Borderline (2 page)

“It’s too deep,” her mother said flatly. “Your underpants will show.”

“I’m not wearing any underpants,” Gabby said, and felt a small stab of satisfaction as Alicia began muttering her rosary under her breath.

“You better not let Marcos hear you saying things like that,” Guadalupe warned her. “He has a temper like his dad.”

Gabriela was glad it was dark so her mother-in-law wouldn’t see the smile that came to her lips when she thought of what Marcos would do if she told him she didn’t have any panties on.

With her mother holding her right arm and her mother-in-law her left, the three of them waded into the river. The night was kind, seventy degrees with a whisper of a breeze coming down from the Chisos, smelling of pine and heat and dust laid by the rain. The water was cool and felt good on Gabby’s legs and groin. The baby in her belly seemed to float on the water, taking the weight off the small of her back for a change.

“Women should give birth in the river,” Gabby said. “Women should be pregnant in the river. You can pee anytime you want.”

“Don’t you dare pee,” Alicia said. “I’m downstream.”

“You are going to have that baby in the water if you two don’t stop making jokes and move faster.”

“Remember your house,” Alicia murmured in Gabriela’s ear and Gabby laughed loudly.

“Now you did make me pee, Mama.”

Before Alicia could make a retort a braying came out of the darkness on the American side of the Rio Grande. A man with a machine amplifying his voice was shouting at them in Spanish:

“Se ha carredo la frontera.
The border is closed. Go back. This border is closed by order of the United States government.”

“No it isn’t,” Alicia yelled back.. “Not between the park and Boquillas.” There was no answering bray, and Gabby’s mother urged her forward. “Some fool ranger not old enough to go to the bathroom by himself gets those talking horns and thinks he’s John Wayne at the Alamo,” Alicia grumbled.

The Alamo
was Alicia’s favorite movie. Gabby had had to watch it at least three times. The only thing that kept it from boring her completely out of her mind was that her mother always rooted for John Wayne and saw nothing funny in that at all. “It’s only a movie,” she’d tell Gabby and her brother. “Nobody’s real. I can like who I like.”

They’d reached midstream when the voice came again and, with it, painfully bright lights. “The border is closed,” the man announced again. “Go back.”

“My daughter is having a baby. She’s having a baby right now!” Alicia shouted.

The disembodied voice came back over the water. “Crossings are permitted only at authorized border stations. Go back. You cannot enter the United States except at authorized border stations.”

The women stopped, dark water curling around their hips, skirts dragging at their legs. “This man is crazy,” Guadalupe said, and shaded her eyes against the lights trying to see what sort of man waited on the riverbank to accost pregnant women and their mothers.

“Maybe we should go back,” Gabby said. The water, so cool and life-affirming at first, was beginning to chill her. The blackness of it, and the scraps of litter the rising levels had washed from the shores upriver flashing through the beam of the man’s light seemed sinister, dirty somehow. She didn’t like it between her legs. She didn’t want it to touch her baby.

Guadalupe surged forward, Gabby’s arm held tightly in her fist. Gabriela tried to turn back and her belly pushed into Alicia. Alicia lost her footing and fell, dragging Gabby down with her.

Gabriela’s arm tore free of her mother-in-law’s grip and her sneakered feet slipped from the rocky bottom. Her belly was taken up by the current, rolling her onto her back, helpless as a beetle tortured by wicked boys. River water washed over her face and she fought to right herself. She wasn’t scared. She grew up on the river. Like most of the village children, she had been in and out of it all of her life. Right up to the mouth of Boquillas Canyon the water was smooth.

From the dark she could hear shouting: her mother and Guadalupe, a man’s voice, without the megaphone now, shouting in English and unintelligible Spanish, the phrases “the border is closed” and “go back” probably the only Spanish he had fully mastered.

Gabby floundered until her stomach was under her and her feet were scrabbling to find purchase on the slippery rock of the riverbed when a partially submerged log struck her in the side. She cried out, not because of the pain, but in fear for the life of the child she carried. The log knocked her off her tenuous footing and its branches snatched up her skirts and swung her around, smashing the weight of the sodden wood into her skull.

