The Great Leader (27 page)

He had to sit down because his legs trembled with exhaustion so that even seated they jerked and flopped. “How could she have saved Bobby when she couldn't save me” was the question that gagged his mind. Halfway through the marriage Diane had tried to convince him to quit and get a graduate degree in history. Her best friend at the time was the wife of the superintendent of schools so it wouldn't be hard to get him a high school teaching job. The trouble with this idea, and it was hard to admit it to himself, was that in twenty years of cop work he had become a bit of an adrenaline junkie. A classroom smelling of chalk dust and the Spanish rice wafting up from the lunchroom and possibly the ozone odor of sloth emerging from the skulls of students was a poor substitute for playing Lone Ranger in a souped-up Crown Victoria chasing a perp on a log trail through the woods throwing out a rooster tail of mud, or taking a photo of the son of an obnoxious politician making a cocaine buy outside a bar. This wasn't the kind of thing you could explain to Diane simply because she was a hundred percent grown up. Her ducks were in a row, as they say, and she was a genuine public servant.

Turning this way and that he had a clear view of the four directions: east toward Chadron and far away home, far south toward the ominous roiling storm, west toward Fort Robinson and the murder of Crazy Horse, and north where the Lakota had been driven and resettled for the third time in a short period simply because we wanted the land. He made out the speck of Adam's trailer in the distance and was a little consoled that you couldn't kill a peopl
e unless you killed all of them.
The exception of reading Deloria's
Playing Indian
was tolerable because it was a clinical study of the absurd ways we tried to adopt customs of the people we had attempted and failed to turn into permanent ghosts.

He had read the histories of the main Indian tribes before he took a course in Greek myth and history so that he tended toward the error of seeing the Greeks in American Indian terms. No groups could be less similar than the Greeks and the Hopis and a twenty-year-old student brain became goofy trying to force them to cohere. His favorite professor had advised him to back away and gave him a monograph with limited conclusions on how one year the United States government failed to give the Lakota their food allotment. Some ate their horses and survived but others refused and starved. The professor's point is that you can't draw large conclusions unless you can draw small, accurate conclusions. Sunderson was unsure as he had noted that academics were forever carping about large-scale brilliant writers like Bernard De Voto in favor of their own minimal conclusions about the Westward Movement.

He was pleased when his legs stopped trembling, which put him in mind of all of the variations of his own hubris. His daffy Uncle Albert, his dad's oldest brother, made it through World War II poorly, losing a dozen friends at Normandy and was over the hill far enough that he survived on half-­disability. He was married for years to an Ojibway woman way up in Mooseknee on Hudson's Bay but she drowned while fishing and Albert moved back close to home over north of Shingleton and east of Munising. Albert was plainly odd, walking in the woods and chanting nonsense and fishing. It was he who got Sunderson started on his lifelong brook trout obsession, a beautiful fish indeed and also delicious. Sunderson and his father would take a casserole to Albert on Sunday or Albert would drive his old Model A crusted with swallow shit from sitting in a barn near Trenary for twenty years. Albert would pick Sunderson up at dawn and they would be off for the day exploring creeks with a bag of sandwiches. The damage was done by a ditty Albert sang incessantly in mocking tones, “Just make the world a better place.” The trouble was that at age seven Sunderson took these words seriously from his insane hero and never questioned his abilities. Of course he could climb Crow Butte at age sixty-five. Of course he would make the world a better place. Of course he had to destroy the Great Leader to save the innocent, both children and adults. The worst criminals were those who took advantage of weakness through greed, lust, and religion. The fact that many of the cult members were college graduates stymied him. The fact that someone could get an
A
in biology at University of Michigan and not understand their own biology left him quite muddy. Dwight was beating the child because it was a child.

But how about retirement? How about letting the mind rest? How about moving over toward L'Anse or Iron Mountain and escaping the scenes of crimes, his own and others. At least Mona was becoming part of his own extended family and disappearing as a sexual being. She was the only example he could think of that showed self-control. You could think it through all you want and you're still going to get a hard-on over the wrong person and human peace is blown away. At least a tinge of incest made it taboo. Quitting drinking was out of the question. His cop mind needed a constant supply of adrenaline.

