Deep South (4 page)

"You look like you're working hard," Anna said politely. "Yeah, well, I ain't law enforcement," Frank countered. The rift that often existed between the two disciplines was evidently fairly pronounced on the Trace.

"All I can tell you is I been trying to raise Randy and Barth for the past ten minutes. Either they got their radios off of they're playin' possum somewhere."

"Mat's the problem?" Anna asked because she had to. Being "the boss" put her in a double bind. As law enforcement, one didn't have the luxury of letting things slide, of looking the other way and letting someone else handle whatever it was needed handling. Now, as a supervisor, she had the added onus of being obliged to look as if she actually cared.

"Dispatch's had half a dozen calls about an obstruction on the road just this side of Big Bayou Pierre. Sounds like somebody's cows got loose.

Nowadays everybody and his dog's got a cellular phone and is dialing 1-800-PARK every time a picnicker breaks a fingernail or somebody gets a flat tire. They don't stop and help like they used to, they just poke them phone buttons and keep right on driving, feeling as pleased as punch thinking they done the Christian thing."

"I'll cbeck it out," Anna said, not sorry to have something to do since sleeping or moving boxes seemed beyond her capabilities.

Frank headed back to his cart. Anna turned the other way, choosing the short side of the loop for the walk back to her quarters.

"Frank," she called after she'd gone half a dozen steps, "Yeah?"

"What's my number?"

"Five-eiglity."

"What's dispatch?"

"Seven hundred." Every park Anna bad worked in had the same radio call number system. One hundred was the superintendent. Rangers were in the five hundreds. The numbers went by position, not personality. But after spending a surreal hour in the nineteenth century, she'd felt the need to check lest Mississippi did things differently from the rest of the world.

Fifteen minutes' digging through cartons freed up her uniform if not her bat. Leather gear, cuffs, badges, service weapon-the symbols of office-were provided by the park where one worked.

Anna'd not vet been issued hers. Like most long-term employees, she managed to @Uyl borrow, and acquire through sins of omission her own gun belt, holster, Kevlar vest and handcuffs. Never had she had the cojones-or the stupidity-to accidentally-on-purpose retain a government-issue Sigsauer nine-millimeter handgun.

Enioying a touch of the good old days before the NPS moved to semi-automatic weapons, she snapped her faithful.357 Colt into the holster. Before departing to her illegal bovines, she shut Taco in the back room with Piedmont. Not because Taco required incarceration, but because, to her surprise, Piedmont had taken a genuine if sarcastic liking to the big lab, and Anna knew it would comfort him to have his friend around to abuse during this time of trial.

Energized by the simple expedient of strapping on her gunthough strapping was no longer involved, it was all done with Velcro. Anna took possession of her new patrol car. It was clean and not more than a year old, a powerful Crown Victoria with a unit on the dash that flashed blue lights: an innovation that served several purposes.

More compact than the traditional light bar, it wouldn't get damaged by low-flying birds and branches and, since it changed the expected police car profile, it made catching speeders easier. The only thing the car lacked was a cage. Mentally, Anna put installing one at the top of her list of things to do. She had no desire to have those she arrested sitting behind her with nothing between her scrawny neck and their hands but goodwill. "Seven hundred, five-eight-zero, ten-seven," she called in service. "Ten-four," a female voice returned from the dispatcher's office in Tupelo and: "Welcome to the Natchez Trace."

"Thanks," Anna said and cut to the heart of the matter. "Could you tell me where Big Bayou Pierre is located?" She'd forgotten to ask Frank for directions.

"Turn right and drive." Getting lost was hard on a north-south road. If Anna stayed too long in Mississippi, her orienteering skills were bound to atrophy.

Until an automobile struck a cow and a litigious citizen filed a lawsuit, animals on the road did not constitute an emergency. Anna drove the specified fifty miles per hour, windows rolled down.

Green and blooming, the Trace meandered through woods and open glades.

