Deep South (30 page)

"Mind if we stop a sec, Taco?" He thumped his tail. Anna took that as a yes.

No cars were at the pullout. She parked crosswise, so she could watch oncoming traffic and reviewed what Barth had said: a problem area, the two cars she'd paid attention to had Hinds County plates.

Barth had posed the question of why locals would come to a rest area off the beaten path when they could go home. He'd cruised slowly through the tiny parking lot, past the Olds with its single occupant, a couple of nondescript sedans and the pickup truck. In that brief span of time, he'd seen or thought something that spurred the sudden retreat. "It's a drag trusting no one," Anna said peevishly.

Taco raised one eyebrow. Not trusting was alien to his nature. "I'm going to look around." Not wanting to call attention to the fact he was a cripple and couldn't go, she added, "Guard the car." Light lingered above the treetops and in the open spaces. Beneath the trees, night was already gathering for its assault on the sky The mowed grassy knoll was unremarkable but for an abundance of litter Anna'd not found in pullouts farther south. The wooden picnic table was scarred with carved graffiti.

In the waning light, she couldn't read it, but she suspected it was the usual mix of love and mathematics: Alice + Joe = defacement of government property. Better the picnic table than the trees; the table was already dead.

Beyond was the band of greenery that edged the Trace. Already the shadows had congealed, but the suffocating darkness of the woods at night had yet to solidify. In the growing gloom, Anna could see half a dozen paths-social trails, the parks called them, not officially maintained trails but trampled lanes visitors made, usually taking shortcuts. Nothing was at the Clinton pullout to take shortcuts between.

People wandering into the trees to pee? Six trails: a lot of natural-world peeing for a place less than a mile from a truck stop with modern facilities. Picking the path that showed the most traffic, Anna pushed into the gloom. Behind her, she heard Taco begin to bark.

Vegetation had grown up thick and wild as is the way with natural areas that have been deforested and allowed to come back. Natural selection had yet to cull the weaker species. Every weed, vine and shrub struggled desperately for light and space.

This was not a good place. Anna could sense it. It lacked the feel of earth and clean, living things. There was about it a tired carnival air, as if hard boot heels had ground lime snowcones into every scrap of ground. Weeds, spindly, clawing, head-high, plucked at her hair and clothes. A cotton ball brushed her shoulder and she stopped. Not cotton, Meenex. Staring to catch what light remained, Anna realized the plethora of pale puffs she'd taken for feral cotton blossoms were toilet tissue.

Most of them were toilet tissue. A closer look and she realized condoms festooned the bushes. Used condoms. Ahead of her, on one of the few trees that had fought past the stringy starving phase, was a square of paper. She followed the path to it, contorting her person to avoid contact with the scatological flotsam.

Without a flashlight, the page looked to be a print of modern art ripped from a magazine, surreal shapes and forms meaning nothing.

Anna pulled it from the tree and, holding her breath, backed through the sewer, ran to her car, climbed in and slammed the door.

"Too gross even for a dog," she told Taco. "Don't lick me-I'm defiled." A past master at eating revolting forms of offal, Taco licked her anyway.

Anna switched on the overhead light and looked at the picture she'd torn from the tree. The strange forms became comprehensible. It wasn't surrealistic art but graphic pornography so up close and personal that the body parts lacked humanity. At the bottom, written in black magic marker, were the words

"Follow Me," and an arrow Night was in full-throated song by the time Anna and Taco returned to Rocky Springs.

Invisible creatures, frog and cricket and nightingale, celebrated in dark festival. A half moon hung above the treetops, so bright its perfect light dappled the road surface with the shadows of leaves. Laden with perfumes intoxicating enough to sweeten the hand of Lady MacBeth, a breeze stirred the shadows and the asphalt appeared insubstantial.