Just before dark he cooked his steak over a small fire of pine, never done in his homeland because the meat would taste like pine resin. His dad used to say, “A Saltine is a feast to a starving man,” but the crackers and cheese were nearly impossible because his mouth couldn't raise enough spittle to effectively chew them. He coughed over and over and a small group of crows that had been hanging around since his arrival scolded him. The tough steak was better because it had some juice and despite the fact that the pine flavor and lack of salt would normally make it intolerable. After this supper and one of the best cigarettes of his life he took his leftovers thirty yards down the slope, returned to his perch, then watched the crows haggle over the food. They were survivors.

Curiously, rather than thinking through the case of the Great Leader, he could think of nothing, not even Diane or his long life. His mind was full of only the grandeur of where he was as if he was trout fishing in the sky. His muddled brain couldn't begin to compete with the rising three-quarter moon and the immense thunderstorm far to the south.

He tried to fall asleep too early without success and felt he'd pay a thousand bucks for a few aspirin. He got up and walked in circles and tried to stretch out his lumpy muscles. He kept being revisited by the image of time going out the door but never back in. Where did this come from, this huge wooden door? The image arrived because it was true. It wasn't an abstraction. The neurons made a painting of his anguish. It was the nursery rhyme where all of the king's horses and all of the king's men couldn't put their marriage back together again. Diane's face was a dozen miles south near the actual storm and the upcoming storm of her new husband's death. Twenty years before they were visiting her parents near Ludington and went for dinner and dancing at a restaurant on the shores of Lake Michigan. They danced at least an hour to a rather schmaltzy Glenn Miller orchestra but loved it. Diane wouldn't make love in her parents' home so they stopped at a motel when they left the restaurant. It was a sublime night and the memory of it made him think his head would burst with tears. It was he who caused their marriage to stop dancing. Now his only fallback position with Diane and Mona was to become a perfect gentleman. After a single beer crazy Uncle Albert would walk in tight circles moaning and after a bender had to be confined in the VA for the last three years of his moaning life. When he was growing up everyone local remarked on Sunderson's father's good manners, now called for in his son's life.

He struggled to drag his mind away from critical issues by pondering an article Mona had faxed him about these large moths that migrate by the millions from Nebraska to Wyoming and Montana and alight at an altitude of eight thousand feet on scree. Dozens of grizzly bears appear and eat up to ninety pounds of protein-rich moths apiece in a day. Staring at the immense thunderstorm moving from the east to the southwest he wondered how this could be? It was certainly a mystery that more deserved to be solved than the inscrutability of wife beating.

Now he saw Mona convoluted in the storm and recalled that the first time he saw her nude on the bed the lust was like a stomach cramp. What in God's name did such lust mean? He was happy when there was a grand lightning stroke and the image of Mona was gone, clearly an experience that belonged to demonology as if the most haunted house of all were biology.

At dawn he felt creaky but had never slept so well in his life. He made a slow, perilous descent from the top of Crow Butte.

Chapter 21

Sunderson thought afterward that they were by far the longest three days of his life. Without the suppressed violence of the present they reminded him of the nasty heartache of homesickness in late spring at college turning in papers and taking exams before he could make the long drive north toward home. It was a lump in the throat time.

The first day the whole idea of using a horse as camouflage for his pretense was most unfortunate. Nearly two hours into his ride while skirting a mudhole the horse became slightly mired and frantically bucked Sunderson off. He watched despondently as the horse ran off in the direction they had come and then he walked toward the cult site perhaps three miles away. It was raining, which at least washed off the mud stuck to his clothes. As he neared the site he was pleased to see a big bonfire behind the house. The workers were burning trash and all the members kept to their distant tipis in the rain. He dried off before the hot fire.

Adam wasn't disturbed about the horse saying that it knew the direct way home better than any human. Most fortunate for Sunderson was that Queenie and Carla had flown off that morning with the guy in the suit on the charter for Denver with a big list of supplies to buy for the new location. Sunderson was put to work by the foreman for ten bucks an hour chipping dried mud off the half dozen new all-terrain vehicles, the noisy four-wheelers that haunt mere walkers in the wild with their insufferable racket. He kept an eye on Dwight's distant tipi thinking that Dwight was the only one with an off chance of recognizing him, remote because of the costume and the idea of being out of context. His outfit made him as invisible as a man in a green janitor suit in urban areas. No one notices janitors. It was, however, comical to Sunderson that he was cleaning up the machine he hated most other than snowmobiles. That night he was totally the exhausted geezer, ate a burger at the bar, and slept twelve hours.

