Hunting Season Read online

  “Problem solved,” she agreed. She looked at her watch. Ninety minutes to kill before Clintus Jones returned. Scheduling duties awaited on the derelict computer in her office. She’d not yet begun the chore of writing up reports on the Barnette murder or the incident at the hunting platform. She’d pulled her gun. If every cop on television had to write up a detailed report every time they unholstered a weapon, primetime would be about paper shuffling. The NPS insisted a ranger have justification for first pulling the weapon; then if, God forbid, one actually pointed it at someone, a whole new set of explanations was required. That and civil litigation partially accounted for why police all over the nation were under fire in the media for looking the other way when crimes were being committed. Easier to let the perpetrators die of old age than justify every action taken in subduing them.

  Thigpen was staring at her. She’d yet to move from the doorway. Anna looked at the dingy light leaking from her office, then at the rich glow of the November afternoon outdoors. Paperwork would have to wait. Her brain was getting claustrophobic. Time had come to air it out.

  “I’m going to head on down to that meadow,” she made a sudden decision. “Look around again. I should be back before Clintus gets here but if I’m not, ask him to wait. It shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”

  Randy Thigpen followed her as she stepped into her office to retrieve her hat and duty belt. Velcroing it on, Anna was aware of the familiar pain on her hipbones where the heavy belt bruised them. She needed to put on a little weight, pad herself.

  Thigpen was blocking her way out again. A flash of anger so hot and irrational flared in Anna she was mildly surprised her hair didn’t catch on fire.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Mind if I ride along with you?”

  No more than I’d mind being staked out naked on a fire ant nest, Anna thought, but said nothing. Maybe she needed food. Something was making her more vicious than usual.

  “I need to have a talk with you,” Thigpen said. His voice was somehow different, his stance less aggressive, the eternal sneer gone from his one visible lip.

  Anna relented. This manager shit was killing her. In good clean fieldwork one was not obligated to give second and third chances. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll drive.”

  8

  Randy was uncharacteristically quiet for the first few miles. Anna summoned calm and strength by concentrating only on the deep blue of the sky, the patchwork curtain of foliage that screened the Trace from the real world of Quick Stops, billboards, car dealers and fast food. The colors had peaked two weeks before. The first hard rain would strip the last of them from the branches. Having grown up in the high desert of eastern California, where hardwoods existed only in front yards and forests were of pine, Anna never tired of the falling of leaves in a true deciduous forest. Day after day, as though there were an endless supply, leaves rained down. A deluge of yellow, orange, rust and red. They fell slowly, erratically. Anna could catch them on their casual journey into oblivion.

  Now, to either side of the narrow ribbon of asphalt the Crown Vic confined her to, she could see this peaceable storm whispering behind tree line. As always she was charmed, amazed and enjoyed the sense of reality and time being suspended.

  “I need to have a talk with you,” Randy repeated his earlier sentiments. Reality slapped back down, cold and smelly as a dead carp on a chopping block.

  Randy waited for her to graciously invite him to share. Feeling petty, Anna didn’t. Finally he gave up and began again.

  “I know that we’ve had our differences,” he said.

  Mentally Anna rolled her eyes, sniffed and said, “Gee, ya think?” Corporally she merely drove, eyes on the road, the glamour of the changing forest lost to the tunnel vision of the highway.

  “I guess maybe I owe you an apology. All I can say in my own defense is that I pretty much figured the district ranger position would go to me. I been here nearly thirty years. Got old driving this stretch of road. Been a GS-7 living like the poor folk most of that time. Finally the s.o.b.s make me a GS-9, then the district ranger leaves and, the way I look at it, they owed that spot to me.”

  Randy had segued smoothly from apology to whine to belligerence. The teensy-weensy spark of camaraderie and understanding that his first words had ignited behind Anna’s breastbone was rapidly being extinguished.

  Maybe Randy saw the faint light die. Maybe he heard the changing tone of his own voice. For whatever reason, he took a breath and changed tactics.

  “Anyway, enough of that,” he said. “They hired you and I guess they had to, you being a woman and all...”

  “If this is an apology, it’s downright crappy,” Anna said without taking her eyes from the road.

