The Great Leader

by Jim Harrison

  He got up at 4:00 a.m. and drank coffee for an hour until he could call Marion at five, which was seven Michigan time.

  “You sound pretty rough.”

  “That’s a fair thing to say.”

  “Maybe it’s because you had the necessary habit of work for forty years and now you don’t.”

  “That must be part of it. I’m going to take a powder for a week or so. If Berenice or Mona call tell them I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure? I could come down for Thanksgiving and we could talk it through.”

  “No. I’m just going to walk and knock off the sauce and then maybe come home.”

  “Sounds wise. Here’s a thought re: our Great Leader. I read a piece by this historian named Carter who claims religion is biological.”

  “Jesus Christ. Why not? Give my love to Mona.”

  “That’s not hard. She and this brother and sister have started wearing identical clothes. It’s upsetting the school authorities.” Marion laughed.

  Despite repeated rinsing the whiskey puke odor was still in his nose. He turned off his cell phone and put it in the refrigerator for no particular reason. He strapped on his shoulder holster and revolver thinking that it would be fun to shoot Daryl-Dwight in the head but then the problem wasn’t the Great Leader’s but the world’s and the only real solution was to shoot himself.

  He drove to the Tucson airport and exchanged his compact for an SUV. He remembered to have breakfast because he was going to the woods of sorts. A burly brown waitress in Birkenstocks saw his copy of Alfred’s map spread on the table and gave suggestions for camping places. She was the typical eco-ninny but pleasant. Her green shorts and brown legs indicated that she was an experienced hiker.

  “I don’t want to see anyone for a week including myself.”

  “You’re in a bad way,” she laughed. “Try the east end of Aravaipa Creek up near Klondyke. It’s north of Bonita between the Pinaleños and the Galiuros. Take the fork up Turkey Creek so the Conservancy assholes don’t hassle you.”

  “Thank you and God bless.” Sunderson had never said “God Bless” before but Roxie used to after he screwed her on the clothes dryer.

  “Drop by and let me know how it works,” she said going off to wait on other customers. She smelled wonderful like a hay field and Sunderson felt a touch of life. He went into a huge sporting goods store and bought a cheap sleeping bag, a tarpaulin, a primus stove, a bunch of trail mix and freeze-dried food, coffee packets and a pot, and a canteen. On the way out he looked at a display of bowling balls, which reminded him of Xavier saying that religion, sex, and money aren’t separable. He was likely right. A human is as indivisible as a bowling ball, a biological knot like any other creature, a distressing notion but then so was much of life.

  Three hours later he was camped on a flat up Turkey Creek a half mile from his car. The beauty of the mountain landscape made him feel insignificant, which was the feeling he was after. The heavy weight of his personality needed to disappear for a while. Properly and openly perceiving the landscape made his currently dismal self vanish. He had been confused since leaving home in Marquette to a degree that daily seemed impossible at his age when he should have had things figured out.

  He walked and walked. Turkey and Aravaipa Creeks were obviously without brook trout but he realized that was missing the point. The truly important idea is where creeks were, often in the most ignored and neglected parts of the landscapes including marshes, swamps, and deep gulleys, landscapes from which the human race couldn’t extract money and therefore they were mostly left to simply be themselves. Marion had said that we have eaten the world and puked it up and except in isolated locations what we have left is mostly puke. This idea was an unpleasant reminder of the tinge of whiskey odor still in his nose so he knelt and snorted some creek water then rubbed some juniper on his upper lip.

  The first late afternoon and evening were hard without his habitual alcohol. He simply never missed drinking every day except when he had the flu and then he felt virtuous about not drinking. He had walked so far his legs trembled so whiskey would have been nice and sitting near his campfire he was fearful over how long the nights were in late November, close to fourteen hours at least at this latitude, and worse far north in Marquette. He and Marion always celebrated on winter solstice, December 21, when it turned around and the light began to increase in increments of a minute or so per day.

  He slept well from his walking fatigue from eight in the evening until midnight. The dinner of freeze-dried beef stroganoff had been wretched and his irritation over forgetting a bottle of Tabasco or a jar of dill pickles was outsized without the calming influence of a little whiskey. It was a feeling similar to losing all of your favorite marbles in a schoolyard contest. This was miniscule compared to the haunting feeling at midnight when he awoke and fed the fire. Alcohol had always worked fairly well in ameliorating or subduing his hair-shirt memories but now without a trace of it in his body he was struck dumb by the little movie his mind made of the morning after Thanksgiving when the Mayflower van had come and moved out Diane’s collection of fine antique furniture and her many boxes of art books. She was in Naples, Florida, with her parents and her stuff was being moved to a bungalow near the hospital from where she could walk to work. He had opened a bottle of cheap Early Times when the movers had left and it was gone by dinnertime when rather than dinner he had opened another bottle of whiskey. This had gone on a couple of days and when he didn’t show up for work Monday morning or answer the phone a colleague had checked up and found him facedown and comatose on the floor of the unheated enclosed back porch after a ten-degree night. There was a trip to the ER in an ambulance and two days in the hospital where Marion had visited.

