Deep South Read online

  Thinking of the fiancé, a man who had once been Anna’s lover, thus providing evidence that life, if it doesn’t mimic art, at least mimics the soaps, Anna asked: “How’s Frederick? Any date set?”

  There was a shivery intake of breath, and Anna had a sick feeling for a second that her sister had started smoking again, but it was just nervous exhilaration.

  “A date is set,” Molly said, giggled, then added, “I would say I hate feeling like a giddy teenager, being postmenopausal and all, but I don’t. I’m getting a kick out of it. When it’s not scaring me to death. September twenty-third.”

  “Any special reason the twenty-third?” Anna asked, because she knew Molly, like any giddy teenager, would want to talk but, unlike most teenagers, had been trained to listen instead.

  Molly laughed. “Calendars. His, mine, and ours. We’re both booked like single professionals. It was the first day we felt safe to pencil in a lifetime commitment.”

  Anna suffered a pang of envy. Or nostalgia. She wasn’t sure. Her lifetime commitment had lasted seven years, then her husband was taken from her in a mindless, pointless accident. A while back she’d finally extinguished the torch she carried for Zach, but there’d been no new flame, at least not one that could hold a candle to the conflagration of the memory of that first and all-consuming love.

  Anna shook off the loneliness, made sure none of it was left to taint her voice, and so her sister’s joy, and asked: “Church? Courthouse? On horseback in the surf? I’ve got to know what sort of dress to buy.”

  “You wear a bona fide dress, and we’ll get married wherever you say.”

  Anna was stung. She wore dresses. She’d worn one less than a year before.

  “Just kidding,” Molly said, and it annoyed Anna that her mind could be read so easily, even over the phone. “No place or plan yet. Setting a date was trauma enough for us both.”

  Molly and Frederick’s was to be a thoroughly modern marriage. They lived in different cities—she in New York, he in Chicago. This was his third marriage, her first. There would be no children, and they would commute. The very things that might earmark a union for failure, but Anna knew this one would last.

  Suddenly tired of romance and matrimony, she said: “Let me tell you about my alligator.”

  It had been many years since Anna had been stationed at a campground. The upside was a mildly pleasant proprietary feeling, one’s own little fiefdom. The downside was long and steep. Campground rangers were never off duty. There were, of course, sixteen hours of the day for which they went unpaid but, if home, the campground ranger was fair game. Visitors routinely banged on the door to borrow sugar, report limping squirrels, complain about their neighbors or just have somebody to talk to. Traumas great and small were laid at the doorstep, noise disturbances called through the bedroom window.

  Memories of those drawbacks had not been lost on Anna, but she’d forgotten the intensity of feeling that came with the loss of privacy.

  Before bed, she dressed in civilian clothes and took Taco for a walk through the camps. It was a coping mechanism. Occasionally, on an incognito round, a ranger could see a situation developing and nip it in the bud so it didn’t flower later, requiring one to be dragged out of bed at an unseemly hour.

  The night was sweet and warm and melodious with the symphony of frogs. Weariness from being up thirty-six hours weighed on Anna’s shoulders and eyes. Taco, too, was uncharacteristically subdued and walked docilely at her side on his leash. Rocky was booked to capacity.

  According to George Wentworth, spring and fall were the busy seasons on the Trace. Year-round there was traffic—local commuters and tourists—but it was February through May and September through November that the campgrounds overflowed. Not only was the weather at its most hospitable, but those were the months when the town of Natchez hosted its biannual pilgrimage. At her request, Anna was enlightened. In some ways it wasn’t too different from Christians making the pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Here it was a pilgrimage to a glorious past still revered by many. Various clubs, mostly the colorful—and powerful—ladies’ garden clubs, opened many of Natchez’s antebellum homes to visitors. Dressed in petticoats and hoops, volunteers gave tours of the now air-conditioned homes. Operas were performed, balls held. Tourists came from all over the world. Pilgrims came from the South.

