The Great Leader

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.