The Great Leader

“No, we’ve talked about it for hours. She’s got a lawyer working on it. It’s late but I could use an actual mother. What do you think?”

“I think it’s wonderful.”

He was fueled by a giddy happiness for hours and then set about making a mental listing of a plan.

1. Buy old cowboy clothes in Chadron. 2. Move to Crawford to be closer to action. 3. Rent a horse from Adam. 4. Learn how to saddle it. 5. Stow car with Michigan plates. Rent old pickup.

He reached the cult site north of Crawford late the next afternoon pleased to see that Adam was part of a crew of fifteen men cleaning up the area and erecting the last half dozen big tipis, thirty of them in all on a flat out in front of the old house and corral. There were even a number of deep blue Porta-Potties and a water truck. He said hello to Adam’s daughter, Morning Star, who was watching with some other kids and the wives of the workers in a near party atmosphere. There was a lot of comic banter about the coming cult. She said shyly that he could use her nickname, Petunia.

“Are these people crazy?” Petunia asked him with a smile. She was tall for her age, dark and handsome with a lilting voice.

“I’m afraid they are a little wacky.”

“Dad said you might be an undercover cop.”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Adam came over with a broad grin saying that the cult front man was keeping him on for top-dollar wages for at least another week. He pointed at a man in a gray suit in the distance looking at the ramshackle house with a foreman. This made Sunderson nervous so he asked Adam if he and Petunia could meet him for dinner in Chadron.

Back in the car he felt he had to be careful because the man in the suit might be one of Queenie’s Detroit lawyers who would wonder about a car with Michigan plates. He found a combination junk and old clothing and pawn shop in Chadron and outfitted himself for twenty bucks, not a bad amount to become another person. The used cowboy hat was sweat-stained and shapeless, a little large but it looked bona fide in the car mirror. He checked back in to his local Chadron motel in a state of delirious fatigue. He’d find a Crawford lodging in the morning.

When he walked into the restaurant in his new costume he could see Adam and Petunia in a far corner but neither recognized him until he was nearly to the table. They both laughed.

“Another piece of shit old cowpoke,” Adam said.

They all had big rib steaks and Sunderson was surprised when Petunia bore down and finished hers first.

“She’s growing like a weed,” Adam said.

“Like a flower,” Petunia corrected. She went off across the room to visit school friends.

“She’s trying to fit into a mostly white world. She’s the star of the seventh-grade basketball team,” Adam said.

“Any chance I can rent that horse I rode last time and maybe you could help me find an old pickup to cover my tracks?”

“I got both at home. That motel outside of Crawford has fenced pasture for travelers pulling horses. I figured you’re really not looking for a missing person.”

“No, I’m tracking a bad guy. He’s the cult leader with many names. If Petunia is out there, keep an eye on her. He’s got freak hots for young girls. I got proof of this.”

“I’d gut him like the buffalo I used to butcher,” Adam said, his face tightened and clouded.

“I wouldn’t blame you.”

Sunderson reached Adam’s at 6:00 a.m. with the first light just squinting low in the east but catching the top of Crow Butte with a glow of sunlight. He thought this whole Sandhills area was as lovely as any country in America, albeit subtly. It had been a haunted night with only a single nightcap to help him into sleep. He had long known that you had to pull back from booze when the pressure became acute despite the daily craving to dull the senses a bit, or quite a bit. When he had wakened at 3:00 a.m. he began brooding about the conclusions of Deloria’s Playing Indian but then it was a scholarly book and scarcely the place for a white-hot rant. It was as if those playing Indian were saying, “Look at us. We’re human and we can be like you, too. We know we took the land of over five hundred tribes and butchered a few thousand and ten million inadvertently died from our diseases and hunger in a two-hundred-year holocaust. But we’re like you dressing up in your garb and dancing.”