Deep South (26 page)

Instead, Barth poked his head in. "You wanted to see me?"

"Yes.

Please come in. Sit down." Anna was well rehearsed. She'd gone over the manuals on disciplinary action. She'd prepared the questions she wanted to ask, the points she wanted to make. Now that the moment had arrived, she found herself feeling an entirely unexpected emotion: pity. Both her rangers were older, close to retirement, but because the new regs on twenty-year retirement hadn't come through till the early nineties, both had another five or so years to serve. Too few years to go anywhere else. Too many to spend in a burnout job.

Thigpen bad only worked one other park. He'd begun his career in the Great Smokies. Barth had worked on the Trace his entire career.

He'd actually started out twenty-three years before as that rarest of creatures, a male secretary, at headquarters in Tupelo. Randy and Barth between them had thirty-eight years in Port Gibson, driving the same ninety miles of road, eating at Gary's Shell Station. They'd grown fat, literally and figuratively. Anna could understand it. Years of writing the same people the same speeding tickets, scraping new generations of drunks off trees-it was bound to burn anybody out.

Now her. She didn't know if either of them had applied for the post of district ranger but she'd gotten it; white, female and a Yankee, she'd gotten it.

Leaning forward, she rested her elbows on her knees and looked up at Ranger Dinkin. Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, saying to Strotber Martin,

"What we've got here is a failure to communicate," shortly before he got a bullet in the brain flashed unpleasantly through her mind. "Barth," she said. "We've got a problem." He squirmed. "What problem is that?" Anna lost her taste for gamesmanship. "Yesterday, I called you and Randy for backup. You never showed."

"We were at Mount Locust," he began.

Not wanting to let him bang himself with more lies, Anna cut him off.

"No. You were here. Not more than five minutes away. You hung me out to dry. Why is that?" Barth looked around her office, but there were no Cheetos handy to soothe his nerves. He fastened his gaze on his leg where his ankle crossed his knee. "Randy said he began, stopped, then started again. "We thought, you being new and all, maybe it'd be good for you to get your own idea of what it's like working down here." Anna said nothing to that. The remark was so patently made up of nine parts bullshit to one part hatefulness that she just let it sit in the air between them and stink. She watched him and, rightly or wrongly, thought she saw him weigh and discard several lines of defense in favor of the truth. "I don't know why we didn't back you up," he said at last. "I've been feeling bad about it. I'm just as glad to get it out in the open."

"Fair enough," Anna said. "I don't know how long I'll be here. I may start throwing in applications for other parks next month or I may stay here till I retire. Either way, right now we're working together. We're new to each other. We've got reservations. That's fine. I don't plan on riding in here like Matt Dillon into Dodge City. I want to learn my way around, get the feel of the place. I can do that without you, but it'll take me longer and be considerably more painful, but if I have to, I will. What I will not tolerate is any conduct that endangers my safety or that of you or Randy. That means I must be able to count on you absolutely to do what you can to your best ability when I call for backup. You can count on the same from me. Anything else is negotiable." Barth nodded slowly. "I'm sorry about last night." Anna believed him.

"Will this go in my personnel file?"

"No, I'll document that you've been warned and counseled. That you have agreed to alter this behavior and that you have been told that any further breach of conduct in this matter will be written up and put in your permanent file and that, at that time, an inquiry into relieving you of your duties will be requested by me." Again Barth nodded. "It won't happen again." She believed that too, maybe against good sense, but Barth held himself like an honorable man; be took responsibility for what he'd done and accepted the consequences without whining. Anna wanted to like him. "While I've got you here, let me catch you up on the Danni Posey investigation." She would have updated him and Randy at some point; that she did it now, and in detail, was her vote of confidence in him. "I've known Pastor Fullerton for years," Barth said when she'd related the interview with him and the sheriff. "My wife and I belong to Southern Baptist. He's our pastor." Mississippi was, indeed, a small town. Anna was beginning to glimpse how small. "You not being from around here, you might think that's ordinary but it's not. Down here there's black churches and there's white churches. That's just the way it is. Oh, you can go to a white church and white folks can go to our churches. Nobody much minds. You'd be made welcome and all. Folks just don't much do it. Lots of churches-black and white-have been working to mix up the congregations, but people are set in their ways. People need comfort. You don't blame them for that. But Pastor Fullerton has done it. Southern Baptist in Port Gibson's about fifty-fifty. It's a big deal. And he makes it not a big deal, if you know what I mean." Anna did. She told Barth of the pastor's parting words, of his concern that race not be dragged into the mix during this investigation. "He'd care," Barth said.

