Jim Harrison - The Great Leader

At the bottom Sunderson took the vehicle’s medicine kit away from Lucy who was ineptly trying to patch a skinned knee.

“I’ve even doctored bullet wounds,” Sunderson said kneeling before her and cleaning the grit from her knee. Her skin was smooth and moist with sweat. The nut twinge was not called for but was there.

“Nice legs, indeed. The only thing of value she got from her tosspot mother, whom I call Miss Absolut, were nice features to moderate my ugly ones. Did you ever shoot anyone? I bet that’s not an original question.”

“Just over their heads to slow them down. A couple were shot by partners. It’s quite ugly.” He was thinking that if Lucy’s mother drank too much it was obvious who drove her there. It would be nice to slow the old fool down. “Once I entered a house south of Detroit with a partner. I knelt down to inspect a guy wheezing with a meat cleaver in his chest. He was blowing a pink bubble like a lung-shot deer. Another guy comes running out of a room with a butcher knife and my partner shot half his ass off with a. 357.”

“My God what an ugly story,” Bushrod said.

They drove on another thirty miles to the southwest, and then on a two-track as bad as Sunderson had experienced reaching the Great Leader’s longhouse. They parked at the foot of a canyon that was shaded from the early winter sun. Sunderson guessed it was nearly eighty degrees and said so.

“It gets to be one-fifteen-plus in June when we head back to Maine.” Bushrod set off at a brisk pace up the canyon. Sunderson tried to help Lucy carry the lunches.

“You go ahead with Dad. I’m the squaw. He likes to lecture.”

“You ever think of shooting him?” Sunderson teased.

“Many times,” she replied archly.

He caught Bushrod who walked up the canyon in silence and Sunderson wondered if it was the cleaver story that battened his gob. They stopped at a place shadowed by paloverde and ironwoods and signs of a fire ring.

“I’ve camped here alone and been satisfied with the company. Before you showed up this morning Lucy said you were divorced?”

“Yes, for three years.”

“Willingly?”

“No. It was my fault. She fled.”

“You must not have much money.”

“None to speak of. A pension. It’s enough.”

“If you’re worth a lot you can’t drive them away unless they can get a big cut.”

“That’s what I heard.”

It was only beginning to occur to Sunderson that he was in the company of high rollers, hard to perceive as they weren’t the least bit demonstrative like the midwestern rich. Having grown up so modestly, if not in poverty, he had done fairly well as a college graduate or so he thought. He had seen nothing enviable in the lives of richer people like Diane’s parents whose peripheries seemed blinded by their possessions. His lifelong obsession with fishing for brook trout was largely free.

“She said you were from the Upper Peninsula. Way back when my family had a lot of timberland up that way and in Wisconsin and Maine of course. We were noble predators, to be sure,” he chuckled unattractively. “Later we were mostly into paper mills. I bailed out totally in the late eighties sensing that computers will make a lot of the paper supply obsolete. I’d wager the Boston Globe will go under. My land will always be land.”

He was thinking that his suspicions were confirmed. Now Bushrod reminded him of a big-shot banker in Marquette who yelled over to him a few weeks before when he walked out of the Verling where he had had a fine whitefish dinner. The banker had been parked in front of the disco and someone had keyed his new Lexus leaving a deep five-foot scratch along the door panels. The man was in tears of rage and wanted immediate action. Sunderson had said that it was out of his territory and that the banker must call the Marquette city police, after which the man actually gasped in rage. Sunderson had suddenly decided to be nice and called the city police. The dispatcher had said, “That guy’s an asshole. We’ll let him wait a half hour.” Sunderson had said that the city cops would arrive momentarily and had walked off with a smile.

Deeper, though, was a rawer place, which was the habitat of his thoughts about his father who had worked for comparative peanuts at the paper mill in Munising for over thirty years. His father, however, felt the job was a big upward step from cutting pulp logs in the woods when winter days could be thirty below zero or in June when the blackflies were insufferably thick. Sunderson had done it himself starting at age twelve on weekends when he had saved enough for a used chain saw but it was brutally hard to make fifteen bucks in a ten-hour day. Bushrod was the dictator in the faraway office who owned the timberland, the pulp mill, and tens of thousands of slaves and acres.

Lucy had laid out lunch on a sky-blue tablecloth and they sat on big rocks that someone who was very strong had dragged near the fire ring. There was an immediate wrangle because there was the wrong kind of mustard on Bushrod’s roast beef sandwich.

“Dad, it’s not my fault.”

“Then whose fault is it?”

“You can have my chicken sandwich.”

“My dear, are you crazy? You know I don’t eat chicken sandwiches.”

Meanwhile Sunderson felt a palpable prickling of the skin on his neck, a sign that they were being watched. When he had noted many human tracks at the base of the canyon Bushrod had said the tracks were made by illegal Mexican migrants who had crossed the border. He raised his eyes up the canyon wall and there not thirty yards away was a petroglyph of a half-man, half-lizard looking down at them. Sunderson knew that no matter what he read, no matter what was explained to him, he would never truly understand what he was looking at. The language that might do so was permanently lost. But this alone did not add up to his neck tingle. Farther up the canyon, easily a hundred yards, there was a small man, or perhaps a boy, looking at them partially concealed by a boulder and a bush. The mental jump between lizard-man and the boy was unavailable to him.

“I was wondering when you’d notice it, crime buster,” Bushrod said with the self-assured voice of a bully politician.

“Quite something,” Sunderson said, pleased to have diverted him from the wrong mustard.

“I have theorized it was made by the local shaman warning others away from his canyon.”

Sunderson ignored him, got up with half his sandwich, a bottle of water, and an apple, and walked diagonally away from the boy up the canyon, putting the food on a solitary boulder beneath a mesquite. “Hola,” he yelled, hola being the sum total of the Spanish he remembered from a Mexican American bunkmate in Frankfurt. He returned to quizzical glances.

“There’s a boy up the canyon.”

They both looked but lacked Sunderson’s tough hunter vision in which you always look through a landscape, looking for a shape that doesn’t belong.

“I don’t see him,” Lucy admitted.

“I think I do.” Of course Bushrod was lying. “You shouldn’t encourage them.”

By the time they started back to Tucson Sunderson would have given an incalculable amount of money to be away from Bushrod not to speak of Lucy in her present incarnation as a dutiful daughter, which meant a piece of raw emotional roadkill. After the lizard-man the remaining singular event was a large rattlesnake crossing a two-track. They got out to look at it and Bushrod teased the viper to exhaustion with a long stick.

“I won that round,” Bushrod said.

“The snake didn’t have a stick,” Sunderson parried.

“What’s that supposed to mean, young man?”

“Try it without a stick.” Sunderson loathed those television nature programs featuring people pestering frantic animals in the name of knowledge.