Where red clover did not lay its carpets of crimson, the sides of the road were neatly mowed to tree line. At mile marker forty-nine the landscape opened into fields: a pasture with horses grazing, a cedar barn weathered to natural gray velvet and, behind it, the unnatural round hill of an Indian mound. This section of the Trace was known as the Valley of the Moon. Anna savored the romance of the words and the world.

More tree-canopied miles of dappled green and sun yellow, then the view opened out again and Anna saw a cluster of cars stopped in the road.

Three in the southbound lane, half a dozen scattered in the northbound, jockeying out from one another as drivers maneuvered for a took at the problem. A handful bad done the unthinkable by actually getting out of their vehicles. A truck, once red, now rust, had tried to circumnavigate the obstruction and slid down the bank, where it remained, mired in the mud twenty feet above the bank of Big Bayou Pierre.

What was missing was any sign of livestock. Closer, and Anna saw what had caused the traffic tie-up. A log, maybe ten feet long and a foot or two in diameter, lay across the center line blocking both lanes.

A small group of men stood around staring at it, waiting, no doubt, for the ranger to come move it. No trees grew near by. The log must have rolled off somebody's trailer.

Turning on her flashers in the faint hope it would keep the next car along from rear-criding her and knocking the collected automobiles into the bayou like so many dominoes, Anna pulled to the side of the road behind the last car in the line.

Out of her patrol car, walking toward the clot of people standing well back from the log, she called: "Go ahead and drag it off." There was a moment of stunned silence, then a man in a suit and tie, who looked as if he'd spent most of his adult life eating fried food, laughed and shouted: "We're waiting for you to drag it off." This annoying sally was met with a gust of laughter that Anna didn't understand till the impromptu crowd parted. The obstruction was not a log but, indeed, livestock of a sort. Blocking the narrow road was the biggest alligator Anna had seen outside a PBS special. "I see your point," she admitted, and Joined the group staring at the prehistoric monster in their midst.

Apparently enjoying the warm asphalt and the attention, the alligator seemed content to stay where he was. If it was a "he." Anna didn't know, and wasn't eager to learn, how one sexed the creatures. The gator had the unformed look of an animal slowly morphing back into elemental mud.

The head was as wide as the body. Only the tail looked to be part of a living thing.

Fascinated, Anna moved toward this long leather portion. A black hand closed on her arm. "Stay back," he warned. "Big as this old fella is, he's fast. Gators are like I igbtning. I've seen 'em Jump a dozen feet like they were shot out of a cannon." More standing. More staring.

"What're you going to do?" the deepfried suit finally asked. "I got to get to work." This brought on a chorus of like complaints. "I'm going to stay right here and make sure none of you harasses the wildlife." Another minute ticked by and Anna relented. "You can throw rocks at him, I guess, as long as they're small."

"Ain't no rocks in Mississippi," the man in the suit said. "All we got's mud." A quarter of an hour passed and another four cars swelled the ranks before the alligator tired of the company and lumbered off to slide down the embankment and sink himself in Big Bayou Pierre. Traffic cleared. Anna dedicated another half an hour to pulling the truck up the slope with a towline the former district ranger had kindly left in the trunk of the Crown Vie, then the festivities drew to a close.

Calling dispatch to clear herself from the scene, Anna realized she'd been thoroughly enjoying herself. The sun was warm, the alligator a rare treat, and it appeared that-if nothing else-a stint in Mississippi would give her stories enough for a lifetime.

Despite the fact that she wasn't officially on duty till the following day, she decided to continue south to the outskirts of the tiny town of Port Gibson, where the ranger station was reputed to be.

As in Mesa Verde, the road had markers at every mile, tasteful four-by-fours painted brown with white numbers and just high enough to rake hell out of a fender if one didn't watch for them when making traffic stops. The numbers grew lesser as she traveled, and Anna deduced the Trace was marked south to north with mile marker number one in Natchez, where the parkway began.

In Colorado, Anna had taken little notice of mile markers, only using them occasionally when she had to report the precise location of an accident. On the Trace, they were of significant interest. In the flatlands, down in the trees, there were no reliable landmarks.