  Thigpen was quiet for a moment, then he laughed. It was the first truly sincere noise Anna’d heard him make and she found herself smiling. Though she hated to say or even think anything favorable about the man, he did have a lovely voice, light and clear and warm. His laugh was even better, a throaty chuckle Burl Ives would have been proud of.

  “Okay, okay,” Thigpen said. All traces of his borrowed southern accent vanished, and Anna heard the more natural iron and granite of his New Jersey upbringing ring under the words. “I’m a hidebound, opinionated, sexist pig,” he said. “That’s how I was brought up and when I die I’m going to be carried to my grave by six men in suits, and if the preacher who recites the Twenty-third Psalm over my grave isn’t wearing pants, I’m going to sit right up in my coffin and raise holy hell.”

  Anna laughed, delighted as much by the sudden honesty as the image his words conjured up.

  “But, given all that, the way I’m figuring it now is you’ve been a good district ranger. You’re not some fast-track equal opportunity bimbo they’re trying to get political points with. You’ve actually been around-learned your stuff. That killing this spring was a bad welcome to Mississippi and you took it in stride. Got yourself nearly killed going at it without proper backup,” he had to add.

  Anna was sorely tempted to remind him that the one time she did call him for backup he hid out in the ranger station at Port Gibson and left her to her fate.

  He must have remembered the incident, too, because he hurried on before she could say anything. “Be that as it may, you pulled it off. That gave me—gave a lot of us—respect for you. You’re not a whiner and you got guts.”

  The compliment sounded genuine and, while Anna didn’t allow herself to be taken in by it, she did allow herself to feel a moment’s pleasure in the accolade. Near as she could remember, it was the first positive thing Randy had had to say since she’d come to the Natchez Trace Parkway. She might as well enjoy it; it could be the last as well.

  “I’m not trying to butter you up,” Randy said. Which of course he was and Anna knew it. By the semi-finality in his tone she guessed she was about to find out why.

  “I don’t have long to retirement. Two months sixteen days—but who’s counting?” He laughed again, alone this time. “And I’d like to leave with a good taste in my mouth. I’d like you and me to work together. Let me show you what I can do. I’m one hell of a ranger. I’m good at what I do. Since you came on board, I know I’ve been dogging it a little. Sulking maybe because you took my-took the job I wanted. Believe it or not, it’s been harder on me than it has on you.”

  Anna doubted that. Goldbricking never got anyone beaten half to death, though there were times she was tempted to change that.

  “I don’t want to leave a thirty-year career feeling bad about myself, you know, leaving you thinking I couldn’t cut it. What I’m saying is, I’m turning over a new leaf here. I want to be part of this investigation. Bring poor ol’ Doyce’s killer to justice. That’d be a good way to buy the gold watch. What do you say?”

  Anna knew she should feel relief, even joy, at this unforeseen announcement. A tribute to her stellar attributes as a manager. But she didn’t want to be pals with Thigpen. Over the months she’d come to take a
perverse pleasure in hating the man. He’d hung her out to dry, refusing her backup for a dangerous car stop. He’d sued her on the grounds of racial discrimination. Turning the other cheek had served only to get her smacked upside the head. Again.

  Shelving these uncharitable thoughts, she said, “Sounds good to me.”

  Thigpen wisely settled into silence. From the comer of her eye, Anna watched him. Beneath his groomed hedge of a mustache, he was smiling. Perhaps at the glow of doing right. It looked to Anna more like smugness. Thigpen had turned over a new leaf. Anna couldn’t help wondering what was under the old leaf that he didn’t want her to see.

  They reached the meadow north of Mt. Locust where the illegal hunting stand was built, and Anna pulled the Crown Vic into the shade of another of the meadow’s old pecans. Beneath its spreading branches, a black family, what looked like grandmother, mother and six children ranging in age from eight or nine to an infant snug and sleeping in a nest of blankets tucked into a wooden peach crate, gleaned pecans from the yellowing grass.

