The Great Leader

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.