There was no sense of doom. Only doom itself.

It was May 2002. Eight months after the terrorist attacks. By order of Homeland Security, the border between Big Bend and the villages that had shared the life of the park had been closed.

S
o, how do you feel?”

Anna stared at the doctor. He wasn’t a real doctor; he was a psychologist with a Ph.D. out of Boulder, Colorado, who liked very much to be called
Doctor
James. Vincent James was not-so-affectionately called Vinny-the-shrink by the rangers at Rocky Mountain National Park. Whenever the brass decided rangers needed to be counseled they were sent down the hill to his shiny little office on the mall. Vinny had decorated his lair in Early Intimidation. The walls were slate gray, the furniture black leather and chrome. An arrangement of dried and very dead grasses in russet and umber was his nod to the real world, the non-Vinny world.

“I feel good,” Anna said, attempting to look comfortable in a sling of shiny patent leather. She drummed her fingertips on the silvery armrests, hoping they’d leave prints. She didn’t doubt that he leapt up to polish them clean before the door closed on departing clients’ butts. Or maybe he carefully lifted the prints with tape and kept them on file.

Vinny smiled slightly and waited. Anna smiled back and waited. Anna liked to wait. If one waited long enough and quietly enough, all manner of woodland creatures might creep out of the underbrush. In Dr. James’s case, perhaps they crept out from under rocks.

The psychologist sighed audibly and smiled a bigger smile this time, the one mothers reserve for tiresome children who insist on playing games with their betters.

“How do you feel about the incident at Isle Royale?” he asked.

Feeling like the tiresome child, Anna purposely misunderstood him. “Not bad. The ankle twinges when I step on it wrong and is stiff in the mornings. My shoulder is as good as new, though. Got to find the silver lining.”

He sighed again, less ostentatiously this time but still audibly. A shrink should know better than to exhibit obvious manipulation.

“That’s a bad habit,” Anna said. “That sighing thing.”

Anger was pressing up under her sternum, a boil of heat she’d carried since returning from Windigo Harbor on Isle Royale in Lake Michigan that February. The balance had gone out of her life, the yin and yang of good and evil, light and dark, peace and pain. What she needed was clean air and warmth and Paul, quiet so deep birdsong could only enhance it, miles free of the millings and mewlings of humanity. She didn’t need a shrink with a sighing problem and ergonomically hostile furniture.

“You seem to be carrying a lot of anger,” Vinny said in a rare moment of insight.

“Bingo,” she said.

Again he waited.

She didn’t elaborate.

Vinny might have been an idiot, but he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t play the waiting game long this time. “You killed a man,” he said. “Up close and personal; killed him with your bare hands.”

“No,” Anna said. “I wore gloves.”

The psychologist’s chest swelled with another sigh but he caught himself and let it out soundlessly through his nose. Leaning back in his chair, a comfortable chair, Anna noted, he took off his wire-rimmed glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He must have seen the gesture in old movies back when psychiatry was new and the public believed in hypnotism and Freud and the dangers of early potty training.

The boil of heat beneath her breastbone was growing. If it burst—if she let it burst—she would spill her guts to this man and she didn’t want to go down that road with anyone but Paul. Since Isle Royale she found herself unable to trust anyone but Paul, and that included herself. Most of all herself. Anna wasn’t sure if she was a good person. Worse, she wasn’t sure if she cared.

“I’ll talk about it with my priest,” she said.

Dr. James rocked forward in his lovely padded office chair and shifted the papers on his desk. He used the tip of his forefinger, as if merely touching the written dirt of others’ lives could soil his soul. “Your husband,” he said. “Paul Davidson, the sheriff of Jefferson County,
Mississippi
.” The way he said Mississippi annoyed her. He said it like it didn’t count, like being a sheriff there was tantamount to being a racist or a campus kiddy cop. “He’s also an Episcopal priest?”

“The gun and The Word,” Anna said.

The psychologist didn’t smile.

“I see you didn’t change your name when you got married. You kept Pigeon. Why is that?”