Anna turned the Rambler into the campground entrance. "Almost home," she told Taco. The dog had worked his crippled hindquarters around till be could rest his chin on her thigh. His breathing sounded shallow and his nose was warm. Anna worried she'd brought him home too soon. The vet had argued for several more days in the hospital. The drawback was Christianson was a large-animal vet who spent his days making barn and sty calls and couldn't care for an inpatient. He'd argued for removal of Taco to another vet. Anna'd argued for home care and won. Now she wondered if she'd placed the restorative power of love too far above that of medical science.

"Here we are," she said and, "We've got company." Parked in the driveway, neatly to one side so her patrol car was not blocked, was a battered and aging Toyota pickup. Arms folded across his chest, a man in khaki pants and pink polo shirt leaned against the rear fender.

Had she not the faithful and ailing Taco to consider, Anna would have thrown the Rambler into reverse and fled to a Motel 6 for the night.

Each religion had its own version of hell: fire, ice, an eternity without the love of God, pointy-tailed vermin with pitchforks and unsavory appetites. Anna's was a place where she had to talk to and be talked at by people day after day. A place where there was no solitude, no silence, no sacred meadows, nowhere one didn't feel the scrape of others' eyes upon one's skin. A place where words fell in a constant assault upon the senses.

According to these lights, Anna bad had a particularly hellish day Words had battered down like bail. Threats, lies, excuses, hopes, dreams, packed into words and shoved from her and to her. Whoever had come up with the chant

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" had been an idiot. Words could hurt worse than any stone, and the bruises lasted longer.

Harboring every intention of being rude, she cranked the wheel and turned into her driveway. Headlights, purposely left on high to be more offensive, raked across the intruder, He raised his hand to shield his eyes, and Anna realized it was Sheriff Davidson.

Her intention to be rude joined other paving stones to hell. It wasn't merely that her mood lightened, her heart leapt in accordance with the rules of paperback romances. To Taco she said: "Hey, look, we've got a helper." Her voice was so downright chipper it annoyed her.

"Fucking Pollyanna," she muttered to maintain equilibrium. Abreast of the defrocked lawman, Anna stopped and spoke through the window. "Are you up to carrying seventy pounds of man's best friend?" 1 can do that," Davidson agreed. "I take it you got your dog back."

"Most of him," Anna said. She had inherited wide shoulders and a strong back. Working outdoors kept her fit. In a pinch she could bench her body weight but genetics decreed she was to be female, five-foot-four and a hundred twenty pounds. History had tagged more than forty years onto that package. Though Anna knew she could lift and carry Taco, she liked the dog well enough to admit she couldn't do it smoothly and painlessly.

That was what she told herself even as a weasly little voice, muffled by layer upon layer of pride, reminded her it was a very old and very feminine form of flattery to ask a man to lift heavy objects.

Davidson had gone around the car and opened the passenger door.

"Hey old buddy, old pal, old doggie, old thing," he was murmuring kindly to the damaged pooch. He leaned in, and Anna leaned over to help scoop Taco into his arms. The faint aroma of shampoo came off the sheriff's hair and, when she brushed his arm during the canine transfer, his skin was warm and dry. Desire passed through her in a wave that left her feeling vulnerable and exposed. Even the marginal glow of the cabin light seemed enough to illuminate her nakedness. Pulling back suddenly lest rampant pheromones give her away, she cracked her head on the door frame. "Damn!"

"Are you all right?" This was said with such warmth and concern that Anna felt compelled to snap his head off. "I'm fine. Watch it with the dog." Southern hospitality was evidently not something acquired by the simple expedient of moving south.

Taco was an exemplary patient till Anna unlocked the front door and Paul carried him inside. Being home didn't soothe his doggie nerves. Once indoors, he began to whine, then growl low in his throat.

Feebly, he tried to struggle free as if, bandaged and crippled, he needed to give chase.

"Easy fella, easy boy," Davidson crooned in a way Anna had heard half a hundred cowboys croon to agitated horses. "Hold him a minute," Anna said, and hurried down the dark hallway toward the back bedroom. The light switches in the Rocky Springs housing had been installed by a mischievous electrician. None were located where reasonable homeowners had been taught to expect them. The light to the hall was at the far end. Having traversed the hallway without incident, Anna didn't bother to locate it but stepped into an even darker bedroom and felt her way around the end of the bed to the far side to switch on the reading lamp.