The next morning, Saturday, life warmed up in every way. It was bright, clear, and sunny and by ten warm enough to be without a coat. Sunderson was put to work with a hammer, nails, and a crow bar repairing the collapsed portion of the corral. Dwight had decided that in harmony with the countryside the cult should have horses and commissioned Adam to secure a dozen rideable quarter horses and give lessons to those without experience. From the corral he watched Adam and Petunia perhaps a hundred yards away, teaching most of the young people horsemanship. He noted the great majority of girls over boys and wondered how this was organized. Dwight was an onlooker in a mauve robe and Sunderson noticed that he was standing fairly close to Morning Star.

At noon there was a picnic to which the workers were invited but Sunderson hung back at the corral and Adam brought him a sandwich.

“He seems like a pretty nice guy,” Adam said.

“I was a state police detective for nearly forty years. You'll have to trust me.”

“True. I've been suckered by a lot of white folks.”

Sunderson sat in the pickup eating the sandwich and glassing the scene. When Adam was off leading a horse and rider at a brisk walk he saw Dwight hold Morning Star's hand and his blood pressure rose precipitously, but then she got in a car with a friend and they were driven off to a Girl Scout meeting.

He had dinner with Adam and Morning Star in the trailer. She was enthusiastic because the cult was hiring her at good wages to teach riding with her father on weekends. Dwight had told her that his nickname was King David which she thought was funny.

“He's such a wonderful man,” she said.

Sunday was bright and sunny but with a brisk wind from the south. The workers had taken the day off and Sunderson ensconced himself near a window upstairs in the old house having packed two wretched bologna sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. Petunia was teaching three girls about twelve how to saddle a horse and he was amazed at the ease at which she pitched the saddle onto the horse. She was a strong girl indeed. He was relieved for her that King David hadn't made a move but also pissed off that it hadn't come to a head like he knew it would.

It was nearly noon when Queenie and Carla drove in with a Suburban jam-packed with supplies from the plane. Only one male member volunteered so Adam was made busy unpacking the supplies and carrying them to the cook tent and various tipis. Sunderson's heart jumped when he saw King David lead Morning Star into his tipi while Adam was coming out of the most distant tipi. Within a few minutes he heard a scream and Morning Star ran out of the tipi in her panties with Dwight stopping at the open tent flap. He looked dazed until he saw Adam running toward him with a drawn knife. Dwight jumped on an ATV and sped off at top speed. Adam swiftly mounted his horse and gave chase but fell behind because the ATV could do fifty on the road but then Dwight made a fatal mistake and turned off the road heading cross-country toward Crow Butte.

“Jesus Christ,” Sunderson yelled, moving to a back window watching the figures become distant. He ran downstairs and luckily one of the ATVs he had cleaned was still parked near the corral. He took a few frantic minutes to figure out how to operate the machine but then he was off and moving. He could see that Dwight was still well ahead but Adam was gaining, while he was a full mile behind. The only reason that he didn't want Adam to cut Dwight's throat is he'd go to prison and leave Morning Star fatherless.

Now Dwight slowed moving up the initial slope of Crow Butte, slowing even more as the slope grew steeper. Sunderson could see him look back at the quickly gaining Adam then gun the powerful ATV, shooting up the steep slope until it became almost vertical whereupon the machine flipped backward in a big arc with Dwight clutching the handlebars until it hit earth landing on Dwight and both man and machine rolled down the hill so that Adam had to dodge on his horse. Adam dismounted taking out his knife.

Sunderson was yelling “no” over the roar of his machine as he came up the beginning of the hill. He feared flipping and jumped off still yelling “no.” Adam turned to him as he crawled and scrambled up the slope to Dwight's side. Dwight was on his back with the left side of his chest clearly stoven in and a leg twisted under him. His head was also cocked at an impossible angle and was the only thing about him that moved. He yawped a primitive sound like a heron then gurgled up puke and blood.

Sunderson and Adam only looked at each other shaking their heads then turned away from the now bleating body.