The Great Leader

Chapter 17

In January the cold winnowed him. It stayed near zero during the day and twenty below at night for a week. In order to walk he had to wear an irritating face mask and he went less far in the woods out of timidity. He carried a compass and wood matches in a small aluminum tube, also candles in his vehicle in case it broke down. It did on a country road south of Trenary with a metallic, hacking cough. Two candles plus the afternoon sun kept the interior well above freezing. He dozed, content that he would live through this and remembering his cell phone was on the coffee table in the living room. He had turned on the warning lights and overcame the irksome clicking sound by turning on the NPR station to a rather dreary Haydn piece and mulling recent developments in the case. Mona had shown him an e-mail from King David sent through Carla. “Carla tells me that you’re extorting information from her. You better be careful, kiddo. You’re no longer a law officer.” Sunderson replied, “It is unwise to threaten someone from jail. I need only to send your message to Maui officials to get your sentence extended. However, I want you out of jail so I can get at you.” To Carla he said, “You should behave yourself. I need only to call the prosecutor to begin extradition on you for sexual abuse of a minor.” He wanted Mona to add, “Mona is now willing to testify,” but she refused. She was stirring a short-rib-and-lentil soup at his stove and said, “Carla got me drunk and stoned and ate me out. I can’t say that. I’m a big girl not one of those kids King David is fucking with.”

A logger towed Sunderson to a tavern in Trenary and pointed out the hole in his engine drooling oil. “You’ve thrown a rod,” the logger said. “Your Blazer is shit-canned, buddy.”

He signed the title over to the logger who could use a vehicle for spare parts for the price of a hamburger and a beer. Marion picked him up in an hour. Sunderson got his gear out of the woebegone junker.

“Aren’t you going to say something sentimental?”

“Good-bye, darling,” he said, patting the hood. The hard part was when he found his dead dog’s teddy bear under the backseat.

When they got back to his house Mona was frying a chicken and had also made succotash, one of his favorites.

“I’m being nice so you won’t run away like my dad did.”

He and Marion looked at each other feeling uncomfortable at her frankness. She was wearing a pair of turquoise earrings Marion had bought her on a trip to Albuquerque.

“Carla e-mailed to say that Queenie’s grandma died and she’s going to inherit a lot more money. The cult is definitely moving to Nebraska in April.”

Sunderson exhaled over a whiskey thinking that he would have time to get all of his ducks in a row whatever that meant. He would walk, read, and intermittently hibernate for three months and then, by God, he would somehow close the case.

In the morning he bought a used, gray Subaru with only sixty thousand miles on it, then stopped at Snowbound Books for a copy of Lolita. He had a painful lunch with Diane which she had requested. She talked a lot about her husband’s white corpuscle count and other medical details and barely touched her food which he, typically, finished. He was down fifteen pounds in the nearly three months since retirement, which made him ponder on the scales whether or not he had a fatal disease but then figured it must be the addictive walking. By the end of lunch she was in tears and he was near tears. Outside she hugged him good-bye and he shuddered at their first real physical contact in over three years. Life could be so merciless.

He fled out to the Skandia area for a hike. The temperature had risen to a balmy ten degrees above zero and he made a three-hour circle on a packed snowmobile track, which made walking without snowshoes easy. When the car came in sight after the lovely mindless exhaustion he wasn’t ready to go home yet and stopped and built a small fire out of dead pine branches to keep himself company. He was thinking about back after 9/11 when he had attended two law enforcement conferences in Canada on the cooperative efforts to prevent terrorism. The problem seemed unlikely indeed in the Upper Peninsula but the U.S. government was paying the tab and the chief ordered him to go. The first was in Toronto and the meetings were mostly pathetic nonsense but the city was wonderful. He met a now retired Toronto detective named Bob Kolb and they talked for hours in taverns and restaurants about trout fishing and grouse and woodcock hunting. There was another meeting a few months later in Calgary wherein much the same material was repeated so that one day he and Kolb skipped a couple of sessions to see the zoo. Strange to say Sunderson had never been to a zoo and the event comprised the beginning of what passed for him as a spiritual life. Soon after entering they saw a group of giraffes and Sunderson stared long and hard at a very young giraffe, a weanling, feeling goose bumps sweep up and down his body. Simply enough, the animal seemed impossible. How could it exist? Of course he had seen pictures but they had meant nothing. How could this creature have been invented? He had taken several college science courses and he was a devout evolutionist but he suspected a mind had to be behind this sublime creature, maybe what Indians called the Great Spirit.

There were repercussions that continued onward to the present time. A trout wasn’t just a trout any more than a crow was simply a crow. This spirit of attention wasn’t with him often but often enough. Marion was better practiced in this spirit of attention and when Sunderson visited Marion’s remote cabin he learned a great deal from him. Once they had found a dead yellow-rumped warbler which Sunderson had kept and put in a plastic bag in the freezer to remind him of the ineffable. A creek or river would also change the texture of his spirit so that staring into the moving water would make his brain tingle as it had in his childhood when wonder is nothing special but an everyday event.

