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.
It was only in the evening of his fifth day at the Nogales hospital that Sunderson felt he had a real inkling of who he was though he was unsure it mattered. He had received a subdural hematoma from the large rock that had struck him in the back of the head, also a minimally depressed fracture that likely wouldn’t require surgery. The hardest symptoms of his post-concussive state were more vague: the anxiety and depression, the inability to concentrate, and the disequilibrium when he toddled out a back door to have a cigarette. Another smoker, a Mexican orderly, pointed to the south of the hospital and told Sunderson that he was real close to the border. This was the best part of his disaster so far as nearly all of the various employees of the hospital spoke Spanish with each other, which meant he didn’t have to struggle with comprehension, which was beyond him anyway. He also liked the pure music of the language. One of the only memories he could recapture was of his Mexican friend in Frankfurt saying “hola,” so Sunderson muttered “hola” to anyone who entered his hospital room. A slight problem was that neither the ER doctor nor the regular doctor Berenice had secured him believed that his injuries came from a fall. They didn’t say why and Sunderson didn’t really give a shit. What could they do, throw more rocks at him? When an attendant, a roly-poly female, had helped him take a shower she kept whispering “ muy malo ” as he looked at himself in a full-length mirror and discovered that his predominant body color was blue.