  “You should have called,” Marion had said.

  “I didn’t have anything to say.”

  That had been the longest winter of his life though from force of will he slowed down his drinking to a point short of passing out. Toward the end of April and the beginning of trout season he found that his fingers trembled so that he couldn’t tie a fly to his leader at which point he was able to cut back to his traditional two drinks after work and two in the evening. This would not have been possible had he not fished a hundred evenings and weekend days in a row. Moving water was the only workable tranquilizer for the central error of his life, the divorce.

  The fire flared nicely after he added a large piece of juniper stump. He wondered at how the totally sober mind’s tongue reached the rawest spots. He should have known that Melissa was spying for her brother and not truly drawn to him, the Lone Geezer from the north. He still had the lovely memory of her crouched all nude and moist in the small clearing of the thicket in the estuarine area of the lake’s end. Part of him had known she was a spy but the stronger part chose to ignore it, led by vanity and the biological ring through his nose until the inevitable falling smack on his foolish face. A fool for love and lust or something like that. How absurd. As he drifted off he heard the howling of coyotes up the canyon break into yips, which meant they were closing in on the kill. He thought that the sex game must be about over for him but then it had never been much of a game, more like a mortal intrusion.

  At dawn he shivered from the cold, the dew on his sleeping bag crisply frozen. Why hadn’t he set up the tent, where a single candle or two would have kept him warmish? He could just barely reach his pile of wood from the bag and flipped a few pieces on the coals. Ever the detective he had awakened thinking that if the Great Leader could be caught with the raised-skirt photo that his girlfriend Carla had taken of Mona he could be charged with possession of child pornography. That would put the sucker away for a while even though it was definitely pushing the envelope to think of Mona as a child except in the eyes of the law. He lay there brooding over the matter until the sun peeked through the Pinaleño Mountains to the east. Of course it had been okay for him to peek at Mona through his bookcase. It was easy in stray moments to forgive yourself.


  He arose, his muscles creaking painfully, and made coffee and then scrambled eggs by adding water to the egg powder in the pan. How nasty and poorly planned. Why hadn’t he brought along a stack of the fine local tortillas? Why hadn’t he brought along a cooler full of steaks, chicken, pork chops, bacon, eggs, and cheese? This dried shit was for hikers who needed to travel light. He could easily have walked the half a mile back to the car once a day to pick up supplies. He had clearly lost his wits in this alien place called Arizona. He had to figure out how to pick up his new life from the ground where he had merely been walking on it and reshape it into a tolerable form.

  Lucky for him he gave up thinking when he walked. His recent thinking always arrived at a pile of the same old compromised shit wherein the mistakes of the past readily suffocated the present. When he walked his level of attention was spread thinly but intensely over the entire landscape as it likely had been for walkers a million years before. His thoughts were idle little slips such as trees stay in one place and that even the smallest creeks or trickles follow declining altitude. His mistakes were those of a relative flatlander. If you climb a steep hill it doesn’t mean that like Michigan you can get down the other side. It took him a couple of days to figure out that there was no way to reach the top of the butte that capped the steep cliffs along Aravaipa Creek. He resented this then concluded that no one had ever been up there except birds.

  As the days passed his sack of dried food diminished. On the fourth day he ate only two granola bars and he felt how far his trousers were loosening. He had worn holes in his only pair of heavy socks and instead put on two pairs of his cheap thin office socks. His feet became so sore he soaked them an hour each day in a pool of the cold creek. He snuck around a small Nature Conservancy cabin at dawn because you needed a permit to enter their land and he didn’t want to wake anyone up. He proceeded west increasingly intimidated by the steep canyon walls and wondering how the conifers, oaks, and mesquite seemed able to grow out of rock. There was certainly nothing comfortable about the heraldic land of the Apaches who in many ways seemed the tribe least like the white intruders. We made much of their savagery though indeed we cut off the head of their leader Mangas Coloradas and shipped it east to the Smithsonian in the name of science, a fact that made the Apaches improbably difficult to subdue. They wanted to enter the spirit world with their dead bodies intact. The West wasn’t settled by nice people.

  He was fatigued by midmorning and forced himself to eat one of the two pathetic so-called energy bars he had carried along. He thought that just because you’re older doesn’t mean that death is imminent every day. There’s generally a tip-off when it’s coming. He sat by the creek chewing his food thinking that we’ll never understand anything. Here he was unable to name the hundreds of varied plants and birds he was seeing that had the solace of taking him away from the miserable world of men, his life in fact. He abruptly felt that even his habitual study of history was parasitic. Like the small leech his was a perfect parasite because he didn’t kill his host, merely attached himself and fed.