Stooping before the fire his back and butt were chilled with drying sweat. When his job confused him he often reread from a letter Kolb had sent years before now kept in a tiny plastic envelope in his wallet. Kolb was responding to Sunderson’s note on how simple it must be to work in the U.P. compared to an immense city like Toronto. “No surprise but the TV networks, the news media, and I imagine most writers, have got it wrong. Crime is not interesting, it’s pathetically predictable. Nothing has changed since Cain slew Abel. Greed, jealousy, mental instability, and economic deprivation remain the prime ingredients. Religion has a place as well. Today substance abuse and moral lassitude thicken the gravy. The interest is in the circumstances, not the act, and not necessarily the people directly involved. Witnesses seldom tell the same story. For any detective, geography notwithstanding, police investigation involves hours of grinding boredom interspersed with moments of shit-your-pants excitement. The latter keeps the adrenaline junkies in the game.”

Sunderson watched the fire die. He shivered and anticipated the soup Mona said she would make out of venison shanks and neck plus barley and his favorite vegetable, rutabaga. Sunderson didn’t realize that he had been a good detective because he was utterly ordinary like a root vegetable. He didn’t separate himself from others like the Romantic hero, writers, painters, famed athletes. He made warm eye contact and spoke slowly in the grungy local accent. “Let’s have a brewsky, hey?” People were disarmed and told him everything. His day job had been total consciousness.

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.

He pulled off on the road’s shoulder and took out his topo map identifying Crow Butte, which the first rays of the sun were hitting with a transcendent glitter of light, the light moving almost imperceptibly downward as the sun rose. He thought that Diane had been right on the money when she said that he saw the world through shit-stained glasses but now the lenses seemed to be clearing.

Driving hard he made Tucson in late afternoon of the second day. He got his old room back at the Arizona Inn on the northwest corner of the hotel property and glassed Dwight’s rental. There was a large, new, black Chevrolet Suburban parked in front, a car favored by drug tycoons, but no sign of activity. He craved doing some closer snooping but it was important not to be detected. He called Mona out of loneliness and she said that her obnoxious mother was there for a few days talking about selling the house no matter that the market was low. Out of anxiety she had called Diane who said she could live with her.

“I miss you,” he said.

“Not as much as I miss you,” she responded.

He drove over to the diner where he had met the stocky girl who had advised him to camp up in Aravaipa Canyon. She seemed delighted to see him but was very busy so he ate slowly until the supper crowd was sparse. She was a bit solid for his usual taste but then he was a man of the U.P. where the larger woman is favored likely due to the wickedly cold climate. She finally sat down with him and they talked about his fine camping week before he posed a question.

“Would you like to make some money?”

“You’re too cute to pay for sex,” she teased.

He made a lengthy explanation because the subject was too complicated for shorthand. He offered two hundred bucks and she agreed to knock on Dwight’s door the next morning and join the cult. There was the problem of the demand for an initiation fee but then maybe it could be delayed. Charlene was her name and she came up with the idea of using a check from a defunct account of her ex-husband which he said was clearly illegal.

“From what you told me about him he’s unlikely to go to the law.”

Sunderson agreed and then suffered a poignant bout of desire for her. She sensed this and said she was already late in picking up her son from the babysitter. He’d be in day care in the morning and she’d stop at Sunderson’s room after she visited King David, a name she was fond of. She gave him a brief hug out in the parking lot which made him hopeful but he was full of free-floating anxiety and drove over to Randolph Park where he walked an hour in the last fading light of the early April day. He was damp with sweat when he paused to watch dozens of duffers driving golf balls under the lights, doomed to go parless because hardly anyone was good at anything. The golfers reminded him of his own inept efforts to learn tennis twenty years before. It looked easy on television but wasn’t. After three lessons he figured the sport was something you had to start young and gave his new racket to a kid down the street.

In his room he was restless and couldn’t go further with Deloria’s Playing Indian but then he had already been through the book twice and tonight the subject utterly enervated him. Mona had stuck a Donna Leon mystery in his briefcase and he drew it out. He had been absolutely averse to mysteries because of his profession but then, after all, he was retired now and Mona’s recommendation had credibility. He was soon immersed in the mind of Commissario Guido Brunetti and an atmosphere he and Diane had loved during their three days in Venice. He was an hour into the book and having his nightcap deciding to turn out the lights early when an idea hit him with a jolt, not too strong a term. Why not go against all law enforcement ethics and have Mona construct some convincing prosecutor’s office stationery saying to Carla that she will be prosecuted for her conduct with Mona unless she turns evidence against Dwight for sexual abuse of minors? He could show this letter to Nebraska cops and they would come down on Dwight. Why play fair with this scumbag? Of course there was an outside chance he could be caught for forgery but it would be unlikely if he mailed a copy of the letter from Chadron. The idea was amusing enough that he fell asleep thinking of Charlene’s ample ass.