Anna moved on to the car stop. Barth knew Mike Posey. He'd pulled him over one night for spotlighting deer on the Trace. There was no hunting on federal park lands. Spotlighting deer, paralyzing them momentarily with high-powered lights, was a practice of slob hunters.

Posey had been meaning to poach and was guilty of harassing wildlife.

Barth had let him off with a warning. "Think you've got a rapport with him?" Anna asked. Mike Posey needed to answer some questions, but since she'd recently arrested him she wasn't the obvious candidate. "Nobody's got rapport with Mike Posey." Anna was afraid of that. "How about a Sean or Jackson Doolittle?" she named the brothers who'd run from her the night before. "You know either of them?" Barth smiled for the first time since he'd come in. Maybe for the first time since Anna'd met him-she couldn't remember. It suited him. His smile had a raffishness that the rest of him had outgrown.

"Better than that," he said. "I know their mama."

"Terrific," she said.

"I know where they work. Stay close. When I'm finished here, we'll ride out there together." Barth took that correctly as a dismissal. "Anna?" He stopped short of the doorway. "Yeah?"

"Randy's pretty good people mostly. His wife up and left him a month back. I might oughtn't to be speaking out of turn, but he's been kind of down on women ever since."

"Thanks," Anna said.

He left, closing the door behind him. For a couple of minutes, she rocked gently in her chair and reviewed their meeting. It had gone well.

Unless Thigpen started working on Barth again, she suspected he'd be a good ranger. They could work together.

Her radio crackled: Randy making a vehicle stop at mile marker thirty-four. He was on his way toward the ranger station working traffic. Rather than summon him into her presence via the radio, Anna decided to wait. However her meeting with Randy Thigpen went, she doubted it would go as well as the one with Barth. Barth seemed more of a get-along-go-along guy. Randy struck her as a hardcore malcontent.

Twenty minutes later, she heard the door slam and left her office.

She didn't want Barth to talk with Randy before she did.

Thigpen had come in with a cigarette in his hand. When he saw her, he made a show of suddenly remembering it, opening the door, and tossing the smoking butt outside, adding littering to his list of crimes and misdemeanors.

"Randy," Anna said. "Could you come into my office? There are some things we need to go over." In one management book or another, Anna had read that publicly shaming an employee was a sure-fire morale breaker.

Besides, capitalizing on the pack mentality went against the grain.

"Lemme get a cup of coffee," Thigpen said.

Anna nodded and returned to her chair. Thigpen was playing his own version of the game she'd abandoned with Barth: making her wait, showing his independence. It bothered Anna not at all. She busied herself picking out the odd bits of paraphernalia previous district rangers had allowed to congeal in the shallow center drawer of the built-in desk.

After about three times as long as it takes to pour and condiment a cup of coffee, Thigpen wandered in, smoothing his mustache as he came. He had a habit of stroking it down in such a way that it looked like he was smelling his fingers. "Why don't you go ahead and close the door," Anna suggested." Ah. Fixin' to get serious?

Over one lousy cigarette?" Anna said nothing. Randy closed the door and took the chair Barth had recently vacated. Middle-aged, too much lard, most of it carried above the belt and in front, Randy was never going to be poster boy for the American Heart Association. He was a cardiac arrest waiting to happen. Dead-end job. Wife deserted him. New boss.

