The Great Leader

by Jim Harrison

  PART II

  Chapter 6

  He tried to run back toward the car while covering his face and squinting out between his fingers but two large rocks hit his fingers in succession, breaking one, and then one hit the back of his head, which felled him like the trees he used to cut, with blood immediately flowing down on his shirt collar. While falling he twisted to try to see his assailants but the blood from his hand smeared his vision. He tried to grab at the bush that had been full of birds but the branches were too brittle and slight to slow his fall and he hit the ground hard facedown, which fractured his nose and knocked out his wind. He scrambled toward his blurred car on his hands and knees with the copper smell of blood gushing from his nose. Rocks continued to thud painfully against his back and the backs of his legs and another large one to the back of his head made him collapse to his stomach again. He became fairly sure he was going to die but rose again crawling slowly toward the gate and through the bottom-most opening and then the rocks stopped coming. He heard a voice that he was sure was Dwight’s shouting, “Go away. Stay away.” He was on his knees beside the compact car and opened the door and felt on the floor for his water bottle, the contents of which he poured on his upturned face. He turned and with limited vision could see Dwight standing there between the canyon walls with a dozen or so young people none of whose height reached his shoulders. All of them were girls wearing skirts. They all turned and walked back toward the ranch.

  Sunderson’s hands were too slippery with blood and water to hold the car keys but he managed to open his suitcase and dry his hands on a pair of boxer shorts. He was sure he had a concussion and wondered if he’d be able to drive. He made it the seven miles out to the main road and had barely pulled over when he passed out. He had noted that it was 10:30 a.m. on the car clock and when he awoke it was high noon with sleet beating against the windows and now the peaks of the Chiricahuas were almost invisible. He had the sense that the part of his brain toward the back of his head was short-circuited. It flashed and swirled and there were moments of intense pain. He took out his cell phone but there was no signal so he drove south twenty miles until he neared a dumpy ranching village named Elfrida where he pulled off the road’s shoulder and passed out again. He awoke in fifteen minutes and now his cell phone worked and he called his sister Berenice who was in a beauty parlor. You always had to say things twice to Berenice and it was hard to talk through two bloody tooth stumps and swollen lips. He said he had fallen on his face down a canyon and needed help ASAP. He said it twice and she said she’d come over with Bob who could drive Sunderson’s car. She and Bob had lived for years in Rio Rico, which was near Nogales, and she knew both a nurse and a doctor at the Nogales hospital. She said they’d reach him in two hours or less.

  The lights in his brain began to dim again as he sat there with the sleet ticking off the windshield. He kept thinking, “I have no evidence,” but didn’t quite know what his brain meant by this sentence. He had never felt further away from his life as he had known it. He smelled the burned smell of the desert earth but that was the grit in his nose from pitching forward on his face. He figured his mind meant that there was no hard evidence for anything of value. He thought that this wouldn’t help anything and was close to mumbling his childhood prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” He couldn’t bring himself to pray but was surprised he remembered the words. He looked east at the foothills of the Chiricahuas which were disappearing with his vision. His brain could see a map in an historical text because it was just over the mountains to the east that Geronimo had surrendered in Skeleton Canyon. The Apaches were the hardest people imaginable but so were those who had stoned him.

  A grizzled old man picking up roadside trash found him and was soon followed by a deputy. He was half awake when the trash man opened the compact door and yelled with breath worse than a skunk’s asshole, “You look like a horse throwed you off and lit on your goddamned face.” The deputy was remote and cool, apparently fresh on the job, trying to do it by the book but the book wasn’t handy so he seemed unsure and frightened by Sunderson’s appearance.

  “I took a header down a steep canyon,” he hissed through his broken teeth and swollen lips. He offered his identification including his Michigan State Police badge. He was upset that it was 2:00 p.m. Where had he been?

  “Sir, we have to get you to a hospital.”

  At that moment Berenice and Bob showed up in their Escalade. Like her mother Berenice was a fair-sized and formidable woman. She took over.

