The Great Leader (24 page)

Chapter 18

Winter passed quickly. He hit a long stretch of the best aspect of retirement which was freedom, the texture of which he had never totally experienced since before the age of twelve when he had begun working. He studied maps over breakfast and when he arrived at various destinations the only significant decision was whether to use cross-country skis, snowshoes, or whether there were solid enough snowmobile trails to go on foot. He had an upsetting pratfall with Roxie one evening when he couldn't get it up, rarely a problem. The throbbing, warm clothes dryer didn't work and she was chewing and snapping Dentyne the odor of which he never cared for. She wept and lapsed into bad grammar. “I don't turn you on no more.”

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

He rather liked the idea that he was leaving for Arizona on April Fool's Day, a Saturday. He had hoped to leave at dawn but Mona who had come over to make him a cheese omelet and fried spuds had become clingy, a homely little word but
au point
. She was in her robe, pj's, and bunny slippers at the stove sniffling a bit and he thought goddamn the lame parents who abandon their children. One generation teaches the next to behave poorly ad infinitum. It all made him recall Dickens's
Bleak House,
which he had read in college and which made him feel like he was trapped in a dentist office every time he picked it up. Given how Sunderson had grown up with empathy for the poor it was not a far reach. His mother was always making truly poor families mountainous casseroles and his dad would deliver a couple of cords of split hardwood to keep them warm.

While eating breakfast his emotions were in his throat so he looked at topographical maps of the Chadron and Crawford area in Nebraska that Mona had ordered for him with the cult's one hundred sixty acres north of Crawford highlighted in pink. Mona pretended to be reading a book about the human genome but he had noted during the half-hour breakfast that she hadn't turned a page. They had embraced at the front door with his hands around her waist through her open robe encircling her flannel pajamas. He was startled when her body appeared to be humming.

“Come back to me. Don't die,” was all that she said and he was well west of town before the lump in his throat began to disappear. Why wasn't she a sensible age like forty-five? Time herself was askew on this spawned-out earth.

The little good-bye supper the evening before had been confusing. Marion's wife Sonia had brought over the same Mexican dish,
carne adovada,
that Melissa had made in Nogales and Sunderson was goofy enough to wonder if this coincidence was a good or bad omen. Sonia was always pissed off in her life's work of defending Indian interests but this evening she concentrated her angry energies on Dwight and the cult. Marion had idly mentioned the Jim Jones massacre in South America and Sonia tore off like an ICBM on the evils of a religion that could con over nine hundred people into cyanide suicide. Marion and Sunderson had tried to slow her down by raising the point that Dwight aka King David hadn't been very successful, never managing more than a hundred followers. This didn't work but then Sunderson knew the secret through Marion that Sonia had been misused as a girl by an uncle. Sonia drank her wine in gulps and shrieked that since Dwight would be arriving in Lakota country she hoped they would “scalp the motherfucker.” Mona, meanwhile, had been unusually quiet struggling with the melancholy of Sunderson's leave-taking so that when they kissed good night she didn't try to put any hip into it but had looked at him so somberly that he had doubled up on his nightcap when she left. The extra whiskey had a negative effect when he reached bed as his mind kept bringing up the old photos of the bloated bodies of Jonestown with the deliquescent flesh bursting against the confinement of the clothing.

Given a number of snow squalls and a sleet storm that froze on the roads it was late the second afternoon before he reached the Chadron area, which he wanted to reconnoiter before heading to Tucson for the planned cult departure within a week. If there were a change of plans he didn't want to be caught waiting in the wrong place. He had descended from Murdo, South Dakota, to Valentine, Nebraska, then headed west to Chadron, mightily impressed by the oceanic sweep of the Sandhills, the slight greenish tinge of the first grass of spring, and, when he peed off a side road, the peerless call of the meadowlark in the air that he figured must have reached forty-five degrees, the low-range cutoff for comfortable brook trout fishing.

