The Great Leader

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.