  The women and children, the tree, the meadow unfurled behind them, a gentle rain of leaves from above, several caught in the coarse dark hair of the harvesters, presented a picture of such timelessness and peace Anna was hard-pressed to remember the night hunting with its guns and the baying of the human hounds. Yankees—herself before a lust to climb up one rung on the career ladder had uprooted her from the mountains of Colorado—persisted in painting the South, most particularly Mississippi, in broad and simple strokes of Black versus White, the people as two dimensional as cartoon characters.

  Mississippi was the most complex place Anna’d ever lived, in both culture and landscape. Worlds collided: swamp and forest, ever-changing sameness, past and present, affluence and poverty, African, Asian, Indian, sublime and ridiculous. A mix of people who’d lived and worked together for four hundred years and yet did not share a history.

  “What are we looking for?” Thigpen asked, trying on his new role as helpful sidekick.

  Anna put the car in park and switched off the ignition. “I’m not sure. I’ve been over the stand. There’s nothing. It was swept down, literally, with a broom.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Not kidding.”

  “I wouldn’t have credited any of those lamebrains with the sense to cover their tracks like that.”

  “Doesn’t much matter,” Anna said. “Chances are those guys are the brand of garden-variety jackasses who never get on any law-enforcement records. Their crimes are the sort that aren’t reported except as jokes told over too many beers.”

  Thigpen laughed and Anna was annoyed. The picture did not amuse her in the least.

  “I just wanted to take a look around the meadow,” she told him. “See if they’d had any luck with the hunting—that is before I showed. Maybe they got careless and forgot to police that.”

  The meadow was small, not more than ten acres. In previous years it had been leased to local ranchers for cattle grazing. This year there’d been no takers and the meadow had rejuvenated itself. With the possible exception of sheep, raising cattle was one of the most devastating things humanity had done to the environment. Too many hooves, too many mouths—each feeding multiple fore-stomachs-on too small a piece of real estate, left the land looking as if it had been visited by a plague of half-ton locusts.

  The South, with its miraculous powers of regeneration, fared far better than the fragile arid lands of the West. The meadow had sprung back with such fervor that if it wasn’t leased the following spring it would have to be mowed as a fire hazard. This time of year it was thigh deep in coreopsis, an orange sunflower-like bloom a couple inches in diameter. Most of the flowers were blown, but for just an instant Anna was eight years old again, seeing the poppy field in Oz through Dorothy’s eyes.

  “Ought to mow this shit,” Randy said, killing the moment. The two of them waded into the fading blooms.

  Randy’s new persona was more irritating than his old. Taking charge, he attempted to direct the search in odd sporadic bursts, first in one direction then another. Anna ignored him and walked a zigzag pattern, eyes on the ground. Shutting out his chatter, she narrowed mind and vision, noting only the yellow of the pollen the flowers painted across the dark fabric of her trousers, the clean acid scent of the crushed plant stems and the scraps of soil visible beneath the tangle of dusty green.

  Randy, daunted by the heat—a pleasant seventy-five degrees in the sun-or his own fat, stuck to the meadow’s edges. Half a dozen times he called Anna to come look at something. Twice she left what she was doing to comply. The first call was to inspect a cluster of frail bones and feathers several months old. The second was to show her a rusted and dented hubcap. Thigpen had trouble articulating why this relic of Detroit was of any concern to their present occupation. The next four calls she ignored, throwing Thigpen an “in a minute,” so she wouldn’t seem as rude as she felt

  Half an hour of careful searching and she found what she was looking for: the remains of a deer poached no more than a day or two earlier. The head, hooves, genitalia and a pile of guts were all that remained; leavings from a hurried field dressing of a young doe. Blood and meat were still fresh enough to attract flies. She worked out from the find in tight circles, seeking any trace of themselves that the hunters might have left behind.

  Excited by success, Randy Thigpen plowed his way in from treeline, Ferdinand the Bull in a field of flowers, and commenced chattering and stomping around the edges in an erratic search destined to destroy rather than unearth anything left behind.

  Anna didn’t call him to order. This had been a wild goose chase at best, merely an excuse to get away from the office that backfired when Ranger Thigpen had insisted on accompanying her.