  Chapter 7

  It was only in the evening of his fifth day at the Nogales hospital that Sunderson felt he had a real inkling of who he was though he was unsure it mattered. He had received a subdural hematoma from the large rock that had struck him in the back of the head, also a minimally depressed fracture that likely wouldn’t require surgery. The hardest symptoms of his post-concussive state were more vague: the anxiety and depression, the inability to concentrate, and the disequilibrium when he toddled out a back door to have a cigarette. Another smoker, a Mexican orderly, pointed to the south of the hospital and told Sunderson that he was real close to the border. This was the best part of his disaster so far as nearly all of the various employees of the hospital spoke Spanish with each other, which meant he didn’t have to struggle with comprehension, which was beyond him anyway. He also liked the pure music of the language. One of the only memories he could recapture was of his Mexican friend in Frankfurt saying “hola,” so Sunderson muttered “hola” to anyone who entered his hospital room. A slight problem was that neither the ER doctor nor the regular doctor Berenice had secured him believed that his injuries came from a fall. They didn’t say why and Sunderson didn’t really give a shit. What could they do, throw more rocks at him? When an attendant, a roly-poly female, had helped him take a shower she kept whispering “muy malo” as he looked at himself in a full-length mirror and discovered that his predominant body color was blue.

  Another slight problem was the visit of a plainclothes officer on the third day. There was buzzing in Sunderson’s ear so he hadn’t heard the details when the man introduced himself. The man was short and squat, of Mexican descent, and looked powerful and feral like some of those Detroit detectives who daily brushed against death. The man asked to see his ID, which Sunderson said was locked in the drawer of the nightstand beside his bed. When Sunderson struggled with the key the man said “never mind” and that he had read the report filed by the Cochise County deputy.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Visiting my mom in Green Valley.”

  “What were you doing near Elfrida? No one goes to Elfrida except for a purpose.”

  “I was looking the country over. I like history. I wanted to see where Geronimo surrendered.”

  “Oh bullshit. The Michigan State Police said that you retired last week. A lot of people who retire from our line of work have someone they want to get even with. That’s not you?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing to do with the drug or illegal migrant problems?”

  “No.”

  “The doctor said you didn’t fall down a canyon. Your palms are fine. If you had fallen they would have been torn up trying to stop your fall.”

  “Who gives a shit?” Sunderson watched a fine-looking vulture fly by the window.

  “I do. You’re in my homeland. It’s easy for me to run you out of here.”

  “I’m looking into a religious cult. A friend’s daughter lost some money to them.”

  “Oh fuck me!” The man laughed explosively. “Those daffy fucks are all over Arizona. They’ve probably blown the money on vegetables.”

  “I suppose so.” Sunderson was relieved at the man’s reaction.

  “Well, take care,” the man said getting up to leave. “It’s obvious your cult doesn’t have a sense of humor. If you shoot anyone you won’t be treated like an officer. Even the
cults down here are armed to the teeth. At least most of them don’t do drugs. I guess religion is their drug, you know, the Marxian opiate of the people.”

  When he left Sunderson regretted having to explain himself even minimally but then it was a courtesy between detectives. He already felt he was too old to play for keeps and would likely back away from the Great Leader.

  His biggest problem was Berenice who visited twice a day. When he told her every other day was enough she began to cry. Bob was loitering out in the hall and Sunderson added that she shouldn’t bring her asshole husband. “Everything gives me a headache in my condition.”

  “I’m so sorry about you and now we think Mom had a little stroke. She’s slurring her words.”

  “She’s eighty-five and she drinks too much.”

  “That doesn’t make it easier.”

  He dictated an e-mail to Mona saying, “I’ve been injured. I’ll be okay. I’ll be in touch in a few days. Don’t send anything to Berenice.” He didn’t want Berenice to read anything Mona might send. When he got out he’d find a Kinko’s store for that.