Anna tried to let the ameliorating factors leaven her mood.

She still didn't like the guy "How's your dog?" Randy asked. "He's going to make it, but he lost the rear leg the alligator bit." Good start, asking about Taco. It was on the tip of her tongue to thank him for the help he'd given her that night, but she suspected that was what he was angling for, so she didn't.

"We got a problem," she said, echoing her opening with Barth.

Randy fought with filibuster. clog ing the room with words, cruising easily from one excuse to another. Finally, when Anna pinned him down to the facts: she'd called, he'd been close, he hadn't come, he painted a picture she could tell he liked. Using much in the way of implication and innuendo, he suggested that he knew Anna was in no real danger and in his infinite and benevolent wisdom he'd decided it would be good for her to learn to handle things by herself, help her gain confidence. Of course, had he known she was going to do a fool thing like draw down on those innocent lads, he'd have come right on out and taken over before she got herself in trouble.

Anna thought wistfully about that heart attack, wondered what in the hell was taking it so long. But then, should he collapse, she'd be duty-bound to give him CPR and the thought of mouth-to-mouth was so vile she decided it was better he should live. "We'll keep this simple," she said, giving up hope of a meaningful conversation.

"Another ranger calls for backup and you don't move heaven and earth to get there in a timely manner, you will be given a written reprimand. Do it again, and you'll be fired." Randy sat back as if she'd slapped him-or woken him from a pleasant dream. "You can't do that!"

"I can," Anna assured him. She had him sign the memo she'd prepared saying he had been counseled and he left.

Maybe he'd shape up. Maybe not. No goodwill to lose, she didn't care which way it went.

T he Bogachitta Lumber Company was situated four miles west of Port Gibson. It had once been on a navigable bayou, but over the years the Army Corps of Engineers had altered the course of the Mississippi, and now the mill sat near a swampy creek scarcely deep enough to drown a cottonmouth.

Anna'd grown up in a logging town in Northern California, and Bogachitta Mills had the rustic look she'd come to expect of the industry.

Computers might have invaded the offices, but the yards were still places of saws, piled logs, evil-smelling ponds and men who worked hard for their wages.

Barth was driving, Anna riding shotgun. Most places she'd worked, at least the places with cars, the men had loved patrolling with her; she had no competitive need to drive. Left to her own devices, she preferred to look out the window, watch the world go by and think her own thoughts. Her ideal was never to patrol in an automobile at all.

Cars cut rangers off from the natural world, blunted their senses and, Anna was convinced, over time, by some alchemy of metal and glass, turned them from rangers into cops.

The crunching of tires on gravel announced their arrival. Barth parked in front of a derelict flat-roofed building with faded blue letters proclaiming Bogachitta Mills. Inside was a single desk, a computer and a woman in her late fifties or early sixties with cotton candy blond curls high on her head. A pack of Virginia Slims lay next to an ashtray full of dead compatriots. The most recent sacrifice burned in a groove put in the glass for that purpose.

"Sean's out in the field today," she informed them, then coughed through a throat full of phlegm. If she wondered what they wanted with the Doolittles, she hid her curiosity remarkably well. So well, Anna wondered if the long arm of the law reaching out to Bogachitta Mills employees was a common occurrence. Recovered from her coughing fit, the woman said: "Jackie's out on the chipper. You can go ahead out, but ya'll gotta wear hard hats." Anna and Barth each took a yellow plastic hard hat from the row she indicated with a red porcelain nail and left their Stetsons in their places.

Finding the chipper did not challenge the detecting skills. The machine, full-sized trees being stuffed into its maw by two men and a Caterpillar armed with a giant pincer claw, made a horrific racket.

Envying the men their ear protection, Anna stood with her fingers in her ears watching once living plants reduced to mulch. Years before, she remembered, a man in the Northeast had murdered his wife, frozen her body and fed it through a wood chipper. Seeing one in action brought the old story home in a graphic way. "Yuck," she said, her editorializing lost in the din.