In the mental comfort of solitary driving he felt that he had attained equilibrium sufficient for the mission at hand. He was somehow going to get the nutcase fucker into prison where the authorities would hopefully throw away the key. Still there was a nagging lack of confidence that intermittently hit him over being in an unfamiliar territory, something that had led to a miserable failure in the Nogales area. On their trip to Italy he had been jealous of Diane's competency. She had refreshed her university Italian, studied maps and local history, and was familiar with the contents of dozens of museums, and also restaurants which she researched through friends, travel guides, and the Internet. Meanwhile, before dawn and haunted by the usual jet lag, he sat in an eighteenth-century Florentine café of surpassing beauty brooding over a case that had arisen the day before they had departed on vacation. Over west in the Sagola area a retired miner had stomped his old wife into a condition near death. Normally the local sheriff's department would have handled the case totally but the stomping was so severe that it raised the possibility of attempted murder. The point was the “no exit” aspect of his job. How could he truly
be
in a Florentine café when he kept seeing in his mind's eye the old woman's knee that looked like a bright purple bowling ball? She had lisped through swollen lips, “I don't want my Frank to get in no trouble with the law.” How many times had he heard of this defense of the guilty? The population at large had no real idea of the amount of domestic malice. The grand prize had been won by a drunk who had screwed his two-year-old baby daughter.

He was anxious to survey the cult site north of Crawford, about fifteen miles from Chadron, but first checked in to the pleasant lodgings Mona had arranged for him in Chadron. There was also a fax from Mona that had likely been read by the desk clerk but he didn't care. “Please keep your cell phone on and charged. I need daily contact with your lovely voice that sounds like a coal shovel grating on cement. I lucked out and raised a chat room of an encounter group of people recovering from being ripped off by cults in America. One of them was a rich lady from Petoskey who had temporarily joined up with Dwight. We exchanged e-mails. She had dropped out because the longhouse accommodations near Ontonagon weren't up to snuff. She also wanted something more ‘Oriental' as her yardman was an Indian and wasn't very spiritual. As an initiation fee Dwight wanted 10 percent of her net worth which in her case was a lot of money. She admitted that she had long been a ‘spiritual adventurer' with a lot of cult experience. She also enjoyed the primitive sex. Anyway Dwight charges poorer members a minimum of twenty grand. I wondered why Carla didn't tell us any of this but Carla said that if any member breaks secrecy Dwight insists that they'll be reincarnated as an amoeba buried in a dog turd. Dwight received his dispensation from the gods while living with the Haida Indians on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia. I asked this lady why people would fork over that kind of money and she said that Americans don't believe in the value of anything unless it's expensive. Salvation and good future lives don't come cheap. Dwight really wanted her cash and declared that she was at the seventeenth stage out of a hundred. Everyone had to have a spirit creature and hers was the sandhill crane. Most poorer members are given the porcupine with which to enact mimesis, or the beaver so they'll work hard. Nifty isn't it? Love, Mona.”

Driving toward Crawford Sunderson reflected on how Mona liked to make him feel uncomfortable especially since he no longer peeked at her. Of greater concern was the idea that everything Dwight was offering was readily available for free to anyone who took the trouble to read a few ethnographic texts, or better yet more accessible anthropological material, or visit modern tribes during powwows. You didn't have to put in that much effort to get the gist but then it took a lifetime effort to internalize the messages assuming you could manage the indeterminate quality of faith.

When he reached the small road that led north to the area of the cult property his thinking rattled to a complete stop when it occurred to him that he had the advantage of growing up with the knowledge of Indians that was likely exotic and alien to others. His dear friend George, an Anishinabe, whom he had hiked and fished so much with when they were twelve, had a peculiar relationship with ravens. They'd ride their bikes from Munising out to a creek near Melstrand. A dozen or so ravens would follow them and George said they were from south of town where he lived in a trailer with his pulp-cutter dad and a crazy sister. George was a great mimic and talked to the ravens and they talked back with easy glibness. Late that summer when George got hit by a car while riding his bike on Route 28 there were ravens at the burial service led by a big bearded male George could hand feed. At the moment Sunderson figured that one reason he was so pissed about the cult is that Dwight was a blasphemy against the spirit of his friend George.

Sunderson drove south a few miles but only until the blacktop ended and the road became muddy and rutted. He was met by an oncoming three-quarter-ton pickup covered with mud and a man who waved him to turn around, yelling through his open window, “You ain't going to make it.” When Sunderson turned around he saw in the distance two cowboys on horseback driving a herd of cattle toward the west, the obvious answer though he had never been on a horse. Like it or not he'd have to masquerade as an old cowboy to conceal himself.

