The Great Leader (26 page)

He was so enervated he drove all night, eleven hours in a row, finally collapsing at the rest stop on Interstate 40 between Santa Rosa and Tucumcari, New Mexico, sleeping deeply and drooling with the spring sun beating in the window. After washing up and getting a thermos of coffee at a gas station he called Mona. He had been brooding in the night about the ethics of sending the phony letter from the prosecutor to the Nebraska authorities. The odds of getting caught were so-so but he would also be making Mona culpable. When he had mentioned it on the phone the other day she was impulsively up for it but during the night he had developed doubts. The state police in Michigan had earned ubiquitous respect for being straight arrow, above reproach, and he had always played by the book. No matter how much he wanted to nail Dwight committing a felony to do so illegally would be a curse to carry the rest of his life since he was a memory junky and never forgave himself for anything.

“Hello darling.”

“I've been thinking about the letter we were going to concoct from the prosecutor. Let's forget it.”

“I could tell by your voice you didn't really want to. Hemingway said good is what you feel good after.”

“I never liked Hemingway.” He had a cigarette cough and gasped.

“Neither do I but what he said was true. The good thing in my life now is that I'm disowning my parents on the grounds of gross negligence and Diane's adopting me.”

“You're kidding me?”

“No, we've talked about it for hours. She's got a lawyer working on it. It's late but I could use an actual mother. What do you think?”

“I think it's wonderful.”

He was fueled by a giddy happiness for hours and then set about making a mental listing of a plan.

1. Buy old cowboy clothes in Chadron.
   
2. Move to Crawford to be closer to action.
   
3. Rent a horse from Adam.
   
4. Learn how to saddle it.
   
5. Stow car with Michigan plates. Rent old pickup.
   

He reached the cult site north of Crawford late the next afternoon pleased to see that Adam was part of a crew of fifteen men cleaning up the area and erecting the last half dozen big tipis, thirty of them in all on a flat out in front of the old house and corral. There were even a number of deep blue Porta-Potties and a water truck. He said hello to Adam's daughter, Morning Star, who was watching with some other kids and the wives of the workers in a near party atmosphere. There was a lot of comic banter about the coming cult. She said shyly that he could use her nickname, Petunia.

“Are these people crazy?” Petunia asked him with a smile. She was tall for her age, dark and handsome with a lilting voice.

“I'm afraid they are a little wacky.”

“Dad said you might be an undercover cop.”

“I don't think so,” he said.

Adam came over with a broad grin saying that the cult front man was keeping him on for top-dollar wages for at least another week. He pointed at a man in a gray suit in the distance looking at the ramshackle house with a foreman. This made Sunderson nervous so he asked Adam if he and Petunia could meet him for dinner in Chadron.

Back in the car he felt he had to be careful because the man in the suit might be one of Queenie's Detroit lawyers who would wonder about a car with Michigan plates. He found a combination junk and old clothing and pawn shop in Chadron and outfitted himself for twenty bucks, not a bad amount to become another person. The used cowboy hat was sweat-stained and shapeless, a little large but it looked bona fide in the car mirror. He checked back in to his local Chadron motel in a state of delirious fatigue. He'd find a Crawford lodging in the morning.

When he walked into the restaurant in his new costume he could see Adam and Petunia in a far corner but neither recognized him until he was nearly to the table. They both laughed.

“Another piece of shit old cowpoke,” Adam said.

They all had big rib steaks and Sunderson was surprised when Petunia bore down and finished hers first.

“She's growing like a weed,” Adam said.

“Like a flower,” Petunia corrected. She went off across the room to visit school friends.

“She's trying to fit into a mostly white world. She's the star of the seventh-grade basketball team,” Adam said.

“Any chance I can rent that horse I rode last time and maybe you could help me find an old pickup to cover my tracks?”

“I got both at home. That motel outside of Crawford has fenced pasture for travelers pulling horses. I figured you're really not looking for a missing person.”

“No, I'm tracking a bad guy. He's the cult leader with many names. If Petunia is out there, keep an eye on her. He's got freak hots for young girls. I got proof of this.”