He was awakened at 6:00 a.m. by an uncomfortable dream about Jesus. It started in the Uffizi in Florence where he had been separated from Diane and couldn’t find her and one of the countless lachryma Christi paintings started talking to him in a foreign language, maybe Aramaic, trying to give him directions to find Diane. Jesus alternately smiled and wept but he recognized this Jesus from Bess’s, the old hotel in Grand Marais where the painting of Solomon’s Jesus was covered with a curious glass shutter that allowed a smile or tears from different angles. While eating a double order of pork sausage accompanied by oatmeal as penance Sunderson figured that he was hardwired for Jesus from all the church and Sunday school in his childhood. He doubted that he could go into a church without a sense of irony but then he was a modern man at the crossroads trying to go in all four directions at once.

He drew a lawn chair from his patio up to the locked wrought-iron gate to the street from which he could glass Dwight’s house. When a starched white employee came by he pretended to be bird-watching what with the area being saturated with twitchers. He was, in fact, looking at a tiny olive bird he knew to be a warbler when he segued back to Dwight’s rental where he saw Charlene walking up the porch steps right on schedule at 9:00 a.m. She came out of the house at 9:30 and when she parked in front of the hotel he whistled and waved at the gate. She looked mildly pissed and concerned.

“He tried to get me to blow him.”

“Did you?”

“Fuck you. No. I told him I had a tooth extracted yesterday, the best excuse. He called me a liar but took a rain check. Anyway I’m now a nine-thousand-dollar member. Everyone except two women named Carla and Queenie are camped out by Bonita. They leave at dawn in three days. Men are always saying that they’re leaving at dawn but they rarely do.”

“Where’s Bonita?” It sounded familiar to Sunderson. He wondered how many times he had heard the tooth extraction trick.

“North of Willcox. There’s nothing much there except a state prison. King David said he lived in Willcox a few months as a foster kid. You passed through Bonita on the way to Klondyke and Aravaipa where you camped.”

They went into his room where she seemed quite uncomfortable. This was a disappointment to his hopes for lovemaking. She took a photo out of her purse.

“I can’t make love to you because you look like my Uncle Harvey in Missouri.” She passed him the photo. There was a distinct resemblance over which he felt silly. He thought of saying “just keep your eyes closed” but he knew that pleading was a fatal tactic.

He checked out of the Arizona Inn mostly because Charlene said that Carla and Queenie told her they went there for lunch and the prospect of being seen was ghastly. He stopped at a camping store and bought a cooler and a coffeepot and a cheap summer sleeping bag and then went to an Italian deli called Roma that Charlene had told him about, buying bread, coffee, salami, mortadella, and provolone. The weather channel had said that it would remain warm with no rain in the immediate future.

As he drove east toward Willcox his thinking was disturbed by an item he had noted in hundreds of interrogations. To a lesser or greater degree people seemed to think that there was someone else besides their obvious selves within them. It was a “you don’t know the half of it” attitude. Marion had said kids often give themselves an alternate name in childhood. He wondered if this was connected to the otherness sought in religion or simple boredom with the way things were? He remembered reading in college that Zen Buddhists attempted to find their true character, but wasn’t everything you were your true character? Or do we have an essence that is a core of a private religion? This kind of thinking tightened his temples so that he was happy he was going camping in Aravaipa well up the road from the cult.

He chose a different camping spot from his previous one and a little more remote. He swore when he heard a big rock scrape the undersides of his car and got out squinting underneath to make sure his oil pan wasn’t punctured. He gathered an enormous amount of firewood and figured he’d build his campfire against a canyon wall so it would reflect heat back on his sleeping bag. He was diverted by thinking about an article he had read by the terrorism expert Jonathan White. One of the many ideas White talked about is how cults with some exceptions internalize their violence while terrorist groups externalize it. If you boiled Dwight down you came up with a malevolent bully. How he became that way was beyond Sunderson’s interests. His mission was to stop the damage.

He took a late afternoon stroll quite overcome by the arrival of spring, the multifoliate greening in the rock crevasse of the canyon walls, the mesquite and oak that somehow grew out of stone, the grasses and flowers along the purling creek the sound of which had soothed him beginning in his childhood. In the natural world he had always been able to take a break from the sense of his own failings and limitations. It was beside a creek that he prayed that his brother could grow another leg. It was beside a creek that he decided not to shoot the teacher who slapped him so hard his face ached for days. It was beside a creek that he buried his dog and figured out how to swipe a puppy from a litter across town where the owner wanted ten bucks that he didn’t have. And far later in life it was on a bank beside the east branch of the Fox that he accepted fully the reasons why Diane was leaving him and came to the realization that she should have done so many years ago.

