Hunting Season Page 9

  She banished the urge to run and steadied the nine-millimeter.

  The advance of lights slowed, then stopped. The hullabaloo of sound lost volume and separated into voices.

  “Listen,” one said, a rasping pant. A man unused to having to chase down his prey.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “What’re we chasin’ now?” Another man spoke and a part of Anna’s mind registered a need to laugh at the sudden bewilderment in his voice, but this totally human response didn’t make it past the cold and snaky heart of her.

  “Shit.”

  “Listen.”

  “She’s gone to ground.” The rasping panting voice. He was the leader then.

  Gone to ground. They were hunters.

  Anna’d forgotten that and she felt a chill. She’d never been hunted by hunters before, men who prided themselves on knowing where the scared and helpless went to hide. These men would not long be fooled by the dark and a few hastily raked-together leaves.

  “Let’s go home,” one said. Anna was pleased to hear the fear she’d been suffering creep into his words.

  Go home, she prayed silently.

  “What now?” another asked. A time of quiet followed, broken only by the shuffling of feet and the crisp sounds dry winter scrub made near Anna’s ears where crushed branches struggled to reassert themselves.

  “Lights.” Then in a whisper, hissed loud and commanding.

  One by one the flashlights were switched off. A wave of fear and disorientation swept over Anna as the beacons pinpointing her pursuers vanished. She thought to scramble free of the bushes and run, but she knew she’d never make it. Had she had a tail with rattles, the clatter would have given her away. As it was, she waited in stillness, listening so hard she felt as if her ears grew out to wave around above her on stalks.

  The hunters were conferring: murmurs, whispers, an occasional sharp and shining note of dissent but no words.

  “Okay then,” was shouted. “Fan out.” Laughter followed, but it was hollow and nervous, not the full-throated baying glee of before. Something had changed. Perhaps the knowledge that one or more of them were going to die. At least that’s what Anna hoped.

  Flashlights were turned back on. Boots pushed through the undergrowth. A few mildly obscene catcalls were attempted, but they were half-hearted. The tenor had changed.

  “Look both high and low,” the leader said distinctly. “She coulda treed herself.”

  The lights separated and began moving more purposefully toward Anna’s makeshift den.

  This was it then. A cool and amoral calm settled over her. Breath and heart slowed perceptibly. Her mind cleared, leaving a cold, watchful place where heated thoughts had recently clamored. Time changed. It seemed she had leisure for idle contemplations.

  Soon, she suspected, she would be taking a life. The thought bothered her not at all. The aftermath, the justification, the investigation, the paperwork that ensued when a ranger was forced to use her weapon was of greater concern than breaking whatever the hell commandment “thou shalt not kill” was.

  Early on, before she’d run, one of the men had said she could not shoot them because they didn’t intend to hurt her. Proper use of force was pounded into modern federal law enforcement. The rule was the officer could only go one level higher in the force continuum than his attacker. If the villain used fists, the officer could graduate to a baton. Only when the attacker evinced a clear and present danger to the life of the officer or the lives of others would the officer be justified in using deadly force. Why had these guys known that? Was one a policeman, a highway patrolman, sheriff’s deputy?

  Anna smiled a mean little smile. Her mind flashed back to her training at FLETC, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia. She’d been the only woman in a class of twenty-eight, the only woman and, by at least thirty pounds, the smallest. Mike Hurly, a man from the Tennessee Valley Authority, had been the biggest, close to six foot three and weighing in at two-ninety-three.

  Instructor after instructor used Anna and Mike as examples of the sliding scale of lethal threat. Who could use fists and batons and pepper spray and bullets and when. Mike, being a monolith of a man, could not legally claim he feared for his life till his assailant at least pulled a knife.

  The consensus was the diminutive Anna could pretty much kill anybody anytime if they were taller than an eight-year-old and threatened her with anything more substantial than a ripe banana and still legally claim she’d feared for her life.

