusion about whether or not to learn how to operate a computer. Roxie had been badgering him on the issue because she would no longer be at his service. She figured she could teach him the essentials in a couple of weeks during the evenings but he was resisting on the basis of not wanting any more obligations. The phone was bad enough and he had noted the general slavery of e-mail in people he knew. His neighbor Mona, the goth hacker, had told him he could just do research and avoid e-mail. She needed pocket money and had offered to help him for ten bucks an hour. There had been a confidentiality issue but now that he was retired it was no longer relevant.
    When he pulled into his drive just before dark Marion was finishing raking the yard and Mona was picking up windfall apples near his Jonathan tree, which yielded only every few years due to late frosts. Sunderson remembered that Marion’s wife was in Milwaukee on tribal business and Marion was going to grill his signature Hawaiian pork chops. Mona put her hand on his shoulder and said she was going to make an apple tart. There was a new twinkle in her eye and he wondered again if she was wise to his window peeking. There was certainly no way to correct his stupidity in not turning out the lights. Of course this is what the Great Leader Dwight was talking about: to make the present and future a far better place to live you must change your past, which is to say, before window peeking make sure there’s no backlight.
    He poured