The Great Leader

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.