  Chapter 8

  In seven days and seven nights in the hospital he certainly hadn’t re-created himself. Most of all he felt his age, a sensation that had previously been creeping up on him but had now fallen from the heavens like the “ton of bricks” people used to talk about. He had been warned by the doctor of certain post-concussive symptoms but had only caught the words “depression” and “forgetfulness.” He had been concentrating on a nurse’s aide who had just taken his temperature and blood pressure prefatory to his checking out. Her name was Melissa and he had looked forward to her visits several times a day. When she hadn’t appeared the day before he had been a little teary because she was definitely his only viable contact with life. She spoke English with a heavy accent and had showed him a photo of her three-year-old daughter who wore tiny earrings, evidently a local custom or so he thought. All the staff knew he was a detective and she told him that her husband had been a narcotico who had been murdered the year before. Each day when she would leave the room he was immediately despondent. He was too timid to ask her for her last name or phone number. She was friendly but he doubted she would want anything to do with a black-and-blue geezer. They had mostly talked about fishing and eating fish. Her father had been a schoolteacher in Hermosillo and had taken she and her brother fishing near Guaymas a number of times. She said she would like to cook him some sea bass with lime, oil, and garlic but now here he was discharged with no way to get in touch with her. What had happened to the easy resourcefulness that had informed his career as a detective? There didn’t seem to be an ounce of detective left in him. With great physical or mental suffering or both simultaneously in his case comes humility, and not virtuous humility but that of a dog who, hit by a car, drags itself off the road into a ditch trying to be out of more harm’s way.

  Berenice had found him a small garage apartment on the northeast side of Nogales just off the road to Patagonia for his further rehabilitation. The house was owned by an elderly couple from Minnesota whom he readily expected to bother him but they turned out to be bird-watchers and nature photographers and were gone from dawn to dark except on Sundays. His little apartment’s walls were covered with too many of their photos so that the total effect was a bit lurid and capped off with a photo of a large wild rattlesnake with an acorn woodpecker in its mouth, the bird staring at the camera as if to ask for an explanation, an easy metaphor for his own situation, or so Sunderson thought. Not very deep in his mind he knew he had no clear objective except that he couldn’t simply cut and run. There was the prominent mystery of what retired people were supposed to do all day. Read and drink? Join AA? Learn to cook? Divorce had brought about the absence of Diane’s good cooking which he sorely missed. He had thought about taking cooking lessons but then both Marion and Mona were good cooks and had offered to help him learn. Meanwhile he felt he should at least stay in Arizona for Thanksgiving with his mother and until his bruised mind cleared. In the miniscule part of his head he referred to as his snake brain there was a fantasy of shooting Dwight in the head from five hundred yards with a Sako target rifle. He had it coming.

  Berenice took him to the dentist to have his two tooth stumps removed and in the pain-free immediate aftermath he listened to his cell phone messages. Lucy called, weeping of course and fairly drunk saying that she missed his company, which seemed unlikely. His ex-wife Diane had left a message saying that she and her ill husband were moving back to Marquette. He had a life expectancy short of a year and wanted to be in his hometown where he could be treated by doctors he knew and trusted. Marion asked if he wanted books sent from the stack of new ones and to please call. Mona’s message was garbled saying that she had had a “disaster” and had sent an explanation via Kinko’s with a lot of cult material. She had also prayed to Odin for his recovery. This latter fact had him stumped but then he recalled she had a lot of little statues of deities on her bedroom dresser. Many were Far Eastern and he wondered about the attraction of India and Tibet for the young.

  Berenice was out in his yard looking at plants so he asked her to fetch Mona’s material without snooping. Naturally tears formed and her face reddened with anger but it was all for show between a brother and sister who in their childhood had readily gotten in each other’s stuff. There were three bedrooms in the second story of the house with his parents up front, then Berenice and Roberta, and then he and little Bobby in the back. Berenice and Roberta had a skeleton key and kept their door locked but Bobby had found a key in their dad’s desk that worked, thus by reading Berenice’s diary they had discovered she had lost her cherry the night that, as a junior, she had been crowned homecoming queen. Sunderson had been a sophomore at the time and Bobby five years younger in the fifth grade. He had questioned, “What’s a cherry,” but Sunderson couldn’t bring himself to answer. The kids had come along in two tiers with Roberta then a year later Bobby coming along after Dad left pulp cutting and driving a log skidder for the comparative prosperity of a job at the mill. When Sunderson had teased Berenice about her lost cherry she had countered by stealing his packet of stolen Trojan condoms and putting them on their mother’s plate at Sunday breakfast and an insufferable scene had followed.