  There were tracks, transformed by recovering leaves and stems, worthless from an identification point of view. Bloodstains where the kill had been shot showed brown a couple yards out in the direction of the stand. Nothing nifty in the way of a classic clue presented itself. In her years investigating crimes Anna had yet to find a silver lighter engraved with the perpetrator’s initials or a matchbook that lead to an exclusive club. Wilderness work lacked the classic glamour.

  Time ran out shortly before her patience did, and they headed back to Port Gibson. Anna was quiet but Randy was as juiced up as if they’d had a wondrous success. For the twenty miles to the ranger station he talked about his brilliance, insight and bravado, reliving and, Anna didn’t doubt, rewriting war stories from his years on the Trace. By the time she turned in under the pin oaks protecting the district office, she felt she had truly come to understand the expression “bending your ear.”

  Clintus Jones was waiting, sitting quietly at Randy’s desk across from Barth Dinkins. Barth had some of the battered and defiled boards from the vandalized sign on the desk. From the cold looks and belated greeting she and Randy received, Anna guessed the two black men had been discussing the centuries of evils the white race had perpetuated on their people.

  Customarily Anna wouldn’t have blamed them. Racial guilt or an innate understanding of the tenacity of psychological wounds would have allowed her to be kind. An hour and a half with Randy Thigpen, reformed or not, had successfully milked her of human kindness.

  “Hey, Barth,” she said shortly. “Ready to go find Badger Lundstrom?” she asked Clintus. A shifting of gears showed in his face as he emerged from a past where she was the enemy to a present where she was a comrade in arms. Anna was an adept reader of people but Clintus was hard. It was his eyes, she realized as he pushed himself up from Randy’s long-suffering chair. They were beyond brown, very nearly black. The pupils and the iris were so close in hue they seemed focused inward, as though he saw only in the dark, things cats and mediums see. The windows of the soul were effectively curtained.

  Lundstrom was a scrap metal collector, buying anything made of iron, steel, tin or aluminum, then reselling it to be melted down. Being a long-time fan of Charles Dickens, Anna’d t
hought the Lundstrom homestead would somewhat resemble Dickens’s garbage sifter, who lived in a shack surrounded by mountains of refuse.

  From the look of the home Lundstrom had built on the western edge of Port Gibson, there was a whole lot more money in scrap metal than Anna would have thought. And a whole lot more imagination in ex-high school football players who, if Paul’s assessment was correct, never grew up.

  The house was well kept but its architect had been interested more in speed than immortality. It was the yard that caught Anna’s fancy. November, near five o’clock, the sun had set. The short fall dusk was composed of clear light, directionless, that leached rather than lent color. Illuminated by this shadowless glow was a wide lawn, at least three-quarters of an acre in. size and sparsely dotted with live oaks. There were none of the great piles of junk Anna had envisioned but the lawn decor left no doubt as to both Lundstrom’s vocation and avocation.

  Fantastic sculptures stalked through the evening light. Prehistoric-sized creatures made of pot-bellied stoves, caterpillar blades and television antennae pursued bipeds welded together from shovels, stove pipes, tire rims and oddly shaped machine parts that Anna did not recognize. Something resembling a pterodactyl, wings forged from the black panels of a cast-off satellite dish, swooped down over a crouching bank of azaleas holding glossy leaves close, blooms only vaguely remembered from the previous spring.

  “Wow,” Anna said.

  “Yeah, what a mess,” Thigpen returned. Anna’d forgotten they’d had to bring him along and didn’t appreciate being reminded.

  “Looks like our poker-playing friend is a man of many talents,” Clintus observed.

  Leaving the sheriff’s car, they threaded their way up a concrete walk inlaid with gears, the smallest no bigger than a quarter, the largest easily a foot across. Anna had fallen to the rear, letting the men take the lead. Without quite knowing how it had happened, this investigation had been coopted by others. That or Anna was out of the practice of sharing. Whatever the cause, she felt a wrongness. Three uniformed law-enforcement officers descending on a citizen en masse didn’t strike her as the most effective way of getting the relaxed cooperation that was required for eliciting accurate memories and information. Innocent or guilty, most people clammed up, even lied, when they were frightened.