The Great Leader

by Jim Harrison

  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 wher
e 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 bullsh
it 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.