  Yelling stopped; lights spread out. Anna’s brain focused sharply. In stillness more frightening than the shouting, she could hear each shuffling step, each grunt and muttered expletive. She fancied she could even hear them breathing, the serrated panting breaths of excited dogs. The stabbing of the lights, wild during the running, became purposeful, scraping high and low, raking through the woods to where she lay. The thick chest of the leader was thrown into faint silhouette by the man behind him, careless of his flashlight. Anna lined the two iridescent green dots on her gun sight, one to either side of center mass, and breathed in. As she exhaled she began a slow, even trigger pull.

  Before her finger reached the point of no return, the black silence of the trees behind the stalkers was cut through with a shout. A familiar voice yelling. “Break it up. Barth go around to the left.” A fourth light careened down on the backs of the hunters. “You there. Drop your weapons. Drop them.” Hesitantly the men began to turn, not throwing down but at least lowering their rifles.

  For the briefest of instants Anna thought she would fire anyway, kill because she could, because she wanted to. God or conscience or sanity stopped her, and she backed the pressure off the trigger.

  Randy Thigpen had arrived. Anna’d given up on him, then forgotten he existed. Once before she’d called him for backup, and he’d quietly gone back to the ranger station and left her to deal as best she could. Randy’d come through. Barth, Anna knew, wasn’t on duty. Randy was showing some imagination.

  “Drop your weapons,” he called again, and Anna whispered hallelujah.

  The hunters stopped. Lights flashed. “Run,” someone shouted and, with rebel yells that sounded, to Anna’s jaded consciousness, more gleeful than disappointed, her attackers fled in all directions, the woods snapping and groaning with the violence of their passage. One of them laughed, high and wild, ending in a hoot. The crunching of their flight faded. Night’s quiet flowed back into the woods. Still Anna did not move.

  She felt as elemental as the dirt and leaf litter she’d cloaked herself in.

  “Anna?” Randy called. She could see him now in the faint backwash of his light. The underside of the absurd mustache glowed orange and the dull gleam of his badge proclaimed him an honorable man. Still Anna stayed where she was, watching him come.

  Finally he stopped not more than three feet from where she’d curled down into the forest floor. “Anna?”

  In his face she read only concern, a deep fear for her safety. Mollified, she said, “I’m here.”

  Randy shrieked like a schoolgirl presented with a snake, stumbled sideways and fell on his most ample feature.

  Uncoiling herself, Anna brushed the leaf litter from her trousers and hair. Her right hand still gripped the semi-automatic pistol.

  Hit with the sudden loss of dignity, Randy’s concern turned to irritation. “Jesus!” he said. “What the hell were you playing at? There were three of them armed with hunting rifles. What would you of done if they’d found you?”

  “Killed them all.”

  By the weak and moving light Anna saw the muscles of his face freeze then twitch back to life again as his brain rejected—or assimilated—her violence.

  “Jesus,” he said again and, using a downed log for a lever, hoisted his considerable bulk into a standing position. “Don’t they have such a thing as due process back wherever the hell you claim to come from? Those boys were just having some fun with you. They never meant you no harm.”


  “I was just going to have some fun with them,” Anna said. The snake that had come to possess her soul had not yet fully let go.

  Thigpen turned his light on her face. She didn’t blink or look away. “Jesus,” he called on his savior a third time. “You give me the creeps, you know that? Let’s get out of here. I’ll walk you to your car.”

  “No.”

  Randy stared at her a moment. “Okay,” he said uncertainly. “Meet me at the Mt. Locust Ranger Station.”

  “Port Gibson.” Anna needed the familiar around her, the things of her everyday life to bring her back from the wild and dangerous place the snake had taken her. Thigpen must have gleaned something from her voice; he didn’t argue.

  “Port Gibson then.”

  Both waited. Neither moved. “You want my light?” he asked finally.

  “No.”

  Anna stayed where she was and watched him go, a lumbering, overfed zoo bear, ill at ease in the forests of the night. When she could no longer see or hear him, she re-holstered her weapon. The faint glow of the meadow beckoned, and she walked toward it. Adrenaline began to be reabsorbed. The scales of the snake fell from her eyes and she saw herself so small, so alone, so hunted. She noted without any recognition of fear that her knees were weak and her hands shaking.

