Deep South Page 4

  “I see your point,” she admitted, and joined the group staring at the prehistoric monster in their midst. Apparently enjoying the warm asphalt and the attention, the alligator seemed content to stay where he was. If it was a “he.” Anna didn’t know, and wasn’t eager to learn, how one sexed the creatures. The gator had the unformed look of an animal slowly morphing back into elemental mud. The head was as wide as the body. Only the tail looked to be part of a living thing.

  Fascinated, Anna moved toward this long leather portion. A black hand closed on her arm. “Stay back,” he warned. “Big as this old fella is, he’s fast. Gators are like lightning. I’ve seen ’em jump a dozen feet like they were shot out of a cannon.”

  More standing. More staring. “What’re you going to do?” the deep-fried suit finally asked. “I got to get to work.” This brought on a chorus of like complaints.

  “I’m going to stay right here and make sure none of you harasses the wildlife.” Another minute ticked by and Anna relented. “You can throw rocks at him, I guess, as long as they’re small.”

  “Ain’t no rocks in Mississippi,” the man in the suit said. “All we got’s mud.”

  A quarter of an hour passed and another four cars swelled the ranks before the alligator tired of the company and lumbered off to slide down the embankment and sink himself in Big Bayou Pierre. Traffic cleared. Anna dedicated another half an hour to pulling the truck up the slope with a towline the former district ranger had kindly left in the trunk of the Crown Vic, then the festivities drew to a close.

  Calling dispatch to clear herself from the scene, Anna realized she’d been thoroughly enjoying herself. The sun was warm, the alligator a rare treat, and it appeared that—if nothing else—a stint in Mississippi would give her stories enough for a lifetime.

  Despite the fact that she wasn’t officially on duty till the following day, she decided to continue south to the outskirts of the tiny town of Port Gibson, where the ranger station was reputed to be.

  As in Mesa Verde, the road had markers at every mile, tasteful four-by-fours painted brown with white numbers and just high enough to rake hell out of a fender if one didn’t watch for them when making traffic stops. The numbers grew lesser as she traveled, and Anna deduced the Trace was marked south to north with mile marker number one in Natchez, where the parkway began.

  In Colorado, Anna had taken little notice of mile markers, only using them occasionally when she had to report the precise location of an accident. On the Trace, they were of significant interest. In the flatlands, down in the trees, there were no reliable landmarks. The endless, unchanging, bucolic splendor made one place very like the next. With familiarity would come differentiation, like moms learning to tell their twin offspring apart. Till then she’d have to do it by the numbers.

  Several miles south of Big Bayou Pierre and its diminutive neighbor, Little Bayou Pierre, an NPS patrol car was parked on the grass up under the shade of the trees. Coming from the high desert, where even the dirt was fragile, she knew seeing people drive and park on the grass was going to take some getting used to. In this fertile bit of the world, vegetation was one of the sturdiest and most easily regenerated of the natural resources.

  There were two possible occupants of the parked car: Randy Thigpen or Bartholomew Dinkin, Anna’s two field rangers. The men with whom she would spend her days, whom she would rely on for assistance and, in a pinch, trust with her life. Thigpen had already made a successful attempt to lead her astray with bogus directions. Neither Thigpen nor Dinkin had garnered rave reviews from Frank, the Rocky Springs maintenance man, and both had failed to respond to their radios when dispatch needed an alligator wrangler.

  The last thing Anna was in the mood for was to suck it up to make a managerial good first impression on either one of them. But to drive by the first day on the job seemed downright unneighborly—or cowardly—and instinct warned her that to appear either could prove disastrous in the long run.

  Telling herself her new rangers were probably terrific guys and she was being unjust, condemning them on circumstance, hearsay and a misplaced practical joke, she pulled onto the grass and gunned the engine, enjoying a mild thrill as the powerful car whipped effortlessly up the bank. In classic law enforcement gossip formation, cars nose-to-tail, driver-side windows matched up, Anna put the Crown Vic in park.