In a tavern in Crawford through the efforts of a friendly bartender he made a deal with a very tall mixed-blood Lakota to take him up to the cult property. The man's name was Adam and he was having a burger with his daughter who looked about eleven and was introduced as Morning Star, nicknamed Petunia. Adam was drinking coffee which was a good sign of reliability. When Sunderson told him the location of the property Adam said it had been bought by religious “kooks” partly as a camp for kids. Yes, indeed, Sunderson thought, kids are the thing. Staring at Adam he recognized the ex-alcoholic in him, possessing as he did many of Marion's hesitant mannerisms.

Sunderson had a fine, fatty rib steak in Chadron, slept well, and was back at the junction turnoff at first light. Adam was standing there rolling a cigarette with two mounted horses. Sunderson felt very awkward mounting and admitted this was his first time. Adam only said, “Don't fight it, sit easy.” It turned out to be a thirty-mile cross-country roundtrip and that eve-ning Sunderson thought of it as a day that would live in infamy as he applied ointment to his raw ass. He was rather proud that he had only fallen off once and that was when they were going down a steep embankment and he slid forward down the horse's neck into a small muddy creek. Adam had hoisted him back on the saddle as if he were a pillow. Sunderson was down from two hundred to one eighty but it was still no mean feat.

At the property, which wasn't much more than an abandoned farmhouse, a shed, a Quonset hut, and a ramshackle corral, Adam told him that a friend of his up in Pine Ridge had an order in for thirty-three high-end tipis. He had met the woman who bought the property and had been kind enough to give Morning Star a nice pair of earrings. He hoped to get on the crew that would set up the tipis and remodel the farmhouse. There was also talk about building a log lodge.

Adam unpacked some elk salami and fry bread from his saddle bag and they sat against the old house out of the gathering wind. Sunderson asked that his own visit be kept confidential explaining that he was a retired detective looking for a missing person. Adam said that he figured Sunderson to be a cop. Adam said he had quit his job butchering and skinning buffalo up in South Dakota because he wanted to get Morning Star out of the Rapid City area. He had quit boozing two years before but his wife couldn't so he packed up and brought his daughter down to Crawford near where his father had broke and wrangled horses on a big ranch. Sunderson said that he was headed for Tucson and would follow the cult up this way and hoped that Adam would rent him a horse so he could pass for a cowboy while looking for the missing person.

“You might need another lesson,” Adam said, pointing to Sunderson's horse which had been improperly tied to the corral and gotten loose.

“I'm sorry,” Sunderson said, feeling shamefaced.

“Sorry won't mean shit if you have to walk fifteen miles,” Adam said, then walked over and opened the door of the Quonset hut, hooting into the darkness. Out of curiosity the horse walked over to see what the fuss was about and Adam grabbed its reins.

A couple hours later back at their vehicle in the mid­afternoon Sunderson slipped getting off the saddle and hit the ground with his right foot still stuck up in the stirrup. Adam lifted him up and detached the foot, “You are not yet a cowboy,” Adam said.

After a long restless night trying to find a comfortable position for his improbably sore ass Sunderson packed up before dawn feeling less than grand having taken six ibuprofen and drinking a half-pint of whiskey to fall asleep. His childhood prejudices against cowboys and horses had returned but then he thought that out this way horses were the only practical way to get around for centuries. He would have to go into a Goodwill store and buy some used cowboy duds. He knew that if he kept a safe distance neither Dwight, Queenie, nor Carla would recognize him.

After steak and eggs and hash browns he headed out of town feeling glum about the evident connection of religion and death. “Jesus died for our sins,” the Lutheran minister used to say. Over nine hundred people at Jones­town committed suicide for whom in particular, an unknown God? Why were Sunnis and Shiites eager to blow themselves into hamburger? To Sunderson the purpose of life, simply enough, was life. He had never been willing like a sophomore atheist to deny anyone their hope of heaven. His mom, for instance, seemed perfectly confident that she would join her dead husband in heaven. Only the beauty of the Nebraskan landscape kept him from smothering in his mental detritus. He had noted many times how particular aesthetic aspects of the landscape could shut down the mind's dithering. During the last two months of the summer preceding the divorce when Diane had moved to a friend's cottage over in Au Train he had gone fishing every day after work not, certainly, in hopes of catching fish but to assuage his torments over her. A creek is more powerful than despair.