The Great Leader

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

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

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

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