  Though she didn’t consider the day particularly hot, the windows of the other car were closed and the engine idling—probably running the air conditioner. Five or six seconds elapsed before the window lowered. Long enough to trigger suspicions. The possibilities were many. He could have been dozing, hiding something, zipping his fly, being rude. Anna would never know. But she noted the delay.

  “Good morning,” she said. “I’m Anna Pigeon.”

  “I heard you were coming tomorrow. ’Bout damn time. Barth and I’ve been running ragged for eight months.”

  This, then, was Randy Thigpen. He didn’t look like a man suffering from overwork. For one thing, he was immensely fat. Anna had nothing against fat; some of her best friends were fat. It was fat on people who were expected to run, jump, fight, defend and protect she found to be a dereliction of duty. Other than that, Thigpen was a decent-looking man: late forties or early fifties, thinning hair a sandy gold-brown color, dark hazel eyes and a spectacular mustache that obliterated his upper lip and the line of his mouth. His voice was easy to listen to: deep with no classic drawl but a slight elongation of vowel sounds.

  “Met one of your locals,” Anna said and told him of the alligator.

  Thigpen heard her unasked question: Where the hell were you when dispatch called? Rather than looking sheepish or defensive, Anna thought, he looked ever so slightly smug. “I got tied up with a motorist assist down by Mount Locust,” Thigpen said. “I was on my way when I heard you call clear, so I pulled over to run a little stationary radar.”

  Beyond him, on the seat, was a paperback novel laid facedown to mark his place and a paper boat filled with biscuit crumbs and squeezed-out honey packets. Anna had called clear six minutes earlier by her dashboard clock. Thigpen had been parked on this knoll considerably longer than that.

  “No harm done,” she said easily.

  The man seemed displeased by her reaction. Whether he’d been hoping for a row or a piteous whine, she couldn’t guess. Getting neither, he felt the need to gain some psychic ground.

  “Alligators are pretty easy to move once you get the knack,” he said.

  “Sounds like a useful knack to have in these parts,” Anna replied mildly. “How do you do it?”

  “Oh. There’s a number of ways. You learn ’em as you go.”

  Thigpen hadn’t the foggiest idea. A good person would have let him off the hook. Anna hadn’t had enough sleep to qualify.

  “What’s your favorite?” she asked with genuine interest.

  “Mine? Oh, I don’t know...”

  “Aw, come on, help a Yankee girl out,” she cajoled.

  She could see the gears grinding behind his high, unlined brow. “The best way’s you find a dead chicken. They like chicken. Then you hold it a ways in front of them, and they’ll follow you anywhere, like big old dogs.”

  “You do that? You lead them with dead chickens?”

  Thigpen nodded.

  “Now, that I’d like to see,” Anna said honestly.

  Adding a few banalities lest he realize she’d been leading him down the garden path, she took her leave. Time would tell whether or not Randy Thigpen was going to be a supervisor’s nightmare. He clearly wasn’t a dream come true.

  The Port Gibson Ranger Station was a low white building set off the west side of the Trace. Asphalt and chain-link fence struggled against some truly fine old pin oaks and nearly succeeded in giving it a soulless governmental look.

  The structure was H-shaped, with the hollow parts of the H as open porticos. To the left were garage doors, both open, where maintenance worked on the many machines needed to groom the ninety miles of ro
adway in the district. To the right was a windowless block, the purpose of which Anna couldn’t guess.

  A patrol car was parked in front of the east-facing portico. By process of elimination, she deduced this heralded the presence of Bartholomew Dinkin. Dinkin was a complete blank, and Anna harbored a hope he would inspire more confidence than his compatriot.

  Walking quietly from habit, she crossed the concrete and let herself into the ranger station. As she slipped through the door, a blast of cold stale air hit her. Though the day was fine, mid-seventies with a breeze, the air-conditioning was cranked up—or down—till the office hovered at sixty-eight. Cranked was an apt description. The building had not been designed for central air, and two aging window units, poked unattractively through either end of the tunnel-like office, clattered and clunked through their duties.

  The staleness comprised two competing elements: grease and super-cooled cigarette smoke. To Anna’s left was a small, untidy office, full of morning sunlight forced through dirty windows. In front of her, in the long dark core of this ungraceful suite, were two old wooden desks butted up against one another so they formed a single surface, chairs on opposite sides, a makeshift partners’ desk.

