Jim Harrison - The Great Leader

Lucy fluttered around, her face pink from embarrassment, stowing water and box lunches into a pretty canvas satchel. “Daddy, please.” She glanced furtively at Sunderson who ate hastily because Bushrod was now up and pacing near the door, muttering at the front page of the Journal.

“They ought to guillotine fifty thousand brokers in Battery Park. Can’t you law people arrange it?”

“This is the first workday of my retirement,” Sunderson said, amused at this antique nutcase, obviously the source of Lucy’s lifestyle. Lucy had called him a “desert rat,” someone who found the deserts of the Southwest obsessively interesting.

“Find something to do full time or you’ll die on the vine,” Bushrod pronounced as if he were Moses.

“I’m investigating the evil connection between religion, money, and sex,” Sunderson joked, relieved that his own father had been a mild, kind man.

“Excellent. Send me the results.”

With Bushrod at the wheel of a battered Range Rover they drove out toward Ina and through Saguaro National Park, with Lucy seemingly frozen in place in the center of the backseat, leafing through a bird book without seeing it. Bushrod explained the nature of the flora they passed, the dozens of species of cacti while Sunderson was glum about the relationship of adult children to their old parents. It was a different person in the backseat and Sunderson was inattentive to Bushrod, meditating on all the forms of bullying in the world. He had faulted his own parents for not letting his dog Ralph in the house. At bedtime he and his brother Robert would lower a basket on a rope from their second-story bedroom window. Ralph would jump in and they would pull him up to where he belonged. His dad finally caught on but it was his mother who was the prime mover of the no dogs rule. His father never mentioned their secret to her.

They reached a desert two-track and drove several miles onto the Tohono O’odham reservation with Sunderson reflecting that the scrawny cattle would have elicited calls to the Humane Society in Michigan. Bushrod pulled up near a grove of shady paloverde and when Sunderson got out his bare arm brushed painfully against a cholla cactus and he yelped.

“Nearly all the flora around here will poke a hole in you.” Bushrod pulled a hemostat out of a Dopp kit and pulled a dozen slender spines from Sunderson’s arm. “Keep an eye out for crotalids,” he said, heading up what looked like a hundred-foot-high pile of basaltic rock.

“He means rattlesnakes,” Lucy said dully, her eyes moist. Her father was already up the steep incline out of earshot. “He’s driven me crazy since I could walk.”

“That’s not a good way to live.” Sunderson supposed he was meant to follow Bushrod. Those from the upper Midwest are not born climbers except maybe when they’re younger and then only conifers with lots of branches. The landscape unnerved him and having seen rattlers on television and in the movies he was not thrilled at the idea of an encounter with a snake that could possibly kill him. He calmed himself thinking that though he was intensely perceptive on his home ground because of his job, when he traveled he was a bit of a goof. Once with Diane in Chicago he had taken a solo walk and had gotten a bit lost, remembering with difficulty their hotel for which she had made the arrangements.

“Come along dear,” Lucy said scrambling up the rocks.

His fears were leavened by her fine bottom in the khaki shorts though there remained a bit of the “What am I doing here?” By the time he reached the top he was breathing heavily while Bushrod and daughter had caught their breath. He had been troubled by the many snake drawings and carvings on the rocks. There were others but snakes were dominant. He seated himself beneath Lucy not failing to notice the nice underthighs beneath her loose-legged shorts.

“A lot of speculation here, possibly about the roots of religion before sex and money came into play,” Bushrod joked. “Or maybe they all happen at once, an amusing idea. This place is called Cocoraque Butte, not really a butte is it? It’s a little close to town for the university boys to get interested in. They’d rather go north for the Navajo and Hopi or maybe down to Casas Grandes. In fact I’ve never seen anyone here in a dozen trips.”

“Why all the renderings of snakes?” Sunderson was uncomfortably leery that a rattler might ooze between the boulders they were sitting on.

“Well, this kind of rockpile is habitat for rodentia and consequently for the snakes that eat them. You have to think that maybe primitive people were encamped here six thousand years ago and there were a prolific number of rattlers. Say that someone from the tribe or group, probably a child, had been killed by a rattler, which is comparatively small but immense in the power of their venom. You naturally would ascribe godlike powers to them. You propitiate the snake gods by drawing or carving them, a sort of prayer. You pray to God so that he won’t kill you and in hopes he’ll give good luck to your family or group. Of course this is a crude and speculative simplification.”

“Where did the priests come in exactly? I mean I took an anthropology course but I don’t recall.” Sunderson tilted a bit for a better look at Lucy’s thighs. She perceived his intent and smiled at him, her first of the day.

“Well, these early people were nomadic and usually had a medicine man, a shaman that stayed off to the side but priesthoods came to people that were established as farmers or, on the northwest coast, as farmers and fishermen. Farmers need rain and are suckers for religious leaders.”

“They also offer consolation and advice,” Lucy added timidly.

“Yours should have told you long ago to get rid of your nitwit husband.”

“Please, Dad.”

“Please, bullshit.” He turned to Sunderson. “You ever meet any of these people in their three-thousand-dollar suits? They’re the priests of money and pretend they have mystical knowledge about how to increase yours, which as you’ve seen recently gives them a chance to swindle everyone. Me, I’m strictly into land. You can read a realtor like a stop sign.”

Sunderson immediately recognized that historically Bushrod was from the moneyed class, which bought all the land out of which a dime could be squeezed and even felt virtuous about their land rape.

Lucy was in tears and began her slow descent, which Sunderson figured was more difficult because you had your gravity behind you. He looked off across the massive landscape to the west and southwest and then down at Lucy who had stumbled near the bottom.

“She was a champ when young but then she became a brood mare to a fool. Early on I had him looked into. Word had it that he cheated his way through Choate and Yale.”

“From this vantage point the Gadsden Purchase doesn’t seem very wise.” Sunderson was trying to avoid the subject of Lucy, upset by the cruelty of the father toward the daughter. He wondered at the number of parents he had known who bludgeon their children with their own ideals for them.

“I read that the part of the Mexican government that sold it to us were crooks. There’s a fuss about it locally in the newspapers.” Bushrod stood up and stretched with crackling bones.

“Yes, a man I’m looking for is involved.” Mona’s fax had said that Dwight was helping fuel this pointless controversy.

“You said you were retired.”

“It’s a hobby.”

“For thirty years my hobby has been the desert. I don’t have time to wear it out.”

Bushrod descended nimbly as if in a hurry while Sunderson backed himself down, bursting into a profuse sweat when he thought he heard a rattling down in a crevasse beneath him. If you looked northeast toward Tucson the sky was discolored by the smudge pot of civilization, while to the west there were the purple mountains majesty in a haze of heat. He peeked down the deep crevasse praying to the snake gods to have mercy.