  He had fed on history and sometimes the food nauseated him. For instance, several months studying the Indian Wars were disastrous. It reminded him of how Diane loved Mahler but Mahler severely jangled him. Composers attached clusters of musical notes to their large emotions but Sunderson didn’t want big emotions so he had truncated his study of the Indian Wars. He often wondered if this emotional timidity was part of the male ethic of the far north, that is, aim low and you won’t be disappointed. In retrospect his being the first college graduate on either side of his family seemed puny. He was amazed after sitting by the creek for fifteen minutes to finally notice the tracks of a big feline in the damp sand near his own feet, obviously a mountain lion. His skin prickled thinking that the beast might be watching him from any of a hundred hiding places along the canyon walls or from the verdant thickets. He didn’t carry his pistol on his walks but then decided he was likely too large to be easy prey. The many small hoof prints also in the damp sand were those of the small pig-like creature the javelina that he had read were the central food of the lion in the Southwest. His ex-landlord Alfred had said that a small number of jaguars, a much more ominous creature, had been migrating north from Mexico.

  On the long walk back to the campsite he passed openly on the trail through the Conservancy property and was accosted by a young man and a woman who were hanging up clothes in the yard of the cabin. To avoid any problem he blithered out pidgin Italian he remembered from the trip he and Diane had taken to Italy. The young man was embarrassed and merely pointed the way east off the property. The young woman grinned as if catching on to his ploy. Her brown legs emerging from her blue shorts gave him a nut buzz. When you don’t see a female in five days a plain Jane can be striking. As he walked on down a two-track she nagged on him in unison with his need for a cigarette. He only had seven cigarettes left and wanted to stay for a full week, which meant two more days in his somewhat helpless addictive purgatory.

  On the sixth day his feet were so sore he mostly sat at the campsite staring at the creek and pondering his next move. He checked the small calendar card in his wallet and noted it was two days until Thanksgiving when he would force himself to grace his mom’s dining table. His mind kept raising the image of Melissa’s bare butt wagging near the lake. He wanted to see her again but he also wanted not to be dead.

  The day had become warmish and he had a disturbing nap with a brief dream wherein the natural world became too vivid to become tolerated. This mood continued on waking. The untitled birds around him had the eyes of snakes, their ancient relatives, and the surrounding foliage became livid. He smoked several of his remaining small cache of cigarettes and decided his mental distortions were due to hunger and loneliness. He cooked up an insipid freeze-dried concoction called Spanish rice but only managed to eat half before his gag reflex began to tickle. He saw a slight movement among the rocks about fifteen feet across the creek. It was a small rattlesnake, perhaps a foot and a half long. He aimed his revolver but couldn’t pull the trigger because he didn’t want to hear the noise. He would zip up his floor tent partway tonight. For the first time in nearly six days he felt an urge to read a book. When darkness fell he made a plan, a map of war, before a roaring fire. He had been offered at least temporarily the clarity of breaking a habit.

  Chapter 11

  Before dawn he sat waiting impatiently for enough light to reach his car. He was packed up and studying the single cigarette he had left, which he held in the palm of his hand. He felt pretty clearheaded about his intentions and was amused wondering what level of enlightenment the Great Leader might consider him. He thought that in some otherwise intelligent people there must be an improbable religious yearning that would make them give up their savings and livelihood to the Great Leader. Again, did he actually believe in what he was preaching? Maybe on alternate days. Sunderson recalled that when he was thirteen and his father had a minimal heart attack he had prayed in the Lutheran church with his mother. His prayers were diverted in their intensity by the sight of a girl named Daisy across the aisle. A friend had heard that she had given a blow job to a guy from Shingleton for two beers and a joint. Meanwhile his family cut back on their comparatively meager expenses so that Dad didn’t have to work twelve hours a day six days a week. There it was, Sunderson thought while dousing his campfire, sex and religion and money.

  It took an hour to reach Willcox. He bought cigarettes and gas, and had a bowl of red chili and beef at the truck stop, then headed south to see the Great Leader, his revolver unbuckled in the shoulder holster.

  To his surprise the gate was open and there was a pile of sleeping bags, packs, pads, and several garbage bags full of trash and belongings. He sorted through the pile that they probably planned to come back for as some of the sleeping bags were expensive models. He was tempted to swipe a smallish day pack that was full of papers and magazines but decided it would be wise to wait until his way out. He was pleased t
o note that a batch of magazines were issues of a soft-core porn rag called Barely Eighteen that he had seen in convenience stores and truck stops in the Upper Peninsula. He had watched hunters and fishermen buy this magazine along with the old standards Hustler and Penthouse on the way out to their camps.

  He was alarmed to hear a vehicle coming down the canyon toward him and felt for his unbuckled revolver but it was a green-suited Forest Service ranger at the wheel, swerving to a halt.

  “May I help you?” He was clearly pissed.

  “Looking for a possible felon.” Sunderson flipped his expired badge from a half dozen feet away.

  “Those jerks flew the coop for Tucson. They leased forty acres here from a rancher but didn’t comprehend their boundaries and built a permanent structure on federal land. They’re cleaning up the site to avoid charges.”

  “We’re contemplating serious charges in Michigan,” Sunderson said, diffidently looking around and wishing the guy would go away. “How many are in there?”

  “Just two. What charges?”