  Rocky Springs was close and clean and free to campers. Trucks, cars and trailers lined the road on both sides. Through this semi-permeable membrane of Detroit iron, Anna could see the flare of fires, each surrounded by its own group of devotees staring fixedly into it. Outside these circles of worship was often a second tier: the followers of Bacchus, men and women in lawn chairs clutching the alcoholic beverage of their choice. Anna’d been in a lot of NPS campgrounds in many parts of the country. She had seen her share of imbibers, but she couldn’t recall seeing quite this many gathered together. Or this many heavy people. It was as if Overeaters Anonymous had reserved the campground for an annual convention.

  Deep-fried everything. She made a mental note to buy a vegetable steamer next time she found herself in the neighborhood of a Wal-Mart.

  The third and outer ring was made up of kids. They eschewed the light and the tedious company of their elders to play in the safe darkness. The populated darkness: the wooded chunk of land encircled by the road was so crowded Anna was mystified as to what part of the wilderness people thought they were experiencing.

  Boy Scouts had the large campground at the top of the loop outside the circle made by the road. They generated some noise but nothing to be concerned about. The Civil War soldiers were happily ensconced across from the scouts, their Confederate flags countering that of the Silver Beavers. Bourbon and poker kept Captain Williams and his boys occupied. That, Anna suspected, was something that hadn’t changed much in Southern camps since the 1800s.

  The site beyond the rebel camp was walled off from the road by three maroon vans with First Baptist Youth Group stenciled on the sides. Muscles along Anna’s spine tightened and her right hand twitched involuntarily. Church groups were trouble, more often than not. The belief that God was on your side had a deleterious effect on the moral fiber.

  Satisfied things were as peaceful as could be realistically hoped, she returned to her house. Her life was still in boxes. Her cat was still sulking and she was too tired for more than a couple of halfhearted cajoleries, both of which failed.

  As campground rangers learn to do, Anna laid out pajamas ready to hand on top of a box marked “books” and her uniform and duty belt on another unmarked box she believed held pictures. This way, when the knocking came in the middle of the night because some hapless camper who wished to make s’mores had forgotten the marshmallows, she would not be answering the door in her birthday suit.

  At two-forty-seven A.M. by the bedside clock, the emergency pj’s were called into action. Knocking as rapid-fire and insistent as that of a woodpecker drilled through the black syrup of unconsciousness and was transformed into half a dozen images of varying weirdness before her tired mind made sense of the racket and dragged her body from bed.

  Fortunately the hall to the living room was relatively long. By the time she reached the door she was oriented as to where she was and who she was expected to be. Rocky Springs’s ranger abode had two luxuries: a porch light and a small window in the front door. Anna flipped the switch and took a look at her callers before greeting them in her nightclothes.

  A stocky balding man in his fifties, his face naturally puffy and baggy, made less appealing by a look of self-righteous ill humor, stood with a flashlight pointed into the weeds by the step. At his elbow stood a tousled young man of fourteen or so who looked to be quite enjoying himself. Both wore burgundy T-shirts with the words “He Is Risen” emblazoned in an arc from nipple to nipple.

  Anna opened the door. Her great security measures in turning on the porch light were made a mockery; she’d not bothered to set the locks before retiring.

  “Can I help you?”
was forming in her throat when the balding man said: “Beats me how you people can sleep through it. But maybe you’ve got used to it.” He spoke with such emphasis that the half dozen strands of hair balanced across his pate quivered like a web with a fly ensnared.

  “There’s been a disturbance?” Anna asked politely.

  “You bet there has. It’s a wonder somebody hasn’t got bad hurt. People come down here for peace and quiet and you got this going on half the night.”

  “Sounds like you have some serious concerns,” Anna said. “Give me a minute to dress and I’ll see what I can do.”

  His jowls ceased to quiver, and he was settling down to simmer as Anna closed the door. The warm-wall-of-mud defense, her old district ranger, Hills Dutton, had called it. Meeting hostility with a soft, meaningless acquiescence often took the starch out of the aggressor.

