The Great Leader

He dozed for an hour leaning against the canyon wall in the sunlight. He had an unfortunate dream of being trapped and suffocating in a sauna of his friend Pavo down in Eben Junction but when he broke down the door and filled his lungs with cold air he wasn’t the man he saw standing in the snow wiping off sweat. How could this be? Awake, the sun was very warm on his face and he idly recalled Carla telling him that Dwight didn’t like sweat lodges because he was claustrophobic and people were smelly adding that all female members were required to shower twice a day, which accounted for the elaborate bathhouse near the longhouse.

He stood and stretched his limbs and then was drawn back to his dream. He was clearly inside the man running out of the sauna but it wasn’t him. It was distressing. Are we also someone else? Do we have dream doppelgangers? One reason people come to a religion is to reach otherness, or so he had read. Marion had talked about traditions but such things spooked Sunderson as if he were a boy walking past a cemetery at night. He struggled to get back to earth by thinking of the newspaper Marion subscribed to called Indian Country Today edited by a man named Giago who among the nuts and bolts of Indian problems was quick to point out silly white rip-offs of Indian customs. Sunderson suspected that behind much of the costumery and rigmarole, the attraction of the cult was the supposedly full expression of sexual freedom, especially for Dwight.

In the late afternoon he abruptly cleaned up his campsite, made sure the embers of his fire were dead, and packed the car. On a short walk up the narrow canyon he had seen with curiosity on his first trip he poked his head into a small side canyon, not much more than a crevasse, and had seen a tiny Anasazi petroglyph not half a foot high of a goat that seemed to be bucking or dancing. He was uncommonly disturbed at the sight of the goat. He would never know what the Anasazi meant by the goat, which was one of Diane’s nicknames for him. Long ago on a camping trip they had danced crazily around a fire to the Grateful Dead on the car stereo. When feeling especially good goats are known to dance.

He drove slowly toward the cult area to avoid raising a lot of visible dust on the road, then parked his car behind a mesquite thicket and walked up the hill with his old Bausch amp; Lomb binoculars. It was nearing twilight but he had an excellent view of the large campsite with all the black Suburbans parked in a neat row. He put a hand behind his back to swivel his ass for a better view and got yet another cholla spine in his hand. You had to carry tweezers in this country. He noted that the ocotillo flowers and his favorite, the primroses, were closing up with the disappearing sun. Back at the binoculars he saw he had missed the immediate arrival of Dwight, Carla, and Queenie. He counted eighty-seven people bowing with young girls in the front. Carla leaned over to get something out of the backseat wearing shorts. What a great ass, he thought. Dwight wandered over to the open-faced cook tent and smelled the pots. Carla had said that unlike most cults with all sorts of dietary rules Dwight was a real meat and potatoes guy. Dwight patted the plump lady cook on the head and she knelt, opened his robe a bit and planted a kiss evidently on his pecker. Jesus Christ! This was the wackiest bullshit he had ever witnessed in a long life.

He was so enervated he drove all night, eleven hours in a row, finally collapsing at the rest stop on Interstate 40 between Santa Rosa and Tucumcari, New Mexico, sleeping deeply and drooling with the spring sun beating in the window. After washing up and getting a thermos of coffee at a gas station he called Mona. He had been brooding in the night about the ethics of sending the phony letter from the prosecutor to the Nebraska authorities. The odds of getting caught were so-so but he would also be making Mona culpable. When he had mentioned it on the phone the other day she was impulsively up for it but during the night he had developed doubts. The state police in Michigan had earned ubiquitous respect for being straight arrow, above reproach, and he had always played by the book. No matter how much he wanted to nail Dwight committing a felony to do so illegally would be a curse to carry the rest of his life since he was a memory junky and never forgave himself for anything.

“Hello darling.”

“I’ve been thinking about the letter we were going to concoct from the prosecutor. Let’s forget it.”

“I could tell by your voice you didn’t really want to. Hemingway said good is what you feel good after.”

“I never liked Hemingway.” He had a cigarette cough and gasped.

“Neither do I but what he said was true. The good thing in my life now is that I’m disowning my parents on the grounds of gross negligence and Diane’s adopting me.”

“You’re kidding me?”