  By the time she reached her patrol car the fit had passed, leaving in its wake exhaustion so deep she wondered if she could drive the twenty minutes to the Port Gibson Ranger Station without falling asleep at the wheel. This day was not the longest Anna had ever lived through, but it was definitely in the running.

  As she traveled the moonlit peace of the Trace, scraps of the last eighteen hours floated behind her eyes: herself in a red dress and high heels, the colored lights of dead saints dyeing her married priest/sheriff/lover’s blond hair, Doyce Barnette, bruised and stripped and beached like an incongruous walrus on Grandma Polly’s bed, Doyce’s brother with his big teeth, his unctuous charm and his tiny model coffins, Mama Barnette carrying a shotgun and glaring with ancient evil eyes, men with daubed faces and raucous laughter chasing her through woods so choked with life that every step was an effort, the Garden of Gethsemane, the painting of the last supper on Mama’s stair landing, Paul intoning “till death do us part.” Mismatched images of violence and guns and God made the South a strange land and Anna a stranger in it.

  She took her time driving back to Port Gibson, gathering her wits and cataloguing her injuries. Now that she had the time to listen, her body began to complain of the ill treatment: a scratched forearm, a bruised knee, a sore shoulder muscle. The flight through the woods hadn’t been nearly as costly as she feared it might.

  Randy reached the ranger station before she did. Lights were blazing. Anna pulled up beside his patrol car and got out. Her mad dash had sapped her strength. Muscles cooled, she found herself moving like a creaky old woman. Consciously she straightened up and loosened her gait. Feeling old and tired and frail was her privilege. Seeing her do so was not Ranger Thigpen’s.

  As if to point up her distress, Randy, older than she and fatter than Jabba the Hutt, was looking quite cool and dapper. He sat at his desk, facing the door she entered through, a bottle of Coke in his left hand, a cigarette in his right.

  Despite years of federal and then, even in Mississippi, state laws banning smoking in public buildings, till Anna’d become district ranger the Port Gibson Ranger Station had been Thigpen’s private smoking lounge. The walls and ceiling were yellow-gray with twenty years’ accumulated residue. The only way to cleanse the building of the smell would be to raze it to the ground and build anew.

  Her first day on duty the previous April, Anna had enforced the smoking ban. Since then Randy had played at compliance. He acted out the familiar scene again.

  “Anna!” A grin, meant to be sheepish but merely sly, ferreted around beneath his mustache. “Caught me red-handed.” Scooting his chair to the opposite door, he threw the butt out on the concrete where she’d have to wade through it and its pals. “Hard to remember after so long doing things our own way.” Emphasis on the “our,” chair rolled back to desk, triumphant look of innocence feigned.

  Because she was new to management, because Thigpen had already sued her once, because she wanted to be fair and understanding, Anna’d put up with this scene half a dozen times. After it played itself through she sighed, dragging the tainted air deep and letting it go with the relaxed musculature of the seriously depressed. “Randy,” she said wearily. He smiled. Anna smiled back. “If I ever catch you smoking in here again, I will put the goddamn cigarette out on your tongue.” Perhaps she’d not shed her totem snake as completely as she thought.

  Randy’s smile quivered, cracked, ran and hid behind his mustache. Obnoxious retorts skittered through his brain; Anna could see them flittering like moths behind his pale blue eyes.

  She waited, half hoping he’d say something stupid. Having been jeered, frightened and chased, she was in the mood to smack the hell out of somebody.

  Thigpen wisely didn’t give her cause. He rested a moment, then, true to form, went back on the offensive.

  “Why didn’t you wait for me?” he demanded. “You could of gotten yourself hurt out there playing at Navy Seals. Not that those old boys would have hurt you. They were just having a little fun. Running through the woods at night, you could’ve broken a leg or gotten yourself snake-bit.”

  Anna chose not to engage. With a satisfying ripping sound, she pulled her duty belt off its underbelt of Velcro and dropped it on Barth’s desk. Thigpen winced and Anna was pleased. Settling into the chair facing his over the appalling clutter her field rangers stubbornly insisted on working in the midst of, she said, “You recognize anybody ? Any voices, faces, anything? It’s a good bet they were locals. Probably the men that built that stand in the first place.”