  Sunderson thought about his family while waiting for Berenice. A lump arose in his throat with the image of Roberta pulling Bobby up the steep hill in her red wagon in the time between when he lost his leg and when his prosthesis could be fitted.

  Sunderson was sitting in a lawn chair and feigned sleep when Berenice returned with the manila envelope. He was relieved when she drove away. The packet remained unopened for five days because of a double obsession, the first one being why he should stay so far from his native ground and in a state of severe physical and mental wreckage. He didn’t have an answer least of all revenge, which was far too large and fancy a word. In the Upper Peninsula people only said “getting even.” The other obsession was Melissa but then he couldn’t proceed beyond her physical image and the slight lisp in her voice. She was only minimally attractive, handsome maybe, a little full-figured like so many of the local Chicano women. He tried to imagine being a father to her daughter but failed. Back at the office Roxie had told him that he should get married again in order to pass on his retirement benefits when he died. That was U.P. thinking. It was not a prosperous area and perhaps half the population had no health insurance. A fishing acquaintance with Lou Gehrig’s disease had shot himself to save money for his wife.

  Sunderson was growing a beard to hide the face he no longer understood with its yellowish-blue chin bruises. On the fifth morning of Mona’s unopened package he had hung a hand towel over the bathroom cabinet mirror so he wouldn’t see himself. He took his coffee out to the lawn chair in the yard surprised to find that his landlord was out weeding flowers rather than being on a nature expedition. The man explained that his wife was ill from her chemo, which she had to take for the cancer, as he called it, rath
er than for simply cancer, a usage Sunderson had noted in the upper Midwest as if cancer were a singular scourge and monster rather than its own multifoliate cellular nightmare.

  “Despite what someone did to you, you should walk every day or you’ll turn to shit,” Alfred said.

  “That’s probably true.” Sunderson was mildly pleased that he didn’t feel pissed off as he usually did with advice of a personal nature.

  “Out here we live up in the sky compared to the Midwest. You have to work to get your lungs acclimated. If you’re in the backcountry you might think of carrying a pistol.”

  Sunderson nodded in agreement and Alfred walked away. If you have to carry a pistol for nearly forty years you’re not enthused about continuing to do so. Maybe Marion could send his pistol with the books but it could be illegal. He couldn’t remember. Sunderson had never been interested in gun control except to favor the banning of automatic weapons and having the conviction that the United States would be better off if like Canada we banned handguns. Ultimately he didn’t give a shit though it was likely if he had fired a warning shot they would have stopped throwing rocks. Again he thought that there was no real conclusive evidence for much of anything.

  Except hunger. He was wobbly from lack of food and went inside to heat up some lentil soup Berenice had made him. He put it on the stove and then sat down at the kitchenette table and finally opened Mona’s material. On top of the stack was a brief e-mail from Lucy whom he had given Mona’s e-mail to keep in touch. “Your idea was to try to screw me and forget me. You’re a bad person. Love, Lucy.” This message confused him because the severity of his concussion had caused memory lapses the doctor said would probably be temporary. Mona’s letter about her “disaster,” however, fully penetrated his bruised brain. Mona had fallen in love with a brother and sister, and her mother had made a surprise visit back home and caught the three of them making out in bed together. She had beat on them with a broom. The upshot was that her mother insisted she have counseling for her perversion. Sunderson made an effort to be shocked but instead was stimulated for the first time in two weeks. He hadn’t dared think sexually about Melissa in an attempt to stay high-minded to withstand the disappointment if she turned him down for a date.