“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.
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.