  “No,” he said too quickly.

  “You told Sheriff Jones you’d gotten to know everybody in Natchez. Who were those guys?”

  Randy looked genuinely, sincerely hurt and confused. Proof, if Anna’d needed any, that he was hiding something. At an easy guess, Thigpen had done what he’d done once before, if only in part. He’d slowed his response time to her call for backup to the point she’d either have settled the matter before he arrived or it would have settled her. That was a firing offense and he knew it. He also knew, this time, there was no way she could prove it.

  “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “I got a look sort of at one of ’em, but even if I had of seen him before, I wouldn’t of recognized him. They had mud or something smeared on their faces.”

  Listening to him Anna felt only emptiness and fatigue. She glanced at her watch: quarter to twelve. The time surprised her. She had that gritty hollow feeling that comes just before sunrise. An absurd scene floated up from a distant past, one spent eating apples and reading novels in the crook of an old oak tree that grew in her parents’ front yard: Scarlett O’Hara standing ragged and worn, clutching a fistful of Tara’s good earth and swearing, “I’ll think about it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day.”

  Tomorrow was fourteen minutes away. Anna didn’t want to start it in the presence of Randy Thigpen. Rising, she gathered up her gunbelt. “You’re off duty in a minute and I’ve about had it. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  As the door was closing behind her, she heard Randy’s light pleasant voice calling “goodnight” in an offensively cheerful cadence.

  “Fuck you,” Anna whispered. “Fuck you all.” The “all” was catholic: Anna hadn’t the energy to separate the saved from the damned.

  6

  Another exquisite Mississippi fall day greeted Anna. Air was dry and cool, sky as blue and deep as a poet could wish. The woods, so sentient with entangling evil the night before, sighed with peaceful dreams of the winter’s sleep to come and breathed out a perfume delicate with sweet memories of a glorious spring.

  Anna inhaled and tried to be appreciative. After the painfully long day before, she’d thought she
would have slept like the dead but perhaps the analogy was too apt. She’d tossed and turned till Piedmont abandoned the bed for the Morris chair in the living room. She’d made so many trips to the bathroom that finally even the faithful Taco gave up escorting her down the long dark hallway. Nightmares plagued her, a confusion of images full of violence and failure. On waking, she remembered none of them, but they’d left her with all the symptoms of a hangover. It was nearly enough to drive her to drink. Paying the piper when the son-of-a-bitch never played rankled.

  Standing at the foot of the crude stairs leading to the hunting stand, she tried to unclutter a mind as full of junk as Fibber McGee and Molly’s closet.

  She’d parked her patrol car on the Trace in the same place she’d parked the previous night and backtracked, following her flight through the trees. After a few false leads, she’d found the place she’d gone to ground. Looking at the stirring and heaping of downed leaves and needles she’d used to camouflage herself brought back the specter of the snake. In her weakened state, her basic humanity precarious, she’d felt an icy touch remembering how close she’d been to taking another life and the keen and joyless pleasure with which she’d looked forward to doing so.

  Tracking her hunters had been a piece of cake, even through the usually trackless fecundity of the Mississippi undergrowth. They’d pursued her with the delicate touch of a pack of all-terrain vehicles, smashing over rotting logs and crashing through thin dry branches. Unfortunately no one had been thoughtful enough to lose a unique button or drop an engraved cigarette lighter.

  By the time she’d reached the tree where they’d first surprised her, she knew no more about them than she had the night before, beyond the fact that they were a mindless group of mean-spirited bozos. During hunting season that didn’t narrow the field of play by much.

  Her flashlight was where she’d left it so the search wasn’t entirely fruitless. She scoured the area where the hunters had lain in wait. Scuffled duff, a few marks in the bark and the butt of three filter cigarettes was all she got for her trouble. The cigarette butts she retrieved and dropped in a baggie, not as evidence but as litter. An interchange such as she’d experienced didn’t warrant the time and expense of high-tech lab work. No DNA would be lifted from the butts. Chances were good her hunters had no criminal records. As Thigpen had said, they were probably just “good old boys having a little fun.”