  At the nearer one sat the green and gray lump that had to be Field Ranger Bartholomew Dinkin. He wasn’t as fat as Thigpen, but he was in the running. By the looks of what remained of his breakfast—three sausage biscuit wrappers and two of the cardboard packets used to serve up hash browns—he was competing for the heavyweight title. Dinkin carried the bulk of his weight “behind the counter,” as a shopkeeper in New York had described the phenomenon to Anna. A lot of green polyester-wool blend had been procured to cover the posterior.

  At his elbow was an ashtray half full of cold butts. A teensy-weensy ache began behind Anna’s left ear.

  Bull by the horns, she thought, and closing the door, moved into her new territory. “Hey,” she warned him of the invasion. “You must be Bartholomew Dinkin. I just met up with Randy up the road a piece.”

  Dinkin stood, carefully wiping his mouth, then his fingers, free of sausage grease. That done, he stuck out a meaty paw for Anna to shake.

  “I take it you’re the new district ranger,” he said amiably enough.

  Dense black hair was sprinkled with wiry white. He wore it close to his skull, the part marked in by the barber’s clippers. His face was lined more by the extra flesh than age. Beyond those drawbacks, Dinkin was an attractive man. His skin deep brown, the tone even and rich, his ears small and close to his head, his teeth crooked but not stained. His most striking feature was his eyes: whites clear and cool, the irises a startling gray-green. Against his dark skin they appeared luminescent, as though he saw things denied ordinary mortals.

  Dinkin offered Anna coffee from a pot on top of a file cabinet behind the door. She accepted and wandered while he waited on her. The office was dirty. Not just old and cluttered, but dirty, as if maintenance had gone on strike. Or given up. The rangers’ desks were elbow deep in flotsam: coffee cups, evidence, candy wrappers, phone messages. Two bulletin boards were completely covered with notes and notices, some yellowed and curling with age. Anna pinched up the corner of a notification of an electrical shutdown at the Mount Locust Historical Site. It was seven years old.

  “We were going to get around to organizing those boards,” Bartholomew told her as he set her coffee down on Thigpen’s desk. “But we heard you were ... well we thought that might be a good job for you.”

  Anna picked up her coffee. “Why’s that?”

  Dinkin sat, he squirmed a little. “You know. You being a woman and all.”

  “Ah,” Anna said. She drank her coffee and watched Dinkin.

  He began to look uncomfortable. He moistened a fingertip, blotted up biscuit crumbs and carried them to his mouth.

  “What’s with the cigarette butts?” she asked, to keep him off balance.

  “Randy likes his weed. Way out here where nobody much comes, we sort of make our own rules,” he said referring to smoking in a federal building. It had been a no-no for so long that the policy was no longer even controversial. At least not in most states of the union.

  “That happens,” Anna said. “But I expect we’d better move the smoking outside.” Her first executive decision. She waited to see if it was going to cost her. Barth sat a moment, his face unreadable.

  “You want to see your office?” he asked abruptly.

  “Sure.” Anna put down the coffee, having no idea whether she’d won or lost points in what was clearly going to be a tiresome course in power politics. As she followed him into the second office on the left, she tried without success to remember why she’d wanted to move up into management. She hated leading. She was damned if she was going to follow. As a field ranger in the West that individualism had stood her in good stead.

  Now she was going to have to develop people skills.

  Anna found herself wishing she was back on the road with the alligator.

  ★ 3 ★

  Anna’s office was small and dirty. Scraps of wisdom, trash, information and memorabilia from the last half dozen district rangers were crammed in drawers and file cabinets, thumbtacked to walls, taped to cupboards. A vintage computer, the likes of which any self-respecting grade school would turn its nose up at, sat dusty and forlorn in one corner. A deceased roach had turned up six feet worth of toes and lay in the dust beneath a counter built into the far wall and serving as a desk. An office chair, its once ergonomically correct back sprung out of alignment by weight or abuse, awaited her administrative behind. Still Anna was pleased. A real office, four walls and a door. She was moving on up in the world. The primitive, visceral, female need to clean, to impose order, rose within her. She shook it off. Once established, she could do as she saw fit. For the present, she sensed if either of these two guys saw her with a broom in her hand, it would put her ten steps back on a road that promised to be long and hard enough from the outset.