With the sudden light, she felt relief and was surprised. She'd been strung tighter than she'd thought. Taco's growling didn't help. Either it carried a note of menace not accounted for by phantom pain in his severed leg or her imagination was working overtime. She sensed a wrongness about the house, or thought she did. But the lamp showed her bedroom just as she had left it, not terribly neat but comfortingly famillar even in its bleak Just-moved-in persona.

Having gathered up the disreputable cushion that was the only keepsake Taco brought with him from his old life, Anna carried it back to the front room and arranged it by a stove she wouldn't need for six months.

Careful and conscientious as a practical nurse, Paul settled Taco on his bed. The growling continued, an alert and hostile sound that made Anna want to follow suit though she didn't know what demons the dog was seeing. "Vets give them ketamine," the sheriff said. "Maybe they hallucinate just like people."

"Flashbacks?" Anna asked.

Ketamine was a powerful hallucinogen that anesthetized animals without depressing the respiratory system. "Who knows?" Davidson said philosophically. Taco pulled his lips back and showed teeth ugly with intent.

Scrabbling with his forepaws, whining against the pain, he tried to pull himself off the cushion and across the hardwood floor toward the hall.

The fur on the back of his neck was standing on end. So was Anna's.

"Jesus, Taco," she said, then felt self-conscious, because Paul Davidson was a priest. "You're okay."

"Maybe he misses his kitty," Davidson offered.

Wben he said it, Anna remembered she had told the sheriff about Taco, about her cat. She'd told him about Molly and Zach, the husband she'd lost so many years back. Contrary to her usual practice, under the beneficent aura of the gun-toting man of God she'd talked a whole lot more than she'd listened. It had felt good at the time. Now it made her uncomfortable. Again the unwelcome feeling of exposure and vulnerability. "Piedmont," Anna called to take her mind off her neurosis. "Here kitty, kitty, kitty." No cat. Perhaps that was the wrongness she and the dog sensed. Piedmont was a personable feline.

Unless occupied by nothing less irresistible than a mouse or lizard in another part of the house, the big orange tom never failed to meet Anna at the door.

"Piedmont," she called again, afraid that her bonding with, of all things, a dog, had forever alienated her friend.

Taco grumbled. Despite the warmth of the night, Anna got a chill.

"Check the empty bedrooms," she said. "I'll get the kitchen and the backyard."

"For the kitty?"

"For anything. Bad juju." Davidson was on his feet. "Gut feeling?"

"Feminine intuition." A floodlight declared the backyard empty of anything more sinister than two cottontail bunnies, neither bigger than the average softball. Skittering roaches contaminated the kitchen, but though they made Anna queasy, they didn't frighten her. "Bedrooms are clear," Davidson announced. "Now we look for the cat." Poking into the cramped spaces where a cat could secrete itself, Anna and Davidson worked from the living room down the hall to the study, to the room closed off for financial idiocy and finally to Anna's bedroom.

With Paul Davidson in her boudoir, Anna wished it was more hospitable: curtains on the windows, pictures on the wall, at the very least the bed made and her dirty underwear somewhere other than on the floor.

Covertly, she watched him scan the room and was relieved to note he looked with the eyes of a policeman, not of a date.

"The window's open," he said. "I leave it open."

"Without a screen?" Anna crossed around him. He stood near the double-sized futon she'd slept on for nine years. The thought that it was time for a real bed, a queen-size, crossed her mind. Then she was at the window and the thought was forgotten. "There was a screen this morning." She raised the sash and leaned out. The screen lay on the ground a couple of feet away. Wriggling around till her rump was on the sill, her feet inside and her upper body outside, Anna looked up at the fastenings: two flattened metal hooks, the kind designed to make the removal of screens easy.

Squirming back inside she banged her head again, just hard enough to make her mad.