“I'd gut him like the buffalo I used to butcher,” Adam said, his face tightened and clouded.

“I wouldn't blame you.”

Sunderson reached Adam's at 6:00 a.m. with the first light just squinting low in the east but catching the top of Crow Butte with a glow of sunlight. He thought this whole Sandhills area was as lovely as any country in America, albeit subtly. It had been a haunted night with only a single nightcap to help him into sleep. He had long known that you had to pull back from booze when the pressure became acute despite the daily craving to dull the senses a bit, or quite a bit. When he had wakened at 3:00 a.m. he began brooding about the conclusions of Deloria's
Playing Indian
but then it was a scholarly book and scarcely the place for a white-hot rant. It was as if those playing Indian were saying, “Look at us. We're human and we can be like you, too. We know we took the land of over five hundred tribes and butchered a few thousand and ten million inadvertently died from our diseases and hunger in a two-hundred-year holocaust. But we're like you dressing up in your garb and dancing.”

Only we weren't Sunderson thought in his middle of the night rambles through the mental swamp of our history. Sunderson recalled Disraeli saying as a Jew something to the effect of, “When your people were cavorting in animal skins mine were walking to the temple singing.” We were Attila and the Huns without a singular Hun, only Andrew Jackson, the many General Crooks and Custers. With our jelly-like good intentions in the manner of a PTA potluck with unrest barely beneath the skin we were always sure we were doing the right thing and it was unbearable as in Vietnam when we realized we weren't doing the right thing any more than we had done in the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. Our attitude had consistently been, “Have gun, will travel.”

Adam had an old Chevy pickup from the sixties parked by the house trailer, their home, up and running and attached a battered one-horse trailer, loading the saddled horse he called Brother-in-Law.

“Take off the saddle when you put him down for the night. There's two bales of hay in the trailer.”

Petunia, though Sunderson preferred Morning Star, called them for a breakfast of buffalo sausage and fried potatoes. He was surprised how pleasant this girl had fixed up the interior of the trailer. There were wreaths of sweetgrass and also dried wild turnips Adam's mother had picked out in the country near Pine Ridge. Adam said that they were reconstituted with dried corn in venison stew.

Sunderson packed his gear in the old Chevy pickup and parked his own car behind Adam's trailer. Adam followed Sunderson to the motel to make sure he made it, then dropped Morning Star off at school, then came back to unload the horse. Adam had said, “This horse don't load well,” which meant that unloading Brother-in-Law could also be a semiviolent mud bath.

“Good luck,” Adam said waving good-bye and looking at Sunderson as if he had doubts.

Sunderson was quite suddenly afflicted with the Great Doubt himself and told Adam he had decided to wait a day and make sure his plan was in order. Adam merely nodded though Sunderson felt that Adam suspected his plan wasn't all that firm.

Driving back to his Crawford room he had the intuition that after months of things going slow the pace had abruptly quickened. He called the Sioux County sheriff and was immediately patched through when he said he was a Michigan state police detective neglecting to mention “retired.” They talked in generalities about the cult and Sunderson described himself as on vacation looking for a friend's daughter who was a member of the cult, mentioning that he knew the Great Leader had a taste for adolescent girls. The sheriff said that they were aware of certain rumors but hadn't received any complaints. They would move quickly if Sunderson noted any hard evidence. This call was an ordinary courtesy among law enforcement professionals but Sunderson was thinking he might need backup. He wasn't up to getting stoned again. It wasn't just the pain it was the prolonged recovery.

Sunderson decided to walk up Crow Butte and camp for the night in hopes of achieving clarity of intention. He packed his camping gear and light sleeping bag trusting in a warm night. He left behind his whiskey bottle with regret. Luckily the horse unloaded easily into the fenced area and he tossed out a half bale of hay. He stopped at a grocery store and bought a small steak, a block of cheese, and some crackers.

He drove as close as he could to the foot of the butte passing one no trespassing sign on a two-track figuring he could flip his expired badge. A good idea for keeping out of harm's way was to turn in the badge when he got home to Marquette.