  “I thought I heard voices. Either you’re the new district ranger or the Girl Scouts have started wearing guns.”

  Anna left off her janitorial lusts and turned. In the door of her office stood a compact man in a class-A maintenance uniform. He was built of squares: jaw, shoulders, wide square hips, thick thighs. There might have been a bit of fat on him but it was spread thin as butter. Though not more than a few inches taller than Anna—maybe five-six or -eight—she guessed he was terrifically strong. And black. Not the golden chocolaty shade of Barth, but deep, dark, old-rotary-phone black. He smiled, a square smile, showing large square teeth, and stuck out his hand. “I’m George Wentworth, head of maintenance for the Port Gibson District. That other office is mine.”

  Anna liked him. There were no shadows about the man. Nothing felt hidden. She took his hand, and she liked him even more. It was warm and dry, dark on the backs of the fingers and a soft tan on the palm. The nails were clipped and clean, his grip neither too much nor too little for a big man shaking hands with a small woman.

  “When did you get in?” Wentworth asked. Anna told him and he said, “Let me call a couple of my boys to give you a hand moving in.”

  “We’re going to get along fine,” Anna said and was treated to another beautiful smile, a study of warmth in black and white.

  Anna’d taken George to be in his early thirties, but a few miles on the road with him and she upped it to mid-to-late forties. That or he’d married when he was eleven years old. George was a family man, and it didn’t take long before he’d told Anna about Leda, his wife, who “put up with him just like he deserved it,” and his three boys. The youngest was a student at Alcorn State and, George told her with great pride, on the way to being the next Air McNair. From the delivery, Anna guessed this was a good thing but had to admit she had no idea what he was talking about. Air McNair, he told her, was a football player from Alcorn who’d made the pros. Lockley—Lock—George’s son, would put McNair to shame. A boy so fast, so handsome, so strong and smart and honest tha
t girls whistled and coaches swooned wherever he went. The maintenance chief didn’t say it in those words, that would have been sacrilege, but Anna got the message.

  With the help of Frank, George and a scrawny, wiry little white guy—one of Wentworth’s mower drivers—Anna’s belongings were in her house within an hour and she had an invitation to lunch.

  “When next you see me, I shall be applying for the position of circus fat lady,” Anna told her sister, Molly, on the phone that night. “I must have gained ten pounds.”

  “One swallow does not make a spring.”

  “It might if the swallow is deep-fried,” Anna countered, and they both laughed, enjoying the nonsense codes of a lifetime together. “We ate in Port Gibson. This lovely movie-set little Southern town with a church—one of a lot of churches—on Main Street. Instead of a cross on top of the steeple, it’s got a big gold finger pointed to heaven.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Lots of God, little in the way of groceries. The culinary glories of the South don’t seem to be represented in my district. George gave me a choice of the Piggly Wiggly plate lunch, a Sonic Burger or Gary’s Shell Station.”

  “You chose Gary’s?”

  “How could I not? In the back of the gas station, there’s a lunch counter. Doing a fine business, I might add, selling deep-fried everything. Everything deep-fried, I should say. I had deep-fried potatoes, onions and pickles. Want to know the creepy part?”

  “I thought that was the creepy part.”

  “It was really good.”

  There was a faint groan from the New York end of the line and a lack of sound Anna was only just coming to get used to. No abrupt shushing as her sister exhaled smoke. Nine months before, Molly had been hospitalized for several weeks. She had very nearly died, and finally she’d been convinced that maybe, just maybe, she should quit smoking. Despite its homicidal bent, Molly loved her dear old drug and missed it terribly. During the first two weeks of the new regimen, Anna had been glad to live halfway across the country. The only report she’d gotten of the rigors of withdrawal were from Molly’s fiancé. Being intensely loyal, as befitted his exalted position, all he would say was, “Thank God she’s still got some Demerol left from the hospital.”