The endless, unchanging, bucolic splendor made one place very like the next. With familiarity would come differentiation, like moms learning to tell their twin offspring apart. Till then she'd have to do it by the numbers.

Several miles south of Big Bayou Pierre and its diminutive neighbor, Little Bayou Pierre, an NPS patrol car was parked on the grass up under the shade of the trees. Coming from the high desert, where even the dirt was fragile, she knew seeing people drive and park on the grass was going to take some getting used to. In this fertile bit of the world, vegetation was one of the sturdiest and most easily regenerated of the natural resources.

There were two possible occupants of the parked car: Randy Tbigpen or Bartholomew Dinkin, Anna's two field rangers. The men with Nvborn she would spend her days, whom she would rely on for assistance and, in a pinch, trust with her life. Thigpen had already made a successful attempt to lead her astray with bogus directions. Neither Tbigpen nor Dinkin had garnered rave reviews from Frank, the Rocky Springs maintenance man, and both had failed to respond to their radios when dispatch needed an alligator wrangler.

The last thing Anna was in the mood for was to suck it up to make a managerial good first impression on either one of them. But to drive by the first day on the)'oh seemed downright unneighborly-or cowardlyand instinct warned her that to appear either could prove disastrous in the long run.

Telling herself her new rangers were probably terrific guys and she was being unjust, condemning them on circumstance, hearsay and a misplaced practical joke, she pulled onto the grass and gunned the engine, enjoying a mild thrill as the powerful car whipped effortlessly up the bank. In classic law enforcement gossip formation, cars nose-totail, driver-side windows matched up, Anna put the Crown Vic in park.

Though she didn't consider the day particularly hot, the windows of the other car were closed and the engine idling-probably running the air conditioner. Five or six seconds elapsed before the window lowered. Long enough to trigger suspicions. The possibilities were many- He could have been dozing, hiding something, zipping his fly, being rude. Anna would never know. But she noted the delay. "Good morning," she said. "I'm Anna Pigeon."

"I heard you were coming tomorrow. Bout damn time. Barth and I've been running ragged for eight months." This, then, was Randy Thigpen. He didn't look like a man suffering from overwork. For one thing, he was immensely fat. Anna bad nothing against fat; some of her best friends were fat. It was fat on people who were expected to run, jump, fight, defend and protect she found to be a dereliction of duty. Other than that, Thigpen was a decent-looking man: late forties or early fifties, thinning hair a sandy gold-brown color, dark hazel eyes and a spectacular mustache that obliterated his upper lip and the line of his mouth.

His voice was easy to listen to: deep with no classic drawl but a slight elongation of vowel sounds. "Met one of your locals," Anna said and told him of the alligator.

Thigpen heard her unasked question: Where the hell were you when dispatch called? Rather than looking sheepish or defensive, Anna thought, he looked ever so slightly smug. "I got tied up with a motorist assist down by Mount Locust," Thigpen said. "I was on my way when I heard you call clear, so I pulled over to run a little stationary radar." Beyond him, on the seat, was a paperback novel laid facedown to mark his place and a paper boat filled with biscuit crumbs and squeezed-out honey packets. Anna had called clear six minutes earlier by her dashboard clock. Thigpen bad been parked on this knoll considerably longer than that. "No harm done," she said easily. The man seemed displeased by her reaction. Whether he'd been hoping for a row or a piteous whine, she couldn't guess. Getting neither, he felt the need to gain some psychic ground. "Alligators are pretty easy to move once you get the knack," he said. "Sounds like a useful knack to have in these parts," Anna replied mildly. "How do you do it?"

"Oh. There's a number of ways. You learn 'em as you go." Thigpen hadn't the foggiest idea. A good person would have let him off the hook. Anna hadn't had enough sleep to qualify. "What's your favorite?" she asked with genuine interest. "Mine? Oh, I don't know "

"Aw, come on, help a Yankee girl out," she cajoled.

She could see the gears grinding behind his high, unlined brow.

"The best way's you find a dead chicken. They like chicken. Then you hold it a ways in front of them, and they'll follow you anywhere, like big old dogs."