  Anna was dressed in three minutes and took another half of that to put her duty belt in place and extra rounds of .38 hollow-point bullets in her pocket. Since the NPS had switched over from .357s to semi-autos, all she had on her duty belt were pouches for spare magazines. No place for stray bullets. She was expecting no more trouble than loud drunks and crabby insomniacs. The gun, the bullets, the pepper spray, the collapsible baton were donned from habit and by regulation.

  Armored in the paraphernalia of her profession, she rejoined her nocturnal visitors on the porch.

  Cars, the man said, had been “hot-rodding” through the campground. “Kids,” he growled. Not good Baptist kids, Anna surmised from his tone. “Driving too fast and shouting obscenities.”

  “Not obscenities, Reverend,” the boy interrupted. “Just hollering.”

  “Obscenities,” the reverend insisted, determined not to let the hellions off on a technicality. “They could easily have run somebody over. Drunk’s my guess.”

  His guess was probably right. Anna sighed inwardly.

  “It’s spring prom, everybody’s out partying,” the boy added wistfully.

  With promises of immediate action and merciless retribution, Anna tried to extricate herself from the reverend. Not yet done being mad and wanting to tell her over again the misdeeds of the ungodly, he told his story a second time with even greater vehemence. After she got them headed back to camp, Anna climbed into her patrol car and called dispatch. No answer. Evidently the Natchez Trace didn’t have twenty-four-hour dispatch. She wasn’t surprised. Few parks did. Rangers got used to working without backup. That or they made unofficial arrangements with local law enforcement or the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife—anybody they could call for help in a pinch. Anna added finding out who, if anybody, that was in Mississippi to her growing list of priority “To Dos.”

  The campground was quiet but for the Baptist boys, stirred up by the reverend’s ire. The hot-rodders had come and gone. An aspect of law enforcement Anna hated was the day-late and dollar-short realities. By the time a crime was reported, it was a done deed and, most likely, the perpetrators would never be caught. On the plus side, perpetrators were usually not bright. What they did once they’d keep right on doing, and eventually, they got nailed. Not tonight, though.

  Because she was up and it was politic to at least appear to be doing her duty, she briefly questioned those campers who were awake. An older couple from Paris, Texas, traveling in a small Airstream with two dachshunds for family, verified the reverend’s story. Two cars, one a late-model blue Mustang, had driven around the loop several times at a high rate of speed. Neither Texan could remember the make of the other car, but the wife thought it was yellow or tan. She said it looked as if the blue car was chasing the light-colored sedan but her husband thought they were just racing.

  The rebel camp was dead quiet. Either the soldiers had grown so accustomed to the sound of battle they’d slept through the excitement, or they weren’t as willing to face modern confrontations as they were to relive those of the past. Anna was surprised. Captain Williams seemed like a take-charge kind of guy.

  The Boy Scout leader said the cars had awakened them. That the people in the cars were shouting, but he couldn’t make out the words. Nonsense. Rebel yells.

  “Those cars may’ve been headed up toward the old church,” the scoutmaster called after her as she was leaving. “Kids like to mess around up there.”

  “I’ll check it out,” Anna promised. Her pride would not allow her to ask just where in the hell the “old church” was. There were maps and brochures; she could expose her ignorance in the sanctity of her patrol car.

  Rocky Springs Church was on the easternmost edge of the parcel that included the main campground, picnic areas, the NPS shooting range and several chunks of the Old Trace. Loess, the stuff that had caused the locust to collapse on Anna’s U-Haul, according to George Wentworth, was a type of soil prevalent in the area. Soft, very fine, it was easily eroded. A long spell of wet weather destabilized it to the point mature trees would topple of their own accord or, as in Anna’s case, with very little provocation. Because of this, the Old Trace had worn deep in many places. Not the two- and ten-inch ruts of the trails out West but twenty- and thirty-feet-deep, wide ravines cut into the forests and swamps from the passage of horse, foot and, finally, wagon traffic.

  As Anna drove the half mile from the campground to where the brochure had Rocky Springs Church marked on it, the road forked and she guessed she was passing through one such section of the original Trace.