Early the next afternoon after a splendid morning hiking new country and a cold bath in the creek he was alarmed and a little angry to hear a vehicle chugging slowly up the two-track toward him. It was Charlene and her four-year-old son Teddy in her battered old Isuzu.

“I decided that you’re a lonely man needing my company,” she said, getting out of the car with a grin.

He got little Teddy started building a dam in the creek, always an engrossing project, then he and Charlene went up behind a thicket and boulder with Charlene peeking out to make sure that Teddy was staying in the creek. “I simply can’t do it. You’re too much the spitting image of Harvey.”

“I give up,” he said laughing.

“Thanks, Harvey. I always thought you were an old jerk but now you’re nice.”

Luckily she had brought along some cold fried chicken because he had had Italian sandwiches for dinner and breakfast. She said that she noticed the cult was starting to pack up and clean up their site for a morning departure rather than the day after. He said he would check it out but wasn’t concerned. He needed to be in Dwight’s area rather than just waiting in Nebraska. She said that she was one of the fifty thousand young people majoring in environmental studies but then she would settle for a job as a park ranger. They watched Teddy continue working on the dam while chewing a chicken leg. She pointed out that males like building dams, it was a control factor. As a trout fisherman he hated dams so he agreed with this feminist point. He was disappointed when she had to leave in order to get to work for dinner hour. He invited her and Teddy to visit in the Upper Peninsula in the coming summer and said he’d send tickets. She said that of course she would come and kissed him good-bye. Teddy screeched and wept when taken from his dam.

He dozed for an hour leaning against the canyon wall in the sunlight. He had an unfortunate dream of being trapped and suffocating in a sauna of his friend Pavo down in Eben Junction but when he broke down the door and filled his lungs with cold air he wasn’t the man he saw standing in the snow wiping off sweat. How could this be? Awake, the sun was very warm on his face and he idly recalled Carla telling him that Dwight didn’t like sweat lodges because he was claustrophobic and people were smelly adding that all female members were required to shower twice a day, which accounted for the elaborate bathhouse near the longhouse.

He stood and stretched his limbs and then was drawn back to his dream. He was clearly inside the man running out of the sauna but it wasn’t him. It was distressing. Are we also someone else? Do we have dream doppelgangers? One reason people come to a religion is to reach otherness, or so he had read. Marion had talked about traditions but such things spooked Sunderson as if he were a boy walking past a cemetery at night. He struggled to get back to earth by thinking of the newspaper Marion subscribed to called Indian Country Today edited by a man named Giago who among the nuts and bolts of Indian problems was quick to point out silly white rip-offs of Indian customs. Sunderson suspected that behind much of the costumery and rigmarole, the attraction of the cult was the supposedly full expression of sexual freedom, especially for Dwight.

In the late afternoon he abruptly cleaned up his campsite, made sure the embers of his fire were dead, and packed the car. On a short walk up the narrow canyon he had seen with curiosity on his first trip he poked his head into a small side canyon, not much more than a crevasse, and had seen a tiny Anasazi petroglyph not half a foot high of a goat that seemed to be bucking or dancing. He was uncommonly disturbed at the sight of the goat. He would never know what the Anasazi meant by the goat, which was one of Diane’s nicknames for him. Long ago on a camping trip they had danced crazily around a fire to the Grateful Dead on the car stereo. When feeling especially good goats are known to dance.

He drove slowly toward the cult area to avoid raising a lot of visible dust on the road, then parked his car behind a mesquite thicket and walked up the hill with his old Bausch & Lomb binoculars. It was nearing twilight but he had an excellent view of the large campsite with all the black Suburbans parked in a neat row. He put a hand behind his back to swivel his ass for a better view and got yet another cholla spine in his hand. You had to carry tweezers in this country. He noted that the ocotillo flowers and his favorite, the primroses, were closing up with the disappearing sun. Back at the binoculars he saw he had missed the immediate arrival of Dwight, Carla, and Queenie. He counted eighty-seven people bowing with young girls in the front. Carla leaned over to get something out of the backseat wearing shorts. What a great ass, he thought. Dwight wandered over to the open-faced cook tent and smelled the pots. Carla had said that unlike most cults with all sorts of dietary rules Dwight was a real meat and potatoes guy. Dwight patted the plump lady cook on the head and she knelt, opened his robe a bit and planted a kiss evidently on his pecker. Jesus Christ! This was the wackiest bullshit he had ever witnessed in a long life.

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.

Buy old cowboy clothes in Chadron.

Move to Crawford to be closer to action.

Rent a horse from Adam.

Learn how to saddle it.

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.

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 people 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.