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.
In the mental comfort of solitary driving he felt that he had attained equilibrium sufficient for the mission at hand. He was somehow going to get the nutcase fucker into prison where the authorities would hopefully throw away the key. Still there was a nagging lack of confidence that intermittently hit him over being in an unfamiliar territory, something that had led to a miserable failure in the Nogales area. On their trip to Italy he had been jealous of Diane’s competency. She had refreshed her university Italian, studied maps and local history, and was familiar with the contents of dozens of museums, and also restaurants which she researched through friends, travel guides, and the Internet. Meanwhile, before dawn and haunted by the usual jet lag, he sat in an eighteenth-century Florentine café of surpassing beauty brooding over a case that had arisen the day before they had departed on vacation. Over west in the Sagola area a retired miner had stomped his old wife into a condition near death. Normally the local sheriff’s department would have handled the case totally but the stomping was so severe that it raised the possibility of attempted murder. The point was the “no exit” aspect of his job. How could he truly be in a Florentine café when he kept seeing in his mind’s eye the old woman’s knee that looked like a bright purple bowling ball? She had lisped through swollen lips, “I don’t want my Frank to get in no trouble with the law.” How many times had he heard of this defense of the guilty? The population at large had no real idea of the amount of domestic malice. The grand prize had been won by a drunk who had screwed his two-year-old baby daughter.
He was anxious to survey the cult site north of Crawford, about fifteen miles from Chadron, but first checked in to the pleasant lodgings Mona had arranged for him in Chadron. There was also a fax from Mona that had likely been read by the desk clerk but he didn’t care. “Please keep your cell phone on and charged. I need daily contact with your lovely voice that sounds like a coal shovel grating on cement. I lucked out and raised a chat room of an encounter group of people recovering from being ripped off by cults in America. One of them was a rich lady from Petoskey who had temporarily joined up with Dwight. We exchanged e-mails. She had dropped out because the longhouse accommodations near Ontonagon weren’t up to snuff. She also wanted something more ‘Oriental’ as her yardman was an Indian and wasn’t very spiritual. As an initiation fee Dwight wanted 10 percent of her net worth which in her case was a lot of money. She admitted that she had long been a ‘spiritual adventurer’ with a lot of cult experience. She also enjoyed the primitive sex. Anyway Dwight charges poorer members a minimum of twenty grand. I wondered why Carla didn’t tell us any of this but Carla said that if any member breaks secrecy Dwight insists that they’ll be reincarnated as an amoeba buried in a dog turd. Dwight received his dispensation from the gods while living with the Haida Indians on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia. I asked this lady why people would fork over that kind of money and she said that Americans don’t believe in the value of anything unless it’s expensive. Salvation and good future lives don’t come cheap. Dwight really wanted her cash and declared that she was at the seventeenth stage out of a hundred. Everyone had to have a spirit creature and hers was the sandhill crane. Most poorer members are given the porcupine with which to enact mimesis, or the beaver so they’ll work hard. Nifty isn’t it? Love, Mona.”
Driving toward Crawford Sunderson reflected on how Mona liked to make him feel uncomfortable especially since he no longer peeked at her. Of greater concern was the idea that everything Dwight was offering was readily available for free to anyone who took the trouble to read a few ethnographic texts, or better yet more accessible anthropological material, or visit modern tribes during powwows. You didn’t have to put in that much effort to get the gist but then it took a lifetime effort to internalize the messages assuming you could manage the indeterminate quality of faith.
When he reached the small road that led north to the area of the cult property his thinking rattled to a complete stop when it occurred to him that he had the advantage of growing up with the knowledge of Indians that was likely exotic and alien to others. His dear friend George, an Anishinabe, whom he had hiked and fished so much with when they were twelve, had a peculiar relationship with ravens. They’d ride their bikes from Munising out to a creek near Melstrand. A dozen or so ravens would follow them and George said they were from south of town where he lived in a trailer with his pulp-cutter dad and a crazy sister. George was a great mimic and talked to the ravens and they talked back with easy glibness. Late that summer when George got hit by a car while riding his bike on Route 28 there were ravens at the burial service led by a big bearded male George could hand feed. At the moment Sunderson figured that one reason he was so pissed about the cult is that Dwight was a blasphemy against the spirit of his friend George.
Sunderson drove south a few miles but only until the blacktop ended and the road became muddy and rutted. He was met by an oncoming three-quarter-ton pickup covered with mud and a man who waved him to turn around, yelling through his open window, “You ain’t going to make it.” When Sunderson turned around he saw in the distance two cowboys on horseback driving a herd of cattle toward the west, the obvious answer though he had never been on a horse. Like it or not he’d have to masquerade as an old cowboy to conceal himself.
In a tavern in Crawford through the efforts of a friendly bartender he made a deal with a very tall mixed-blood Lakota to take him up to the cult property. The man’s name was Adam and he was having a burger with his daughter who looked about eleven and was introduced as Morning Star, nicknamed Petunia. Adam was drinking coffee which was a good sign of reliability. When Sunderson told him the location of the property Adam said it had been bought by religious “kooks” partly as a camp for kids. Yes, indeed, Sunderson thought, kids are the thing. Staring at Adam he recognized the ex-alcoholic in him, possessing as he did many of Marion’s hesitant mannerisms.