Sunderson had a fine, fatty rib steak in Chadron, slept well, and was back at the junction turnoff at first light. Adam was standing there rolling a cigarette with two mounted horses. Sunderson felt very awkward mounting and admitted this was his first time. Adam only said, “Don’t fight it, sit easy.” It turned out to be a thirty-mile cross-country roundtrip and that eve-ning Sunderson thought of it as a day that would live in infamy as he applied ointment to his raw ass. He was rather proud that he had only fallen off once and that was when they were going down a steep embankment and he slid forward down the horse’s neck into a small muddy creek. Adam had hoisted him back on the saddle as if he were a pillow. Sunderson was down from two hundred to one eighty but it was still no mean feat.
At the property, which wasn’t much more than an abandoned farmhouse, a shed, a Quonset hut, and a ramshackle corral, Adam told him that a friend of his up in Pine Ridge had an order in for thirty-three high-end tipis. He had met the woman who bought the property and had been kind enough to give Morning Star a nice pair of earrings. He hoped to get on the crew that would set up the tipis and remodel the farmhouse. There was also talk about building a log lodge.
Adam unpacked some elk salami and fry bread from his saddle bag and they sat against the old house out of the gathering wind. Sunderson asked that his own visit be kept confidential explaining that he was a retired detective looking for a missing person. Adam said that he figured Sunderson to be a cop. Adam said he had quit his job butchering and skinning buffalo up in South Dakota because he wanted to get Morning Star out of the Rapid City area. He had quit boozing two years before but his wife couldn’t so he packed up and brought his daughter down to Crawford near where his father had broke and wrangled horses on a big ranch. Sunderson said that he was headed for Tucson and would follow the cult up this way and hoped that Adam would rent him a horse so he could pass for a cowboy while looking for the missing person.
“You might need another lesson,” Adam said, pointing to Sunderson’s horse which had been improperly tied to the corral and gotten loose.
“I’m sorry,” Sunderson said, feeling shamefaced.
“Sorry won’t mean shit if you have to walk fifteen miles,” Adam said, then walked over and opened the door of the Quonset hut, hooting into the darkness. Out of curiosity the horse walked over to see what the fuss was about and Adam grabbed its reins.
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.
In his room he was restless and couldn’t go further with Deloria’s Playing Indian but then he had already been through the book twice and tonight the subject utterly enervated him. Mona had stuck a Donna Leon mystery in his briefcase and he drew it out. He had been absolutely averse to mysteries because of his profession but then, after all, he was retired now and Mona’s recommendation had credibility. He was soon immersed in the mind of Commissario Guido Brunetti and an atmosphere he and Diane had loved during their three days in Venice. He was an hour into the book and having his nightcap deciding to turn out the lights early when an idea hit him with a jolt, not too strong a term. Why not go against all law enforcement ethics and have Mona construct some convincing prosecutor’s office stationery saying to Carla that she will be prosecuted for her conduct with Mona unless she turns evidence against Dwight for sexual abuse of minors? He could show this letter to Nebraska cops and they would come down on Dwight. Why play fair with this scumbag? Of course there was an outside chance he could be caught for forgery but it would be unlikely if he mailed a copy of the letter from Chadron. The idea was amusing enough that he fell asleep thinking of Charlene’s ample ass.