  Walls of golden-brown dirt rose on either side of what had suddenly become a one-lane road. Above the Crown Vic, roots poked out from the banks. Headlights caught their undersides, and in light and shadow they clawed fantastic patterns against the night. Above them, seen sketchily at the uppermost of the high beams, were the tops of the trees they supported. The sky was lost in the branches.

  Anna emerged from this hobbit’s-eye view of the world into a small paved parking lot. At one edge was the reassuringly mundane sight of an NPS notice board complete with empty brochure box and badly faded map behind a sheet of Plexiglas.

  There was a flashlight in the car’s glove box, but it didn’t work. Another item for the list. Anna got out of the car, closed the door and listened. The frogs were still. A bird sang as sweetly as if the sun shone. Trees surrounded the parking lot, soaking up light from a waning moon. Beyond this black belt of vegetation, Anna could hear the unsettling sound of grunted laughter, the kind without joy. The grunting stopped. Still the frogs did not sing. Anna slipped into the shadow at the edge of the parking lot to listen. Nothing. At her feet, a path, paved for a yard or two in pale gray concrete, then lapsing into wood chips, led into the woods. According to the map, she was heading toward the old church and what remained of the original town of Rocky Springs.

  Anna had no fear of the dark. She found comfort in its cloaking embrace. A catlike quality of the nocturnal hunter had been part of her makeup since she could remember. Even as an adult she took childlike pleasure in sneaking and creeping, being invisible to her fellow humans. But it was three in the morning and this dark was an inky, stub-a-toe, sprain-an-ankle kind of dark. The worst she had planned for the reverend’s midnight marauders was a stiff talking-to and a couple of phone calls if nobody was sober enough to drive home. Hardly the stuff to lose the rest of a night’s sleep over.

  Had her prey remained quiet, she might have gone away. But they stirred and the hunting urge returned. From above and a ways away—how far, Anna couldn’t tell, dense vegetation changed the quality of sound—came a thunk. Two solid objects colliding. Then the word “shit” and “let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Somebody wanted to get away. Instinctively Anna wanted to catch them. Moving into the woods, she trod noiselessly on a thick carpet of wood chips a kindly Park Service laid down for a path. Cypress or cedar, they gave off a faint pleasant smell. To her left was a split-rail fence. Touching the top rail, she used it to guide her footsteps into the lightless interior of the forest. A litigation-weary park service could be trusted not to leave anything shar
p or dangerous on a marked trail, so she moved quickly.

  The ground beneath her inclined. Cobwebs stuck and tickled on her face and arms. Faint sounds echoed her passage in the woods to either side. The skittering of small creatures foraging, the scuttle of a tiny night beast alarmed by her presence. Subtly the smell of the forest altered. An earthy odor permeated the air, and, almost imperceptibly, the nature of darkness changed. Wide-eyed to catch even the faintest hint of light, Anna stopped and looked up. The canopy of trees had opened. She was at the base of a steep bank, maybe fifty feet high. Roots thrust out from its face. Trees clung precariously to its upper edge. Above, black against a sky made light with stars and a sliver of moon, was the silhouette of a building with a tall central steeple. The old church.

  Made of soft and crumbling soil, the embankment would be treacherous. Anna stayed on the path. With a memory of light to go by, she covered the last angle where the trail doubled back up the hill toward the church, Methodist according to a weathered sign. A road curved nearby along with a tiny paved lot for cars.

  Because of the thick curtain of trees to either side, the Natchez Trace created an illusion of isolation, wilderness. In reality, civilization in the form of roads, houses and fields pressed close on both sides.

  Seen by night, Rocky Springs Church loomed black and monolithic. Even so, Anna could tell it was a classic: simple and symmetrical in the way of many early American churches. Tomorrow—today—after sunup, she promised herself a trip back. Now she used the old building for its shadow. Keeping close to the brick walls, she moved quietly to the back of the church, nearer where she thought the voices had come from.