Anna took a deep breath, trying to ease the pressure in her chest. She felt like Mount St. Helens the day before. Steam pouring from her vents, molten lava pressing against a dome of rock, fires so deep and burning so hot nothing could contain them. She had a sudden mental image of her small middle-aged self on a city street, women and children fleeing in every direction, men yelling, “Look out, she’s going to blow!” The picture startled her and she laughed.

“You find the question funny?” Vincent James asked.

“I find the question irrelevant and intrusive,” she said. It was happening. The crown of rock that was her sternum was bowing under the push of the fire and she couldn’t stop it. “I find the question none of your damn business. Yes, I killed a man. With my gloves on because it was so cold your fingers would freeze off without them but, yes, up close and personal. You want to know what that was like? What kind of person could kill like that? Me. That’s what kind. The son of a bitch deserved to die. The world is better off without guys like that. There are a whole hell of a lot of people in this world who should be ushered into the next, if there is a next, which I sincerely doubt. If I had it to do over again I would have killed him in his sleep the first night on the island.”

Blowing off steam wasn’t helping. If she didn’t shut up she was going to cry. The inherent knowledge that Vinny would take her tears as a personal victory was the only thing that kept them at bay. They dried in the heat of her anger but there were plenty more where those had come from and Anna had to clamp her mind shut to keep them from pouring out, to keep her face from melting in a flood of saltwater and snot.

Vinny put his elbows on the papers he’d fingered and steepled his hands. He’d never bothered to replace his glasses and Anna wondered if they were merely a prop, the lenses plain glass, or if he decided she was too hard to look at when her edges were clear.

“Would you?” he asked.

She had no idea what he was talking about. The repression of the volcano was making it hard to concentrate on anything else.

“Would you have killed him in his sleep? Killed him in cold blood?”

Anna didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think about anything but she couldn’t stop her mind from pawing through the images of her weeks on Isle Royale. Nights she’d wake up so cold she couldn’t clamp her teeth against their chattering, her heart pounding. Days she walked in a fog, blind to the beauty of the Rockies and the needs of the visitors and fellow rangers. April didn’t bring an end to winter at that elevation. Snow capped the mountains and the glaciers. Wind blew ragged and vicious down the canyons. She could not get warm and she couldn’t think clearly and the man she’d killed stalked her.

“I’m not sorry it happened, if that’s what you’re getting at,” she snapped. The use of
it
and
happened
shuddered with weakness. Anna was tired of the hard words so she made herself say them: “I’m not sorry I killed him. I’m sorry I
had
to kill him.”

“Earlier you said”—Vincent poked at his papers again as if every word she’d spoken had been magically and instantaneously written into the report on his desk—“that there were a lot of people who needed to be ‘ushered into the next world.’ Do you feel you have to kill the bad guys, that you have a calling to do this so-called ushering?”

Anna could tell Vinny-the-shrink thought he was on to something big, that he’d found the key to what ailed her. Anna didn’t feel she had a calling to kill or to do anything else. Once she’d thought she had a calling to protect the wild places, but she wasn’t even feeling that anymore. What she felt mostly was an inner darkness lit by strange fires from below and haunted by scraps of thoughts and fragments of conversations. The only time she felt good or safe or halfway normal was when she curled under the blankets and buried her face in a purring cat. The purring and the silky warmth of the fur tethered her to the land of the living.

She didn’t know what ailed her, and she doubted Vinny knew. “No,” she said firmly. “No calling to kill.” To have said anything else would have brought the men in the white coats bearing straitjackets. If they still used straitjackets on crazy people. “Sufficient stopping force if the assailant is a danger to law enforcement or others.” She paraphrased one of the rules from the levels of force continuum drummed into the heads of the students at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, where she and countless others had received their education.

“Stopping force, is that how you think of what you did? That you ‘stopped’ him?”

Vincent’s voice didn’t sound combative. If anything, it might have gentled somewhat since she’d first arrived. Anna wished she could read his face but to do that she’d have to see it, and her vision was growing odd. Unshed tears made it hard to focus her eyes; unshed thoughts made it hard to focus her mind.