He was two hours into a strenuously steep uphill walk when while taking a rest it occurred to him he had forgotten salt for the steak and, more important, a canteen full of water. He would have to live without both, unable to be angry because of the sublimity of the landscape and a comic memory of a dinner date with a bright schoolteacher two years before. They had gone to a nice little log cabin restaurant in Au Train but being in her company reminded him of trying to eat fried fish or corn on the cob without salt. You only had to remind yourself flippantly of the thousands of men who had died for salt on the ancient trade routes. Human history was so basically berserk that he easily imagined one man strangling another for a one-pound sack of salt at an oasis in the Gobi. Once a doctor had told him to knock off all salt for a week to improve his high blood pressure and it had been a disgusting experience, plainly time to find another doctor. Toward the end of the salt-free week he had sucked the tits of a hefty barmaid over in Newbury at the end of her shift on a hot summer day and reached bliss with the salt on her skin.

It took him nearly six hours to reach the top because of frequent pauses to still his fluttery heart. Also the climb was much more difficult than it looked from a distance where the crags, culverts, and gullies were somewhat concealed. His mouth became quite dry but his struggle excluded worrying about a water-starved body. As a flatlander from the densely forested north he was totally without experience in climbing and though he could walk for hours the angle of nearly straight up exhausted him. During one short rest period he reflected that descending the next morning would be even more difficult because of the gravity of his body. It occurred to him that he would have made this climb as a boy or young man but lost the impulse for forty years, and now it returned as a nearly old man when certain aspects of the mind become captious and boyish again. He suddenly remembered he and Roberta pulling Bobby up a steep wooded hill in his red wagon soon after he came home from the hospital. In their churning climb they disturbed a yellow-jacket nest and each was painfully stung a couple of times. Bobby bawled like a baby and Roberta screamed “Goddamn God” which frightened all of them. In another hour towing the wagon they were out on the end of the timber boat dock where the men had just unloaded the logs and this big Swede who was the captain and a friend of their father's invited them along to Grand Island to pick up another load. Grand Island was only a few hundred yards away but the three treated the ride as if it were an ocean adventure. When they got home for supper Bobby yelled at the table that it had been the best day of his life despite the yellow jackets.

Sunderson found himself weeping as he climbed and asked his long dead brother, “What's going on out there if anything?” He was fairly confident that he was losing his mind but then it was a mind well lost. Men did a lot of silent weeping but rarely out loud. He paused to try to think of another but saw one coming and backed away. Before it starts you think you're going to burst and then you begin weeping like you did out in the woods the day that Dad died.

Time was misarranged, a quirky idea but unavoidable. If the timing had been right Diane would likely have been able to save Bobby in his heroin narcosis but toward his last years he wouldn't come home or see anyone except Roberta. Sunderson had driven himself into a depression investigating heroin, even snorted a dose, but only came up with the idea that the drug worked for those who want to feel nothing. A blank page. Zero. The emotions were all cessations of emotion. Life became white on white paper. There was an intriguing notion that life became photographs and for once all horrors were at safe removal, totally immovable and at rest. But then parts of the photograph began to move and you needed more of the drug and finally you wiped reality clean.

At the very top there was a mound with a flat space where he collapsed and slept for an hour waking sore but refreshed with the unnerving perception that he could see nothing but sky. This was an odd experience as waking always offered peripheral objects such as a pillow's edge, a night table, a door, a wall. He wasn't dead because the clouds were moving and there was a huge front far to the south moving from southwest to northwest that he hoped wouldn't push his way. He had no idea what time it was because he had left his cell phone with its clock back in the room with the pint of whiskey. He smiled at the idea that what he was doing was a vague parody of what Marion described as an Anishinabe or Chippewa power vision where you spent three days and nights on a hill without food, water, or shelter waiting for vision. The possible grandeur of such an experience was alien to him. He had always refused the sophomoric notion that life was a process of settling for less in favor of the idea that sometimes life was good, sometimes bad. He mildly teared thinking how much Diane would have liked it up here.