“Fuck it,” he said.
“Fuck what,” one of the boys croaked hugging his girlfriend.
“I don’t have time to take you in. I have to go fishing.” Sunderson was staring at a trout rising and feeding at the edge of the eddy. How happy he and Diane had been in the Guarnacci Etruscan Museum in Volterra.
He was struggling with shelling pistachios as he drove south from Willcox past the Dos Cabezas Mountains toward the immense and ominous Chiricahuas farther south. Perhaps shelling pistachios while driving was as dangerous as talking on a cell phone in heavy traffic. His mood of unrest and a somewhat cramped tummy from his huge breakfast was matched by the weather, a strong wind from the north and a temperature in the low fifties out in the valley that was twice the altitude of sunny Tucson. He couldn’t seem to keep up with the banks of clouds scudding overhead and it seemed to be snowing on the mountaintops of the Chiricahuas. His doubt came from recognizing his own hubris, the jump from busting young people for pot and meth or petty burglary to investigating the evils of religion too sizable to give him a sense of solid footing. His last burglary before retiring was an old man whose two jars of coins were stolen and Sunderson had busted the high school perps when they turned the coins in for cash at the bank the next morning. This was a decidedly nonreligious crime.
After nearly thirty miles he pulled off the blacktop at the intersection of a gravel road leading east toward the Chiricahuas. The MapQuest was fairly clear and the Google aerial showed a rather run-down ranch house with a number of corrals and ramshackle outbuildings but there was the question of whether it was a recent photo. A topographical map would have been handier and so would a 4WD he thought because the seven miles of gravel led into successively rougher country. He made his right turn and drove the mile toward the ranch thinking that the aerial had given no indication of the depth of the canyon on each side of the two-track, which showed signs of traffic in the dirt. He parked off to the side of a locked gate feeling a little naked without his.38, which was in a locked desk drawer back in Marquette, but then the Great Leader Dwight had always been friendly enough if somewhat distant.
He climbed the iron-bar gate with wobbly legs and headed up the road amused at the similarity of the landscape to the cowboy movies where Indians or outlaws would pop up from the uniform and phony-looking boulders and start shooting arrows or bullets at Gene Autry or Roy Rogers.
He stopped to look at a large gathering of varied birds on the bushes around a small spring, really a seep from the canyon wall, and then he was quite literally stoned. Stoned as happened in certain Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia where the woebegone malefactor tries to cover his face while being pelted by fair-sized rocks.
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.